Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [106]
“A gärtner. But if Lorenz saw that Wittich was in pain, naturally, he tried to help.”
“But it is not among us natural for the greater to help the lesser. An artisan would not help a mere gärtner; not without … Without your charitas to move him.”
“To be fair,” Dietrich said, “Lorenz did not know his life would be forfeit.”
“He knew,” Gottfried said, releasing his grip. “He knew. I had warned him against touching the wires when they were animate. I told him the fluid could strike a man like lightning. That was how he knew Wittich’s peril. Yet he had no thought to stand by and watch him die.”
Dietrich studied the Krenk. “Nor had you,” he said after a moment.
Gottfried tossed his arm. “I am Krenk. Could I do less than one of you?”
“Let me see your hands again.” Dietrich took Gottfried by the wrists and turned his hands up. The Krenkish hand was not like a man’s hand. All six fingers could act as thumbs and they were long compared to the palm, which consequently appeared no bigger than a Thaler gold-piece. The passage of the fiery fluid had left a burn on each palm, which the Krenkish physician had treated with an unguent of some sort.
Gottfried pulled his hands away and snapped his side-lips. “You doubt my words?”
“No,” said Dietrich. The black marks had seemed much like the stigmata. “Have you the love of God in your heart?” he asked abruptly.
Gottfried imitated the human nod. “If I show in my actions this next-love, then I have it inside my head, not true?”
“‘By their fruits you shall know them,’” Dietrich quoted, thinking of both Lorenz and Gottfried. “Do you reject Satan and all his works?”
“What is then this ‘satan’?”
“The Great Tempter. The one who always whispers to us the love of self rather than the love of others, and so doing seeks to turn us from the good.”
Gottfried listened while the Heinzelmännchen translated. “If when I am beaten,” he suggested, “I speak inside my head—think—of beating another. If when something of mine is taken, I think to take from another to replace it. If when I take pleasure, I do not ask the other’s consent. Is this what you mean?”
“Yes. Those sentences are spoken by Satan. We seek always the good, but never may we use evil means to achieve it. When others do evil to us, we must not respond with further evil.”
“Those are hard words, especially for the likes of him.”
All voices spoken through the Heinzelmännchen sounded alike, but Dietrich turned, and saw in the doorway Hans. “Hard, indeed,” Dietrich told the servant of the talking head. “So hard that no man can hope to follow. Our spirits are weak. We succumb to the temptation to return evil for evil, to seek our own good at the expense of others, to use other men as means to our own ends. That is why we need the strength—the grace—of our Lord Jesus Christ. The burden of such sinfulness is too great for us to carry alone, and so He walks by our side, as Simon the Cyrenian once walked beside Him.”
“And Blitzl—Gottfried—will follow this way? A Krenk well known as a brawler?”
“I will,” said Gottfried.
“Are you such a weakling, then?”
Gottfried exposed his neck. “I am.”
Hans’s horn lips spread wide and his soft lips fell open. “You say so?” But Gottfried rose and strode to the sacristy door, passing close by Hans to emerge on the altar. Dietrich looked at his friend. “He will need your prayers, Hans.”
“He will need one of your miracles.”
Dietrich nodded. “We all do.” Then he followed Gottfried to the baptistery.
“Baptism,” he told the Krenk beside the copper basin, “is the washing away of sin, just as ordinary water washes away dirt. One emerges from the water born again as a new man, and a new man needs a new name. You must choose a Christian name from among the roll of saints who have preceeded us. ‘Gottfried’ is itself a good name—”