Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [135]
But the man denied knowledge and departed, though with many a wary glance at his surroundings. Joachim, who was also helping in the church, said, “I think rumors have reached the bishop’s ears. That man was sent to deliver a message, but he was also told to keep his eyes open.”
The Krenken dropped to the flagstones and resumed their work with the shrouds. Gottfried, last to drop, said, “Shall we give him something to see?” Then he departed, laughing.
Dietrich slit the seal on the packet and unfolded it. “What is it?” Joachim asked.
It was an indictment from the episcopal court that he had baptized demons. If there were any surprise in the contents, it was that they had been so long in coming.
It came suddenly upon Dietrich that it was on this night, at about this time of day, that the Son of Man had been betrayed by one of his own. Would they come for him tonight, as well? No, he had a month’s grace to respond.
He read the document a second time, but the words had not changed.
“A MONTH’S grace,” said Manfred when Dietrich came to his scriptorium with the news.
“By law,” Dietrich answered. “And I must provide a list of my enemies, so the investigating magistrate may decide whether the charges have been laid in malice. There must be at least two witnesses before a judge will act. The bill does not name them, which is unusual.”
Manfred, sitting in his curule chair at his desk, curled his fingers under his chin. “So. How long is your enemy list?”
“Mine Herr, I did not believe I had any.”
Manfred nodded toward the indictment. “You have at least two. By Catherine’s wheel, you are naïve for a priest. I can name a dozen here in the village.”
Dietrich thought irresistibly of those who had objected to Hans’s baptism, who feared the Krenken beyond reason. The punishments for false witness were severe. Years ago, a man in Köln who had accused his son of heresy out of spite over the lad’s disobedience had been placed in the stocks, where he had died. Dietrich went to the slit window and sucked in the evening air. Firelight glowed in cottage windows in the valley below. The forest was a rustling black under a twinkling sky.
How could he name her, and deliver her to such a fate?
6
NOW
Tom
TOM AND Judy met at the Pigeon Hole to discuss her latest findings over a couple of cheesesteak hoagies. Searching for Pastor Dietrich, Judy’s worm had turned up a ton of klimbim. “Do you know how many medieval Germans have been named Dietrich?” She rolled her eyes up to Heaven, but secretly she knew how much work one eureka took. The journey of a thousand miles really does begin with a single step; it just doesn’t end there. “Wrong century; wrong kingdom. Saxony, Württemberg, Franconia … A ‘Dietrich’ in Cologne, even a ‘Dietrich’ in Paris. Those, I could eliminate. The tough ones had no particular year or place associated with them. Those I had to read one by one. And this one?” She waved the printout in the air. “The idiots didn’t put ‘Oberhochwald’ in their index. Otherwise, it would have popped out long ago.” She bit her hoagie savagely. “Jerks,” she muttered.
This was a book excerpt. During the 1970s, an enterprising group of liberals had published a book called Tolerance Through the Ages, whose contents were intended to show enlightened attitudes in many times and places. Along with Martin Luther King’s I have a dream … speech and Roger Williams’s The Bloody Tenet was a letter from Pastor Dietrich to his bishop.
To the Rt. Rev. Wilhelm Jarlsberg, Archdeacon of Freiburg in the Breisgau
I beseech your good offices to present with my humble prayers this apologia to his grace, Berthold II, Bishop of Strassburg.
I have remained meekly silent while my detractors, hoping to turn your heart against me, have laid a charge against me with the tribunal of the Holy Office. Reason and truth will prevail, I thought. Yet,