Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [158]
LATER, WHEN Dietrich went by Theresia’s cottage to see to her welfare, he encountered Gregor outside her door, nursing one hand with the other. “My little finger, I think,” the mason said. “It wants a splint. I jammed it between two stones.”
Dietrich rapped on the doorpost and Theresia pulled open the upper door and, seeing Gregor, brightened into the first smile Dietrich had witnessed since the advent of the Krenken. Then she caught sight of Dietrich. “Greet God, father,” she said before turning to address Gregor. “And how goes it by you, mason?”
Gregor raised his bloody hand in mute appeal, and Theresia gasped and rushed him in. Dietrich followed, leaving the upper door open for the air. He watched Theresia cleanse the wound and bind it to a splint with a hemp bandage, although it seemed to Dietrich that the mason was not one to quail at such small hurts. Only after she had cared for Gregor did Theresia address Dietrich. “And are you then also wounded, father?”
Yes, he thought. “I came only to see how matters go with you,” Dietrich said.
“It goes well,” she said, turning up her eyes to his face.
Dietrich waited for her to say more, but she did not; and so he took her by the shoulders and kissed her on the brow, as he had so often in her childhood. Unaccountably, she began to weep. “I wish they had never come!”
Dietrich said, “Gottfried-Lorenz has assured me that they will soon go home.”
“To one home or another,” Gregor said. “Two more died this past week. I think they die of homesickness.”
“No one dies of homesickness,” Dietrich said. “The cold killed some—the alchemist, the children, a few others—but summer is come.”
“It’s what Arnold once told me,” the mason insisted. “He said, ‘We will die because we are not at home.’ And again, he said, ‘Here, we eat our fill, but are not nourished.’”
“That is senseless,” said Dietrich.
The mason scowled, and glanced at Theresia, and then at the open doorway, through which the sounds of birds thrilled the morning air. “It puzzles me,” the big man admitted. “Your friend, the Kratzer, said once that he wished for half the hope that Arnold had. Yet, Arnold murdered himself, and the Kratzer did not.”
“Their talking head may not understand such words as ‘hope’ or ‘despair.’”
“What difference,” said Theresia, “whether they die or depart?”
Diertrich turned and took her hand in his, and she did not pull away. “All men die,” he told her. “What matters in God’s eye is how we have treated one another in life. ‘Love the Lord with your whole heart and your whole soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.’ This command binds us to one another and saves us from the snares of vengeance and brutality.”
“There is no shortage among Christians of vengeance and brutality,” Gregor observed.
“Men are men. ‘By their fruits you shall know them,’ not by what name they call themselves. Sudden grace may come upon even the most wicked of men. Ja, even the most wicked of men … I have—I have seen this myself.”
Theresia reached out and touched his cheek to brush away a tear. Gregor spoke: “You mean Gottfried-Lorenz. Grosswald called him choleric, and now he is the humblest of Krenken.”
“Ja,” said Dietrich, glancing toward him. “Ja. I meant like Gottfried-Lorenz.”
“But I think Grosswald intended no praise by calling him humble.”
Theresia was weeping also and Dietrich returned her favor. “No, he would not,” he answered. “By him are forbearance and forgiveness weakness and folly. A man with power uses it; one without, obeys. But I believe all men thirst for justice and mercy, whatever is written in the ‘atoms of their flesh.’ We have saved six of his folk—perhaps seven, for of the alchemist I am uncertain.”
“Justice and mercy,” said Gregor. “Both at once? Now, there stands a riddle.”
“Father,” said Theresia suddenly, “can one love and hate the same man?”
A bee had found its way into the cottage and hunted diligently among the herbs that Theresia grew in small clay pots on her windowsills. “I think,” Dietrich said