Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [191]
AFTERWARD, DIETRICH walked with Klaus to Walpurga Honig’s cottage, where they sat on the bench before it. Klaus rapped his knuckles on the window shutter and, a moment later, the ale-wife opened it and shoved a pot of ale into his hands. She glanced at Dietrich, reappeared with a second pot, then slammed and bolted the shutter. The sudden noise startled little Atiulf Kohlmann, sitting in the dirt across the street, and he cried out for his mommy.
“Everyone is afraid,” Klaus said, with a gesture of the pot. He took a sip, closed his eyes, and began to weep, the pot dropping from nerveless fingers and spilling his ale in the dirt. “I don’t understand,” he said after a time. “Has she wanted for anything? Her mere word was its purchase. Brocades, girdles, wimples. Silken small-clothes one time in the Freiburg—Italian work, and did that not cost me? ‘French paint’ for her face. I put food on her table, a roof over her head—and not a hut like her father’s. No, a wooden building with a stone fireplace and a chimney to heat the bed-loft. I gave her two fine children and, while God saw fit to call the boy back too young, I saw our ‘Phye fairly wed to a Freiburg merchant. Only God knows how Freiburg fares this day.” He studied his hands and wrung one with the other. He looked east, toward the lowlands.
“Yet she seeks other men,” he said. “Everyone knows it, but I must pretend otherwise—and take my little revenges when I weigh out the meal. I jested when I lifted her skirt for you. But I think now you really were the last man in Oberhochwald to see that sight; though I did not think so at one time. I thought you went into the woods to be with her, pastor. Priest though you are, you’re a man. So I followed one day. That was when I saw the monsters for the first time. Yet they were not so terrible a sight as my Hilde, splayed upon a bed of forest leaves while that crude sergeant entered her.”
Dietrich remembered one of the miller’s horses tethered in the clearing and thinking then that it was Hilde’s. “Klaus—” he said, but the miller continued with no indication of having heard.
“I’m an agile man in the marriage bed. Not so agile as in my spring, but I’ve had no complaint from others. Oh, yes, I’ve swyved other women. What choice had I? Your choice? No, I burn like your Paul. I don’t know why she turns from me. Do other men speak sweeter words? Are their lips more agreeable?”
And now the miller raised his eyes to look at Dietrich squarely. “You could tell her. You could make it a commandment. But … I don’t want her submission. I want her love, and I can’t have that, and I don’t know why.
“I saw her first in her father’s swineyard, feeding the pigs. Her feet were bare in the muck, but I saw the princess in the mire. I was apprenticed to old Heinrich—Altenbach’s father, that was—who held the Herr’s mill before me, so my prospects were good. My Beatrix had died in that terrible winter of 1315, and all our children with her, so my seed would die with me, unless I wed again. I proposed a marriage to her father and paid merchet and the Herr consented. No woman here ever had so fine a wedding-feast, save only the Herr’s own Kunigund! I learned that night that she was no virgin, but what woman is by that age? It did not bother me then. Perhaps it should have.”
Dietrich laid a hand on Klaus’s shoulder. “What will you do now?”
“He was not gentle with her, that pig sergeant. For him, just another ‘loch.’”
“Wanda Schmidt has died.”
Klaus nodded slowly. “That sorrows me. We were good friends. We shared the same lack, but filled it with each other. I know it was a sin, but …”
“A small sin,” Dietrich assured him. “There was no evil, I think, in either of you.”
Klaus laughed. His thickset body shook like an earthquake in a barrel, and tears started in the corners of his eyes. “How often,” he said when the laughter