Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [201]
Everyone looked at everyone else. Those whose blood harbored the small-lives, but who had not yet fallen ill, hung their heads, and a few stood and walked off. Gregor Mauer shrugged and looked at Klaus, who tossed his arm Krenkishly. “If Atiulf is hale,” he suggested.
When the villagers had dispersed, Joachim followed Dietrich to the millpond, just above the sluiceway to Klaus’s mill. The wheel turned in bright splashes of water, but the stones were silent, which meant the cam was disengaged. The mist cooled, and Dietrich welcomed the relief from the heat. Joachim faced the gurgling water where it jostled into the sluice, so that he and Dietrich stood with their backs to each other. For a time, the hissing water and the groaning wheel were the only sounds. Turning, Dietrich saw the young man staring at the bright, crisscrossed lines of sunlight that quartered the choppy stream. “What is wrong?” he asked.
“You send me away!”
“Because you are clean. Because you have a chance yet to live.”
“But, you, also …”
Dietrich silenced him with a gesture. “It is my penance … for sins committed in my youth. I have nearly fifty years. How few I have to lose! You have not yet twenty-five, and many years more remain in service to God.”
“So,” the young man said bitterly. “You would deny me even the martyr’s crown.”
“I would give you the shepherd’s staff!” Dietrich snapped. “Those folk will be filled with despair, with denial of God. Had I given you the easy task, I would keep you here!”
“But I, too, wish the glory!”
“What glory in changing bandages, in lancing pustules, in wiping up the shit and the vomit and the pus? Herr Jesu Christus! We are commanded all these things, but they are not glorious.”
Joachim had edged away from his diatribe. “No. No, you are wrong, Dietrich. It is the most glorious work of all, more glorious than plumed knights spitting men on their lances and bragging on their deeds.”
Dietrich remembered a song the knights used to sing in the aftermath of the Armleder. Peasants live like pigs/And have no sense for manners … “No,” he agreed, “the deeds of knights are not always so glorious, either.” They had returned hate for hate, and abandoned all sense of that chivalry for which they had once been renowned—if that renown had ever been more than lies on the lips of minnesingers. Dietrich glanced toward Castle Hill. He had asked once of Joachim where he had been when the Armleder passed through. He had never asked Manfred.
“We have been found wanting,” Joachim said. “The demons were our test, our triumph! Instead, most escaped unchristened. Our failure has brought God’s punishment upon us.”
“The pest is everywhere,” Dietrich snapped, “in places that have never seen a Krenk.”
“Each to his own sin,” Joachim said. “To some, wealth. To others, usury. To others still, cruelty or rapaciousness. The pest strikes everywhere because sin is everywhere.”
“And so God slays all, giving men no chance to repent? What of the Christ-taught love?”
Joachim’s eyes turned dull and sullen. “The Father does this; not the Son. He of the Old Dispensation, whose gaze is fire, whose hand is a thunderbolt and whose breath is the storm wind!” Then, more quietly, “He is like any father angry with his children.”
Dietrich said nothing and Joachim sat for a while longer. After a moment, the monk said, “I have never thanked you for taking me in.”
“Monastic quarrels can be brutal.”
“You were a monk once. Brother William called you ‘Brother Angelus.’”
“I knew him at Paris. It was a sly gibe of his.”
“He is one of us, a Spiritual. Were you?”
“Will cared naught for the Spirituals until the tribunal condemned his propositions. Michael and the others fled Avignon at the same time, and he threw in with them.”
“They would have burned him.”
“No, they would have made him rephrase his propositions. To Will, that was worse.” Dietrich found a small smile in the jest. “One may say anything, if only it is framed as a hypothesis, secundum