Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [46]
Max only grinned. “Perhaps he is not so well-schooled as you.”
IN SEPTEMBER, the year paused, weary from the harvest, and inhaled deeply for the fall planting, wine press, and slaughter. The air grew cool and the broadleaf trees shivered in anticipation. Time enough, in this interstice between the summer and autumn labors, to finish the repairs from the “Great Fire,” and to wed Seppl to Ulrike.
The nuptials took place on the village green, where the witnesses could gather ‘round the couple. There, Seppl declared his intent and Ulrike, dressed in traditional bridal yellow, declared her consent, after which everyone proceeded up Church Hill. The Lateran Council had required that all weddings be public, but not that the Church participate in them. Nonetheless, despite his losses in the fire, Felix had elected a nuptial mass for his daughter’s marriage. Dietrich preached a sermon on the history and development of marriage, and explained how it was a figure of Christ wed to His Church. He was well into the contrast between muntehe, or family alliance, and friedehe, the love-match favored by the Church, when he sensed the restlessness of the congregants and the growing concupiscence of the wedding couple, and drew his discourse to a hasty and ill-reasoned conclusion.
Friends and relatives paraded the couple from the church to a cottage that Volkmar had prepared for them, and watched them lie together in the bed, giving helpful lastminute advice all the while. Then the neighbors withdrew and waited outside the window. Dietrich, who had stayed behind at the church, heard the shout and the pot-banging all the way at the top of the hill. He turned to Joachim, who was helping him strip the altar.
“It’s a wonder young people wed publicly at all, if that is what they must endure.”
“Yes,” said Joachim with a hooded look. “A woods-marriage has its advantages.”
By its tone, the Minorite’s remark was freighted with irony and Dietrich wondered what he had meant by it. The singular advantage of privately spoken vows lay in their easy denial afterward. Absent witnesses, who could say what was promised, or whether consent was given? A marriage promised in the throes of passion could fade with that selfsame passion. To combat this evil, the Church insisted on public weddings. Even so, many couples still exchanged vows in the woods—or even in the bed itself!
Dietrich folded the altar cloth in half, then in half again. He decided that Joachim had intended a humorous affirmation of Dietrich’s own remark and said, “Doch,” which earned a sharp glance, quickly suppressed, from the Franciscan.
THE REBUILT cottages were blessed on the Commemoration of Pope Cornelius, still remembered as a friend to the poor and therefore an auspicious patron for such a blessing. Lueter Holzhacker led a troop of men into the Lesser Wood below Church Hill and there toppled a fir, perhaps twenty shoes tall, which they carried to the green with much ceremony. The men barked the trunk halfway to the top, leaving the uppermost branches untouched and liberating the sweet, piney scent of virgin wood. The remaining branches they decked with wreaths, garlands, and other ornaments, and a profusion of colored flags; and stood the tree in a post-hole prepared at the corner of Felix Ackermann’s cottage.
Afterward, there was singing and dancing and tankards of beer and the flesh of a roast pig that Ackermann and the brothers Feldmann offered jointly as a love-gift to their neighbors. The festivities spread from the cottages down the length of the high street, spilling around the well, the oven, and into the meadow by the millpond.
The armsmen who had helped fight the fires came down from the Burg to join the celebration. They were a swaggering lot, older than their years and possessed of a hardness beside which the village youth seemed callow. More than one maiden found herself