Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [48]
The priest scratched his head. “Albrecht the Great described such bones. He thought with Avicenna that they had been turned to stone by some mineral process. But they may be the bones of some great animal lost in the Flood and not of giant men.”
“Perhaps the bones of a dragon, then,” Lorenz suggested slyly, leaning close and placing a conspiratorial hand on his arm.
Dietrich smiled. “Do you think so?”
“Your tankard is empty. I’ll fetch another.” Lorenz pushed to his feet, and hesitated half-turned away. “There is talk,” he said after a pause.
Dietrich nodded. “There generally is. What of?”
“That you go too often into the woods with the Frau Müller.”
Dietrich blinked and looked into his empty stein. He wondered why he should be surprised to learn of the gossip. “Bluntly put, my friend, but the Herr has established a lazaretto—”
“—in the Great Wood. Ja, doch. But with the Frau Müller we know also which way the rabbit runs and if she truly is caring for lepers, that would be a second pair of boots.”
Dietrich, too, wondered that so selfish and prideful a woman had persisted in her charity. “Rash judgment is a sin, Lorenz. Besides, Max the Schweitzer goes often with us.”
The smith shrugged. “Two men in the woods with his wife will hardly reassure the miller. I’ve only said what I’ve heard. I know …” He paused and turned the tankard over in his hand. It was as if his soul had retreated from the two windows in his face. The dregs of the beer dribbled out onto the dirt unseen. “I know the sort of man you are, so I believe you.”
“You could try believing with greater certitude,” Dietrich said sharply, so that Lorenz turned a startled face on him, then hurried off on his errand. The smith was a gentle man—surprisingly so, given his strength—but he was a woman for gossip.
Felix and Ilse came to give him a pair of hens for the blessing of the house. Dietrich would have refused them, yet winter would be coming and even priests must eat. The eggs would be appreciated and, later, the stew. In return, Dietrich reached into his scrip and pulled out the wooden doll and gave it to their little girl. He had polished it to remove the scorches, and had replaced the charred arms and legs with fresh sticks he had found. The hair, he had cut from his own head. But Maria dropped the doll into the dirt and cried, “That isn’t Anna! That isn’t Anna!” And she ran inside the rebuilt cottage, leaving Dietrich crouching in the dust.
Sighing, he replaced the doll into his scrip. It wasn’t the doll, he thought. The doll was only a construction of sticks and rags. There was nothing precious about such things. He stood and picked up the wooden cage with the clucking chickens. “Come now, sister hens,” he said, “I know a rooster who is anxious to meet you.”
Something repaired, he thought as he returned to the parsonage, is never quite what it was before. Whatever other parts were replaced, the memories could never be.
TWO YEARS before his death, while praying fervently on Mount Alvernia, Saint Francis of Assisi received on his body an impression of the sacred wounds of Christ. Three-quarters of a century later, Pope Benedict XI, a sickly, scholarly, peace-loving man, uneasy outside the company of his Dominican order, established the feast as a token of goodwill to the rival order. So, although Hildegarde of Bingen was the saint for that day, Dietrich read the Mass Mihi autem to honor Francis and as a brotherly gesture toward his houseguest. This may have disappointed Theresia, for the Abbess Hildegarde, author of a well-known treatise on medicines, was a special favorite of hers; but if so, she made no protest.
The Mass had barely concluded when Joachim threw himself facedown on the freshly washed flagstones before the altar. Dietrich, putting the vessels away, thought the display unseemly. He slammed the storage cabinet and made a show