Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [54]
“If I can forgive them, so can you.”
“Have you, then, forgiven them?”
“But naturally.”
Theresia laid her needlepoint in her lap. “It is not so natural to forgive. Revenge is natural. Strike a cur and it will snap. Stir up a wasps’ nest and they will sting. That was why it took such a one as our blessed Lord to teach us to forgive. If you have forgiven those people, why have you not gone back, while the soldier and the miller’s wife have?”
Dietrich laid the breast aside, half-eaten. Buridan had argued that there could be no action at a distance, and forgiveness was an action. Could there be forgiveness at a distance? A pretty question. How could he move the Krenken to depart if he did not go to them? But the Krenkish ferocity terrified him. “A few days more rest,” he said, postponing the decision. “Come, bring the sweetcakes now by the fire, and I will read to you from De usu partium.”
His adopted daughter brightened. “I do so love to hear you read, especially the books of healing.”
ON THE Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, Dietrich limped to the fields to assess the plowing on the tithe-lands—which he farmed to Felix, Herwyg One-eye, and others. The second planting had begun and so the lowing of oxen and the neighing of horses mixed with the jingle of harness and whippletree, the curses of the plowmen, and the whapping of mattocks and clodding beetles. Herwyg had broken the field in April and was plowing more deeply now. Dietrich spoke briefly with the man and was content with his labors.
He noticed Trude Metzger behind the plow on the neighboring manse. Her oldest son, Melchior, tugged the lead ox by a strap while her younger son, a stripling, swung a mattock not much smaller than he was. Herwyg, turning his own team about on the headland, volunteered the wisdom that the plow was man’s work.
“It’s dangerous for a boy so small to lead the oxen,” Dietrich said to his farmer. “That was how her husband was trampled.” A roll of distant thunder echoed from the Katerinaberg and Dietrich glanced up at a cloudless sky.
Herwyg spat into the dirt. “Thunder-weather,” he said. “Though I’ve smelt no rain. But ‘twas a horse what trampled Metzger, not an ox. Greedy fool worked the beast too long. Sundays, too, though I’d not speak ill of the dead. Your ox, he comes on steady, but a horse can take a mind to rear and kick. That’s why I drive oxen. Hai! Jakop! Heyso! Pull!” Herwyg’s wife goaded Heyso, the lead ox, and the team of six began to plod forward. The wet, heavy clay slid off the plow’s mouldboard, forming a ridge on either side of the furrow. “I’d help her,” Herwyg said with a toss of his head toward Trude. “But her tongue be no sweeter nor her man’s ever were. And I have my own manses to plow yet, after I finish with yours, pastor.”
It was a courteous invitation to leave; so Dietrich crossed the berm to Trude’s land, where her son still struggled to turn the team. Each time the ox shifted its stance, Dietrich expected the lad to be crushed underfoot. The younger boy had sat down on the ridge and was weeping from weariness, the mattock fallen from numb and bleeding fingers. Trude, meanwhile, lashed the oxen with her whip and her boy with her tongue. “Pull him by the nose, you lazy brat!” she cried. “Left, you doodle, to the left!” When she saw Dietrich, she turned a mud-streaked face on him. “And what do you have, priest? More useless advice, like old One-eye?”
Metzger had been a surly man, given to drink and excess, though he’d been a fair plowman. Trude hadn’t his cunning at the plow, but owned a portion of his surliness.
“I have a pfennig for you,” Dietrich said, reaching into his scrip. “You can hire a gärtner to work the plow for you.”
Trude lifted her cap and swiped a hand across her red brow, leaving another streak of dirt across it. “And why should I share my wealth with some lackland?”
Dietrich wondered how his pfennig had become her wealth. “Nickel Langerman can use the work and he has the strength for the plow.”
“So why has no one else hired him?”
Dietrich