Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [63]
Dietrich, uncertain what the quarrel signified and unwilling to provoke the Kratzer’s anger, answered that the Herr God had arranged the color-change to warn of approaching winter, while the evergreens maintained the promise of spring to come, and thus imbued into the moods of the year sorrow and hope alike. This explanation puzzled the Kratzer, who asked whether Manfred’s overlord were a master forester, at which non sequitur Dietrich despaired of explanation.
THE CHURCH celebrated the beginning of each agricultural season: to pray for a good planting or for summer rains or for a good harvest. The feriae messis opened the wine harvest and, in consequence, the mass Exultáte Deo was better attended than most. The southern slope of the Katerinaberg prickled with vineyards that produced a vintage that sold well in the Freiburg markets and provided Oberhochwald with one of its few sources of silver. But the past year had been again a cold one and there was concern that the press be bountiful.
At the Offertory, Klaus presented a bunch of ripe grapes picked from his own vines and, during the Consecration, Dietrich squeezed one of the grapes to mingle its juice with the wine in the chalice. Usually, the congregation would chatter among themselves, even lingering in the vestibule until summoned by the Preparation Bell. Today they watched in rapt concentration, engaged not by memory of the Christ’s sacrifice, but by hope that the ritual would bring good luck in the harvest—as if the Mass were mere sorcery, and not a memorial of the Great Sacrifice.
Elevating the chalice high above his head, Dietrich saw nested in the vises under the clerestory the glowing yellow eyes of a Krenk.
Frozen, he stood with arms extended, until the appreciative murmur of his flock called him to himself. A superstition had been gaining favor of late that the door from Purgatory to Heaven flew open while the bread and wine were elevated, and worshippers sometimes complained if the priest made too brief an Elevation. Surely, by such a lengthy elevation, their priest had won a great many souls free, to the greater sanctification of the wine harvest.
Dietrich replaced the cup on the altar and, genuflecting, mumbled the closing words because the sense of them had suddenly fled his mind. Joachim, who knelt beside him holding the hem of the chasuble in one hand and the bell in the other, glanced also toward the rafters, but if he saw the creature, he gave no sign. When Dietrich dared once more to raise his own eyes, the unexpected visitor had withdrawn into the shadows.
AFTER MASS, Dietrich knelt before the altar with his hands clenched into a ball before him. Above, carved from a single great piece of red oak, darkened further by a hundred years of smoking beeswax, Christ hung impaled upon His cross. The wasted figure—naked but for a scrap of decency, body twisted in agony, mouth gaping open in that last pitiable accusation—Why have you abandoned me?— emerged from the very wood of the cross, so that victim and instrument grew one from the other. It had been a brutal and humiliating way to die. Far kinder, the faggot, noose, or headsman’s ax that in modern times eased the journey.
Dimly, Dietrich heard the rumble of carts, clatter of billhooks and pruning shears, braying of donkeys, indistinct voices, curses, snap of whips, groan of wheels, as the villagers and the serfs gathered and departed for the vineyards. Quiet descended by degrees until all that was left beyond the ancient groaning of the walls was a distant, irregular kling-klang from Lorenz’s smithy at the foot of the hill.
When he was certain that Joachim had not lingered, Dietrich rose to his feet. “Hans,” he said softly when he had donned the Krenkish head-harness and had pressed the sigil that awoke the Heinzelmännchen. “Was it you I saw in the clerestory during Mass? How came you into