Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [64]
A shadow moved under the roofbeams and a voice spoke in his ear. “I wear a harness that gives flight, and entered through the bell tower. The sentence was in my head to watch your ceremony.”
“The Mass? Why?”
“The sentence is that you hold the key for our salvation, but the Kratzer laughs, and Gschert will not listen. Both say we must find our own way back to the heavens.”
“It is a heresy many have fallen prey to,” admitted Dietrich, “that Heaven can be reached without help.”
The Krenk servant was silent for a moment before answering. “I had thought your ritual would complete inside my head the picture of you.”
“And has it?”
Dietrich heard a sharp clack from the rafters above him and he craned his neck to spy where the Krenk had now perched himself. “No,” said the voice in his ear.
“The picture of Dietrich inside my own head,” Dietrich admitted, “is also incomplete.”
“This is the problem. You want to help us, but I see no gain for you.”
Shadows shifted in the flickering candlelight, not quite black because the flames that cast them guttered red and yellow. Two small lights gleamed in the vises. Were they the Krenk’s eyes catching the dancing fires, or only metal fittings securing a beam? “Must there be always a gain for me in what I do?” Dietrich asked of the darkness, uncomfortably aware that the gain he sought was his own continued solitude and freedom from fear.
“Beings act always to their own gain: to obtain food or stimulate the senses, to win acceptance in one’s place, to reduce the labors needed to possess these things.”
“I cannot call you wrong, friend grasshopper. All men seek the good, and certainly food and the pleasures of the flesh and a surcease from labor are goods, or else we would not seek them. But I cannot say that you are entirely right either. What does Theresia gain with her herbs?”
“Acceptance,” was the Krenk’s swift reply. “Her place in the village.”
“That won’t make the cabbage fat. A man in want of food may drain a swamp—or steal a furrow; in want of pleasure, he may love his wife—or fick another’s. The way to Heaven is not found in partial goods, but only in the perfect good. To help others,” he said, “is a good in itself. Our Lord’s cousin James wrote: ‘God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble,’ and, ‘Religion pure and undefiled is this: to give aid to orphans and widows in their desperation.’”
“Manfred’s cousin carries no weight with the Krenk. He is not—our—lord, nor is Manfred so strong as Gschert has feared. When his own folk defied him over the haycocks, he did not strike them as they deserved, but allowed—his servants—to decide the matter for him. The act of a weakling. And they came back, his own underlings, and said that the gärtners had right. Duty binds them to gather Manfred’s hay, but not to place the cocks in the carts.”
Dietrich nodded. “So stands it in the weistümer. It is the custom of the manor.”
The Krenk drummed on the rafter and leaned into the ambit of the guttering candlelight so far that Dietrich thought he would topple off. “But that leaves next year the haycocks standing in the fields,” Hans said, “while the serfs wait in the curia to unload. That is—thought-lacking.”
A small smile crossed Dietrich’s lips as he recalled the muddle that had ensued in the court following the findings of the inquest. “We gain some small amusement from paradoxes. It is a form of entertainment, like singing or dancing.”
“Singing—”
“Another time I will explain that.”
“It is dangerous for one who rules to show weakness,” Johann insisted. “Had your Langermann made such a demand on Herr Gschert, he would be picking-food ere now.”
“I do not deny that Gschert is choleric in his humor,” Dietrich said dryly. Lacking true blood, the Krenken could not balance their choler properly with a sanguine humor. Instead, they possessed a yellow-green ichor; but as he was no doctor of the medical arts, Dietrich was uncertain which humor the ichor might govern. Perhaps one unknown to Galen. “But no worries,” he told Hans. “The haycocks will be loaded