Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [65]
“Charity.”
“Ja. To seek the good of another and not your own.”
“You do so—question.”
“Not so often as the good Herr commanded; but yes. It gathers merit for us in Heaven.”
“Does the Heinzelmännchen overset correctly—question. A superior being came from the Heaven, made himself your Herr, and ordered that you perform this ‘charity.’”
“I would not phrase it so …”
“Then all fits.”
Dietrich waited, but Hans said nothing more. The silence lengthened and waxed oppressive, and he had begun to suspect that his stealthy visitor had stolen away—the Krenken were not long on the formalities of greeting and farewell—when Hans spoke once more.
“I will say now a thing, though it shows us weak. We are a mixed folk. Some belong to the ship, and its captain was their Herr. The captain died in the shipwreck and Gschert now rules. Others form a school of philosophers whose task is to study new lands. It was they who hired the ship. The Kratzer is not their Herr, but the other philosophers allow him to speak for them.”
“Primus inter pares,” Dietrich suggested. “First among equals.”
“So. A useful phrase. I will tell him. In the third band are those who travel to see strange and distant sights, places where the well-known have lived or where great events have happened…. What call you such folk?”
“Pilgrims.”
“So. The ship was to visit several places favored by pilgrims before bearing the philosophers onward to a newfound land. The ship’s company and the school of philosophers say always that on such journeys into the unknown there may be no return. ‘It has happened; it will happen.’”
“Ja, doch,” Dietrich said. “In my father’s time, some Franciscan scholars sailed with the brothers Vivaldi to seek India, which Bacon’s map placed but a short distance westward across the Ocean Sea. But nothing was again heard of them after they departed Cape Non.”
“Then you have the same sentence in your head: A new voyage may fare one-way. But in the pilgrims’ heads there stands always a return, and our failure to reach the correct heaven must be from someone’s … I think your word is ‘sin.’ So, some pilgrims place our present failure on Gschert’s sin, and even some of the ship’s company say that he is nothing beside he who was captain before. One thinking himself stronger may seek to replace him. And if so, Gschert will likely raise his neck, for it is in my head that he may think the same.”
“It is a grave matter,” Dietrich said, “to overthrow the established order, for who is to say but that the result may not be worse. We had such an uprising twelve years ago. An army of peasants laid waste the countryside, burning manor houses, killing lords and priests and Jews.”
And Dietrich recalled with sudden, unbearable immediacy, the swirling intoxication of being swept along by something greater and more powerful and more right than oneself, the safety and arrogance of numbers. He remembered noble families immolated inside their own houses; Jew moneylenders paid in full with hemp and faggot. There had been a preacher among them, a man of some learning, and he had exhorted the crowds with the words of James:
Woe to you rich! Your wealth has rotted, your fine wardrobe is moth-eaten. Your gold and silver has tarnished and their corrosion is a testament against you! Here, crying aloud, are the wages you withheld from the serfs who worked your fields! The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord. You lived in wanton luxury on the earth; you fattened yourself for the day of slaughter!
And the Armleder army—it called itself an army, with self-proclaimed captains, and wore leather brassards for livery—sweaty, lust-mad, impatient for loot, foreboding their own death-warrants, would join in the last, so that the shout, “Day of Slaughter!” hoarse from a thousand throats, were the last words many a wealthy lord or Jew heard in this life. Manor houses lit the night with their flames, so that a man might travel the