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In the morning, the portcullis of the castle opened with a clatter of chains and Richart the schultheiss, with Wilifrid the clerk and a few others galloped furiously down Castle Hill and out the Bear Valley road. Shortly thereafter, the bell in the castle chapel tolled once. Dietrich waited, and waited; but there came no second stroke.
That afternoon, the villagers held an irregular court under the linden and Dietrich asked the gathering which of them Ulf had found free of the small-lives. About half raised their hands, and Dietrich noted that they sat for the most part at a distance from their neighbors.
“You must leave Oberhochwald,” he said. “If you stay, the small lives will invade you, as well. Take, also those whose fever has broken. When the pest has gone, you may return and set things aright once more.”
“I’ll not return,” cried Jutte Feldma
“But, where would we go?” asked Jakob Becker. “The pest lies all about us. In the Swiss, so also in Vie
Dietrich stopped him before he could enumerate the whole world. “Go south and east into the foothills,” he said. “Shun all towns and villages. Build shelters in the forest, keep fires burning, and stay near the fires. Take flour or meal, so you will have bread. Joachim, you will go with them.”
The young monk stared at him open-mouthed. “But… What do I know of the forest?”
“Lueter Holzhacker knows the forests. And Gerlach Jaeger has ranged about hunting deer and wolves.” Jaeger, who had been hunkered down a little to the side of the group whittling on a limb, looked up and spat. “By m’self,” he said, and resumed whittling.
Everyone looked at everyone else. Those whose blood harbored the small-lives, but who had not yet fallen ill, hung their heads, and a few stood and walked off. Gregor Mauer shrugged and looked at Klaus, who tossed his arm krenkishly. “If Atiulf gets well,” he suggested.
When the villagers had dispersed, Joachim followed Dietrich to the mill pond, just above the sluiceway to Klaus’ mill. The wheel turned in bright splashes of water, but the stones were silent, which meant the cam was disengaged. The mist cooled, and Dietrich welcomed the relief from the heat. Joachim faced the gurgling water where it jostled into the sluice, so that he and Dietrich stood with their backs to each other. For a time, the hissing water and the groaning wheel were the only sounds. Turning, Dietrich saw the young man staring at the bright, criss-crossed lines of sunlight that quartered the choppy stream. “What is wrong?” he asked.
“You send me away!”
“Because you are clean. Because you have a chance yet to live.”
“But, you, also…”
Dietrich silenced him with a gesture. “It is my penance…, for sins committed in my youth. I have nearly fifty years. How few I have to lose! You have not yet twenty-five, and many years more remain in service to God.”
“So,” the young man said bitterly. “You would deny me even the martyr’s crown.”
“I would give you the shepherd’s staff!” Dietrich snapped. “Those folk will be filled with despair, with denial of God. Had I given you the easy task, I would keep you here!”
“But I, too, wish the glory!”
“What glory in changing bandages, in lancing pustules, in wiping up the shit and the vomit and the pus? Herr Jesu-Christus! We are commanded all these things, but they are not glorious.”
Joachim had edged away from his diatribe. “No. No, you are wrong, Dietrich. It is the most glorious work of all, more glorious than plumed knights spitting men on their lances and bragging on their deeds.”
Dietrich remembered a song the knights used to sing in the aftermath of the Armleder. Peasants live like pigs/And have no sense for ma
“We have been found wanting,” Joachim said. “The demons were our test, our triumph! Instead, most escaped unchristened. Our failure has brought God’s punishment upon us.”
“The pest is everywhere,” Dietrich snapped, “in places that have never seen a Krenk.”
“Each to his own sin,” Joachim said. “To some, wealth. To others, usury. To others still, cruelty or rapaciousness. The pest strikes everywhere because sin is everywhere.”
“And so God slays all, giving men no chance to repent? What of the Christ-taught love?”
Joachim’s eyes turned dull and sullen. “The Father does this; not the Son. He of the Old Dispensation, whose gaze is fire, whose hand is a thunderbolt and whose breath is the storm wind!” Then, more quietly, “He is like any father angry with his children.”
Dietrich said nothing and Joachim sat for a while longer. After a moment, the monk said, “I have never thanked you for taking me in.”
“Monastic quarrels can be brutal.”
“You were a monk once. Brother William called you ‘Brother Angelus.’”
“I knew him at Paris. It was a sly gibe of his.”
“He is one of us, a Spiritual. Were you?”
“Will cared naught for the Spirituals until the tribunal condemned his propositions. Michael and the others fled Avignon at the same time, and he threw in with them.”
“They would have burned him.”
“No, they would have made him rephrase his propositions. To Will, that was worse.” Dietrich found a small smile in the jest. “One may say anything, if only it is framed as an hypothesis, a secundum imaginationem. But Will holds his hypotheses as matters of fact. He argued Ludwig’s case against the Pope, but to Ludwig he was a tool.”
“No wonder we are smitten.”
“Many a good truth has been upheld by wicked men for their own purposes. And good men have caused much wickedness in their zealotry.”
“The Armleder.”
Dietrich hesitated. “That was one such case. There were good men among them.” He fell silent, thinking of the fishwife and her boy in the Freiburg market.
“There was a leader among the Armleder,” Joachim said slowly, “called ‘Angelus’.”
Dietrich was a long time silent. “That man is dead now,” he said at last. “But through him I learned a terrible truth: that heresy is truth, in extremis. The proper object of the eye is light, but too much light blinds the eyes.”
“So, you would compromise with the wicked, as the Conventuals do?”
“Jesus said the weeds would grow with the wheat until the Judgement,” Dietrich answered, “so one finds both good men and bad in the church. By our fruits we will be known, not by what name we have called ourselves. I have come to believe that there is more grace in becoming wheat than there is in pulling up weeds.”
“So might a weed say, had it speech,” said Joachim. “You split hairs.”
“Better to split hairs than the heads beneath them.”
Joachim rose from his rock. He skipped a stone across the mill pond. “I will do as you ask.”
The next day, four score villagers gathered on the green under the linden, prepared to leave. They had tied their belongings into bundles, which they carried on their backs or in a sack on the end of a pole slung across their shoulder. Some had the stu