The Witch's Trinity (2 page)

We all held hands while Jost said the prayer of thanks. Alke’s fingers were impatient in my right hand, while my left stretched across the table to capture Matern’s. And then we all picked up our spoons and wetted our tongues.

At least it was hot.

Heat added flavor to things that had none, we had learned.

I took a spoonful into my mouth and simply sat with it, one carrot coin sitting on my tongue like a communion crumb. I closed my eyes to fully sense it, the meager gift of water with a ghost of taste. Everyone else plunged in with quick spoons, as if it would wink at them and run out the door if they did not hurry.

“What has Ramwold said this day?” asked Irmeltrud, in between gulps. Jost and the other village men had gone to hear him read the runes.

“He said the winter is yet to stretch more grievous,” said Jost. Some
Suppe
dribbled from his mouth from the haste. He used no cloth to wipe his face, only his own tongue, to not waste even a drop.

“Can it be so?” asked Irmeltrud in a horrified tone. “What have we done to bring this?”

“I know not, but there is talk of a hunting party to gather together. The woods here are emptied.”

“Better to solve the reason for our hunger than to lose yourselves to a boar’s tusks or worse betides. The woods are full of the devil’s minions.”

“Solve it, Mutter? How?” asked Matern with wide eyes.

“By seeking the source of the evil and suppressing it,” said Irmeltrud. She had already reached the bottom of her bowl, despite her talking, and clapped it down on the board. Her eyes snaked over to mine. “Someone is making mischief and bringing misery to this village,” she said. “One who has made a bargain with the devil and benefits from our distress.”

“We all toil in sin,” said Jost. “Yet I know of no one who would have struck such a bargain.”

“Not all toil,” she said, and looked into my eyes. I saw no warmth there. “There’s talk of old Künne Himmelmann.”

“What manner of talk?” Jost’s voice took on an edge of anger.

“The Töpfers say their hen has stopped laying. She is simply dried of eggs. And this happened after Künne sat down on a rock by their door.”

“Everyone sits at that rock,” said Jost. “The children sit there to play, the women sit on that rock to card their wool. And an old one such as Künne, to be walking the road, she’d have to tarry a bit to rest her feet.”

“But the hen?”

“The hen is as hungry as the rest of us and hasn’t the will to push out eggs,” said Jost.

I stared down at the rind of carrot spinning slowly in my bowl. Künne was my friend. I remembered when her hair had been flaxen, her braids thick as a goose neck. Now they were thin and gray, straggled like mine. I had taken only one sip from the bowl but could eat no more. If Künne was being talked of in this way, she was in danger. A Dominican friar had come to our village a week ago—he had been the one to speak of God punishing one of our villagers by withholding the harvest from everyone. I nodded to Jost and began to push my bowl across the board to him. He smiled weakly, knowing what Künne was to me. My shaky fingers, barely recognizable to me now as those that once easily did my bidding, pushed too hard and the bowl spilled.

“Fool!” said Irmeltrud as she stood and tried to scoop the liquid back into the bowl. “You’ve wasted an entire bowl. Would that you worked for it yourself, you’d treat it a little more carefully!”

It was true. I’d done naught to prepare for this repast. My fingers were too shaky for the knife to cut the carrots and my frame too frail to carry water to the cauldron.

The soup dripped down onto the dirt below. Jost’s face registered the regret that he had given me of his, and now it was lost to both.

“I don’t know how we’re to keep all these mouths full, Jost,” said Irmeltrud, turning her ire to him. “It’s barely enough to even wet the teeth. There’s too many in this house.”

“Calm yourself. All’s here that needs to be, and we will fill our stomachs when winter passes, God willing,” he said.

“I can barely think, I’m so hungry!” she yelled, and both children jumped at the loud bark of her tone. “And here she sits all the day, doing nothing but dreaming! All her age have already gone!
My
parents died many years ago! Yet
she
keeps sitting at our table, opening her mouth for whatever food we have!”

Jost got up from the table. “She is my mother, wife. Pray that Matern treats you kindly when you are gray. Have pity; she’s worked her entire life and now she deserves her rest.” He put on his cloak and hat and brushed past her to go out the door. A shattering wind came in and swirled around us before the door shut.

For a moment I thought Jost’s words had shamed her. She stared down at the table. Then she got up to get a kitchen cloth, which she pressed to the wet board to soak up the soup, then put in Matern’s mouth to suck. “You need to earn your keep, old woman,” she said in a tired voice. She reached across and cradled Alke’s cheek in her hand. Alke concentrated only on the thin sheen of soup on her spoon.

“Look at my hands,” I whispered. “Scarcely more useful than those buried in the graveyard, and with little more flesh on them. How can I put them to use?”

“By holding them out flat for alms. Beg for your meal, old woman. I’m through with feeding you.”

I stared.

“That’s right, Güde. Get your garments on and beg from the village. Get these children some food!”

Alke now licked the bowl that had been spilled, her pink tongue darting down to the bottom to catch the halfway salty flavor. Matern stared at his mother solemnly, still suckling the cloth she had placed in his mouth.

I stood to go to my straw mattress in the corner and shun her wrath, but she put her hands on my shoulders and funneled me to the door. “Here then! Here’s your scarf, there, and there,” she said as she wrapped it around my head and neck. She thrust my cloak at me.

“You’re sending me out to beg?” I asked. Even though my voice had gotten reedy as I aged, I was surprised at the frail sound coming from me.

“Your mind is going along with your body,” said she. “Haven’t I said it clearly?”

She pushed me outside and I shivered instantly in the shock of cold. The sky was a large gray stone pressing down upon the treetops. I turned to press my hand to the door to stop her, but she was stronger and it closed.

I stared at the wood in disbelief.

I banged my palm against the door. “Irmeltrud,” I called. “Please let me in. It is freezing as night out here. It’s snowing.”

She made no reply.

“Please,” I cried. I curled both hands into fists and battered them against the door.

My fists stilled and I listened to the wind. Inside I heard Matern begin to wail. I hammered more, thinking of Hensel and his mallet plugging the logs of this cottage into place, decades ago. The same
thump, thump.
My husband had built this
Hütte
, and our own son’s wife had locked its door against me.

2

They take the unguent, which, as we have said, they make at the devil’s instruction from the limbs of children…whereupon they are immediately carried up into the air, either by day or by night, and either visibly or, if they wish, invisibly.

—M
ALLEUS
M
ALEFICARUM

I
turned my back to the wind and saw Jost’s footprints. Although it made my bones ache to climb the hill behind the granary, I did so to follow him. Those with candles were lighting them now, and the village was spread before me, beginning to glow, with the tavern lit brightest. I looked across to Künne’s cottage yard, where in the fading light I saw someone, far too short to be my Jost, milking her goat for her. I shivered and pulled the cloak tightly around me so that the garment was doubled across my front. I remembered a time when my girth was such that the stitches strained to keep me covered. How long was I to wander?

Had Hensel crested the hill, he’d never have recognized me. The man who’d known my skin better than I did, who’d taken such pleasure in the rut that I stopped in the snow now to think of it—he’d have passed by me with only a nod. And now I could barely see my hands in front of me from the steadfastness of the snowfall. It was a storm and nothing an old woman should be out in. “Jost!” I cried into the wind. “I can no longer see where you’ve stepped!”

I could not bear the thought of the door fastened against me, so I descended the hill on the other side, the side that led to the forest.

As I walked, it began to trouble me that someone other than Jost was milking Künne’s goat. He would milk for her sometimes, as she was old and stooping to sit upon the milking stool was hard work for her bones. But what other man would do that task for her? I was disturbed also at Irmeltrud’s statement that the Töpfers thought her responsible for their hen’s dry womb. Künne did not know such spells. She knew how to combine plants and other substances to help cure sicknesses—all but the plague, which no human seemingly could cure—but she surely did not know how to make an animal behave any other way than its nature dictated. And even if she had such knowledge, she would never apply it. The only type of person who could cast such a spell came with a very particular name, one that I hoped would never be spoken in the same sentence as Künne’s.

Hexe:
witch.

The friar had hinted strongly about
Hexen
but not used the word. The Sunday our priest first introduced us to him, everyone stared. We couldn’t help ourselves. We had never seen such grandeur before. He wore a great black robe of such voluminous folds and length that it flowed down to the ground like a pitch-black alpine waterfall. Underneath, his tunic was so purely white that I thought he must have dressed in the very church itself, pulling the garment from a protective casket as he knelt before the altar, for it bore no signs of mud or wear.

“We have a new guest to our village,” the priest had said. “This is Friar Johannes Fuchs. He is here to help us.”

The friar then stood and took the priest’s place at the pulpit. The robes so consumed his body that as he walked I saw no sign of legs moving beneath. He glided. I closed my eyes to remove the rapture of that magnificence. And when I opened them again, I struggled to look beyond the robes, to see the face of the man bold enough to wear such opulence. He was young and his chin bore no hair. His mouth was small, a mere smudge in his face, and he looked as if he had never known a day of lightness. But he was not thin; it shocked me that his cheeks were rounded as all of ours had been in times of plenty. He had shaved his pate, forming a circlet of hair like Christ’s crown of thorns.

“I come from a monastery many days’ journey away, founded by those who follow in Saint Dominic’s footsteps,” he announced. “You have no doubt heard of our large fortress surging to the sky, blessed by God and Rome.”

I marveled at the booming voice that came from one so young. He was not afraid to rise and address us, all strangers.

“Here in your tiny burg of Tierkinddorf, the woods are thick on all sides. You are nestled snugly out of harm’s way. But my city sits on the edge of a wide river and enemies sail to our banks, ready to steal our goods and all that we cherish. We have built a wall around our city to fortify it, and none may come or go without a gatekeeper’s consent. We could not imagine the liberty you have to wander your fields without always looking behind you. You are truly blessed to be so insignificant and tiny.”

Did he wish now to live with us?
I wondered.
He wanted our freedom as well?

“But there is one thing that you are not blessed with, and that is a profitable harvest. I received a piteous letter from your lord, summoning me. Lord Obermann told me of your seedless fields.”

I looked at the back of Lord Obermann’s head. He was seated in the front on a handsome carved chair, the only chair in the church. Even the priest sat on a rough bench, and most of us stood.

“Yours is not the only village that is suffering. All across this land, people are hungry. Even in my city, we are counting the cakes in the larder. And that is why I have set off on this miraculous journey, with Christ’s hands governing me, to find out why the land is cursed. I am here to help you, people of Tierkinddorf.”