Dancing in the Palm of His Hand (2 page)

Katharina had crept up beside Eva and now stood on tiptoe trying to gain a better view, her white-gold braid swinging as she bobbed her head. Then, she stood still. Eva put an arm around her and tried to pull her close, to turn her away from the window, but the slight girl stood as solid and resistant as a pillar of stone. Eva placed her hand over her daughter's eyes. “Don't watch,” she said.

Katharina pulled the hand away. “But Mama, I saw an angel come out of the flames. She had big white wings.” The girl held out her thin arms as if she were cradling an infant. “She carried a white dog.”

Eva grabbed the girl's shoulders. “You must not say such things!” There were no flames. Not yet. And certainly there were no angels. “You saw nothing of the kind.” She released her daughter, giving her a small shove. “Go back by the ovens.”

“But Mama, can't we go, too?”

“
Nein
! Go fetch yeast and flour for the men.”

Her face in a pout, Katharina walked toward the back of the bakery, her left foot dragging like the whisper of brittle leaves across the wooden floor.

Eva turned from the window. She never went to the burnings, and she would not allow her daughter to go. There'd been no burnings when she was a child, and when they started, about sixteen or seventeen years ago, she'd gone only once, when she was twenty and still working as a maidservant. Even now Eva sometimes woke in the middle of the night hearing echoes of the old woman's screams and smelling the nauseating stench of
scorched flesh. Ten or twelve years ago there'd been so many burnings, hundreds, that the stink had hung over Würzburg for three solid years. Then the burnings stopped, and Eva hoped it was finished, that all the witches were dead, but now there seemed to be more of them than ever.

The door creaked open. Eva stepped behind the counter as three women came in, each wearing the small embroidered cap of a matron. Eva's fingers went to her own black cap, a widow's cap, and smoothed her brown hair beneath it.

One of the matrons held fast to a little boy's hand. She brushed her fingertips over the youngest woman's belly. “Perhaps there will be more babies now,” she said, “and the harvests will improve. There'll be more grain, cheaper bread.” She glanced sharply at Eva, then pointed to a dark loaf. She opened her hand and held out eight
pfennigs
.

Eva shook her head.

“It's all I have,” the woman pleaded.

Eva thought of the tattered ledger in the bedchamber upstairs. She kept the accounts, adding and subtracting the numbers each night. The bakery would fail if she didn't keep raising her prices to match the rising costs of wheat, barley, and rye.

The boy gripped the edge of the counter and stared at the loaf. His fingers were grimy, his cheekbones sharp under sallow skin. His huge eyes glinted like a stray dog's. He swallowed.

Eva wiped her hands on her apron. Were he still alive, Jacob would beat her for what she was about to do. She took the loaf from the shelf and handed it to the woman, taking only four
pfennigs
from the callused palm.

The woman clutched the bread to her chest. “
Danke
,” she whispered.

The three women left quickly, and two younger women came in, one tall and angular, the other small and too thin, but comely nonetheless. Both wore plain dark gowns, much like Eva's own,
laced over muslin chemises, and each carried a woven basket. Their long hair was tied back, but neither wore a cap. Unmarried maidservants. The smaller one leaned toward the other. “The harvests will be better now,” she said, her face bright. “And Karl will be able to save money.”

“Enough to think of marrying?” said the other girl.

The first young woman blushed prettily, then reached into her basket and held out three
kreuzers
. “
Bitte
, two loaves of rye.”

Eva placed the loaves on the counter and picked up the
kreuzers
.

“But there are undoubtedly more of them,” warned the tall girl. “Because the end-time is near. That's what the priest says. Ruining crops and killing babies.” She shuddered. “I hate them all.”

Eva counted out six
pfennigs
in change.

“I wish them all dead,” said the other girl, “then the emperor's generals would win the war, and everyone would return to the true faith.” She gave Eva a sidelong glance, as if seeking her agreement.

Eva gave it, nodding, sure that the girl was only repeating what she'd heard from her employer, or priest. Eva could feel the unspoken fear hovering just below the young maidservants' fierce words. They might hate witches, but, like her, they'd chosen not to attend the burnings.

The girl placed the loaves in her basket, then she and her companion left.

Eva went to stand before a small painting of the Virgin and Son she'd hung in the alcove under the stairway. Her fingers trembled as she made the sign of the cross. “Mary, Mother of God, have mercy upon me for I have sinned,” she prayed. When she'd seen Frau Basser, she had not felt what she was supposed to feel: fury at the witch and satisfaction at the rightful punishment meted out by the court. She had felt only pity. And pounding fear.

She considered Mary's calm and kindly face, the golden light surrounding her and the child, and felt reassured. The Holy Mother would feel pity, even for a witch. And perhaps those three women were the last in the city. The harvests
would
improve now. Würzburg would be spared from plague. There
would
be more babies. And there would be no more burnings. The tall girl's words entwined themselves around her hopes.
There are undoubtedly more of them. Because the end-time is near
. Eva knew the words to be true. And now even women she knew and thought to be good and righteous were being revealed as witches.

Eva crossed herself again. When there were so many witches, and they appeared in such guises, how could anyone know who was a witch and who was not?

Herr Doktor Franz Lutz tugged his fingers through his tangled white beard and stared into the distance where row after row of grapevines striped the sunlit hillside. In a small patch of untrammelled meadow, yellow and white flowers bloomed amidst the tall grasses. A few bony cows grazed, apparently unalarmed by the noisy crowd that had gathered so near to them.

Father Herzeim stepped down from the tumbrel. One witch, Frau Basser, tried to follow the priest, and the executioner had to shove her back into the cart. Lutz kept his gaze locked on the priest. He felt a vague sense of shame when his eyes strayed to the witches and their nakedness, particularly the young one. She must have been a great beauty, he thought, a young woman of generous and comely proportions.

Father Herzeim's face was haggard, and Lutz wondered for the hundredth time how his friend managed it, visiting witches in their stinking cells, hearing their final confessions, going with them to their deaths. It was a dangerous ministry, coming face to face with witches and the Devil. The priest, a professor of civil and ecclesiastical law at the university, was entirely unsuited for such crude work, and Lutz wished the Prince-Bishop had never appointed him. Father Herzeim, a Jesuit, rarely spoke of it, except to say “it is our way of proceeding,” but Lutz could see the terrible toll this onerous duty was taking. His friend had been the final confessor for witches for less than a year, and in that brief span, premature streaks of silver had crept into his dark hair and beard, the lines on his handsome face had deepened, though he was not yet forty.

Lutz raised an arm, and Father Herzeim made his way toward him, his broad-brimmed hat bobbing above the crowd. People warily stepped away from the final confessor for witches, and the priest took his place beside Lutz. Drops of blood, witches' blood, spotted the pale yellow cincture around the waist of his black cassock. He made the sign of the cross, his long fingers sweeping from his forehead to his chest, left shoulder to right. “
In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti
.” He clasped his hands over his breviary and bowed his head.

The executioner, masked and gloved, led the witches from the tumbrel, one by one. Frau Basser was first. Shrieking, she tried to pull away from his grasp. He cuffed her across the face, then untied her wrists only long enough to bind her to one of the three tall stakes

Lutz resisted the urge to plug his forefingers into his ears, to shut out Frau Basser's screams, the mob's curses and jeers, and, especially, the monks' chanting, which unnerved him even more than the screams. He feared that the monks might be right. The end of the world was near; everything predicted in The Apocalypse was coming to pass. He tallied the evidence, keeping count by tapping his fingers against his wool breeches. One: hunger. Last autumn's grain harvests had been the worst in years and people were starving. Beggars were thick on the streets, not just in Würzburg, but throughout the southwest. Two: plague. It was breaking out everywhere around them, Ansbach, Rothenburg, Nuremberg. At yesterday's Lower City Council meeting, the councilmen had voted to direct the city gatekeepers to allow no strangers to enter Würzburg nor any citizen to re-enter who was returning from a city with plague. Three: war. The Holy Roman Empire now had a new and powerful enemy. The Netherlands had just joined England and Denmark on the side of the Protestant Union. Four: witches. The Devil was actively recruiting more witches. Scores had been executed, not
only in Würzburg, but in Bamberg, Eichstatt, and Ellwangen as well, and still there were more of them. Only two days earlier, at Easter mass, the priest had read from The Apocalypse:
Woe to the earth, and to the sea, because the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, knowing that he hath but a short time
. The priest had followed that verse with words from the Dominicans'
Der Hexenhammer, The Hammer of Witches
. No matter how hard he tried, Lutz could not erase the words from his mind:
And so in this twilight and evening of the world...the evil of witches and their iniquities superabound
.

Lutz pulled a linen handkerchief from under his starched cuff and pressed it against his sweating forehead. He could admit, at least to himself, that he was not a brave man. Thoughts of the end-time scared him. Witches and their depraved deeds scared him. Even now he feared that if he met their eyes they would put a curse on him. He wanted to be nowhere near this place. Now, or later. The ghosts of those who died violently lingered in the place of their death, and if witches had done such vile things in life, what might they do in death? Were Lutz not a member of the Lower City Council and his attendance required, he'd never have come. Yet here he was, standing near the front of the raucous crowd so that Father Herzeim would have one welcoming face to walk toward.

The executioner placed a thick wire around Frau Basser's neck. She screamed. Once. He quickly twisted the iron rod to tighten the wire. Her face purpled, her eyes bulged. Her tongue protruded and her body convulsed.

Lutz felt his head floating away. The bright sky closed in, then receded. The noise of the crowd faded away in echoes, and he could hear his own blood pulsing. He blinked hard, then lowered his head and took a deep breath. His wife Maria had fussed at him that morning to bring his pomander filled with hartshorn to keep himself from fainting, but Lutz, wanting to forget where he was
going, managed to forget that as well. He regretted the oversight. It would be unseemly for a member of the Lower City Council to be seen swooning at an execution. He tried to calm himself. Over the bulge of his belly, he studied a small blue flower near the toe of his boot, wondering how it had escaped trampling. He counted the petals. Five, and a bright yellow centre. The strangling was a mercy really. The witches would not have to endure the horrendous pain of the fires, and he would not have to endure their screaming. He hated it when witches retracted their confessions and had to be burned alive, with green wood to prolong the suffering. The shrieks were unbearable.

Lutz heard cheers, then smelled the smoke. His stomach roiled. His breakfast had worked its way up, lodging in his gullet. He could taste bitterness at the back of his throat. Maria had warned him not to eat.

Lutz's ears rang in the silence. His back and legs ached. He'd been standing for hours, but he knew Father Herzeim would not leave until the witches had been burned to ash, as prescribed by law. Even their bones were dangerous. The executioner would gather the ashes and throw them into the river to be carried far away from Würzburg.

Lutz could risk looking up now. The flames had burned down and nearly everyone had left. Only a few ragged beggars patrolled the grounds for scraps of food. With a long pole, the executioner stirred the ash. A glowing ember flickered, then died, releasing a final smoky breath.

Father Herzeim turned his face to the sky. Dark clouds had gathered overhead. “Why must they bring the children?” he said.

“To instruct them,” said Lutz. “To show them the wages of sin.”

A small muscle at the corner of the priest's mouth twitched. “The wages of sin,” he said softly. He turned abruptly and strode
toward the city gate, his black cassock flapping around his ankles.

Lutz, his short legs pumping, hurried to keep pace. His closefitting doublet squeezed his chest and belly so tightly he could hardly draw breath. “Father,” he panted.

“I must speak to the Prince-Bishop. At once.”

“Not now, surely. It's nearly time for evening prayers.”

Father Herzeim slowed, waiting for Lutz to catch up. “There's been a new opinion from the theologians at the University of Ingolstadt,” said the priest. “You've read it?”

“I'm a contract lawyer, not a theologian,” Lutz huffed.

“It's important, Lutz. They argue that people should not be arrested for witchcraft on the basis of accusations made by condemned witches. There must be other evidence. I must inform the Prince-Bishop.”