The Witch's Trinity (13 page)

“I won’t leave her bones,” I protested.

“You must,” he said. “How will it seem for you to bring them with you? The friar is a hard man, and he already wonders about you and me.”

“I will wrap them in my cloak and tend them in the night. In the morning, you will help me bury her as she should be buried, next to her husband.”

“You know as I do, Mutter, she can never be buried in holy ground.”

“Then I shall bury her in her cottage yard,” I said. “With a cross above.”

“The villagers would think that blasphemy, to be burned for a witch and then buried under a cross,” said Jost.

“What do you think they mean to do with her bones, then?” I cried.

He was silent a long time. “A hole,” he said finally. “A simple pit in the ground.”

“With no spot marked for God to find her? Jost, we will bury her ourselves, deep in the woods where they won’t see the cross.”

“We can’t, Mutter. It is too dangerous. Künne would not want us to do that. We must leave her bones here, for them to do with as they wish.”

“But if the wolves drag them off?”

“Then the wolves drag them off.”

He wrapped his arms around me and hugged me, and my nose was filled with the warm, sweaty scent of his body, a relief from the ash-clogged smell of Künne. I inhaled deeply, burying my nose in his woolen cloak.

“Mutter, remember what Künne told the friar, that you had tried to sway her from the witchcraft ways? She wanted you to be safe. She would not want you to risk your life for the sake of bones she cannot now use.”

“Will you say a prayer for me?” I asked.

He let me go and we together stood facing the small fire and its pile of cluttered bones. “Father, we pray that you allow Künne into your kingdom. You have the truth in heaven and we hope that you accept your falsely accused daughter into your merciful, all-knowing hands.”

“Amen,” I said.

I walked to the fire to look one last time at what remained of my dearest friend on earth. The fine rigging of her fingers still clenched at the coals, and the longer shards connected them with the rods that I thought were her shoulders, or her ribs, a confusing jumble. A broad expanse of white was her pate, buried facedown in the ashes. I was glad not to be able to see the hollows of her eyes and the strangeness that a nose becomes: I had seen a few skulls in my lifetime and did not like the face that lies under our living faces.

Jost had come to fetch me not only because it was dark and time to be climbing into our beds but because he wanted me to eat. I stared in dumb wonder at the plate waiting for me on the board: three slices of ham, each thick as my thumb. The children were asleep already, and Irmeltrud was sitting at the table with a nearly empty tankard of ale. “We drank it all,” she said flatly, “but saved you some meat.”

Ale in the house? How? And three thick, thick pieces of meat, each larger than what I’d expect to eat in any meal this year. I thought with sudden terror of the child’s flesh offered me in the forest. “Where does it come from?” I asked.

“The friar arranged it to reward the gathering of the wood,” said Irmeltrud.

Jost winced.

“Your son here wouldn’t do it,” said Irmeltrud, “wouldn’t put food in front of his children. But I’m their
Mutter
and I will do as I must to put food in their bellies.”

“Did the children help as well?” I asked, remembering that they had been gone much of the morning.

“They did indeed! It was good, warm work for them and look at how we feasted.”

“Someone had to do it, after all,” said Jost uneasily. “At least it was not gathered in spite.”

“Yes, we honored Künne with our morning’s work,” said Irmeltrud. “We blessed the wood as we cut it and used Lord Obermann’s sled to pull it.”

“Did she know?” I whispered. I had missed the beginning of the ceremony while I prepared the
Pillen
at Künne’s cottage. Had the friar made a grand announcement of which family had made the burning possible?

“I think she did not know,” said Jost. He sighed, a long sound that made Irmeltrud stop in mid-drink. “Mutter, you should eat. We can’t undo anything that is done.”

I walked myself to the bench and sat. I looked a long while at the pink cuts of ham. Heard the sound of Irmeltrud greedily swallowing the last of her ale, then heavily setting down the tankard. I touched the meat. It was warm still, slightly greasy. The skin was rough under my fingers. Then I cupped the first slice in my fist and drove my few teeth into it.

Hunger has turned me into an animal,
I thought.

8

They used the phantasm of a cat, an animal which is, in the Scriptures, an appropriate symbol of the perfidious, for cats are always setting snares for each other.

—M
ALLEUS
M
ALEFICARUM

I
n the morning, Jost woke me early so we could go back to the fire site and watch the raking of the ashes. The friar stood guarding the laborers; Jost and I stood behind and to the side of him so that he would not notice us. I had slept heavily, with dreams of my own hair bursting into flames.

The men moved their rakes as if they were in the fields preparing the soil for planting. How I wished this were so! That they had labor that warmed their bones and that the dirt heeded the lessons of the tines and nourished the seeds the men would next drop! But this was a field that could bear no crop. We had sown the soil with ashes. Setting aside the large bones, they pushed snow over the gray remnants of my friend, and she was instantly vanished. One gave a whistle, and I wished the skies were full of birds and their cries. Birds were here when the air was warm, when the fields issued buds of grain they stole with wicked abandon.

As I watched the men gather up the bones and roll them into cloth, I felt little emotion. I had already released Künne last night with the prayer Jost offered. I shed no tear and felt almost as if I were still dreaming as we trailed one man with a shovel. He chose a spot at the base of a pine tree not far from the churchyard, but definitely outside its holy realm.

“This tree then shall mark it?” he asked, checking with the friar.

“No landmark for such as these. As their lives were unfit in God’s eyes, these
Hexen
must lie in anonymous ground,” replied the friar.

The man threw his shovel and where it landed, he began digging as best he could in the cold ground. I would have laughed at the action if he were digging a different sort of hole.

“God be praised,” said the friar directly to me.

I stiffened. I had not known he noticed us. I was scared to look into his eyes and so studied his shoes. They were not coarse and softened with use, but made of fresh and tough leather.

“God be praised,” I echoed.

Our priest emerged from the church then and walked across the churchyard to the friar. He glanced at me and Jost, and we both took several steps backward and half turned away to watch the man continue to dig.

“You can feel the strength of God’s work here,” said the priest.

The friar nodded thoughtfully. “I am filled with holy light at moments like this. It is an honor to be Christ’s servant.”

“Our village is indebted to you.”

“Not to me, to God,” corrected the friar. “I am only an earthly hand to do his divine will.” He held up his right hand in front of his face, as if he scarce believed it was his. “
My
body does
God’s
bidding. And it is such a fierce and wild sensation to do so!”

“Were you always pledged to do his work?” asked the priest.

“I heard his call when I was but a child. God spake to me in a dream, and I quit my father’s house to join the Dominican brothers. They were more of a family to me than my own brothers ever were. And fate brought Herr Kramer to me, who infused me with his brilliance. I am truly blessed among men.”

“We are the true nobility,” agreed the priest. “Our meals here on earth may be meager, but in heaven we shall feast.”

The man with the shovel walked away, and the friar and priest followed him. He had not had to dig deeply. There was little to bury. I listened to the wind until Jost pulled at my sleeve.

We went home, and because I had been wakened so early, I returned to my straw. But it was strange to be lying there while the rest of the household moved. Irmeltrud swept, although no crumbs had had a chance to sully the ground, nor beasts to move across it since our empty larder offered no scents to entice them. Jost sharpened a knife though there was nothing to cut. “Is there naught I can help with, Jost?” I called out finally, sleepless.

“Rest and sleep,” he said. “The air is brisk, so snuggle down into your straw.”

This time my sleep was dreamless. For a while, Matern came and slept next to me, burrowing against my back for warmth. This child was the tenderest of all of us, and I had paid him no heed yesterday. I was certain he must have sobbed all throughout Künne’s burning. He swung an arm over me and I kissed the small hand, tucking it into mine, grateful. His stomach rumbled from last night’s rich meal, making my spine quiver as well. “You’re a good lad,” I whispered.

I drifted back into sleep.

But this was not to last.

“For God’s sake, Matern, are you lazing while the rest of us are doing the work of the house?” came Irmeltrud’s brittle call.

“Vater said I could rest like Großmutter,” he answered into my back, barely moving.

“And by what honor have you earned this?”

“Because I was so sad,” he said. “I tried to help Vater, but I couldn’t see because my eyes were full of the weep.”

“It’s enough we have one useless body in this house,” said Irmeltrud. “I’m damned if we will have another. Get up and find your
Vater.
”

The small hand slipped out of mine and the forehead left my back. I was instantly cold. He got out of bed without a word and did as she bade. I pulled the blanket up so it covered me to the ears. Irmeltrud’s cruelty was growing, and I wondered that even this day she would keep comfort from me.

The door opened as the poor boy went out, and soon after I felt the straw shift as something pounced up on it. Of course: the cat again. I lowered the blanket and peered over its striped body at Irmeltrud, busy with Alke at some task, and unwitting of the new visitor. I lifted the blanket to show the cat a space it might choose to hide, and indeed it quickly stepped into the hot void by my belly, turned twice, and lay down nestled against me. Ah! Warmer than Matern, even! And such fur. I cupped one hand into the warmest part of it, between the four legs, and stroked its tiny head with the other. The cat commenced the strange, guttural shaking of its body, the purr of its pleasure. And I drifted off to sleep yet again, my fingers drowsily moving and my body basking in the heat from this small oven. It was past noonday when I awoke again.

Jost had returned and it was his stamping his boots to rid them of snow that wakened me.

“Nothing in the traps?” Irmeltrud inquired.

“It seems all beasts know these forsaken woods have no food for them and they have moved to better prospects.”

“Well, you’ll go again and there’ll be a fat rabbit there, its leg caught.”

Jost moved to the fire and warmed his hands. “All of us men see the same thing. No tracks in the snow but our own. No beasts are moving.”

“But surely if you walk farther…,” protested Irmeltrud.

“We have all searched the length and breadth of these woods,” said Jost. “Künne’s goat is gone, the sheep herd is gone; we were lucky enough to get the pig meat yesterday.”

“Lucky,” grunted Irmeltrud. “The luck of my sweat.”

“We gathered to speak just now with Ramwold. He read the runes again, and the truth is the same. We must form a hunting party and journey far from here to find the beasts that have scattered.”

I propped myself up on my elbows to see Irmeltrud’s response. She folded her arms and approached him at the fire. “Let the others go. You’re so thin! Let the young ones go and fetch for us.”

“Don’t tell me you’re scared to stay alone?” asked Jost in a rare, teasing voice I hadn’t heard him use in years.

“I can’t bear the thought of you not coming back,” she said, ignoring his playfulness.

“We all take that risk alike,” said he. “The runes told of deer in the forests south of here, a large herd. Would you not like venison after so much air that we’ve eaten?”

“How long a journey?”

“The runes didn’t say. A week? A fortnight?”

The cat now reacted to my shifting and stood up. I held the blanket down to contain it.

“Will we be yet living when you return?” asked Irmeltrud.

“What else would you have me do? I cannot ask animals that don’t exist to step into my traps.” He put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her into a hug, even though her arms were still crossed. Such uncommon tenderness! It was as if he didn’t think he’d return.

“When does the party leave?” she asked.