The Witch's Trinity (30 page)

“I was so frightened about the second pyre,” she said. “I thought myself to steal up to it with a torch and set it aflame just so it couldn’t be used but now
he
shall burn there!”

She fell to her knees, and because they were connected, the children went to theirs too. “Oh, thank God Jost returned!” she keened. “My God! Güde, it would have been us!”

I was struck dumb as Lot’s wife. I looked past Irmeltrud to Fronika’s fire. For it was fire now, not woman. A blaze that took the rough shape of a woman, but could be anything tall and narrow. A pine tree, a maypole…she was only a pillar of fire.

And the men were now taunting the friar, flashing the torches past his face. The robes were bunched and folded to tie him to the stake. His eyes followed the path of the torches, intent and terrified. I thought of the cats of yore, mousing in the mill, how they’d track the movement of a fly or bee, moving not their heads but their eyes only.

Oh, the cat.
The cat I’d thought was Fronika. No. Surely not. A demon had possessed me and now I saw clearly. Fronika was a woman. The rabbit Jost had killed was no sister, but a beast of the wood only. I had seen no dancing. I had no man rut with me under the moon. There was no book, nor had I signed it.

I had a mind that was crazed.

I coughed and spat onto the snow. Was I breathing in Fronika? Was her will and her spirit infusing through my breath?

Everyone moaned and coughed for the odor. There was no more screaming. Fronika was gone.

“I can’t see,” said Irmeltrud, coming to her feet again. “The smoke is so thick. But I want to be sure he burns. Come, children.”

She pressed on through the yellowish smoke so that she could witness the friar’s end. I had no such desire. No matter what, I would never be safe.

The first scream was so high in pitch I would have thought it a woman’s. And he screamed as Fronika did, over and over.

I turned my back on the spectacle, seeing the smoke furling behind me as I walked. I would not sleep. No, never again.

My mind took me evil places when I slept.

I would remain awake eternally.

I saw Jost on the edge of the crowd. He was crying. “Mutter!” he said, and came to me. He embraced me and his wet cheek gave the tears over unto me. “How has all this vileness come to us?” he asked. “How, Mutter, how?”

I held him while he sobbed out his love of the field and the mill and working to grind the grain, and the men singing the end of day with a mug of beer coming to the lips, and the red-cheeked wives and the board full of food. How he wanted only the smallness of neighbors squabbling over tiny injustices, and the priest and Ramwold leading together. How the village would thank the runes and thank the birds and the deer and elk and skies, how we would be thankful ever after and bless every aspect of the world that offered itself to us. How we would live long lives and die on our straw tick, easily. Cozily. We would hold hands and dance with each other, carrying each other’s weight and flying as much as our heavy feet would let us.

Flying as much as our heavy feet would let us.

Flying.

Oh, God, to fly.

I kissed my son goodly on each check and put him from me. I was too distressed in mind to bear his distress as well. I walked away from the square but I did not send my steps home. I knew home had gone up in smoke like Künne, like Fronika.

18

I
N THE YEAR
1509

W
hat will happen if there is no food again?”

I could see that she hadn’t wanted to ask it, but her mouth had issued it anyway, the way the well bucket sometimes yields a toad. She looked down at the board full of thick elk slices, the circlet of cheese, and the mug of hot, thin milk. At my right hand was a loaf I hadn’t cut into yet, with a dough braid on top that I had crafted while smiling about her hair, now bright and thick again.

Alke was a wise girl. She was unseduced by the fields plumed with grain, the cows sturdy enough to beget calves. Behind her daily smiles and her light voice singing as she did her chores, she still remembered sitting with her family to eat of snow.

I wanted to laugh and say,
Alke! For shame! There shall always be food.
But I couldn’t say that. She had many years of life ahead of her, and who knew when I was long in my grave what the fields would say to the town? Who knew what tremendous wind might shake through the forest and send the animals scattering far away?

“

I stood up and went to her side of the table, lowered my old limbs down, and gathered her into a hug. We clung to each other, both remembering.

“I dream about the fire all the time,” she said, beginning to cry. “Mutter made us build that fire!”

“You were only a babe.”

“I was not!” she stormed, her head pressed against my paps. “I heard that man tell Mutter, and I understood everything. But all I cared about was the food he promised.”

It had been two harvest seasons since then, and this was the first Alke had talked of it. I had hoped that, emerging from childhood, she had released these memories.

She pulled away and looked straight into my eyes. “And Künne was your friend,” she said in a low voice.

“We are none of us blameful for things we did from the asking of our parents,” I said. I waved an arm in the air to show her how, like smoke, her fears should waft. She winced and I know we both thought of Künne’s arm, sore and bubbled. “You were a
child,
Alke. You knew as much of the world as what was contained in the eye of my needle.”

“No, I
knew,
” she said.

“You didn’t know,” I said simply. “Because if you were old enough to know that you would feel this way now, you would have run away into the snow.”

We sat quietly, taking no heed of the food, honoring the thought of Künne and Fronika.

“I spake for her,” said Alke finally. “I stood up in the church and begged for her life. But not yours. And not Künne’s.”

“You were a child,” I said again. “What child doesn’t value its
Mutter
most?”

“Mutter will go to hell when she dies,” said Alke. “She traded fire in this life for endless fire after.”

I did not answer. I didn’t know what I thought of heaven above us or hell deep below, the fires supposed to be constantly stoked and tended. I was afraid to tell her what I feared: that both places were kingdoms of air. I had been to the churchyard to sit above Hensel’s bones and to the spot where Künne’s blackened remnants lay, and when I listened to the earth, it told me they were still down there. And for all the praying I’ve done in my life, I fear that prayers are bits of grain the birds drop to the winds.

But if Alke needed to hear that Irmeltrud would twist forever in the great maw of the devil, smelling the burning flesh of thousands and knowing that stench was her own as well, then I would let her keep that small, bitter gift.

“If there comes a day when the food is scarce again,” I said, “you must equally divide what you have.”

She nodded strongly.

“It is wrong to say that one should eat more than another,” I continued. “Or that one deserves nothing. Give it out with the hope that more will come.”

“I know,” she whispered. “That is what we should have done.”

“Yes,” I whispered back.

A knock came at the door and jolted us out of our quietude. And Libeste came in without waiting for a response, as she always did, instantly making the
Hütte
small with her huge, red cheeks and eyes as large as plates. I smiled to see her; no one could come near the spirit of this girl and not smile.

“Alke and Güde!” she cried, as if we were a field away and she had to call for our attention. “Come, come! The sheep is giving birth!”

Libeste and her family had come soon after the events that Alke and I were talking of; they had moved into the Kuepers’ abandoned
Hütte.
They were from the monastery city, like the friar, and had never been famished. They came into our village like wildly singing birds, arousing us out of our stupor and making a clear path for us to ease our way out of pain. In my mind, I thanked them daily for coming. They had saved all of us.

They had brought with them five fluffy sheep, all well fed, that they set up on the hillside where Irmeltrud’s family’s flock once roamed. When the grass came in that spring and I saw the bounce of the sheep’s progress from hillside to hillside, I sank to my knees in the sweet-smelling grass and cried. Is there ever a vision as hopeful as those life-crazed, oiled, and softened beasts? With their black noses and feet and the sturdiness of their hay-bale bodies, they told me to move my mind, keep searching for sights that could bring me joy.

And now the dame of the group was giving birth.

“Ah, but you didn’t eat yet,” Libeste said, looking at our untouched board. “Hurry, then, hsst!”

And because I knew that food was a gift, and one that could be taken away, I plunged my hands into the loaf and pulled out a still-warm chunk for Libeste. Her broad face became broader with her delighted grin. “No one makes bread as well as you do, Güde,” she said, as her strong white teeth bit into it.

They ran ahead, hair flying from under their caps like May Day streamers, and I plodded more slowly. To see sheep birthing! How different the world was.

I stepped past the place where the blood of Künne’s goat had spilled, now covered by edelweiss I had asked Alke to bring back from the meadows, for we now lived in Künne’s cottage, the two of us.

While Fronika, poor Fronika, was tied to her pole and burning for being a woman no one understood, and the friar was giving his life in exchange for the dozens he had doubtless taken, I had walked straight to Künne’s
Hütte.
I had set to work gathering the bristles in the corner, torn from her broom. Once I had them together, fat in my fist, I tied twine around them. Then I held the bundle out at arms’ length and looked at it.
Did they really think a woman could use this to fly through the air
? I remembered wondering.
Was that why it had been ripped apart? Or did the men think she had hidden jewels in the tight weave?

To me, it was nothing more than the fields brought inside to do a woman’s bidding. I set the tip down onto the ground and began to sweep. The familiar sound had comforted me.
Swish swish. Swish swish.
I swept all of Künne’s tumbled belongings into the center of the room. There was little I could save. I pulled out her gowns and took them outdoors to flap the dust and dirt from them. I found her salt cellar, miraculously unbroken, lying on its side. This I gave a kiss and put onto the sill. I heaved with all my strength and righted the table.

But everything else, save a few branches of herbs I didn’t recognize, was broken and useless and for the fire. I made several journeys to the hearth with my arms full, putting Künne’s belongings where previously only wood went. And then I began the fire, to clean the
Hütte
and make it mine.

Künne’s cottage was far enough that I could not hear the friar’s mortal screams. Our two fires had burned without knowledge of the other.

The night of the burning, no one came to me. As I curled up on the ground as I had in the Witch’s Tower and slept with my ear pressed to the earth, I wondered what they all thought. Were they in the woods looking for me? Surely the smoke from my chimney had alerted them.

In the morning, Jost brought my straw bed, and his little girl. “Alke wants to live with you,” he said.

And I opened my arms and gathered her thinness to me. “Yes,” I whispered fiercely.

We have never spoken of this, but I can only imagine Irmeltrud’s face when, after all of it, she lost Alke anyway. Five times has Irmeltrud come and stood at our door, three times in snow and twice in mud, to beg us to let her in.

But I have looked on that face enough in this lifetime. I remember, if she does not, how she sealed the door against me and ignored my hands beating against it. A door is only a plank of wood, but I am grateful for its ability to preserve me from that which would punish my eyes. When we do see her, we give no sign.