Someone was putting a cloak around her shoulders, so she stood up. She suddenly had an urge to reload the revolver, so she broke it open with a practiced flip of her wrist and pushed the spent rounds out into her hand. The brass was valuable and needed to be reloaded. Brass in one hand, open revolver in the other, she stood there, uncertain. She had no other rounds with her. Someone took them both from her hands. They were gentle, and at first, she didn’t want to let go of the Smith & Wesson. They didn’t give her back the .32, after all. But someone said she would get it back, so she released it.
From there things were fragmented, snippets.
Maria, her chambermaid, looking terrified. Weeping. Wiping her face, dabbing at cuts and scrapes, pulling her hair out of her face and tying it back. Gently, tenderly. Hovering nearby, a pained and generous presence.
Back at the coal yard, bodies lined up on the ground, the burned man one of them. Cloaks covered them. She looked at them, each one, curious. Lifeless, inert. She walked down the line, looking at each one, marveling at the suddenness of the change.
Stadelmeier and his scary, scarred face, looking tired and angry. Horses galloping by at an insane speed, in the dark. Shouted orders. Torches everywhere; guards everywhere, looking tense and focused. She wandered about, and people avoided her eyes, looking away, fearful, piteous, nervous. Afraid. Afraid of her. She thought it odd.
The stocky form of Father Huntsha, kneeling, making the sign of the cross in front of the line of bodies.
Johann, finally Johann. He had been crying, she could see his eyes were red, and he could barely speak. He stood in front of her, his posture stiff. “Are you okay, Mary?” His voice was gentle, pained. “It has been a difficult evening for you.” He looked as if he could fracture into pieces, like a glass sculpture of some kind, if he were tapped in just the right way.
“I'm fine,” she answered. “Fine. Okay.” It seemed like the thing to say. A thing that should be said at this time. She was sure it wasn’t true. She didn’t want him to break. “How are you?”
“Bertran has died. He was wounded, we thought it was nothing, but he was bleeding. In-inside. He kept fighting. I didn’t know.” Small cracks in the glass.
“I’m sorry.” She meant it. They both stood there for a moment, in the light rain. It felt a little warmer. Maybe it was just the cloak. Mary turned to the line of bodies in the coal yard. “Is he there…?” She pointed.
Johann shook his head. “No. T-the surgeon was...” he broke off for a moment. “There is a cart by the path.”
She took his hand. “We should go to him. To thank him. To pray for him.” They went to him and stood over his body for a while. She had a vague recollection of Father Huntsha being there with them. Sometime after that, she collapsed.
Chapter 25 Confessional
Mary awoke the next day and found herself bathed and bandaged, in her own bed in the Schloss. She was sore everywhere. She had a headache that would not quit, she had taken a pretty good whack to the head when she fell the first time. But she was hungry, and thirsty. Which she took to be a good sign. The clouds had gone away, replaced with bright sunshine. The early snow and ice were melting away, and the smells of a damp fall day flowed into her room.
Her brain was a jumble. She had just killed several men. Three by her count. Shot them dead. Looked at them afterwards. She still hadn’t fully processed that. She wondered how long that would take. Another man had died trying to rescue her. Someone she knew.
Men who worked for the Fugger family had betrayed her, had set her up and lured her to the coal yard. These must be the men from Munich that she was warned about. But they were close to her, knew her movements, her relationships, knew that she would come and talk to Johann alone…. Johann. She thought about him. His friend had died. She remembered standing over the corpse of Bertran, lying in the back of a wagon. She remembered holding Johann’s hand. He had come for her, fought for her. Found her. Rescued her. Johann.
Hell, she was a Disney princess. All she needed was a goddamn dragon.
She had killed three men. That wasn’t in any of the movies, except maybe Mulan. Mulan had a dragon.
Maria eased into the room carrying a tray of food, followed by Regina. Mary’s mouth began to water as the smells of roasted chicken made their way to her nose. She was still terribly thirsty.
“Good morning, Mistress. I saw you were waking up, so I got you some lunch. It’s nearly mid-day.” Maria eased the tray down on the desk where Mary typically ate. “You were sleeping like a woodchuck all night and all morning. Are you feeling up to eating? I got you something special today.” She eased Mary out of the bed, and they made their way to the chair.
She limped a bit, and she felt stiff, and each little pinch of discomfort brought back a flash of memory of the injury. “What do you have special? I really need some water.” Maria pulled the cloth from the food and revealed a large pitcher of what looked and smelled like honest-to-God orange juice. “Where in the world did you get that?”
Maria beamed at her. “Cook heard you talking about it one day, so we sent for a shipment of oranges from Spain, and they came last week. We cooled them in an ice cavern up in the mountains. The Count tried it last week and he liked it very much, so we will be getting more of them. Try it!”
Mary drank some water first, then some orange juice. The juice was not as super sweet as up-time juice, and it had a redder coloration, but it was good. Sweet and tart and refreshing. The taste brought back a flash of memory of sitting at her mother’s kitchen table on a Saturday morning, eating breakfast cereal and drinking orange juice. She clamped down on a wave of homesickness.
After eating some food and polishing off the juice – she shared it with Maria and Regina – she was feeling much better, at least physically. She wasn’t certain about how well she was doing mentally, what she should do next, or even if she wanted to stay here at the schloss after what had happened last night. There was a lot she had to deal with. But she was sure of one thing she had to do first.
“Is Father Huntsha around anywhere? Nearby? I would like to talk to him, please.”
Regina came to her. “I can get him for you, he came up to the schloss last night when we brought you back. He was very concerned.”
“Thank you.”
Less than a half hour later the bearded, stocky priest was ushered into her room, and everyone else left. He stood awkwardly next to her bed, as Mary had crawled back into it after eating. Propped up on an embarrassing number of pillows, she had on one of her up-time flannel shirts for modesty. Although the young father seemed to be a more old-fashioned priest when it came to that sort of thing, and comfortable with the ways of the flesh, not in the vein of Vincent DePaul, who was still running around France somewhere trying to reform the priesthood. Her parish church was named after Saint Vincent DePaul before the Ring of Fire. Father Larry decided to change it. Awkward, that, a living saint.
They exchanged pleasantries, and stood for a moment or two, sunlight pouring into the windows. Mary finally decided to just come to the point. “Father, I killed three people yesterday. I am not sure I had to.”
He was quiet for a moment, then simply pulled up a chair, and sat next to the bed, facing her. “It’s never easy to take a life, child. It never should be.” He was quiet after that, but his face told her to continue speaking.
“If there is one thing I've learned since I came here, and started teaching, is well, I'm a teacher. It’s what I think I’m supposed to do, what I like to do. I've been a soldier, at least on the surface I was. I went through training, although the only soldiering I did was to research witch-burning records and learn how to do guard duty in the middle of the night. So it really wasn’t much of a career. But here, I’ve learned that teaching makes me happy. I enjoy light bulbs going on over people’s heads.” He tilted his head, questioning. “When someone gets something, the light goes on. When they don’t understand, the light I imagine over their head is dim, and not lit up.” He
smiled and urged her to continue.
“So, I’m not a soldier. I’m a teacher. It’s what I like, what I think is important, what I think I'm good at. It’s good, isn’t it, to teach?”
“Yes,” he replied. “Indeed, it is Christ-like.”
She raised an eyebrow and snapped, “Don’t patronize me, Father. That isn’t why I asked you to speak with me.”
He looked back at her patiently, kindly. “I am not patronizing you. I am merely stating a fact. Christ was, first and foremost, a teacher. A Rabbi, if you will.”
Mary could feel her cheeks turning red. “I-I’m sorry, Father. I'm a little tense. Angry. And at the same time, I'm numb inside. Dead inside. Boiling and numb at once. I’ve never felt this way before.”
“You have been through a difficult time. You should expect to be troubled by it. God can challenge us in many ways.”
She snorted out a surprised laugh. “Ha! That’s funny, Father.” He smiled at her, but he remained quiet, his face inviting her to talk. She sighed. “I suppose that’s true, I guess. God challenges us. Challenges us all.” She tilted her head to him. “I wonder. What kind of challenge did he give the men I killed, Father? How did it work out for them? How does that fit in with his plans, do you think?”
He spoke softly to her. “I do not presume to understand His plans. You shouldn’t either.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “I shot three men yesterday. Killed them. Watched them, heard them, smelled them as they died. I was covered in their blood.” She fought back an urge to throw up as the coppery scent-memory came flooding back. “I'm not sure that I needed to do it, Father. I could have gone with them. Could have allowed them to take me away to wherever it was they wanted to take me. Could have just gone along. I don’t know if they were going to hurt me or not, where they were taking me, what they wanted from me other than to kidnap me. Maybe it was just ransom money, maybe it was just someone wanting me to fix some technical issue, maybe they just wanted to talk to me.” She began to cry, tears flowing unchecked. “But I was frightened, Father. I was afraid they would take me off somewhere and hurt me. Kill me even. But I don’t know that for sure. I don’t know for sure, if I had to shoot them. Maybe I didn’t have to kill them. Do you see? Maybe I didn’t have to kill.” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed for a while.
Father Huntsha found one of the handkerchiefs stacked neatly on a side table, and placed in on her lap. He spoke kindly, evenly. “You know that Catholic doctrine allows you to defend yourself if attacked. Self-defense is a right that God allows, especially against the aggression of an unjust person. This sort of thing can be morally complex, and truly vexing in many cases.” He paused a moment and scratched his beard. “But in yours, unless you were willing to allow them to take you, that is, to take a truly pacifist approach, then you are doctrinally allowed to defend yourself. And you also have a duty to the family to defend it as well. The Church defines this defense of property as moral-- the defense of property and life as part of a lawful duty. It could be argued that it was your duty, as well as your choice not to be abducted.”
Mary wiped her eyes and recovered somewhat. “That’s certainly convenient. That it’s okay to kill someone as part of my ‘duty’ to prevent the theft of myself from the rightful ownership of the Fugger. Is that what you are saying?”
He sighed. “Yes, in a very, very, broad sense. That’s where the dog is buried. That’s correct.”
“Seems like a lot of lawyering. And what do you mean by ‘that’s where the dog is buried’? Seems kind of dark.”
“An idiom, pragmatically German, it means to go to the heart of the matter, the essential point of things.”
She cracked a smile. “That’s a new one on me.”
“It’s quite an old one for me, as idioms go.” He shifted in his seat and held her hand. “Men create rules they believe to be the best, and make those rules as close to what we think God would want them to be. Rules are made by men, followed, and broken by men. It’s the best we can do, being only men.”
“And women,” she added with a bit of an arched eyebrow.
He smiled in acknowledgement. “And women too. I can see that change coming.”
“I hope so.” She arched her other eyebrow.
He turned to her, ignoring her jibe, and took her hand in both of his. “The point I am trying to make, Mary, is that you're feeling pain and remorse for taking a life, several lives, in order to defend yourself. That fact you feel this is a good thing. It’s right to ask yourself these questions. It fills me with joy to find you remorseful, doubtful, pained. It shows me, and God, the nature of your heart. And notwithstanding all the Church’s rules, all of the lawyering, all of the details of doctrine, your heart is what God will judge. And your heart is true in this matter.”
She looked away from him, unable to meet his gaze. She stared out the window.
The priest stood up and looked out the window himself. He then turned to face her. “There is one last thing that you should know. About the men. Stadelmeier told me. They were to take you back to Munich, where you would have been tried as a witch.”
“Then I should have killed them all.” Her voice was flat, calm, and matter of fact. The stocky priest sighed heavily and bowed his head. But Mary noticed he said nothing. She took his silence for tacit agreement. There was another pause between the two of them, and Father Huntsha again turned to look out the window, sun falling across his face.
“Ya know, Father. Down-time sucks,” Mary said matter-of-factly.
He gave a little laugh. “Heh. Yes. Yes it does, I imagine for you. But what you call down-time, is nothing more than my here-and-now. My world.” He turned and patted the windowsill, over two feet thick. “Our towns have walls for a reason. We live in stone castles for a reason. They keep the evil out, they keep armies out, they keep us alive. They keep us civilized as best we can. We need to make this world better, Mary. And you're here to help. You and all of the up-timers that God, through his infinite wisdom, placed here.”
“Is that doctrine, Father?”
The stocky priest just shrugged, and then walked back to his seat next to the bed.
They sat companionably for a few minutes. Finally, Mary asked, “Father, will you hear my confession?”
Chapter 26 Til the Cows Come Home
Two Weeks Later
"O
kay, Johann,” Mary said with a smile, “I've never seen a cow with a fancy head-dress before. They are kind of spectacular, in a cow sort of way. I mean the flowers, and the leather work is very cool.” They were standing by the side of a dirt road that wandered along the side of the valley, not far from Schloss Tratzberg. It was a bright fall day, and men were bringing cattle down from the high pastures for the winter. The soft metallic tonk-tonk of the cow bells, the quick piercing whistles of the cowherders dressed in their lederhosen, the occasional bark of a dog, and the thud of the hoofs were the only sounds.
“I like this time of the year,” said Johann, as they waited for the small herd to pass. “There are celebrations in the villages, it’s called ‘Almabtrieb.’ If they have a good year up in the high pastures, the animals are decorated with the headdress and flowers and pine boughs. Once they get them into a fenced area lower down, they are sorted by owners to the proper barns.”
“Some of them are really neat.” And they were. Flowers were tied into the head dresses sometime a couple of feet tall. “What are the different bells?” Mary was watching Johann carefully, and she enjoyed letting him play tour guide. He was obviously proud of what he knew, and it was nice to see him somewhat relaxed. Because that’s what they were supposed to be doing on this little pilgrimage. Relax, and do a little penance. They were on their way to the St. Georgenberg Monastery which was only a couple of miles away from Schloss Tratzberg. Father Huntsha had given Mary a penance of visiting the monastery and taking mass in the chapel. The site housed a relic of Saint George and had been a pilgrimage site for nearly six-hundred years.
Not that Mary was particularly enamored of the arm-bone of a saint, since in all likelihood it was a fake. But a penance is a penance, and if Father Huntsha said it would help, she was willing to give it a try.
The Father had explained the penance was two-fold. Part of that was for her well-being, of course. As much as she wanted to roll her eyes at that when he explained it, she refrained. But it was also to present a public face. Because of witchcraft. He explained that she had done the correct things the night of the shootings, those memories still raw in her mind. She had prayed that night over Jacob Bertran’s body, had solemnly observed the other bodies, and had confessed to Father Huntsha as soon as she was able. She had attended Bertran’s funeral. But rumors of witchcraft, once started, were hard to keep in check. So, this pilgrimage was also a visible PR move, showing proper respect and penance in a public way, as a method for suppressing those rumors.
Johann proudly explained the bells. “There are two kinds. ‘Glocken’, which are cast, and ‘Schellen’, which are wrought from plate metal. It’s a very relaxing sound, don’t you think?”
“Yes, very peaceful. Pastoral.” The small herd passed them, and they resumed the walk to the monastery. Johann and Mary were not alone, but accompanied by four men. Two were ahead of them and two behind. All were armed. Mary had to force herself to relax around all the security. Johann had said that it was very unlikely that anyone would try anything, and while she knew it made logical sense, Mary still was jumpy. Hocholting had vanished the night of the attack, and it was assumed he went back over the mountains to Bavaria. So, all of this pastoral atmosphere was good. She figured it was going to take her some time to learn to relax again.
Up-Time Pride and Down-Time Prejudice Page 30