Daughter of the Sword (34 page)

“My people won't use them.” Conrad's smile deepened. “Mennonites are forbidden violence.”

“Even to defend themselves?”

Conrad nodded. “The tenet's been strengthened by three centuries of persecution. I'm not a Mennonite, but I can assure you none of them came here to abandon their beliefs.”

“I never heard the like!” Frowning, Johnny carved more ham. “What're you goin' to do if someone steals your fine oxen?”

“Pray for the thief and pull the plow ourselves.”

Johnny scanned his guest's attire, which, though plain, was of good cut and material. “You?”

“I.”

“And if they trample your grain?”

“Plant again.”

Johnny didn't push further, perhaps deciding that mention of fire and murder was cruel to the bereaved women. He looked Conrad in the eye and said grimly, “I'll nowise let Deborah bide with you unless you promise to protect her.”

“I've told you I'm not a Mennonite,” Conrad said gently, but his tone held an edge of hauteur. An aristocrat might renounce his privileges but would never quite cast off his rearing, the manner bred into him from the cradle. “I will wrap my life around her like a shield. But Friedental is rightly named. We have peace. Indians have stopped there several times, armed warriors, but we gave them food and they left as friends.”

“They knew you were crazy,” Johnny growled. “And Indians think it's bad luck to bother the insane!”

Conrad laughed at that, unruffled. Deborah tore her eyes from him.

He spoke as her parents might have. Look what had happened to them! It was a shock, both brutal and poignant, to listen to him. He behaved as if he had searched out many answers for himself, as if he were at peace with the deepest part of his nature.

But when he watched her, his eyes held a question.

xv

Conrad's tall gray stallion was the color of river mists. Beside him, Chica was a small bright cloud. “You ride a high horse,” grinned Johnny, seeing them off at dawn next morning. Conrad's straight lips curved in a smile.

“Ah, my friend, I gave up my sword and place in the Herrenhaus, but I couldn't part with Sleipner. I raised him from a colt. Only I have ridden him.”

“He's a fine animal.” Johnny eyed the horse critically. “Might not fare so well, though, on open prairie with no extra fodder.”

“Well,” shrugged Conrad easily, “he shall have what he requires through his life. His colts, from your smaller, tougher horses, won't need pampering.”

“I'd admire to see them,” said Johnny.

“I have a likely two-year-old I'd trade you for black-smithing if he suits you. I'll bring him next time I come, or you can visit us. All of you,” he added, including the rest of the gathered household.

Good-byes had already been said, but as Conrad collected his reins, Sara ran forward and Deborah bent to embrace her, pressing close the body her brother had loved, cherishing the memory of him in Sara, as Sara must know in her his twin flesh.

“Don't be any sadder than you have to,” Sara whispered. “Smile when you can.”

Deborah couldn't speak but kissed her friend, raised her hand to the others, and rode off beside Conrad, blinded by tears.

The sun climbed, warming the prairie, gilding the withered grass, sparkling where moisture left beads or patches. January. Much winter lay ahead, cruel March winds, but spring
would
come. The wheat she and Thos had planted last fall would sprout and grow, but he wouldn't see or harvest it. Was there no way to escape this circling of thoughts? No matter what she tried to concentrate on, the linkings ran inexorably to Thos or her parents.

“Perhaps it's good if I talk?” suggested Conrad. He'd kept the big gray reined to one side, slightly behind, obviously not wishing to intrude. “I can tell you about Friedental.”

Deborah nodded mutely.

It was a fascinating story. Conrad's house descended from one of the Teutonic Knights, an order formed in the thirteenth century to check the surging tide of Slavs that randomly threatened to overwhelm Western Europe. Though the knights in time became pillagers, seizing land from heathen and convert alike, till soundly defeated by the massed strength of Poland and the Lithuanian Empire, which reached from Baltic to Black seas and almost to Moscow, crusading zeal continued strong in Conrad's forebears, though it took an unorthodox streak which made him suspect that some ancestor had sympathized with the Waldenses.

When these heretics were being burned by the hundreds throughout Europe for refusing infant baptism and for following the Scriptures rather than the Roman Church, the count of that day had given them asylum, and a later count had refused to imprison and burn or drown those of his tenants who became Mennonites.

“What do they believe?” Deborah asked.

“You've heard of the Amish in Pennsylvania? They're a branch of Mennonites who came over in the early 1700s from Switzerland, where persecution was terrible to a fairly late date, and from the Palatinate. In the canton of Bern, Mennonites were sold as galley slaves as late as 1750, and full toleration wasn't granted till 1815. You can see why the hope of freedom to worship according to their beliefs brought many Mennonites to your country.”

In spite of her aching heart, Deborah couldn't repress a wry laugh. “No, I guess we don't kill people for their religion. In Kansas and Missouri it depends on whether you're Free State or pro-slave.”

Conrad sighed. “It's strange! To us in Europe, America seems so free, a land to grow in and believe what you will. But, indeed, I see the Indians pressed back, made sick and corrupt with whisky and vice, and there is this monstrous custom of slavery, fostered in your young country when it had become unthinkable in the civilized world.” He added hopefully, “At least you're facing the evil. It belongs to the old, bad days and can't endure.”

“But will it take a war?” cried Deborah. “Will what's happened along this border have to spread through the whole land?”

“Pray that it won't,” said Conrad somberly. His gaze touched her like a physical comforting. “But countries survive wars. I'd weary you with telling, even if I could remember them all, the battles that have wasted what we call Prussia. Out of all that's ruined and wasted, some people survive, some seed buried in trampled ground brings forth grain. The martyr's agony buys freedom for those who follow.”

“You still haven't told me what Mennonites are.”

“The best farmers in the world.” He laughed at her incredulous look. “I didn't bring them here only because I had sympathy with their faith. Since they were repeatedly driven from good land to bad, Mennonites have reclaimed boggy land in Holland, Prussia, and Poland, and they established rich farms in drought-plagued regions of the Ukraine, where they were especially invited by Catherine the Great.”

That name conjured up the vague impression of a be-jeweled, plump despot with an appetite for handsome, strong young, guardsmen. “Why ever did
she
want Mennonites?” Deborah asked.

“Not for her personal entertainment,” Conrad chuckled. “But she was German-born and knew the Mennonites to be resourceful farmers and the most law-abiding of people so long as their religion wasn't tampered with. After Russia took the Crimea from Turkey, Catherine wanted the region settled. Her envoy, in 1786, offered Prussian Mennonites free transport, one hundred seventy-five acres of land per family, self-government, and their own schools—and, most importantly, exemption from military duty and complete religious freedom so long as they didn't try to convert native Russians.”

“I'm surprised there were any left to come with you!”

“Especially when Prussia and the Lutheran Church were determined to check the growth of the Mennonites,” he agreed. “They were taxed to support the state church, taxed in lieu of military service, and couldn't buy more land without special permission. More than six thousand went to Russia, where they've mostly prospered.”

“Why didn't your colonists?”

“Alexander the Second is the fourth czar since Catherine. He doesn't feel bound by her promises, and it seems unlikely that he'll let the Mennonites retain their special privileges. The czar wishes to unify his country, and especially after losing the Crimean War, he is determined to have a strong military.”

“Mennonites won't serve in an army?”

“No. Nor swear an oath. But the main reason they've been hounded and persecuted since their beginnings in Switzerland and Holland over three hundred years ago is that they reject infant baptism and claim that sacrament should be given only to adults who understand its seriousness.”

“Were they part of the Reformation?”

“Yes. But when reformers like Calvin and Luther had finally been successful in defying Rome and making their beliefs the official creeds of various Protestant countries, Calvinists and Lutherans joined with Catholics to savagely torture and murder those whose only sin was trying to live according to what they found in scripture.”

“Like the slaughter of Jews?”

“Very like.”

Deborah thought aloud. “You admire them. You chose them for neighbors when you left your country. Yet you're not of their faith.”

Those deep eyes sought hers, probed. “I don't wish to offend or trouble you, Miss Deborah, but I'm not of any faith.”

She gasped. “But you must be! To give up your title, your privileges, come here and be a farmer—”

“I should say that having lost faith in God, I'm compelled to have faith in man.”

It was so near her own recent thoughts, without the grief and anger, that she stared at him in disbelief. “I—why do you feel like that, Mr. Lander?”

“I suppose it began when I saw boys teasing an idiot, and it has increased with experience, though so long as ‘God's will' didn't press on me, I remained philosophical and called myself Christian. But as I learned that hundreds of thousands of innocents have been burned at the stake, drowned, tortured, or beheaded in the name of a loving Christ, my whole nature rebelled.”

He stopped and glanced at her frowningly. “I shouldn't say this. If you're comforted by your religion—”

“But I'm not!” Deborah cried, the relief of being able to say what she thought feeling much like the sudden draining of an infected wound. “That's one of the terrible things! My—my patents, they were so
good.
I can't believe a God fit to worship would have let them die like that if He could help it. So either there's no God, or He doesn't, concern himself with what happens, which amounts to about the same thing. I've been brought up to pray, but I can't pray now and it hurts! It—hurts!”

“Of course it does.”

The odd note in his voice made her look at him. Again he seemed to be gazing into her heart. “It will hurt for a longtime,” he went on. “But the pain will become a part of you, a blending into other things so that it won't stab as it does now. So much of our poetry, music, and art comes from trying to assuage loss.”

“And a lot of regular work, too,” Deborah said, moved to a faint smile. “Yesterday we went through about a week's ordinary chores, but it was better than sitting around crying.”

“The same impulse drove Shah Jahan to build the Taj Mahal for his favorite wife.” Conrad gave a small chuckle. “I've wondered if that made for peace with his remaining ladies.”

Deborah laughed, then choked it off, feeling guilty. Fleetingly, Conrad laid his gloved hand over hers. “The dead, if they know anything of what we do, won't grudge you laughter.”

Why was it possible to say things to him that she'd have had trouble putting even to Sara? “Sometimes I forget for a few minutes,” she pondered. “Then I feel guilty, as if I'd forsaken them—Mother and Father and Thos. It's as if—as if the life they have is in me, my remembering.”

“It is. But wouldn't they rather be remembered for the happy things, for the good times? Surely there were enough of those to outweigh the end.”

“It's remembering the happiness that makes the rest so awful!”

“Now, yes. But in time, unless you fight to keep the horror, the good will be far stronger.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He shrugged. “I call myself a happy man. Yet twice my life was a burden I could scarcely endure. I adored my older brother. When he was killed in the Revolution, I stayed drunk for weeks, tried to still my pain in any wild way I could think of. But time
does
heal.”

He was saying this to help her, so Deborah prompted, “And the second time?”

“My wife.” Shocked, Deborah raised her hand to protest that he needn't go on, but he did. “She was delicate; I knew that when I married her. Gradually I had to admit that charming, hesitating little cough was changing into seizures that left her exhausted. She grew so weak that she couldn't put her arms around me when I carried her through the gardens. She died like that, eight years ago, in my arms among the roses.”

Tears stung Deborah's eyes. She bowed her head. Conrad went on slowly. “But, you know, what lasts for me is not how ill she was, but how she loved roses. I called her Röslein because of that, and because we loved Heine's poem. Röslein had no thorns for me, except the losing of her.”

“She sounds—sweet.”

“She was. There's an old folksong I learned in my student days and used to sing for her. Would you like to hear it if I can remember? And English it, more or less?”

If he could sing, Deborah could listen. She nodded. He looked ahead, cleared his throat, and brought up the words, at first like something unwinding slowly from a hidden place, then with a rough male tenderness that penetrated even Deborah's numbness.

“Your garden is so lovely, girl.

Please! May I walk there?

Let me see your roses, girl,