Pilgrims of Promise by C. D. Baker Page A

and Heinz had said little that morning. They stared anxiously at the gray clouds above and at the silhouettes of the haze-shrouded mountains rising in the distance to the north. Heinz skipped a stone across the water. He counted three skips, and then grumbled and threw another. A light rain began to fall, dimpling the lake lightly until a blast of cold wind suddenly scratched the water’s surface. To the boys it seemed like a dark omen.
    “Pieter, we buried four by this lake.”
    The old man nodded as he lifted his hood over his head. “Aye, lad. One should have been me.”
    “And what of Anna?”
    “I am chief of all cowards,” moaned Pieter. “I fear for the both of them. Anna was such a quiet child. She asked for little and marched bravely. I can still see her little white head bobbing in the column.” He filled his lungs with a deep breath and released it slowly. “Enough. ‘Tis time to know.” He drove his staff hard into the earth and set his face forward. “Follow, boys, and take heart. What is to be shall be.”
    The three said nothing more for a long while as brief gusts of wind rumpled their clothing. None wanted to go on, none wanted know, yet they knew they must. Anna, of course, was beloved to be sure. But Maria had given so much to all of them. It was she who had given them smiles when darkness had nearly overwhelmed them; it was she who would sing in the midst of misery. The little girl was uncommonly blessed with a quiet grace of which she was utterly unaware. She saw only others’ needs and served them with an ineffable wealth of kindness. Maria’s disfigured left arm had provided good sport to her many lessers—most of whom were pleased to believe that God’s judgment had been foisted on the fair child and not themselves. Yet the long-suffering Mädel had returned charity for evil at every turn, saving her tears for secret places.
    The three figures and their companion moved quietly along the lakeshore. In the distance they could see the rising foothills of the mighty Alps; behind them, the collapsing landscape leading to the plain from which they had just come.
    Just ahead lay Arona, a prosperous town built directly on the edge of the clear lake where wide-hulled fishing boats and tangles of nets lined the stony beach. On Arona’s northern edge was a sheer cliff nearly twenty rods high—“the first Alp,” Pieter had said—and atop it sat the Rocca di Arona , the gray-stone castle of an aging lord.
    “I remember the cliff, but not the keep,” said Otto. “The cliff has two eye sockets … it made me think it was the face of a giant!”
    Heinz shuddered. “A fortress atop the head of a sleeping giant!”
    Pieter said nothing. He was silently rehearsing the emotions he might expect to feel before the hour would pass. He withdrew Maria’s cross from his belt and stared at it, suddenly lost in a swirl of memories. Little more than bumpy apple wood, the small icon seemed to have empowered the little girl with amazing faith. He could see it held high in her hand in the haunted forests of the Rhineland, in the horrors of Basel’s dungeon, and high above the world in the mighty Alps. He then remembered it in Karl’s belt, somehow remaining unbroken in the lad’s awful death. The old man kissed it reverently.
    Under a lessening rain, the three entered the town past the sleeping guard of the south gate and hurried uphill toward the Benedictine Abbey of Saints Gratian and Felinus. The cloister overlooked the town’s market from a low ridge that paralleled the lake on its western side. It, and the attached church, the Chiesa die S. Martin , had been founded nearly three centuries earlier by Count Ammiz-zone, a captain in the army of Otto I of Saxony. The church’s reliquary boasted the remains of the martyrs Gratian and Felinus—soldiers in Rome’s imperial army martyred in Perugia nearly one thousand years prior.
    The abbey itself had become wealthy and powerful, owning lands all over