Wittenförden
November, 1635
Kunigunde stood in the quiet dim coolness of her mother’s house near the very center of Wittenförden, a small, secluded village where she knew she was not welcome.
The house, before, during, and after her mother, had been slowly expanded so that the loft was now more of a shelf, and the central hearth was large enough to heat the interior without the addition of farm animals.
Good, strong German trees had been felled by good German axes, some of which her papa had made from good German ore, to hold up the well-made roof. What had been an exterior meeting area with an awning rather than a roof was now an interior room with a long, heavy table that had seen much, carried much, and been scarred, burned, and gouged by much.
Those who experienced it called it a section of castle wall laid upon its side.
The door was a good, strong German door held together by strong German hinges with a lock that held the door tight to the frame. For all its inherent value and strength and thickness it could not prevent the silence from coming inside.
“Papa?” she asked quietly. She did not expect her father to hear her. Not yet.
If there was anything in the house that was her mother it was the hearth Kunigunde had her back firmly turned to; more of an oven and a stove than a mere fireplace. In the winter it could heat a house three times the size of this one and make meals for ten times the number of people who commonly ate at the table that was also behind her.
The hearth was a clever combination of brick and cast iron with a clever collection of tools; each one made to the sort of exacting specifications her papa was well-known for from Schwerin to as close to Berlin as anything from her papa dare come.
Even Danzig knew of her papa’s specifications.
Once a year, sometimes twice, a wagon came and took away tools and pieces of carefully crafted metal to places in Poland that might not know her papa’s name but knew her papa’s work well.
Wittenförden might not be well-known or easily locatable but it was well-thought of.
Like her mother…
“Papa?”
In the end it was the silence that made her open the door, forced her out into the very late morning, almost midday. There should be loud, raucous noise, and there was not.
“Papa?” She was louder this time.
From sunrise to sunset her papa’s forge, his smithy, was never silent, and he was the loudest thing or person there. Wittenförden rang with his blows upon red, hot metal. Not now.
A wagon had come and there had been voices and the rumble of unloading. There had been horse sounds and wood sounds and the sounds of footsteps but no sound of the forge. No sound of her papa.
When her papa awoke and found the apprentices gone for the holiday in Schwerin he had not bellowed, so she had hunkered down in her mother’s kitchen awaiting the inevitable, which never came. She struggled through the baking of bread and simmering of broth and the cutting of vegetables but, all morning, there had been silence.
“Papa?”
The wagon had gone with the normal sounds such things make, diminishing in the slow distance along a road, a path really, back to Schwerin.
Kunigunde had finally taken off her mother’s apron, the one she wore while working inside the house, and put on the leather apron, the one the women of Wittenförden looked at with disapproval. She left the house and strode across the yard and stopped at the boundary between house and smithy.
She would have dared the women of Wittenförden and even those of Schwerin to say any single thing about her leather apron, the one she wore in the smithy when she worked beside her papa, whether he or the women of Wittenförden approved or not.
In the distance she could just hear the wagon, its sound diminishing, respectful of the silence of the smithy.
“Papa?” she inquired of the silence that haunted the smithy, a silence so unnatural in a usually loud and busy place. The crackle of flames or the sizzle of the quenching trough would have been loud in this silence.
The heat was there and the smoke and the smells of metal, hot and cold. There was nothing obviously amiss. Everything from brooms and baskets, hammers and wood and coal and charcoal were all where they belonged. Work waited to be finished and finished work waited to be paid for and taken to market.
Such were the tides of the smithy of Wittenförden.
“Papa?”
Her papa was a big man. Normally he dominated the smithy and the vast sound of him filled the countryside. He was called ‘the Smith,’ rarely by his more common name, Ernst.
Few from Wittenförden, fewer from Schwerin called him Ernst. No one in her memory used his family name, his surname. Formally, which was rare, he was called Herr Ernst.
To her, he was simply Papa. The surname didn’t matter to her, not here, certainly not now.
“Papa?”
Wittenförden produced two things: axes of all sorts and the trees those axes felled.
Her papa made the finest axes in the north of Germany, possibly Poland and the south of Germany as well and his skills at fixing wagons and harness, at least as far as the metal that bound the wood and shackled the leather, were well-thought of.
Any farmer or shepherd who needed a knife fixed or a pot mended could depend on her papa’s strong arm and firm, well-placed hammer blows. With those same hands and same hammers he made needles and pins far too fine to come from a place so obviously a smithy created to make axes and horse shoes and loud, large things of metal.
When he made needles and pins Kunigunde thought, for a moment, he was remembering her mother, his wife.
“Papa?”
“Stay away!” His voice finally burst out of the smithy like a flock of geese thrown up and off the nearby lake. “Go back in the house where you belong! Go!”
Kunigunde did not stay away. She did not go. It was not in her nature to do so. Besides, the memory of her mother was in that house. Better she should be here, being bellowed at by her papa, than inside remembering the mother she never knew.
Kunigunde strode forward into papa’s command as if it were a stiff wind, cold and forbidding, full of ice and snow, but between her and where she needed to be.
In the end, it was not her papa’s command that stopped her, but his silence.
“Papa?” Kunigunde began. “What is wrong? You are not working? The forge is almost cold. Look…”
“You are like your damned brother. He doesn’t listen either. Off being chased about…swinging that damned sword like he knew what he was doing! Instead of coming to show himself, show that he was well, he sends me this damned…trash. Both of you don’t listen.”
“I am not like my brother! I am here. He is not. You should thrash those lazy apprentices!”
The silence was oppressive, stifling. She expected a response, a noise, a shout. Anything?
She had to walk around the large, brutish hulk that was her papa to see what had silenced him.
It was a pile of metal on the smashed and pounded dirt floor of the smithy.
Armor.
“Is that blood, Papa?”
“This is no place for a woman. I told you to stay away! Why can’t you follow directions? Why?”
She stood beside her papa and looked at the pile of metal on the ground, before her.
“I should marry you off…” he muttered. “But who would have you?”
His hands clenched. She could hear muscles creak.
“What will you do with it all, Papa?”
The silence was hot and lasted a lifetime, or so it seemed.
“It is good metal…the best…” her papa whispered. “Some fine man had it made to protect his precious son and see what good it did? What a waste…”
That frightened her. The whisper frightened her. In her fifteen years she had never heard her papa whisper. He was too big to whisper. Even his soft good night could wake the dead then frighten those very same dead back into their graves!
There was no fear in that whisper, no reverence or the quiet of men waiting for just the right moment to set loose an arrow at a rabbit tempted close and careless. His was a whisper of remembrance, when louder words might scare a memory away.
He was remembering her mother, and events even more tragic, and because he did she must.
In that silence her sigh was loud.
Kunigunde took a deep breath, adjusted her leather apron and began.
She let her loudness speak for both of them. Her actions were obvious, designed to confront her papa’s silence, to challenge his whisper. She clattered and banged and stomped. She slammed and clashed and grunted. Smithies were excellent places for noise and clamor!
This was the part she liked; early in the morning, scaring the night away with the awaking of the forge; the eager clanging of the smithy ready to do work.
But this was midday. Kunigunde sighed and forged forward, anyway.
She made up for the time of day with loud rattling and shaking of the metal armor as if to wake the dead; even if that dead was the one who had worn this armor.
She cut off the leather straps, carefully, putting the knife down as loudly as she dared when finished. You did not live in a small town like Wittenförden and not understand the concept of “waste naught, want naught.” Everything, even silences and memories and forgetfulness, had a use.
Even the distaste and frowns of the women of Wittenförden made when she appeared had a use.
Once the cloth and leather was taken away, the metal need only be heated and pounded and used to make other things, useful things. There were a myriad of things to do; bring the forge to the right temperature, collect the appropriate tools, check the metal for anything that might interfere with the work.
She could see where a few ‘garnishments’ had been gouged out of the metal. The enameling had been light and she left it alone. The blood was more like a thin, powdery mud now; easy to ignore.
The silence from her papa was almost unbearable. She wanted to shriek at him! But shrieking was something women did.
Papa told her once that her mother never shrieked until that day, that horrid and not easily remembered day, when Kunigunde had been born.
She let the clanking of the metal shriek for her. She slammed the bellows into action until the coals glowed and the leather shrieked.
The idea was to heat the metal and pound it back into an ingot which could then be re-forged, cut, shaped into useful things.
Usually her papa was loud with comments and instructions, loud proclamations and deep, bellowing reprimands. Even his compliments came as loud as his recriminations, but not now.
Silence.
Once heated, once the stench of scorched blood was removed, she pulled the red-hot metal from the furnace and placed it on an anvil.
Her papa had many anvils and woe betide the apprentice or daughter who chose the wrong tool for the work at hand.
She chose a hammer.
Her papa had many hammers and woe betide the apprentice or daughter who chose the wrong one for the work at hand.
This was a critical part of the process and usually there was a loud, brutal chorus from her papa on which hammer and which anvil to pick and which not to even consider, let alone touch.
She had learned early to never touch a single tool in the smithy without permission. That she did so now, using his silence as permission, hammering her papa with his own silence, frightened her, scalded her.
Her papa often fought with her. Until now, she had never fought with her papa.
Even that time when she had stolen one of her papa’s hammers for a purpose it was not meant for, applying to a boy’s forehead, she had not fought, not dared to fight, with her papa.
The memory came and she smiled as she slammed and clattered and made noise in the once-silent smithy.
She had been nine in that memory; a shorter version of her present self. She had been angry, fuming like a red-hot forge, even at nine.
The memory of that nine-year-old girl came silently to her mind.
Kunigunde knew she was not pretty, then and now. Forges, though, do not make such unnecessary judgments. Anvils did not care about beauty. Hammers merely hammered.
A group of boys from Wittenförden had once made her lack of beauty well-known, even as far away as Schwerin, and the nickname horse-face, pferdegesicht, had been used once too often, and when a nine-year-old daughter of a well-respected and busy blacksmith is annoyed she reaches for a hammer.
Her papa had many. Would he even notice? When you are nine you do not think of many things that you consider long and quietly when you are fifteen.
Papa did notice, of course, but that was for later in the memory.
She chose the largest boy in the smirking, mocking pack and applied the hammer to the front of his skull in as un-woman-like a manner as could be imagined by any woman of Wittenförden.
Sons had worth, value, preciousness and wore armor. Daughters had a place, a kitchen perhaps or shrieking in childbirth, little more.
The boy, now older, still bore the mark. The women of Wittenförden and even Schwerin remembered the girl who gave it and marked her, therefore, as a woman outside her place.
If anyone used the nickname pferdegesicht, it was done out of her hearing, though. Sometimes “horse” was replaced with “ox,”, sometimes unconscious fingers rubbed uninjured foreheads when she was seen in public.
What was one to do with a girl who did not have a mother and did not know her place?
Her papa had used a strap on her for taking one of his hammers without permission but only smiled whenever he thought of the village boy who now became very quiet around his daughter and rubbed the spot on his forehead and found other things to do and other places to be.
His approval of her was silent, but a smiling, approving silence.
Not like this present silence.
Finally, a hand pushed her roughly aside and she staggered and, suddenly, the smithy erupted into noise—good, hardworking, hammering, clanging noise.
Together, papa and daughter, beat the hot metal until only memory remained of its former use.
But that memory was more than enough, possibly too much.
Later that night at the supper table, between the hearth and a good German door
Kunigunde had an aunt, her father’s aunt, who often came to the house to help with womanly chores in an effort to show her, force her to see, how a real woman behaved and where her place was.
This aunt cleaned like a man beat a disobedient dog. She cooked like a wagon driver whipped a lazy horse.
Tonight she had not come, and Kunigunde did the cooking.
Reluctantly.
Supper preparations began just after breaking of the fast, with an interruption for a quick, hasty lunch. Her arms were tired, and her mind did not need the memories cooking brought.
This had been her mother’s house, her kitchen, her place, not her daughter’s.
The kitchen was well-ordered and scrubbed and clean and the house as tidy as one could imagine when so few used it so very infrequently and cleaned it often.
It was almost as if someone had tried to erase the memory of her mother; except for the letters shaped into the metal of a little, cast-iron door—To H.
She closed her eyes and trembled with the memory of those molded words.
Kunigunde, Gundie to her brother, brought the large metal pot to the heavy oak table and set it down like a hammer blow. Her papa made many pots and pans and other cooking utensils but, in this house, there was one pot used to cook almost anything from chickens to carrots or both at the same time. As pots went it was very utilitarian, no embellishment, nothing fancy.
She stabbed the ladle, the only ladle available while the smithy burst with tools of every sort, inward, smashing aside the vegetables, splashing the liquids like blood, forcing aside the chunks of good, German meat, then sat down with all the grace of a sack of coal dropped beside the forge.
Her papa knew not to comment and her brother didn’t even look. That was how she liked it.
To H—these were the letters on the little, cast-iron door on the stove.
It had been her large head that had done the deed.
Cooking reminded her of that fact, which was one reason why she hated it.
Papa clapped his hands together in what should be, but never was, quiet prayer.
Kunigunde had taught herself, much to the disdain of the women of Wittenförden, to cook quickly and efficiently. This, of course, gave her more time to be in the forge despite whatever her papa said to the contrary. The forge wasn’t work to her as the house was. Her memories of the forge were pleasant. Memories of the house and hearth were not.
Papa began the prayer. Her brother was silent throughout the prayer.
It had been her large head that had done the deed.
Kunigunde pretended the smell from the stew wasn’t a smell she had anything to do with.
“God bless the memory of my mother, amen,” she added to the very end of the prayer her papa almost bellowed and her brother barely acknowledged.
Eating began slowly, quietly, like the heating of a forge.
Kunigunde did ‘stew’ well. Throw it all into a pot and heat. Pretend not to see To H.
It was her great, big…
“I had them send you some of the metal, father!” Reichart stated as proud as a spring sun rising over the mountains it thought it had conquered. Kunigunde almost smiled.
His name, like hers, was far older than he was. Reichart wore it like he wore his clothing; like it was in style or would be or had been.
Her papa, ignoring his son, ate as one who was deaf or deafened.
“The apprentices will be back tomorrow at sunrise, father,” Reichart stated. “They are celebrating the victory over those who thought they still ruled here. The fools were coming from Berlin to set things straight. We set them straight, instead! We sent them straight back to Berlin…those that survived. We sent a message that we are not serfs waiting for our masters to come back and tell us what we must do!”
Her papa, ignoring his son, ate as one who was deaf or deafened.
She prodded the stew with her spoon. Her father had made an entire set of spoons and even forks as a gift to her mother whom she killed with her…
“Father…” Reichart began.
“I am eating!” papa bellowed like a mishandled forge.
The silence was punctuated with the sounds of slow, methodical eating.
Her brother made one more attempt, though oblique.
“I brought this for you, ‘Gundie.” He smiled, purposefully not even looking at his father. He reached out his fist and opened it just above the good, German table, beside her almost empty bowl.
They were metal; that much was obvious. They were shining bolts with nuts screwed on them. They were too small to be bolts with nuts screwed on them. There were no tools in her papa’s smithy to make bolts this small, let alone tighten them.
Her papa made needles and pins with his biggest hammer on his largest anvil, like he was challenging the challenge.
What could possibly require bolts that small?
How were they so shiny? They were not silver or silvered.
Kunigunde looked up quickly at her papa who was cleaning the bottom of his bowl with a chunk of bread torn like a limb from a tree, not cut from it with a good, German axe.
“Now these…” He produced two…things that she could almost explain. They were bolts with some sort of sleeve on them. The sleeve was metal, and the bolt screwed into it. “…I don’t know what they are. There is so much I do not know.”
Her brother paused as if listening to his father’s grunt, as close to a laugh as she had ever heard him make.
“I traded for them. Tell father I am going to find out. I am going with my friends from the Committees of…”
The hand came down on the time-scarred table that many compared to something like a wall. The sound was like thunder and the table actually shook. It required at least three strong men to move this table, but it moved under her papa’s single hand.
“Not in my house!” her papa bellowed.
“…next spring, when all this mess goes away…” her brother continued as if his papa’s hand had not come down and the heavy, oak table, with bolts large enough to kill a man with a blow delivered to the forehead perhaps, had not moved.
“…and how will you know this mess, the mess you and the fools you call friends created, will ‘go away’? How do you know that you and your foolish…friends have not brought it here? Those who are born to rule do not give up easily what they are taught they deserve. They are not iron that can be made into gold or gold that can be made into iron. They are men! Men!”
“…I will go to Magdeburg or Hamburg at least and find out what these are and how to make them…”
“…we do not need them! We do not need to know how to make these things!”
The silence was loud. Kunigunde knew to wait through the silence.
“I might even go to this…Grantville, Father.”
Kunigunde waited for her papa to explode. When he did not she looked at him.
“Your grandfather…” her papa began as he so often did in situations like this. He turned to his papa like a priest turned to the Holy Cross. Her brother turned away, at such times, like a heretic.
“…first you call my friends fools then you want to remind us all of this revolt of the peasants and your father. His revolt failed, Father! This one will not!”
She waited for her father to explode. He did not and his short silence frightened her.
“And what will you do when your friends take control and become the monsters you killed out there somewhere? Will you kill them, too? Iron does not change. Men do.”
“Iron rusts, Father!”
“And with a simple procedure it can be made into iron again. Men age and piss all over what they once revered and cherished! Men pray to God on a Sunday then do evil to make the devil weep on Monday. Men smile and rub their hands before a meal then squat and shit and fart. Men rust then change into something else and then forget how to be men again! Iron does not forget it is iron! Even when it is rust it remembers!”
“Father…”
“All this…this Grantville did was remind men they can be what God never meant them to be. Boys need to be trained to be men and men need to be reminded where they came from and to where they will all go!”
“Father…”
“Papa!”
“Go. You are almost nineteen. I will not stop you. Wait for spring. Wait for all hell to freeze over! When you go, take your friends with you. When you go…don’t come back. Don’t bring your human rust to my forge!”
With that papa stood and receded into the darkness that huddled like memory around the table.
“I don’t understand him,” Reichart said softly, almost whispering. “So much is changing. Why will he not change with it, ‘Gundie? How do I make him understand?”
“The armor you sent to us…it was made for a very young man and resized to fit a man…a few years older, maybe one about your size. You don’t understand. His tears sizzled on the metal, on gashes and gouges. You did not see those tears, Reichart. He is afraid for you. He sees you in the stories he remembers from his grandfather and his papa. He sees you on those battlefields, hung from trees, heads cut off with good German axes. He is afraid and papa does not…fear well.”
“This is different! Things are different now! Things will be better…I swear…”
Kunigunde heard the whirring and felt, through the table, the crisp thunk of the good German axe into the large, wooden pole, once a good, German tree, that helped to hold up this part of the roof.
There was more than enough space, overhead, for a whirling axe; a good, German axe. Papa wanted his wife to feel she cooked in a large kitchen not a hovel somewhere in a secluded place in Germany. He was proud of that tall roof and the open space.
The silence was stunned, brittle; like the silence after a tree falls hard onto good German soil.
“You might need your grandfather’s axe for this…new, better, different world, this bright shining whore you will be running to this spring,” came the pronouncement from the darkness that surrounded the table like the past. “Take it when you go. When you hold it…maybe you will remember who held it before you and…remember that someone might hold it after you are gone.”
“I wish you luck, brother,” Kunigunde told her brother, speaking as soft and still as the dust that was rattled out of the rafters, as the memory of her mother. “Will you help me clear away the meal?”
****