Quest of Hope

Chapter 1



THE CODE





Brave Heinrich stood in the first line, nervous and unsure. He breathed quickly and gripped his weapon with fists squeezed white with fear. Behind him and to each side crowded the woollen horde of angry peasants. They chanted and cursed and raised their spears and axes in defiance of the ordered ranks of knights preparing to charge them once again. A long trumpet blasted and the earth began to shake.

Heinrich licked his dry lips and closed his eyes. A warm wind blew through his curly hair, and it felt good as it brushed across his stubbled face. Yearning only for peace, the simple man seemed always beset by strife and disharmony. He had spent his life offered to the bondage of things familiar, yet he was ever pursued by the disrupting purposes of something greater than himself. Persistent, patient, and persevering, Truth had labored to stir and prod, to urge and teach until, at last, the poor wretch might be freed to lift his eyes toward the light beyond his own dark world. Now he had been placed in the center of the greatest paradox of all his troubled years.

The mighty warhorses raged closer and closer like a furious tempest bearing down upon a helpless village. The thundering hooves filled Heinrich’s ears with dread, but the man held shoulder to shoulder with his stouthearted comrades. Steely-eyed and bearing all the confidence of their station, the knights crashed into the stubborn line of these lesser men.

With a shout and a lunge, Heinrich entered the whirlwind. All around him swirled the blurred images of horse and knight, the flash of swords and the splatters of blood. The stench of butchered men and slaughtered beasts filled his nose and choked his lungs; his ears were crowded with the thuds and clangs of hammers and steel, the cries of men and the whinnies of stallions lurching about the mêlée. Heinrich jabbed his glaive this way and that, impaling whom he could and dodging others. The man fought well.

But somewhere in the fury Heinrich’s world fell silent. He dropped to the ground gently and closed his eyes as if to sleep. It was then, it seemed, his spirit was lifted like a hawk on the wind far above the bloody plain. Higher and higher he climbed until he felt he was soaring and drifting in the sun’s kind currents. There he sailed and fluttered free, like a butterfly on a summer’s day. His weary heart was glad, and he sang with joy as the warmth of the merciful sun bathed his wounded soul. Calmed and steadied, he was touched by hope and returned to his struggle in the world of time.





In the tiny village of Weyer, a young peasant woman gave birth to a son on the nineteenth day of January, in the Year of Grace 1174. The event was not uncommon, of course, and only a few bothered to give it the slightest pause, but the story of a life had begun, and it, like that of every other life, would not be common at all.

Two days later the mother carried her child out of the cold shadows of Weyer’s dark stone church. The woman was pretty, though haggard, having the sunken eyes of one already wearied by life. As baby Heinrich turned his squinted face toward the warm rays of the winter’s sun, she quickly raised her thin hand to shield the infant’s eyes from the light.

“Too much sun ‘tis never good for young eyes,” grumbled the priest.

Berta nodded solemnly and drew her cloak around her newborn’s chin. Her husband, Kurt, leaned close to his Frau and wrapped a thick arm around her shoulders. They both thought this to be a good day, for a dip into icy water and the mumbled words of an old priest had pronounced their newborn’s soul safe from the fires of hell.

Now certain of their child’s eternal safety, Kurt and Berta could turn their hopes toward the lad’s survival of things temporal. They could only wonder what events might shape Heinrich in the time he would be granted. In the two days since Berta’s painful delivery both parents had surely grown close to the little one, and Kurt, of course, was quick to boast of his manhood in the siring of a son. Yet, they knew it would be wise to hold loosely to their affections, for bundlings were so very often laid to rest in sad, tiny graves. For this reason, the young mother, though content to lean against the solid frame of her broad-chested husband, now found deeper comfort in the Church’s sure embrace.

Berta turned and addressed the priest dutifully. “You’d be welcome to our home by sext for a bit of mush and mead, father.”

The old priest thought only of spending the remainder of this cold Sabbath day sleeping in front of his own good fire. There he’d be chewing salted-pork and white rolls, not grinding dark rye between his few remaining teeth or sucking mush from his fingers. “Nay, methinks m’old bones needs stay here on the hill. But blessings for the asking and God’s best to your family.”