Wheel of the Fates by J. Boyce Gleason

Author:J. Boyce Gleason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: J. Boyce Gleason

Twenty-One

Hesse

It took nearly three days to ferry his army across the Rhine. Although he was relieved to have finished the arduous task, Carloman was more than a little anxious to be on the east side of the river. After years of campaigns with his father in Alemannia, Frisia, and Hesse, he had come to realize that he was a man of the west where century-old roads and highways connected one province to the next; where cities with great churches and markets gave way to towns and villages; and where people worked the land and plied their trades. In the west, the language was common, the Church was ubiquitous and the power of the mayors, unquestioned.

East of the river, chaos reigned. A Babel of tribal chieftains waged incessant war that left their people scarred, desperate, and violent. Dark and endless forests covered the landscape where huge wolves often held dominion over mankind. Even the mountains were made to intimidate, towering over their counterparts in the west with peaks so close to heaven that trees no longer grew.

In such a place it was easy to understand the pagan worship of nature deities. The gods of such a wild and untamed land would have to be terrible gods, indeed.

To Carloman’s amusement, crossing the Rhine had the opposite effect on Boniface.

“This is the way the earth looked when God created it.” Boniface swept his hand across the horizon where the flat marshland gradually gave way to undulating green hills reckless with wildflowers. “It’s as if we are present on the fifth day of Genesis and only the beasts and plants inhabit the world.”

Having made this journey with Boniface in the past, Carloman wasn’t surprised by the bishop’s enthusiasm. The east roused a wild nature in the man that one rarely saw at court in Paris. Crossing the river changed him.

Carloman decided to tease his godfather. “I disagree, Boniface. One side of the river looks much like the other.”

“Then you, Carloman, are a blind man. Do you see any roads, or towns, or cities to mar the countryside? Are there monuments here to man’s self-glorification as there are in the west? Here, the people are of the land. They don’t deform it for their purposes. Life lived here is as our Lord intended it should be lived.”

“You are hardly objective, Boniface.”

The bishop harrumphed. “I suppose you have a point. Though not my native land, Hesse is the land of my making. It was here that I first came under the tutelage of Willibord. It was here that I first ministered to the pagans and here that the fires of my spiritual passion took hold. My work east of the Rhine made me a missionary and ultimately a Bishop. Everywhere I look, the land conjures up such memories that I feel like laughing at the sheer joy of it.”

Carloman had agreed to honor a request from the bishop to escort him to the Hessian monastery at Fritzlar and then a few days march south to Fulda where Boniface planned to found a new monastery.

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