Eifelheim (19 page)

“That reminds me,” Gregor added. “Max has been looking for you. The Herr wants to speak to you, up in the Hof.”

“On what matter, did he say?”

“The leper colony.”

“Ah.”

Gregor worked the stone, striking his chisel with hard, precise strokes. Chips flew. Then Gregor squatted to study the level, running his hand along it. “Is it dangerous, having lepers so close by?” he asked.

“The rot spreads by touch, so the ancients wrote. That is why they must live apart.”

“Ach, no wonder Klaus is in such a state.” Gregor straightened and wiped his hand with a rag tucked into his leather apron. “He fears Hilde’s touch. Or so I’ve heard.” The mason looked at him from under lowered brows. “So does everyone else. She’s had no riding this last month, the poor woman.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Half the village may explode from lust. Was it not Augustine who wrote that a lesser evil may be tolerated to prevent a greater?”

“Gregor, I shall make a scholar of you yet.”

The mason crossed himself. “May Heaven forbid such a thing.”

T
HE AFTERNOON
sun had not yet reached the slit window, and Manfred’s scriptorium lay partly in shadows undispelled by the torches. Dietrich sat before the writing table while Manfred cut in two a Roman apple and proffered half.

“I could order you to return to the lazaretto,” the lord said.

Dietrich took a bite from his apple and savored the tartness. He looked at the candle prickets, at the silver inkstand, at the leering beasts on the arms of Manfred’s curule chair.

Manfred waited a moment longer then he laid the knife aside and leaned forward. “But I need your wits, not your obedience.” He laughed. “They have been in my woods long enough now that I ought to take rent of them.”

Dietrich tried to imagine Everard collecting rents from Herr Gschert. He told Manfred what the servant had said: that their cart was broken and they could not leave. The Herr rubbed his chin. “Perhaps that is just as well.”

“I had thought you wanted them gone,” Dietrich said carefully.

“So I had,” Manfred answered. “But we mustn’t be too hasty. There are things I must know about these strange folk. Have you heard the thunder?”

“All afternoon. An approaching storm.”

Manfred shook his head. “No. That crack is made by a
pot de fer
. The English had them at Calais, so I know the sound of it. Max agrees. I believe your ‘lepers’ have black-powder, or they know the secret of it.”

“But there is no secret,” Dietrich said. “Brother Berthold discovered it in Freiburg back in Bacon’s day. He had the ingredients from Bacon, though not the proportions, which he learned by trial and error.”

“It would be the errors that concern me,” Manfred said dryly.

“Berthold was called ‘the Black’ because he had been
singed by his powder so often.” Ockham had presented Buridan with a copy of Bacon made by the monks at Merton directly from the master’s copy, and Dietrich in turn had read it avidly. “It is the niter that does the violence, as I recall, together with sulfur to make it burn and …” Dietrich stopped and looked at Manfred.

“… And charcoal,” Manfred finished blandly. “Charcoal of willow is best, I have heard. And we have lately lost our charcoal makers, not so?”

“You expect these Krenken to make black-powder for you. Why?”

Manfred leaned back against the stones. He twined his fingers under his chin, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair. “Because the gorge is a natural route between the Danube and the Rhine, and Falcon Rock sits like a stopper in a pipe. Trade has dried to a trickle—and with it, my own dues.” He smiled. “I mean to bring down Falcon Rock.”

D
IETRICH AGREED
that von Falkenstein, despoiler of pilgrims and holy nuns, was in want of a reininin. Yet he wondered if Manfred realized that enough black-powder to bring down Falcon Rock was more than enough to obliterate Burg Hochwald. Dietrich contented himself with the thought that the art was a difficult one, requiring a sure touch. If the Krenken could handle the mixture safely, and Manfred learned it of them, how long before all Christendom knew? What worth, then, Burg or
schildmauer?

In his mind, ranks of peasants bore Bacon’s “fire lances” across a battlefield while da Vigevano’s armored war carts hurled balls of stone from immense
pots de fer
. Bacon had described small parchment tubes that his friend, William Rubruck, had brought from Cathay, and which exploded with great noise and flash. “If a device of large size were made,” the Franciscan had written in his
Opus tertius
, “no one could withstand the noise and blinding light, and if the parchment were replaced by metal, the violence of the explosion would be much greater.” Bacon
had been a man of great and disturbing visions. Such devices planted on the battlefield could destroy the chivalry of an entire nation.

Entering his quarters, Dietrich saw that the hour-candle was out. He placed some tinder in a flash pan and ignited it from a flint. Perhaps someday an artisan might fashion a mechanical clock small enough to fit inside a room. Then, instead of forgetting to light the candle, he could forget to lift the counterweights. Using a taper, he transferred the flame to the hour candle. Light chased shadow from the center of the room, confined it to the corners. Dietrich bent to read the hour and was gratified to find that only a little time had been lost from the sun’s position. The candle must have blown out but a scant while ago.

He straightened—and across the room the globular eyes of a Krenk danced with the reflection of a hundred flames. Dietrich gasped and took a step back.

The Krenk extended its peculiarly long arm, dangling the harness worn by many of their servants. When Dietrich made no move, the Krenk shook it vigorously and tapped its own head to indicate its twin. Then it laid the harness on the table and took a step back.

Dietrich understood. He plucked the harness up and, after a study of his visitor revealed how it was to be worn, strapped it to his own head.

Krenkish heads were smaller and so the harness fit poorly. Nor were the creature’s ears properly positioned, so that when Dietrich had inserted the “hearing-mussel” in his ear—as he saw the Krenk had done—the other piece, the mikrofoneh, did not hang by his mouth. The Krenk vaulted the table and seized Dietrich.

Dietrich tried to pull away, but the Krenk’s grip was too strong. It made rapid passes at Dietrich’s head, but they were not blows and, when the creature stepped away, Dietrich discovered that the straps now fit more comfortably.

“Does now the harness sit well—question,” asked a voice in his ear.

Quite involuntarily, Dietrich turned his head. Then he realized that the earpiece must contain an even smaller
Heinzelmännchen
than the box in the Krenkish apartments. He turned to stare at his visitor. “You speak in your mikrofoneh, and I hear you through this mussel.”

“Doch,”
said the creature.

Since there could be no action at a distance, there must be a medium through which the impetus flowed. But had the voice flowed through the air, he would have heard the sound directly, rather than through this engine. Hence, an aether must exist. Reluctantly, Dietrich put the matter aside. “You are come to deliver a message,” he guessed.

“Ja. The one you call the Kratzer asks why you have not returned. The Herr Gschert frets because he thinks he knows. They do not accept the reason I offer.”

“You are the servant. The one they tried to beat.”

There was a silence while the Krenk pondered an answer. “Perhaps not a ‘servant’ in your usage,” it said at last.

Dietrich let that pass. “And what reason have you given them for my absence?”

“That you fear us.”

“And the Kratzer fell from the stalk at that?
He
does not wear bruises.”

“He ‘fell from the stalk’ …”

“It is a figure we use. To be so surprised as to fall down like ripe corn.”

“Your language is strange; yet the head-picture is vivid. But, attend. The Kratzer observes your … your besitting? Yes. He observes that you are a natural philosopher, as is he. So he dismisses my suggestion.”

“Friend grasshopper, you obviously believe you have explained something, but I am at a loss to know what.”

“Those who are struck accept the grace of the beating—as any philosopher should know.”

“Is it so common among you, then? I can imagine better graces.”

The Krenk made the tossing gesture. “Perhaps ‘grace’ is the wrong word. Your terms are strange. Gschert sees that
we are few where you are many. He has the sentence in his head that you would attack us—and that is why you stay away.”

“If we stay away, how can we attack?”

“I tell him that our bugs have seen no warlike preparations. But he answers that all the bugs within the Burg have been carefully removed, which argues for secret preparations.”

“Or that Manfred dislikes being spied upon. No, far from an attack, the Herr proposes that you become his vassals.”

The Krenk hesitated. “What does ‘vassal’ signify—question.”

“That he will grant you a
fief
and the income from it.”

“You explain one unknown in terms of another. Is this a common thing with you—question. Your words circle endlessly, like those great birds in the sky.” The Krenk rubbed his forearms slowly. Irritation, Dietrich wondered? Impatience? Frustration?

“A
fief
is a right to use or possess that which belongs to the Herr in return for rents of money or service. In turn, he will … shield you from the blows of your enemies.”

The Krenk remained unmoving while the shadows in the corners deepened, and the eastern sky, visible through the window, darkened to magenta. The tip of the Katerinaberg glowed in the sunlight, unshrouded as yet by the swelling shadow of the Feldberg. Dietrich had just begun to grow concerned when the creature moved slowly to the window and stared out at … What? Who could say in which direction those peculiar eyes focused?

“Why do you do this—question,” it asked at length.

“It is considered a good thing among us to succor the weak, sinful to oppress them.”

The creature turned its golden eyes on him. “Foolishness.”

“As the world measures things, perhaps.”

“‘Gifts make slaves,’ is a saying among us. A lord succors to show his strength and power, and obtain the services
of those he rules. The weak give gifts to the strong to gain his forbearance.”

“But what is strength?”

The Krenk struck the windowsill with its forearm. “You play games with your words,” the voice of the
Heinzelmännchen
whispered in Dietrich’s ear, seeming eerily in that moment to be a disembodied spirit on his shoulder. “Strength is the ability to crush another.” The Krenk stretched out its left arm and curled its six fingers slowly into a ball, before lifting the fist and jerking it toward the floor.

The creature raised its head to stare directly at Dietrich, who could neither move nor speak in the face of such vehemence. He need not return to the lazaretto to risk a beating by these fierce-tempered folk. The Krenken were quite capable of coming into the village, and had refrained so far only because they thought themselves too weak. Let them once suspect their own power and who knew what casual brutality they might inflict?

“There is,” he began to say, but he could not finish the utterance under that basilisk glare; and so he faced Lorenz’s crucifix above his prie-dieu. “There is another sort of strength,” he said. “And that is the ability to live in the face of death.”

The Krenk clicked its side-jaws once, emphatically. “You mock us.”

Dietrich realized what the emphatic click reminded him of—the two blades of a scissors cutting something off. He remembered that, when the sign had been used, the other party had exposed its neck. Dietrich’s hand rose by itself to his throat, and he put the table once more between himself and the stranger. “I intended no mockery. Tell me how I have offended.”

“Even now,” the Krenk responded, close by his ear though the room lay between them. “Even now—and I cannot say why—you seem insolent. I must tell myself always that you are not Krenkish and so do not know proper
behavior. I have told you: Our cart is broken and we are lost, and so we must die here in this far place. So you tell us ‘to live in the face of death’.”

“Then we must repair your cart, or find you another. Zimmerman is a skilled wheelwright, and Schmidt can fashion whatever metal fixtures are needed. Horses dislike your smell, and the villagers cannot spare their ploughoxen to pull your cart; but if you have silver we may buy draft animals elsewhere. If not, then once the way is known, a steady walk will …” Dietrich’s voice trailed off as the Krenk beat his forearms arrhythmically against the wall.

“No, no, no. It cannot be walked, and your carts cannot endure the journey.”

“Well, William of Rubruck walked to Cathay and back, and Marco Polo and his uncles did the same more lately, and there is on this earth no farther place than Cathay.”

The Krenk faced him once more and it seemed to Dietrich that those yellow eyes glowed with a peculiar intensity. But that was a trick of the shadows and the candlelight. “No farther place on this earth,” the creature said, “but there are other earths.”