Eifelheim (31 page)

In the silence that followed these announcements, Joachim began to sing, low at first and then more strongly, lifting his chin and throwing words to the vises and rafters, as if transported by some inner fire. Dietrich recognized the hymn,
Christus factus est pro nobis
, and at the next phrase, joined his own voice in
duplum
, at which Joachim faltered, then recovered. Dietrich took the “holding voice,” or
tenor
, and Joachim the upper and their voices moved freely against each other, Joachim sometimes rendering a dozen notes to Dietrich’s one. Dietrich became aware that the Krenken had stilled their chittering and stood as the statues in their niches. Not a few of them held
mikrofonai
aloft to capture the sounds.

At last their two voices fell into unison on “the refreshing fa” with which the fifth mode ended, and the church remained hushed for some moments, until Gregor’s rough “Amen!” started a chorus of affirmations. Dietrich blessed the congregation, saying, “May God prosper this enterprise and strengthen our resolve. We ask this through Jesus
Christ, our Lord, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.”

Then he prayed silently that the concord miraculously elicited by Joachim’s unexpected sermon would not vanish in the face of second thoughts.

W
HEN DIETRICH
later brought Hans and the Kratzer to the parsonage, he found that Joachim had built up the fire in the main room and was adjusting the crackling logs with an iron poker. The two Krenken made exclamations untranslatable by the talking head and pushed into the room, close to the flames. Joachim stepped back, the poker in his hands and considered them.

“These are to be our particular guests,” he supposed.

“The one wearing the strange furs is called the Kratzer, because when I met him he used his forearms to make a rasping sound.”

“And you called their lord ‘Gschert,’” Joachim said with a flat smile. “Does he know it means ‘stupidly rude’? Who is the other? I’ve seen those garments before, in the church rafters at the
feriae messis.”

“You saw him then—and said nothing?”

Joachim shrugged. “I had fasted. It might have been a vision.”

“His name is Johann von Sterne. He is a servant who tends the talking head.”

“A servant, and you call him ‘von.’ I never looked for humor from you, Dietrich. Why does he wear short pants and doublet while the other is wrapped in fur?”

“Their country is warmer than ours. They keep their arms and legs bare because their speech sometimes makes use of the arm-rasping. As their ship was bound for lands likewise warm, neither pilgrims nor crew brought cold-weather clothing. Only the Kratzer’s folk, who had planned to explore an unknown country, did so.”

Joachim rapped the poker against the stone fireplace to knock the ashes off. “He will share the fur, then,” he said, hanging the poker on its hook.

“It would never occur to him,” Hans Krenk answered. After a pause, he added, “Nor to me.”

D
IETRICH AND
Joachim went to prepare beds for the strangers in the kitchen outbuilding, where the larger kitchen hearth would provide greater warmth. In the snow-path between the buildings, Joachim said, “You sang well in the church today.
Organum purum
is difficult to master.”

“I learned d’ Arezzo’s method in Paris.” That had involved memorizing the hymn
Ut queant laxis
and using the first syllables of each line for the hexachord: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.

“You sang like a monk,” Joachim said. “I wondered if you’d ever been tonsured.”

Dietrich rubbed the back of his head. “I came by the bald spot in the common course.”

Joachim laughed, but touched Dietrich on the arm. “Do not be afraid. We shall succeed. We shall save these demons for Christ.”

“They are not demons. You will see that in time, as I did.”

“No, they are steeped in evil. The philosopher refused to share his fur with his servant. Philosophers will always have logical reasons for avoiding the good—and those reasons will always hang on their lust for material goods. A man who has little thinks little of sharing it; but the man who has much will clutch it with his dying fingers. This device …” Joachim fingered the cord of the head harness that Dietrich wore. “Explain how it works.”

Dietrich did not know, but repeated what he had been told about insensible waves in the air, “felt” by devices which he had named “feelers,” or
antennae
. But Joachim laughed. “How often you say that we ought not imagine new entities to explain a thing when those already known suffice. Yet you accept that there are insensible waves in the air. Surely, that the device is demonic is by far the simpler hypothesis.”

“If this device is demonic, it did me no harm.”

“Diabolical arts cannot harm a good Christian, which testifies in your favor. I had feared for you, Dietrich. Your faith is as cold as the snow, and provides no warmth. True faith is a fire that gives life—”

“If by that you mean that I don’t shout and weep—”

“No. You talk—and while the words are always right, they are not always the right words. There is no joy in you, only a long-forgotten sorrow.”

Dietrich, much discomfited, said, “There is the tithe barn. Fetch the straw for the bedding.”

Joachim hesitated. “I had thought you went into the woods to lie with Hildegarde. I thought the leper colony a ruse. To believe that was the sin of rash judgement—and I pray your pardon.”

“It was a reasonable hypothesis.”

“What has reason to do with it? A man does not reason his way into a slattern’s bed.” He scowled and his thick brows knit together. “The woman is a whore, a temptress. If you did not go into the woods to be with her, it is certain that she went into the woods to be with you.”

“Judge
her
not too rashly, either.”

“I’m no philosopher, to mince words. If we are to grapple with a foe, let us at least name him. Men like you are a challenge to women like her.”

“Men like me …?”

“Celibates. Oh, how tasty are the grapes that dangle out of reach! How much more desired! Dietrich, you haven’t granted me pardon.”

“Oh, surely. I take the words of the Lord’s Prayer. I will pardon you as you pardon her.”

Surprise contorted the monk’s features. “For what must I pardon Hilde?”

“For having such ‘a woodpile stacked by the hut’ that you dream of her at night.”

Joachim blanched and his jaw muscles knit. Then he looked at the snow. “I do think on them, what they felt—might feel like in my hands. I am a miserable sinner.”

“So are we all. Which is why we merit love, and not condemnation. Which of us is worthy to throw the first stone? But let us at least not blame another for our own weakness.”

I
N THE
kitchen, Dietrich discovered Theresia huddled in a tight corner between the hearth and the outer wall. “Father!” she cried. “Send them away!”

“What ails you?” He reached to her, but she would not emerge from her corner.

“No, no, no!” she said. “Evil, wicked things! Father, they’ve come for us, they mean to take us down down down to Hell. How could you let them come? Oh, the flames! Mother! Father, make them go away!” Her eyes did not apprehend Dietrich, but looked on another vision.

This affliction he had not seen in many years.

“Theresia, these Krenken are the distressed pilgrims from the woods.”

She clutched at the sleeve of his gown. “Can you not see their hideousness? Have they enchanted your eyes?”

“They are poor beings of flesh and blood, as we are.”

The monk had come to the door of the kitchen outbuilding, a bundle of staw for the bedding balanced on his shoulder. He dropped it and rushed to the alcove where he went to his knee before Theresia.

“The Krenken terrify her,” Dietrich told him.

Joachim held his hands out. “Come, let us go down to your own cottage. There are none there to frighten you.”

“She ought not to be frightened of them,” Dietrich said.

But Joachim turned on him. “In the name of Christ, Dietrich! First, give comfort; then juggle your dialectic! Help me lift her out of there.”

“You are a handsome boy, brother Joachim,” Theresia said.
“He
was handsome, too. He came with the demons and the fire but he wept and he carried me away and saved me from them.” She had taken two more steps, supported by Joachim and Dietrich on either side, when she shrieked. Hans and the Kratzer had come to the kitchen door.

“I would observe this woman,” the Kratzer said through the talking head. “Why do some of your folk respond so?”

“She is not one of your beetles or leaves, to be studied and divided by genus and species,” Dietrich said. “Fright has awakened old memories in her.”

Joachim took Theresia under his arm, placing himself between the herb woman and the Krenken, and hurried her through the door. “Make them go away!” Theresia begged Joachim.

Hans clicked his horny lips and said, “You shall have your wish.”

He did not ask Dietrich to translate the remark for the girl, and the priest could not help but wonder if it had been an involuntary exclamation, not meant for overhearing.

T
HAT EVENING
, Dietrich tramped into the Lesser Wood and cut down pine branches, which he wove into an Advent wreath for the coming Sunday. When afterward he looked into the kitchen, he saw Joachim’s quilted, goose-down blanket laid over the shivering body of Johann von Sterne.

XII
JANUARY
, 1348
Before Matins, the Epiphany of the Lord

W
INTER FELL
like a shroud. The first snow had barely slumped under the pale sun when a second fell upon it, and path and pasture vanished alike into anonymity. The millstream and its pond froze clear to the bottom, and fish could be spied mid-wriggle in the wintry glass. Peasants in their cottages, employed in mending and repair, threw another log on the fire and rubbed their hands. The wider world
had been emptied out and a pall of gray woodsmoke hung over the silence.

The Krenken huddled miserably before their hosts’ firesides, seldom venturing out. The snow had halted all thought of repair to their ship. Instead, they talked about how they would someday repair it.

But after a time, even the talk ceased.

T
HE COMPLINES
of St. Saturnius brought a wind to buffet the parsonage’s shuttered windows. A low sussurus moaned through chinks in the planking. Hans had gone to the outbuilding to prepare special Krenkish foods for himself and the Kratzer. Joachim hunched over the refectory table where, under the Kratzer’s critical eye, he whittled Balthazar from a bough of black oak, to add to his crèche figurines.

The door flew open, and the alchemist burst into the room and hopped immediately to the fireside, where he opened Gregor’s fur coat and luxuriated in the flames. “In Germany,” Dietrich said as he went to close the door, “the custom stands that we knock on the doorpost and await permission to enter.” But the alchemist, whom they had named after Arnold of Villanova, made no answer. He clacked some announcement to the Kratzer, and the two fell into an animated discussion which the
Heinzelmännchen
did not translate.

Dietrich took up the stew pot that he had earlier hung to simmer over the fire and served Joachim. The Krenken were a rude and ill-mannered folk. Small wonder they quarreled so among themselves.

Hans returned from the outbuilding with two plates in his hands. At sight of the alchemist, he hesitated, then handed one to the alchemist and the other to the Kratzer. He sat himself across the table from Joachim.

“That was kindly done,” Joachim said, curling another shaving from Balthazar’s back.

Hans tossed his arm. “Were but one morsel left, it would be Arnold’s to swallow.”

Dietrich had noticed that even Gschert deferred to the alchemist, though Arnold was clearly an underling. “Why?” He spooned some soup into a wooden bowl and gave it to Hans, along with a stick of little-bread.

Instead of answering, Hans picked up the Christ-child that Joachim had previously carved. “Your brother tells me that this portrays your lord-from-the-sky; but the philosophy of the likelihood of events concludes that folk from different worlds must have different forms.”