Eifelheim (52 page)

Yes
, he thought. “I came only to see how matters go with you,” Dietrich said.

“It goes well,” she said, turning up her eyes to his face.

Dietrich waited for her to say more, but she did not; and so he took her by the shoulders and kissed her on the brow, as he had so often in her childhood. Unaccountably, she began to weep. “I wish they had never come!”

Dietrich said, “Gottfried-Lorenz has assured me that they will soon go home.”

“To one home or another,” Gregor said. “Two more died this past week. I think they die of homesickness.”

“No one dies of homesickness,” Dietrich said. “The cold killed some—the alchemist, the children, a few others—but summer is come.”

“It’s what Arnold once told me,” the mason insisted. “He said,
‘We will die because we are not at home.’
And again, he said,
‘Here, we eat our fill, but are not nourished.’”

“That is senseless,” said Dietrich.

The mason scowled, and glanced at Theresia, and then at the open doorway, through which the sounds of birds thrilled the morning air. “It puzzles me,” the big man admitted. “Your friend, the Kratzer, said once that he wished for half the hope that Arnold had. Yet, Arnold murdered himself, and the Kratzer did not.”

“Their talking head may not understand such words as ‘hope’ or ‘despair.’”

“What difference,” said Theresia, “whether they die or depart?”

Diertrich turned and took her hand in his, and she did not pull away. “All men die,” he told her. “What matters in God’s eye is how we have treated one another in life. ‘Love the Lord with your whole heart and your whole soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.’ This command binds us to one another and saves us from the snares of vengeance and brutality.”

“There is no shortage among Christians of vengeance and brutality,” Gregor observed.

“Men are men. ‘By their fruits you shall know them,’ not by what name they call themselves. Sudden grace may come upon even the most wicked of men. Ja, even the most wicked of men … I have—I have seen this myself.”

Theresia reached out and touched his cheek to brush away a tear. Gregor spoke: “You mean Gottfried-Lorenz. Grosswald called him choleric, and now he is the humblest of Krenken.”

“Ja,” said Dietrich, glancing toward him. “Ja. I meant like Gottfried-Lorenz.”

“But I think Grosswald intended no praise by calling him humble.”

Theresia was weeping also and Dietrich returned her favor. “No, he would not,” he answered. “By him are forbearance and forgiveness weakness and folly. A man with power uses it; one without, obeys. But I believe all men thirst for justice and mercy, whatever is written in the ‘atoms of their flesh.’ We have saved six of his folk—perhaps seven, for of the alchemist I am uncertain.”

“Justice
and
mercy,” said Gregor. “Both at once? Now, there stands a riddle.”

“Father,” said Theresia suddenly, “can one love and hate the same man?”

A bee had found its way into the cottage and hunted diligently among the herbs that Theresia grew in small clay pots on her windowsills. “I think,” Dietrich said at last, “that it may be not the same man, but rather two: the man he is now and the man he once was. If a sinner truly repents, he dies to sin and a new man is born. That is what it means to forgive, for it defies reason to blame one man for the deeds of another.”

He feared to press the matter further and left the cottage shortly after with Gregor. Outside, the mason rubbed his injured finger absently. “She is a sweet woman, if a simple one. And she may not be entirely wrong about the demons. It may be as Joachim says—the supreme test. But who is tested? Do we lead them to humility, or do they lead us to vengeance? Knowing men, I fear the second.”

A
T BREAKFAST
the next morning, the Kratzer opened a flask that he kept in his scrip. The contents proved a murky broth, which the Krenk stirred into his porridge. He screwed the cork back into place, but sat frozen with the flask in hand for some time before returning it to his scrip. The Kratzer pulled a spoonful of porridge to his lips, hesitated, then returned spoon and contents to the bowl and pushed it away. Dietrich and Joachim exchanged puzzled glances, and the Minorite rose from his seat and went to the pot to check the porridge.

“Does it fill, but not nourish?” Dietrich asked in jest, remembering what Gregor had said the day before.

The Kratzer responded with that stillness in which his folk seemed to turn to stone. Always unnerving to Dietrich, the gesture became suddenly clear. Certain animals responded to danger by likewise remaining still. “What is wrong?” Dietrich asked.

The Kratzer stirred his porridge. “I ought not speak of it.” Dietrich waited and Joachim watched with a puzzled frown. He ladled porridge into his own bowl but, although he had to reach past the Kratzer to do so, the Krenk did not move.

“I have heard some among you,” the Kratzer said at last, “speak of a famine that befell many years ago.”

“More than thirty years past,” Dietrich said. “I had been lately received into orders and Joachim was not even born. It rained mightily for two years and the crops drowned in the fields from Paris to the Polish marches. There had been small hungers before, but in those years there was no grain anywhere in Europe.”

The Kratzer rubbed his forearms together forcefully. “I was told that people ate grass,” he said, “to fill their bellies—but the grass did not sustain them.”

Dietrich stopped eating and stared at the Krenk.

“What?” Joachim asked, sitting down.

Dietrich sensed the sidelong glance of the creature, who remained otherwise entranced by some inner vision. “How much longer,” he asked the Kratzer, “will your particular stores last?”

“We have eked them out since the beginning, but drop-by-drop even the mightiest sea must one day empty. Some hold out great ‘hope,’ but their way is hard, perhaps too hard for some of us. It has pleased me,” he added, “that your ‘early time’ came before the end. I should have missed seeing your flowers bloom, and your trees come back to life.”

Dietrich looked on his guest with horror and pity. “Hans and Gottfried may yet repair—”

The Kratzer kratzled his forearms. “That cow comes not off the ice.”

P
RAYING A
horse from Everard, Dietrich sped to the Krenkish encampment, where he found Hans, Gottfried, and four others in the lower apartment of the strange vessel,
clustered around a “circuit” illustration, and making a great chitter of discussion. “Is it true,” Dietrich demanded bursting in, “that your folk will soon starve?”

The Krenken paused in their work and Hans and Gottfried, who wore head-harnesses, turned about to face the door.

“Someone has told you,” Hans said.

“‘Jaws have hinges,’” Gottfried commented.

“But is it
true?”
insisted Dietrich.

“It has truth,” Hans said. “There are certain … materials—acids is your alchemic word—which are essential for life. Perhaps four score of these acids befall in nature—and we Krenken need one-and-twenty of them to live. Our bodies produce naturally nine, so we must from our food and drink obtain the others. That food which you have shared with us holds eleven of those twelve. One is lacking, and our alchemist found it nowhere in all the foodstuffs he proofed. Without that particular acid, there is one … I must call it a ‘firstling,’ as it is the first building block of the body, though I suppose it should wear one of your Greekish terms.”

“Proteios,”
Dietrich croaked.
“Proteioi.”

“So. It puzzles me why you use different ‘tongues’ to speak of different matters. This Greekish for natural philosophy; the Latinish for matters touching your lord-from-the-sky.”

Dietrich seized the Krenk by his forearm. The rough spines that ran its length pricked his hand, drawing blood. “That makes nothing!” he cried. “What of this
protein?”

“Without this acid, the
protein
cannot be formed, and lacking it, our bodies slowly corrupt.”

“Then we must find it!”

“How, my friend? How? Arnold spent sleepless nights searching for it. If it eluded his keen eye, how may we discover it? Our physician is skilled, but not in the arts of the laboratory.”

“So, you chewed upon the roses near Stag’s Leap? You robbed the monastery at St. Blasien?”

A toss of the arm. “As if one could know by tasting! Yes, some of our folk try this or that. But the best source of the
protein
lies at our journey’s end. The missing acid lies within our own particular food, which we eke out to supplement that which your people have provided.” Hans turned away. “Our ship will sail before the hunger grows acute.”

“What is in the broth that the Kratzer will not eat?”

Hans did not turn around, but his voice whispered in Dietrich’s ear as if he stood by his side. “There is one other meat that has this
protein
, and the supply of it is not yet exhausted.”

Dietrich did not understand for a long moment. Then Gottfried said, “This is my body, to be given up for us. Your words have given us hope,” and the full horror of the stranger’s situation fell upon him, nearly crushing him with its weight.

“You must not!”

Hans turned once more to face Dietrich. “Would you have
all
die, when
some
might live?”

“But—”

“You have taught that it is good to offer one’s body for the salvation of others. We have a sentence. ‘The strong devour the weak.’ It is a sign, a
metaphor
, but in times of great hunger in our past, it has befallen in fact. But you have saved us. It is the
offer
and not the eating that saves, and the strong too may offer themselves to save the weak among us.”

D
IETRICH RETURNED
to Oberhochwald numbed. Could he have mistaken the Krenken? It was not beyond reason. The
Heinzelmännchen
did not understand the significances of words and associated the signs only from usage.
Evidentia naturalis
, he thought.

Yet clearly the Kratzer was distressed by the thought. So much so that he would not even taste the broth. Dietrich shuddered anew at the memory. Of whom had that broth been distilled? Arnold? The children?
Had any of
them been hurried to their deaths to prepare the broth?
That thought was most horrid of all. Would the Krenkish
instinctus
move them willingly to the stewpot?

Arnold had given his own life. “This is my body,” he had promised the other Krenken in his death-note. A terrible parody, Dietrich now realized. Having failed in his search for the elusive acid, he had despaired and quit the struggle. And yet he had retained, like the legendary casket of Pandora, one last tenuous hope—that Hans and Gottfried might repair the ship and sail the Krenken back to their heavenly home. Anything that extended the needed foodstuffs would add that many days to the effort. Unwilling himself to follow the path he saw necessary, the alchemist had taken the only path he could, for the sake of others.

And so he had died a Christian after all.

T
HE RIDER
wore the livery of the Strassburg Bishop and Dietrich watched his approach from a crag overlooking the Oberreid road. Hans, who had warned him of it, perched beside him, clinging somehow to the very rock so that, although he leaned far beyond the precipice, he did not fall as a man might. A different center of gravity, he had explained once to Dietrich, showing him a trick with straws, a pfennig, and a cup. “Does he bring your arrest?” the Krenkl asked. “We would fight to keep you from their hands.”

“‘Put away your sword,’” Dietrich quoted self-consciously. “Your attack would hardly allay what fears they nurse.” Hans laughed then clacked into his farspeaker a warning to the others.

He watched the herald turn his mount up the track toward St. Catherine.

Looking about, Dietrich realized that Hans had departed without a sound, a Krenkish ability eerily akin to ghostly vanishing.
I must keep the herald from the parsonage
, he realized, for the weakening Kratzer lay within. He
gathered his skirts and hurried to the head of the path just as the herald reached its top, bringing the man to an abrupt halt. “Peace be with you, herald,” Dietrich said. “What mission brings you here?”

The man searched from side to side, glancing even above his head, and clutched his cloak more tightly about him, though the day was warm. “I carry a message from His Excellency, Berthold II, by grace of God bishop of Strassburg.”

“Indeed, I spy his badge on your cloak.” If they had come for him, why had they sent only this one man? Yet, if the message were an order to return to Strassburg with the messenger, he would do so meekly. In the distant fields, some of the peasants had paused at the furrow to stare toward the church. At the hill’s base, the arrhythmic clang-clang of Wanda Schmidt’s hammer had ceased while she watched events transpire above her.

The herald pulled forth a parchment, folded and tied with a ribbon and sealed with wax. This he tossed to the ground at Dietrich’s feet. “Read this at Mass,” the man said, and then, with marked hesitation, “I have more parishes to visit, and should like a pot of ale before I leave.”

That he had no intention of dismounting had become clear. His rouncy was haggard and nearly blown. How many parishes had he already visited, how many more yet to go? Dietrich saw now other packets in the herald’s pouch. “You may pray a horse from the Herr’s stables,” he said with a gesture across the valley.

The messenger said nothing, but regarded Dietrich with wariness. The parsonage door banged open and a bird took sudden flight from the eave, and the herald started with a terrible fear distorting his face.

But it was only Joachim bearing the requested ale. He must have been listening from the window. The bishop’s man regarded the Minorite with suspicion. “No surprise finding one of
them
in this place,” he sneered.

“I could dip a sponge in the pot and offer you the ale on
a hyssop reed,” said Joachim, who had not the reach to hand the mounted man his cup.

The herald bent and snatched the cup from the Franciscan’s hands, quaffed his fill, and tossed it to the dirt. Joachim knelt to retrieve it. “I have offended my lord,” he said, “by offering him not a golden cup studded with emeralds and rubies.”