Eifelheim (55 page)

Manfred spared him a curious glance. “Imre reasoned that if a man as educated as a guild-merchant deemed it wise to flee east, he would be a great fool himself to continue west. The servant with the pack horse quickly outdistanced Imre’s mules, yet Imre came upon his load shortly after, scattered along the trail up the gorge. He supposed that the roughness of the trail had caused the pack to come loose again and, lacking his master’s voice in his ear, the servant had this time abandoned all and fled. Imre thought the clothing too fine to lie deserted so he gathered them into his own pack.”

Klaus said, “I misdoubt he helped tie the man’s bundle with that very end in view.” He spoke too quickly and too sharply and rubbed one hand with the other as he looked at each councilor in turn.

“A little farther on,” Manfred continued grimly, “he came upon the body of the merchant’s lady, lying as she had fallen from her horse. Her face was deep blue and distended in agony, and she had vomited black bile over herself. Beside which, her neck was broken in the fall.”

Klaus had no quip his time. Everard had gone pale. Young Eugen caught his lip between his teeth. Baron Grosswald did not move. Dietrich crossed himself and prayed God’s mercy for the unknown woman. “And her husband stopped not to aid her?” he asked.

“Nor the servant. Imre says that in pity he placed over her form a blanket from the abandoned bundle, daring naught else. But,” and Manfred slumped a little in his high
seat, “I have not said all. The peddler confessed that he had come west in flight. The pest was in Vienna already in May and in Munich this month, but he kept silence for fear we would expel him.”

At that, there were many exclamations. Everard cursed the peddler. Klaus exclaimed that Munich was, after all, many leagues distant, and the malady might travel north into Saxony, rather than west into Swabia. Eugen worried that the pest was surrounding them, east and west. Dietrich wondered about the Jews, who had set off in that direction with the Duke’s escort.

Baron Grosswald, silent until now, spoke up. “Illness stems from countless creatures, too small for thought and borne in divers ways—by touch, on the breath, in the shit or piss, in the spit, or even on the breeze. It matters not which way the roads wind.”

“Such foolishness!” Eugen cried.

“Not so,” said Dietrich, who had heard already this thesis from Hans, as well as from the Krenkish physician. “Marcus Varro once proposed that very thing in
De re rustica.…”

“Which is very interesting, pastor,” said Klaus in a high, tight voice, “but this pest is not like other afflictions, and so may not spread like those of the monsters.” To Gschert: “Can you swear that what you say of
your
small-lives is true of
us?
I’ve heard your folk remark more than once on our differences.”

Gschert tossed his arm. “‘What may be, may be; but what is, must be.’ I have other concerns than this
mal odour
of yours. You may live or you may die, however you may deny it, as the luck of the small-lives have it. As for us, we may only die.” The affectless tones of the talking head endowed his pronouncement with a fatal chill. Dietrich wanted to tell the monster that his reasoning had failed, had asserted the consequent. What
must be
is; but what
is
need not be, but can through the grace of God be changed.

But Manfred struck the table with the pommel of his
dagger. Dietrich marked how white the knuckles were that held it. “Could your physician not mix for us a medicine?” the Herr asked. “If the pest is natural, then the treatment must be natural, and we have no theriac in the village.”

But Gschert shook his head in the human fashion. “No. Our bodies—and yours, I must suppose—have naturally many small lives within, with whom we live in balance. An ‘anti-life’ compound must take careful aim so that only the invader is slain. Your bodies are too strange to us; and we would not know friend from foe among your small-lives, even did our physician know the art. Subtle skills are called for in fashioning a compound to hunt and destroy an invading small-life. To create a new one from whole cloth, and for creatures whose bodies she does not know, is beyond her.”

Silence fell, and Manfred sat still for a time while the others watched. Then he pressed both palms to the table and pushed himself to his feet, and all eyes but Gschert’s turned to him.

“This is what we shall do,” Manfred announced. “Everyone knows it is death to have contact with the sick. So. We must cut ourselves off and have nothing to do with the outside. No one may use the road through the village. Any who come hither from Freiburg or elsewhere must pass around, through the fields. Anyone trying to enter the village will be turned away—by force of arms, if need be.”

Dietrich took a slow breath and studied his hands. Then he looked up to Manfred. “We are commanded to show charity to the sick.” A low sigh ran around the table. Some cast eyes down with shame; others glared at him.

Manfred rapped the table with his knuckles. “This is not uncharity,” he declared, “since we can do nothing to help them.
Nothing!
All we can do is allow the pest among us.”

That drew loud exclamations of assent from all save Dietrich and Eugen.

“There are rumors,” Manfred added, “that we harbor demons. Very well. Let it be known. Let the Krenken fly about at will. Let them be seen in St. Blasien and St. Peter;
in Freiburg and Oberreid. If folk are too frightened to come here, we may yet keep this … this Death at bay.”

T
HAT EVENING
, Dietrich organized a penitential procession for the morn to pray the intercession of the Holy Virgin and St. Catherine of Alexandria. The procession would be barefoot and in rags and the penitents would wear blessed ashes on their brows. Zimmerman would take the great cross down from above the altar and Klaus would carry it on his back. “A bit late for that, priest!” Everard complained when he was told of it. “You were sent to tell us God’s will! Why’d you not warn us of His anger years ago?”

“It is the end of the world,” Joachim said quietly, and perhaps even with satisfaction. “The end of the Middle Age. But the New Age arrives! Peter departs; John comes! Who will be worthy to live through these times?” Yet, the monk’s eschatology perhaps meant no more than Everard’s complaints, or Klaus’s jokes, or Manfred’s severity.

After making the arrangements, Dietrich knelt in prayer in his room.
Be mindful, O Lord, of thy covenant
, he prayed,
and say to the destroying angel: Now hold thy hand, and let not the land be made desolate, and destroy not every living soul
. When he raised his eyes, he saw Lorenz’s strange iron crucifix and bethought himself of the smith. A strange and gentle man in whom God had blended both strength and mildness; a man who had died trying to save a monstrous stranger from an unseeable peril. What had God intended by that? And what had God intended by moving a violent and wrathful Krenk to take Lorenz’s name—and as much of his mildness as the Krenkish nature could assume?

Rising from the prie-dieu, he saw Hans squatting knees-above-head behind him. Donning the Head-harness, he admonished his guest. “You must make some sound when you enter, friend grasshopper, or you shall kill me from surprise.”

A faint parting of the soft lips indicated a wan smile.
“Among us, noise is evidence of clumsiness. In the atoms of our flesh, it is written that we make no sound, and the most silent are the most admired, and esteemed the most attractive. When our forefathers were animals, lacking thought and speech, we were prey to terrible flying things. And so, when we were pagans, we worshipped swooping, fearsome gods. Death was a release from fear—and our only prize.”

“‘Do not be afraid.’ Our Lord said that more often than he said anything else.”

Hans clacked his side-lips. “Do you have the sentence in your head that tomorrow’s procession will halt this pest of yours, that it will bar the small-lives from the High Woods?”

“If it is as you say, no. No more than prayer can stay a charging horse. But that is not why we pray. God is no such cheap juggler as to play for a pfennig.”

“Why, then?”

“Because it will focus our minds on last things. All men die, as all Krenken die. But how we approach that death matters, for we will receive another life according to our merits.”

“When your folk submit, you kneel before your Herr. Among us, we squat as you see.”

Dietrich accepted this, and after a moment he asked, “For what purpose have you prayed?”

“For thanks. If I must die, at least I have lived. If my companions have perished, at least I have known them. If the world is cruel, at least I have tasted kindness. I had to cross to the far side of the sky to taste it but, as you say, the world is full of miracles.”

“There is no hope, then, for your folk?”

“‘One thing alone removes all chance of death; and that thing is death.’ But hear me, Dietrich, and I will tell you a sentence that my folk have learned.
The body may be strengthened by an exercise of the spirit
. Do you understand me? One man may welcome death, and so find it. Another man may will himself to live, and in that will may lie the
difference in their fates. So, if these prayers and processions muster your
energia
, you may better resist the entry of the small-lives into your bodies. As for me, I have an answer to my own prayer.”

“And what is that?”

But Hans refused to say. He hopped to the bedside of the dying Kratzer and affixed to the wall before his eyes a brightly colored reproduction of the meadow-scene that Dietrich had first noted on the strange “view-slate” on the Kratzer’s desk. Hans then squatted by the bedside for a time in silence. Then he said, “For every Krenk, the sentence is that he would see his birth-nest once more. What you call his ‘heimat.’ However he fares through the world-inside-the-world, whatever wonders he finds in distant places, there gives always that place for him.”

Hans unfolded to his feet. “Our ship will sail,” he said. “In another week, perhaps two. No more.” Then without another word he left the parsonage.

D
URING THE
week that followed the procession, a curious humor came over the folk of Oberhochwald. There gave much merriment and spontaneous laughter, and they told one another that Munich and Freiburg were far off and what happened there did not affect the High Woods. Folk left their harrows to sport in the field. Volkmar Bauer gave Nickel Langermann a meat pie and his wife cared for little Peter, who had fallen ill with the murrain. Jakob Becker walked through the village and left a loaf of bread at each cottage and two at each hut and afterward visited the grave in which his son had been laid.

Gregor and his sons brought Theresia Gresch to Mass on the Fifth Sunday in Pentecost. This Mass was better attended than most, and afterward Gregor said that if people were frightened more often, the village would be a friendlier place, and he laughed as if at a great and terrible joke.

Dietrich gave thanks for the newfound concord but when, after that week, nothing had happened, the village slowly returned to normal. The free tenants once more spurned the
gärtners and serfs; the horseplay in the fields ceased. Dietrich wondered if the penitential procession had, as Hans had suggested, strengthened their spirits to resist the bad air; but Joachim only laughed.

“How heartfelt is a penance that fades so soon?” He shook his head. “No, true contrition is longer, broader, deeper than that, for this sin was so long with us.”

“But the pest is not a punishment,” Dietrich insisted.

Joachim turned his eyes away.
“Do not say that,”
he whispered fiercely in the soft confines of the wooden church—and the statues seemed to whisper back in creaks and moans. “If it is not punishment, it is nothing; and it is too terrible a thing to be nothing.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, quietly, the Kratzer died.

Joachim wept, for the philosopher had never accepted Christ and had died outside the arms of the Church. Hans said only, “Now, he knows.”

Dietrich, to comfort the servant of the talking head, said that God could save whom He would, and there was a limb of Heaven reserved for the virtuous pagans, a place of natural happiness.

“Do I experience that which you call ‘grief’?” the Krenk wondered. “We do not
weep
as you do; so perhaps we do not
feel
as you do. But there is a sentence in my head that I will see the Kratzer no more, that never more will he give me instruction, never more strike me for my faults. Since a long time, I have not paid
homage
to him—I use your term—and since that time, I have looked on him differently. Not as a servant looks on a master, but as one servant looks on another, for are we not both servants of a greater Lord? The sentence in my head is that this pleased him in some way, for even now I cannot bear that I have disappointed him.”

He turned to the window, where he stared down Church Hill to the village and beyond that to the Great Woods. “He would not drink, and I did. The strength he refused was mine to repair the ship. Which of us was right?”

“I do not know, my friend,” said Dietrich.

“Gschert drank,
and did nothing.”

Dietrich did not answer him. The Krenk’s lips worked slowly.

After a time, the physician came with two other Krenken and they carried off the mortal remains of the Kratzer to their vessel, there to prepare him for the nourishment of others.

F
RIDAY, ON
the commemoration of the Seven Holy Brothers, the Krenken departed the High Woods. Manfred bade them a ceremonial farewell in his manor hall, inviting their leaders and those who had hosted them. To Shepherd he gave a necklace of pearls, while to Baron Grosswald he gave a coronet of silver to signify his rank. Perhaps for the only time, Dietrich thought the Krenken leader affected. He set the laurel upon his head with great care and, though Shepherd split her lips in the Krenkish smile, the knights and armsmen present gave forth a loud “Hoch!” that startled the Krenken.

Manfred summoned Dietrich, Hilde, and Max. “I had not the heart to forbid it,” he said. “Their ship’s rudder has been fully repaired, and they have no cause anymore to linger.” He paused. “If they stay, all will follow poor Kratzer to the tomb. As you three were the first to welcome them, I am sending you with them to bless their craft. I hope for their speedy return now that they know which winds carry them here. The Baron Grosswald has promised to return with skilled physicians and apothecaries, who may aid us against the pest.”