Eifelheim (62 page)

“Mother of God!” The steward clawed at himself, raking his skin with his nails, and shrieking. Then, abrubtly, he lay back quietly, panting and gasping, as if he had repelled an assault from the ramparts and was resting now for the next attack.

Dietrich had washed the knife already in sour wine, and Ulf suggested heating it in the fire as well. The hearth smoldered in sullen red embers. No firewood stood ready.
She has fled
, Dietrich thought.
Yrmegard has abandoned her husband
. He wondered if Everard knew.

The boils were as large as apples, the skin stretched tight and shining around them. He chose the one under the right arm and touched it with the point of his scalpel.

Everard howled and thrashed, striking Dietrich with his fist and knocking the scalpel from his hand. Dietrich knelt, seeing double from the blow, then groped among the rushes for the fallen blade. When he rose, Everard lay on his side, hugging his arms tight against himself and with his knees drawn up. Dietrich walked to the stool beside the bed and sat for a moment, rubbing his temple and thinking. Then he called Hans by the farspeaker.

“There is a basket in my shed, marked with the cross of the Hospitallers,” he told his friend. “Bring to the steward’s cottage one of the sponges you will find in it—but handle it with care. It has been steeped in mandrake and other poisons.”

Hans arrived soon, and stood with the other Krenken to watch. Dietrich moistened the sponge in the water barrel behind the cottage and returned, holding it at arm’s length. Then, as the Savoyard had instructed, he held it firmly against Everard’s nose and mouth while the steward clawed at his hands. Long enough for sleep, the Savoyard had said, but not so long as for death. Everard went suddenly limp, and Dietrich tossed the sponge into the fire. Too long? No, the man’s chest rose and fell. Dietrich crossed himself. “Blessed Jesus, guide my hand.”

The blade’s touch did not awaken the steward, but he groaned and struggled a little. Hans and Ulf held his limbs steady. The boil was tough and Dietrich pressed harder with the point.

Suddenly, it split, and a vile, suppurating black filth oozed forth, bearing with it the most abominable stench. Dietrich clenched his teeth and applied himself to the remaining boils.

When he was done, Heloïse handed him a rag that she had meanwhile boiled and soaked in vinegar. With this, Dietrich mopped up the slime and cleaned the man’s body as best he could. “I would not touch the pus,” Ulf advised, and Dietrich, who had had no such intention, ran outside and bent double, vomiting out that morning’s breakfast and gulping in great gasps of mountain air. Hans, following, touched him briefly several times. “It was bad?”

Dietrich gasped. “Very bad.”

“My …” Hans touched his antennae briefly. “I must wash them.” Then he said, “The steward will not live.”

Dietrich blew his breath out. “We must ever hope, but … I think you are right. His wife has taken their boy and run off. He has none to care for him.”

“Then we will do it.”

They placed Everard on an ambulance that Zimmerman had fashioned, and Ulf and Heloïse took up the handles before and after. Dietrich walked alongside and held the litter steady as they negotiated the hill. He remembered
how St. Ephraem the Syrian had fashioned three hundred ambulances during a famine in Mesopotamia.
We will need more
, he told himself.

Hans stayed to burn all the rags and clothing, and kill whatever small-lives they harbored. Ulf called to him. “Save a portion of the pus for my inspection.”

“Why did you ask that?” Dietrich said as they proceeded down the hill.

“I labored with the instruments in our craft’s lazaret,” Ulf told him. “We have a device, which Gschert left with us, that enables us to see the small-lives.”

Dietrich nodded, though he did not understand. Then he asked, suddenly, “Why do you help us with the sick, if you have no faith in
charitas
?”

The pagan Krenk tossed his arm. “The Hans is now the Krenkish Herr, so I follow him. Besides it employs my days.”

Which was, withal, a Krenkish sort of answer.

W
ANDA SCHMIDT
died the next day, on the Commemoration of St. Maternus of Milan. She kicked and writhed and bit her own tongue in twain. Black blood welled up from within her and spilled forth from her mouth. She heard not the words of comfort that Gottfried Krenk spoke to her; perhaps she did not even feel the gentle pokes which stood among his kind for caresses.

Afterward, Gottfried accosted Dietrich. “The Herr-from-the-sky would not save the woman of the blessed Lorenz. Wherefore did we pray His aid?”

Dietrich shook his head. “All men die when God calls them back to Himself.”

And Gottfried answered, “Could he not have called her more softly?”

K
LAUS AND
Odo brought Hilde to the hospital on an ambulance that they carried between them. When they had lain her on a pallet in the smithy, near the fire that Dietrich
had built in the furnace, Klaus bid Odo return to the house, and the old man nodded distractedly, and said, “Tell Hilde to hurry back and cook my dinner.”

Klaus watched him go. “He sits on the stool before the fireplace, and stares into dry ashes. When I enter the room, he turns his eyes toward me for only a moment before he is drawn back to the fascination of cinders. I think he is already dead—in here.” He beat his breast. “All else is mere ceremony.” He knelt to stroke Hilde’s hair. “The beasts are dying, too,” he said. “Along the roadside I saw dead rats, several cats, and Herwyg’s old hound. One-eye will miss that dog.”

Dear God
, Dietrich prayed,
will you scour the earth of all living things?
“What is this?” he asked, fingering the sleeve of Klaus’s jerkin. “It looks like blood. Has she vomited blood?”

Klaus dropped his eyes to the stains and stared at them as if he had never seen them before. “No,” he said. He touched one of the spots with his fingertip, but it came away with no color, so the blood there was already dried. “No. I … I followed …”

But whatever the miller had been about to say was lost to his hesitation, for Hilde rose from her sickbed and stood suddenly upright. At first, Dietrich thought it a miracle; but the woman began to turn and spin and sing la-la-la, flailing her arms. Klaus clutched at her, but her arm struck him a mighty blow to the cheek that nearly felled him.

Dietrich went to the pallet’s other side and tried to grab one arm while Klaus grabbed the other. He took hold of her wrist and used his own weight to bear her down. Klaus did the same. Hilde continued to twist side to side, singing wordlessly. Then, abruptly, she ceased and lay still. Klaus’s head snapped up. “Has she …?”

“No. No, she breathes.”

“What does it mean? The dancing.”

Dietrich shook his head. “I know not …” Her pustules were grown large, but there were yet no streaks of poison on her arms. “May I see her legs?” Wordlessly, Klaus
lifted Hilde’s skirt, and Dietrich studied her groin and thighs and was relieved to see no streaks there, either. “Gottfried,” he called, “bring the old wine.”

Klaus dipped his head. “Ja, ja, I need also a drink. Will she rest now?”

“It’s not to drink. I must wash my lance.”

Klaus laughed suddenly, then reverted to morose silence.

Gottfried brought a pot of vinegar and Dietrich washed the blade in it. Then he held it in the smithy fire until the handle became hot. He would not chance the soporific sponge this time. Those he must save for ones like Everard, where the chance of life and the risk of death were more closely balanced.

“Hold the bowl,” Dietrich said to Gottfried, handing him a clay basin. “When I lance the pustule,” he added to Klaus, “the pus must drain into the bowl. Ulf said that we must not let our flesh contact it, but the Krenkl do not believe it affects them.”

“There is but one way to discover that,” said Gottfried.

“He is a wise demon, then.” Klaus studied the Krenkl. “She took care of
them;
now
they
take care of her. I understand the one act no better than the other.” He stared at the knife.

“Fear not,” Dietrich said. “De Chauliac told Manfred that this course was often effective, if not delayed too long.”

“Cut then! I could not bear it should she—”

Dietrich had honed the lance to razor-keenness. He brought it through the pustule with a clean stroke. Hilde gasped and arched her back, though she did not scream as Everard had. Dietrich had firm hold of her arm and the putrescence spilled into Gottfried’s bowl. He looked to see if it contained blood and was relieved to see that it did not.

Though less vile than Everard’s eruptions, the pus stank badly enough. Klaus gulped and retained his stomach by sheer will, though he did recoil.

Soon, the grim effort was over. Dietrich poured more of
the vinegar over the wounds. He was uncertain why this might be efficacious, but medical doctors had taught so since the great age of Aquinas. Vinegar burned, so perhaps the element of fire burned out the small-lives.

A
FTERWARD, DIETRICH
walked with Klaus to Walpurga Honig’s cottage, where they sat on the bench before it. Klaus rapped his knuckles on the window shutter and, a moment later, the ale-wife opened it and shoved a pot of ale into his hands. She glanced at Dietrich, reappeared with a second pot, then slammed and bolted the shutter. The sudden noise startled little Atiulf Kohlmann, sitting in the dirt across the street, and he cried out for his mommy.

“Everyone is afraid,” Klaus said, with a gesture of the pot. He took a sip, closed his eyes, and began to weep, the pot dropping from nerveless fingers and spilling his ale in the dirt. “I don’t understand,” he said after a time. “Has she wanted for anything? Her mere word was its purchase. Brocades, girdles, wimples. Silken small-clothes one time in the Freiburg—Italian work, and did that not cost me? ‘French paint’ for her face. I put food on her table, a roof over her head—and not a hut like her father’s. No, a
wooden
building with a
stone
fireplace and a chimney to heat the bed-loft. I gave her two fine children and, while God saw fit to call the boy back too young, I saw our ‘Phye fairly wed to a Freiburg merchant. Only God knows how Freiburg fares this day.” He studied his hands and wrung one with the other. He looked east, toward the lowlands.

“Yet she seeks other men,” he said. “Everyone knows it, but I must pretend otherwise—and take my little revenges when I weigh out the meal. I jested when I lifted her skirt for you. But I think now you really were the last man in Oberhochwald to see that sight; though I did not think so at one time. I thought you went into the woods to be with her, pastor. Priest though you are, you’re a man. So I followed one day. That was when I saw the monsters for the first
time. Yet
they
were not so terrible a sight as my Hilde, splayed upon a bed of forest leaves while that crude sergeant entered her.”

Dietrich remembered one of the miller’s horses tethered in the clearing and thinking then that it was Hilde’s. “Klaus—” he said, but the miller continued with no indication of having heard.

“I’m an agile man in the marriage bed. Not so agile as in my spring, but I’ve had no complaint from others. Oh, yes, I’ve swyved other women. What choice had I?
Your
choice? No, I burn like your Paul. I don’t know why she turns from me. Do other men speak sweeter words? Are their lips more agreeable?”

And now the miller raised his eyes to look at Dietrich squarely. “You could tell her. You could make it a commandment. But … I don’t want her submission. I want her love, and I can’t have that, and I don’t know why.

“I saw her first in her father’s swineyard, feeding the pigs. Her feet were bare in the muck, but I saw the princess in the mire. I was apprenticed to old Heinrich—Altenbach’s father, that was—who held the Herr’s mill before me, so my prospects were good. My Beatrix had died in that terrible winter of 1315, and all our children with her, so my seed would die with me, unless I wed again. I proposed a marriage to her father and paid
merchet
and the Herr consented. No woman here ever had so fine a wedding-feast, save only the Herr’s own Kunigund! I learned that night that she was no virgin, but what woman is by that age? It did not bother me then. Perhaps it should have.”

Dietrich laid a hand on Klaus’s shoulder. “What will you do now?”

“He was not gentle with her, that pig sergeant. For him, just another
‘loch.’”

“Wanda Schmidt has died.”

Klaus nodded slowly. “That sorrows me. We were good friends. We shared the same lack, but filled it with each other. I know it was a sin, but …”

“A small sin,” Dietrich assured him. “There was no evil, I think, in either of you.”

Klaus laughed. His thickset body shook like an earthquake in a barrel, and tears started in the corners of his eyes. “How often,” he said when the laughter had settled into melancholy, “in your dry, scholastic sermons, have I heard you say that an ‘evil’ is the lack of a ‘good’? So, tell me, priest,” and the eyes he turned on Dietrich overflowed with emptiness, “what man had ever lacked as much as I have?”

They sat in silence. Dietrich handed the miller the pot of ale he held and the miller drank from it. “My sins,” he said. “My sins.”

“Everard is dead also,” Dietrich told him, and Klaus nodded. “And Franzl Long-nose from the castle. They put his body outside the walls this morning.” He looked toward the towers behind the battlements. “How fares Manfred?”

“I don’t know.”

Klaus set both pots on the sill for Wanda to take back. “I wonder if we ever will.”

“And the Unterbaums are gone,” Dietrich said. “Konrad, his wife, their two surviving children …”

“Toward Bear Valley, I hope,” said Klaus. “Only a fool would hie for the Breisgau with the pest in Freiburg. Where is Atiulf ‘s mother?”

They stood and crossed to the boy crying in the dirt. “What is it, my small?” Dietrich asked, kneeling beside the lad.

“Mami!” Atiulf howled. “Want mami!” He ran out of breath and sucked in for a great bellow that ended in a paroxysm of phegmy coughing.