Eifelheim (66 page)

“You send me away!”

“Because you are clean. Because you have a chance yet to live.”

“But, you, also …”

Dietrich silenced him with a gesture. “It is my penance … for sins committed in my youth. I have nearly fifty years. How few I have to lose! You have not yet twenty-five, and many years more remain in service to God.”

“So,” the young man said bitterly. “You would deny me even the martyr’s crown.”

“I would give you the shepherd’s staff!” Dietrich snapped. “Those folk will be filled with despair, with denial of God. Had I given you the easy task, I would keep you here!”

“But I, too, wish the glory!”

“What glory in changing bandages, in lancing pustules, in wiping up the shit and the vomit and the pus?
Herr Jesu Christus!
We are commanded all these things, but they are not
glorious
.”

Joachim had edged away from his diatribe. “No. No, you are wrong, Dietrich. It is the most glorious work of all, more glorious than plumed knights spitting men on their lances and bragging on their deeds.”

Dietrich remembered a song the knights used to sing in the aftermath of the Armleder.
Peasants live like pigs/And have no sense for manners …
“No,” he agreed, “the deeds of knights are not always so glorious, either.” They had returned hate for hate, and abandoned all sense of that
chivalry for which they had once been renowned—if that renown had ever been more than lies on the lips of minnesingers. Dietrich glanced toward Castle Hill. He had asked once of Joachim where he had been when the Armleder passed through. He had never asked Manfred.

“We have been found wanting,” Joachim said. “The demons were our test, our triumph! Instead, most escaped unchristened. Our failure has brought God’s punishment upon us.”

“The pest is everywhere,” Dietrich snapped, “in places that have never seen a Krenk.”

“Each to his own sin,” Joachim said. “To some, wealth. To others, usury. To others still, cruelty or rapaciousness. The pest strikes everywhere because sin is everywhere.”

“And so God slays all, giving men no chance to repent? What of the Christ-taught love?”

Joachim’s eyes turned dull and sullen. “The Father does this; not the Son. He of the Old Dispensation,
whose gaze is fire, whose hand is a thunderbolt and whose breath is the storm wind!”
Then, more quietly, “He is like any father angry with his children.”

Dietrich said nothing and Joachim sat for a while longer. After a moment, the monk said, “I have never thanked you for taking me in.”

“Monastic quarrels can be brutal.”

“You were a monk once. Brother William called you ‘Brother Angelus.’”

“I knew him at Paris. It was a sly gibe of his.”

“He is one of us, a Spiritual. Were you?”

“Will cared naught for the Spirituals until the tribunal condemned his propositions. Michael and the others fled Avignon at the same time, and he threw in with them.”

“They would have burned him.”

“No, they would have made him rephrase his propositions. To Will, that was worse.” Dietrich found a small smile in the jest. “One may say anything, if only it is framed as a hypothesis,
secundum imaginationem
. But Will
holds his hypotheses as matters of fact. He argued Ludwig’s case against the Pope, but to Ludwig he was a tool.”

“Small wonder we are smitten.”

“Many a good truth has been upheld by wicked men for their own purposes. And good men have caused much wickedness in their zealotry.”

“The Armleder.”

Dietrich hesitated. “That was one such case. There were good men among them.” He fell silent, thinking of the fishwife and her boy in the Freiburg market.

“There was a leader among the Armleder,” Joachim said slowly, “called ‘Angelus.’”

Dietrich was a long time silent. “That man is dead now,” he said at last. “But through him I learned a terrible truth: that heresy
is
truth,
in extremis
. The proper object of the eye is light, but too much light blinds the eyes.”

“So, you would compromise with the wicked, as the Conventuals do?”

“Jesus said the weeds would grow with the wheat until the Judgement,” Dietrich answered, “so one finds both good men and bad in the Church. By our fruits we will be known, not by what name we have called ourselves. I have come to believe that there is more grace in becoming wheat than there is in pulling up weeds.”

“So might a weed say, had it speech,” said Joachim. “You split hairs.”

“Better to split hairs than the heads beneath them.”

Joachim rose from his rock. He skipped a stone across the millpond. “I will do as you ask.”

T
HE NEXT
day, four-score villagers gathered on the green under the linden, prepared to leave. They had tied their belongings into bundles, which they carried on their backs or in a sack on the end of a pole slung across their shoulder. Some had the stunned look of a calf at slaughter and stood unmoving in the press with their eyes cast down. Wives without husbands; husbands without wives. Parents without
children; children without parents. Folk who had watched their neighbors shrivel and blacken into stinking corruption. A few had already started out alone on the road. Melchior Metzger went to Nickel Langermann, who lay on a pallet in the hospital, and embraced him one last time before Gottfried shooed him away. Langermann was too far in delerium to recognize the caress.

Gerlach Jaeger stood to the side and watched the assembly with no small displeasure. He was a short, thickset man with a wiry black beard and many years of the forest in his face. His clothing was rough and he carried several knives in his belt. His walking staff was a thick oak limb, trimmed and whittled to his pleasure. He stood now with both hands cupped over the top of it and his chin resting on his hands. Dietrich spoke to him.

“Will they fare well, do you guess?”

Jaeger hawked and spat. “No. But I’ll do what I can. I’ll train ’em up in makin’ snares and traps, and there’s one or two might know which way the bolt sits in the crossbow’s groove. I see Holzhacker has his bow. And his axe. That’s good. We’ll need axes. Ach! We
don’t
need a casket full of
klimbim!
Jutte Feldmann, what are ye thinkin’! We’re goin’ in the Lesser Wood and up the Feldberg. Who d’ye think’ll carry that thing? Herr God in Heaven, pastor, I don’t know what people have in their heads.”

“They have grief and tragedy in their heads, hunter.”

Jaeger grunted and said nothing for a time. Then he raised his head and took his staff in hand. “I guess I count myself lucky. I’ve no woman or kin to lose. That’s luck, I s’pose. But the forest and the mountain, they won’t care about grief, and you don’t want to hie into th’ wilderness with half a mind. What I meant is that they don’t need to take everything with ’em. When the pest has gone, we’ll come back and it will all be here waiting.”

“I’ll not be coming back,” Volkmar Bauer snarled. “This place is accursed.” And he spat for good measure. He was pale and unsteady yet, but stood among those leaving.

Others took up Volkmar’s cry and some threw clods of dirt at Gottfried, who had come also to watch them go. “Demons!” some cried. “You brought this on us!” And the crowd growled and surged. Gottfried snapped his horny side-lips like a pair of scissors. Dietrich feared his choleric nature coming to the fore. Even in his weakened condition, Gottfried might slay a dozen attackers with his serrated forearms before sheer weight of numbers brought him down. Jaeger lifted his staff and brandished it. “I’ll have order here!” he cried.

“Why did they stay when their countrymen left?” shouted Becker. “To show us our doom!”

“Silence!”

That was Joachim, employing his preacher’s voice. He strode onto the green, threw back his cowl, and glared at them. “Sinners!” he told them. “Do you want to know why they stayed?” He gestured toward the Krenkl. “They stayed to
die!”
He let the words echo from the surrounding cottages and Klaus’s mill.
“And
to give us succor! Who among you has not seen the sick comforted, or the dead buried by them? Who, indeed, has not been nursed by them, save by your own obstinancy? Now you are invited to a greater adventure than any minnesinger’s invention. You are invited to be the New Israel, to pass a time in the wilderness, and possess as your reward the Promised Land. We will bring in the New Age! Unworthy, we are, but we will be purified by trials as we await the coming of John.” Here he dropped his voice and the murmuring crowd fell silent to catch his words. “We will live apart for a time, while Peter leaves and the middle age passes away. There will be many trials; and some among us may be found wanting. We will experience privation and heat and hunger and perhaps the wrath of wild beasts. But it will strengthen us against
the day of our return!”

There was a ragged, subdued cheer and a few amens, but Dietrich thought they were more cowed than convinced.

Jaeger took a breath. “Right, then. Now that everyone is here … Lütke! Jakob!” With a great deal of profanity and one or two swipes of his staff, he started his flock moving. “‘Children of Israel,’” he muttered.

Dietrich clapped him on the shoulder. “Those were also a fractious lot, I have read.”

As the others filed past, Joachim came to Dietrich and embraced him. “Fare well,” Dietrich told him. “Remember, listen to Gerlach.”

The hunter, at the wooden bridge cried out, “Heaven, ass, and welkin-break!”

Joachim smiled wanly. “To the peril of my soul.” The others had gone back to the village and the two were alone. Joachim looked back toward the village and a shadow seemed to pass across his features as he took in the mill and the oven, the mason’s yard, the smithy, Burg Hochwald, St. Catherine’s church. Then he brushed at his cheek and said, “I must hurry after,” and shifted the blanket-bundle he wore around his shoulder. “Or I’ll be left, and …” Dietrich reached out and pulled the monk’s cowl up over his head.

“The day is hot. The sun can strike you down.”

“Ja. Thank you. Dietrich … Try not to think so much.”

Dietrich placed his palm on the other’s cheek. “I love you, too, Joachim. Take care.”

He stood on the green watching the monk depart; then he moved to the bridge to catch a final glimpse before they vanished between the shoulders of the autumn fields and the meadow. They bunched up there, naturally, where the way was narrow, and Dietrich smiled, imagining Gerlach’s profanity. When there was nothing more to be seen, he returned to the hospital.

H
E MOVED
Hans that night out into the open so that the Krenk could gaze on the firmament. The evening was warm and moist, having the characteristics of air, being moved to that state from the corruption of fire, for the day had been hot and dry. Dietrich had brought his breviary and a candle to
read by, and he was adjusting his spectacles when he realized that he did not know the day. He tried to count from the last feast of which he was certain, but the days were a blur, and his sleeping and waking had not always matched the circle of the heavens. He checked the positions of the stars, but he had not noted the sunset, nor had he an astrolabe.

“What seek you, friend Dietrich?” Hans said.

“The day.”

“Bwah … You seek the day at night? Bwah-wah!”

“Friend grasshopper, I think you have discovered
synecdoche
. I meant the date, of course. The motions of the heavens could tell me, had I the skill at reading them. But I have not read the
Almagest
since many years, or ibn Qurra. I recall that the crystalline spheres impart a daily motion to the firmament, which is beyond the seventh heaven.”

“Saturn, I think you called it.”

“Doch. Beyond Saturn, the firmament of stars, and beyond that, the waters above the heavens, though in a form crystallized to ice.”

“We, too, find a belt of ice bodies girdling each world-system. Though, of course, they turn on the hither side of the firmament, not the farther.”

“So you have said, though I understand not what then keeps the ice water from seeking its natural place here in the center.”

“Worm!” Hans replied. “Have I not told you that your image is wrong? The sun sits in the center; not the earth!”

Dietrich held his forefinger in post. “Did you not tell me that the firmament … What did you call it?”

“The horizon of the world.”

“Ja, doch. You say its warmth is the remnant of the wondrous day of creation; and beyond it no one can see. Yet this horizon lies in every direction at the same distance, which any student of Euclid can tell you is the locus of a sphere. Therefore, the earth lies truly at the center of the world,
quod erat demonstrandum
.”

Dietrich smiled broadly at having determined successfully the question, but Hans stiffened and emitted an
extended hiss. His arms flew up and across his body, presenting the serrated edges.
A protective gesture
, Dietrich thought. After a moment, the Krenkl’s arms slowly relaxed, and Hans whispered, “Sometimes the dull ache sharpens like a knife.”

“And I conduct a quodlibet while you suffer. Are there no more of your particular medicines?”

“No. Ulf needed it far more.” Hans pawed with his left hand, seeking Dietrich. “Move, twitch. I can barely see you. No, I would rather discourse on great questions. Unlikely, that either you or I have the answers, but it distracts a little from the pain.”

Dawn was crawling up the Oberreid road. Dietrich rose. “Perhaps some willow bark tea, then. It eases head-pain among us, and may serve you also.”

“Or kill me. Or it may contain the missing
protein
. Willow bark tea…. Was it among those things Arnold or the Kratzer tried? Wait, the
Heinzelmännchen
may have it in his memory.” Hans chittered into his
mikrofoneh
, listened, then sighed. “Arnold tested it. It makes naught.”

“Still, if it dulls the pain … Gregor?” He called to the mason, who sat by his eldest son on the other side of the smithy. “Have we any willow bark prepared?”

Gregor shook his head. “Theresia was stripping bark two days ago. Shall I fetch it?”