Eifelheim

VIII. October, 1348 Michaelmas to the Feriae Messis

Michaelmas came and with it the annual court, which the Herr held on the green under an ancient, pale-yellow linden. The tree rustled in the autumn breeze, and women pulled shawls more snugly across their shoulders. To the southeast, dark clouds had gathered over the Wiesen valley, but the air had no smell of rain and the wind sighed in the wrong direction. A dry winter, Volkmar Bauer prophesied, and talk turned to the winter seeding. Each man and woman had worn his best clothing to honor the court: hose and smock carefully darned and nearly clean, but dull against the finery of Manfred and his retinue.

Everard presided at a bench before the great tree, and the jurors sat by to ensure that no custom of the manor was violated. Richart the schultheiss brought forth the Weistümer, the village by-laws, written on parchment and sewn into a book, and he researched it from time to time on the rights and privileges recorded therein. This was no mean task, as rights had amassed over the years like clutter in a shed, and one man might own different rights for different strips of land.

White Jürgen, the vogt, presented his tally sticks and knotted strings and gave an accounting of the lord’s salland for the past harvest year. The free tenants attended this recital with keen interest, comparing the Herr’s increases to their own with the sort of subtle arithmetic available to those who owned no numbers beyond their fingers. Wilimer, the Herr’s clerk of accounts, himself but a few years removed from haying and mowing, transcribed everything in neat miniscule onto a parchment roll of sheets glued together side-to-side. He cast his sums on an abacus and announced that the Herr owed Jürgen twenty-seven pence to balance the account.

Afterward, old Friedrich, the steward’s clerk, took account of fines and dues. Like Wilimer, he cast his sums in Fibonacci’s Arabic numbers, but he translated the results into the Roman sort for his fair copy. This introduced grave chance of error, since old Friedrich’s grasp of Latin numbers was little better than his grasp of Latin grammar, where he frequently confused the ablative with the dative. “If I write the words in Latin,” the man had explained one time, “I must write the numbers in Latin also.”

The first fine was buteil for old Rudolf from Pforzheim, who had died on Sixtus Day. The Herr took possession of his “best beast,” a breeding sow called Isabella — and naturally all the men debated whether this was in fact Rudolf’s “best beast,” rendering a variety of opinions, no two of which were compatible.

Felix Ackermann stood to pay merchet on his daughter, but Manfred, who had been following matters from his seat beneath the linden, announced a commutation “in view of the man’s losses in the fire.” This drew admiring murmurs from the assembly; which Dietrich deemed cheaply bought. The Herr could be generous in small matters.

Trude Metzger astonished everyone by paying merchet on herself for the lord’s permission “to marry at will.” This set all the women’s tongues a-wagging and cast a pall of apprehension upon all the single men. The Herr, greatly amused, granted the boon.

And so it went while the sun climbed high. Heinrich Altenbach was fined four pfennigs in chevage for living off the manor without the lord’s grace. Petronella Lürm had gleaned the Herr’s fields “contrary to the prohibitions of autumn.” Fulk Albrecht’s son had stolen Trude’s grain during the harvest. The jurors questioned the witnesses closely and, knowing the parties concerned, recommended the fines.

Oliver Becker had raised the hue-and-cry against Bertram Unterbaum on May Day past, in malice over the affections of Anna Kohlmann. Reinhardt Bent had appropriated three furrows from all the strips abutting his headland. For this offence, the man was widely hooted, for there was to the manse peasant no greater crime than stealing a furrow from a neighbor.

Manfred himself brought suit against twelve gärtners who during the July hay harvest had refused to load the hay cocks into the carts. Nickel Langermann claimed that the labor had been done in prior years “out of love for the Herr,” but was not actually required by the weistümer. He asked that the free tenants inquire into the matter and Everard appointed an inquest from among the jurors.

At this, the court recessed for a board of bread and ale at the Herr’s expense.

“Langermann fancies himself a schultheiss,” said Lorenz as the crowd broke up. “He’s always finding by-laws that say he doesn’t have to work.”

“Enough such findings,” Dietrich said, “and no one will hire him, since then he won’t work at all.”

Max Schweitzer appeared and led him a little distance from the others. “The Herr bade me inquire about the black powder,” he murmured.

“Their alchemist recognized charcoal from the specimens,” Dietrich told him, “and sulfur by its properties and appearance; but the Heinzelmännchen knew not what krenkish word signified niter, so we are at an impasse. I told him it was commonly found under dung piles, but their shit differs from ours.”

“Perhaps it smells sweeter,” Max suggested. “And if we give him a specimen? Of niter, I mean. Alchemists can identify unknown materials, nay?”

“Ja, but the Krenken seem disinclined to make the effort.”

Max cocked his head. “I wouldn’t think their inclinations mattered.”

“They have angst to repair their ship and return to their own country.” Dietrich looked off to where Manfred stood with his retinue. The men were laughing over some matter and Kunigund, her gown wrapped in a white girdle embroidered in orfrois with scenes of stag hunting and hares, was torn between a lady-like dignity in Eugen’s company and the desire to chase her younger sister, who had just tugged Kunigund’s cap loose. Manfred thought to hold the Krenken against their will so he could learn their occult secrets. “The Herr would be wise not to press the matter,” he said.

“On his own land? Why not?”

“Because the strong arm should be gently used on folk you suspect of having black powder.”

In the afternoon, the villagers elected beer-tasters, jurors, wardens, and other ministers for the coming harvest-year. White Jürgen declined the honor — and potential expense — of another term as vogt, so Volkmar Bauer was elected in his stead. Klaus was chosen again as maier.

Seppl’ Bauer shyly cast his first vote, raising his hand for Klaus along with the other householders. Or with almost all, for Trude Metzger loudly dissented and, as she was householder for her manse, cast a lone vote for Gregor. “The mason may be a dim-wit,” she declared, “but he is not a thief who damps the meal.”

Gregor, turning to Dietrich, said, “She sweet-talks me to win my affections.”

Lorenz on the other side wagged his finger. “Remember, Gregor, should you ever seek to remarry, that she has already paid merchet on herself, so she would be a cheap catch.”

“And worth every pfennig.”

“The body is but a mantle,” said Theresia Gresch, breaking a silence she had held throughout the day, “which shines if true beauty lies within. So she seems plainer than she is.”

“Perhaps you are one to light her lamp,” Lorenz told Gregor.

Gregor scowled, now more than half-worried that his friends were plotting his remarriage. “A man would need a bonfire for that undertaking,” he grumbled.

Dietrich named his nocturnal visitor Johann von Sterne — John-of-the-stars. He resumed his visits to the lazaretto, and slowly his confidence returned. The creatures would glance his way when he arrived, pause a moment, then calmly resume their activities. None threatened him.

Some worked diligently on the ship. Dietrich watched them play fire across certain seams and spray fluids and spread colored earths upon its surfaces. Air, no doubt, also figured in the repairs, for he sometimes heard the hissing of gasses deep within the nether regions of the structure.

Others occupied themselves in natural philosophy, in bizarre and patternless leaping, or in solitary walks and idleness. Some perched in trees like birds! As the autumn forest became a blaze of color, they used wonderful instruments — fotografia - to capture miniature “light drawings” of the leaves. Once, Dietrich recognized the alchemist by his more particular clothing, squatting in that peculiar knees-above-head posture, overlooking the stream where it tumbled over an escarpment. He hailed him, but the creature, absorbed in some contemplation, made no response and, thinking him in prayer, Dietrich quietly withdrew.

Dietrich felt a growing frustration with krenkish laggardness. “I have seen your carpenters taken from their tasks,” he told the Kratzer on one visit, “to collect beetles or flowers for your philosophers. Others, I have seen playing with a ball, or leaping up and down to no apparent purpose, indeed, sporting themselves naked. Your most urgent task is the repair of your ship, not why our trees change color.”

“All those who do the work do the work,” the Kratzer announced.

Dietrich thought he meant that philosophers were unskilled in shipbuilding, which was no astonishing insight. “Even so,” he insisted, “there may be apprentice tasks you could perform.”

At this, the Kratzer’s antennae stiffened to rods, and his features, never expressive, grew more still yet. Hans, who had been occupied to the side cataloguing images of plants and paying no apparent attention to the discourse, sat upright in his seat with his hands poised over the array of types by which he instructed the Heinzelmännchen. The Kratzer’s eyes pinned Dietrich to his seat, and Dietrich gripped the sides of his chair in unaccountable terror.

“Such labor,” the Kratzer said finally, “is for those who perform such labors.”

The statement had the seeming of a proverb and, like many proverbs, suffered from a conciseness that reduced it to a tautology. He was reminded of those philosophers who, grown lately besotted with the Ancients, affected their prejudice against manual labor. Dietrich could not imagine himself shipwrecked and unwilling to assist his fellows in the necessary repairs. In such straits, even the gently born would put a hand to the task. “Labor,” he pointed out, “has its own dignity. Our Lord was a carpenter and called to Himself fishermen and tent-makers and other humble folk. Pope Benedict, may he rest in peace, was the son of a miller.”

“Did I hear the utterance correctly,” the Kratzer said. “A carpenter may become a lord. Bwawawa. Can a stone become a bird — question. Or are all your lords base-born — question.”

“I grant you,” Dietrich admitted, “that a man born into his besitting will seldom rise above it, yet we do not despise the working man.”

“Then we are not so different, your folk and mine,” the Kratzer said. “For us, too, our besitting is written… I think you would say, it is written into ‘the atoms of our flesh.’ There is a sentence among us: ‘As we are, so we are.’ It would be thought-lacking to despise one for being what he was born to be.”

“The ‘atoms of flesh’…?” Dietrich had started to ask when the Heinzelmännchen interrupted, “Seldom means more often than never — question, exclamation.”

The Kratzer directed a series of rapid clacks at Hans, at the conclusion of which, the latter exposed his neck and addressed once more his type-writing. When the philosopher spoke again he returned to, “this curious event of the colored trees. Know you the reason for it — question.”

Dietrich, uncertain what the quarrel signified and unwilling to provoke the Kratzer’s anger, answered that the Herr God had arranged the color-change to warn of approaching winter, while the evergreens maintained the promise of spring to come, and thus imbued into the moods of the year sorrow and hope alike. This explanation puzzled the Kratzer, who asked whether Manfred’s overlord were a master forester, at which non sequitur Dietrich despaired of explanation.

The Church celebrated the beginning of each agricultural season: to pray for a good planting or for summer rains or for a good harvest. The feriae messis opened the wine harvest and, in consequence, the mass Exsultáte Deo was better attended than most. The southern slope of the Katerinaberg prickled with vineyards that produced a vintage that sold well in the Freiburg markets and provided Oberhochwald with one of its few sources of silver. But the past year had been again a cold one and there was concern that the press be bountiful.

At the Offertory, Klaus presented a bunch of ripe grapes picked from his own vines and, during the Consecration, Dietrich squeezed one of the grapes to mingle its juice with the wine in the chalice. Usually, the congregation would chatter among themselves, even lingering in the vestibule until summoned by the Preparation Bell. Today they watched in rapt concentration, engaged not by memory of the Christ’s sacrifice, but by hope that the ritual would bring good luck in the harvest — as if the Mass were mere sorcery, and not a memorial of the Great Sacrifice.

Elevating the chalice high above his head, Dietrich saw nested in the vices under the clerestory the glowing yellow eyes of a Krenk.

Frozen, he stood with arms extended, until the appreciative murmur of his flock called him to himself. A superstition had been gaining favor of late that the door from Purgatory to Heaven flew open while the bread and wine were elevated, and worshippers sometimes complained if the priest made too brief an Elevation. Surely, by such a lengthy elevation, their priest had won a great many souls free, to the greater sanctification of the wine harvest.

Dietrich replaced the cup on the altar and, genuflecting, mumbled the closing words because the sense of them had suddenly fled his mind. Joachim, who knelt beside him holding the hem of the chasuble in one hand and the bell in the other, glanced also toward the rafters, but if he saw the creature, he gave no sign. When Dietrich dared once more to raise his own eyes, the unexpected visitor had withdrawn into the shadows.

After Mass, Dietrich knelt before the altar with his hands clenched into a ball before him. Above, carved from a single great piece of red oak, darkened further by a hundred years of smoking beeswax, Christ hung impaled upon His cross. The wasted figure — naked but for a scrap of decency, body twisted in agony, mouth gaping open in that last pitiable accusation — Why have you abandoned me? — emerged from the very wood of the cross, so that victim and instrument grew one from the other. It had been a brutal and humiliating way to die. Far kinder, the faggot, noose, or headsman’s axe that in modern times eased the journey.

Dimly, Dietrich heard the rumble of carts, clatter of billhooks and pruning shears, braying of donkeys, indistinct voices, curses, snap of whips, groan of wheels, as the villagers and the serfs gathered and departed for the vineyards. Quiet descended by degrees until all that was left beyond the ancient groaning of the walls was a distant, irregular kling-klang from Lorenz’s smithy at the foot of the hill.

When he was certain that Joachim had not lingered, Dietrich rose to his feet. “Hans,” he said softly when he had donned the krenkish head-harness and had pressed the sigil that awoke the Heinzelmännchen. “Was it you I saw in the clerestory during Mass? How came you into those heights without being seen?”

A shadow moved under the roof-beams and a voice spoke in his ear. “I wear a harness that gives flight, and entered through the bell tower. The sentence was in my head to watch your ceremony.”

“The Mass? Why?”

“The sentence is that you hold the key for our salvation, but the Kratzer laughs, and Gschert will not listen. Both say we must find our own way back to the heavens.”

“It is a heresy many have fallen prey to,” admitted Dietrich, “that heaven can be reached without help.”

The Krenk servant was silent for a moment before answering. “I had thought your ritual would complete inside my head the picture of you.”

“And has it?”

Dietrich heard a sharp clack from the rafters above him and he craned his neck to spy where the Krenk had now perched himself. “No,” said the voice in his ear.

“The picture of Dietrich inside my own head,” Dietrich admitted, “is also incomplete.”

“This is the problem. You want to help us, but I see no gain for you.”

Shadows shifted in the flickering candlelight, not quite black because the flames that cast them guttered red and yellow. Two small lights gleamed in the vises. Were they the Krenk’s eyes catching the dancing fires, or only metal fittings securing a beam? “Must there give always a gain for me in what I do?” Dietrich asked of the darkness, uncomfortably aware that the gain he sought was his own continued solitude and freedom from fear.

“Beings act always to their own gain: to obtain food or stimulate the senses, to win acceptance in one’s place, to reduce the labors needed to possess these things.”

“I cannot call you wrong, friend grasshopper. All men seek the good, and certainly food and the pleasures of the flesh and a surcease from labor are goods, or else we would not seek them. But I cannot say that you are entirely right either. What does Theresia gain with her herbs?”

“Acceptance,” was the Krenk’s swift reply. “Her place in the village.”

“That won’t make the cabbage fat. A man in want of food may drain a swamp — or steal a furrow; in want of pleasure, he may love his wife — or fick another’s. The way to heaven is not found in partial goods, but only in the perfect Good. To help others,” he said, “is a good in itself. Our Lord’s cousin James wrote: ‘God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble,’ and, ‘Religion pure and undefiled is this: to give aid to orphans and widows in their desperation.’”

“Manfred’s cousin carries no weight with the Krenk. He is not — our — lord, nor is Manfred so strong as Gschert has feared. When his own folk defied him over the haycocks, he did not strike them as they deserved, but allowed — his servants — to decide the matter for him. The act of a weakling. And they came back, his own underlings, and said that the gärtners had right. Duty binds them to gather Manfred’s hay, but not to place the cocks in the carts.”

Dietrich nodded. “So stands it in the weistümer. It is the custom of the manor. ”

The Krenk drummed on the rafter and leaned into the ambit of the guttering candlelight so far that Dietrich thought he would topple off. “But that leaves next year the haycocks standing in the fields,” Hans said, “while the serfs wait in the curia to unload. That is — thought-lacking.”

A small smile crossed Dietrich’s lips as he recalled the muddle that had ensued in the court following the findings of the inquest. “We gain some small amusement from paradoxes. It is a form of entertainment, like singing or dancing.”

“Singing—”

“Another time I will explain that.”

“It is dangerous for one who rules to show weakness,” Johann insisted. “Had your Langermann made such a demand on Herr Gschert, he would be picking-food ere now.”

“I do not deny that Gschert is choleric in his humor,” Dietrich said dryly. Lacking true blood, the Krenken could not balance their choler properly with a sanguine humor. Instead, they possessed a yellow-green ichor; but as he was no doctor of the medical arts, Dietrich was uncertain which humor the ichor might govern. Perhaps one unknown to Galen. “But no worries,” he told Hans. “The hay cocks will be loaded into the carts again next mowing season, but the gärtners will do so not from duty but from charitas — or for a fee for the added labor.”

“Charity.”

“Ja. To seek the good of another and not your own.”

“You do so — question.”

“Not so often as the good Herr commanded; but yes. It gathers merit for us in heaven.”

“Does the Heinzelmännchen overset correctly — question. A superior being came from the heaven, made himself your Herr, and ordered that you perform this ‘charity.’ ”

“I would not phrase it so…”

“Then all fits.”

Dietrich waited, but Hans said nothing more. The silence lengthened and waxed oppressive, and he had begun to suspect that his stealthy visitor had stolen away — The Krenken were not long on the formalities of greeting and farewell — when Hans spoke once more.

“I will say now a thing, though it shows us weak. We are a mixed folk. Some belong to the ship, and its captain was their Herr. The captain died in the shipwreck and Gschert now rules.

Others form a school of philosophers whose task is to study new lands. It was they who hired the ship. The Kratzer is not their Herr, but the other philosophers allow him to speak for them.”

“Primus inter pares,” Dietrich suggested. “First among equals.”

“So. A useful phrase. I will tell him. In the third band are those who travel to see strange and distant sights, places where the well-known have lived or where great events have happened… What call you such folk?”

“Pilgrims.”

“So. The ship was to visit several places favored by pilgrims before bearing the philosophers onward to a new-found land. The ship’s company and the school of philosophers say always that on such journeys into the unknown there may be no return. ‘It has happened; it will happen.’ ”

“You have right,” Dietrich said. “In my father’s time, some Franciscan scholars sailed with the brothers Vivaldi to seek India, which Bacon’s map placed but a short distance westward across the Ocean Sea. But nothing was again heard of them after they departed Cape Non.”

“Then you have the same sentence in your head: A new voyage may fare one-way. But in the pilgrims’ heads there stands always a return, and our failure to reach the correct heaven must be from someone’s… I think your word is ‘sin.’ So, some pilgrims place our present failure on Gschert’s weakness, and even some of the ship’s company say that he is nothing beside he who was captain before. One thinking himself stronger may seek to replace him. And if so, Gschert will likely raise his neck, for it is in my head that he may think the same.”

“It is a grave matter,” Dietrich said, “to overthrow the established order, for who is to say but that the result may not be worse. We had such an uprising twelve years ago. An army of peasants laid waste the country-side, burning manor houses, killing lords and priests and Jews.”

And Dietrich recalled with sudden, unbearable immediacy, the swirling intoxication of being swept along by something greater and more powerful and more right than oneself, the safety and arrogance of numbers. He remembered noble families immolated inside their own houses; Jew moneylenders paid in full with hemp and faggot. There had been a preacher among them, a man of some learning, and he had exhorted the crowds with the words of James:

Woe to you rich! Your wealth has rotted, your fine wardrobe is moth-eaten.

Your gold and silver has tarnished and their corrosion is a testament against you!

Here, crying aloud, are the wages you withheld from the serfs who worked your fields! The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord. You lived in wanton luxury on the earth; you fattened yourself for the day of slaughter!

And the Armleder army — it called itself an army, with self-proclaimed captains, and wore leather brassards for livery — sweaty, lust-mad, impatient for loot, foreboding their own death-warrants, would join in the last, so that the shout, “Day of Slaughter!” hoarse from a thousand throats, were the last words many a wealthy lord or Jew heard in this life. Manor houses lit the night with their flames, so that a man might travel the Rhineland by their illumination as if by day. Merchant wagon trains plundered by the roadside. Itinerant peddlers, promoted by hue and cry to cosmopolitan Jew money-lenders, torn apart. Free-town burgers, fled within ancient walls, watching from the parapets while their guild-halls and ware-houses burned.

But Burg walls had withstood the undisciplined mobs, and rage faded to a realization that now only the gibbet awaited. From stone citadels had poured forth a river of steel: Herrs and knights; armsmen and guild militias and feudal levies; lances and halberds and crossbows hacking and piercing flesh and bone. Coursers swifter than the most eager of flying heels. A rag-tag of farm implements, clubs, knives, billhooks thrown down by the roadside. Chivalry in mail coats riding down peasants lacking so much as breeches beneath their smocks, so that they littered the highways with the shit and piss of their terror and showed their shriveled privates as they dangled from every tree limb in the Elsass and the Breisgau.

Dietrich became aware of the silence. “Thousands perished,” he told the Krenk abruptly.

The Krenk was silent still. In the quiet, the wood of the church groaned.

Dietrich said, “Hans…?”

“The Kratzer was wrong. Our folk are very different.” Hans leapt from roof beam to roof beam, toward the rear of the church and then up into the clerestory, where a window stood open.

“Hans, wait!” Dietrich cried. “What mean you?”

The creature paused at the open window and turned its gaze on Dietrich. “Your peasants killed their lords. That is an — unnatural — thing. What we are, we are. We have this sentence in our heads from those animals who were our ancestors.”

Dietrich, dumbstruck at this off-hand pronouncement, found his voice only with difficulty. “You… number animals among your ancestors?” He imagined foul couplings with beasts. Women lying with dogs. Men futtering donkeys. What might be born of such unions? Something unspeakable. Something monstrous.

“In ancient times,” the Krenk replied. “There gave creatures like your honey bees. Not in form, but in the divisions of their labor. They had no sentences inside their heads to tell them their duties. Instead the sentences were written into the atoms of their flesh, and these atoms were passed from sires and dams to their offspring, and so after an age, to us. So do each of us know our besitting in the great web. ‘So it was; so it is.’ ”

Dietrich trembled. All beings, desiring their proper end, move toward it by nature. So a stone, being earth, moved naturally toward the earth; and a man, loving the good, moved naturally toward God. But in animals, the appetites are moved by the estimative power, which rules despotically, while in men, they are moved by the cognitive power, which rules politically. So, the sheep esteems the wolf as enemy and runs without thinking; but a man may stand his ground or flee as his reason suggests. Yet, if the Krenken were ruled by instinctus, the rational appetite could not exist in them, since a higher appetite necessarily moved a lower one.

Which meant that the Krenken were beasts.

Memories of talking bears and talking wolves enticing children to their doom flickered in his memory. That the being in the rafters above him was no more than a beast that spoke, terrified Dietrich beyond measure, and he fled from Hans.

And Hans fled from him.