Eifelheim

XVIII. June, 1349 At Tierce, The Commemoration of Ephraem of Syria

June came and, in the timeless wheel of the seasons, the winter fields were harvested and the resting field plowed for the September planting. Fully half the plow-days were allotted to the Herr’s salland, so that while the weistümer called for rest from labors at eventide, the free tenants kept hand to plow on their own manses to make the lost time up. One of Trude Metzger’s oxen had died of a murrain the week before, and so she harnessed a cow to her team, though with marked lack of enthusiasm on the cow’s part.

Dietrich and Hans watched the villagers at work from a slab of granite at the edge of the Great Woods. In the rock’s crevices, Dietrich marked the large, blue flowers of adder-heads, and resolved to tell Theresia of their location. Nearby, the spring that ran near the krenkish camp tumbled into the valley. “What foods grow you in your country?” Dietrich asked. “They must differ from those we grow here.”

Hans became as one with the granite slab on which he squatted. This absolute stillness into which the Krenken sometimes fell no longer frightened Dietrich, but he did not yet understand what the habit signified.

Then Hans’ antennae twitched and he said, “The terms do not overset well, but we grow plants much like your grapes and beans and turnips and cabbage. Your ‘wheat’ is something strange to us; and likewise our foods include some strange to you. Greatleaf! Twelvestem! Ach! How my throat longs for their smack!”

“May you taste them soon. Is your vessel yet ready to depart?”

A parting of the soft-lips. “You tire of my company?”

“Never that, but there will be… difficulties should you remain much longer.”

“Yes. I have heard you consort with demons.” Hans’ lips gaped and he made threatening gestures. “Perhaps I will fly to this Strassburg and frighten the bishop into surrender.”

“Pray, do not.”

“Rest easy. Soon, your ‘demons’ shall trouble you no more.” He hunched forward, as if poised to leap, and stretched forth his arm. “I see movement on the Bear Valley road.”

Dietrich shaded his eyes against the distance. “Dust,” he said at last. “Use your far-speaker and alarm Baron Grosswald. I fear he must hide his people once again.”

At first the travelers were shadows against the westering sun, and Dietrich, waiting in the road astride his rouncy, heard the weary clop of the hooves and the whining complaints of the axle well before he could discern their features. But as they closed, he saw that the man astride the jennet wore a fringed talith and curled his long, graying hair into elaborate ringlets. It needed no yellow star on his cloak to identify him. A second man, meanly dressed and both sharper of feature and darker in complexion, and wearing his hair in two thick, black braids, slouched upon the wagon bench with a servant’s resignation. The awning overhanging the wagon shielded two women garbed in veils.

The Jew noted Dietrich’s garb and said, with the briefest dip of his head, “Peace to my lord.”

Dietrich knew that Jews who were strict observers of their Law were forbidden to greet or to return the greeting of a Christian, and so by ‘my lord’ the man had meant in his heart his own rabbi and not Dietrich. It was a deft stratagem by which he could observe both the innumerable laws of his tribe and the conventions of courteous discourse.

“I am Malachai ben Schlomo,” the old man said. “I seek the lands of Duke Albrecht.” His voice reeked of Spain.

“The Duke disposes a fief nearby called Niederhochwald,” he told them. “This is the road to Oberhochwald, held by the same Herr. I will take you to him, if it pleases.”

The old man brushed with his fingers, a gesture that meant to lead on, and Dietrich turned his horse toward the village. “Have you come from… Strassburg?” Dietrich asked.

“No. Regensburg.”

Dietrich turned to him in surprise. “If you seek Hapsburg lands, you have come the wrong way.”

“I took what roads I could,” the old man said to Dietrich.

Dietrich brought the Jew to Manfred’s hof, where he told his story. The blood libel had sparked riots in Bavaria, it seemed, and Malachai had been forced to flee, his home burned, his possessions plundered.

“That was infamous!” Dietrich exclaimed.

Malachai dipped his head. “I had suspected so; but my thanks for the confirmation.”

Dietrich ignored the sarcasm and Manfred, much affected by the man’s woes, bestowed sundry gifts on him and conducted him personally to the manor house in Niederhochwald, where Malachai would await a party of the Duke’s men to escort them safely across Bavaria to Vienna.

The one place in Oberhochwald where the Jews would not betake themselves was inside the church of St. Catherine, so many of the Krenken had hidden themselves there. Dietrich, entering to prepare for the Mass, spied the gleaming eyes of Krenken perched among the rafters. He repaired to the sacristy and Hans and Gottfried followed. “Where are the others?” he asked them.

“At the camp,” Hans told him. “Though it is warm now, they have grown soft these past months, and find the woods less congenial than the village. We, in turn, find their company less congenial, and so have come here. The Kratzer asks when they can emerge.”

“The Jews depart tonight for the Lower Woods. Your folk may return to their labors tomorrow.”

“That pleases,” said Hans. “’Work is the mother of forgetting.’”

“A difficult mother,” Gottfried said, “with so little food to sustain one.”

This puzzled Dietrich, the Lenten fast being long past. But Hans held a hand out to silence his companion. He hopped to the window, from which he viewed the village. “Tell me about these Jews and — their special foods.”

Gottfried had turned to the vestments and appeared to study them, but in that head-halfcocked way that showed he was also listening closely.

“I know little of Jewish foods,” Dietrich said, “save that some, like pork, they shun.”

“Much like us,” Gottfried said, but Hans again silenced him.

“Are there other foods, which they eat, but you do not?”

By the stillness of the Krenken, Dietrich knew that the question was important. Gottfried’s comment, with its implication of judaizing tendencies, troubled him. “I know of none,” he said carefully. “But they are a very different folk.”

“So different as Gottfried from me?” Gottfried turned from his inspection of the Mass vestments and flapped his soft lips.

Dietrich said, “I see no difference between you.”

“Yet his folk came once to our land and… But that is the foregone-time, and all has changed. You may have noticed that Shepherd speaks differently. In her heimat, what we call grandkrenkish is little used, so the Heinzelmännchen must twice translate. By us, you and Malachai seem much the same, save for the hair and the garb — and the food. Yet we overheard that your folk attack them and drive them from their homes and even kill them. It cannot be this usury I hear of. As thought-lacking as it is to kill a man because you owe him money, it is doubly so to kill a man because you owe someone else money.”

“Rumors of the well-poisonings have outrun the pest, and men do mad things from fear.”

“Men do foolish things.” Hans ran his finger down the edging that held the glass light in the window. “Does killing their neighbor stem the ‘small-lives’ that make disease? Is my life longer if I have shortened another’s?”

Dietrich said, “Pope Clement has written that Christian piety must accept and sustain Jews; so these massacres are the work of sinful and disobedient men. He contends that Jewish and Christian learning make one whole, which he calls ‘Judaeo-Christian.’ Christendom issued from Israel as a child from a mother, so we must not anathematize them as we do heretics.”

“But you do not like them,” Hans said. “You have shown it so.”

Dietrich nodded. “Because they rejected the Christ. For so long as the Savior was to come, the Jews were chosen by God to be a light to the nations, and God placed many laws on them as a sign of their holiness. But once the Savior was come, their mission ended, and the light was given to all the nations, as Isaiah prophesied. The laws that set them apart were void; for if all peoples are called to God, there can be no distinctions among them. Many Jews did believe, but others clung to the old Law. They incited the Romans to kill our blessed Lord. They killed James, Stephen, Barnabas and many others. They sowed dissension in our communities, disrupted our services. Their general Bar Kochba massacred the Jewish Christians and drove many into exile. Later, they betrayed Christians to Roman persecutors. In Alexandria they lured Christians from their homes by crying that the church was on fire and then attacked them when they emerged; and, in far-off Arabia, where they ruled as kings, they massacred thousands of Christians at Najran. So you see the enmity is of long standing.”

“And those who did these deeds are still alive?”

“No, they are dust.”

Hans tossed his arm. “Can a man be guilty of a deed done by others? What I see is that there stands a limit to this charitas that you and Joachim preach, and enmity may be returned for enmity.” He struck the window frame repeatedly with his forearm. “But if vengeance is the law, why did I leave the Kratzer?” This outburst was greeted with silence by both Gottfried and Dietrich. Hans turned from the window. “Tell me I have not made a fool’s choice.”

Gottfried handed Dietrich an alb of white linen. Donning it, Dietrich recalled that it represented the garment with which Herod had draped the Lord to revile him as a fool.

“No,” he told Hans. “Of course not. But the Jews have been enemies for generations.”

Hans turned from the window to face him in the human manner. “Someone once said, ‘Love your enemies.’”

Gottfried turned once more to the table, he said, “Father, you have worn white vestments of late. Should I lay those out?”

“Yes. Yes.” Dietrich turned from Hans, his thoughts in turmoil. “St. Ephraem is a doctor of the church, and so: white, which is the sum of all colors and signifies joy and purity of soul.”

“As if such ritual mattered,” said Brother Joachim from the doorway. He stepped into the room. “You have acquired two sacristans, I see. Do they know their tasks well? Do they know with which fingers to touch and hold the holy armor so that you may gird yourself to battle the devil and lead the people victorious to the eternal Fatherland?”

“The sarcasm is heavy-handed, brother,” Dietrich told him. “A lighter touch is needed for the best effect. Men crave ceremonies. It is our nature.”

“It was to change our nature that Jesus came among us. Di Flora’s Everlasting Gospel eliminates all need for signs and riddles. ‘When that which is perfect is come, forms and traditions and laws will have fulfilled their purpose and will be done away with.’ No, we must travel deep within ourselves.”

Dietrich turned to the two Krenken. “All that over whether linen be white or green! By the holy saints, Joachim, such minutiae obsess you more than they do me.”

“About such things, we know nothing,” Hans said. “But he has right over the inward-curling directions. To find our heavenly home, we must travel in directions not of height or length or breadth, and through a time not of duration.”

“We could always walk,” said Gottfried, flapping his soft lips, but Hans clicked his horny lips and his companion cut his laughter short. “We have been cut off from home,” he said, “and from our companions. Let us not be cut off from each other.”

The next day, Dietrich came upon a man in close study of the church walls. Seizing him by the surcoat, he discovered it was the Jew servant. “What make you here?” he demanded. “Why were you sent?”

But the Jew cried out, “No tell master I come. No tell, please!”

The distress was so palpable that Dietrich judged it genuine. “Why?”

“Because… Is unlawful for us to walk near house of… of tilfah.”

“Truly? So, does it not defile you?”

The servant cringed. “Honored one, I base-born rascal, not so pure and holy as master. What can defile me?”

And was that irony that Dietrich heard in that voice? He nearly smiled. “Explain yourself.”

“I hear of them, carvings, from hof servants and think I come see. We forbid to make images, but I am loving beauty.”

“By His wounds, I believe you speak the truth.” Dietrich straightened and released his grip on the man’s sleeve. “How are you called?”

The man doffed his cap. “Tarkhan Hazer ben Bek.”

“A large name for such a small man.” Tarkhan wore a long, tasseled scapular beneath his rough coat, and his thick braids were unlike the delicate curls his master affected. “You are not Spanish.”

“My people from east, from borderlands of Letts. Perhaps you know Kiev?”

Dietrich shook his head. “Is it far, this Kiev of yours?”

Tarkhan grinned sadly. “So far as edge of world. Once was mighty city of my people, when we hold Golden Empire. Now, who am I whose fathers once were kings?”

Dietrich found himself amused. “I would invite you to my table, and learn of this Golden Empire; but I fear you would pollute yourself.”

Tarkhan crossed his hands over his breast. “Mighty ones, like master, so pure even small things are polluting them. Now he think golden-eye demon watching him and he draw seal of Solomon around rooms. But me, what matter? Beside, good manners never pollute.”

The mention of golden-eyed demons held Dietrich momentarily speechless. Had the Krenken gone to the lower woods to peek at this exotic stranger? “I… I think I may have some porridge, and a little ale. I cannot place your accent.”

“Is because my accent has no place. In Kiev, are Jews and Rus, Poles and Letts, Turks and Tatars. Is wonder I understand myself!” He followed Dietrich into the parsonage.

Joachim had just placed two bowls of porridge on the table. He stared, and Tarkhan favored him with a cautious smile. “You preacher I hear of.”

“I am no friend to Jews,” Joachim replied.

Tarkhan spread his hands in mock astonishment. Joachim said no more, but fetched a third bowl and some bread from the kitchen. These he placed on the table, just out of Tarkhan’s reach. “No wonder,” the Jew murmured to Dietrich as he gathered his food, “you sometimes burn them.”

“Beware of too much cleverness,” Dietrich whispered in return.

Each prayed grace after his own fashion. Tarkhan said over the clack of wooden spoons on wooden bowls, “Hof servants say you man of learning, much travel, and study nature.”

“I was a scholar at Paris. Buridan was my master. But of this Kiev, I know nothing.”

“Kiev, merchant city. Many come and go, and this wonders me when I boy. I taking service with ben Schlomo because he travel, so I seeing many place.” He spread his hands. “So, I know he forbids ‘Maimonism’? He say council of rabbis declaring forty years ago scientia not proper to Jews. Talmud only should be study. I should know this? I ask, where in Talmud this written, and he tell me only pure may study Talmud — which I am not. Oy!” He raised his eyes to heaven in silent entreaty — or rebuke.

Joachim grunted. “Your master is right about the vanity of worldly knowledge, but wrong about which book should be studied.”

The Jew took another spoon of porridge. “Everywhere I go, I hear this thing. In Muslim lands, too, but there, only Koran fit for study.”

“The Muslims were wonderful scholars once,” Dietrich said. “And I have heard of your Maimonides — as great a scholar as our Thomas and the Saracen Averröes.”

“Master is calling Maimonists worse heretics than Samaritans. ‘Destroy, burn and root them out,’ he say. Is popular idea, I am thinking, for all folk. Muslims, too.” Tarkhan shrugged. “Oy!

Everyone else persecute Jews. Why not other Jews? Maimon himself was flee Cordoba because Ispanish rabbis persecute him. Until Master say this,” he added, “I never hear of him. So I was follow teacher I never hear?”

Dietrich chuckled. “For a Jew, you are a man of wit.”

Tarkhan’s grin vanished. “Yes. ‘For a Jew.’ But I find it so in all land. Some men wise, some fools; some wicked, some good. Some all of that, some times. I say Christian can be save in his religion, as Jew can in his, or Muslim in his.” He paused. “Master is never telling you this, but we escape Regensburg because guilds take arms and fight Jew-killers. There gave in that city, two-hundred and seven and thirty righteous gentiles.”

“May God bless those men,” said Dietrich.

“Omayn.”

“Now,” Dietrich said, as he carried the bowls to the sideboard, “let us sit by the hearth, and hear of this Golden Empire.”

The Jew planted himself upon a stool while Dietrich stirred the logs to encourage the flames. Outside, wind rushed and the afternoon windows darkened with the clouds.

“This tale from old time,” Tarkhan said, “so how much true? But is good tale, so no matter. In old times, in north of Persia, live ‘Mountain Jews,’ Simeon tribe, put there by Asshurrim. But many laws forgot until King Joseph find Talmud again. They know Elijah and Amos, Micah and Nahum, but now come flatland Jews from Babylon tell of new prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekial. Then pagan Turks come over to One God. Together we create Golden Empire. Our merchants go I’Stamboul, Baghdad, even Cathay.”

“Merchants,” said Joachim, who had affected not to listen. “You had much gold, then.”

“Among Turks each direction is having color. South white, west gold, and Khazars then west-most of all Turks. Itli Khan name seven judges. Two judging our people by Talmud; two judging Christians; two judging Muslims by shari’a. Seventh judge pagans, who were worship sky. Many years our khan fight Arab, Bulgar, Greek, Rus. I see in old book, Jewish knight in chainmail riding steppe pony.”

Dietrich stared in astonishment. “I have never heard of this empire!”

Tarkhan struck his breast. “Like all grown proud, Lord bring us low. Rus take Kiev and Itli. All this happen long ago, and most are forgotting, save some, like me, who love for old tales. Land rule now by Mongols and Poles; and I, whose fathers once kings, must serve Ispanish moneylender.”

“You don’t like Malachai,” Dietrich guessed.

“His mother find that hard. Ispanish Jews proud, with strange customs. Eat rice cakes for Passover!”

When Dietrich later showed Tarkhan the door, he said, “It has grown dark. Can you find Niederhochwald?”

The Jew shrugged. “Mule can find. I ride with him.”

“I would…” Dietrich dipped his head, looked away for a moment at the stars. “I would thank you. Though I never wished your people any harm, never before have I seen a Jew as a man. Always it was ‘a Jew is a Jew!’”

Tarkhan scowled. “True. But by us, Greek and Roman notzrim are same.”

Dietrich recalled how the Krenken had seemed at first alike. “It is the strangeness,” he said. “Just as the trees of a distant forest blend into an indistinguishable whole, so do the singularities of strangers fade when their appearance or customs are distant from our own.”

“You may have right,” said Tarkhan ben Bek. “Master, he travel many years, see only pollution. Though master is think he seeing you before, when he much younger.”

The troubling thought that he had been recognized stayed with Dietrich, and he gave thanks that Malachai was safely segregated in the Lower Woods and would not see Dietrich again before he departed for Vienna.

At mid-day on the Feast of St. Barnabas, a lone rider, astride a jennet mule and clad in the brown robes of a Minorite, worked his way up the track from St. Wilhelm and entered the manor house.

“I’ll not go back,” Joachim sneered when Dietrich mentioned the stranger. “Not while Strassburg’s prior is a truckling Conventual who has forgotten every humility that Francis taught.” Later, as they went to clean the church, he pointed across the notch that separated the two hills. “He’s coming here. If he is a Conventual, I’ll not kiss his hairy -.”

The stranger monk studied the crest of Church Hill, pausing when he caught sight of the two watchers. There seemed no face within the cowl, only a black emptiness, and the notion sprang irresistibly to Dietrich’s mind that this was Death, now these dozen years overdue, treading a weary mountain trail in search of him. Then a flash of white showed within the shadow and Dietrich realized that it was only the angle of the sun that had made that hood seem so empty. Immediately another apprehension replaced it: namely, that the rider was an exploratore sent by the Strassburg bishop to question him.

His unease grew as the inexorable mule plodded to the hill top. There, the rider threw back his cowl, revealing a thin face, long in the chin and crowned by a laurel of tangled white hair. There was something of the fox in it, and of the deer surprised by a hunter, and the lips seemed those of a man who had lately mistaken for new wine a jar of old vinegar. Though time had aged him, had drawn him out more gaunt than ever, had spotted his northland-pale skin, five-andtwenty years sloughed off in an eye-blink and Dietrich gasped in surprise and delight.

“Will!” he said. “Is it truly you?”

And William of Ockham, the venerabilis inceptor, bowed his head in mock humility.

Resigned by now to the periodic intrusions of strangers, the Krenken had absented themselves from the public space; but perhaps having grown bored, they played this time a precarious game of hide-and-seek, keeping themselves just out of sight rather than flying off to the Great Wood.

As Dietrich escorted his visitor about the village, he marked, from the corner of his eye, the sudden leap of a Krenk from one concealment to another.

The church walls held Will Ockham’s tongue mute, a feat no Pope had yet accomplished. He stood before them some time before he began to circuit the building, exclaiming with delight over the blemyae, complimenting the peredixion tree and the dragon. “Delightfully pagan!” he declared. Some Dietrich must explain: the Little-Ash-Men of the Siegmann Woods, or the Gnurr of the Murg Valley, which seemed to emerge from the woodwork itself. Dietrich named the four giants supporting the roof. “Grim and Hilde and Sigenot and Ecke — the giants slain by Dietrich of Berne.”

Ockham cocked his head. “Dietrich, was it?”

“A popular hero in our tales. Mark you Alberich the Dwarf in Ecke’s pedestal. He showed King Dieter to the lair where Ecke and Grim lived. Giants don’t like dwarves.”

Ockham thought about that for a moment. “I shouldn’t think they’d even notice them.” He regarded the dwarf further. “At first, I thought him grimacing in his effort to hold the giantess up; but now I see that he is laughing because he is about to toss her over. Clever.” He studied the kobolds under the eaves. “Now those are surpassingly ugly gargoyles!”

Dietrich followed his gaze. Five Krenken perched nude under the roofline, frozen in that preternatural stillness into which they sometimes fell, and pretended to uphold the roof. “Come,” Dietrich said quickly, turning Ockham about. “Joachim will have prepared our meal by now.” As he chivvied his guest along, he glanced backward over his shoulder and saw one of the Krenken open and close his soft lips in the krenkish smile.

Dietrich and Ockham passed the evening over a supper of pumpernickel and cheese and wholesome amounts of ale. News of the great, wide world drifted through the High Woods on the lips of travelers; and Ockham had been at the center of that world.

“I was told,” Dietrich said, “you are to make your peace with Clement.”

Will shrugged. “Ludwig is dead, and Karl wants no quarrel with Avignon. Now that all the others are dead — Michael, Marsiglio, and the rest — why pretend that we were the true Chapter? I sent the Seal of the Order back, the one that Michael took with us when we fled. The Chapter met on Pentecost and told Clement of my gesture, and Clement sent to Munich offering better terms than Jacques de Cahors ever did. So we will kiss and pretend that all is well.”

“You meant Pope John.”

“The Kaiser never called him anything but ‘Jacques de Cahors.’ He was a religious man.”

“Ludwig, religious!”

“Certainly. He created his own pope. You can’t get more religious than that. But when you have said ‘hunting’ and ‘feasting’ and ‘bohorts,’ you have limned the man in all his essentials. Oh, and securing his family’s good fortune. A simple man, easily guided by his more subtle advisors — he would never have gone into Italy but for Marsiglio’s wheedling — but his stubbornness could rebut the subtlest of reasoning. Karl, on the other hand, is much taken with the arts, and intends a university for Prague to rival Montpelier or Oxford, if not Paris itself. A place free of the rigid orthodoxies of established scholars.”

He meant free of Thomists and Averröeists. “A place where they may pursue nominalism?” Dietrich teased.

Ockham snorted. “I am no nominalist. The problem with teaching the Modern Way is that lesser scholars, excited by the novelty, seldom bother to master my insights. There are lips on which I heartily wish my name had never rested. I tell you, Dietl, a man becomes a heretic less for what he writes than for what others believe he has written. But I will outlive all my enemies. The false pope Jacques is dead, and that old fool Durandus. One hopes the odious Lutterell will soon follow. Mark me. I shall dance on their graves.”

“ ‘Doctor Modern’ was hardly an ‘old fool’…,” Dietrich ventured.

“He sat on the tribunal that condemned my theses!”

“Durandus himself once faced the tribunal,” Dietrich reminded him. “Peer-review is the fate of all philosophers worth reading. And he did exert his influence favorably on two of your propositions.”

“Out of fifty-one on trial! Such a mewling favor is more insult than the honest hostility of the odious Lutterell. Durandus was a falcon that had choosen not to fly. He would have been less a fool had he been less brilliant. One does not criticize a stone for falling. But a falcon? Come, who else did we know at Paris?”

“Peter Aureoli… No, hold. He was raised archbishop, and died the year before you came.”

“Is an archbishopric often so fatal?” Ockham said with amusement.

“You and ‘Doctor Eloquent’ would have found much in common. He shaved with your razor. And Willi is archdeacon now in Freiburg. I posed him a question this past market.”

“Willi Jarlsburg? The one with the pouty lips? Yes, I remember him. A second-rate mind. An archdiaconate suits him, for there he will never be called upon to utter an original thought.”

“You are too harsh. He always treated me kindly.”

Ockham regarded him for a moment. “His sort would. But a kindly man may yet own a second-rank intellect. The assessment is no insult. The second rank is far more than what most scholars achieve.”

Dietrich recalled Ockham’s agility in taking shelter behind his precise words. “The Herr brought me a tract by a young scholar now at Paris, Nicholas Oresme, who has a new argument for the diurnal motion of the earth.”

Ockham chuckled. “So, you still debate the philosophy of nature?”

“One does not debate nature; one experiences nature.”

“Oh, surely. But John Mirecourt — you will not have heard of him. They call him ‘White Monk.’ A Capuchin, as you might suppose. His propositions were condemned at Paris last year — no, it was in ’47 — by which accolade we know him for a thinker of the first rank. He has shown that experience — evidentia naturalis — is an inferior sort of evidence.”

“Echoing Parmenides. But Albrecht said that in investigations of nature, experience is the only safe guide.”

“No. Experience is a poor guide, for tomorrow one may have a contrary experience. Only those propositions whose contrary reduces to a contradiction — evidentia potissima — can be held with certainty.” Ockham spread his hands to invite rebuttal.

Dietrich said, “A contradiction in terms is not the only sort of contradiction. I know that grass is green from experience. The contrary can be falsified by experientia operans.”

Ockham cupped his ear. “Your lips move, but I hear Buridan’s voice. Who can say but that, in some far-off place, one may not find yellow grass?”

Dietrich was brought short by his recollection that, in the krenkish homeland, the grass was indeed yellow. He scowled, but said nothing.

Ockham pushed himself to his feet. “Come, let us proof your proposition with an experience. The world turns, you said.”

“I did not say that it did turn; only that, loquendo naturale, it might. The motion of the heavens would be the same in either case.”

“Then why seek s second explanation? Of what use would it be, even were it true?”

“Astronomy would be simplified. So, applying your own principle of the least hypothesis -”

Ockham laughed. “Ah. Argument by flattery! A more potent argument by far. But I never intended entities in nature. God cannot be bound by simplicity and may choose to make some things simple and others complex. My razor applies only to the workings of the mind.” He was already striding toward the door and Dietrich scurried to catch up.

Outside, Ockham studied the indigo sky. “Which way is east? Very well. Let us apply experience. Now, if I move my hand rapidly, thus, I feel the air pushing against it. So, if we are moving toward the east, I should feel an east wind on my face, and I -.” Closing his eyes, and spreading his arms. ” — feel no wind.”

Joachim, climbing Church Hill, stopped in the path and gaped at the scholar, who seemed to have adopted the attitude of the Crucified.

Ockham turned toward the Lesser Wood. “Now, if I face north…” He shrugged. “I feel no change in the wind whichever direction I face.” He paused expectantly.

“One must arrange the experience,” Dietrich insisted, “so that all matters affecting the conclusion are accounted for, which Bacon called experientia perfectum.”

Ockham spread his hands. “Ah, so the common senses are insufficient for this special sort of experience.” Grinning as if he had triumphed in a quodlibet, he returned to the parsonage, Dietrich again in his wake. Joachim, following, latched the door and went to the pot for a stein of ale. He sat at the table beside Dietrich and tore a piece of bread off the loaf and listened with a smirk.

Dietrich pressed the argument. “Buridan considered the objections to a turning earth in his twenty-second Question on the heavens, and found a response for each, save one. If the entire world moves, including earth, water, air, and fire, we would no more feel a resisting wind than a boat drifting with the current feels the motion of the river. The one compelling objection was that an arrow loosed straight up does not fall west of the archer, which it would if the earth were turning underneath it, for an arrow moves so swiftly that it cuts through the air and thus would not be carried along by it.”

“And this Oresme has resolved the objection?”

“Doch. Consider the arrow at rest. It does not mover. Therefore, it begins already with the motion of the earth and, when loosed, possesses two motions: a rectilinear motion up and down, and a circular motion toward the east. Master Buridan wrote that a body impressed with motion, will continue in its motion until the impetus is dissipated by the body’s gravity or other resisting forces.”

Ockham shook his head. “First the earth moves, then the people move with it to explain why they do not constantly stumble; then the air must move with it to answer a second objection; then the arrow, to answer another; and so further. Dietl, the simplest explanation for why the stars and the sun appear to circle the earth is that they do circle the earth. And the reason why we feel no motion in the earth is that the earth does not move. Ah, ‘Brother Angelus,’ why waste your powers on such trivia!”

Dietrich stiffened. “Do not call me that!”

Ockham turned to Joachim and said, “He would be at his readings before the morning bells and stayed at it by candlelight after the evening bells, so the other scholars called him—”

“That is a long time since!”

The Englishman tilted his head back. “May I still call you doctor seclusus?” He grunted and sought another bout of ale. Dietrich retreated into silence. He had thought to share a fascinating idea, and Will had somehow created a disputatio. He should have remembered that, from Paris. Joachim glanced from one to the other. Ockham returned to the table. “This is the last of the ale,” he said.

“There gives more in the kitchen,” Dietrich answered.

They discussed the ‘calculators’ at Merton and the death of Abbot Richard of Wallingford, who had invented a new “triangular” geometry and an instrument, the rectangulus, much favored by navigators. “And to speak of navigators,” Dietrich added, “the Spanish have discovered new islands in the Ocean Sea.” He had the tale from Tarkhan, who had it in turn from his master’s agents. “They lie off the coast of Africa, and boast great flocks of canaries. So it may be that a ‘new way’ across Ocean may be found, leading to the ‘oversea lands’ on Bacon’s map.”

“One may more easily explain Bacon’s Land by a cartographer’s imagination and the lure of blank spaces.” Ockham smiled and added, “Much as your rustic woodcarvers here have filled in the walls of your church with giant grasshoppers and the like.”

Joachim had a slice of pumpernickel in his mouth and nearly choked until Dietrich had helped him to swallow some ale to help it down. Ockham rose, saying, “I’ll fetch more ale from the kitchen.” But Joachim gasped, “No, there waits also a giant grasshopper.”

Unsure of the jest, Ockham barked puzzled laughter.