Eifelheim

XXI. June, 1349 The Nativity of St. John the Baptist

The Mass, Recordáre, Dómine, was said at nones, and St. Catherine’s filled with the dreadful curious. Burg and dorp alike were there, and the Krenkl’n as well, even those unbaptized, for all knew that some portentious word had reached the pastor. Manfred and his family, forewarned, stood in front to provide an example. Dietrich celebrated jointly with the chaplain, Father Rudolf, a vain and haughty man much consumed with the prestige of his benefice. Yet Rudolf’s pale countenance, like the ruin of a Roman temple, demanded pity and Dietrich gave him the Savior’s words, Be not afraid, for I am with you always.

The bishop’s letter, when read aloud, had not the heart-draining sound of the herald’s flat pronouncement. A few citizens had fallen ill with the unmistakable signs, but not in the vast numbers felled in Paris or, the year before, in Italy. Yet, all parishes were warned to prepare themselves. Special prayers were begged for Strassburg — and for Basel and Berne, for the pest was now known to have been in Berne in February, and in Basel by May.

At this news, Anna Kohlmann threw herself weeping to the flagstones and would not be comforted. “Bertram!” she cried. “Ach, Bertram!” Manfred, who had sent the boy to Berne, maintained a Stoic countenance.

Into this commotion crawled from the rear of the nave Ilse Krenkerin. Like the Kratzer, she was much weakened by her refusal to drink the elixir, and moved only by use of oddly-shaped crutches; but these she abandoned and went to Anna on hands and knees, where she proceeded to poke at the girl. Some cried out at the attack. But Joachim breasted the crowd and stood over the two girls, crying that this was only the krenkish caress.

“I know the sentences inside your head,” Ilse told Anna, and the Heinzelmännchen spread the words to a score of head harnesses, and whispers spread it further. “I died when Gerd fell. But he fell in his duties to the common good, and I will see him when my energy enters the lands of the Herr-from-the-sky.” Joachim repeated these simple words of faith for the assembled congregation. This brought mutters of agreement and much nodding of heads, but little comfort Anna Kohlmann.

After services, Dietrich and Father Rudolf unvested in the sacristy. “The bishop wrote only that it might come here,” the chaplain said. “Only that it might. Not that it would.” He seemed to take much comfort in grammar. “And Strassburg is distant. The Elsass borders on the Frenchreich. Not so distant as Avignon or Paris, but…”

Dietrich said only that such reports were often exaggerated.

For several days thereafter, folk remained shuttered in their cottages or told one another that the pest would not come so high into the mountains. Bad air is heavy, Gregor announced with confidence, and seeks always a lower level. But Theresia said that God had fashioned His instrument and only repentance could stay His hand. Manfred was more thoughtful. “Those bells we heard on Rogation Day,” he said to Dietrich. “They were in Basel, I think, and carried to us by a freak of wind. God was warning us.”

Hans suggested marking the times and locations of the outbreaks on a land-chart, by which Dietrich supposed he meant a portolan. But, as none such existed in the village and most other such charts were symbolic in intent, the suggestion came to nought. The Krenken knew not the geography to compile what Hans called a “true chart.” Still, all men knew that to travel from Berne to Basel to Strassburg was to pass by Freiburg and thus the roads into the High Woods. A turn to the east, and… It had been, withal, a narrow escape.

Ilse Krenkerin died a few days after the Pestilence Mass, and Dietrich sang the Dead Mass for her in St. Catherine’s. Hans, Gottfried, and the other baptized Krenken carried the bier into the church and set it down before the altar. Shepherd attended in silence, for Ilse had been of her party of pilgrims. She paid no mean attention to the ceremony, though whether from reverence or mere curiosity, Dietrich could not say.

Only a few villagers came, as they were for the most part yet huddled in their cottages. Norbert Kohlmann came and Konrad Unterbaum and their families; so also, surprisingly, Klaus and Hilde. Hilde wept at the sight of Ilse’s body and her husband was helpless to comfort her.

Afterward, the Krenken bore their companion away to be stored in the cold-boxes until her flesh was needed. “I bandaged her wounds,” Hilde said as the Hochwalders watched the Krenken progress the Bear Valley road toward their ship. Dietrich looked at her.

“She was hurt in the shipwreck,” she said, “and I bandaged her wounds.”

Klaus placed an arm around her shoulder, saying, “My wife is tender-hearted,” but she shrugged the arm off.

“Tender-hearted! It was a terrible penance, imposed upon me! Ilse stank, and a snap of her jaws could take my wrist off. Why should I weep for her? She is one burden less for my penance.” She wiped her face with a kerchief, turned, and nearly collided with Shepherd as she fled.

“Explain, Dietrich,” Shepherd said. “All recitation over corpse! All water shaken; all smoke swung and swirled! What you accomplish? What good for Ilse? What good? What good? What I tell her birth-givers?”

She reared her head and clacked her side lips so fast as to make a buzzing that grew sensibly into a musical note, and a remote part of Dietrich’s mind was delighted to learn that a tone was a high frequency of clicks. She leapt away, not toward the fine cottage of Klaus and Hilde, where she had been staying, but out across the resting fields toward the Great Wood. Konrad Unterbaum said, “I never thought them like us before today. But I know her heart; that I do.”

Joachim sat on a small stool by the Kratzer’s cot and spooned a little porridge into the creature’s mouth. Outside, weathercocks turned and dark clouds tumbled over one another as they raced across the sky. A distant cloud over the lowlands flashed. Dietrich stood by the open window and smelled rain in the air.

“Your weather pleases,” said a voice in the head harness, and it seemed so hale that Dietrich needed a moment to mark it as the Kratzer’s. It ought to gasp and sound weak, as befit his estate, but the Heinzelmännchen’s art did not extend so far. “The change in the air caresses my skin. You do not have this sense. No, you do not feel the pressing of the air. But, ach! That tongue of yours! So supple an organ! We taste nothing so intensely as you. How fortunate that is! How fortunate. With a school of philosophers will I return this place to study. Not since the bird-folk of Cliff-home World have I known any so fascinating as you.”

The Kratzer raved when he spoke of returning, since it was growing ever more evident that he would not be leaving — save in the manner that all men left this world. Dietrich felt a great wash of pity and he stood by the cot to carress the strange creature in his own strange way.

As gently as he could, Dietrich told him of Ilse, at which the philosopher turned his face to the wall.

Each day, Dietrich and Joachim prepared a meal for the weakening Kratzer, trying divers materials in the hope that one might contain the substance that his body craved. They made stews of unlikely fruits, and teas of doubtful herbs. Nothing could do more harm than doing nothing more. The philosopher had put aside untasted the flask containing the alchemist’s vile brew, and each day his horny skin grew more mottled. “He bleeds within,” explained the krenkish physician, when Dietrich had called upon her skills. “If he will not drink the broth, there is naught I can do. And even should he drink,” she added, “it but prolongs the dying. All our hope is in Hans, and Hans has gone mad.”

“I will pray for his soul,” Dietrich said, and the physician tossed her arm for souls, for life, for death, for hope.

“You may believe that the energia can live without the body to support it,” the Krenkerin replied, “but ask no such foolishness from me.”

“You have the plow before the ox, doctor. It is the spirit that supports the body.” But the doctor was a materialist and would not hear it. Good in small things, as such folk often were, she esteemed the krenkish body as but a machine, like a water wheel, and gave no thought to the rushing waters that moved it.

When, after a week had gone by with no further word, the dread of the pest began to fade and people laughed at those who had shown so much fear before. By the Nativity of John, festivities drew them forth from their cottages. The tenants sent their tithe of meat to the parsonage and lit bonfires on the hills, even on the Katerinaberg, so that the vigil night was pocked with ruddy glows. Boys ran about the village drawing fiery arcs with their torches to chase away dragons. At the last, a great hoop of wood and brush was lit on the church green and rolled downhill, and a great sigh lifted from a hundred lips, for it toppled to its side halfway down. The children delighted in the flames and diversions, but their elders clucked over the bad luck thus signified. The fiery wheel more often reached the bottom without falling, the old women told the old men, who nodded without contradiction, although memory might run otherwise.

Hans parted his lips. “Underseeking your customs was the Kratzer’s great work, and I have the sentence in my head that this example might please him.”

“He is dying.”

“And so, deserving a comfort.”

Dietrich fell silent. When a few moments had gone by, he said, “You loved your master.”

“Bwa-wa! How could I not? It is written in the atoms of my flesh. Nevertheless, one more bite of knowing to feed his mind would please him.” He stiffened abruptly into immobility. “Gottfried-Lorenz calls. There is trouble.”

Gottfried wore a floral crown and had shed his leather hose to leap among the revelers. Few remarked the custom any longer, as he had no shameful organs to display. At least, none that women would recognize as such. Somehow, in the whirling, he had swiped Sepp Bauer across the crown with his serrated arm, and the young man lay now prostrate amid the flickering torches. Some in the crowd made ugly growls in their throats. Others gathered by the moment, asking questions.

“The monster attacked my son!” Volkmar declared. He swept his arm around his neighbors. “We all saw.” A few nodded and muttered. Others shook their heads. A few cried that it was chance. Ulrike, swollen with child, shrieked to see her husband lying so. “You beast!” she cried at Gottfried. “You beast!”

Dietrich saw anger, confusion, fright, recognized the signs. He noticed from the corner of his eye, a handful of other Krenken gathering in the outer darkness, and one, who held the rank of sergeant among them and was known therefore as Hopping Max, had unfastened the flap on the scrip that held his pot de fer. “Gregor,” Dietrich called to the mason. “Fetch Max from the castle. Tell him we have a matter for the Herr’s justice.”

“The Markgraf’s, you mean!” Volkmar shouted. “Murder is for the high justice.”

“No. See! Your son breathes. It wants only the scalp sewn back in place and a little rest.”

“Not by you,” Volkmar replied. “Your tender-heartedness to these demons is a scandal.”

What might have happened then remained unknown, for Max arrived with a half-dozen armsmen and imposed the Herr’s peace upon them; and Manfred, when he arrived much put out at the late hour, ruled the matter accidental and declared that a full trial of the facts would await the annual court at Michaelmas.

The crowd sullenly dispersed, some giving Volkmar a slap on the shoulder, others giving him a look of disgust. Gregor said to Dietrich, “Volkmar’s not a bad man, but his tongue can slither out of his food-hole before he knows it. And he says things with such certitude that he cannot after deny them without seeming foolish.”

“Gregor, at times I think you are the cleverest man in Oberhochwald.”

The mason crossed himself. “God forbid, that is no great feat.”

When the revelers had dispersed and Dietrich was alone with Hans and Gottfried, Hans said, “The Herr is a clever man. In three months, sits the court, and long before, all questions are moot.

Gottfried touched Dietrich in the shoulder, startling him. “Father, I have sinned,” the Krenkl said. “Sepp taunted me, and I struck without thinking.”

Dietrich regarded his convert. “Guilt may be altered by circumstances,” he allowed. “If your instinctus overcame you—”

“Striking him was not my sin.”

“What, then?”

“Afterward…, I was happy.”

“Ah. That is serious. How did he provoke you?”

“He taunted me. He called himself happy that we would soon be gone.”

Dietrich cocked his head. “Because you starve? He hoped for your death?”

“No, he meant our ship. I did not think. He might have meant a ‘fare well.’ He could not have known of our failure.”

Dietrich stopped and grabbed Gottfried by the arm, which caused the Krenk to freeze and check an instinctive blow. “Failure?” Dietrich demanded. “What means this?”

“The wire will not serve,” he said. “There is a measure… You know how a rope will snap if too much weight pulls on it? Our electronik mill snaps also, though in a different way. With each proofing, it grows less strong. We cast the sums and…”

Gottfried fell silent and Hans touched him several times about the torso. “But the doctrine of chances, brother,” he told Gottfried, “gives no certainty. There gives yet a chance of success.”

“There gives yet a chance that Volkmar Bauer will caress me,” Gottfried answered. He faced Dietrich directly, after the human fashion. “The weakening is such that our ship can drop into the abyss between the worlds, but will likely lack the power to climb back out on the farther shore. A hard fate.”

“Or an easy one, brother,” said Hans. “Who has ever come back to tell us which?”

Gottfried batted Hans’ arm away and sprang down the hill. Dietrich watched him go. Then he turned on Hans.

“You always knew you would fail.”

Hans’ eyes were unreadable. “A schlampig device like that? Wire drawn with pliers by a boy on a swing? No clothing for the wire to contain its fluids? We made the work as sound as we could, but it is more rags and patches than that coat of Manfred’s jester. I thought failure likely from the start.”

“Then…, why the pretense?”

“Because you were right. When the alchemist failed, my folk might have seen nothing before them but lingering death. We gave them something else these past five moons. Hope may be a greater treasure than truth.”

Returning to the parsonage, Dietrich found the Kratzer lying upon his pallet, his soft lips opening and closing, though too slowly to signify laughter. He recalled that Hans had made once the same sign beneath an anonymous sky. He is weeping, Dietrich thought, and found it oddly affecting that, for Krenk as for man, the outward appearance of tears was so like that of laughter.

The Kratzer was a materialist. Was that why he wept? All men naturally feared death. Yet a materialist, holding naught beyond the threshold, might dread the passage more. He leaned over the Krenkl’s pallet, but saw only his own myriad reflections in those strange, golden eyes. There were no tears, could be no tears and, lacking them, how could the melancholic humor be bled?

The Krenkl’n were impaired in all expressions; their humors heightened by containment, like the black powder in one of Bacon’s paper tubes. They wept more deeply, angered more brightly, celebrated more wildly, idled more slowly. But they knew no poems, and sang no songs.

And yet, as a man might be happy who knew of naught else — happy before waterwheels and eye-glasses and mechanical clocks, when life was harder than in these more modern times — so too could the Krenken live content until finding themselves in the Hochwald.

Dietrich crossed to the outbuilding to obtain some grain with which to make a porridge. Upon the window sill, above the grain sack, sat the Kratzer’s flask. It was fashioned of a white, semi-opaque material that the Kratzer had named “rock-oil,” and the sun, passing through the clarified oilskin that served as a light in that window, cast the contents in shadow. Dietrich took the flask in hand.

He was not mistaken. The level had diminished.

Returning to the parsonage, Dietrich gazed down at the philosopher. I know now why you weep, my friend. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak, and the Kratzer’s dread had pulled the stopper that his revulsion had meant to keep sealed. “Do you know what he drank?” Dietrich asked the monk, who knelt in prayer.

Joachim’s murmurs stopped, and he nodded, once. “With this very spoon, I fed him. I poured into him his friends and companions. God moves mysteriously.” Then he sat back on his heels. “The body is but a husk; only the spirit is real. We respect our body as the image of God, but their bodies are not God’s image, and so might be used in ways not permitted to us.”

Dietrich did not contest the casuistry. He watched the Minorite scoop up the fine, dark-green granules that the Kratzer’s body expelled and pour them into a waste-bucket. “But if the body is consumed,” he asked, “what remains for the ressurection of the dead?”

Joachim wiped the creature clean. “What remains when worms consume it? Do not limit God. With Him, are all things possible.”

Shortly after the Nativity of John, a peddler arrived from the direction of Bear Valley, leading a pack mule full of goods. He prayed the Herr’s leave to set up a stall on the village green for a few days. A swarthy man with wide, thick moustaches, and with bangles on his wrists and two hoops of gold in his ears, he fired his tin-pot up and promised miracles of repair. He displayed also ornaments he had procured in the East. He gave the name of Imre and claimed Hungarian blood. He did a brisk business on sundry trifles, and mending pots and pans.

At Angelus the following day, Dietrich approached him as he packed his goods away for the night. “You have something, I fix?” the man asked.

“You are far from home,” Dietrich suggested.

That elicited a cheerful shrug. “Man stay home, man no peddler,’ the other replied. “Only Soprón shopkeeper. Sell to neighbors, what profit? What I make, they make. Here, when you see these things like I bring?” He dipped into a coffer and emerged with a white pallium done up in fishes and crosses and edged in bright colors of red and blue. “When see the scarf so fine?”

Dietrich pretended to study the material. “You’d fetch a better price for it in Vienna or Munich than in a little hill dorp.”

The man licked his lips and glanced to the side. He tugged on his moustache. “City guilds no like the peddlers; but here, how often see one?”

“More often than you may think, friend Imre. Freiburg is no great trek.” He did not mention that tales of demons had kept such traffic at bay of late. That Imre might spy an incautious Krenk was a chance to which Dietrich had resigned himself. “Now, if you would return to me Volkmar’s brooch, I will give you a word of advice. Substitutions of base metal are too bald for so small a village, where each man knows his few gauds with greater intimacy than do your city folk.” Imre grinned and dug into his scrip, retrieving the ornament. Dietrich checked the clasp on the back and saw that it had been repaired with considerable skill. “A man of your craft need not resort to such petty theft.” He handed over the tin piece that the peddler had substituted. “If you are once marked a thief, who will trade with you?”

Imre dropped the false brooch into his scrip with a careless shrug. “Men of skill must also eat. Think vogt want me sell for him brooch in Freiburg. Fool wife, keep money.”

“You would be advised to leave,” Dietrich told him. “Volkmar will talk to the others.”

Again, the man shrugged. “Peddler come, peddler go. Otherwise, no peddler.”

“But do not go to Strassburg or to Basel. The pest has appeared there.”

“Oho…” The Magyar looked east, toward Bear Valley. “So. Then I no go those places.”

The peddler returned to Oberhochwald three days later, although Dietrich did not learn of it until after noon. Manfred himself, riding at exercise with Eugen and one of the castle knights, came upon him on the track from Niederhochwald. Imre declared that he had private words for the Herr, and Manfred led him a little to the side. Eugen sat his horse close by and, on hearing the Herr gasp and thinking him treacherously struck, rendered the peddler senseless with the flat of his sword. This proved an injustice, as Manfred related to a council hastily called afterward in the great hall.

“The pest is come into the Breisgau,” he announced without preamble.