Eifelheim

XXII. June, 1349 Until Nones, The Seven Holy Brothers

The pest is stalking us, Dietrich thought. It had crept incrementally closer, from Berne to Basel to Strassburg, turning now to Freiburg. Would it come next into the mountains? It had crossed the Alps, so climbing the Katerinaberg would be no great feat.

“This Imre had reached the glade at Church-Garden,” Manfred continued, “where he encountered a party of Freiburgers riding at the canter toward the gorge. There were a dozen, all told: a merchant by his surcoat, his lady, maids and servants in livery, and a few others. They would have trampled our peddler down, had he not pulled his mules aside in haste. A bag fell from their pack horse as they passed, and the merchant ordered a servant to reharness the load, even as he and the others pressed on. The servant worked in terrible haste, spilling clothing and other goods and gathering them up again in clumsy fingers. Imre helped him re-secure it.”

“More likely he yanked it loose as it passed,” said Klaus, and the others tittered nervously.

Manfred did not smile. “That was when the servant told him of the pest, and that hundreds were each day dying in the Freiburg.”

“Did he verify the servant’s tale, mine Herr?” Everard insisted. “Perhaps the man exaggerated. Servants are notorious liars.”

Manfred spared him a curious glance. “Imre reasoned that if a man as educated as a guildmerchant deemed it wise to flee east, he would be a great fool himself to continue west. The servant with the pack horse quickly outdistanced Imre’s mules, yet Imre came upon his load shortly after, scattered along the trail up the gorge. He supposed that the roughness of the trail had caused the pack to come loose again and, lacking his master’s voice in his ear, the servant had this time abandoned all and fled. Imre thought the clothing too fine to lie deserted so he gathered them into his own pack.”

Klaus said, “I misdoubt he helped tie the man’s bundle with that very end in view.” He spoke too quickly and too sharply and rubbed one hand with the other as he looked at each councilor in turn.

“A little farther on,” Manfred continued grimly, “he came upon the body of the merchant’s lady, lying as she had fallen from her horse. Her face was deep blue and distended in agony, and she had vomited black bile over herself. Beside which, her neck was broken in the fall.”

Klaus had no quip his time. Everard had gone pale. Young Eugen caught his lip between his teeth. Baron Grosswald did not move. Dietrich crossed himself and prayed God’s mercy for the unknown woman. “And her husband stopped not to aid her?” he asked.

“Nor the servant. Imre says that in pity he placed over her form a blanket from the abandoned bundle, daring naught else. But,” and Manfred slumped a little in his high seat, “I have not said all. The peddler confessed that he had come west in flight. The pest was in Vienna already in May and in Munich this month, but he kept silence for fear we would expel him.”

At that, there were many exclamations. Everard cursed the peddler. Klaus exclaimed that Munich was, after all, many leagues distant, and the malady might travel north into Saxony, rather than west into Swabia. Eugen worried that the pest was surrounding them, east and west. Dietrich wondered about the Jews, who had set off in that direction with the Duke’s escort.

Baron Grosswald, silent until now, spoke up. “Illness stems from countless creatures, too small for thought and borne in divers ways — by touch, on the breath, in the shit or piss, in the spit, or even on the breeze. It matters not which way the roads wind.”

“Such foolishness!” Eugen cried.

“Not so,” said Dietrich, who had heard already this thesis from Hans, as well as from the krenkish physician. “Marcus Varro once proposed that very thing in De re rustica…”

“Which is very interesting, pastor,” said Klaus in a high, tight voice, “but this pest is not like other afflictions, and so may not spread like those of the monsters.” To Gschert: “Can you swear that what you say of your small-lives is true of us? I’ve heard your folk remark more than once on our differences.”

Gschert tossed his arm. “’What may be, may be; but what is, must be.’ I have other concerns than this mal odour of yours. You may live or you may die, however you may deny it, as the luck of the small-lives have it. As for us, we may only die.” The affectless tones of the talking head endowed his pronouncement with a fatal chill. Dietrich wanted to tell the monster that his reasoning had failed, had asserted the consequent. What must be is; but what is need not be, but can through the grace of God be changed.

But Manfred struck the table with the pommel of his dagger. Dietrich marked how white the knuckles were that held it. “Could your physician not mix for us a medicine?” the Herr asked. “If the pest is natural, then the treatment must be natural, and we have no theriac in the village.”

But Gschert shook his head in the human fashion. “No. Our bodies — and yours, I must suppose — have naturally many small lives within, with whom we live in balance. An ‘anti-life’ compound must take careful aim so that only the invader is slain. Your bodies are too strange to us; and we would not know friend from foe among your small-lives, even did our physician know the art. Subtle skills are called for in fashioning a compound to hunt and destroy an invading small-life. To create a new one from whole cloth, and for creatures whose bodies he does not know, is beyond him.”

Silence fell, and Manfred sat still for a time while the others watched. Then he pressed both palms to the table and pushed himself to his feet, and all eyes but Gschert’s turned to him.

“This is what we shall do,” Manfred announced. “Everyone knows it is death to have contact with the sick. So. We must cut ourselves off and have nothing to do with the outside. No one may use the road through the village. Any who come hither from Freiburg or elsewhere must pass around, through the fields. Anyone trying to enter the village will be turned away — by force of arms, if need be.”

Dietrich took a slow breath and studied his hands. Then he looked up to Manfred. “We are commanded to show charity to the sick.” A low sigh ran around the table. Some cast eyes down with shame; others glared at him.

Manfred rapped the table with his knuckles. “This is not uncharity,” he declared, “since we can do nothing to help them. Nothing! All we can do is allow the pest among us.”

That drew loud exclamations of assent from all save Dietrich and Eugen.

“There are rumors,” Manfred added, “that we harbor demons. Very well. Let it be known. Let the Krenken fly about at will. Let them be seen in St. Blasien and St. Peter; in Freiburg and Oberreid. If folk are too frightened to come here, we may yet keep this… this Death at bay.”

That evening, Dietrich organized a penitential procession for the morn to pray the intercession of the Holy Virgin and St. Catherine of Alexandria. The procession would be barefoot and in rags and the penitents would wear blessed ashes on their brows. Zimmerman would take the great cross down from above the altar and Klaus would carry it on his back. “A bit late for that, priest!” Everard complained when he was told of it. “You were sent to tell us God’s will! Why’d you not warn us of His anger years ago?”

“It is the end of the world,” Joachim said quietly, and perhaps even with satisfaction. “The end of the middle age. But the new age arrives! Peter departs; John comes! Who will be worthy to live through these times?” Yet, the monk’s eschatology perhaps meant no more than Everard’s complaints, or Klaus’ jokes, or Manfred’s severity.

After making the arrangements, Dietrich knelt in prayer in his room. Be mindful, O Lord, of thy covenant, he prayed, and say to the destroying angel: Now hold thy hand, and let not the land be made desolate, and destroy not every living soul. When he raised his eyes, he saw Lorenz’s strange iron crucifix and bethought himself of the smith. A strange and gentle man in whom God had blended both strength and mildness; a man who had died trying to save a monstrous stranger from an unseeable peril. What had God intended by that? And what had God intended by moving a violent and wrathful Krenk to take Lorenz’ name — and as much of his mildness as the krenkish nature could assume?

Rising from the pre-dieu, he saw Hans squatting knees-above-head behind him. Donning the head harness, he admonished his guest. “You must make some sound when you enter, friend grasshopper, or you shall kill me from surprise.”

A faint parting of the soft lips indicated a wan smile. “Among us, noise is evidence of clumsiness. In the atoms of our flesh, it is written that we make no sound, and the most silent are the most admired, and esteemed the most attractive. When our forefathers were animals, lacking thought and speech, we were prey to terrible flying things. And so, when we were pagans, we worshipped swooping, fearsome gods. Death was a release from fear — and our only prize.”

“’Do not be afraid.’ Our Lord said that more often than he said anything else.”

Hans clacked his side-lips. “Do you have the sentence in your head that tomorrow’s procession will halt this pest of yours, that it will bar the small-lives from the High Woods?”

“If it is as you say, no. No more than prayer can stay a charging horse. But that is not why we pray. God is no such cheap juggler as to play for a pfennig.”

“Why, then?”

“Because it will focus our minds on last things. All men die, as all krenken die. But how we approach that death matters, for we will receive another life according to our merits.”

“When your folk submit, you kneel before your Herr. Among us, we squat as you see.”

Dietrich accepted this, and after a moment he asked, “For what purpose have you prayed?”

“For thanks. If I must die, at least I have lived. If my companions have perished, at least I have known them. If the world is cruel, at least I have tasted kindness. I had to cross to the far side of the sky to taste it but, as you say, the world is full of miracles.”

“There is no hope, then, for your folk?”

“’One thing alone removes all chance of death; and that thing is death.’ But hear me, Dietrich, and I will tell you a sentence that my folk have learned. The body may be strengthened by an exercise of the spirit. Do you understand me? One man may welcome death, and so find it.

Another may may will himself to live, and in that will may lie the difference in their fates. So, if these prayers and processions muster your energia, you may better resist the entry of the small lives into your bodies. As for me, I have an answer to my own prayer.”

“And what is that?”

But Hans refused to say. He hopped to the bedside of the dying Kratzer and affixed to the wall before his eyes a brightly colored reproduction of the meadow-scene that Dietrich had first noted on the strange “view-slate” on the Kratzer’s desk. Hans then squatted by the bedside for a time in silence. Then he said, “For every Krenk, the sentence is that he would see his birth-nest once more. What you call his ‘heimat.’ However he fares through the world-inside-the-world, whatever wonders he finds in distant places, there gives always that place for him.”

Hans unfolded to his feet. “Our ship will sail,” he said. “In another week, perhaps two. No more.” Then without another word he left the parsonage.

During the week that followed the procession, a curious humor came over the folk of Oberhochwald. There gave much merriment and spontaneous laughter, and they told one another that Munich and Freiburg were far off and what happened there did not affect the high woods. Folk left their harrows to sport in the field. Volkmar Bauer gave Nickel Langermann a meat pie and his wife cared for little Peter, who had fallen ill with the murrain that had killed already his mother. Jakob Becker walked through the village and left a loaf of bread at each cottage and two at each hut and afterward visited the grave in which his son had been laid.

Gregor and his sons brought Theresia Gresch to Mass on the Fifth Sunday in Pentecost. This Mass was better attended than most, and afterward Gregor said that if people were frightened more often, the village would be a friendlier place, and he laughed as if at a great and terrible joke.

Dietrich gave thanks for the new-found concord but when, after that week, nothing had happened, the village slowly returned to normal. The free tenants once more spurned the gärtners and serfs; the horseplay in the fields ceased. Dietrich wondered if the penitential procession had, as Hans had suggested, strengthened their spririts to resist the bad air; but Joachim only laughed.

“How heartfelt is a penance that fades so soon?” He shook his head. “No, true contrition is longer, broader, deeper than that, for this sin was so long with us.”

“But the pest is not a punishment,” Dietrich insisted.

Joachim turned his eyes away. “Do not say that,” he whispered fiercely in the soft confines of the wooden church — and the statues seemed to whisper back in creaks and moans. “If it is not punishment, it is nothing; and it is too terrible a thing to be nothing.”

That night, quietly, the Kratzer died.

Joachim wept, for the philosopher had never accepted Christ and had died outside the arms of the Church. Hans said only, “Now, he knows.”

Dietrich, to comfort the servant of the talking head, said that God could save whom He would, and there was a limb of Heaven reserved for the virtuous pagans, a place of natural happiness.

“Do I experience that which you call ‘grief’?” the Krenk wondered. “We do not weep as you do; so perhaps we do not feel as you do. But there is a sentence in my head that I will see the Kratzer no more, that never more will he give me instruction, never more strike me for my faults. Since a long time, I have not paid homage to him — I use your term — and since that time, I have looked on him differently. Not as a servant looks on a master, but as one servant looks on another, for are we not both servants of a greater Lord? The sentence in my head is that this pleased him in some way, for even now I cannot bear that I have disappointed him.”

He turned to the window, where he stared down Church Hill to the village and beyond that to the Great Woods. “He would not drink, and I did. The strength he refused was mine to repair the ship. Which of us was right?”

“I do not know, my friend,” said Dietrich.

“Gschert drank, and did nothing.”

Dietrich did not answer him. The Krenk’s lips worked slowly.

After a time, the physician came with two other Krenken and they carried off the mortal remains of the Kratzer to their vessel, there to prepare him for the nourishment of others.

Friday, on the commemoration of the Seven Holy Brothers, the Krenken departed the High Woods. Manfred bade them a ceremonial farewell in his manor hall, inviting their leaders and those who had hosted them. To Shepherd he gave a necklace of pearls, while to Baron Grosswald he gave a coronet of silver to signify his rank. Perhaps for the only time, Dietrich thought the Krenken leader affected. He set the laurel upon his head with great care and, though Shepherd split her lips in the krenkish smile, the knights and armsmen present gave forth a loud “Hoch!” that startled the Krenken.

Manfred summoned Dietrich, Hilde, and Max. “I had not the heart to forbid it,” he said. “Their ship’s rudder has been fully repaired, and they have no cause any more to linger.” He paused. “If they stay, all will follow poor Kratzer to the tomb. As you three were the first to welcome them, I am sending you with them to bless their craft. I hope for their speedy return now that they know which winds carry them here. The baron Grosswald has promised to return with skilled physicians and apothecaries, who may aid us against the pest.”

“Mine Herr,” said Dietrich, “their rudder—” He could not continue and said only, “I, too, wish them fair winds and calm seas.”

They rode the Herr’s rouncies past golden fields to the clearing where the vessel lay. Dietrich suggested they picket the horses at the charcoal kiln and walk the rest of the way, lest the nearness of so many Krenken panic them. Dietrich noted that Max wore now a scrip on his belt in which nestled a hand-held pot de fer. “You have finally secured one, I see.”

Max grinned and slipped the machine from his scrip. “Hopping Max gave it me before they decamped for their ship.”

“What will you do when there are no more bullets for it?”

Max shrugged. “Is there a flaw in my weave? They’ve taught us how to make safely the black powder, and that is enough. To make bullets for this device wants arts mechanical which we do not have. The bullets we use for our slings are too irregular in size and shape. But it is a cunningly wrought piece, and I will keep it for its beauty and as a think-piece for the strange events of this past year.”

“Last night, Joachim begged Shepherd and others to stay.”

Max cocked his head. “He hates them so? If they stay, they die.”

“He believes that our great work was to win these creatures to Christ, and this labor alone has kept the pest from our homes. If the Krenken depart unbaptized, he says, the pest will come.”

Max laughed. “He calls them demons still? I’ve helped cart too many of their bodies to believe that any more.”

Hilde joined them at the base of the ridge. She handed Dietrich the bundle that contained his vestments. Max carried the bucket and the aspergum. “It will please me when they are gone,” she said, “and matters put back in order.”

Dietrich took his companions by the hand. “Have your own guests said aught about this voyage to you? Shepherd? Augustus? Any of them?”

“Why?” said Max. “What is wrong?”

Dietrich released them. “I do not know whether this is a terrible sin or a wonderful act of hope. Come.” With that, he led the way up the ridge and down the other side, where the Krenken stood about in divers attitudes, preparing to embark. They were fewer than before, and many were in the extremes of their particular illness, their skin having mottled. Most of these stood or squatted alone, but a few were supported by their fellows or carried in pallets. They stood in silence.

Baron Grosswald had erected a table and cunning machines to repeat in Krenkish Dietrich’s words. “You must make swift,” he said over the private canal, “or our resolve may falter.” Dietrich nodded to show that he had heard, and donned the purple vestments used in the Mass for Pilgrims and Travelers. He would not celebrate the Mass, of course, but the prayers were of special merit to the occasion.

He crossed himself. “In nómine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…” A few of the Krenken repeated the gesture. The wind whipped through the trees, bending the branches and causing them to bow.

“Rédime me, Dómine,” he prayed for his guests. “Redeem me, O Herr, and have mercy on me: for my foot has stood on the straight path. Judge us, O Herr, for we have traveled in innocence. If we should walk in the shadow of death, we will fear no evil, for Thou art with us.

“Direct our steps according to Thy word; and let no iniquity have dominion over us. God has given his angels charge over us, to keep us in all thy ways. In their hands, they will bear us up, lest we dash our foot against a stone.

“Perfect Thou, O Herr, our goings and our comings, that our footsteps be not moved from the straight path. Incline Thy ear and hear my words. Show forth Thy wonderful mercies.” Then, raising his arms, he cried, “Send Thy grace before these pilgrims to guide their steps, and let it follow after them and accompany them in their paths, so that by the protection of Thy mercy, we may rejoice in both their progress and in their safety.”

Dietrich progressed around the vessel, blessing it with holy water which Max carried in the bucket for him, and finished by drawing the sign of the cross over the assembled Krenken, saying, “Go with God.” After this, the pilgrims, still silent, filed on board their ship. Some of them bowed or genuflected to Dietrich as they passed, though he did not think they meant more than courtesy. “Good-bye, my Krenkl’n,” he said again and again. “May God go with you.” One replied over the private voice-canal, “I will carry your message of charitas home with me.” Dietrich gave her a particular blessing even while his eyes searched among the passing figures.

“What seek you?” Max asked him.

“A face.” Yet, in an odd fashion, while he had learned to mark individuals, seeing the Krenken now standing in ranks, their particulars faded once more into the sameness he had perceived on his earliest encounters. It was as if, on the cusp of their departure, they had grown once more indistinct.

Perhaps Hans and the others, bound by duty to their posts, were already inside.

Some Krenken hesitated at the ramp and a few made to turn back. These, Grosswald’s henchmen encouraged with blows and shoves. One of the henchmen was Friedrich, who had stood with Hans when Hans and Gottfried had defied Grosswald. He froze on noticing Dietrich’s regard, then pushed his way through the jostling pilgrims into the ship.

Shepherd and Grosswald were last to board. The captain of the ship paused and seemed about to speak, but then he merely smiled in the krenkish manner. “Perhaps the magic works.”

Shepherd was the last. She stood halfway up the ramp and looked about the clearing. “Strange world; strange folk,” she said. “Lovely, but deadly. There worse shores on which to beach, but none so cruel.” She turned to go, but Dietrich held out the three head harnesses.

“We won’t need these any more,” he said, though Shepherd would not understand now that he had taken it off.

But Shepherd only touched the mikrofoneh with a fingertip and pressed them back on Dietrich, along with her own. At the head of the ramp, she chittered a last, untranslated statement, then she was inside and the door closed upon her and the ramp clanked into its recess.

Dietrich intended to watch the vessel out of sight, for he was consumed by a curiosity as to how it proposed to do so. Hans had insisted that it moved on a cushion of magnetism in a direction “inside of all direction.” Dietrich had read Pierre Maricourt’s Epistola de magnete in Paris, and he remembered that magnets had two poles and that like poles repelled each other, so what Hans had told him was allowed by natural philosophy. But what had Hans meant when he said that these “inner directions” receded without regard to where one stood? Maricourt — Bacon’s “Master Peter” — had written also that an investigator “diligent in the use of his own hands… will in a short time correct an error which he would never do in eternity by his knowledge of natural philosophy and mathematics alone.” And so, Dietrich determined to watch the krenkish ship recede and, if he and Max and Hilde watched from different points, test the proposition that it would recede in all directions at once.

Yet, after he had explained his experientia, and Max and Hilde went toward their assigned positions, several Krenken bounded down upon them and, seizing them in their long serrated arms, carried them away behind the far side of the ridge.

The Krenken pinned them to the loam and held them motionless. Max shouted and tried in vain to reach his pot de fer. Hilde screamed. Dietrich’s heart beat against his ribs like a captive bird. The Krenk who held him to the ground ground his side-lips together, but Dietrich could make nothing of it without the head harness. Hilde subsided into heaving sobs.

“Hans?” said Dietrich, for the Krenk who held him to the earth wore leather hose and a loose blouse of homespun that fit ill on his frame. The Krenk had opened its mandibles, perhaps to answer, perhaps to bite Dietrich’s neck in two, when a sudden wind swayed the upper reaches of the spruces and birch. Limbs creaked, birds took wing. Deer bolted through the underbrush. An odd tension gripped Dietrich and he sucked in his breath and waited. It was like the morn when the Krenken arrived, only not so strong.

Terror and unease flowed through him like the mill stream over the wheel. The wind rose to a howl and lightning snapped like bolts from a cross-bow, striking trees all about and causing branches to burst. The thunder claps echoed off the Katerinaberg, piled one upon the other, died slowly away.

The brief storm ended. The trees bowed for a moment, then steadied. The Krenken who had pinned Dietrich and his companions to the earth straightened and stood very still while their antennae waved about. Dietrich, too, sniffed the air and detected a faint odor at once metallic and pungent. The krenkish heads moved fractionally and Dietrich understood that they were looking at one another. Hans clicked something and Gottfried stepped forward from where he had been waiting in the trees with several large coffers and sundry equipments and climbed to the top of the slope.

From there, he chittered something short and intense and those holding Max and Hilde and four others waiting in the woods bounded towards the top of the ridge, where, after several loud rounds of clacks, they poked one another with stiffened fingertips.

Dietrich and Max climbed to their feet. A moment longer, and Hilde joined them. They followed the eight Krenken to the ridgetop.

The clearing below lay empty.

All that remained of the great vessel were the stumps of many trees, the broken remnants of others, and a scattering of debris overlooked or ignored in the departure. One by one, the Krenken bounded down the slope, where they stood in utter silence.

One bent and retrieved some object from the ground, which he held indifferently, but which Dietrich, watching from the ridge, knew he studied with great intensity, for he twisted it first one way, then another, which is what the Krenken often did to sharpen the vision of their strange eyes.

“That device,” said Hilde, and Max and Dietrich both turned to her. “I saw it often in the hands of their children. It is some plaything.”

Below, the Krenken squatted and hugged their knees high above their heads.