Eifelheim

XXIV. July, 1349 At Primes, The Commemoration of St. Hilarinus

Thursday dawned and the wind blew hot and from the west, hissing through the black spruce and the stirring the half-grown wheat. The heavens faded into a blue so pale as to be alabaster. In the distance, toward the Breisgau, small, dark plumes rose, suggesting fires in the lowlands. The air twisted from the heat, conjuring half-seen, invisible creatures to stalk the land.

Dietrich sat by Joachim’s cot and the young man turned his back so that Dietrich could annoit the welts. Dietrich dipped his fingers in the bowl he had prepared and smeared the ointment gently on the wounds. The Minorite shuddered at the touch. “You might have died,” Dietrich chided him.

“All men die,” Joachim answered. “It is only a matter of when and how. What concern is it of yours?”

Dietrich set the bowl aside. “I have grown accustomed to having you about.”

As he rose, Joachim twisted to face him. “How goes it with the village?”

“It has been three days, with no further afflictions. Folk are telling one another that the pest has moved on. Many have returned to work.”

“Then my sacrifice has not been in vain.” Joachim closed his eyes and laid his head back. In moments, he was again asleep.

Dietrich shook his head. How could he say that the boy was wrong?

When Dietrich left the parsonage to ready the church for Mass, he saw One-eyed Herwyg, Gregor and his sons, and others were on their way to the field, hoes or mowing scythes across their shoulders. Jakob’s oven was lit, and Klaus’ mill turning. Only the forge stood yet cold and silent.

Dietrich remembered how Lorenz would stand by the anvil, sweaty in his apron, and wave to him from below. Perhaps Wanda had found a man’s task at last too much. Or perhaps she lacked for charcoal.

He made his way downhill, past the sheepfold, where stood a bare handful, all uncertain and with a sickly mien. The decimation of the village beasts had passed barely remarked for the greater dread of the pest. Cattle and sheep had fallen to the murrain. Rats, too, lay about, though that was a blessing. Herwyg’s dog barked, sat, and scratched furiously at his fleas.

Dietrich stepped inside the open-walled smithy, picked up a hammer that lay upon the anvil, and cradled it in his two hands, finding it curiously heavy. Lorenz had swung it one-handed high over his head, yet Dietrich could barely lift it. A barrel of ox-shoes and another of horse-shoes stood nearby. In the quenching barrel, a green film had grown on the suface of the water.

A raven’s cry drew his attention. He watched it circle, drop into the smithy’s back garden, then rise again. And circle.

Dropping the hammer, Dietrich rushed out the rear exit, and there he found Wanda Schmidt sprawled upon her back amidst the beans and cabbage, arms waving as if reaching toward the sky. Her tongue, black and swollen, protruded from dry cracked lips. The raven swooped again, and Dietrich chased it off with a stick.

“Water,” the prostrate woman gasped. Dietrich returned to the smithy, found a cup by the quenching barrel, and filled it. But when he extended the cup to the stricken woman, her thrashing arms batted it away. Her face was red with fever, so he found a rag, soaked it in water, and laid it across the woman’s brow.

Wanda shrieked, arching her back and flailing her arms until she had knocked the cloth aside. Retrieving it, Dietrich found the rag already dry. He crumpled the rag in his hands, and sank to his haunches. Why, O Lord? he pleaded. Why?

Yet that was an impious thought. This pest comes not from God, he reminded himself, but from some mal odour borne on the wind. Everard had breathed it; now Wanda had, too. She had had no late contact with the steward, so the krenkish theory of small-lives jumping from man to man seemed now proven false. Yet there must be reason to it. God had “ordered all things by measure, weight, and number,” and so by measuring and weighing and numbering, mere men could learn the “eternal ordinances by which He set the courses of the stars and the tides of the sea.”

Wanda cried out, and Dietrich edged away. The mere glance of a stricken one could infect. Blue flames shot forth from the eyes. The only safety lay in flight. He scrabbled to his feet, and backed through the smithy to the high street, where he stood breathing rapidly.

Without, all seemed in order. He heard the rasping saw from Boettcher’s cooperage, the sheering cry of a hawk circling high over the autumn fields. He saw Ambach’s pig rooting through the garbage along the high road, the flash off the water dripping from the mill’s paddlewheel. He felt the wind’s hot breath on his cheek.

Wanda was too large a woman to move alone. He must run for help, he told himself. He ran first to the stoneyard, but Gregor had taken his sons out to mow hay. Then, recalling that Klaus and Wanda had lain together, he ran to the western end of the village.

Odo swung the upper door open, but gazed at Dietrich without recognition. “The curse is complete,” the old man said, a riddle he forebore explaining. Dietrich reached past him and, unlatching the lower door, pushed his way inside. “Klaus!” he shouted. Old Schweinfurt stood by the open door, gazing upon the empty street. A groan issued from above, and Dietrich scrambled up the ladder to the sleeping loft.

There, he found the miller upon a three-legged stool drawn close to the bed. The bed boasted a headboard and, at its foot, an oaken chest with iron hinges and carved with the image of a water-wheel. Upon the bed lay a mattress stuffed with ticking and, upon the mattress, lay Hilde.

Her golden hair was twisted and matted with sweat, and her frame racked by coughs. She stared with near-krenkish eyes. “Summon pastor Dietrich,” she cried. “Dietrich!”

“Here,” Dietrich said, and Klaus jerked to that soft statement where he had not reacted to the earlier knocks and shouts. Without turning, he said, “She complained of headaches when she awoke and I thought little of it and went to start the wheel. Then…”

“Dietrich!” cried Hilde.

Dietrich knelt beside the bed. “Here I am.”

“No! No! Bring the pastor to me!”

Dietrich touched her gently on the shoulder, but the woman jerked away.

“She has lost her wits,” Klaus said, in a voice preternaturally calm.

“Have the boils appeared?”

The maier shook his head. “I know not.”

“If I may lift her gown up to inspect…?”

The miller stared at Dietrich for a moment, then began to laugh. They were great rolling laughs that shook his frame and died abruptly. “Pastor,” he said gravely, “you are the only man in this dorp who has prayed my grace before looking.” He moved aside.

Dietrich lifted the night gown and was relieved to find no swellings in her groin, though reddish spots near her secret place showed where they intended their appearance. When he tried to look at her chest and under her arms, the gown caught and she flailed about. “Max!” she said. “Send for Max! He will protect me!”

“Will you give her the last rites?” Klaus asked.

“Not yet. Klaus…,” he hesitated, but then said nothing about Wanda. The miller would not leave his wife in this condition. When he rose, and Hilde clutched at his robe. “Fetch Dietrich,” she begged him.

“Ja doch,” Dietrich answered unfastening her grip. “I go now to fetch him.”

Outside, he paused for breath. God was a clever sort. Dietrich had run from the pest in one house, only to find it in another.

Hans and Gottfried had helped him move Wanda to her bed. When Dietrich returned to the parsonage, Joachim took one look at his face. “The pest!” he said. At Dietrich’s nod, he threw his head back and cried, “O God, I have failed You!”

Dietrich laid a hand on his shoulder. “You have failed no one.”

He shrugged off the touch. “The Krenken are gone back to Hell unshriven!”

When Dietrich turned away, Joachim snatched his sleeve. “You cannot let them die alone.”

“I know. I go to Manfred to pray his grace for a hospice.”

He found the Herr in the great hall, sitting between a roaring fire in the hearth and a second built in a large cauldron placed on the other side of the room. The entire household had huddled there, even Imre the peddler. Servants came and went, bearing wood to feed the fires. They left slowly and returned quickly.

Manfred, who sat at the council table scratching with a pen on a sheet of parchment, spoke without looking up. “The fires worked for your pope. De Chauliac recommended it when I bespoke him in Avignon. The element of fire destroys the bad air…” He waved the pen in dismissal. “…somehow. I leave science to those trained in it.” His eyes darted to the corners of the room, as if he might spy the pest lurking there. Then he bent once more to the parchment.

Fire might be effective, Dietrich thought, since it loosened the stiffened mass of bad air and caused it to rise. Bells, too, might break up the mass by shaking the air. But if the pest was carried by innumerable “mikrobiota,” Dietrich did not see where the flames would help — unless, like moths, the small-lives were drawn to the fire for self-immolation. Of these thoughts he said nothing. “Mine Herr, Wanda Schmidt and Hilde Müller have been struck by the pest.”

“I know. Heloïse Krenkerin warned us by the farspeaker. What do you want of me?”

“I pray your grace to establish a hospital. Soon, I fear, too many will lie ill to—”

Manfred tapped the pen against the table, blunting its point. “You stand too much on ceremony. A hospital. Ja, doch. So be it.” He waved a hand. “For what good it may do.”

“If we cannot save their lives,” Dietrich said, “we can at least make their dying gentler.”

“A great comfort that must be. Max!” He dusted the parchment and folded it in quarters. In a gobbet of wax poured off a candle, he impressed his signet. He studied the ring afterward, twisting it a little on his finger. Then he looked to little Irmgard who stood close by with her nurse, snuffling through her tears, and he smiled briefly at her. He handed Max the letter and another that he had already finished. “Take these to the Oberreid road and give them to the first respectable-looking travelers you see. One is for the Baden Markgraf, the other for the Hapsburg Duke. Freiburg and Vienna have already their own problems, but they ought to know what has befallen here. Gunther, go with, and saddle a mount for him.”

Max looked unhappy, but he bowed his head and, pulling his gloves from his belt, strode toward the door. Gunther followed, looking, if possible, even less happy.

Manfred shook his head. “I fear death is in this house. Everard fell after he exited this very room. How fares he?”

“Quieter. May I move him to the hospital?”

“Do what you think needful. Do not ask my permission again. I am taking everyone to the schloss. I barred folk from entering the village and none heeded me. Now Odo has brought this on us. The schildmauer at least I can bar against intruders. Each man must look now to his own house and to his own kin.”

Dietrich swallowed. “Mine Herr, all men are brothers.”

Manfred made a long, sad face. “Then you have much work ahead.”

Dietrich called on Ulf and Heloïse to carry Everard to the make-shift hospital in the smithy. Neither Krenkl had yet accepted Christ. They had stayed, Hans had suggested, because their fear of death in the “gap between the worlds” exceeded their fear of death by starvation. But when he asked Ulf about this, the Krenk only laughed. “I fear nothing,” he bragged over the private canal.

“Krenk die. Men die. One must die well.”

“With charitas in the heart.”

An arm toss. “There is no ‘charitas,’ only courage and honor. One dies without fear, in defiance of the Swooper. Not that one believes, naturally, in the Swooper, but it is a saying of ours.”

“Then why did you stay behind when your vessel left, if not from dread of this ‘Gap’?”

Ulf indicated the Krenkerin striding ahead of them. “Because the Heloïse stayed. I promised our spouse -. Understand you our man-woman-nurse? Good. The nurse stays always at the nest. I swore a… a blood-oath to it that I would by our Heloïse stay. Some truth-seekers claim that the Gap lacks time, and so prolongs death forever. The Heloïse feared that above all. By me, is all death the same, and I snap my jaws at it. I stayed because of my oath.”

The stench, when they entered Everard’s cottage, was a palpable thing. The steward lay naked upon his bed, save for a dry, filthy rag placed over his brow. Dark blue-black lines ran up his limbs from from the groin and armpits. Of Yrmegard or Witold, there was no sign. Dietrich bent over Everard, thinking him dead, but the man’s eyes flew open and he half-rose in the bed. “Mother of God!” he cried.

“I must lance the boils before we move him,” Dietrich said to Ulf, gently pressing the steward supine. The black rivers of poison running out the arms and legs suggested that he was already too late. “Where are your wife and child?” he asked Everard. “Who cares for you?”

“Mother of God!” The steward clawed at himself, raking his skin with his nails, and shrieking. Then, abrubtly, he lay back quietly, panting and gasping, as if he had repelled an assault from the ramparts and was resting now for the next attack.

Dietrich had washed the knife already in sour wine, and Ulf suggested heating it in the fire as well. The hearth smoldered in sullen red embers. No firewood stood ready. She has fled, Dietrich thought. Yrmegard has abandoned her husband. He wondered if Everard knew.

The boils were as large as apples, the skin stretched tight and shining around them. He chose the one under the right arm and touched it with the point of his scalpel.

Everard howled and thrashed, striking Dietrich with his fist and knocking the scalpel from his hand. Dietrich knelt, seeing double from the blow, then groped among the rushes for the fallen blade. When he rose, Everard lay on his side, hugging his arms tight against himself and with his knees drawn up. Dietrich walked to the stool beside the bed and sat for a moment, rubbing his temple and thinking. Then he called Hans by the farspeaker.

“There is a basket in my shed, marked with the cross of the Hospitallers,” he told his friend. “Bring to the steward’s cottage one of the sponges you will find in it — but handle it with care. It has steeped in mandrake and other poisons.”

Hans arrived soon, and stood with the other Krenken to watch. Dietrich moistened the sponge in the water barrel behind the cottage and returned, holding it at arm’s length. Then, as the Savoyard had instructed, he held it firmly against Everard’s nose and mouth while the steward clawed at his hands. Long enough for sleep, the Savoyard had said, but not so long as for death. Everard went suddenly limp, and Dietrich tossed the sponge into the fire. Too long? No, the man’s chest rose and fell. Dietrich crossed himself. “Blessed Jesus, guide my hand.”

The blade’s touch did not awaken the steward, but he groaned and struggled a little. Hans and Ulf held his limbs steady. The boil was tough and Dietrich pressed harder with the point.

Suddenly, it split, and a vile, suppurating black filth oozed forth, bearing with it the most abominable stench. Dietrich clenched his teeth and applied himself to the remaining boils.

When he was done, Heloïse handed him a rag that she had meanwhile boiled and soaked in vinegar. With this, Dietrich mopped up the slime and cleaned the man’s body as best he could. “I would not touch the pus,’ Ulf advised, and Dietrich, who had had no such intention, ran outside and bent double, vomiting out that morning’s breakfast and gulping in great gasps of mountain air. Hans, following, touched him briefly several times. “It was bad?”

Dietrich gasped. “Very bad.”

“My…” Hans touched his antennae briefly. “I must wash them.” Then he said, “The steward will not live.”

Dietrich blew his breath out. “We must ever hope, but… I think you are right. His wife has taken their boy and run off. He has none to care for him.”

“Then we will do it.”

They placed Everard on an ambulance that Zimmerman had fashioned, and Ulf and Heloïse took up the handles before and after. Dietrich walked alongside and held the litter steady as they negotiated the hill. He remembered how St. Ephraem the Syrian had fashioned three hundred ambulances during a famine in Mesopotamia. We will need more, he told himself.

Hans stayed to burn all the rags and clothing, and kill whatever small-lives they harbored. Ulf called to him. “Save a portion of the pus for my inspection.”

“Why did you ask that?” Dietrich said as they proceeded down the hill.

“I labored with the instruments in our craft’s lazar,” Ulf told him. “We have a device, which Gshert left with us, that enables us to see the small-lives.”

Dietrich nodded, though he did not understand. Then he asked, suddenly, “Why do you help us with the sick, if you have no faith in charitas?”

The pagan Krenk tossed his arm. “The Hans is now the krenkish Herr, so I follow him. Beside, it employs my days.”

Which was, withal, a krenkish sort of answer.

Wanda Schmidt died the next day, on the Commemoration of St. Maternus of Milan. She kicked and writhed and bit her own tongue in twain. Black blood welled up from within her and spilled forth from her mouth. She heard not the words of comfort that Gottfried Krenk spoke to her; perhaps she did not even feel the gentle pokes which stood among his kind for caresses.

Afterward, Gottfried accosted Dietrich. “The Herr-from-the-sky would not save the woman of the blessed Lorenz. Wherefore did we pray His aid?”

Dietrich shook his head. “All men die when God calls them back to Himself.”

And Gottfried answered, “Could he not have called her more softly?”

Klaus and Odo brought Hilde to the hospital on an ambulance that they carried between them. When they had lain her on a pallet in the smithy, near the fire that Dietrich had built in the furnace, Klaus bid Odo return to the house, and the old man nodded distractedly, and said, “Tell Hilde to hurry back and cook my dinner.”

Klaus watched him go. “He sits on the stool before the fireplace, and stares into dry ashes. When I enter the room, he turns his eyes toward me for only a moment before he is drawn back to the fascination of cinders. I think he is already dead — in here.” He beat his breast. “All else is mere ceremony.” He knelt to stroke Hilde’s hair. “The beasts are dying, too,” he said. “Along the roadside I saw dead rats, several cats, and Herwyg’s old hound. One-eye will miss that dog.”

Dear God, Dietrich prayed, will you scour the earth of all living things? “What is this?’ he asked, fingering the sleeve of Klaus’ jerkin. “It looks like blood. Has she vomited blood?”

Klaus dropped his eyes to the stains and stared at them as if he had never seen them before. “No,’ he said. He touched one of the spots with his fingertip, but it came away with no color, so the blood there was already dried. “No. I… I followed…’

But whatever the miller had been about to say was lost to his hesitation, for Hilde rose from her sickbed and stood suddenly upright. At first, Dietrich thought it a miracle; but the woman began to turn and spin and sing la-la-la, flailing her arms. Klaus clutched at her, but her arm struck him a mighty blow to the cheek that nearly felled him.

Dietrich went to the pallet’s other side and tried to grab one arm while Klaus grabbed the other. He took hold of her wrist and used his own weight to bear her down. Klaus did the same. Hilde continued to twist side to side, singing wordlessly. Then, abruptly, she ceased and lay still. Klaus’ head snapped up. “Has she…?”

“No. No, she breathes.”

“What does it mean? The dancing.”

Dietrich shook his head. “I know not…” Her pustules were grown large, but there were yet no streaks of poison on her arms. “May I see her legs?” Wordlessly, Klaus lifted Hilde’s skirt, and Dietrich studied her groin and thighs and was relieved to see no streaks there, either. “Gottfried,” he called, “bring the old wine.”

Klaus dipped his head. “Ja, ja, I need also a drink. Will she rest now?”

“It’s not to drink. I must wash my lance.”

Klaus laughed suddenly, then reverted to morose silence.

Gottfried brought a pot of vinegar and Dietrich washed the blade in it. Then he held it in the smithy fire until the handle became hot. He would not chance the soporific sponge this time. Those he must save for ones like Everard, where the chance of life and the risk of death were more closely balanced.

“Hold the bowl,” Dietrich said to Gottfried, handing him a clay basin. “When I lance the pustule,” he added to Klaus, “the pus must drain into the bowl. Ulf said that we must not let our flesh contact it, but the Krenkl do not believe it affects them.”

“There is but one way to discover that,” said Gottfried.

“He is a wise demon, then.” Klaus studied the Krenkl. “She took care of them; now they take care of her. I understand the one act no better than the other.” He stared at the knife.

“Fear not,” Dietrich said. “De Chauliac told Manfred that this course was often effective, if not delayed too long.”

“Cut then! I could not bear it should she—”

Dietrich had honed the lance to razor-keenness. He brought it through the pustule with a clean stroke. Hilde gasped and arched her back, though she did not scream as Everard had. Dietrich had firm hold of her arm and the putrescence spilled into Gottfried’s bowl. He looked to see if it contained blood and was relieved to see that it did not.

Though less vile than Everard’s eruptions, the pus stank badly enough. Klaus gulped and retained his stomach by sheer will, though he did recoil.

Soon, the grim effort was over. Dietrich poured more of the vinegar over the wounds. He was uncertain why this might be efficacious, but medical doctors had taught so since the great age of Aquinas. Vinegar burned, so perhaps the element of fire burned out the small-lives.

Afterward, Dietrich walked with Klaus to Walpurga Honig’s cottage, where they sat on the bench before it. Klaus rapped his knuckles on the window shutter and, a moment later, the alewife opened it and shoved a pot of ale into his hands. She glanced at Dietrich, reappeared with a second pot; then slammed and bolted the shutter. The sudden noise started little Atiulf Kohlmann, sitting in the dirt across the street, and he cried out for his mommy.

“Everyone is afraid,” Klaus said, with a gesture of the pot. He took a sip, closed his eyes and began to weep, the pot dropping from nerveless fingers and spilling his ale in the dirt. “I don’t understand,” he said after a time. “Has she wanted for anything? Her mere word was its purchase. Brocades, girdles, wimples. Silken small-clothes one time in the Freiburg — Italian work, and did that not cost me? ‘French paint’ for her face. I put food on her table, a roof over her head — and not a hut like her father’s. No, a wooden building with a stone fire-place and a chimney to heat the bed-loft. I gave her two fine children and, while God saw fit to call the boy back too young, I saw our ‘Phye fairly wed to a Freiburg merchant. Only God knows how Freiburg fares this day.” He studied his hands and wrung one with the other. He looked east, toward the lowlands.

“Yet she seeks other men,” he said. “Everyone knows it, but I must pretend otherwise — and take my little revenges when I weigh out the meal. I jested when I lifted her skirt for you. But I think now you really were the last man in Oberhochwald to see that sight; though I did not think so at one time. I thought you went into the woods to be with her, pastor. Priest though you are, you’re a man. So I followed one day. That was when I saw the monsters for the first time. Yet they were not so terrible a sight as my Hilde, splayed upon a bed of forest leaves while that crude sergeant entered her.”

Dietrich remembered one of the miller’s horses tethered in the clearing and thinking then that it was Hilde’s. “Klaus -,” he said, but the miller continued with no indication of having heard.

“I’m an agile man in the marriage bed. Not so agile as in my spring, but I’ve had no complaint from others. Oh, yes, I’ve swyved other women. What choice had I? Your choice? No, I burn like your Paul. I don’t know why she turns from me. Do other men speak sweeter words? Are their lips more agreeable?”

And now the miller raised his eyes to look at Dietrich squarely. “You could tell her. You could make it a commandment. But… I don’t want her submission. I want her love, and I can’t have that, and I don’t know why.

“I saw her first in her father’s swineyard, feeding the pigs. Her feet were bare in the muck, but I saw the princess in the mire. I was apprenticed to old Heinrich — Altenbach’s father, that was — who held the Herr’s mill before me, so my prospects were good. My Beatrix had died in that terrible winter of ’15, and all our children with her, so my seed would die with me, unless I wed again. I proposed a marriage to her father and paid merchet and the Herr consented. No woman here ever had so fine a wedding-feast, save only the Herr’s own Kunigund! I learned that night that she was no virgin, but what woman is by that age? It did not bother me then. Perhaps it should have.”

Dietrich laid a hand on Klaus’ shoulder. “What will you do now?”

“He was not gentle with her, that pig sergeant. For him, just another ‘loch.’”

“Wanda Schmidt has died.”

Klaus nodded slowly. “That sorrows me. We were good friends. We shared the same lack, but filled it with each other. I know it was a sin, but…”

“A small sin,” Dietrich assured him. “There was no evil, I think in either of you.”

Klaus laughed. His thick-set body shook like an earthquake in a barrel, and tears started in the corners of his eyes. “How often,” he said when the laughter had settled into melancholy, “in your dry, scholastic sermons, have I heard you say that an ‘evil’ is the lack of a ‘good’? So, tell me, priest,” and the eyes he turned on Dietrich overflowed with emptiness, “what man had ever lacked as much as I have?”

They sat in silence. Dietrich handed the miller the pot of ale he held and the miller drank from it. “My sins,” he said. “My sins.”

“Everard is dead also,” Dietrich told him, and Klaus nodded. “And Franzl Long-nose from the castle. They put his body outside the walls this morning.” He looked toward the towers behind the battlements. “How fares Manfred?”

“I don’t know.”

Klaus set both pots on the sill for Wanda to take back. “I wonder if we ever will.”

“And the Unterbaums are gone,” Dietrich said. “Konrad, his wife, their two surviving children…”

“Toward Bear Valley, I hope,” said Klaus. “Only a fool would hie for the Breisgau with the pest in Freiburg. Where is Atiulf’s mother?”

They stood and crossed to the boy crying in the dirt. “What is it, my small?” Dietrich asked, kneeling beside the lad.

“Mommi!” Atiulf howled. “Want mommi!” He ran out of breath and sucked in for a great bellow that ended in a paroxysm of phegmy coughing.

“Where is she?” Dietrich asked.

“Don’t know! Mommi, I don’t feel good!”

“Where is your father?”

“Don’t know! Vatti, make it stop!” Then the couging racked his body once again.

“And your sister, Anna?”

“Anna’s sleeping. Don’t wake her! Mommi said.”

Dietrich looked at Klaus, and Klaus looked at him. Then they both looked at the cottage door. The maier set his jaw. “I suppose we must…”

Klaus opened the door and stepped inside, and Dietrich, with the boy in hand, followed.

There was no sign of Norbert and Adelheid, but Anna lay on a pallet of straw, with a countenance of peace and contentment.

“Dead,” Klaus announced. “Yet not a sign on her. Not like poor Everard.”

“Atiulf,” said Dietrich sternly, “was your sister ill when you went to bed last night?” The boy, still whimpering, shook his head. Dietrich looked to Klaus, who said, “Sometimes the murrain strikes people so, when it enters the mouth instead of the skin. Perhaps the pest acts the same way. Or she has died from grief over that boy.”

“Bertam Unterbaum.”

“I would have thought better of Norbert,” Klaus said, “than that he left his boy to die.”

Reason would have told him to fly, Dietrich thought. If the boy was doomed, what purpose was served by staying — and falling himself victim? And so all reasonable people had fled — from ancient Alexandria, from Constantine’s plague-wracked army, from the Paris Hospital.

Klaus picked the boy up in his arms. “I will take him to the hospital. If he lives, he will be my son.” Norbert had acted contrary to his temperament, but Klaus’s offer was astonishing. Dietrich offered a blessing and they parted company. Dietrich continued toward the Bear Valley end of the village for no other reason than that he had started out in that direction.

A cottage door flew open and Ilse Ackermann ran from it with Maria in her arms. “My little Maria! My little Maria!” she shrieked over and over. The girl was a blackened figure soiled with vomit, with lips and tongue dark blue, and blood flowing freely from her mouth. She exuded the pest’s peculiar odor. Before Ilse could say more, the girl spasmed and died.

The woman cried out one more time and dropped her daughter to the ground, where she lay like the blackened doll that the selfsame girl had rescued from the fire. The pest seemed to have invaded every thumb’s-length of her body, rotting it from within. Dietrich backed off in horror. This sight was more dreadful than Hilde with her delerium, or even Wanda with her blackened, lolling tongue. This was Death in all his awful majesty.

Ilse threw hands to her face, and ran off toward the autumn field where Felix labored, leaving her daughter in the dirt behind her.

Death had buffeted Dietrich from all sides and too quickly. Everard, Franzl, Wanda, Anna, Maria. Peaceful or agonizing; long or short; rotting with stench or simply falling asleep. There was no order to it, no lawfulness. Dietrich quickened his pace. The pest, after three days rest, had redoubled its efforts.

Vile fruit dangled from the linden tree in the green: a human figure twisted in the hot July breeze. It was Odo, Dietrich saw as he edged closer, and he thought first of suicide. But the rope was tied to the trunk and there was nothing under his feet from which he might have jumped. Then he understood. Returning to his son-in-law’s house, Odo had been waylaid and killed for the sin of bringing the pest.

Dietrich could endure no more. He ran. His sandals clapped against the wooden planks of the mill stream bridge and found the Bear Valley road. The track was baked hard in the sun, except where it ran between the swell of the land. Here, the rivulet had turned it to mud, which splattered Dietrich’s legs as he splashed through it. At the bend, he came upon one of the Herr’s rouncies, a gray one, fully saddled and caparisoned, nibbling from some succulent bush by the pathside.

A sign! he thought. God had sent a sign. Seizing the reins, he scrambled up the bank and settled himself into the saddle. Then, without a look behind, he directed the unwilling horse eastward.