Eifelheim

XXV. July, 1349 Ferial Days

The gray was disinclined to flight, and her stubborn walk was a compromise between Dietrich’s desire to gallop and her own desire not to move at all. When they reached the stretch by the meadow gate where the bushes gave way to open land, and the mare saw untied, windscattered sheaves of half-mown hay, she turned off the road and tried to nuzzle the rope from the gate-post. “If you are that hungry, sister horse,” Dietrich conceded, “you’ll not last the journey.” Leaning down, he undid the latch and the horse quickstepped into the meadow like a child shown his birth-day cake.

While Dietrich waited impatiently for the gray to feed, curiosity turned his mind to the saddle bags, and he wondered to whom beside God he owed this boon. Searching, he found a linen maniple, dyed bright green and embroidered in thread-of-gold with crosses and the chi-rho. Below that were stuffed other priestly vestments of surpassing beauty. He settled himself in the saddle. What more sign could he ask that the horse had been sent for him to find?

When the mare had eaten her fill, Dietrich turned her toward the shade of the Great Wood. There was a stream there, he remembered, where the horse could drink, and the canopy would be relief against the awful heat.

He had not entered the wood since the krenkish vessel’s departure, and the expression of summer foliage had altered its aspect considerably. The woods-masters and wild roses suffused the air with their fragrances. Bees hummed. New growth had obscured many of the blazes that Max had cut. Yet, the horse seemed purposeful. Dietrich supposed that she smelled the water and gave her free rein.

Unseen creatures bolted from their path, disturbing the shrubs and the hazel. A blue-winged tail-mouse watched his progress for a space before flying off. Petrarch, it was said, found peace in nature and had once climbed Mount Ventoux near Avignon for no reason but the prospect from its summit. Perhaps the savagery of his writings, his distortions and libels, owed something to his love of savage places.

Dietrich came upon the clearing where the stream pooled before completing its rush down the mountainside. The horse dipped her head and began to drink and Dietrich, reflecting that he too would grow thirsty on the road, dismounted and, hobbling the mare with a hippopede, walked upstream a few paces to drink.

A stone fell into the pool, and Dietrich leapt back. Above him, upon a projecting ledge where the water tumbled into the pool, squatted Heloïse Krenkerin. Dietrich awoke his head harness. “Greet God,” he told the other through the private canal.

The Krenkerin reached to the side and slung another stone into the pool. “Greet God,” she said. “I thought your kind avoided these forests.”

“They are fearful places,” Dietrich agreed. “What brings you here?”

“My folk find… quiet-inside-the-head in places like this. It has… what is your word… Maze. Balance.”

“Arnold used to sit there so,” Dietrich said. “I spied him once.”

“Did you… He, too, was of the Great Isle.” She threw another stone into the pond, refreshing ripples that had begun to subside. Dietrich waited, but she said no more until he turned to go.

“When you stand still,” Heloïse said, “you seem to vanish. I know that is the way our eyes are fashioned, and the Ulf tried to explain how yours were different; but he is only… one-who-laborswith-machines-for-physicians, and not a physician himself.” She tossed another stone. “But that makes naught.” The stone struck directly in the center of the fading ripples, and Dietrich thought that each of her tosses had struck precisely the same spot. Was it the motion of the water that drew her aim? Humans gauged distance more exactly than krenken; but krenken gauged motion more exactly. Thus God assigned to each folk gifts suitable to their being.

“How fares Ulf?” the krenkerin asked. “Shows he the spots?” And she extended her arm so that Dietrich could see the dark-green mottling that presaged the strange starvation of his guests.

“Not that I have seen.”

She ran a finger around a large blemish. “Tell me, is it better to die quickly or slowly?”

Dietrich looked down while he scuffed the dirt with his foot. “All beings seek naturally to live, so death is an evil, never to be sought for its own sake. But all beings seek also to avoid pain and terror. As to die quickly lessens these, a quick death is therefore, if not a ‘good,’ at least a lesser defect of the good. But a quick death gives also no chance for repentance and expiation to those one has wronged. So, a slower death may also be thought a lesser evil.”

“It is true, what is said of you.” A fifth stone followed the others. “The Ulf stayed because Hans asked for his particular skills, and he obeyed as if Hans had been a… one-set-above.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“I could not fore-leave him. Yet, each day I smell my death step closer. That is not right. The Death ought to swoop like your hawk; not stalk like your wolf. ‘So it was; so it is.’”

“Death is but a doorway to another life,” Dietrich assured her.

“Is it.”

“And our Herr, Jesus Christ, is the gate.”

“And how pass I through this gate-that-is-a-man?”

“Your hand is already on the latch. The way is love, and you have shown that already by your acts.”

So also had her husband. It wondered Dietrich, as he returned to his horse, that both had stayed because each believed the other would. Thus does one turn from care because it is a duty to duty because one cares. He stepped into the stirrup and seated himself. “Come to me when you return to the village,” he said, “and we will talk.” With that he tugged the reins and headed the gray toward the trail.

The horse had indeed been a sign, and a miracle as well. The sign had been to lead him here, so that God might gently admonish him through the mandibles of a stranger. The cup would pass from Heloïse no more than it had passed from the Son of Man in the Garden, so what presumption it was to think that it could pass from him! “Lord,” he prayed, “when did I see You sick or in distress and fail to comfort You?”

He leaned forward and stroked the horse’s head and she gave him a whicker of pleasure. “You are a miraculous horse,” he told her, for God had permitted her to come into the presence of a Krenkl without panic.

Along the way back, he said a prayer for the repose of the soul of Father Rudolf. God had presented Dietrich the means of flight, and with it a warning of the rewards awaiting flight.

The horror built much like a rainstorm: first a few, then a period of quiet when folk believed the menace past, then a few more, until at last a torrent. Folk cowered in their homes. In the fields, crops rotted and hay wilted unscythed. A few joined Dietrich and the Krenken at the hospital. Joachim, when he had recovered from his stripes; but also Gregor Mauer, Klaus Müller, Gerda Boettcher, Lueter Holzhacker. Theresia Gresch labored over her herbs, preparing those that eased pain or induced sleep, though she would not enter the smithy.

Gottfried had dedicated the hospital to St. Laurence, though Dietrich suspected that he meant the late smith, not Sixtus’ deacon. Having been told by Dietrich of the Knights of the Hospital, the creature took to wearing a surcoat with the cross of the Order blazoned on the upper left.

Folk sickened slowly — and suddenly; from coughing fits — and boils. Herwyg One-Eye seemed to blacken before Dietrich’s horrified gaze, as if a shadow had passed across his soul. Marcus Boettcher lingered, like Everard, in agony and convulsions. Volkmar Bauer’s entire family perished: his wife, Seppl, even Ulrike and her newborn babe. Only the vogt himself lived, and he precariously.

Days fell together: Margaret of Antioch, Mary Magdalen, Appolinaris, James the Greater, Berthold of Gasten… Losing track of the feasts, Dietrich celebrated unnamed ferial days.

Burials brought people out. Marcus Boettcher. Konrad Feldmann and both his girls. Rudi Pforzheimer. Gerda Boettcher. Trude and Peter Metzger. At each death, Dietrich rang the church bell. Once for a child, twice for a woman, thrice to signify a man. Who would hear, he wondered? He imagined the peals drifting ever fainter over a landscape devoid of life.

The churchyard filled, and they dug graves in fresh ground that Dietrich consecrated irregularly. Again and again, Dietrich told himself, Not all die. Paris lived, and Avignon. Even in Niederhochwald, a handful had survived. Hilde seemed to grow better, and Little Gregor, and even Volkmar Bauer.

Reinhardt Bent would steal no more furrows from his neighbors, nor Petronella Lürm glean the Herr’s fields. Fulk’s woman, Constanz, died in the sudden fashion. Melchior Metzger led a delerious Nickel Langermann to the hospital. “It isn’t fair,” the young man said, as if blaming Dietrich. “He had the murrain and he grew well. Why strike him this second time?”

“There is no ‘why,’” Hans answered from the bedside of Franz Ambach. “There is only ‘how,’ and that no one knows.”

Ulf had been working with a device that magnified very small things, by which Dietrich had named it mikroskopion. Through this, Ulf had studied the blood of both the stricken and the hale. One day, when Dietrich had come to the parsonage to wake Joachim for his turn in the hospice, Ulf showed them on the image-slate numberless black flecks of varied shapes and sizes, like dust motes caught in a beam of sunlight. Ulf indicated one particular curl. “This one never appears in hale blood; but always in those stricken.”

“What is it?” Joachim asked, only half-awake.

“The enemy.”

But it was one thing to know the face of the enemy, and quite another to slay him. Arnold Krenk might have succeeded, or so Ulf said. “Yet, we have not his skills. We can but proof a man’s blood and say if the enemy is present within him.”

“Then,” said Joachim, “all who do not yet bear this mark of Satan must flee.”

Dietrich rubbed the stubble on his chin. “And the ill can be restrained from flight, lest they spread the small-lives farther abroad.” He glanced at Joachim, but said nothing of logic. “Ja, doch. It is little enough, but it is something.”

Max was the natural leader of such a flight. He knew the forests better than any but Gerlach the hunter, and was more accustomed to leading men than was Gerlach.

Dietrich went to the Herr’s stables and saddled a sleek, black courser. He had tightened the cinch and was proposing that the beast accept the bit when Manfred’s voice said, “I could have you flogged for your presumption.”

Dietrich turned to find the Herr behind him, bearing a great hunting bird on his left forearm. Manfred nodded toward the horse. “Only a knight may ride a courser.” But when Dietrich began to remove the bridle, he shook his head. “Na, who will care? I came forth only because I remembered my birds, and thought to free them before they starved. I was in the rookery when I heard you fumbling around. I plan to unbar the kennel and the stable, too, so it is well you came now. I suppose you mean to flee as Rudolf did.”

The ease of the supposition angered Dietrich, not least because it struck too truly; but he said only, “I go to find Max.”

Manfred raised his gauntlet and stroked the falcon, which craned its head, side-stepped a bit on the thick, leather glove, and screeched. “You know what the gauntlet means, don’t you, precious one? You yearn to spread your wings and fly, aren’t you? Max has flown, too, I suppose, or he would have returned ere now.” Dietrich made no answer, and Manfred continued. “But it is bred into his character to return to me. Not Max; this beauty. Max, too, now that I think on it. He’ll circle and circle, searching for the welcoming arm below and will not see it. Is it right to release him to such sorrow?”

“Mine Herr, surely he will adjust to his new circumstances.”

“So he will,” Manfred answered sadly. “He will forget me and the hunts we carried out together. That is why the falcon symbolizes love. You cannot keep a falcon. You must release him, and then he will return of his own will, or…”

“Or ‘fly to other lands’.”

“You know the term? Did you study falconry? You are a man of parts, Dietl. A Paris scholar. Yet, you know horsemanship and perhaps hunting with birds. I think you were gently born. Yet you never speak of your youth.”

“Mine Herr knows the circumstances in which he found me.”

Manfred grimaced. “Most delicately put. Indeed, I do. And had I not seen you stay the mob at Rheinhausen, I would have left you there. Yet it has, on the whole, been well. I have copied many of our conversations in memoranda. I never told you that. I am no scholar, though I think myself a practical man, and I have always delighted in your ideas. Do you know how you make a falcon return to you?”

“Mine Herr…”

“Dietrich, after all these years, you and I may ‘duzen,’ and dispense with formalities.”

“Very well,… Manfred. One cannot make a falcon return, though one may easily bar it from returning. A falconer must master his emotions, must make no sudden moves that could frighten the bird off.”

“Would that more lovers knew that art, Dietrich.” He laughed and then, in sudden silence, his face grew long. “Eugen has the fever.”

“May God save him.”

Manfred’s lips twitched. “His death is the end of my Gundl. She’ll not live without him.”

“May God deny her wish.”

“Do you think God hears you any more? I think He has gone away from the world. I think He has grown disgusted with men and will have no more to do with us.” Manfred stepped outside the mews and, with a sweep of his arm, launched the falcon. “God has flown to other lands, I think.” He watched for a moment, admiring the bird’s beauty, before he ducked back inside the mews. “I hate to break troth with him in such a manner.” He meant the bird.

“Manfred, death is but a falcon launched to ‘fly to other lands’.”

The Herr smiled without humor. “Apropos, but perhaps too easy. When you return with the black, give him hay, but do not stable him. I must see to the other beasts.” He turned, hestitated, then spread his arms. “You and I may never meet again.”

Dietrich took the embrace. “We may, should God grant us both our hearts’ desires.”

“And not our deserts! Ha. So we part on a jest. What else can a man do amidst such sorrow?”

Dietrich did not at first notice Max, save that the heavy buzz of flies under the summer heat led him to the spot. He hunched his shoulders and slid from the horse’s back, tying the beast with special care to a nearby oak. Procuring a kerchief, he plucked blossoms from patches of wildflowers and crushed them within the cloth to release their perfume before tying the kerchief to his face. He broke off a branch from a hazel bush and, using it as a broom, swept it across the sergeant’s body, dispersing its aerial diners. Then, with as much dispassion as he could muster, he looked upon the carcass of his friend.

The anatomists of Bologna and Padua had made anatomies on bodies dried in the sun, or consumed in the earth, or submerged in running water, but Dietrich did not think they had ever done so on a body in this state. His stomach leapt through his mouth, and so visited a final indignity on the man. When he had recovered, and had refreshed his ‘flower-pocket,’ Dietrich confirmed what he had glimpsed.

Max had been stabbed in the back. His jerkin was rent there, at the kidneys, and a great gout of blood had issued forth. He had fallen forward, in the act of drawing his quillon, for he lay upon his right arm with the handle of the long dagger in his death-hardened grip and the blade half out of its sheath.

Dietrich staggered to a nearby stone, a block that had tumbled countless years before from the escarpment overhead. There, he sobbed — for Max, for Lorenz, for Herwyg One-eye and all the others.

Dietrich returned to the hospital after vespers. For a time, he watched Hans and Joachim and the others walk among the sufferers, applying cool cloths to fevered brows, spooning food into indifferent mouths, washing the bandages used to cover the sores in tubs of hot, soapy water and laying them out to dry, a practice Hugh de Lucca and others had commended.

At last, Dietrich stepped inside where Gregor watched over his ailing son. “Everyone says he has my face,” Gregor said, “and maybe that’s true when he’s awake and tries to be like me; but when he’s asleep, he remembers that he is her first-born, and her shade looks out at me from inside his heart.” He was silent for a moment. “I must look after Seybke. The two of them fought. Always scuffling like two bear cubs.” Gregor craned his neck. “Gregerl’s not a pious boy. He mocks the church, despite my scolds.”

“The choice is God’s, not ours, and God acts not from petty spite, but from boundless love.”

Gregor looked around the smithy. “Boundless love,” he repeated. “Is that what this is?”

“It is no comfort,” Hans interjected, “but we Krenken know this. There is no other manner in which the world could be fashioned that would bear life. There are… numbers. The strength of the bonds that hold the atoms together; the… the strength of the elektronik essence; the attraction of matter… Ach!” He tossed his arm. “The sentences in my head wander; and it was not my calling. We have shown that these numbers can be no other. The smallest change in any, and the world would not stand. All that happens in this world, follows from these numbers: sky and stars, sun and moon, rain and snow, plants and animals and small-lives.”

“God has ordered all things,” Dietrich quoted from the Book of Wisdom, “by weight and measure and number.”

“Doch. And from those numbers come also ills and afflictions and death and the pest. Yet had the Herr-in-the-sky ordered the world in any other way, there would be no life at all.”

Dietrich remembered that Master Buridan had compared the world to a great clock that God has wound, and which swung now by its own instrumental causes.

“You are right, monster,” Gregor said. “It is no comfort.”

Heloïse Krenkerin died the next day. Hans and Ulf carried her body to the church and laid it out on a bench that Joachim had prepared. Then Dietrich left them alone for the private rites that he had implicitely condoned. Afterward, in the parsonage, Hans held his flask up to the window.

“This many days only remain,” he said, tracing the level with his fingertip. “I will not see you through to the end.”

“But after the end, we will see each other again,” Dietrich told him.

“Perhaps,” the Krenkl allowed. He placed his flask carefully upon the shelf, then walked outside. Dietrich followed, and found him balanced upon the outcropping where he liked to perch. Dietrich lowered himself to the grass beside him. His legs complained and he rubbed his calf. Below them, the shadows were long from the setting sun, and the eastern sky had deepened already to cobalt. Hans extended his left arm. “Ulf,” he said.

Dietrich followed the gesture to the weed-choked autumn field, where Ulf stood with his arms outstretched. His shadow ran like a knight’s lance across the furrows, broken by the irregularity of the plants and the ground. “He makes the sign of the Crucified!”

Hans flapped his lips. “Perhaps he does. The Herr-from-the-sky is often whimsical. But see how he shows his neck to the sky. He invites the Swooper to take him. This was an old rite, practiced among Ulf’s folk on their far island in the Eastern Sea of Storms. Gottfried’s folk and mine alike thought them foolish and vain, and Shepherd’s folk tried to suppress them. Indeed, the rite has long passed out of use, even on the Great Isle; but in times of peril, a man may turn to the ways of his forefathers and stand exposed in an open field.”

Hans unfolded from his perch, staggered, and nearly fell from the rock. Dietrich seized him by the arm, pulling him to safety. Hans laughed. “Bwah! There is an ignoble end! Better to be taken by Ulf’s Swooper than a clumsy tumble, though I would prefer a quiet death in my sleep. Ach! What is this?”

One of Manfred’s loosed falcons had come to rest on Ulf’s outstretched arm! The bird sheered, and Dietrich and Hans heard its distant cry. But when Ulf did not provide the expected morsel, the bird spread its wings and soared into the sky once more, where it circled thrice before departing.

Hans fell to a sudden squat and hugged his knees, his side jaws agape. In the far field, Ulf leapt into the air in the manner of krenkish dance. Dietrich looked from one to the other in bewilderment.

Hans stood erect and brushed absently from his leather-hose the grass and dirt. “Ulf will take our baptism now,” he said. “The Swooper has spared him. And if It can show mercy, why not swear fealty to the very Herr of mercy?”

“Pastor, pastor!” It was little Atiulf, who had taken to following Klaus about and calling him Daddy. “Men! On the Oberreid road!”

It was the day after Ulf’s baptism, and Dietrich had been digging graves atop Church Hill with Klaus, Joachim, and a few other men. They joined the boy at the crest and Klaus fetched him up in his arms. “Perhaps they bring word that the pest has gone,” the miller said.

Dietrich sook his head. The pest would never go. “By his cloak, it is the Markgraf’s herald, and a chaplain. Perhaps the bishop has sent a replacement for Father Rudolf.”

“He’d be a fool to come here,” Gregor suggested.

“Or overjoyed to leave Strassburg,” Dietrich reminded him.

“We do not need him here, in any case,” said Joachim.

But Dietrich had taken only a few steps down the hillside when the herald’s horse reared and nearly overthrew him. The rider fought the reins as the terrified beast pawed the air and whinnied. A few paces behind him, the chaplain found his mount also fractious.

“Ach,” said Gregor under his breath. “That’s done it.”

The two riders retreated into the pass between the hills before the herald wheeled his horse and, standing in the stirrups, tossed his right arm in what Dietrich mistook for the krenkish gesture of dismissal. Then the shoulder of the hill cut them off from sight, and only a dust haze lingered to show where they had been.

They found Hans in the open space between the smithy and Gregor’s stoneyard gazing down the high road toward Oberreid. “I thought to warn them off,” he said, swaying slightly. “I had forgotten that I was not one of you. They saw me and…”

It was Klaus, of all people, who placed his hand on the Krenkl’s shoulder and said, “But you are one of us, brother monster.”

Gottfried stepped from the shadows of the clinic. “What matter if they saw? What can they do but release us from this? The one in the fancy cloak threw something in the dirt.”

Gregor trotted down the road to retrieve it. Hans said, “It sorrows me, to betray you, Dietrich. By us is motionlessness hard to see. I forgot myself and stilled. Habit. Forgive me.” And so saying, he collapsed into the dust of the crossroads.

Klaus and Lueter Holzhacker carried the twitching body into the hospital and laid it on a pallet there. Gottfried, Beatke, and the other surviving Krenkl’n gathered round him. “He was sharing his portion with us,” Gottfried said. “I did not learn of it until yesterday.”

Dietrich stared at him. “He sacrificed himself, as the alchemist did?”

“Bwah-wah! Not as the alchemist did. Arnold thought the extra time would gain us the repairs. Well, he was not a man of the elektonikos, and who is to say he was wrong to hope? But Hans acted not from carnal hope, but from love of us who served him.”

Gregor had come up with a parchment bound up in string. He handed it to Dietrich. “This is what the herald dropped.”

Dietrich untied the string. “How long…?” he asked Gottfried. The servant of the elektronik essence shrugged his shoulders as a man might. “Who can say? Heloïse went to the sky in but a few days; the Kratzer lingered for weeks. It is as with your pest.”

“How reads the bill?” Joachim asked, and Dietrich pulled his spectacles from his scrip.

“If there be no priest among us,” he announced when he had finished, “laymen are authorized to hear one another’s confessions.” He raised his head. “A miracle.”

“What miracle,” said Klaus. “That I should confess my sins to the mason, here? That would be a miracle.”

“Na, Klaus,” said Lueter. “I’ve heard you confess after a couple of steins of Walpurga’s brew in you.”

“Archdeacon Jarlsberg writes that there are no more priests to send.”

“A miracle indeed,” said Klaus.

“Half the benefices in the diocese are vacant — because their priests did not run off like Father Rudolf. They stayed with their flocks and died.”

“Like you,” said Klaus. And Dietrich laughed a little at the comment.

Gregor frowned. “Pastor isn’t dead. He isn’t even sick.”

“Nor you, nor I,” said Klaus. “Not yet.”

Dietrich sat by Hans’ pallet all day and slept there at night. They spoke of many things, he and the monster. Whether a vacuum existed. How there could be more than one world, since each would try to rush toward the center of the other. Whether the sky was a dome or a vast empty sea. Whether Master Peter’s magnets could make a machine that would never stop, as he had claimed. All those matters of philosophy that had so delighted Hans in happier days. They spoke, too, of the Kratzer, and Dietrich was convinced more than ever that, if love had any meaning in the hidden hearts of the Krenkl, that Hans and the Kratzer has loved one another.

In the morning, the portcullis of the castle opened with a clatter of chains and Richart the schultheiss, with Wilifrid the clerk and a few others galloped furiously down Castle Hill and out the Bear Valley road. Shortly thereafter, the bell in the castle chapel tolled once. Dietrich waited, and waited; but there came no second stroke.

That afternoon, the villagers held an irregular court under the linden and Dietrich asked the gathering which of them Ulf had found free of the small-lives. About half raised their hands, and Dietrich noted that they sat for the most part at a distance from their neighbors.

“You must leave Oberhochwald,” he said. “If you stay, the small lives will invade you, as well. Take, also those whose fever has broken. When the pest has gone, you may return and set things aright once more.”

“I’ll not return,” cried Jutte Feldmann. “This place is accursed! A place of demons and sorcery.” There were mutters of approval, but some, like Gregor and Klaus, shook their heads and Melchior Metzger, grown suddenly old, sat on the grass with a grim look on his face.

“But, where would we go?” asked Jakob Becker. “The pest lies all about us. In the Swiss, so also in Vienna, in Freiburg, in Munich, in…”

Dietrich stopped him before he could enumerate the whole world. “Go south and east into the foothills,” he said. “Shun all towns and villages. Build shelters in the forest, keep fires burning, and stay near the fires. Take flour or meal, so you will have bread. Joachim, you will go with them.”

The young monk stared at him open-mouthed. “But… What do I know of the forest?”

“Lueter Holzhacker knows the forests. And Gerlach Jaeger has ranged about hunting deer and wolves.” Jaeger, who had been hunkered down a little to the side of the group whittling on a limb, looked up and spat. “By m’self,” he said, and resumed whittling.

Everyone looked at everyone else. Those whose blood harbored the small-lives, but who had not yet fallen ill, hung their heads, and a few stood and walked off. Gregor Mauer shrugged and looked at Klaus, who tossed his arm krenkishly. “If Atiulf gets well,” he suggested.

When the villagers had dispersed, Joachim followed Dietrich to the mill pond, just above the sluiceway to Klaus’ mill. The wheel turned in bright splashes of water, but the stones were silent, which meant the cam was disengaged. The mist cooled, and Dietrich welcomed the relief from the heat. Joachim faced the gurgling water where it jostled into the sluice, so that he and Dietrich stood with their backs to each other. For a time, the hissing water and the groaning wheel were the only sounds. Turning, Dietrich saw the young man staring at the bright, criss-crossed lines of sunlight that quartered the choppy stream. “What is wrong?” he asked.

“You send me away!”

“Because you are clean. Because you have a chance yet to live.”

“But, you, also…”

Dietrich silenced him with a gesture. “It is my penance…, for sins committed in my youth. I have nearly fifty years. How few I have to lose! You have not yet twenty-five, and many years more remain in service to God.”

“So,” the young man said bitterly. “You would deny me even the martyr’s crown.”

“I would give you the shepherd’s staff!” Dietrich snapped. “Those folk will be filled with despair, with denial of God. Had I given you the easy task, I would keep you here!”

“But I, too, wish the glory!”

“What glory in changing bandages, in lancing pustules, in wiping up the shit and the vomit and the pus? Herr Jesu-Christus! We are commanded all these things, but they are not glorious.”

Joachim had edged away from his diatribe. “No. No, you are wrong, Dietrich. It is the most glorious work of all, more glorious than plumed knights spitting men on their lances and bragging on their deeds.”

Dietrich remembered a song the knights used to sing in the aftermath of the Armleder. Peasants live like pigs/And have no sense for manners… “No,” he agreed, “the deeds of knights are not always so glorious, either.” They had returned hate for hate, and abandoned all sense of that chivalry for which they had once been renowned — if that renown had ever been more than lies on the lips of minnesingers. Dietrich glanced toward Castle Hill. He had asked once of Joachim where he had been when the Armleder passed through. He had never asked Manfred.

“We have been found wanting,” Joachim said. “The demons were our test, our triumph! Instead, most escaped unchristened. Our failure has brought God’s punishment upon us.”

“The pest is everywhere,” Dietrich snapped, “in places that have never seen a Krenk.”

“Each to his own sin,” Joachim said. “To some, wealth. To others, usury. To others still, cruelty or rapaciousness. The pest strikes everywhere because sin is everywhere.”

“And so God slays all, giving men no chance to repent? What of the Christ-taught love?”

Joachim’s eyes turned dull and sullen. “The Father does this; not the Son. He of the Old Dispensation, whose gaze is fire, whose hand is a thunderbolt and whose breath is the storm wind!” Then, more quietly, “He is like any father angry with his children.”

Dietrich said nothing and Joachim sat for a while longer. After a moment, the monk said, “I have never thanked you for taking me in.”

“Monastic quarrels can be brutal.”

“You were a monk once. Brother William called you ‘Brother Angelus.’”

“I knew him at Paris. It was a sly gibe of his.”

“He is one of us, a Spiritual. Were you?”

“Will cared naught for the Spirituals until the tribunal condemned his propositions. Michael and the others fled Avignon at the same time, and he threw in with them.”

“They would have burned him.”

“No, they would have made him rephrase his propositions. To Will, that was worse.” Dietrich found a small smile in the jest. “One may say anything, if only it is framed as an hypothesis, a secundum imaginationem. But Will holds his hypotheses as matters of fact. He argued Ludwig’s case against the Pope, but to Ludwig he was a tool.”

“No wonder we are smitten.”

“Many a good truth has been upheld by wicked men for their own purposes. And good men have caused much wickedness in their zealotry.”

“The Armleder.”

Dietrich hesitated. “That was one such case. There were good men among them.” He fell silent, thinking of the fishwife and her boy in the Freiburg market.

“There was a leader among the Armleder,” Joachim said slowly, “called ‘Angelus’.”

Dietrich was a long time silent. “That man is dead now,” he said at last. “But through him I learned a terrible truth: that heresy is truth, in extremis. The proper object of the eye is light, but too much light blinds the eyes.”

“So, you would compromise with the wicked, as the Conventuals do?”

“Jesus said the weeds would grow with the wheat until the Judgement,” Dietrich answered, “so one finds both good men and bad in the church. By our fruits we will be known, not by what name we have called ourselves. I have come to believe that there is more grace in becoming wheat than there is in pulling up weeds.”

“So might a weed say, had it speech,” said Joachim. “You split hairs.”

“Better to split hairs than the heads beneath them.”

Joachim rose from his rock. He skipped a stone across the mill pond. “I will do as you ask.”

The next day, four score villagers gathered on the green under the linden, prepared to leave. They had tied their belongings into bundles, which they carried on their backs or in a sack on the end of a pole slung across their shoulder. Some had the stunned look of a calf at slaughter and stood unmoving in the press with their eyes cast down. Wives without husbands; husbands without wives. Parents without children; children without parents. Folk who had watched their neighbors shrivel and blacken into stinking corruption. A few had already started out alone on the road. Melchior Metzger went to Nickel Langermann, who lay on a pallet in the hospital, and embraced him one last time before Gottfried shooed him away. Langermann was too far in delerium to recognize the caress.

Gerlach Jaeger stood to the side and watched the assembly with no small displeasure. He was a short, thickset man with a wiry black beard and many years of the forest in his face. His clothing was rough and he carried several knives in his belt. His walking staff was a thick oak limb, trimmed and whittled to his pleasure. He stood now with both hands cupped over the top of it and his chin resting on his hands. Dietrich spoke to him.

“Will they fare well, do you guess?”

Jaeger hawked and spat. “No. But I’ll do what I can. I’ll train ’em up in makin’ snares and traps, and there’s one or two might know which way the bolt sits in the crossbow’s groove. I see Holzhacker has his bow. And his axe. That’s good. We’ll need axes. Ach! We don’t need a casket full of klimbim! Jutte Feldmann, what are ye thinkin’! We’re goin’ in the Lesser Wood and up the Feldberg. Who d’ye think’ll carry that thing? Herr God in Heaven, pastor, I don’t know what people have in their heads.”

“They have grief and tragedy in their heads, hunter.”

Jaeger grunted and said nothing for a time. Then he raised his head and took his staff in hand. “I guess I count myself lucky. I’ve no woman or kin to lose. That’s luck, I s’pose. But the forest and the mountain, they won’t care about grief, and you don’t want to hie into th’wilderness with half a mind. What I meant is that they don’t need to take everything with ’em. When the pest has gone, we’ll come back and it will all be here waiting.”

“I’ll not be coming back,” Volkmar Bauer snarled. “This place is accursed.” And he spat for good measure. He was pale and unsteady yet, but stood among those leaving.

Others took up Volkmar’s cry and some threw clods of dirt at Gottfried, who had come also to watch them go. “Demons!” some cried. “You brought this on us!” And the crowd growled and surged. Gottfried snapped his horny side-lips like a pair of scissors. Dietrich feared his choleric nature coming to the fore. Even in his weakened condition, Gottfried might slay a dozen attackers with his serrated forearms before sheer weight of numbers brought him down. Jaeger lifted his staff and brandished it. “I’ll have order here!” he cried.

“Why did they stay when their countrymen left?” shouted Becker. “To show us our doom!”

“Silence!”

That was Joachim, employing his preacher’s voice. He strode onto the green, threw back his cowl, and glared at them. “Sinners!” he told them. “Do you want to know why they stayed?”

He gestured toward the Krenkl. “They stayed to die!” He let the words echo from the surrounding cottages and Klaus’ mill. “And to give us succor! Who among you has not seen the sick comforted, or the dead buried by them? Who, indeed, has not been nursed by them, save by your own obstinancy? Now you are invited to a greater adventure than any minnesinger’s invention. You are invited to be the New Israel, to pass a time in the wilderness, and possess as your reward the Promised Land. We will bring in the New Age! Unworthy, we are, but we will be purified by trials as we await the coming of John.” Here he dropped his voice and the murmuring crowd fell silent to catch his words. “We will live apart for a time, while Peter leaves and the middle age passes away. There will be many trials; and some among us may be found wanting. We will experience privation and heat and hunger and perhaps the wrath of wild beasts. But it will strengthen us against the day of our return!”

There was a ragged, subdued cheer and a few amens, but Dietrich thought they were more cowed than convinced.

Jaeger took a breath. “Right, then. Now that everyone is here… Lütke! Jakob!” With a great deal of profanity and one or two swipes of his staff, he started his flock moving. “’Children of Israel,’” he muttered.

Dietrich clapped him on the shoulder. “Those were also a fractious lot, I have read.”

As the others filed past, Joachim came to Dietrich and embraced him. “Fare well,” Dietrich told him. “Remember, listen to Gerlach.”

The hunter, at the wooden bridge cried out, “Heaven, ass, and welkin-break!”

Joachim smiled wanly. “To the peril of my soul.” The others had gone back to the village and the two were alone. Joachim looked back toward the village and a shadow seemed to pass across his features as he took in the mill and the oven, the mason’s yard, the smithy, Burg Hochwald, St. Catherine’s church. Then he brushed at his cheek and said, “I must hurry after,” and shifted the blanket-bundle he wore around his shoulder. “Or I’ll be left, and…” Dietrich reached out and pulled the monk’s cowl up over his head.

“The day is hot. The sun can strike you down.”

“Ja. Thank you. Dietrich… Try not to think so much.”

Dietrich placed his palm on the other’s cheek. “I love you, too, Joachim. Take care.”

He stood on the green watching the monk depart; then he moved to the bridge to catch a final glimpse before they vanished between the shoulders of the autumn fields and the meadow. They bunched up there, naturally, where the way was narrow, and Dietrich smiled, imagining Gerlach’s profanity. When there was nothing more to be seen, he returned to the hospital.

He moved Hans that night out into the open so that the Krenk could gaze on the firmament. The evening was warm and moist, having the characteristics of air, being moved to that state from the corruption of fire, for the day had been hot and dry. Dietrich had brought his breviary and a candle to read by, and he was adjusting his spectacles when he realized that he did not know the day. He tried to count from the last feast of which he was certain, but the days were a blur, and his sleeping and waking had not always matched the circle of the heavens. He checked the positions of the stars, but he had not noted the sunset, nor had he an astrolabe.

“What seek you, friend Dietrich?” Hans said.

“The day.”

“Bwah… You seek the day at night? Bwah-wah!”

“Friend grasshopper, I think you have discovered synecdoche. I meant the date, of course. The motions of the heavens could tell me, had I the skill at reading them. But I have not read the Almagest since many years, or ibn Qurra. I recall that the crystalline spheres impart a daily motion to the firmament, which is beyond the seventh heaven.”

“Saturn, I think you called it.”

“Doch. Beyond Saturn, the firmament of stars, and beyond that, the waters above the heavens, though in a form crystallized to ice.”

“We, too, find a belt of ice-bodies girdling each world-system. Though, of course, they turn on the hither side of the firmament, not the farther.”

“So you have said, though I understand not what then keeps the ice-water from seeking its natural place here in the center.”

“Worm!” Hans replied. “Have I not told you that your image is wrong? The sun sits in the center; not the earth!”

Dietrich held his forefinger in post. “Did you not tell me that the firmament… What did you call it?”

“The horizon of the world.”

“Ja-doch. You say its warmth is the remnant of the wondrous day of creation; and beyond it no one can see. Yet this horizon lies in every direction at the same distance, which any student of Euclid can tell you is the locus of a sphere. Therefore, the earth lies truly at the center of the world, quod erat demonstrandum.”

Dietrich smiled broadly at having determined successfully the question, but Hans stiffened and emitted an extended hiss. His arms flew up and across his body, presenting the serrated edges. A protective gesture, Dietrich thought. After a moment, the Krenkl’s arms slowly relaxed, and Hans whispered, “Sometimes the dull ache sharpens like a knife.

“And I conduct a quodlibet while you suffer. Are there no more of your particular medicines?”

“No. Ulf needed it far more.” Hans pawed with his left hand, seeking Dietrich. “Move, twitch. I can barely see you. No, I would rather discourse on great questions. Unlikely, that either you or I have the answers, but it distracts a little from the pain.”

Dawn was crawling up the Oberreid road. Dietrich rose. “Perhaps some willow bark tea, then. It eases head-pain among us, and may serve you also.”

“Or kill me. Or it may contain the missing protein. Willow bark tea… Was it among those things Arnold or the Kratzer tried? Wait, the Heinzelmännchen may have it in his memory.” Hans chittered into his mikrofoneh, listened, then sighed. “Arnold tested it. It makes naught.”

“Still, if it dulls the pain… Gregor?” He called to the mason, who sat by his eldest son on the other side of the smithy. “Have we any willow bark prepared?”

Gregor shook his head. “Theresia was stripping bark two days ago. Shall I fetch it?”

Dietrich dusted his robes. “I will.” To Hans, he added, “Rest well. I’ll be back with the potion.”

“When I am dead,” the Krenkl replied, “and Gottfried and Beatke drink of me in my memory, each will give his share to the other out of charity, and thus will the quantity double in size from being traded back and forth. Bwah-wa-wah!”

The jest escaped Dietrich, and he supposed his friend had developed a flaw in his weave. He crossed the road, waving to Seybke at work in his father’s stoneyard. Carving tombstones. Dietrich had told the masons not to worry at the task, but Gregor had said, “What is the point of living if folk forget you when you’re dead?”

Dietrich knocked on Theresia’s doorjamb and received no answer. “Are you awake?” he called. “Have you any willow bark prepared?”

He knocked again and wondered if Theresia had gone to the Lesser Wood. But he pulled the string on the latch and opened the door.

Theresia stood barefoot in the middle of the dirt floor, wearing only her night gown but crumpling and wringing a coverslut in her hands. When she saw Dietrich, she cried out. “What do you want! No!”

“I came to ask after willow bark. Excuse my intrusion.” He backed away.”

“What have you done to them?”

Dietrich stopped. Did she mean those who had left? Those who had died in the hospital?

“Don’t hurt me!” Her face had turned red with anger; her jaw clenched tight.

“I would never hurt you, schatzl. You know that.”

“You were with them! I saw you!”

Dietrich had just begun to parse her sentence, when she opened her mouth once more; only this time, rather than cries of fright, there issued forth a fountain of black vomit. He was close enough that some of it spattered him, and the rank of it quickly filled the room. Dietrich gagged .

“No, God!” he cried. “I forbid this!”

But God was not listening and Dietrich wondered madly if He, too, had fallen to the pest and His vast incorporeal essence, “infinitely extended without extent or dimension,” was rotting even now in the endless void of the Empyrean sphere, beyond the crystalline heavens.

The fear and rage had fled from Theresia’s countenance and she looked down at herself with astonishment. “Daddy? What’s wrong, daddy?”

Dietrich opened his arms to her and she staggered into them. “Here,” he said. “You must lie down.” He reached into his scrip and pulled out his cloth pocket of flowers and held it to his nose. But their essence had faded, or else the stink was too powerful.

He guided her to the bed, and thought as she leaned upon him that she had become already as light as a spirit. As it is the nature of earth to seek the center of the earth, so is it the nature of air to seek the heavens.

Gregor had come to the door of the cottage. “I heard you cry — . Ach, Herr God in Heaven!”

Theresia turned to go to him. “Come, dear husband.” But Dietrich held her firmly. “You must lie down.”

“Ja, ja, I am so tired. Tell me a story, daddy. Tell me about the giant and the dwarf.”

“Gregor, bring my lance. Wash it with old wine and hold it in the fire, as Ulf showed us. Then hurry.”

Gregor leaned against the jamb and ran a hand over his face. He looked up. “The lance. Ja, doch. So soon as possible.” He hesitated. “Will she…?”

“I don’t know.” Gregor left and Dietrich made Theresia lie down upon the straw. He arranged a blanket under her head as a pillow. “I must check for the pustules,” he told her.

“Am I sick?”

“We’ll see.”

“It’s the pest.”

Dietrich said nothing, but lifted the sodden gown.

There it sat in her groin, great and black and swollen, like a malignant toad. It was larger than the one he had lanced on Everard. It could not have grown overnight. When the onset was rapid, the afflicted died quickly and quietly, without pustules. No, this had been growing for several days, if he was to judge by those he had seen on others.

Gregor rushed in and squatted beside him, first passing him the lance still warm from the fire, then taking Theresia’s hand in his own. “Schatzi,” he said.

Theresia’s eyes had closed. Now they opened and she gazed seriously into Dietrich’s face. “Will I die?”

“Not yet. I need to lance your pustule. It will give great pain, and I have no more sponges.”

Theresia smiled, and blood dripped from the corners of her mouth, reminding Dietrich of the stories of the Freudenstadt Werewolf. Gregor had found a cloth somewhere and he dabbed at the blood, trying to clean her, but more blood welled up with every dab. “I am afraid for her to open her mouth,” he said tightly. “I think all her life will gush forth.”

Dietrich climbed atop the woman and sat athwart her legs. “Gregor, hold her down by the arms and shoulder.”

He \ reached toward the pustule in Theresia’s crotch. When the point had but touched the tough, hard integument, Theresia shrieked, “Sancta Maria Virgina, ora pro feminis!” And her legs spasmed wildly, nearly unseating Dietrich. Gregor grimly held tight to her arms.

Dietrich pressed in with the point, thrusting a little to break the skin, as he had grown sadly accustomed to doing. I am too late, he thought. The pustule is far advanced. It was the size of an apple, and of a dark, malignant blue.

“She showed no sign of it yesterday,” Gregor said. “I swear it.”

Dietrich believed him. She had concealed the signs, afraid of being bedded among the demons. What sort of fear was it, he wondered, that could smother even the fear of ghastly death? The Lord had commanded, be not afraid, but men broke all His other commandments, why not that one?

The skin broke and a thick, foul, yellow ichor oozed forth, coloring her thighs and soaking into the straw ticking of the mattress. Theresia screamed and called on the Virgin again and again.

Dietrich found another pustule, much smaller, high up on her inner thigh. This, he lanced more swiftly and with a cloth squeezed out as much pus as he could. “Examine under her arms and on her chest,” he told the mason.

Gregor nodded and pulled her gown up as far as he could. Theresia’s cries had subsided into sobs. She said, “The other man was not so nice.”

“What was that, schatzi? Pastor, what does she mean?”

Dietrich would not look at him. “She is delirious.”

“He had a beard, too; but it was bright red. But daddy made him go away.” The blood ran down her chin as she talked and Gregor mopped after it without hope.

Dietrich remembered the man. His name had been Ezzo, and his beard had been red from his own blood, after Dietrich had slit his throat and pulled him off the girl.

“You are safe now,” he told the girl, told the woman she had become. “Your husband is here.”

“It hurts.” Her eyes were clenched closed now.

There was one more pustule, under her right arm, as big as Dietrich’s thumb. This was more difficult to lance, for when he came off her legs, they bent and tucked themselves up, as small children were wont to do when sleeping. Theresia hugged her knees. “It hurts,” she said again.

“Why has God abandoned us?” Gregor asked.

Dietrich tried to pry Theresia’s arm loose so he could lance the last pustule. He did not think it mattered. “God will never abandon us,” he insisted, “but we may abandon God.”

The mason swept his arm wide, relinquishing his grip on Theresia’s shoulder. “Then where is He in all this?” he shouted. Theresia flinched at the bellow and he immediately took a more tender note and stroked her hair with his great stubby fingers.

Dietrich thought of all the reasoned arguments, of Aquinas and the other philosophers. He wondered how Joachim would have answered. Then he thought that Gregor did not need an answer, did not want an answer, or that the only answer was hope.

“Theresia, I need to cut the pustule under your arm.”

She had opened her eyes. “Will I see God?”

“Ja. Doch. Gregor, look for some cooking oil.”

“Cooking oil? Why?”

“I must anoint her. It is not too late.”

Gregor blinked, as if annointing were a sudden and alien thing that had never been done before. Then, he released Theresia and went to the other side of the cottage, near the hearth, and came back with a small flask. “I think this is oil.”

Dietrich took it. “It will do.” His lips moved in silent prayer as he blessed the oil. Then, wetting his thumb in it, he traced the sign of the cross on her forehead, then on her closed eyelids, praying, “Illúmina óculos meos, ne umquam obdórmium in morte…” From time to time, when Dietrich paused to recollect the proper words, Gregor would say, “Amen,” through his tears.

He was nearly finished with the sacrament when Theresia coughed and a bolus of blood and vomit issued forth from her mouth. Dietrich thought, the small-lives are in there. They will have gotten Gregor and me. Yet this was not the first time he had been spattered; and Ulf, on his last inspection of Dietrich’s blood, had pronounced it still clean.

But Ulf died many days ago.

When he had completed the rite, Dietrich set the oil aside — Others would need it soon. — and he took one of Theresia’s hands in his own. It seemed a fragile thing, though the skin was rough and cracked. “Do you remember,” he said, “when Fulk broke his finger and I taught you how to set it?” Her lips, when she smiled, were as red as berries. “I do not know which of the three of us was more frightened, you, I, or Fulk.” To Gregor, he said, “I remember her first words. She was mute when I brought her here. We were out in the Lesser Wood searching for peony and other herbs and roots, and I was showing her where to find them when her foot became caught in the cleft of a fallen branch, and she said…”

“Help me,” said Theresia and her hand clenched Dietrich’s so tight as possible in her weakness. She coughed a little, and then a little more, and the coughing built until a great flood of vomit and blood poured from her, soaking her gown all the way to her waist. Dietrich reached around to turn her head so that she would not choke on the effluvium, but as he lifted it he knew, perhaps from that it was a little lighter than before, that his unbegotten daughter had died.

Some long time afterward, he crossed the road to the hospital to tell Hans what had happened and found the Krenkl had died also in his absence. Dietrich knelt by the corpse and lifted the great, long, serrated arms and folded them across the mottled torso in an attitude of prayer. He could not close the eyes, of course, and they seemed still aglow, though that was only the rays of the declining sun out beyond the autumn fields reflecting through them like one of Theodoric’s raindrops, and the shadow of a rainbow fell on Hans’ cheeks.