Eifelheim

III. August, 1348 At Compline, The Vigil of St. Laurence

“Dispérsit,” said Dietrich. “Dédit paupéribus; justítia éjus mánet in saéculum saéculi: córnu éjus exaltábitur in Glória.”

Joachim answered him. “Beátus vir, qui tímet Dóminum; in mandátes éjus cúpit nímis.”

“Glória pátri et Fílio et Spirítui Sáncti.”

“Amen.” That they said in unison, but with no echo from the church save that of Theresia Gresch, who knelt solitary on the flagstones of the nave in the flickering candlelight. But Theresia was a fixture, like the statues that lurked in the niches in the wall.

There were only two sorts of women so perfervid in their devotions: madwomen and saints, nor were the two species entirely distinct. One must be a little mad to be a saint, at least as the world measured madness.

Theresia had the soft, round face of a maiden, though Dietrich knew her for twenty. She had never to Dietrich’s certain knowledge gone with a man, and indeed, still spoke with simplicity and innocence. At times, Dietrich knew jealousy on her account, for the Lord had opened heaven to those who became as little children.

“…from the oppression of the flame which surrounded me,” Joachim read from the Book of Wisdom, “and in the midst of the fire I was not burnt…” Dietrich gave silent thanks for their deliverance from the fires three days before. Only Rudolf Pforzheimer had died. His aged heart had stopped when the elektronik essence had been at its thickest.

Dietrich shifted the book to the other side of the altar and read from the Gospel of Matthew, concluding, “If any man will come after me, let him take what he has and give it to the poor.”

Joachim cried, “Amen.”

“Na, Theresia,” he said as he closed the book, and she sat back on her heels to listen with a guileless smile. “Only a few feasts possess a vigil-night. Why is St. Laurence among them?” Theresia shook her head, which meant she did remember, but preferred that Dietrich tell her.

“A few days since, we remembered Pope Sixtus II, who was killed by the Romans while praying Mass in the catacombs. Sixtus had seven deacons. Four were killed at the Mass with him and two others were hunted down and killed the same day. That is why we say, ‘Sixtus and his Companions.’ Laurence was the last of the deacons, and eluded capture for several days. Sixtus had given him the possessions of the Church for safekeeping — including, so they say, the cup from which Our Lord drank at the Last Supper and which the Popes had used at Mass until then. These he had distributed to the poor. When the Romans found him and ordered him to hand over ‘all the wealth of the Church,’ Laurence took them into the hovels of the City and showed them the poor, declaring—”

“There is the wealth of the Church!” Theresia cried and clapped her hands together. “Oh, I love that story!”

“Would that more Popes and bishops,” Joachim murmured, “loved it as much.” Then, seeing himself heard, he continued more forcefully: “Remember what Matthew wrote of the camel and the needle’s eye! Some day, O woman, artisans may fashion a singularly large needle. Somewhere in far Arabia may live an exceedingly small camel. Yet if we take the Master’s words at their least meaning, it is this: Wealthy lords and bishops — those who dine at groaning tables, who sit their asses on satin pillows — are not our moral guides. Look to the simple carpenter! And look to Laurence, who knew where true treasure lay — where thief cannot steal nor mice consume. Blessed are the poor! Blessed are the poor!”

Ejaculations like that had put Joachim’s order in deep disfavor. The Conventuals had disavowed their brothers in the face of it, but the Spirituals would not hold their tongues. Some had burned; some had fled to the Kaiser for protection. How much better, Dietrich thought, to escape notice entirely. He raised his eyes to heaven, and something seemed to move among the candle-sent shadows in the rafters and vises in the clerestory. A bird, perhaps.

“But poverty is not merit enough,” Dietrich cautioned Theresia. “Many a gärtner in his hut loves riches more than does a generous and open-handed lord. It is the desire and not the possession that diverts us from the straight path. There is good and ill in any besitting.” Before Joachim could dispute the point, he added, “Ja, the rich man finds it more difficult to see Christ because the glitter of the gold dazzles his eyes; but never forget that it is the man that sins and not the gold.”

He returned to the altar to finish the Mass, and Joachim took the bread and wine from the credence table and followed him. Theresia handed him a basket of herbs and roots that she had gathered and Joachim brought those to the altar, too. Then, having received only the lesser orders, the Minorite stood aside. Dietrich spread his arms wide and recited a prayer for the offerings. “Orátio mea…”

Theresia took all in with the same simplicity with which she accepted everything else in life. This was a good woman, Dietrich thought. She would never be placed on the calendar of saints, never be remembered for centuries like Laurence and Sixtus; yet she owned their generosity of spirit. Christ lived in her because she lived in Christ. Irresistably, he compared her to the wanton Hildegarde Müller.

Councils had proposed that the priest should turn his back on his flock, and not face them across the altar as had been done since the earliest times. The argument was that priest and people should face God together, the celebrant standing at the fore as the commander of an army leads his lances into battle. Some of the great cathedrals had already reversed their altars, and Dietrich expected the practice to become soon universal. And yet, how sad if he could not gaze upon the Theresias of the world.

After the vigil, as they returned by torchlight to the parsonage, Joachim said to Dietrich, “That was a fine thing you said. I had not looked to you for it.”

Dietrich had been watching Theresia make her way down the hillside with her basket of herbs, now blessed and therefore meet for preparing salves and unguents. “What did I say?” He had not expected praise from Joachim, and the compliment of the first utterance pleased him more than the implicit criticism of the second nettled.

“When you said that the rich man cannot see Christ because the gold dazzles his eyes. I liked that. I would like to use it myself.”

“I said it was more difficult. It’s never easy for anyone. And don’t forget the glitter. Gold itself is a useful thing. It is the glitter that is the blinding illusion.”

“You could have been a Franciscan yourself.”

“And burn with the rest of you? I’m a simple priest of the diocese. Thank you, but I will stay out of it. Kaisers and Popes are like the upper and nether millstone in Klaus’ mill. Between them is a bad place to lie.”

“I never read of Christ praising luxury and wealth.”

Dietrich lifted his torch the better to see his companion. “I never heard of him leading bands of armed peasants to the sacking of a manor house, either!”

Joachim shrank from the vehemence he heard. “No!” the Minorite said. “We don’t preach that. The Way of Francis is—”

“Where were you when the Armleder went about the Rhineland hanging the rich men and burning their houses?”

Joachim stared at him. “The Armleder? Why, I was a child in my father’s house. The Armleder never came there.”

“Be thankful they never did.”

A strange look passed across the monk’s features. Fear, but something else. Then the face closed up once more. “It is vain to discuss what might have been.”

Dietrich grunted, suddenly tired of baiting the young man, who might have been eight or nine when the mobs rampaged. “Be wary,” he said, “of unlocking such passions as envy.”

Joachim stalked away from him, but turned after a few paces. “It was still a good thing to say.” He left, and Dietrich gave thanks that the younger man had not asked the same question of him. Where were you, Dietrich, when the Armleder passed through?

A motion to his right drew his attention, but his eyes were dazed by the torch and he could make out nothing but a shape that leapt from behind the church. Dietrich ran to the crest of the hill and held his torch high to illuminate the rocky slope behind, but he saw only the rustle of a wild raspberry bush and a stone that clattered down the hill.

Another movement, this one behind him — . He whirled suddenly, caught a glimpse of great glowing eyes, then the torch was knocked from his grasp, and he was tripped to the ground. He cried out over the snapping of twigs and the rustling of leaves as the second intruder fled.

In moments, Joachim and Theresia were at his side. Dietrich assured his rescuers that he was unhurt, but Theresia explored his skull and arms for injuries anyway. When her fingers reached the back of his head, he winced. “Ach!”

Theresia said, “You’ll have a lump there in the morning, but the bone is not fractured.”

Joachim had retrieved Dietrich’s torch and held it so Theresia could see what she was doing. “Are you a chirurgeon, then?” he asked.

“Father taught me herbs and medicines and bone-setting from his books,” Theresia told him. “Put something cold against it, father,” she added to Dietrich. “If you have a headache, take some ground peony root with oil of roses. I’ll blend a compound tonight and bring it to you.”

When she had gone, Joachim said, “She called you ‘father.’”

“Many do,” Dietrich answered dryly.

“I thought she meant… something more.”

“Did you. Well, she was my ward, if you must know. I brought her here when she was ten.”

“Ach. Were you then her uncle? What befell her parents?”

Dietrich took the torch from him. “The Armleder killed them. They burned the house down with everyone in it. Only Theresia escaped. I taught her what I had learned of healing in Paris, and when she turned twelve and became a woman, Herr Manfred granted her the right to practice the craft on his manor.”

“I had always thought…”

“What?”

“I had always thought they had a just grievance. The Armleder, I mean, against the wealthy.”

Dietrich looked into the flames of the torch. “So they had; but summum ius, iniuria summa.”

On Monday, Dietrich and Max set out for the Great Woods to look after Josef the charcoal burner and his apprentice, neither of whom had been seen since the Sixtus day fires. The day broke hot, and Dietrich was sodden with his own sweat before they had walked half the distance. A thin haze mitigated the sun’s intensity, but it was small dispensation. In the spring fields, where the harvest army labored on the lord’s salland, Oliver Becker idled in the speckled shade of a broad oak, unmindful of the scowls of his peers.

“The gof,” Max said when Dietrich pointed him out. “Grows his hair long as if he were a young Herr. Sits on his ass all day and watches everyone else do the work because he can pay the shirking-fine. In the Swiss, everyone works.”

“It must be a wonderful country, then, the Swiss.”

Max cast him a suspicious glance. “It is. We have no ‘mine Herrs.’ When a matter needs settling, we gather all the fighting men and take a show of hands, with no need for lords.”

“I thought the Swiss lands were Hapsburg fiefs.”

Schweitzer waved a hand. “I expect Duke Albrecht thinks so, too; but we mountain folk have a different opinion… You look pensive, pastor. What is it?”

“I fear the hands of all those neighbors, raised together, may impose one day a tyranny weightier than the hand of a single lord. With a lord, at least you know who to bring to account, but when a mob raises its many hands, which holds the blame?”

Max snorted. “Bring a lord to account?”

“Four years since, the village brought suit against the steward when Manfred enclosed the common greenway.”

“Well, Everard…”

“The lord must save his honor. It’s a legal fiction, but a useful one. Like that quillon of yours. One thumb longer, and it would be a sword, which would be above your station.”

“We Swiss like them,” he said, laying a hand on the pommel and grinning.

“What I mean is, Manfred could then chastise his steward for doing what he had told him to do, and everyone pretends to believe it.”

Max made a curt gesture. “Moorgarten rendered a more vigorous verdict. We brought the Hapsburg Duke to account there, I tell you.”

Dietrich looked at him. “Anything too vigorous ends with peasants dangling from trees. That’s a fruit I’d not see harvested again.”

“In the Swiss, the peasants won.”

“And yet here you are, serving the Hochwald Herr, who serves both the Baden Markgraf and the Hapsburg Duke.” To this, Max made no response.

They crossed over the mill-brook bridge and took the road toward Bear Valley. The fallow fields lay on the left and the autumn fields on the right, the ground swelling higher and edging into the dirt track, pinching it until it seemed more trench than road. Hedgerows and briar-bushes, meant to keep cows and sheep from wandering into the croplands, provided a bit of inadvertent shade to the walkers — and seemed veritable trees by reason of the height of the land from which they sprouted. The road, muddy through this stretch from a rivulet tributary to the mill brook, meandered first this way, then that, as slope and pitch dictated. Dietrich had wondered at times what sort of place Bear Valley might be that travelers seemed disinclined to go straight there.

Near the common pasture, the road shed its subterranean aspect and emerged onto the shoulder of the hill, a gentle swell of land that marked the first pitch into the Katerinaberg. The sun was more unremittingly present here, with even the small shade of the hedgerows gone. Someone had opened the gate between the commons and the autumn fields so that the village cows could graze on the stubble and deposit their manure for the fall planting.

From the higher ground of the meadow, yellow with goose-blooms, they spied Heinrich Altenbach’s homestead on the track to Stag’s Leap. Altenbach had left the manor several years since to drain some marshland. Being waste, the marsh had been claimed for no lord’s manor, and Altenbach had built on it a cottage so he would not have to walk each day to his fields.

“I suppose every man would rather live on his own land,” Max suggested when Dietrich had remarked the farmhouse. “If he owned his own plow and beasts, and had no wish to share them with his neighbor. But it is a far run to the castle should an army pass this way, and those neighbors might not open the gate to him.”

On the far side of the meadow, the forest glowered softly black. Thin streamers of white smoke twisting among the birch and pine and oak. Dietrich and Max paused under a solitary oak to drink from their water-skins. Dietrich had some chestnuts in his scrip, which he shared with the sergeant. The latter, for his part, studied the plumes of smoke with great attention, juggling the nuts in his hand like a set of knucklebones.

“Easy to get lost in there,” Dietrich commented.

“Stay to the game trails,” Max said, half-distracted. “Don’t hare off into the brush.” He popped the meat from a chestnut and threw it into his mouth.

The forest was cooler than the open meadow. Sunlight penetrated only in shattered fragments, dappling the hazel bushes and bluebells underneath the canopy. A few strides and Dietrich was swallowed up. The harvest sounds grew distant, then muffled, then ceased entirely to argue with the silence. He and Max passed among the oaks and larches and black spruce on grumbling carpets of last year’s leaves. Dietrich soon lost all sense of direction and stayed close by the sergeant.

The air reeked of stale smoke and ashes and, overlaying it, a sharp smell, like salt and urine and sulfur all mixed together. They came soon to burnt land. There, hot wood glowered within split trunks, awaiting only a blast of air to unravel again into flames. The seared corpses of small animals lay tangled in the brush.

“Holzbrenner’s kiln is deeper in, I think,” Dietrich said. “That way.” Max said nothing. He was trying to look everywhere at once. “The charcoal burner is a solitary man,” Dietrich continued. “He would have made a fine contemplative.” But Max was not listening. “It was only lightning,” Dietrich said, and the sergeant flinched, turned at last to look at him.

“How did you — ?”

“You were thinking too loudly. I would not have asked you to accompany me, but Josef has not been seen since the fires and Lorenz fears for him and his apprentice.”

Max grunted. “The smith fears running short of charcoal. Klaus tells me that this Josef only comes into the village when he has charcoal to sell or duties to pay the Herr, and then he nearly always sends the boy. That supernatural wind topped his kiln and set the woods on fire, and he’s been digging a new one. That’s why we’ve not seen his smoke.”

“The wind was not supernatural,” Dietrich insisted, but with no great conviction.

The ruin grew more extensive the farther they walked. They saw trees broken off, uprooted, toppled, leaning one upon the other. Sunlight poured through holes in the canopy. “A giant has played at jack-straws,” said Dietrich.

“I’ve seen destruction like this,” Max said.

“Like this? Where?”

Max shook his head. “Only not so vast. Look how the trees lie here and how they lie over there, as if they have all fallen outward from some center.”

Dietrich gave him a look. “Why?”

“At the siege of Cividale down in the Friuli, nearly — oh, near twenty years ago, I think. Christ, I was young and stupid, running off that way. To help the Austrians fight the Venetians?

What quarrel was that of mine? Two of the German knights brought a pot-de-fer with the black powder. Well, it helped us carry the city, but one of the barrels burst while they were mixing the powder — they always do the mixing in the field, and I can see why. There was a crack like thunder and the wind-blast scattered men and equipment all about.” He looked again at the fallen trees. “Like those.”

“How large must a barrel of the black powder be to do so much damage?” Dietrich asked.

Max did not answer. A chittering sound, like the buzzing of locusts, filled the air — though it was the wrong year for locusts. Dietrich looked at the fallen trees and thought, The impetus came from that direction.

Finally, the sergeant blew his breath out. “Right, then. This way.” He turned away to follow the trail toward the kiln.

The clearing was a shallow pit fifty paces across and floored with a layer of ash and beaten earth. In the flattened center stood the kiln itself: a mound of earth and sod five long paces in diameter. But the earthen seal had been ripped away on one side, exposing the wood inside and allowing the wind to blast the fire. The sparks had been scattered into the woods, setting the fires whose remnants they had lately passed.

The Sixtus’ Day wind had rung the church bells on the far side of the valley. Here, it must have blown a hundred times stronger — harrowing the trees that surrounded the clearing, scattering the windbreaks that regulated the airflow into the kiln, peeling the earth from the kiln, gouging a channel through the forest like a river in flood. Only the strongest trees remained upright, and many of those were shattered and bent.

Dietrich stepped around the ruined kiln. A fan of burnt timbers and thatch marked where the charcoal-makers’ cottage had once stood. At the end of that spray, against the sagging trees on the far side of the clearing, Dietrich found Josef and his apprentice.

Their charred torsos lacked arms and legs and, in the lad’s case, a head. Dietrich searched his memory for the boy’s name, but it would not come. Both bodies had been smashed and broken, as if they had fallen from a great cliff, and both were skewered with splinters of wood. Yet, what wind could be so strong? Farther off, he saw a leg wedged in the fork of a cracked beech. He searched no further, but put his back to the terrible sight.

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” Max asked from the other side of the kiln. Dietrich nodded and, bowing his head, recited a short prayer in his heart. When he crossed himself, Max did the same.

“We’ll need a horse,” the sergeant said, “to carry the bodies out. Meanwhile, the kiln will serve for a crypt.”

It took only a few minutes, in the course of which Dietrich found the boy’s head. The hair had been burned off and the eyes had melted, and Dietrich wept over the charred remnant of the lad’s beauty. Anton. He remembered the name now. A comely lad, with much promise in his eyes. Josef had loved him greatly, as the son his solitary life had never granted.

When they had finished, they arranged the loose sod around the opening to provide as much protection as they could from animals.

Schweitzer jerked suddenly about and took a step toward the smoky woods behind him. A snapping of twigs faded rapidly in the distance. “We are watched,” he said.

“It didn’t sound like footsteps,” Dietrich suggested. “It sounded more like a deer, or a rabbit.”

The sergeant shook his head. “A soldier knows when he’s being watched.”

“Then, whoever these people are, they’re timid,” Dietrich told Max.

“I don’t think so,” Max answered without turning. “I think they are sentries. They run to take word back or to remain unseen. It’s what I would do.”

“Outlaw knights?”

“I doubt it.” He tapped the pommel of his Burgundian quillon. “France has employment enough. They needn’t live like poachers in a place like this.” After a few more minutes, he said. “He’s gone, at any rate. The Herr will be back on the morrow. We’ll see what his wishes are.”