Eifelheim

IV. August, 1348 The Feast of St. Clare of Assisi

In the shimmering heat of an August afternoon, the Herr Manfred von Hochwald danced his palefridus up the Oberreid road to the amazement and delight of the peasants bent over the grain. First, came Wolfram the herald, astride a white jennet, bearing the banner with the Hochwald arms and crying the lord’s return to the harvest army. There followed a troop of men-at-arms, with their pikes resting upon their shoulders and their helmets glinting like the sun off the tumbling mill stream. Then came the captains and the knights, then chaplain Rudolf and Eugen the jung-herr, then the Herr himself: tall and splendid, well-seated, gorgeous in his surcoat, with his helm crooked in his arm and his hand raised in beneficent greeting.

In spring-sown fields now sagging with wheat, the women unbent from the reaping, sickles dangling from their numbed hands, and the men turned from sheaves half-bound to gape at the procession. They paused, mopped brows with kerchief or cap, traded uncertain looks, questions, guesses, exclamations, until all — villein and free, man and woman and child — drifted in one accord toward the road, gathering speed as they went, excitement building upon itself, splashing through the brook that bordered the fields, voices swelling from murmur to shout. Behind, atop the wagons, the wardens of autumn seethed over the lost afternoon, for the grain would ripen with or without the sickle. But the wardens, too, waved their caps at the noble procession, before tugging them firmly back into place.

The party crossed the valley. Feet and hooves drummed the brook bridge; armsmen shouted greetings to sweet hearts and wives long unswyved (as they hoped). Fathers called to sons happily returned (and grown unaccountably older) amid wails for husbands, sons, brothers missing from the ranks. Hounds gave tongue and chased alongside the file of men. Glitter in the air as Eugen tossed small coins to the throng. Booty taken from dead English knights, or ransomed off live ones. Men and women scrabbled for coppers in the dirt, praising their lord for his generosity, and biting the coins.

The procession trudged up Church Hill, where Dietrich, Joachim, and Theresia awaited. Dietrich had vested for the occasion in a gold chasuble, but the Minorite wore the same patched robe as always and watched the approaching lord with a mixture of wariness and contempt. More of the former and less of the latter, Dietrich thought, might serve the man better. Beside them, less quiet, more uncertain, the Herr’s daughters chattered with their nurse. Irmgard, the younger, alternated smiles with apprehension. Her father was coming! But two years is forever in the life of a child, and he was that long estranged. Everard chewed his moustache with the unease of a man left two years in charge of his master’s estate. Klaus, who was maier for the village, stood beside him with an indifference that betokened either an innocent heart or one more confident in its misappropriations.

Max had drawn the castle guard up in two lines, and sixteen men presented their arms in a shout and a clash of metal as their lord rode between them. Even Dietrich, who had seen more splendid displays than this in towns and cities far more grand, was stirred by the spectacle.

The herald dismounted planted the Hochwald banner — vert, a boar passant below an oak tree, all proper. Manfred reined in before it and his horse reared and pawed the air. The harvesters, who had rambled up the hillside, cheered the horsemanship, but Theresia whispered, “Oh, the poor beast, ridden hard.”

If the horse had been ridden hard, so had the men. Dietrich noted the signs of a forced march beneath the brave show. Weary eyes; tattered livery. There were fewer than had marched forth, and some strange faces had been added — the discards and left-behinds of some battlefield, hungry for a lord to feed them. Hungry enough, indeed, to leave their homelands behind.

Eugen, the jung-herr, dropped to the ground, staggered and grabbed hold of the snaffle rein to steady himself. The horse shied and pawed the ground, tossing up a clot with his foot. Then Eugen stepped smartly to his lord’s stirrup and held it while the Herr dismounted.

Manfred touched knee to ground before Dietrich, and the pastor placed his left hand on the Herr’s brow and drew the sign of the cross over him with his right, announcing public thanks for the troop’s safe return. Everyone crossed themselves, and Manfred kissed his fingers. Rising, he said to Dietrich, “I would pray a while in private.”

Dietrich could see creases around the eyes that hadn’t been there before, a greater and more pallid gray in the hair. The long, lean face framed sorrow. These men, he thought, have come a long, hard way.

Passing to the church, the lord clasped hands with his steward and with Klaus and told them both to come in the evening to the manor house for the accounts. His two daughters, he embraced with much feeling, removing his gauntlets to stroke their hair. Kunigund, the older, giggled with delight. Each one he greeted — priest, steward, maier, daughter — the Herr studied with deep concern; and yet it had been Manfred absent and unheard from these two years.

The Herr paused at the church door. “Good old Saint Catherine,” he said, running a hand along the curve of the saint’s figure and touching a finger to her sad smile. “There were times, Dietrich, when I thought I would never see her again.” After a curious glance at Joachim, he strode inside. What he told God, what boon he asked or thanks he gave, he never afterward said.

The Herrenhof, the lord’s manor house, sat within its curial lands atop a hill across the valley from the church, so that lord and priest oversaw the land from their separate perches and warded the folk between them, body and soul. There were other symbolisms behind the separation, playing — in miniature — dramas that elsewhere had shaken thrones and cathedrals.

Upon the crest, Burg Hochwald warded the Oberreid road. The outer wall was a small affair, embracing curia as well as castle; but it and the moat were meant only to keep wild animals out and domestic ones in and so was of no military significance. The inner wall, the Schildmauer, was prouder and of more warlike intent. Rearing behind the shield-wall was the tower of the Bergfried, the redoubt which had anciently housed the lords of the high woods when Saracen and Viking had roamed at will and each dawn might see a Magyar horde lining the horizon. The castle was a machine designed for defense and could be held, like most, by only a small garrison; but it had been tested only once, and then not to the limit. No army had marched from the Breisgau since Ludwig the Bavarian had bested Friedrich the Fair at Mühldorf; so the drawbridge was down and the portcullis up and the guards none too vigilant.

The curia spread across an acre and a half around the manor house, crowning the hill with dairy, dovecote, sheepfold, malting house, a kitchen and bakery, a great timber barn of twelve bays to store the grain harvest from the lord’s salland; a stable grunting with cows, horses, oxen. To the rear, more noisome, the curial privy. Elsewhere, an apple orchard, a vineyard, a pound for stray animals that had wandered innocently onto the salland. In generations past, the manor had produced for itself everything needful; but much now lay abandoned. Why weave homespun when finer cloth could be had in the Freiburg market? In the modern age, pack peddlers trekked from the Breisgau, braving for the sake of profit the chance of von Falkenstein’s regard.

No serfs were about. By long custom, the harvest day ended with the meal served in the fields and the lord could demand no work afterward. No monastic sexton, appraising his water-clock to mark the canonical hours, ever gauged time so finely as a manorial serf. Matters differed among the freeholders. Dietrich had noted much late activity in shed and garden and within walls by candlelight in his passage through the village. But a man who labored on his own account did not watch the sun as closely as one who labored for another’s.

Dietrich’s entry into the curial grounds was met with much indignation by the resident geese, who harried and chivvied the priest as he made his way to the Hof. “Next Martinmas,” Dietrich scolded the birds, “you will grace the Herr’s table.” But the chastisement had no effect and they escorted him to the doors of the hall, announcing his arrival. Franz Ambach’s cow, impounded for trespass on the salland, watched placidly while she awaited her ransom.

Gunther, the maier domo, conducted Dietrich to a small scriptorium at the far end of the hall, where the Herr Manfred sat at a writing table below a slit window. Through the window drifted the woodsmoke of evening meals, the cries of hawks circling the tower battlement, the clanging of the smithy, the slow toll of Joachim at the Angelus bell on the other side of the valley, and the amber remains of the afternoon light. The sky was deepening to indigo rimmed by bright orange on the underside of the clouds. Manfred sat in a curule chair fashioned of gracefully curved rosewood whose slats ended in the heads of beasts. His pen scratched across a sheet of paper.

He glanced up at Dietrich’s appearance, bent once more to his writing, then put quill aside and passed the sheet to Max, who stood a little to the side. “Have Wilimer make fair copies of this and see it sent to each of my knights.” Manfred waited until Max had gone before turning to Dietrich. His lips twitched into a brief smile. “Dietrich, you are prompt. I’ve always admired that in you.” He meant “obedient to a summons,” but Dietrich forbore from pointing it out. It might not even be true, but neither of them had tested it as yet.

Manfred indicated a straight-backed chair before the desk and waited until Dietrich had seated himself. “What’s this?” he asked when the priest placed a pfennig before him.

“The fine for Ambach’s cow,” he said.

Manfred picked up the coin and regarded Dietrich for a moment before placing it in a corner of his desk. “I’ll tell Everard. You know if you always pay their fines for them, they’ll lose their dread of delinquency.” Dietrich said nothing, and Manfred turned to his coffer and removed a bundle of parchments wrapped in oiled skin and tied up in string. “Here. These are the latest tractates from the Paris scholars. I had them copied by the stationers while we idled in Picardy. Most of them are direct from the masters’ copies, but there were a few from the Merton calculators, who interest you so much. Those are from secondary copies, of course, brought over by English scholars.”

Dietrich paged through the bundle. Buridan’s On the heavens. His Questions on the eight books of physics. A slim volume On money, by a student named Oresme. Swineshead’s Book of calculations. The very titles conjured up a swarm of memories and Dietrich recalled for a blinding moment of unbearable longing lost student days in Paris. Buridan and Ockham and he arguing the dialectic over tankards of ale. Peter Aureoli scowling and interrupting with the petulance of age. The free-for-all quodlibets, with the master determining on questions thrown up by the crowd. Sometimes in the rustle of the spruces that surrounded Oberhochwald, Dietrich thought he could hear the disputations of doctors, masters, inceptors, bachelors, and wondered if peace and seclusion had been too high a price to pay.

He found his voice with difficulty. “Mine Herr, I hardly know what…” He felt himself as one of Buridan’s famous asses, uncertain which manuscript to read first.

“You know the price. Commentaries, if you think ’em useful. Suitable for a ‘kettle-head’ like me. You must have your own tractate—”

“Compendium.”

“Compendium, then. When it is finished, I will have it sent to Paris, to your old master.”

“Jean Buridan,” Dietrich said reflexively. “At the school called Sorbonne.” But did he really want to remind Paris where he was?

“So.” Manfred steepled his hands under his chin. “I see we have a Franciscan about.”

Dietrich had been expecting the inquiry. He laid the manuscripts aside. “His name is Joachim of Herbholzheim, from the Strassburg friary, living here now since three months.”

He waited for Manfred to ask why the Minorite was staying in a backwoods parish rather than in the bustling cathedral town of the Elsass, but instead the lord cocked his head and placed a finger alongside his cheek. “A von Herbholz? I may know his father.”

“His uncle, that would be. His father’s the younger brother. But Joachim forswore his inheritance when he took the vow of poverty.”

Manfred’s lip quirked on one side. “I wonder if he gave it up faster than his uncle cut him off. He won’t give me any trouble, will he? The boy, I mean; not the uncle.”

“Only the usual denunciations of wealth and display.”

Manfred snorted. “Let him protect the high woods without the means to support a troop of armsmen.”

Dietrich knew all the counter-arguments and saw in the lord’s quickly narrowed gaze that Manfred remembered that he did. The rents and services from the peasantry supported more than armsmen. They supported fine clothing and banquet-feasts and clowns and minnesingers. Manfred kept a household suited to his station and was lavish in its maintenance; and if protection was needed, it lay at the lower end of the valley, at Falcon Rock, far nearer than Mühldorf or Crécy. “I will keep him on a check-rein, sire,” he assured the Herr before old matters could be resurrected.

“See that you do. The last thing I want is an exploratore asking questions and distressing people.” Again, he paused and gave Dietrich a significant look. “Nor you, I should think.”

Dietrich chose to misunderstand the resurrection. “I try not to distress people, but I cannot help asking questions now and then.”

Manfred stared a moment, then he reared his head and laughed, smacking the table with his palm. “By my honor, I’ve missed your wit these past two years.” He sobered instantly and his eyes seemed to look somewhere else without actually turning. “By God, if I have not,” he said more quietly.

“It was bad, then, the war?”

“The war? No worse than others, save that Blind John died a fool’s death. I suppose you’ve heard that tale by now.”

“Charged into the melee roped to his twelve paladins. Who hasn’t heard that tale? An imprudent act for a blind man, I would say.”

“Prudence was never his particular strength. All those Luxemburgers are mad.”

“His son is German King, now.”

“Yes, and Roman Kaiser, too. We were still in Picardy when the news reached us. Well, half the Electors had voted Karl anti-king while Ludwig was still alive, so I don’t suppose they were seized by any great hesitation once he was dead. Poor old Ludwig — to survive all those wars with Hapsburg, and then fall off his horse while hunting. I suppose old Graf Rudolf — no, it’s Friedrich now, I’ve heard — and Duke Albrecht have sworn their oaths, so that settles matters for me. Do you know why Karl did not die with John at Crécy?”

“Were I to guess,” Dietrich said, “I would say he had no ties to his father.”

Manfred snorted. “Or a rope uncommonly long. When the French chivalry charged the English longbows, Karl von Luxemburg charged in the other direction.”

“Then he was a wise man, or a coward.”

“Wise men often are.” The Herr’s lip’s twitched. “It’s all that reading that does it, Dietrich. It takes a man out of the world and pushes him inside his own head, and there is nothing there but spooks. I hear Karl is a learned man, which is the one sin that Ludwig never committed.”

Dietrich made no reply. Kaisers, like Popes, came in diverse sorts. He wondered what would happen now to those Franciscans who had fled to Munich.

Manfred rose and walked to the lance window and stared out. Dietrich watched him brush idly at the grit of the window stone. The evening sun bathed the lord’s face, giving his skin a ruddy cast. After a silence, he said, “You haven’t asked why it’s taken me two years to return.”

“I imagined you had difficulties,” Dietrich said with care.

“You imagined I was dead.” Manfred turned away from the window. “Assumption’s natural when you think how thick the dead lie between here and Picardy. Night’s coming on,” he added, inclining his head toward the sky outside. “You’ll want a torch to see you safely back.” Dietrich made no response, and after another moment, Manfred continued.

“The French-Reich is in chaos. The King was wounded; his brother killed. The Count of Flanders, the Duke of Lorraine, the King of Majorca… And the fool King of Bohemia, as I’ve said… All dead. The Estates have met and scolded Philip handsomely for losing the battle — and four thousand knights with it. They voted him new monies, of course, but fifteen deniers will not buy what three once did. It was a close thing, our returning. Knights are selling their lances to whoever will hire them. It was… a temptation, to throw off all responsibility and seize whatever a strong right arm might seize. When princes flee battle, and knights turn free-lance, and barons rob pilgrims, what value has honor?”

“Why, all the more, seeing how rare it has become.”

Manfred laughed without humor, then resumed his study of the sunset. “The pest reached Paris this past June,” he said quietly.

Dietrich started. “The pest!”

“Yes.” Manfred crossed his arms and seemed to become smaller. “They say half the city lies dead, and I think it but plain fact. We saw… things no man should see. Corpses left to rot in the street. Strangers denied hospice. Bishops and lords in flight, leaving Paris to fend for herself. And the church bells tolling funeral upon funeral until the town council bade them stop. Worst, I think, were the children — abandoned by their parents, dying alone and uncomprehending.”

Dietrich crossed himself three times. “Dear God have mercy on them. As bad as Italy, then? Did they wall up families into their houses, as the Visconti did in Milan? No? Then some shred of charity remained.”

“Ja. I was told the sisters in the Hospital stayed at their posts. They died, but so fast as they died, others took up their place.”

“A miracle!”

Manfred grunted. “You have a grim taste in miracles, my friend. The English fare no better in Bordeaux. And it reached Avignon in May, though the worst was over by the time we passed there. Don’t worry, Dietrich. Your Pope survived. His Jew physicians bade him sit between two fires and he never even fell sick.” The Herr paused. “I met a brave man there. Perhaps the bravest man I shall ever meet. Guy de Chauliac. Do you know him?”

“Only by reputation. He is said to be the greatest physician in Christendom.”

“That may be. He is a large man with the hands of a peasant and a slow, deliberate way of speaking. I would not have marked him a physician had I found him in the fields. After Clement left the city for his country house, de Chauliac remained — ‘to avoid the infamy,’ he told me, though there is no shame in fleeing such an enemy. He fell ill himself of the pest. And all the while he lay abed, wracked with fever and pain, he described his symptoms and treated himself in divers ways. He wrote everything down, so that any who came after him would know the course of the disease. He lanced his own pustules, and recorded the effect. He was… He was like a knight who stands his ground against his enemy, whatever wounds he has received. Would I had six men with such courage by my side in battle.”

“De Chauliac is dead, then?”

“No, he lived, praise God, though it is hard to say which treatment saved him — if indeed it was anything more than the whim of God.”

Dietrich could not understand how sickness could travel such distances. Plagues had broken out before — inside town walls or castles, among besieging armies — but never since the time of Eusebius had it consumed whole nations. Some invisible, malevolent creature seemed to stalk the land. But it was bad air, all the doctors were agreed. A mal odour, or malady.

An alignment of the planets had caused deep earthquakes in Italy, and the chasms had exuded a vast body of stiff, bad air, which the winds then moved from place to place. None knew how wide the malady was, nor how far it would travel before it finally broke up. Folk in sundry towns had tried to sunder it with loud noises, church bells and the like, but to no avail. Travelers had marked its progress up the Italian peninsula and along the coast to Marseilles. Now it had gone to Avignon, and so to Paris and Bordeaux.

“It has passed us by!” he cried. “The pest has gone west and north!” Dietrich knew shameful joy. He did not rejoice that Paris had suffered, but that Oberhochwald had been spared.

Manfred gave him a bleak look. “No sign among the Swiss, then? Max said not, but there is more than one road out of Italy since they hung that bridge across St. Gothard’s Pass. It worried us on the march that we would find you all dead, that it had passed through here before reaching Avignon.”

“We may be too high for the malady to reach,” Dietrich told him.

Manfred made a dismissive wave. “I am only a simple knight, and leave such notions as malady to scholars. But in France, I bespoke a knight of St. John, lately come from Rhodes, and he said that the pest came out of Cathay, and the story is that the dead there lie without number.

It struck Alexandria, he told me, and his brotherhood at first deemed it God’s judgment on the Saracens.”

“God has not such poor aim,” Dietrich said, “as to lay Christendom waste while smiting the infidel.”

“They’ve been burning Jews over it, all the way from the Mediterranean north — save in Avignon, where your Pope protects them.”

“Jews? That makes nonsense. Jews die also of the pest.”

“So said Clement. I have a copy of his Bull that I obtained in Avignon. Yet Jews travel all about Europe; as also does the pest. The story is that the kabbalists among them have been poisoning the wells, so it may be that the good Jews themselves know nothing about it.”

Dietrich shook his head. “It is bad air, not bad water.”

Manfred shrugged. “DeChauliac said the same, though in his delerium, he wrote that rats brought the pest.”

“Rats!” Dietrich shook his head. “No, that cannot be. Rats have been always about, and this pest is a new thing on earth.”

“As may be,” said Manfred. “But this past May, King Peter put down a pogrom in Barcelona. I had the news from Don Pero himself, who had come north looking for glory in the French war. The Catalans ran wild, but the burger militia protected the Jewish quarter. Queen Joanna sought likewise in Provence, but the folk rose up and expelled the Neapolitans. And last month Count Henri ordered all the Jews in the Dauphine brought into custody. To protect them from the mob, I think; but Henri’s a coward and the mob may ride him.” Manfred curled his right hand into a fist. “So you see that it was no such simple thing as a war that kept me at bay these past two years.”

Dietrich did not want to believe it true. “Pilgrim tales…”

“…may grow in the telling. Ja, ja. Maybe only two Jews have been burned and only twenty Cathayans died; but I know what I saw in Paris, and I would as soon not see it here. Max tells me there are poachers in my woods. If they bring the pest with them, I want them kept away.”

“But people do not carry bad air with them,” Dietrich said.

“There must be a reason why it spreads so far and wide. Some towns, Pisa and Lucca among them, have reported good fortune by blockading travelers, so travelers may well spread it. Perhaps the malady clings to their clothing. Perhaps they really do poison the wells.”

“The Lord commanded we show hospitality to the sick. Would you have Max chase them off, to the peril of our souls?”

Manfred grimaced. His fingers drummed restless on the table top. “Find out, then,” he said. “If they are hale, the wardens may use them in the grain harvest. One pfennig the day plus the evening meal and I overlook any trapping or fishing they may have done in the mean time. Two pfennig if they forego the meal. However, if they need hospitality, that is your affair. Set up a hospital in my woods, but none may enter onto my manor or into the village.”

In the morning, Max and Dietrich went in search of the poachers. Dietrich had prepared two perfumed kerchiefs with which to filter the malady, should they encounter it, but he did not think much of Manfred’s theory that clothing could carry bad air with it. There was nothing in Galen; nor had Avicenna written of it. All that clothing customarily carried were fleas and lice.

When they came to the place where the trees lay toppled like mown hay, Max hunkered down and sighted along a trunk. “The sentry ran off in that direction,” he said, holding his arm out. “Past that white beech. I noted its location at the time.”

Dietrich saw a great many white beeches, all alike. Trusting, he followed the soldier.

But Max had walked only a few arm-lengths into the brush when he stopped by the flat stump of a great oak. “So. What is this?” A bundle sat upon the stump. “Food stolen from the boon,” the sergeant said opening the kerchief. “These are the loaves that Becker makes for the harvest meal — see how much longer they are than the normal loaf? And turnips and, what’s this?” He sniffed. “Ah. Soured cabbage. And a pot of cheese.” Max turned, brandishing a loaf big enough to feed three men. “Eating well, I think, for landless men.”

“Why would they abandon it?” Dietrich wondered.

Max glanced about. “We frightened them off. Hush!” He held an arm out to Dietrich to still him while his eyes searched the surrounding brush. “Let’s be on our way,” he said more loudly, and turned as if to proceed deeper into the woods, but at the sudden snap of a twig behind them, he whirled and in two leaps grabbed hold of an arm.

“Got you, you rubbish!”

The figure yanked from concealment squealed like a yearling pig. Dietrich glimpsed a brocaded coverslut and two long, flying, yellow braids. “Hilde!” he said.

The miller’s wife swung on Max, who had turned at Dietrich’s cry, and struck him on the nose. Max howled and slapped her with his free hand, spinning her so that he could pull her other arm up high behind her back, nearly to her shoulder blade. “Max, stop!” Dietrich cried. “Let her go! It’s Klaus’ wife!”

Max gave the arm another twist, then shoved the woman away. Hilde staggered a step or two, then turned. “I thought you were robbers, come to steal the food I laid out for the poor.”

Dietrich regarded the bread and cheese on the tree stump. “Ach… You are bringing the poachers food from the harvest meal? Since how long?” Dietrich wondered that Hilde should have done so. There was nothing of pride in the act.

“Since Sixtus Day. I leave it here on this stump just before sunset, after the harvest work. My husband never lacks for meal, and this is as good a use for it as any. I paid the baker’s son to make loaves for me.”

“So that is how the fellow bought himself free of the boon-work. But, why?”

Hilde drew herself up and stood straight. “It is my penance before God.”

Max snorted. “You should not have come here alone.”

“You said there were landless men here. I heard you.”

Dietrich said, “Landless men can be dangerous.”

“More dangerous than this doodle?” Hilde jerked her head toward Max. “They’re timid folk. They wait until I leave before they take the offering.”

“So you thought to hide and have a look at them?” the sergeant said. “Womanly thinking. If they’re serfs off their manor, they’ll not wish to be seen.”

She turned and wagged a finger at Schweitzer. “Wait until I tell my Klaus, the maier, how you handled me!”

Max grinned. “Will that be after you tell him how you go into the woods to feed poachers? Tell me, do you bite and scratch as well as you punch?”

“Come closer and learn.”

Max smiled and took a step forward to Hilde’s step back. Then, his gaze traveled past her, and the smile froze. “God’s wounds!”

Dietrich glimpsed a stealthy figure darting into the woods with the food bundled up into the kerchief. He was a spindly sort — arms and legs too long for his body, joints too far down his limbs. He wore a belt of some shining material, but wore it too high to mark a waist. That much, and grayish skin through strips of colorful cloth, was all that Dietrich saw before the figure had disappeared into the brush. Hazel twigs rustled; an acorn-jay complained. Then all was still.

“Did you see him?” Max demanded.

“That pallor…,” said Dietrich. “I think he must be a leper.”

“His face…”

“What about it?”

“He had no face.”

“Ah. That oft happens in the last stages, when the nose and ears rot off.”

They stood irresolute, until Hildegarde Müller stepped into the brush. “Where are you going, you ignorant slattern?” Max cried.

Hilde cast a bleak look on Dietrich. “You said they were landless men,” she said in a voice like an overtuned lute string. “You said it!” Then she took two more steps into the hazelwood, stopped, and looked about.

Max closed his eyes and let out a breath. Then he pulled his quillon from its sheath and set after the miller’s wife. “Max,” said Dietrich, “you said we should stay on the game trails.”

The sergeant hacked an angry blaze into a tree. “The game has better sense. Stand still, you silly woman! You’ll get yourself lost. God save us.” He squatted and ran some branches from a raspberry bush through his hand. “Broken,” he said. “That way.” Then he set off without looking to see if the others followed.

Every few steps, Max would stoop and examine the ground or a branch. “Long steps,” he muttered at one point. “See where the shoe has come down in the mud? Its fellow was back there.”

“Leaping,” Dietrich guessed.

“On deformed feet? Mark the shape. When have you ever heard of cripples leaping?”

“Acts,” said Dietrich. “Chapter three, verse eight.”

Max grunted, stood and brushed his knees. “This way,” he said.

He led them by stages deeper into the forest, blazing at times a tree or arranging rocks upon the ground as a sign for which way they had come. They pushed past thickets and brambles, stepped over felled trees that had buried their heels in their path, stumbled down sudden ravines. “Lover-God!” said Max when he had found the footprints once more. “He leapt from one bank to the other!”

The trees grew taller and farther apart, their branches arching overhead like the vaulting of a cathedral. Dietrich saw what Max had meant about the game trails. Here, protected by a ridge, no trees had fallen to the blast and every direction looked the same. Bushes and smaller trees had abandoned the field to their triumphant seniors. A mat of leaf-fall, years thick, softened their footsteps. Nor was there cue from the sun. Light was present only in shafts that, arrow-like, pierced the foliage above. When Max hacked a tree, muffled echoes spoke from every direction, so that Dietrich thought that sound itself had gotten lost. Hilde began to say something, but her voice, too, whispered from the stillness and she quieted immediately and thereafter followed the Schweitzer more closely.

In a small clearing where a brook chattered through the forest, they stopped to rest among the ferns. Dietrich sat on a mossy stone beside a pool. Max tested the water, then cupped his hands and drank from it. “Cold,” he said as he refilled his water-skin. “It must run down from the Katerinaberg.”

Hilde looked about and shivered. “Woods are frightnening places. Wolves live here, and witches.”

Max laughed at her. “Villager tales. My parents were foresters. Did I ever tell you that, pastor? We cut wood and sold it to the charcoal burners. We bought our grain from the valley folk, but fruits and meat we took from the forest. It was a quiet life, peaceful, and nobody bothered us much, except once when a troop of Savoy’s men came through on some quarrel.” He thought silently for a time, then rammed the stopper into his water-skin. “That’s when I left. You know what young men are like. I wondered if there was a world outside the forest, and the Savoyards needed a guide. So I went with them until I had shown them the way to — to somewhere. I’ve forgotten. They had a quarrel there with the Visconti over some worthless patch of the Piedmont. But I stayed with them and carried arms and fought the Milanese.” He took Dietrich’s water-skin and refilled it as well. “I found I liked it,” he said as he handed it back. “I don’t think you can understand that, pastor. The overcoming joy when your opponent falls. It’s like… It’s like having a woman, and I guess you don’t understand that, either. Mind you, I never killed a man who did not have his sword bared for me. I’m no murderer. But now you know why I can never go back. To live in the Alps after what I’ve seen, to live in a place like this,” and he swept his arm around him.

Hilde stared at the sergeant with a peculiar intensity. “What sort of man enjoys killing?”

“A living one.”

That utterance was greeted by silence from both the priest and the miller’s wife; and in that silence they heard through the continuo of chittering locusts, the sound of distant hammers. Max craned his neck. “That way. Close. Move quietly. Sound carries in a forest.”

Nearing the source, Dietrich heard a chorus in an arrhythmic but not unpleasing mix. Drums, perhaps. Or rattles. Beneath it all, rasping and clicking. One sound, he could identify: the chunk of ax on tree, followed by the peculiar crackling rush of a toppling fir. “Now,” said Max, “we can’t have that. Those are the Herr’s trees.” He waved the others back and crept forward on cat feet to the edge of the screen of trees that marked the top of the ridge. There, he stiffened and Dietrich, who had come up behind him, whispered, “What is it?”

Max turned and cried, “Run, for your soul’s sake!”

Dietrich instead grabbed the sergeant and said, “What…,” before he too saw what lay below.

A great, circular swathe had been cut out of the forest, as if a giant had swung a scythe through it. Trees lay broken in all directions. In the center of the fall was a white building, as large as an abbot’s tithe barn, with doors along its side lying open. A dozen figures in suspended activity stared up the ridge at Max and Dietrich.

They were not landless men, at all, Dietrich saw.

They were not men.

Spindly, gangly, misjointed. Bodies festooned with ragged strips of cloth. Gray skin suffused with blots of pale green. Long, hairless torsos surmounted by expressionless faces lacking nose and ear, but dominated by huge, golden, globular eyes, faceted like diamonds, that looked nowhere but saw everything. Antennae waved from their brows like summer’s wheat.

Only their mouths showed expression: Working softly, or hanging half-open, or shut into firm lines. Soft, moist lips parted two ways at either end, so that they seemed to smile and scowl at once. Twin strips of some horny substance lay in the folds at either end of the lips and a broken sound lifted from them as of distant locusts.

One creature was supported by two of its fellows. It opened its mouth as if to speak; but what issued forth was not words, but a yellow pus that dribbled down its chin. Dietrich tried to shriek, but his throat was choked with fear. Nightmares arose from childhood of the great stone gargoyles of the Köln Minster come alive in the night to steal him away from his mother’s bed. He turned, flight in mind, only to find that two more of the creatures had come up behind him. He smelled the sharp tang of urine and his heart pounded like the Schmidmühlen trip-hammers. Were these monsters the folk that spread the pest?

Max whispered, “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” over and over. Otherwise, all was hushed. Birds silent, only the low susurrus of the wind. The forest beckoned, its bracken and recesses a lie of safety. If he ran, he would become lost — but was that not better than to stay and be lost for all eternity?

Yet he was all that stood between these apparitions and his two companions, for only he had been consecrated with the power to cast out demons. From the corners of his eyes he saw Max’s fingers frozen on the hilt of his quillon.

Dietrich’s right hand inched up his chest and gripped his pectoral, holding the Crucified One before him like a shield. A demon responded by reaching slowly toward a scrip that hung from his belt — only to have his hand stayed by his companion. The hand had six fingers, Dietrich noticed, not a comforting number. He tried to speak the words of exorcism — I, a priest of Jesus Christ, do abjure you unclean spirits… - but his throat was spitless.

A shrill buzz pierced the air, and every head turned toward the barn, from which another creature had emerged, this one dwarfish and with an oversized head. It ran toward them and one of the taller demons let out a clacking ululation and charged after it. To do what? To rip their souls from their very bodies?

At that, the tableau broke.

Dietrich cried out.

Max drew his quillon.

The demon behind them pulled a strange, shiny tube from his pouch and pointed it at them.

And Hildegarde Müller staggered down the ridge toward the demons below.

She stopped once and looked back, locking gazes with Dietrich. Her mouth parted as if to speak; then she set her shoulders and continued forward. Oddly, they drew back from her.

Dietrich seized his fear and watched the unfolding drama with dreadful concentration. God, grant me the grace to understand! He felt that much depended on his understanding.

Hildegarde halted before the demon spewing pus from his mouth and she extended both hands to him. The hands clenched, drew back, opened again. And the demon fell into her arms and collapsed against her.

With a thin, high cry, she went to her knees in the dust and ashes and wood chips and cradled the creature on her lap. The greenish-yellow ichor stained her clothing and gave forth a sweetish, sickly odor. “Welc—” She stopped, swallowed and began again. “Welcome, pilgrims, to the hospitality of my home. It pleases — . It pleases me that you might abide with us.” She stroked the thing’s head gently, looking much like the Sorrowful Mother in those Vesperbilden that had lately grown popular, save that her eyes were squeezed shut and she would not look on what she comforted.

Everything came clear for Dietrich in a sudden, dizzying rush. The monster cradled by the miller’s wife was badly injured. The effluvium that issued from him was a humor of some sort. The strips of cloth the demons wore were the torn and burnt remnants of clothing employed as bandages around limbs and torsos. Their bodies and faces were smoke-smudged and the motley of their skin signified dull-green bruises and scratches. And do hellish creatures suffer earthly torments? As for the smaller creature who had charged them buzzing like an angry hornet…

A child, Dietrich knew. And demons had no children; nor did they run and snatch them up into their arms as did the second creature racing close behind.

“Pastor?” said Max. His voice trembled. He was on the point of breaking, and with his hand on a knife. “What manner of demons are these?”

“Not demons, sergeant.” Dietrich had seized hold of Max’s wrist. He glanced at Hildegarde — and the injured one. “Men, I think.”

“Men!”

Dietrich held fast. “Think, sergeant! Are there not centaurs, half-man and half-horse? And what of the blemyae of which Pliny wrote — men with their eyes in their torsos? Honorius Augustodenensis described and sketched dozens of such.” The words tumbled and fought each other, as if they fled from his own tongue. “Stranger beings than these grace the very walls of our church!”

“Creatures more talked of than seen!” Yet Dietrich felt the man untense, and so released his knife arm. The sergeant backed away a step, and then another. One more step and he runs, Dietrich thought.

Then would tales run through the village and down the mountainside to pool in the ears of Freiburg; and a commotion would ensue in this quiet fleck of earth. Preachers would find God or Devil in the hearing and announce new heresies. Ecstatics would claim these creatures in visions; philosophers gravely question their existence. Some would in hidden rooms burn incense and pray to their images; others would ready the stake for those who did. Questions would be asked; Inquisition would be made. Old matters would be remembered; old names recalled.

A woodleafsinger trilled from the treetop and Dietrich noticed how the monsters shrank from an innocent bird.

“Max,” he said. “Hurry to the parsonage and fetch my bag of salves and my copy of Galen. It’s bound in dark brown leather and has a drawing of a man’s body on the cover.” He doubted Galen had much to say on injuries to demons, but he could not let anyone vomit his life into the dirt without some attempt to save him. “And, Max,” he said, calling after the man. “Tell no one what we have seen. We want no panic. If anyone asks, say that… that these strangers may carry the pest.”

Max gave him a serious look. “You’d warn them of the pest to stay a panic?”

“Then tell them something else. Leprosy. Only keep them away. We have need of cool heads. Now hurry — and bring my salves.”

Dietrich slid down the face of the ridge to where the creatures stood, now in a compact mob. Some held axes and mallets at the ready, but others bore no arms at all and shrank from him. A stack of logs had been placed to the side of the strange white building, and Dietrich realized that they had been clearing the broken trees from around it. Yet how could such a large building have been erected in the midst of the forest without a clearance to begin with?

He knelt beside the creature that Hilde comforted and moistened his fingers with spit. “On the condition that you have led a just and good life, I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” He traced a cross on the thing’s brow. “Amen,” said Hildegarde.

Dietrich rose and brushed his habit off, wondering whether he had committed sacrilege. Held Heaven a place for such creatures? Maybe, had they souls. He could make nothing of the injured one’s featureless gaze; could not, indeed, know if it was gazing or not, as there were no lids to the faceted hemispheres. The others had not turned a head while he gave their fellow a conditional baptism. Yet he had the uneasy feeling that they were all looking directly at him. Their strange, bulging eyes did not move. Could not move, he guessed.

Discovered now, what would these creatures do? That they had sought to remain hidden boded well, for their unnatural presence, demonic or not, must remain secret. Yet, they had builded themselves a house on the Herr’s land, so it seemed that they meant to stay, and no secret could keep forever.