Eifelheim (10 page)

G
UNTHER, 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 Heaven
. 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 determing 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 counterarguments 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? 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 lips 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 freelance, 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
—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 drove 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. Gotthard’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.”