Eifelheim (11 page)

“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. “De Chauliac 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 tabletop. “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 meantime. 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.”

I
N 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’s 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.”

N
EARING 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?