Eifelheim (16 page)

As summer waned, Dietrich visited the encampment every few days. Sometimes he went alone, sometimes with Max or Hilde. Hilde would change bandages and clean slowly healing wounds, and Dietrich would teach the Kratzer and Gschert enough German through the good offices of the talking head so they would understand that they must leave. Their response had thus far been a guarded refusal, but whether from willfulness or incomprehension was unclear.

Max would sometimes sit with him in these sessions. Drill being to him natural, he was helpful with the repetition and dumb-play needed to communicate the meaning of many words. More often, the sergeant watched over Hilde like her guardian angel and would, when her unwonted ministry was concluded, escort her back to Oberhochwald.

The
Heinzelmännchen
acquired German quickly, for the talking head, once he learned a usage, never forgot. He owned a prodigious memory, though the lacunae in his understanding were curious.
Day
, he had intuited by listening to village talk, but
year
puzzled him entirely until it was explained. Yet how could any breed of men, however distant their homeland, fail to recognize the circuit of the sun? So, too, the word
love
, which the device confused with the Greek
eros
through some unfortunate clandestine observations into which Dietrich thought it best not to inquire.

“He is an intuitive collection of cogs and cams,” Dietrich told the sergeant after one session. “Any words which are signs in themselves—such as refer to beings or to actions by beings—he apprehends immediately; while those which are signs for species or relations he finds a stumble-step. Hence,
cottage
and
castle
were clear, but
habitation
required instruction.”

Max only grinned. “Perhaps he is not so well-schooled as you.”

I
N SEPTEMBER
, the year paused, weary from the harvest, and inhaled deeply for the fall planting, wine press, and slaughter. The air grew cool and the broadleaf trees shivered in anticipation. Time enough, in this interstice between the summer and autumn labors, to finish the repairs from the “Great Fire,” and to wed Seppl to Ulrike.

The nuptials took place on the village green, where the witnesses could gather ‘round the couple. There, Seppl declared his intent and Ulrike, dressed in traditional bridal yellow, declared her consent, after which everyone proceeded up Church Hill. The Lateran Council had required that all weddings be public, but not that the Church participate in them. Nonetheless, despite his losses in the fire, Felix had elected a nuptial mass for his daughter’s marriage. Dietrich preached a sermon on the history and development of marriage, and explained how it was a figure of Christ wed to His Church. He was well into the contrast between
muntehe
, or family alliance, and
friedehe
, the love-match favored by the Church, when he sensed the restlessness of the congregants and the growing concupiscence of the wedding couple, and drew his discourse to a hasty and ill-reasoned conclusion.

Friends and relatives paraded the couple from the church to a cottage that Volkmar had prepared for them, and watched them lie together in the bed, giving helpful lastminute advice all the while. Then the neighbors withdrew and waited outside the window. Dietrich, who had stayed behind at the church, heard the shout and the pot-banging all the way at the top of the hill. He turned to Joachim, who was helping him strip the altar.

“It’s a wonder young people wed publicly at all, if that is what they must endure.”

“Yes,” said Joachim with a hooded look. “A woods-marriage has its advantages.”

By its tone, the Minorite’s remark was freighted with irony and Dietrich wondered what he had meant by it. The singular advantage of privately spoken vows lay in their easy denial afterward. Absent witnesses, who could say what was promised, or whether consent was given? A marriage promised in the throes of passion could fade with that selfsame passion. To combat this evil, the Church insisted on public weddings. Even so, many couples still exchanged vows in the woods—or even in the bed itself!

Dietrich folded the altar cloth in half, then in half again. He decided that Joachim had intended a humorous affirmation of Dietrich’s own remark and said,
“Doch,”
which earned a sharp glance, quickly suppressed, from the Franciscan.

T
HE REBUILT
cottages were blessed on the Commemoration of Pope Cornelius, still remembered as a friend to the poor and therefore an auspicious patron for such a blessing. Lueter Holzhacker led a troop of men into the Lesser Wood below Church Hill and there toppled a fir, perhaps twenty shoes tall, which they carried to the green with much ceremony. The men barked the trunk halfway to the top, leaving the uppermost branches untouched and liberating the sweet, piney scent of virgin wood. The remaining branches they decked with wreaths, garlands, and other ornaments, and a profusion of colored flags; and stood the tree in a post-hole prepared at the corner of Felix Ackermann’s cottage.

Afterward, there was singing and dancing and tankards of beer and the flesh of a roast pig that Ackermann and the brothers Feldmann offered jointly as a love-gift to their neighbors. The festivities spread from the cottages down the length of the high street, spilling around the well, the oven, and into the meadow by the millpond.

The armsmen who had helped fight the fires came down from the Burg to join the celebration. They were a swaggering lot, older than their years and possessed of a hardness
beside which the village youth seemed callow. More than one maiden found herself beguiled by tales of far lands and fell deeds, and more than one soldier found himself beguiled by fair maid. Fathers glowered with suspicion and mothers with disapproval. Such men seldom possessed land, and were poor matches for a peasant’s daughter.

After solemnly blessing tree and cottages, Dietrich stood apart and observed the festivities. He was solitary by nature—one reason he had come to this remote village. Buridan had often chastised him for this love.
You live inside your head too much
, the master had said,
and while it is sometimes a very interesting head, it must also be a little lonely in there
. The jape had much amused the visitor from Oxford who, on encountering Dietrich mulling over his copy book in solitary places about the university, had taken to calling him
doctor seclusus
. Ockham owned the most brilliant mind Dietrich had ever encountered, but his affections often had an edge to them. A man clever with words, he had shortly after found the world composed of more than words, for he had been summoned to Avignon to answer Questions.

“They think you unfriendly,” said Lorenz, jostling him loose of memories. “You stand here by the tree when everyone else is over there.” He waved toward the sounds of fiddle and whistle and bagpipe, a congeries of noises with the seeming of familiar songs, yet attenuated a little by distance and the breeze, so that only snatches of tune remained sensible.

“I’m guarding the tree,” Dietrich said with utter gravity.

“Are you?” Lorenz turned his head up toward the bright decorations fluttering in the treetop. The breeze whipped the flags and garlands so that the tree, too, seemed to dance. “And who might steal such a thing?”

“Grim, maybe; or Ecke.”

Lorenz laughed. “What a fancy.” The smith sank to his haunches and leaned back against the wall of Ackermann’s cottage. He was not a large man—Gregor dwarfed him—but he was tempered like the very metal he worked:
impervious to the strongest blows and as supple as the famed steel of Damascus. His hair was black, like an Italian’s, and his skin had been tinted by the smoke of his forges. Dietrich sometimes called him “Vulcan” for all the obvious reasons, though his features were exceedingly fine and his voice higher pitched than one might expect of a man with such a sobriquet. His wife was a handsome woman, larger and older than he, of strong features and chaste demeanor. God had not blessed their union with fruit.

“I always loved those stories when I was young,” the smith confessed. “Dietrich of Berne and his knights. Fighting Grim and the other giants; outwitting the dwarves; rescuing the Ice Queen. When I see Dietrich in my mind, he always looks like you.”

“Like me!”

“Sometimes I imagine new adventures for Dietrich and his knights. I thought I would write them myself, had I my letters. There was one—I set it during the time the hero spent with King Etzl—that I thought especially fine.”

“You could always recite your tales for the children. You don’t need your letters for that. Did you know Etzl’s real name was Attila?”

“Was it? But, no, I would never dare recite my stories. They wouldn’t be true, only fancies I had made up.”

“Lorenz,
all
of the Dietrich tales are fancies. Laurin’s helm of invisibility, Wittich’s enchanted sword, the mermaid’s bracelet that Wildeber wore. Dragons and giants and dwarves. When have you ever seen such things?”

“Well, I’ve always supposed that in this base age we have forgotten how to make enchanted swords. And as for the dragons and giants—why, Dietrich and the other heroes killed them all.”

“Killed them all!” Dietrich laughed. “Yes, that would ‘save the appearances’.”

“You said Etzl was real. What of the Goth kings—Theodoric and Ermanric?”

“Yes. They all lived in the Frankish Age.”

“Since so long!”

“Yes. It was Etzl who killed Ermanric.”

“There. You see?”

“See what?”

“If
they
were real—Etzl and Herman and Theodor—then why not Laurin the dwarf or Grim the giant? Don’t laugh! I met a pack peddler from Vienna once, and he told me that when they were erecting the cathedral there, the builders found huge bones buried in the earth. So the giants were real
—and their bones were made of stone
. They named the portal the Giants’ Gate because of it. They couldn’t have done that if they had been only fancies.”

The priest scratched his head. “Albrecht the Great described such bones. He thought with Avicenna that they had been turned to stone by some mineral process. But they may be the bones of some great animal lost in the Flood and not of giant men.”

“Perhaps the bones of a dragon, then,” Lorenz suggested slyly, leaning close and placing a conspiratorial hand on his arm.

Dietrich smiled. “Do you think so?”

“Your tankard is empty. I’ll fetch another.” Lorenz pushed to his feet, and hesitated half-turned away. “There is talk,” he said after a pause.

Dietrich nodded. “There generally is. What of?”

“That you go too often into the woods with the Frau Müller.”

Dietrich blinked and looked into his empty stein. He wondered why he should be surprised to learn of the gossip. “Bluntly put, my friend, but the Herr has established a lazaretto—”

“—in the Great Wood. Ja, doch. But with the Frau Müller we know also which way the rabbit runs and if she truly is caring for lepers, that
would
be a second pair of boots.”

Dietrich, too, wondered that so selfish and prideful a woman had persisted in her charity. “Rash judgment is a sin, Lorenz. Besides, Max the Schweitzer goes often with us.”

The smith shrugged.
“Two
men in the woods with his wife will hardly reassure the miller. I’ve only said what I’ve heard. I know …” He paused and turned the tankard over in his hand. It was as if his soul had retreated from the two windows in his face. The dregs of the beer dribbled out onto the dirt unseen. “I know the sort of man you are, so
I
believe you.”

“You could try believing with greater certitude,” Dietrich said sharply, so that Lorenz turned a startled face on him, then hurried off on his errand. The smith was a gentle man—surprisingly so, given his strength—but he was a woman for gossip.

Felix and Ilse came to give him a pair of hens for the blessing of the house. Dietrich would have refused them, yet winter would be coming and even priests must eat. The eggs would be appreciated and, later, the stew. In return, Dietrich reached into his scrip and pulled out the wooden doll and gave it to their little girl. He had polished it to remove the scorches, and had replaced the charred arms and legs with fresh sticks he had found. The hair, he had cut from his own head. But Maria dropped the doll into the dirt and cried, “That isn’t Anna! That isn’t Anna!” And she ran inside the rebuilt cottage, leaving Dietrich crouching in the dust.

Sighing, he replaced the doll into his scrip. It wasn’t the doll, he thought. The doll was only a construction of sticks and rags. There was nothing precious about such things. He stood and picked up the wooden cage with the clucking chickens. “Come now, sister hens,” he said, “I know a rooster who is anxious to meet you.”

Something repaired, he thought as he returned to the parsonage, is never quite what it was before. Whatever other parts were replaced, the memories could never be.

T
WO YEARS
before his death, while praying fervently on Mount Alvernia, Saint Francis of Assisi received on his body an impression of the sacred wounds of Christ. Three-quarters of a century later, Pope Benedict XI, a sickly,
scholarly, peace-loving man, uneasy outside the company of his Dominican order, established the feast as a token of goodwill to the rival order. So, although Hildegarde of Bingen was the saint for that day, Dietrich read the Mass
Mihi autem
to honor Francis and as a brotherly gesture toward his houseguest. This may have disappointed Theresia, for the Abbess Hildegarde, author of a well-known treatise on medicines, was a special favorite of hers; but if so, she made no protest.

The Mass had barely concluded when Joachim threw himself facedown on the freshly washed flagstones before the altar. Dietrich, putting the vessels away, thought the display unseemly. He slammed the storage cabinet and made a show of stepping around the prostrate monk as he crossed the sanctuary. “In
Galatians
today,” he said, “Paul told us that it matters not whether we bear visible marks, so long as we become a new man.”