Eifelheim (18 page)

“How well we know that significance.”

Gschert stood away from the wall and the Kratzer turned to face the servant, by which acts Dietrich knew that it had been the servant who had last spoken, and that the servant had spoken out of turn. Whether Gschert or the Kratzer cried, “Silence!” was unclear, but the servant was unfazed. “You could ask him.”

With that, the Herr Gschert sprang across the room. The leap was lightning-quick, vaulting the furniture and, before Dietrich had quite grasped what had happened, the lord was beating the servant of the talking head with his rasping forearms, raising cuts and welts with each blow. The Kratzer, too, had turned his anger on the servant and pummeled him with kicks.

Dietrich sat speechless for a moment before, without thinking, he cried, “Stop!” and interposed himself between the combatants. The first blow to the side of his head was enough to render him insensible, so he never felt the others.

W
HEN HE
came again to his senses, he found himself still in the same apartment, lying as he had fallen. Of Gschert and the Kratzer, there was no sign. However, the servant sat on the floor beside him with his great long legs drawn up. Where a man might have rested his chin upon his knees, these knees actually topped his head. The servant’s skin was already discoloring with the dark-green bruising of his folk. When Dietrich stirred, the servant chattered something and the box on the desk spoke.

“Why took you the blows on yourself?”

Dietrich shook his head to rid it of the ringing, but the sensation in his ears did not go away. He placed a hand on his brow. “That was not my purpose. I thought to stop them.”

“But why?”

“They were beating you. I did not think that good.”

“‘Think’ …”

“When we speak sentences inside our heads that no one can hear.”

“And ‘good’ …?”

“It does me sorrow, friend grasshopper, but there is too much noise inside my head to answer so subtle a question.” Dietrich struggled to his feet. The servant made no move to help him.

“Our cart is broken,” the servant said.

Dietrich tried his shoulder and winced. “What?”

“Our cart is broken, and its Herr is dead. And we must stay here and die and never see our homeland again. The steward of the cart, who rules now, said that to reveal this would show our weakness, and so invite an attack.”

“The Herr would not …”

“We hear the words you speak,” the Krenk said. “We see the things you do, and all the words for these things the
Heinzelmännchen
has mastered. But the words for what is here …” And the creature laid a gracile, six-fingered hand across his stomach. “… these words we do not have. Perhaps we can never have them, for you are so very strange.”

VII
SEPTEMBER
, 1348
The Apparition of Our Lady of Ransom

S
OME IN
the village, when they saw the bruises that their priest had endured at the hands of those he had sought to help, wished to drive the “lepers” from the Great Woods; but Herr Manfred von Hochwald declared that none might trespass there save by his grace. He stood a squad of armsmen on the Bear Valley road to turn back any who, from curiosity or revenge, sought the lazaretto. In the following days, Schweitzer’s men turned back Oliver, the baker’s son, with several other young men of the village; Theresia Gresch and her basket of herbs; and, to Dietrich’s astonishment, Fra Joachim of Herbholzheim.

The motives of young Oliver and his friends were easily known. The deeds of knights were their bread and ale. Oliver grew his hair to shoulder length to ape his betters, and wore his knife tucked swordlike into his belt. The love of a good fight quickened them, and revenge for their pastor provided but a finer-sounding reason for fist and cudgel. Dietrich gave them a tongue lashing and told them that if he could forgive those who struck him, they could do likewise.

The motives that drove Theresia toward the Great Wood were at once more transparent and more opaque, for in her
herb basket she had placed with the rue and the yarrow and the pot marigold, certain obnoxious mushrooms and the keen knife that she sometimes used to let blood. Dietrich questioned her on these items when Schweitzer’s men had returned her to the parsonage, and proper answers could indeed be found in Abbess Hildegarde’s
Physica;
yet Dietrich wondered if she had had other employments in mind. The thought troubled him, but he could not logically ask her motives when he had not yet established her purpose.

As for Joachim, the friar said only that poor and landless men needed God’s word more than most. When Dietrich replied that the lepers needed succor more than sermons, Joachim laughed.

W
HEN MAX
and Hilde went to the lazaretto on St. Eustace Day, Dietrich pleaded that he was still too sore and repaired instead to the refectory of his parsonage, where he ate an oat porridge that Theresia had cooked in the outbuilding. Theresia sat across the table from him, absorbed in her needlepoint. He had beside the porridge a breast of hazel-hen that had been rubbed with sage and bread and a little wine and boiled. The hen was dry in spite of all, and every time he bit into it, his mouth would hurt because his jaw was swollen and a tooth on that side had come loose.

“A tincture made of clove would help the tooth,” Theresia said, “were clove not so dear.”

“How well to hear of absent treatments,” Dietrich muttered.

“Time must be the healer,” she answered. “Until then, only porridges or soups.”

“Yes, ‘O doctor Trotula’.”

Theresia shrugged off the sarcasm. “My herbs and bone-setting are enough for me.”

“And your bloodletting,” Dietrich reminded her.

She smiled. “Sometimes blood wants letting.” When Dietrich looked at her sharply, she added, “It’s a matter of balancing the humors.”

Dietrich could not penetrate her sentence. Had she intended
revenge on the Krenken? Blood for blood?
Beware the rage of the placid, for it smolders long after more lively flames have died
.

He took another bite of hazel-hen and placed a hand against his jaw. “The Krenken deal mighty blows.”

“You must keep the poultice in place. It will help the bruising. They are terrible people, these Krenken of yours, to treat you so, dear father.”

The words tugged at his heart. “They are lost and afraid. Such men often lash out.”

Theresia attended her needlepoint. “I think brother Joachim is right. I think they need another sort of aid than that which you—and the miller’s wife—have been bringing them.”

“If I can forgive them, so can you.”

“Have you, then, forgiven them?”

“But naturally.”

Theresia laid her needlepoint in her lap. “It is not so natural to forgive. Revenge is natural. Strike a cur and it will snap. Stir up a wasps’ nest and they will sting. That was why it took such a one as our blessed Lord to teach us to forgive. If you have forgiven those people, why have you not gone back, while the soldier and the miller’s wife have?”

Dietrich laid the breast aside, half-eaten. Buridan had argued that there could be no action at a distance, and forgiveness was an action. Could there be forgiveness at a distance? A pretty question. How could he move the Krenken to depart if he did not go to them? But the Krenkish ferocity terrified him. “A few days more rest,” he said, postponing the decision. “Come, bring the sweetcakes now by the fire, and I will read to you from
De usu partium.”

His adopted daughter brightened. “I do so love to hear you read, especially the books of healing.”

O
N THE
Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, Dietrich limped to the fields to assess the plowing on the tithe-lands—which he farmed to Felix, Herwyg One-eye, and others. The second
planting had begun and so the lowing of oxen and the neighing of horses mixed with the jingle of harness and whippletree, the curses of the plowmen, and the whapping of mattocks and clodding beetles. Herwyg had broken the field in April and was plowing more deeply now. Dietrich spoke briefly with the man and was content with his labors.

He noticed Trude Metzger behind the plow on the neighboring manse. Her oldest son, Melchior, tugged the lead ox by a strap while her younger son, a stripling, swung a mattock not much smaller than he was. Herwyg, turning his own team about on the headland, volunteered the wisdom that the plow was man’s work.

“It’s dangerous for a boy so small to lead the oxen,” Dietrich said to his farmer. “That was how her husband was trampled.” A roll of distant thunder echoed from the Katerinaberg and Dietrich glanced up at a cloudless sky.

Herwyg spat into the dirt. “Thunder-weather,” he said. “Though I’ve smelt no rain. But ‘twas a horse what trampled Metzger, not an ox. Greedy fool worked the beast too long. Sundays, too, though I’d not speak ill of the dead. Your ox, he comes on steady, but a horse can take a mind to rear and kick. That’s why I drive oxen. Hai! Jakop! Heyso! Pull!” Herwyg’s wife goaded Heyso, the lead ox, and the team of six began to plod forward. The wet, heavy clay slid off the plow’s mouldboard, forming a ridge on either side of the furrow. “I’d help her,” Herwyg said with a toss of his head toward Trude. “But her tongue be no sweeter nor her man’s ever were. And I have my own manses to plow yet,
after
I finish with yours, pastor.”

It was a courteous invitation to leave; so Dietrich crossed the berm to Trude’s land, where her son still struggled to turn the team. Each time the ox shifted its stance, Dietrich expected the lad to be crushed underfoot. The younger boy had sat down on the ridge and was weeping from weariness, the mattock fallen from numb and bleeding fingers. Trude, meanwhile, lashed the oxen with her whip and her boy with her tongue. “Pull him by the nose, you lazy brat!”
she cried. “Left, you doodle, to the left!” When she saw Dietrich, she turned a mud-streaked face on him. “And what do you have, priest? More useless advice, like old One-eye?”

Metzger had been a surly man, given to drink and excess, though he’d been a fair plowman. Trude hadn’t his cunning at the plow, but owned a portion of his surliness.

“I have a pfennig for you,” Dietrich said, reaching into his scrip. “You can hire a gärtner to work the plow for you.”

Trude lifted her cap and swiped a hand across her red brow, leaving another streak of dirt across it. “And why should I share my wealth with some lackland?”

Dietrich wondered how his pfennig had become her wealth. “Nickel Langerman can use the work and he has the strength for the plow.”

“So why has no one else hired him?”

Dietrich thought,
because he is as ill-tempered as yourself
, but held his tongue from prudence. Trude, perhaps suspecting the imminent withdrawal of the pfennig, snatched it from Dietrich’s fingers, saying, “I’ll speak to him tomorrow. He lives in the hut by the mill?”

“That is the man. Klaus uses him in the mill when he has the work.”

“We’ll see if he is as good as your praises make him out. Melchior! Have you gotten the team straight yet? Can you do nothing right?” Trude dropped the reins and strode to the head of the team and yanked the leads from her son’s hands. Leaning into them, she shortly had the team aligned and shoved the reins back at Melchior. “That’s how it’s done! No, wait until I have the plow in hand! God in Heaven, what did I ever do to deserve such gofs? Peter, you missed some clods. Pick up that mattock.” Peter hopped to his feet before his mother could yank his head about as she had the lead ox.

Dietrich picked his way to the road and returned to the village. He thought he might visit Nickel to warn him.

“You do not seem a happy man,” Gregor announced as
Dietrich passed the mason’s yard. Gregor had a great stone slab set up on his trestle and he and his sons were working it down.

“I’ve been to Trude in the field,” Dietrich explained.

“Hah! Sometimes I think old Metzger threw himself under the horse to escape her.”

“I think he was drunk and fell.”

The mason grinned without humor. “The prime mover is the same in either case.” He waited to see if Dietrich appreciated his use of philosophical language, then he laughed. His sons, not understanding what a prime mover was, understood that their father had told a jest and laughed with him.