Eifelheim (21 page)

Max cocked his head. “I wouldn’t think their inclinations mattered.”

“They have angst to repair their ship and return to their own country.” Dietrich looked off to where Manfred stood with his retinue. The men were laughing over some matter and Kunigund, her gown wrapped in a white girdle embroidered
in orfrois
with scenes of stag hunting and hares, was torn between a ladylike dignity in Eugen’s company and the desire to chase her younger sister, who had just tugged Kunigund’s cap loose. Manfred thought to hold the Krenken against their will so he could learn their occult secrets. “The Herr would be wise not to press the matter,” he said.

“On his own land? Why not?”

“Because the strong arm should be gently used on folk you suspect of having black-powder.”

I
N THE
afternoon, the villagers elected beer-tasters, jurors, wardens, and other ministers for the coming harvest-year. White Jürgen declined the honor—and potential expense—of another term as
vogt
, so Volkmar Bauer was elected in his stead. Klaus was chosen again as
maier
.

Seppl Bauer shyly cast his first vote, raising his hand for Klaus along with the other householders. Or with almost all, for Trude Metzger loudly dissented and, as she was householder for her manse, cast a lone vote for Gregor. “The mason may be a dimwit,” she declared, “but he is not a thief who damps the meal.”

Gregor, turning to Dietrich, said, “She sweet-talks me to win my affections.”

Lorenz on the other side wagged his finger. “Remember, Gregor, should you ever seek to remarry, that she has
already paid
merchet
on herself, so she would be a cheap catch.”

“And worth every pfennig.”

“The body is but a mantle,” said Theresia Gresch, breaking a silence she had held throughout the day, “which shines if true beauty lies within. So she seems plainer than she is.”

“Perhaps you are one to light her lamp,” Lorenz told Gregor.

Gregor scowled, now more than half-worried that his friends were plotting his remarriage. “A man would need a bonfire for that undertaking,” he grumbled.

D
IETRICH HAD
named his nocturnal visitor Johann von Sterne—John-of-the-stars. He resumed his visits to the lazaretto, and slowly his confidence returned. The creatures would glance his way when he arrived, pause a moment, then calmly resume their activities. None threatened him.

Some worked diligently on the ship. Dietrich watched them play fire across certain seams and spray fluids and spread colored earths upon its surfaces. Air, no doubt, also figured in the repairs, for he sometimes heard the hissing of gasses deep within the nether regions of the structure.

Others occupied themselves in natural philosophy, in bizarre and patternless leaping, or in solitary walks and idleness. Some perched in trees like birds! As the autumn forest became a blaze of color, they used wonderful instruments—
fotografia
—to capture miniature “light drawings” of the leaves. Once, Dietrich recognized the alchemist by his more particular clothing, squatting in that peculiar knees-above-head posture, overlooking the stream where it tumbled over an escarpment. He hailed him, but the creature, absorbed in some contemplation, made no response and, thinking him in prayer, Dietrich quietly withdrew.

Dietrich felt a growing frustration with Krenkish laggardness. “I have seen your carpenters taken from their tasks,”
he told the Kratzer on one visit, “to collect beetles or flowers for your philosophers. Others, I have seen playing with a ball, or leaping up and down to no apparent purpose, indeed, sporting themselves naked. Your most urgent task is the repair of your ship, not why our trees change color.”

“All those who do the work do the work,” the Kratzer announced.

Dietrich thought he meant that phitosophers were unskilled in shipbuilding, which was no astonishing insight. “Even so,” he insisted, “there may be apprentice tasks you could perform.”

At this, the Kratzer’s antennae stiffened to rods, and his features, never expressive, grew more still yet. Hans, who had been occupied to the side cataloguing images of plants and paying no apparent attention to the discourse, sat upright in his seat with his hands poised over the array of types by which he instructed the
Heinzelmännchen
. The Kratzer’s eyes pinned Dietrich to his seat, and Dietrich gripped the sides of his chair in unaccountable terror.

“Such labor,” the Kratzer said finally, “is for those who perform such labors.”

The statement had the seeming of a proverb and, like many proverbs, suffered from a conciseness that reduced it to a tautology. He was reminded of those philosophers who, grown lately besotted with the Ancients, affected their prejudice against manual labor. Dietrich could not imagine himself shipwrecked and unwilling to assist his fellows in the necessary repairs. In such straits, even the gently born would put a hand to the task. “Labor,” he pointed out, “has its own dignity. Our Lord was a carpenter and called to Himself fishermen and tent-makers and other humble folk. Pope Benedict, may he rest in peace, was the son of a miller.”

“Did I hear the utterance correctly,” the Kratzer said. “A carpenter may become a lord. Bwa-wa-wa. Can a stone become a bird—question. Or are all your lords base-born—question.”

“I grant you,” Dietrich admitted, “that a man born into his besitting will seldom rise above it, yet we do not despise the working man.”

“Then we are not so different, your folk and mine,” the Kratzer said. “For us, too, our besitting is written … I think you would say, it is written into ‘the atoms of our flesh.’ There is a sentence among us: ‘As we are, so we are.’ It would be thought-lacking to despise one for being what he was born to be.”

“The ‘atoms of flesh’ …?” Dietrich had started to ask when the
Heinzelmännchen
interrupted, “Seldom means more often than never—question, exclamation.”

The Kratzer directed a series of rapid clacks at Hans, at the conclusion of which, the latter exposed his neck and addressed once more his typewriting. When the philosopher spoke again he returned to, “this curious event of the colored trees. Know you the reason for it—question.”

Dietrich, uncertain what the quarrel signified and unwilling to provoke the Kratzer’s anger, answered that the Herr God had arranged the color-change to warn of approaching winter, while the evergreens maintained the promise of spring to come, and thus imbued into the moods of the year sorrow and hope alike. This explanation puzzled the Kratzer, who asked whether Manfred’s overlord were a master forester, at which non sequitur Dietrich despaired of explanation.

T
HE CHURCH
celebrated the beginning of each agricultural season: to pray for a good planting or for summer rains or for a good harvest. The
feriae messis
opened the wine harvest and, in consequence, the mass
Exultáte Deo
was better attended than most. The southern slope of the Katerinaberg prickled with vineyards that produced a vintage that sold well in the Freiburg markets and provided Oberhochwald with one of its few sources of silver. But the past year had been again a cold one and there was concern that the press be bountiful.

At the Offertory, Klaus presented a bunch of ripe grapes picked from his own vines and, during the Consecration, Dietrich squeezed one of the grapes to mingle its juice with the wine in the chalice. Usually, the congregation would chatter among themselves, even lingering in the vestibule until summoned by the Preparation Bell. Today they watched in rapt concentration, engaged not by memory of the Christ’s sacrifice, but by hope that the ritual would bring good luck in the harvest—as if the Mass were mere sorcery, and not a memorial of the Great Sacrifice.

Elevating the chalice high above his head, Dietrich saw nested in the vises under the clerestory the glowing yellow eyes of a Krenk.

Frozen, he stood with arms extended, until the appreciative murmur of his flock called him to himself. A superstition had been gaining favor of late that the door from Purgatory to Heaven flew open while the bread and wine were elevated, and worshippers sometimes complained if the priest made too brief an Elevation. Surely, by such a lengthy elevation, their priest had won a great many souls free, to the greater sanctification of the wine harvest.

Dietrich replaced the cup on the altar and, genuflecting, mumbled the closing words because the sense of them had suddenly fled his mind. Joachim, who knelt beside him holding the hem of the chasuble in one hand and the bell in the other, glanced also toward the rafters, but if he saw the creature, he gave no sign. When Dietrich dared once more to raise his own eyes, the unexpected visitor had withdrawn into the shadows.

A
FTER MASS
, Dietrich knelt before the altar with his hands clenched into a ball before him. Above, carved from a single great piece of red oak, darkened further by a hundred years of smoking beeswax, Christ hung impaled upon His cross. The wasted figure—naked but for a scrap of decency, body twisted in agony, mouth gaping open in that last pitiable accusation—
Why have you abandoned me?—
emerged from the very wood of the cross, so that victim
and instrument grew one from the other. It had been a brutal and humiliating way to die. Far kinder, the faggot, noose, or headsman’s ax that in modern times eased the journey.

Dimly, Dietrich heard the rumble of carts, clatter of billhooks and pruning shears, braying of donkeys, indistinct voices, curses, snap of whips, groan of wheels, as the villagers and the serfs gathered and departed for the vineyards. Quiet descended by degrees until all that was left beyond the ancient groaning of the walls was a distant, irregular kling-klang from Lorenz’s smithy at the foot of the hill.

When he was certain that Joachim had not lingered, Dietrich rose to his feet. “Hans,” he said softly when he had donned the Krenkish head-harness and had pressed the sigil that awoke the
Heinzelmännchen
. “Was it you I saw in the clerestory during Mass? How came you into those heights without being seen?”

A shadow moved under the roofbeams and a voice spoke in his ear. “I wear a harness that gives flight, and entered through the bell tower. The sentence was in my head to watch your ceremony.”

“The Mass? Why?”

“The sentence is that you hold the key for our salvation, but the Kratzer laughs, and Gschert will not listen. Both say we must find our own way back to the heavens.”

“It is a heresy many have fallen prey to,” admitted Dietrich, “that Heaven can be reached without help.”

The Krenk servant was silent for a moment before answering. “I had thought your ritual would complete inside my head the picture of you.”

“And has it?”

Dietrich heard a sharp clack from the rafters above him and he craned his neck to spy where the Krenk had now perched himself. “No,” said the voice in his ear.

“The picture of Dietrich inside my own head,” Dietrich admitted, “is also incomplete.”

“This is the problem. You want to help us, but I see no gain for you.”

Shadows shifted in the flickering candlelight, not quite black because the flames that cast them guttered red and yellow. Two small lights gleamed in the vises. Were they the Krenk’s eyes catching the dancing fires, or only metal fittings securing a beam? “Must there be always a gain for me in what I do?” Dietrich asked of the darkness, uncomfortably aware that the gain he sought was his own continued solitude and freedom from fear.

“Beings act always to their own gain: to obtain food or stimulate the senses, to win acceptance in one’s place, to reduce the labors needed to possess these things.”

“I cannot call you wrong, friend grasshopper. All men seek the good, and certainly food and the pleasures of the flesh and a surcease from labor are goods, or else we would not seek them. But I cannot say that you are entirely right either. What does Theresia gain with her herbs?”

“Acceptance,” was the Krenk’s swift reply. “Her place in the village.”

“That won’t make the cabbage fat. A man in want of food may drain a swamp—or steal a furrow; in want of pleasure, he may love his wife—or
fick
another’s. The way to Heaven is not found in
partial
goods, but only in the
perfect
good. To help others,” he said, “is a good in itself. Our Lord’s cousin James wrote: ‘God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble,’ and, ‘Religion pure and undefiled is this: to give aid to orphans and widows in their desperation.’”

“Manfred’s cousin carries no weight with the Krenk. He is not—our—lord, nor is Manfred so strong as Gschert has feared. When his own folk defied him over the haycocks, he did not strike them as they deserved, but allowed—his servants—to decide the matter for him. The act of a weakling. And they came back, his own underlings, and said that the gärtners had right. Duty binds them to gather Manfred’s hay, but not to place the cocks in the carts.”

Dietrich nodded. “So stands it in the
weistümer
. It is the custom of the manor.”

The Krenk drummed on the rafter and leaned into the
ambit of the guttering candlelight so far that Dietrich thought he would topple off. “But that leaves next year the haycocks standing in the fields,” Hans said, “while the serfs wait in the curia to unload. That is—thought-lacking.”

A small smile crossed Dietrich’s lips as he recalled the muddle that had ensued in the court following the findings of the inquest. “We gain some small amusement from paradoxes. It is a form of entertainment, like singing or dancing.”

“Singing—”

“Another time I will explain that.”

“It is dangerous for one who rules to show weakness,” Johann insisted. “Had your Langermann made such a demand on Herr Gschert, he would be picking-food ere now.”

“I do not deny that Gschert is choleric in his humor,” Dietrich said dryly. Lacking true blood, the Krenken could not balance their choler properly with a sanguine humor. Instead, they possessed a yellow-green ichor; but as he was no doctor of the medical arts, Dietrich was uncertain which humor the ichor might govern. Perhaps one unknown to Galen. “But no worries,” he told Hans. “The haycocks will be loaded into the carts again next mowing season, but the gärtners will do so not from
duty
but from
charitas
—or for a fee for the added labor.”