Eifelheim (24 page)

D
URING THE
two weeks that followed Hans’s terrifying revelation, Dietrich again avoided the Krenkish encampment; nor did Hans call him over the far-speaker, so at times, he could almost forget that the beasts were there. He tried even to dissuade Hilde from visiting them, but the woman, taking by now an unseemly pride in her ministry, refused. “Their alchemist desires I bring more divers foods, to find those more to their taste. Besides, they are mortal beings, however repulsive.”

Mortal, yes; but wolves and bears were mortal, and one did not approach them lightly. He did not think Max could protect her should the Krenken turn and bite.

Yet, the Krenken spoke, and devised clever tools, so they clearly owned an intellect. Could there be a soul with intellect, but no will? These questions perplexed him, and he wrote an inquiry for Gregor to take to the Archdeacon in Freiburg.

The Herr had announced on St. Aurelia’s Day that he would send a train of wagons to the Freiburg markets to sell his wine and hides and to purchase cloth and other goods. And so a frenzy of activity consumed the village. The large four-wheeled wagons were brought out, trucks and wheels inspected, harnesses repaired, axles rubbed with tallow. The villagers meanwhile studied their own stores
for marketable goods, and assembled consignments of hides, tallow, honey, mead, and wine as their wit and possessions dictated. Klaus had named Gregor to drive the commune’s wagon.

Dietrich found the mason in the green, seeing to the stowage of the wagons. “Be sure that barrel is tied tight,” Gregor warned his son. “Good day, pastor. Have something for the markets?”

Dietrich handed him the letter he had written. “Not to sell, but give this to Archdeacon Willi.”

The mason studied the packet and the red wax seal into which Dietrich had set his signet. “This looks official,” he said.

“Only some questions I have.”

Gregor laughed. “I thought you were the one with answers! You never go into town with us, pastor. A learned man like yourself would find much interest there.”

“Perhaps too much,” Dietrich answered. “Do you know what Friar Peter of Apulia once answered when asked what he thought of Joachim of Flora’s teaching?”

Gregor had ducked under the wagon bed and began greasing the axles. “No, what?”

“He said, ‘I care as little for Joachim as for the fifth wheel of a wagon.’”

“What? A fifth wheel? Haha! Ay, thunder-weather!” Gregor had banged his head on the cart’s underside. “A fifth wheel!” he said, sliding out from under. “That’s funny. Oh.”

Dietrich turned to see Brother Joachim stalking off. He started after him, but Everard, who had been overseeing the estate wagons, took Dietrich by the arm. “The Herr has summoned three of his knights to serve as guards,” he said, “but he wants Max to lead a troop of armsmen. Falkenstein won’t plunder the train going down. What does he need with honey—save to sweeten his disposition? But the return might prove too tempting. All that silver would jingle like the preparation bell at Mass and his
greed may overcome his prudence. Max is gone to the lazaretto. Take one of the Herr’s
palefridi
and go fetch him back.”

Dietrich gestured toward his departing houseguest. “I must speak to …”

“The word the Herr used was ‘now.’ Discuss it with him, not me.”

Dietrich did not want to visit the talking animals. Who knew to what acts their instict would drive them? He glanced at the sun. “Max is likely on his return even now.”

Everard twisted his mouth. “Or else he’s not. Those were the Herr’s instructions. No one else has his leave to go there, God be thanked, to deal with …
them.”

Dietrich hesitated. “Manfred’s told you, hasn’t he? About the Krenken.”

Everard would not meet his eyes. “I don’t know which would be worse: to see them face to face, or to imagine them.” He shivered. “Yes, he’s told me about them; and Max, who uses his head for more than helmet padding, swears they are mortal. For myself, I have a wagon train to organize. Don’t bother me. Thierry and the others arrive on the morrow, and I’m not ready.”

Dietrich crossed the valley to the stables, where Gunther already waited with a fine road-horse. “It sorrows me,” Gunther said, “that I cannot offer you a jennet.”

Jennets, or palfrey mules, were bred for use by women and clergy and owned a mule’s more stolid disposition. Nettled, Dietrich ignored Gunther’s cupped hands, and mounted from the stirrup. Taking the reins from the startled
maier domo
, he danced the horse a few paces to show it he was master, then kicked with his heels. He had no spurs—for a commoner to wear them would violate the Swabian Peace—but the horse accepted the thesis and set off at a walk.

On the road, Dietrich took his mount to a trot, enjoying the rhythm of the creature and the feel of the wind on his face. It had been a long while since he had ridden so fine a
beast as this, and he lost his thoughts for a time in sheer animal pleasure. But he should not have let his pride master him. Gunther might wonder how a mere parish priest had won such horse skills.

Manfred no doubt had his reasons, but Dietrich wished he had not told Everard about the Krenken. Word would leak out in the end, but there was no point augering holes in the bucket.

A
T THE
place where the trees had been blown down, he spied the miller’s jennet, picketed by the stump where Hilde used to leave the food. No other mount was near, but since Max would not have abandoned Hilde, he must have ridden “the shoemaker’s black horse.” Dietrich dismounted, slipped a hippopede onto his palfrey’s hind legs, and set forth on the track that Max had blazed.

Although the day was high, he was soon enveloped in a green gloaming. Spruce and fir reached into the sky, while the more humble hazel, shorn now of their raiment, huddled naked beneath them. He had not gone far when he heard soft, womanly gasps echoing off the trees, as if the forest itself moaned. Dietrich’s heart beat faster. The forest, always menacing, took on a more sinister aspect. Groaning dryads reached to embrace him with dry, naked fingers.

I’m lost
, he thought, and he looked about in panic for Max’s signs. He turned and a branch scratched his cheek. He gasped, ran, crashed into a white birch. He twisted away, desperate now to reach his horse. Coming to a swell of ground, he slipped and fell. He pressed his head against the ancient leafy mat and musky earth, waiting for the forest to grab him.

But the expected touch did not come, and he grew slowly aware that the moans had ceased. Raising his head, he saw below him, not the clearing where his horse awaited, but the brook where he and Max and Hilde had paused that first day. Tied to a spindly oak that twisted from the bank of the stream stood two rouncies.

Max and Hilde were there, lacing a codpiece in place, tugging a skirt back down. Max brushed leaves and dirt and fir needles from Hilde’s coverslut, squeezing her breasts while he did.

Dietrich crawled backward, unseen. Max had been right. Sound did carry in the forest. Then, rising, he scrabbled back among the spruce, blundering from clearing to copse until fortune showed him the blazes, and he followed them to where he had left the palfrey.

The jennet he had seen there earlier was gone.

S
INCE MAX
was returning already to the village, Dietrich headed his mount also homeward, happy that he need not proceed to the lazaretto. But, coming to a bend in the trail, the beast balked. Dietrich clamped the barrel with his thighs until the horse had bolted a few paces back toward the kiln. At that, it calmed somewhat and Dietrich spoke soothingly. The palfrey rolled wild, round eyes and whickered nervously.

“Be still, sister horse,” he told her. Fitting the head-harness in place, he said, “Hans. Are you on the kiln trail?”

Only the rustling of pine needles and dry branches fell upon his ears. That, and the inevitable, distant chitterings of the Krenken, which, being so natural a sound, seemed more a part of the forest than had the amorous cries of Hilde Müller in the arms of Max Schweitzer.

“Come no nearer,” said the voice of the
Heinzlmännchen
in his ear.

Dietrich remained still. The sun was visible through the iron-gray lacework of trees, but stood already lower than he wished. “You bar my path,” Dietrich said.

“Gschert’s—artisans—want for two hundred shoe-lengths of copper wire. Know your kind the art of wire-drawing—question. It must be drawn to the fineness of a pin, with no cracks.”

Dietrich rubbed his chin. “Lorenz is a blacksmith. Copper may lie beyond his art.”

“So. Where finds one a coppersmith—question.”

“In Freiburg,” Dietrich said. “But copper is dear. Lorenz might do the task from charity, but not a Freiburg guildsman.”

“I will give you a copper brick we have mined from rocks near here. The smith may keep whatever is not used for the wire.”

“And this wire will further your departure?”

“Lacking it, we cannot leave. Prying the copper from the ore required only … heat. We have not the means to draw it. Dietrich, you do not have the sentence in your head to do this. I hear it in your words. You will not go to Free Town.”

“There are … risks.”

“So. There are then limits to this ‘charity’ of yours, to this rent you owe the Herr-from-the-stars. When he returns, he will thrash those who failed to do his bidding.”

“No,” said Dietrich. “That is not how he rules. His ways are mysterious to men.” And what better proof than this encounter, he thought. He glanced once toward the clouds, as if he expected to see Jesus there, laughing. “Na. Give me the ingot and I will see to its drawing.”

But Hans would not approach him, and left the ingot on the trail.

T
HE WAGONS
set forth the next day across the plateau to the rendezvous point, where they were joined by the wagon from Niederhochwald. Thierry von Hinterwaldkopf commanded the three knights and Max’s fifteen armsmen. Eugen bore the Hochwald banner.

Other wagons joined them along the way: one, from an imperial holding by Stag’s Leap and another from the manor of St. Oswald’s chapel. The chapter provided two more armsmen and Einhardt, the imperial knight, brought his junker and five more armsmen. Thierry, seeing his small force thus augmented, grinned. “‘S Blood, I’d almost welcome a sally from Burg Falkenstein!”

F
ROM ABOVE
the gorge, Dietrich heard that eerie whisper in which distant valleys speak—a patois formed from the wind through the naked branches and evergreen needles below, from the rushing brook cascading off the escarpment, from a choir of grasshoppers and other insects.

The wagon track switchbacked down the face of the Katerinaberg. Inhospitable patches of gray stone and barren ground alternated with copses of desolate, wind-shorn beeches. The road ahead wound only a few hundred feet below them, but across insuperably steep pitches, so that Dietrich sometimes spied the vanguard coming from the other direction. Footpaths ran off where wagons could not follow. He saw ancient stairs carved into the stone hillside and wondered who had cut them.

The bottom, when they reached it, was a wild ravine, tangled with brush and toppled oaks, and flanked on both sides with great overhanging rocks and steep, wooded precipices. A rushing torrent, fed by waterfalls plunging from the heights, crashed and hissed over rocks down its center, turning to mud what little track the wagons had.

“There’s Stag’s Leap,” said Gregor, pointing to an outcropping that jutted out over the gorge. “The story is that a hunter chased a stag through the woods near here and the beast leapt from that crag over to the Breitnau side. You see how the valley pinches up here? Still, it was a wonderful leap, they say. The hunter was in such hot pursuit that he tried to follow, though with less happy results.”

B
URG FALKENSTEIN
, high upon one of the precipices, held the gorge tight. Bartizans dotted the schildmauer like warts on a toad, and were slit by cruciform ballistaria to give openings for hidden archers. Sentries were silhouettes in the battlement’s crenels; their jibes rendered indistinct by distance. The escort feigned indifference, but they hefted their shields a little higher and kept a tighter grip on their pennoned lances.

“Those dogs won’t sally against knights,” Thierry said
after the troop had passed with no more damage than the taunts. “Tough enough to take nuns or fat merchants, but they’d not stand fast in a real battle.”

At the mouth of the gorge, the stream calmed from torrent to murmuring brook and the narrow valley broadened into green meadows. On the heights above, a square tower commanded the view of the countryside. “Falkenstein’s watchtower,” Max explained. “His
burgraf
here signals the castle when a party worth plundering passes by. Then Falkenstein sallies forth to block their advance while the men in the watchtower come out to block the retreat.”

I
N THE
broader, softer Kirchgartner Valley, the track from Falkenstein Gorge met the Freiburg High Road. The Hochwalders circled their wagons for the night and built a fire. Thierry told off men to stand watch. “Safe enough to encamp here,” Max told Dietrich. “If von Falkenstein sallies on this side, he must answer to the Graf of Urach, and that means Pforzheim and the whole Baden family.”