Eifelheim (28 page)

“Ha!” Manfred made a gesture with his free hand. The kestrel shrieked and flexed her wings. “Thunder-paste, and a flying harness?”

“Nothing supernatural,” Dietrich assured him. “In Franconian times, an English monk named Eilmer fastened wings to his hands and feet and leapt from the summit of a tower. He rode the breeze the distance of a furlong.”

Manfred pursed his lips. “I saw no English birdmen at Calais.”

“The swirl of the air, and his own fright at being so high, caused Eilmer to fall and break both his legs, so that ever after he limped. He attributed his failure to the want of tail feathers.”

Manfred laughed. “Needed a feather up his arse? Hah!”

“Mine Herr, there are other prisoners in need of rescue.” He explained about the Jew’s caravan and the Hapsburg silver.

Manfred rubbed his chin. “The Duke lent the Freiburgers money to buy back the liberties they sold to Urach during the barons’ war. I suspect the treasure was a payment on those loans. Mark me, one day the Hapsburgs will own the Breisgau.”

“The other prisoners …”

Manfred waved a dismissive hand. “Philip will free them—once he’s taken all they have.”

“Not having seized the Hapsburg silver. Falkenstein’s safety lies in their silence. Albrecht may assume the Jew absconded with the treasure.”

“Since you have already escaped, he gains nothing by silencing the others. And a
de Medina
would not be tempted by such an amount. Albrecht knows that.”

“Mine Herr, a coil of especially fine copper wire I had drawn in Freiburg for the Krenken … Falkenstein has taken it.”

Manfred raised his gauntlet and studied the kestrel, brushing her feathers with his forefinger. “This is a lovely bird,” he said. “Mark the taper of the wing, the elegance of the tail, the delightful chestnut plumage. Dietrich, what would you have me do? Attack Falcon Rock to retrieve a coil of wire?”

“If the Krenken give aid with their thunder-paste and flying harnesses and
pots de fer.”

“I will tell Thierry and Max I have found a new captain
to advise me. Why should the Krenken give a fig about Falcon Rock?”

“They need the wire to repair their ship.”

Manfred grunted, frowned, and stroked the kestrel’s head before restoring it to its perch in the rookery. “Then it is better lost,” he said as he closed he cage. “The Krenken have many useful arts to teach us. I’d fain they not leave too soon.”

W
HEN DIETRICH
called Hans on the mikrofoneh afterward, the Kratzer answered instead.

“He you call ‘Hans’ sits in Gschert’s dungeon,” the philosopher told him. “His sally against the Burg in the valley was not by Herr Gschert ordered.”

“But he did it to retrieve the wire you need!”

“That is of no account. What matters, matters. Quicksilver falls.”

Alchemists associated quicksilver with the planet Mercury, which was also quick, and Dietrich thought the Kratzer meant that the very planet had fallen from the sky. But he had no chance to ask, for the Krenkish philosopher ended the audience.

Dietrich sat at his table in the parsonage and twisted the now-silent head harness around his fingers before tossing it to the table. The Krenken had been now for three months in the woods, and wild stories were already in Freiburger ears. And the wire they needed for flight was lost.

D
URING THE
next two weeks, the Krenken barred Max and Hilde from their encampment. They were felling trees again, Hilde told him, and building bonfires. Dietrich wondered if some festival of theirs impended, similar to St. John’s Day but requiring the exclusion of outsiders. “It isn’t that,” Max said. “They’re planning something. I think they’re afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. It’s a soldier’s instinct.”

T
HE FEAST
of St. Catherine of Alexandria dawned close and cold, under a sky sullen with heavy clouds and a breeze not bold enough for wind. The villagers, having celebrated the
Kirchweihe
in memory of the foundation of their church, crowded from the church into the morning light, eager for the foot races and other games that marked the Kermis, only to stare dumbfounded at snowy hummocks rolling white to the horizons. During the church-vigil, a stealthy snow had thickened the land.

After a moment’s awed contemplation, the children fell to with a collective shriek, and soon young and old were engaged in mock battles and fortifications. Across the valley, a troop of armsmen emerged from the castle. Dietrich thought at first that they intended to join the snow-fight, but they turned and marched at the double-quick down the Bear Valley road.

A snowball struck Dietrich on the chest. Joachim grinned and threw another, which missed. “That’s how your sermons strike some people,” the Minorite cried, and those in the snow-fort laughed. Only Lorenz took exception, and crushed a great block of snow over Joachim’s head. Gregor, who had been organizing the opposition, took that as a signal to launch an attack, and the villagers on the farther side of the churchyard swarmed forth into a general melee.

Through the midst of this confusion, Eugen stepped his palfrey, kicking up sprays of snow, drawing silence in his wake, until he came at last before Dietrich. Only Theresia and the children remained shouting and oblivious to his appearance.

“Pastor,” Eugen said, striving to keep his voice deep, “the villagers must come to the castle.”

“Why?” shouted Oliver Becker. “We’re no serfs, to be ordered about!” He made to throw a snowball at the junker, but Joachim, who was standing beside him, placed a hand on his arm.

Dietrich looked to Eugen. “Are we attacked?” He envisioned Philip von Falkenstein leading his men in a snowy charge to seize the escaped pastor.
We should have built the snow-forts higher …

“The … the lepers …,” and here Eugen’s voice did fail him. “They’ve left the woods. They’re coming to the village!”

4
NOW
Tom

D
URING THE
Middle Ages, on the Rogation Days, the peasants of a village would tour the borders of their manor and throw their children into brooks or bump their heads on certain trees so that the youngsters would learn the boundaries of their lives. Had he studied narrative history, Tom would have known that.

Consider the calls that Tom received from Judy Cao—a manuscript traced and located, or a reference newly discovered, or his approval needed on access fees levied by sundry archives and databases. There was a certain intoxication to these calls, much as a man hiking in the mountains might feel an exhilaration at the approach of a crest—not that he saw the world laid out below him, but that he saw the promise of such a horizon just beyond. To Tom, the steady trickle of information from Judy was like a cold spring in an arid place and, if a man can become drunk on water, it is in small sips of this Pierian sort.

Items had been appearing regularly in his Eifelheim file, all properly beribboned and pedigreed like dogs at a kennel show. Judy was a meticulous researcher. She had located monastic annals, uncovered manorial accounts,
unearthed tantalizing odds and ends—the haphazardly preserved detritus of a vanished world. “The documents of everyday life,” reliable precisely because they had not been recorded with posterity in mind.

• From a hodgepodge of “Baconalia” at Oxford: an
  aide memoire
  of the local knight of Hochwald recounting a discussion with “the pastor of St. Catherine” regarding the theories of Fra Roger Bacon: seven league boots, flying machines, talking mechanical heads.
  

• Preserved among the papers of Ludwig der Bayer in the Fürstenfeld Museum: a tantalizing reference in the writings of William of Ockham to “my friend, the
  doctor seclusus
  in Oberhochwald.”
  

• Buried in the Luxembourg collection at the Charles University in Prague: a mention of “Sir Manfred von Oberhochwald” among the companions of the King of Bohemia at the battle of Crécy.
  

• A comment in the Annals of St. Blasien that “the Feldberg demon,” having eluded attempts to capture him by fire, had “escaped in the direction of the Hochwald” after setting a larger fire that almost engulfed the monastery.
  

• A levy dated 1289, in the Generallandesarchiv Baden, by Markgraf Hermann VII of Baden on Ugo Heyso of Oberhochwald for six-and-a-half foot soldiers and one-and-a-half horse soldiers.
  

• A similar levy on Manfred in 1330 by Duke Friedrich IV Hapsburg of Austria.
  

• A copy of an episcopal letter in the archives of the Lady Church of Freiburg-im-Breisgau addressed to Pastor Dietrich, affirming the doctrine that “the body’s appearance does not reflect the state of the soul.”
  

• An anonymous compendium, MS.6752, in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, on natural philosophy, “unusual for its wide range and systematic organization,”
  attributed in a gloss on its 237th folio to “my quondam student, Seclusus,” supposedly added by the great Arts Master, John Buridan.
  

If a man cannot get drunk on such sips as this, he is doomed to eternal sobriety. Why, the question of how a vassal might supply six-and-a-half soldiers to his liege is one to occupy a salon of Jesuits.

Sharon was happy for him, for this steady conduit from Judy meant that he was less in her hair, and she consequently had more time for physics and could shampoo less often. She thought this was what she had wanted and derived some welcome contentment from it. The major drawback, as she saw it, was that Tom would immediately share with her whatever sparkle of data he had been given, which she would acknowledge in a distracted and sometimes irritable manner. She was sure the information was fascinating in its own way but, like head cheese or scrapple, its enjoyment was an acquired taste.

One evening, while dining at a neighborhood Italian restaurant, Tom “shared” with her a Christmas fruitcake of facts that Judy had stumbled across in a doctoral dissertation on medieval village life. Among the records cited were a few from Oberhochwald in the 1330s. These were mostly those villagers unfortunate enough to come to the attention of the manorial courts, but some were happier cases of boons and grants. Almost as soon as he was off the cell phone and before the red clam sauce could stain his lips Tom was reciting particulars.

He had learned the names of actual people who had lived in “his” village. Being more accustomed to the broad abstractions of cliology, he had seldom encountered any of the folk behind his equations and models. He didn’t know it yet, but he was being seduced by Judy Cao. He was beginning to delight in narrative history.

Thus, one Fritz Ackermann had been fined three pfennig in 1334 for “withdrawing himself from the lord’s common oven”—meaning he had dared to bake his own bread
at home. And in 1340, one Theresia Gresch had been granted the right to gather herbs in the common meadow and in the lord’s woods.

Sharon thought the three-pfennig fine a sign of the tyranny of feudalism and said so in greater irritation than the size of the fine warranted, or indeed than Ackermann had probably expressed in paying it. Tom thought of correcting her equation of feudalism with manorialism, but said only, “Try buying your liquor across the bridge in New Jersey and you’ll learn what fine the Lords of Pennsylvania levy for breaking
their
monopoly if they catch you at it.”