Eifelheim (3 page)

From the crest of Church Hill, Dietrich saw that a lustrous glow, like the pale cast that bleached the morning skies, suffused the Great Woods on the far side of the valley. But it was too early—and in the wrong sky. Atop the church spire, blue-flamed corposants swirled around the cross. Had even those asleep in the cemetery been aroused by the dread? But
that
sign was not promised until the last days of the world.

He uttered a hasty prayer against occult danger and turned his back on the strange manifestations, facing the church walls, seeking comfort in their familiarity.

My wooden cathedral
, Dietrich had sometimes called it, for above its stone foundation St. Catherine’s oak walls and posts and doors had been whittled by generations of earnest woodsmen into a wild congeries of saints and beasts and mythic creatures.

Beside the door, the sinuous figure of St. Catherine herself rested her hand upon the wheel whereon they had thought to break her.
Who has triumphed?
her wan smile asked.
Those who turned the wheel are gone, but I abide
. Upon the doorposts, lion, eagle, man, and ox twisted upward toward the tympanum, in which the
Last Supper
had been carved.

Elsewhere: Gargoyles leered from the roof’s edge, fantastic in horns and wings. In spring, their gaping mouths disgorged the flow of melting snows from the steep-pitched tiles of the roof. Under the eaves, kobolds hammered. On lintels and window jambs, in panels and columns, yet more fantastic creatures were relieved from the wood. Basilisks glared, griffins and wyverns reared. Centaurs leaped; panthers exuded their sweet, alluring breath. Here, a dragon fled from Amaling knights; there, a
sciopod
stood on his single enormous foot. Headless
blemyae
stared back from eyes affixed to their bellies.

The oaken corner-posts of the building had been carved into the images of mountain giants upholding the roof. Grim and Hilde and Sigenot and Ecke, the villagers called them; and Ecke, at least, seemed a proper name for a
corner-post. Someone with a sense of humor had worked the pedestal of each column into the form of a weary and irritable dwarf upholding the giant and glaring with resignation at passersby.

The wonderful riot of figures, emerging from the wood but never entirely separate, seemed indeed to be a living part of it.
Somewhere
, he thought,
there are creatures like these
.

When the wind blew hard or the snow lay heavy upon the roof, the menagerie would whisper and groan. It was only the shifting and bending of joists and rafters, yet it often seemed as if Sigenot rumbled and dwarfish Alberich squeaked and St. Catherine hummed a small tune to herself. On most days, the murmuring walls amused him, but not today. With the unease that lay upon him, Dietrich feared that the Four Giants would suddenly unburden themselves and bring the whole edifice down upon him.

More than one cottage below the hill now showed a flicker of candlelight behind its windows, and atop Manfred’s keep on the other side of the little valley, the night watch paced in unwonted alertness, peering first one way then another for the approach of some unseen enemy.

A figure stumbled toward him from the village, recovered, slipped in the dirt, and a thin sob carried in the early morning air. Dietrich raised his torch and waited. Was the heralded menace even now slouching brazenly toward him?

But even before it fell to its knees breathlessly before him, the figure had resolved itself into Hildegarde, the miller’s wife, barefooted and with her hair a tangle, a hasty cloak thrown over her night smock. Dietrich’s torchlight glimmered on an unwashed face. A menace she may have been, but of another and long-familiar sort.

“Ach, pastor!” she cried. “God has discovered my sins.”

God, Dietrich reflected, had not had far to look. He raised the woman to her feet. “God has known all our sins from the beginnings of time.”

“Then why has he awakened me today with such fear? You must shrive me.”

E
AGER TO
put walls between himself and the foreboding miasma, Dietrich led Hilde into the church; and was disappointed, if not surprised, to find his anxiety undiminished. Holy ground might hold the supernatural at bay until the end of time, but the merely natural intruded where it would.

In the stillness Dietrich heard a soft whisper, as of a small wind or a running brook. Shading his eyes against the brightness of his torch, Dietrich discerned a smaller shadow crouched before the main altar. Joachim the Minorite hunched there, his hurried ejaculations rushing over themselves like a fleeing crowd, so that the words blended into an indistinct susurration.

The prayers cut off, and Joachim turned, rising in a quick, lithe movement. He wore a tattered, brown habit of long employment, carefully and repeatedly mended. The cowl shadowed sharply chiseled features: a small dark man with heavy brows and deep brooding eyes. He wet his lips with a quick motion of his tongue.

“Dietrich …?” the Minorite said, and the word quavered a little at the end.

“Don’t be afraid, Joachim. We all feel it. The beasts, too. It is some natural thing, a disturbance in the air, like silent thunder.”

Joachim shook his head and a curl of black hair fell across his brow.
“Silent
thunder?”

“I can think of no better way to describe it. It is like the bass pipe of a great organ that makes the glass shiver.” He told Joachim his reasoning with the wool.

The Minorite glanced at Hildegarde, who had lingered at the rear of the church. He rubbed both his arms under his robe and looked side to side. “No, this dread is God’s voice calling us to repentance. It is too terrible to be anything else!” He cried this in his preaching voice, so that the words came back from the statues that watched from their niches.

Joachim’s preaching favored gestures and colorful stories, while Dietrich’s own closely reasoned sermons often
had a soporific effect on his flock. Sometimes he envied the monk his ability to stir men’s hearts; but only sometimes. Stirred, a heart could be a terrible thing.

“God may call,” he instructed the younger man, “by wholly material means.” He turned the young man with a gentle pressure on his shoulder. “Go, vest the altar. The Mass ‘Clamavérunt.’ The rubrics call for red today.”

A hard man to deal with, Dietrich thought as Joachim left, and a harder one to know. The young monk wore his rags with greater pride than the pope in Avignon his gilded crown. The Spirituals preached the poverty of Jesus and His Apostles and railed against the wealth of the clergy; but the Lord had blessed not the poor, but the poor
in spirit
—”Beati pauperes spritu.” A clever distinction. As Augustine and Aquinas had noted, mere poverty was too easily attained to merit such a prize as Heaven.

“Why is he here?” Hildegarde asked. “All he does is sit in the street and beg and rant.”

Dietrich made no answer. There were reasons. Reasons that wore golden tiaras and iron crowns. He wished that Joachim had never come, for he could accomplish little else but draw attention. But the Lord had said, “I was a stranger, and you took me in,” and He had never mentioned any exceptions.
Forget the great events of the world beyond the woods
, he reminded himself.
They concern you no longer
. But whether the world beyond the woods would forget him was another, and less comforting, thought.

I
N THE
confessional, Hildegarde Müller confessed to one small and petty act after another. She had damped the flour on the bags of grain brought to her husband for milling, the second worst-kept secret in Oberhochwald. She had envied the brooch worn by Bauer’s wife. She had neglected her aged father in Niederhochwald. She seemed determined to work her way through the entire Decalogue.

Yet, two years past, this same woman had sheltered a ragged pilgrim on his way to the Church of St. Sepulcher in
Jerusalem. Brian O’Flainn had walked all the way from Hibernia, at the very edge of the world, through a land in turmoil—for that year the English king had slaughtered the chivalry of France—only to be robbed of everything by the lord of Falcon Rock. Hilde Müller had taken this man into her house, nursed his sores and blisters; had given him new raiment from her scowling husband’s garderobe, and had sent him on his way refreshed and hale. Against the theft and the jealousy and the covetousness, weight that in the pan, as well.

Sin lay not in the concrete act, but in the will. Behind the woman’s recitation lay the cardinal sin of which these mean transgressions were but the visible signs. One could return a brooch or visit a parent; but unless the inner flaw were healed, repentance—however sincere the moment—would shrivel like the seed upon the bad ground.

“And I have taken pleasure with men who were not my lawful husband.”

That being the worst-kept secret in Oberhochwald. Hildegarde Müller stalked men with the same cool deliberation with which Herr Manfred stalked the stags and boars that adorned the walls of Hof Hochwald. Dietrich had a sudden and disconcerting vision of what might dangle from Hildegarde’s trophy wall.

Trophies? Ach!
That
was the inner sin. Pride, not lust. Long after the fleshly pleasures must have palled, the stalking and capture of men remained an affirmation that she could have whatever she desired whenever she desired it. Her kindness to the Irish pilgrim, too—not paradox but confirmation. She had done it for show, so that others could admire her generosity. Even her endless recitation of venial sins was a prideful thing. She was bragging.

For every weakness, a strength; and so for pride, humility. Her penance, he decided, would require the usual restitutions. Return the brooch, restore the flour, visit her father. Have no other man than her husband. Treat
any
distressed pilgrim, however mean his station, with the same charity as
she had shown the Irish lordling. But she must also, as a lesson in humility, scrub the flagstone floor of the church nave.

And this must be done in secret, lest she take pride even in her penances.

A
FTERWARD, ROBING
in the sacristy for the morning Mass, Dietrich paused with his cincture half tied. There was a sound, like that of a bumblebee, at the edge of his hearing. Drawn toward the window, he saw in the distance woodleaf-singers and acorn-jays flying in mad gyres above the place where earlier had glowed the pale luminescence. The glow had either faded or was now insensible against the brightening sky. But the vista seemed odd in some indefinable manner. There was a pinchedness to the outlook, as if the forest had been creased and folded on itself.

At the base of Church Hill, a knot of people milled as witlessly as the birds above. Gregor and Theresia stood by the smithy in agitated conversation with Lorenz. Their hair was wild and unkempt, sticking out from their heads, and their clothing clung to them as if wet. Others were about as well, but the usual morning work had come to a standstill. The smithy’s fire was unlit and the sheep bleated in their pen, the sheep-boys nowhere in sight. The pall of smoke that usually marked the charcoal kiln deep in the forest was absent.

The humming grew distinctly louder as Dietrich approached the window. Touching the glass lightly with a fingernail, he felt a vibration. Startled, he pulled away.

Dietrich passed a hand through his locks, only to feel his hair writhe like a nest of snakes. The cause of these curiosities was waxing in strength, as the sound and size of a galloping horse grew with its approach—which analogy would argue that the source of the impetus was drawing nearer.
There can be no motion in a body
, Buridan had argued,
unless an actor impresses an impetus
. Dietrich frowned, finding the thought disturbing.
Something
was approaching.

He turned from the window to resume vesting and paused with one hand on the red chasuble.

Amber!

Dietrich remembered. Amber
—elektron
, as the Greeks called it—when rubbed against fur impressed an impetus to the fur that caused it to move in much the same way as his hair. Buridan had demonstrated it at Paris while Dietrich had been in studies. The master had found such delight in instruction that he had foregone the doctorate—and had become from his fees that great anomaly: a scholar never in want. Dietrich saw him now in memory, rubbing the amber vigorously against the cat’s skin, his mouth pulled back in an unconscious grin.

Dietrich studied his own image in the window.
God was rubbing amber against the world
. Somehow, the thought excited him, as if he were on the verge of uncovering a form previously occult. A dizzy feeling, like standing atop the belfry. Of course, God was not rubbing the world. But something was happening that was
like
rubbing the world with amber.

Dietrich stepped to the sacristy door and looked into the sanctuary, where the Minorite was finishing the altar preparations. Joachim had thrown his cowl back, and the tight black curls ringing his tonsure danced to the same unseen impetus. He moved with that lithe grace that betokened gentle birth. Joachim had never known the villein’s hut or the liberties of the free-towns. The greater wonder when such a man, heir to important fiefs, dedicated his life to poverty. Joachim turned slightly, and the light from the clerestory highlighted fine, almost womanly features, set incongruously beneath shaggy brows that grew together over the nose. Among those who measured the beauty of men, Joachim might be accounted beautiful.