Eifelheim (48 page)

Dietrich chuckled. “For a Jew, you are a man of wit.”

Tarkhan’s grin vanished. “Yes. ‘For a Jew.’ But I find it so in all land. Some men wise, some fools; some wicked, some good. Some all of that, sometimes. I say Christian can be save in his religion, as Jew can in his, or Muslim in his.” He paused. “Master is never telling you this, but we escape Regensburg because guilds take arms and fight Jew-killers. There gave in that city, two hundred and seven and thirty righteous gentiles.”

“May God bless those men,” said Dietrich.

“Omayn.”

“Now,” Dietrich said, as he carried the bowls to the sideboard, “let us sit by the hearth, and hear of this Golden Empire.”

The Jew planted himself upon a stool while Dietrich stirred the logs to encourage the flames. Outside, wind rushed and the afternoon windows darkened with the clouds.

“This tale from old time,” Tarkhan said, “so how much true? But is good tale, so no matter. In old times, in north of Persia, live ‘Mountain Jews,’ Simeon tribe, put there by Asshurrim. But many laws forgot until King Joseph find Talmud again. They know Elijah and Amos, Micah and Nahum, but now come flatland Jews from Babylon tell of new prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekial. Then pagan Turks come over to One God. Together we create Golden Empire. Our merchants go I’Stamboul, Baghdad, even Cathay.”

“Merchants,” said Joachim, who had affected not to listen. “You had much gold, then.”

“Among Turks each direction is having color. South white, west gold, and Khazars then west-most of all Turks. Itli Khan name seven judges. Two judging our people by Talmud; two judging Christians; two judging Muslims by
shari’a
. Seventh judge pagans, who were worship sky. Many years our khan fight Arab, Bulgar, Greek, Rus. I see in old book, Jewish knight in chainmail riding steppe pony.”

Dietrich stared in astonishment. “I have never heard of this empire!”

Tarkhan struck his breast. “Like all grown proud, Lord bring us low. Rus take Kiev and Itli. All this happen long ago, and most are forgotting, save some, like me, who love for old tales. Land rule now by Mongols and Poles; and I, whose fathers once kings, must serve Ispanish moneylender.”

“You don’t like Malachai,” Dietrich guessed.

“His mother find that hard. Ispanish Jews proud, with strange customs. Eat rice cakes for Passover!”

W
HEN DIETRICH
later showed Tarkhan to the door, he said, “It has grown dark. Can you find Niederhochwald?”

The Jew shrugged. “Mule can find. I ride with him.”

“I would …” Dietrich dipped his head, looked away for a moment at the stars. “I would thank you. Though I never wished your people any harm, never before have I seen a Jew as a man. Always it was ‘a Jew is a Jew!’”

Tarkhan scowled. “True. But by us, Greek and Roman
notzrim
are same.”

Dietrich recalled how the Krenken had seemed at first alike. “It is the strangeness,” he said. “Just as the trees of a distant forest blend into an indistinguishable whole, so do the singularities of strangers fade when their appearance or customs are distant from our own.”

“You may have right,” said Tarkhan ben Bek. “Master, he travel many years, see only pollution. Though master is think he seeing you before, when he much younger.”

T
HE TROUBLING
thought that he had been recognized stayed with Dietrich, and he gave thanks that Malachai was safely segregated in the Lower Woods and would not see Dietrich again before he departed for Vienna.

A
T MIDDAY
on the Feast of St. Barnabas, a lone rider, astride a jennet mule and clad in the brown robes of a Minorite, worked his way up the track from St. Wilhelm and entered the manor house.

“I’ll not go back,” Joachim sneered when Dietrich mentioned the stranger. “Not while Strassburg’s prior is a truckling Conventual who has forgotten every humility that Francis taught.” Later, as they went to clean the church, he pointed across the notch that separated the two hills. “He’s coming here. If he
is
a Conventual, I’ll not kiss his hairy—”

The stranger monk studied the crest of Church Hill, pausing when he caught sight of the two watchers. There seemed no face within the cowl, only a black emptiness, and the notion sprang irresistibly to Dietrich’s mind that this was Death, now these dozen years overdue, treading a weary mountain trail in search of him. Then a flash of white showed within the shadow and Dietrich realized that it was only the angle of the sun that had made that hood seem so empty. Immediately another apprehension replaced it: namely, that the rider was an
exploratore
sent by the Strassburg bishop to question him.

His unease grew as the inexorable mule plodded to the hilltop. There, the rider threw back his cowl, revealing a thin face, long in the chin and crowned by a laurel of tangled white hair. There was something of the fox in it, and of the deer surprised by a hunter, and the lips seemed those of a man who had lately mistaken for new wine a jar of old vinegar. Though time had aged him, had drawn him out more gaunt than ever, had spotted his northland-pale skin, five-and-twenty years sloughed off in an eyeblink and Dietrich gasped in surprise and delight.

“Will!” he said. “Is it truly you?”

And William of Ockham, the
venerabilis inceptor
bowed his head in mock humility.

R
ESIGNED BY
now to the periodic intrusions of strangers, the Krenken had absented themselves from the public space; but perhaps having grown bored, they played this time a precarious game of hide-and-seek, keeping themselves just out of sight rather than flying off to the Great Wood. As Dietrich escorted his visitor about the village, he marked, from the corner of his eye, the sudden leap of a Krenk from one concealment to another.

The church walls held Will Ockham’s tongue mute, a feat no Pope had yet accomplished. He stood before them some time before he began to circuit the building, exclaiming with delight over the
blemyae
, complimenting the peredixion tree and the dragon. “Delightfully pagan!” he declared. Some Dietrich must explain: the Little-Ash-Men of the Siegmann Woods, or the Gnurr of the Murg Valley, which seemed to emerge from the woodwork itself. Dietrich named the four giants supporting the roof. “Grim and Hilde and Sigenot and Ecke—the giants slain by Dietrich of Berne.”

Ockham cocked his head. “Dietrich, was it?”

“A popular hero in our tales. Mark you Alberich the Dwarf in Ecke’s pedestal. He showed King Dieter to the lair where Ecke and Grim lived. Giants don’t like dwarves.”

Ockham thought about that for a moment. “I shouldn’t think they’d even notice them.” He regarded the dwarf further. “At first, I thought him grimacing in his effort to hold the giantess up; but now I see that he is laughing because he is about to toss her over. Clever.” He studied the kobolds under the eaves. “Now
those
are surpassingly ugly gargoyles!”

Dietrich followed his gaze. Five Krenken perched nude under the roofline, frozen in that preternatural stillness into which they sometimes fell, and pretended to uphold
the roof. “Come,” Dietrich said quickly, turning Ockham about. “Joachim will have prepared our meal by now.” As he chivvied his guest along, he glanced backward over his shoulder and saw one of the Krenken open and close his soft lips in the Krenkish smile.

D
IETRICH AND
Ockham passed the evening over a supper of pumpernickel and cheese and wholesome amounts of ale. News of the great, wide world drifted through the High Woods on the lips of travelers; and Ockham had been at the center of that world.

“I was told,” Dietrich said, “you are to make your peace with Clement.”

Will shrugged. “Ludwig is dead, and Karl wants no quarrel with Avignon. Now that all the others are dead—Michael, Marsiglio, and the rest—why pretend that we were the true Chapter? I sent the Seal of the Order back, the one that Michael took with us when we fled. The Chapter met on Pentecost and told Clement of my gesture, and Clement sent to Munich offering better terms than Jacques de Cahors ever did. So we will kiss and pretend that all is well.”

“You meant Pope John.”

“The Kaiser never called him anything but ‘Jacques de Cahors.’ He was a religious man.”

“Ludwig, religious!”

“Certainly. He created his own pope and carted him all over Italy. You can’t get more religious than that. But when you have said ‘hunting’ and ‘feasting’ and ‘bohorts,’ you have limned the man in all his essentials. Oh, and securing his family’s good fortune. A simple man, easily guided by his more subtle advisors—he would never have gone into Italy but for Marsiglio’s wheedling—but his stubbornness could rebut the subtlest of reasoning. Karl, on the other hand, is much taken with the arts, and intends a university for Prague to rival Montpellier or Oxford, if not Paris itself. A place free of the rigid orthodoxies of established scholars.”

He meant free of Thomists and Averröeists. “A place where they may pursue nominalism?” Dietrich teased.

Ockham snorted. “I am no nominalist. The problem with teaching the Modern Way is that lesser scholars, excited by the novelty, seldom bother to master my insights. There are lips on which I heartily wish my name had never rested. I tell you, Dietl, a man becomes a heretic less for what he writes than for what others believe he has written. But I will outlive all my enemies. The false pope Jacques is dead, and that old fool Durandus. One hopes the odious Lutterell will soon follow. Mark me. I shall dance on their graves.”

“‘Doctor Modern’ was hardly an ‘old fool’ …” Dietrich ventured.

“He sat on the tribunal that condemned my theses!”

“Durandus himself once faced the tribunal,” Dietrich reminded him. “Peer-review is the fate of all philosophers worth reading. And he did exert his influence favorably on two of your propositions.”

“Out of fifty-one on trial! Such a mewling favor is more insult than the honest hostility of the odious Lutterell. Durandus was a falcon that had choosen not to fly. He would have been less a fool had he been less brilliant. One does not criticize a stone for falling. But a falcon? Come, who else did we know at Paris?”

“Peter Aureoli … No, hold. He was raised archbishop, and died the year before you came.”

“Is an archbishopric often so fatal?” Ockham said with amusement.

“You and ‘Doctor Eloquent’ would have found much in common. He shaved with your razor. And Willi is archdeacon now in Freiburg. I posed him a question this past market.”

“Willi Jarlsburg? The one with the pouty lips? Yes, I remember him. A second-rate mind. An archdiaconate suits him, for there he will never be called upon to utter an original thought.”

“You are too harsh. He always treated me kindly.”

Ockham regarded him for a moment. “His sort would. But a kindly man may yet own a second-rank intellect. The assessment is no insult. The second rank is far more than what most scholars achieve.”

Dietrich recalled Ockham’s agility in taking shelter behind his precise words. “The Herr brought me a tract by a young scholar now at Paris, Nicholas Oresme, who has a new argument for the diurnal motion of the earth.”

Ockham chuckled. “So, you still debate the philosophy of nature?”

“One does not debate nature; one experiences nature.”

“Oh, surely. But John Mirecourt—you will not have heard of him. They call him ‘White Monk.’ A Capuchin, as you might suppose. His propositions were condemned at Paris last year—no, it was in forty-seven—by which accolade we know him for a thinker of the first rank. He has shown that experience—
evidentia naturalis
—is an inferior sort of evidence.”

“Echoing Parmenides. But Albrecht said that in investigations of nature, experience is the only safe guide.”

“No. Experience is a poor guide, for tomorrow one may have a contrary experience. Only those propositions whose contrary reduces to a contradiction
—evidentia potissima
—can be held with certainty.” Ockham spread his hands to invite rebuttal.

Dietrich said, “A contradiction in terms is not the only sort of contradiction. I know that grass is green from experience. The contrary can be falsified by
experientia operans.”

Ockham cupped his ear. “Your lips move, but I hear Buridan’s voice. Who can say but that, in some far-off place, one may not find yellow grass?”

Dietrich was brought short by his recollection that, in the Krenkish homeland, the grass was indeed yellow. He scowled, but said nothing.

Ockham pushed himself to his feet. “Come, let us proof your proposition with an experience. The world turns, you said.”

“I did not say that it
did
turn; only that,
loquendo naturale
, it
might
. The motion of the heavens would be the same in either case.”

“Then why seek a second explanation? Of what use would it be, even were it true?”

“Astronomy would be simplified. So, applying your own principle of the least hypothesis—”

Ockham laughed. “Ah. Argument by flattery! A more potent argument by far. But I never intended entities in nature. God cannot be bound by simplicity and may choose to make some things simple and others complex. My razor applies only to the workings of the mind.” He was already striding toward the door and Dietrich scurried to catch up.