Eifelheim (53 page)

He was ignored. The herald gestured to the message in the dust. “The pest is come to Strassburg.”

Dietrich crossed himself and Joachim forgot to rise. “God help us all,” Dietrich whispered.

XXI
JUNE
, 1349
The Nativity of St. John the Baptist

T
HE MASS
,
Recordare, Dómine
, was said at nones, and St. Catherine’s filled with the dreadful curious. Burg and dorp alike were there, and the Krenken as well, even those unbaptized, for all knew that some portentious word had reached the pastor. Manfred and his family, forewarned, stood in front to provide an example. Dietrich celebrated jointly with the chaplain, Father Rudolf, a vain and haughty man much consumed with the prestige of his benefice. Yet Rudolf’s pale countenance, like the ruin of a Roman temple, demanded pity and Dietrich gave him the Savior’s words,
Be not afraid, for I am with you always
.

The bishop’s letter, when read aloud, had not the heart-draining sound of the herald’s flat pronouncement. A few citizens had fallen ill with the unmistakable signs, but not in the vast numbers felled in Paris or, the year before, in Italy. Yet, all parishes were warned to prepare themselves. Special prayers were begged for Strassburg—and for
Basel and Berne, for the pest was now known to have been in Berne in February, and in Basel by May.

At this news, Anna Kohlmann threw herself weeping to the flagstones and would not be comforted. “Bertram!” she cried. “Ach, Bertram!” Manfred, who had sent the boy to Berne, maintained a stoic countenance.

Into this commotion crawled from the rear of the nave Ilse Krenkerin. Like the Kratzer, she was much weakened by her refusal to drink the elixir, and moved only by use of oddly shaped crutches; but these she abandoned and went to Anna on hands and knees, where she proceeded to poke at the girl. Some cried out at the attack. But Joachim breasted the crowd and stood over the two girls, crying that this was only the Krenkish caress.

“I know the sentences inside your head,” Ilse told Anna, and the
Heinzelmännchen
spread the words to a score of head-harnesses, and whispers spread it further. “I died when Gerd fell. But he fell in his duties to the common good, and I will see him when my energy enters the lands of the Herr-from-the-sky.” Joachim repeated these simple words of faith for the assembled congregation. This brought mutters of agreement and much nodding of heads, but little comfort to Anna Kohlmann.

After services, Dietrich and Father Rudolf unvested in the sacristy. “The bishop wrote only that it
might
come here,” the chaplain said. “Only that it
might
. Not that it
would.”
He seemed to take much comfort in grammar. “And Strassburg is distant. The Elsass borders on the French-reich. Not so distant as Avignon or Paris, but …”

Dietrich said only that such reports were often exaggerated.

F
OR SEVERAL
days thereafter, folk remained shuttered in their cottages or told one another that the pest would not come so high into the mountains. Bad air is heavy, Gregor announced with confidence, and seeks always a lower level. But Theresia said that God had fashioned His instrument
and only repentance could stay His hand. Manfred was more thoughtful. “Those bells we heard on Rogation Day,” he said to Dietrich. “They were in Basel, I think, and carried to us by a freak of wind. God was warning us.”

Hans suggested marking the times and locations of the outbreaks on a land-chart, by which Dietrich supposed he meant a
portolan
. But, as none such existed in the village and most other such charts were symbolic in intent, the suggestion came to nought. The Krenken knew not the geography to compile what Hans called a “true chart.” Still, all men knew that to travel from Berne to Basel to Strassburg was to pass by Freiburg and thus the roads into the High Woods. A turn to the east, and … It had been, withal, a narrow escape.

I
LSE KRENKERIN
died a few days after the Pestilence Mass, and Dietrich sang the Dead Mass for her in St. Catherine’s. Hans, Gottfried, and the other baptized Krenken carried the bier into the church and set it down before the altar. Shepherd attended in silence, for Ilse had been of her party of pilgrims. She paid no mean attention to the ceremony, though whether from reverence or mere curiosity, Dietrich could not say.

Only a few villagers came, as they were for the most part yet huddled in their cottages. Norbert Kohlmann came and Konrad Unterbaum and their families; so also, surprisingly, Klaus and Hilde. Hilde wept at the sight of Ilse’s body and her husband was helpless to comfort her.

Afterward, the Krenken bore their companion away to be stored in the cold-boxes until her flesh was needed. “I bandaged her wounds,” Hilde said as the Hochwalders watched the Krenken progress the Bear Valley road toward their ship. Dietrich looked at her.

“She was hurt in the shipwreck,” she said, “and I bandaged her wounds.”

Klaus placed an arm around her shoulder, saying, “My wife is tenderhearted,” but she shrugged the arm off.

“Tenderhearted! It was a terrible penance, imposed upon me! Ilse
stank
, and a snap of her jaws could take my wrist
off. Why should I weep for her? She is one burden less for my penance.” She wiped her face with a kerchief, turned, and nearly collided with Shepherd as she fled.

“Explain, Dietrich,” Shepherd said. “All recitation over corpse! All water shaken; all smoke swung and swirled! What you accomplish? What good for Ilse? What good? What good? What I tell her birth-givers?”

She reared her head and clacked her side-lips so fast as to make a buzzing that grew sensibly into a musical note, and a remote part of Dietrich’s mind was delighted to learn that a tone was a high frequency of clicks. She leapt away, not toward the fine cottage of Klaus and Hilde, where she had been staying, but out across the resting fields toward the Great Wood. Konrad Unterbaum said, “I never thought
them
like us before today. But I know her heart; that I do.”

J
OACHIM SAT
on a small stool by the Kratzer’s cot and spooned a little porridge into the creature’s mouth. Outside, weathercocks turned and dark clouds tumbled over one another as they raced across the sky. A distant cloud over the lowlands flashed. Dietrich stood by the open window and smelled rain in the air.

“Your weather pleases,” said a voice in the head-harness, and it seemed so hale that Dietrich needed a moment to mark it as the Kratzer’s. It ought to gasp and sound weak, as befit his estate, but the
Heinzelmännchen’s
art did not extend so far. “The change in the air caresses my skin. You do not have this sense. No, you do not feel the pressing of the air. But, ach! That tongue of yours! So supple an organ! We taste nothing so intensely as you. How fortunate that is! How fortunate. With a school of philosophers will I return to this place to study. Not since the bird-folk of Cliff-home World have I known any so fascinating as you.”

The Kratzer raved when he spoke of returning, since it was growing ever more evident that he would not be leaving—save in the manner that all men left this world. Dietrich felt a great wash of pity and he stood by the cot to carress the strange creature in his own strange way.

E
ACH DAY
, Dietrich and Joachim prepared a meal for the weakening Kratzer, trying divers materials in the hope that one might contain the substance that his body craved. They made stews of unlikely fruits, and teas of doubtful herbs. Nothing could do more harm than doing nothing more. The philosopher had put aside untasted the flask containing the alchemist’s vile brew, and each day his horny skin grew more mottled. “He bleeds within,” explained the Krenkish physician, when Dietrich had called upon her skills. “If he will not drink the broth, there is naught I can do. And even should he drink,” she added, “it but prolongs the dying. All our hope is in Hans, and Hans has gone mad.”

“I will pray for his soul,” Dietrich said, and the physician tossed her arm for souls, for life, for death, for hope.

“You may believe that the
energia
can live without the body to support it,” the Krenkerin replied, “but ask no such foolishness from me.”

“You have the plow before the ox, doctor. It is the spirit that supports the body.” But the doctor was a materialist and would not hear it. Good in small things, as such folk often were, she esteemed the Krenkish body as but a machine, like a waterwheel, and gave no thought to the rushing waters that moved it.

W
HEN, AFTER
a week had gone by with no further word, the dread of the pest began to fade and people laughed at those who had shown so much fear before. By the Nativity of John, festivities drew them forth from their cottages. The tenants sent their tithe of meat to the parsonage and lit bonfires on the hills, even on the Katerinaberg, so that the vigil night was pocked with ruddy glows. Boys ran about the village drawing fiery arcs with their torches to chase away dragons. At the last, a great hoop of wood and brush was lit on the church green and rolled downhill, and a great sigh lifted from a hundred lips, for it toppled to its side halfway down. The children delighted in the flames and diversions,
but their elders clucked over the bad luck thus signified. The fiery wheel more often reached the bottom without falling, the old women told the old men, who nodded without contradiction, although memory might run otherwise.

Hans parted his lips. “Underseeking your customs was the Kratzer’s great work, and I have the sentence in my head that this example might please him.”

“He is dying.”

“And so, deserving a comfort.”

Dietrich fell silent. When a few moments had gone by, he said, “You loved your master.”

“Bwa-wa! How could I not? It is written in the atoms of my flesh. Nevertheless, one more bite of knowing to feed his mind would please him.” He stiffened abruptly into immobility. “Gottfried-Lorenz calls. There is trouble.”

G
OTTFRIED WORE
a floral crown and had shed his leather hose to leap among the revelers. Few remarked the custom any longer, as he had no shameful organs to display. At least, none that women would recognize as such. Somehow, in the whirling, he had swiped Sepp Bauer across the crown with his serrated arm, and the young man lay now prostrate amid the flickering torches. Some in the crowd made ugly growls in their throats. Others gathered by the moment, asking questions.

“The monster attacked my son!” Volkmar declared. He swept his arm around his neighbors. “We all saw.” A few nodded and muttered. Others shook their heads. A few cried that it was chance. Ulrike, swollen with child, shrieked to see her husband lying so. “You beast!” she cried at Gottfried. “You beast!”

Dietrich saw anger, confusion, fright, recognized the signs. He noticed from the corner of his eye, a handful of other Krenken gathering in the outer darkness, and one, who held the rank of sergeant among them and was known therefore as Hopping Max, had unfastened the flap on the scrip that held his
pot de fer
. “Gregor,” Dietrich called to
the mason. “Fetch Max from the castle. Tell him we have a matter for the Herr’s justice.”