Eifelheim (56 page)

“Mine Herr,” said Dietrich, “their rudder—” He could not continue and said only, “I, too, wish them fair winds and calm seas.”

They rode the Herr’s rouncies past golden fields to the clearing where the vessel lay. Dietrich suggested they picket the horses at the charcoal kiln and walk the rest of the way, lest the nearness of so many Krenken panic them. Dietrich noted that Max wore now a scrip on his belt in
which nestled a handheld
pot de fer
. “You have finally secured one, I see.”

Max grinned and slipped the machine from his scrip. “Hopping Max gave it me before they decamped for their ship.”

“What will you do when there are no more bullets for it?”

Max shrugged. “Is there a flaw in my weave? They’ve taught us how to make safely the black-powder, and that is enough. To make bullets for this device wants arts mechanical which we do not have. The bullets we use for our slings are too irregular in size and shape. But it is a cunningly wrought piece, and I will keep it for its beauty and as a think-piece for the strange events of this past year.”

“Last night, Joachim begged Shepherd and others to stay.”

Max cocked his head. “He hates them so? If they stay, they die.”

“He believes that our great work was to win these creatures to Christ, and this labor alone has kept the pest from our homes. If the Krenken depart unbaptized, he says, the pest will come.”

Max laughed. “He calls them demons still? I’ve helped cart too many of their bodies to believe that anymore.”

Hilde joined them at the base of the ridge. She handed Dietrich the bundle that contained his vestments. Max carried the bucket and the aspergum. “It will please me when they are gone,” she said, “and matters put back in order.”

Dietrich took his companions by the hand. “Have your own guests said aught about this voyage to you? Shepherd? Augustus? Any of them?”

“Why?” said Max. “What is wrong?”

Dietrich released them. “I do not know whether this is a terrible sin or a wonderful act of hope. Come.” With that, he led the way up the ridge and down the other side, where the Krenken stood about in divers attitudes, preparing to embark. They were fewer than before, and many were in the extremes of their particular illness, their skin having
mottled. Most of these stood or squatted alone, but a few were supported by their fellows or carried in pallets. They stood in silence.

Baron Grosswald had erected a table and cunning machines to repeat in Krenkish Dietrich’s words. “You must make swift,” he said over the private canal, “or our resolve may falter.” Dietrich nodded to show that he had heard, and donned the purple vestments used in the Mass for Pilgrims and Travelers. He would not celebrate the Mass, of course, but the prayers were of special merit to the occasion.

He crossed himself.
“In nómine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti …”
A few of the Krenken repeated the gesture. The wind whipped through the trees, bending the branches and causing them to bow.

“Rédime me, Dómine,”
he prayed for his guests. “Redeem me, O Herr, and have mercy on me: for my foot has stood on the straight path. Judge us, O Herr, for we have traveled in innocence. If we should walk in the shadow of death, we will fear no evil, for Thou art with us.

“Direct our steps according to Thy word; and let no iniquity have dominion over us. God has given his angels charge over us, to keep us in all Thy ways. In their hands, they will bear us up, lest we dash our foot against a stone.

“Perfect Thou, O Herr, our goings and our comings, that our footsteps be not moved from the straight path. Incline Thy ear and hear my words. Show forth Thy wonderful mercies.” Then, raising his arms, he cried, “Send Thy grace before these pilgrims to guide their steps, and let it follow after them and accompany them in their paths, so that by the protection of Thy mercy, we may rejoice in both their progress and in their safety.”

Dietrich progressed around the vessel, blessing it with holy water which Max carried in the bucket for him, and finished by drawing the sign of the cross over the assembled Krenken, saying, “Go with God.” After this, the pilgrims, still silent, filed on board their ship. Some of them bowed or genuflected to Dietrich as they passed, though he did not think they meant more than courtesy. “Good-bye,
my krenkl’n, he said again and again. “May God go with you.” One replied over the private voice-canal, “I will carry your message of charitas home with me.” Dietrich gave her a particular blessing even while his eyes searched among the passing figures.

“What seek you?” Max asked him.

“A face.” Yet, in an odd fashion, while he had learned to mark individuals, seeing the Krenken now standing in ranks, their particulars faded once more into the sameness he had perceived on his earliest encounters. It was as if, on the cusp of their departure, they had grown once more indistinct.

Perhaps Hans and the others, bound by duty to their posts, were already inside.

Some Krenken hesitated at the ramp and a few made to turn back. These, Grosswald’s henchmen encouraged with blows and shoves. One of the henchmen was Friedrich, who had stood with Hans when Hans and Gottfried had defied Grosswald. He froze on noticing Dietrich’s regard, then pushed his way through the jostling pilgrims into the ship.

Shepherd and Grosswald were last to board. The captain of the ship paused and seemed about to speak, but then he merely smiled in the Krenkish manner. “Perhaps the magic works.”

Shepherd was the last. She stood halfway up the ramp and looked about the clearing. “Strange world; strange folk,” she said. “Lovely, but deadly. There worse shores on which to beach, but none so cruel.” She turned to go, but Dietrich held out the three head-harnesses.

“We won’t need these anymore,” he said, though Shepherd would not understand now that he had taken it off.

But Shepherd only touched the
mikrofoneh
with a fingertip and pressed them back on Dietrich, along with her own. At the head of the ramp, she chittered a last, untranslated statement, then she was inside and the door closed upon her and the ramp clanked into its recess.

D
IETRICH INTENDED
to watch the vessel out of sight, for he was consumed by a curiosity as to how it proposed to do so. Hans had insisted that it moved on a cushion of magnetism in a direction “inside of all direction.” Dietrich had read Pierre Maricourt’s
Epistola de Magnete
in Paris, and he remembered that magnets had two poles and that like poles repelled each other, so what Hans had told him was allowed by natural philosophy. But what had Hans meant when he said that these “inner directions” receded without regard to where one stood? Maricourt—Bacon’s “Master Peter”—had written also that an investigator “diligent in the use of his own hands … will in a short time correct an error which he would never do in eternity by his knowledge of natural philosophy and mathematics alone.” And so, Dietrich determined to watch the Krenkish ship recede and, if he and Max and Hilde watched from different points, test the proposition that it would recede in all directions at once.

Yet, after he had explained his
experientia
, and Max and Hilde went toward their assigned positions, several Krenken bounded down upon them and, seizing them in their long serrated arms, carried them away behind the far side of the ridge.

T
HE KRENKEN
pinned them to the loam and held them motionless. Max shouted and tried in vain to reach his
pot de fer
. Hilde screamed. Dietrich’s heart beat against his ribs like a captive bird. The Krenk who held him to the ground ground his side-lips together, but Dietrich could make nothing of it without the head-harness. Hilde subsided into heaving sobs.

“Hans?” said Dietrich, for the Krenk who held him to the earth wore leather hose and a loose blouse of homespun that fit ill on his frame. The Krenk had opened its mandibles, perhaps to answer, perhaps to bite Dietrich’s neck in two, when a sudden wind swayed the upper reaches of the spruces and birch. Limbs creaked, birds took wing. Deer bolted through the underbrush. An odd tension gripped Dietrich and he
sucked in his breath and waited. It was like the morn when the Krenken arrived, only not so strong.

Terror and unease flowed through him like the millstream over the wheel. The wind rose to a howl and lightning snapped like bolts from a crossbow, striking trees all about and causing branches to burst. The thunderclaps echoed off the Katerinaberg, piled one upon the other, died slowly away.

The brief storm ended. The trees bowed for a moment, then steadied. The Krenken who had pinned Dietrich and his companions to the earth straightened and stood very still while their antennae waved about. Dietrich, too, sniffed the air and detected a faint odor at once metallic and pungent. The Krenkish heads moved fractionally and Dietrich understood that they were looking at one another. Hans clicked something and Gottfried stepped forward from where he had been waiting in the trees with several large coffers and sundry equipments and climbed to the top of the slope.

From there, he chittered something short and intense and those holding Max and Hilde and four others waiting in the woods bounded toward the top of the ridge, where, after several loud rounds of clacks, they poked one another with stiffened fingertips.

Dietrich and Max climbed to their feet. A moment longer, and Hilde joined them. They followed the eight Krenken to the ridgetop.

The clearing below lay empty.

All that remained of the great vessel were the stumps of many trees, the broken remnants of others, and a scattering of debris overlooked or ignored in the departure. One by one, the Krenken bounded down the slope, where they stood in utter silence.

One bent and retrieved some object from the ground, which he held indifferently, but which Dietrich, watching from the ridge, knew he studied with great intensity, for he twisted it first one way, then another, which is what the
Krenken often did to sharpen the vision of their strange eyes.

“That device,” said Hilde, and Max and Dietrich both turned to her. “I saw it often in the hands of their children. It is some plaything.”

Below, the Krenken squatted and hugged their knees high above their heads.

7
NOW
Sharon

S
HE HEARD
him call distantly, a tiny, insect-voice, squeak-squeaking her name. But her universe was too lovely to leave. No, not the
uni
-verse, the
poly-
verse.
Twelve
dimensions, not eleven. A triplet of triplets. The rotation groups and the meta-algebra made sense now. The speed of light anomaly fit, too. She squeezed the polyverse, and her pulse quickened. Smart lad, that Einstein. He got it just right. A twist. Kaluza and Klein were no dummies, either. And bend, and …
There!
If she warped it in
that
way …

There is an altered state that overcomes one in such moments, as if the mind had slipped into another world. Everything else becomes distant, and time itself seems suspended. Motion ceases. The sun stands still. In such moments, famous mathematicians make cryptic marginal notes.