Eifelheim (59 page)

Amidst the color, Everad twitched.

“He’ll be sore when he sobers up,” Max observed, “thrashing on the ground like that.”

“He may choke on his vomit,” said Dietrich. “Come, let us carry him to his wife.” Dietrich strode ahead and knelt by the steward.

“He seems comfortable where he is,” said Max. Klaus laughed.

The vomit beside the path was black and loathsome, and Everard himself exuded a repellant odor. His breath wheezed like a bagpipe; and his cheeks, when Dietrich touched them, were hot. The steward twitched at the gentle touch and cried out.

Dietrich stood abruptly, taking two steps back.

He collided with the miller, who had come forward crying, “Awake, drunkard!” The steward and the maier had been rivals and partners for many years and bore each other that mix of friendly contempt that such associations often engendered.

“What is it?” the sergeant called to Dietrich.

“The pest,” Dietrich told him.

Max closed his eyes. “Herr God in Heaven!”

Dietrich said, “We should carry him to his cottage.” But he made no move. Klaus, hugging himself, turned away. Max returned to the manor house, saying, “The Herr must know.”

Hans Krenk shouldered them aside. “Heloïse and I will carry him.” The pagan Krenkerin, who had been resting nearby from her flight, joined him.

On the hill opposite, Joachim tolled the midday bell, announcing lunch to the workers in the fields. Klaus listened a moment, then said, “I thought it would be a bleaker scene.”

Dietrich turned to him. “What would be?”

“This day. I thought it would be marked by terrible signs—lowering clouds, ominous winds, a crack of thunder. Twilight. Yet, it is so ordinary a morning that I grow frightened.”

“Only now frightened?”

“Ja. Portents would mean a Divine Mover, however mysterious His moves; and the wrath of an angry God may be turned away by prayer and penance. But it simply happened. Everard grew sick and fell down. There were no signs; so it may be a natural thing, as you have always said. And against nature, we have no recourse.”

In the steward’s cottage, they scattered ledgers and rolls from the table and placed Everard there, as if serving a suckling pig. His wife, Yrmegard, wailed and clutched at her hands. Everard had begun to kick and twitch, and his face was now sensibly hotter. Dietrich pulled the man’s shirt away, and they saw the boils on his chest.

“The murrain,” said Klaus in relief.

But Dietrich shook his head. The resemblance was keen, but these were not the pustules of the “wool sorter’s illness.”

“Place cold rags on his forehead,” he told Yrmegard. “And touch not the boils. When he thirsts, allow no more than sips. Hans, Heloïse, let us move him to his bed.”

Everard howled when they picked him up and the Krenken nearly dropped their burden. “Heloïse will stay with him,” Hans announced. “Yrmegard, come no closer. Small-lives may travel in the spit, others from touch or the breath. We do not know which may be the case here.”

“Shall I give my husband to the care of demons?” Yrmegard demanded. She wrung her hands in her cover-slut, but made no movement toward the bed. Young Witold, her son, clung to her skirts and stared wide-eyed at his twitching father.

Outside the cottage, Klaus turned to Dietrich. “Everard never came near my father-in-law.”

Hans tossed his arm. “The small-lives may be carried by
the wind, like the seeds of some plants. Or they may ride on other animals. Each kind travels in preferred ways.”

“Then none of us is safe,” wailed Klaus.

Hooves clattered in the courtyard, and Thierry and Imein galloped past, leaping their horses across the low stone wall and jumping the moat that encircled the grounds. Klaus, Hans, and Dietrich watched them pass through the village and thence the fields, where lunching peasants marveled at the sight and, not yet knowing the cause, cried out in admiration for the horsemanship.

But by the evening Angelus, everyone had heard the news. Those returning from the fields slipped away to their cottages without a word. That night, someone threw a rock through the fine tinted glass light that Klaus had placed so proudly in the window of his house. In the morning, no one stirred from his dwelling. They peeked through wooden shutters at the deserted street, as if the poisoned breath of the pest waited to pounce on whoever might show himself.

A
FTER DIETRICH
prayed Mass the next morning to a congregation of Joachim and the Krenken, he walked to the crest of the hill to gaze upon the village emerging from the shadow of night. Below, the smithy was dark and cold. A rhythmic creak sounded in the morning air—Klaus’s mill wheel, disengaged and slowly turning. A cock noticed sunrise and the sheep in the murrain-infested flock bleated piteously at their brethren who had fallen during the night. A faint mist lay over the fields, white and delicate as spun flax.

Joachim joined him. “It is like a village of the dead.”

Dietrich made the sign of the cross. “May God avert your words.”

There was another silence before Joachim spoke again. “Do any need succor?”

Dietrich tossed his arm. “What succor can we give?”

He turned away, but Joachim seized him. “Comfort, brother! The body’s ills are the least of ills, for they end
only in death, which is but a little thing. But if the spirit dies, then all is lost.”

Still, Dietrich could not proceed. He had discovered that he was afraid of the pest.
Media vita in morte summus
. In the midst of life we are in death, but
this
death terrified him. He had seen men with their guts hanging in strings from a sword thrust into the belly, screaming and hugging themselves and soiling their clothes. Yet, no man went to battle without accepting that chance. But this sickness took no sense of risk or hope, and struck where and whom it willed. Heloïse had spied a man in Niederhochwald dead at his plough; and what man goes into his strips accepting that such a death might await him there?

Hans laid a hand on his shoulder, and he started at the touch.
“We
will go,” the Krenk said.

“A demon treading the high street calling out for the sick?
There
is comfort for those folk.”

“So, we are demons, after all?”

“Men afraid may see demons in the familiar, and direct their fear of the insensible to a fear of the sensible.”

“Thought-lacking!”

“So it is; but it is what folk do.”

Dietrich took a step down the path, hesitated, then continued unsteady to the bottom. Coming first to Theresia’s cottage, his call was answered by a shrill voice he barely recognized.

“Go away! Your demons brought this on us!”

The charge was illogical. The pest had wasted regions that had never seen a Krenk; but Theresia had never been swayed by keen reason. He continued to the smithy, where he found Wanda Schmidt already speaking with Joachim.

“You did not have to come,” Dietrich told the monk as the two proceeded on either side of the high street, but Joachim only shrugged.

And so they went, house by house until, at the far end of the village, they reached the gärtners’ huts. Entering the Metzger cottage, Dietrich assured himself that Trude suffered no more than the murrain. The black streaks on her
arm showed that the poison was spreading in her.
Trude will die
, he thought, keeping the belief from his face and lips as he prayed a blessing on them.

He returned to the cusp where Church Hill and Castle Hill met, where he awaited Joachim, who crossed the meadow from the miller’s cottage. Sheep baa’ed at the Minorite as he passed among them. “Are they well?” Dietrich asked, indicating the cottages that lined the other side of the meadow, and Joachim nodded.

Dietrich let out a gust he hadn’t known he held. “None other, then.”

Joachim kicked a dead rat from the path and looked up Castle Hill. “There is yet the curia—and there is where the pest first showed itself.”

“I will ask among Manfred and his folk.” Impulsively, he embraced the monk. “You had no need to expose yourself. Care of this flock is mine.”

Joachim studied the sheep dying in the meadow, as if wondering which flock Dietrich had meant. “The vogt is derelict in his business,” he said. “Dead sheep ought to be burned, or the murrain will destroy the flock. My father’s sheep were once afflicted so, and two of the shepherds died with them. It was my fault, of course.”

“Volkmar has now other worries than the village sheep.”

Joachim grinned suddenly. “But I do not. ‘Feed my sheep,’ the Master said, but not all food is bread. Dietrich, that was a hard journey down that high street, but a journey is made lighter with a companion.”

In the end, Everard alone was ill, and he seemed to be resting now peacefully. Dietrich dared hope that it might go no further. Hans clicked his mandibles at this, but said nothing.

G
OTTFRIED AND
Winifred Krenk took two of the flying harnesses and flew to the lower valley to bury the unfortunate folk of that place. There were so many corpses that they used the thunder-paste to dig the graves. Dietrich wondered if that were a proper way to dig a grave, but then
reflected that a grave dug all at once might be proper for a village that had died all at once. He spoke the words over them using the far-speaker that Heloïse had taken with her.

Afterward, Hans replenished the fire barrels of the talking head by unfolding a triptych made of glass. This glass converted sunlight into the
elektronik
essence. Philosophically, one sort of fire might be converted into another sort of fire, but the practical alchemy eluded him.

“Why has the pest come here?” Dietrich asked suddenly.

Hans watched the sigil on the body of the
Heinzelmännchen
that signified how full the fire barrels were. “Because it has come everywhere else. Why not here? But, Dietrich, my friend, you speak of it like a beast that goes and comes with a purpose. There is no purpose.”

“That holds no comfort.”

“Must there be comfort?”

“Life without purpose is not worth living.”

“Is it? Listen, my friend. Life is ever worth living. My … You would say, my ‘grandsire.’ My ‘grandsire’ spent many—months—huddled in a broken nest—a town—wrecked by … by an aerial assault. His nest-brothers were gone down in flames. His nurse had died in his arms from a violent expression worse than that of black-powder. He did not know where he would find his next meal. But his life was worth living, because in such straits, finding that next meal gives purpose; the next dawn marks your success. Never was he more alive than in those months when he lived so close by death. It was my own hatching-brood—which wanted for nothing—that found life oppressive.”

W
HEN TUESDAY
dawned with no further instances of the pest, the villagers crept from their cottages and spoke together in hushed voices. Word had come from the manor that Everard was resting and his fever seemed a little milder. “Perhaps the village will escape with no worse,” Gregor Mauer said, when Dietrich passed through the village that morning.

“May God grant it so,” Dietrich answered. They stood in the mason’s workyard, amidst stone dust and chips. Gregor’s two sons idled nearby in leather aprons and wearing thick gloves. Little Gregor, a hulking youth near ten stone in weight, held a plumb in his hand and was swinging it absently.

“Pastor …” Gregor seemed oddly hesitant. He studied the dust in his courtyard, pushing it with the sole of his boot. A glower sent his sons off. Little Gregor poked his younger brother with his elbow and grinned at his father over his shoulder.

“No respect,” said Gregor. “I should have sent them away for their ‘prenticing.” He sighed. “Pastor, I would wed Theresia. She is your ward, to give in marriage.”

Dietrich had not looked for this day. In his heart, Theresia remained a tearstained waif, blackened with the soot of her burning home. “Does she understand your wish?”

“She consents.” When Dietrich made no answer, he added, “She is a sweet woman.”

“She is. But her heart is deeply troubled.”

“I have tried to explain about the Krenken.”

“There is more than that. I think she impresses her inner demons upon the outer ones.”

“I … don’t understand.”

“Something Hans told me about the soul. The Krenken have made a philosophy of it. I call it
psyche logos
. They have divided the soul into parts: the self—that which says,
ego
, the conscience—which sits above
ego
and rules it, the original sin below it, and, naturally, the vegetative and animal souls of which Aristotle wrote. They say …” He grew suddenly irritated with himself. “But that is of no matter. What I mean is …” He smiled briefly. “There stand matters in her past of which you know nothing.”

“It is less her past than her future that concerns me.”

Dietrich nodded.

“Then we have your blessing?”

“I must think on it. There is no man I’d rather give her
to than you, Gregor. But it is a decision for the rest of her life, and not one to be made on a moment’s fancy.”

“The rest of her life,” Gregor said slowly, “may be no long time.”

Dietrich crossed himself. “Do not tempt God. None else have fallen ill.”

“Not yet,” Gregor agreed, “but the end of the world is coming, and in Heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage.”

“I told you I would think on it.” Dietrich turned to go, but Gregor’s shout turned him round.

“We don’t need your permission,” the mason said, “but we wanted your blessing.”

Dietrich nodded, hunched his shoulders, and left the stoneyard.

A
FTER VESPERS
, Dietrich ate a simple meal of bread and cheese washed down with ale. He had cut extra pieces for Joachim, but the young monk had not reappeared. Hans squatted by the open window, listening to the insect song called up by evenfall. From time to time, the Krenkl bit into a piece of bread that had been dipped into the life-giving elixir. Even so, some bruises had already marked his skin. The stars, reflected in his huge eyes, seemed to twinkle inside his head. “There stands a sentence in my head,” he said, “that one of those must be Home-star. If God is good, He’d not abandon me with no glimpse of it. I only wish I knew which. Perhaps …” He extended a long forearm, a long finger, “… that one. It is so bright. There must be some reason it is so bright.” He buzzed with his side-lips. “But no. It is bright because it is close. The philosophy of chances tells me that Home-star is unknowably distant, in an unknowable direction, and not one of those lights even shines in Krenkheim’s skies. Even that tenuous bond is denied me.”