Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  “We’ll need a horse,” the sergeant said, “to carry the bodies out. Meanwhile, the kiln will serve for a crypt.”

  It took only a few minutes, in the course of which Dietrich found the boy’s head. The hair had been burned off and the eyes had melted, and Dietrich wept over the charred remnant of the lad’s beauty. Anton. He remembered the name now. A comely lad, with much promise in his eyes. Josef had loved him greatly, as the son his solitary life had never granted.

  When they had finished, they arranged the loose sod around the opening to provide as much protection as they could from animals.

  Schweitzer jerked suddenly about and took a step toward the smoky woods behind him. A snapping of twigs faded rapidly in the distance. “We are watched,” he said.

  “It didn’t sound like footsteps,” Dietrich suggested. “It sounded more like a deer, or a rabbit.”

  The sergeant shook his head. “A soldier knows when he’s being watched.”

  “Then, whoever these people are, they’re timid,” Dietrich told Max.

  “I don’t think so,” Max answered without turning. “I think they are sentries. They run to take word back or to remain unseen. It’s what I would do.”

  “Outlaw knights?”

  “I doubt it.” He tapped the pommel of his Burgundian quillon. “France has employment enough. They needn’t live like poachers in a place like this.” After a few more minutes, he said. “He’s gone, at any rate. The Herr will be back on the morrow. We’ll see what his wishes are.”

  * * *

  IV. August, 1348

  The Feast of St. Clare of Assisi

  In the shimmering heat of an August afternoon, the Herr Manfred von Hochwald danced his palefridus up the Oberreid road to the amazement and delight of the peasants bent over the grain. First, came Wolfram the herald, astride a white jennet, bearing the banner with the Hochwald arms and crying the lord’s return to the harvest army. There followed a troop of men-at-arms, with their pikes resting upon their shoulders and their helmets glinting like the sun off the tumbling mill stream. Then came the captains and the knights, then chaplain Rudolf and Eugen the jung-herr, then the Herr himself: tall and splendid, well-seated, gorgeous in his surcoat, with his helm crooked in his arm and his hand raised in beneficent greeting.

  In spring-sown fields now sagging with wheat, the women unbent from the reaping, sickles dangling from their numbed hands, and the men turned from sheaves half-bound to gape at the procession. They paused, mopped brows with kerchief or cap, traded uncertain looks, questions, guesses, exclamations, until all — villein and free, man and woman and child — drifted in one accord toward the road, gathering speed as they went, excitement building upon itself, splashing through the brook that bordered the fields, voices swelling from murmur to shout. Behind, atop the wagons, the wardens of autumn seethed over the lost afternoon, for the grain would ripen with or without the sickle. But the wardens, too, waved their caps at the noble procession, before tugging them firmly back into place.

  The party crossed the valley. Feet and hooves drummed the brook bridge; armsmen shouted greetings to sweet hearts and wives long unswyved (as they hoped). Fathers called to sons happily returned (and grown unaccountably older) amid wails for husbands, sons, brothers missing from the ranks. Hounds gave tongue and chased alongside the file of men. Glitter in the air as Eugen tossed small coins to the throng. Booty taken from dead English knights, or ransomed off live ones. Men and women scrabbled for coppers in the dirt, praising their lord for his generosity, and biting the coins.

  The procession trudged up Church Hill, where Dietrich, Joachim, and Theresia awaited. Dietrich had vested for the occasion in a gold chasuble, but the Minorite wore the same patched robe as always and watched the approaching lord with a mixture of wariness and contempt. More of the former and less of the latter, Dietrich thought, might serve the man better. Beside them, less quiet, more uncertain, the Herr’s daughters chattered with their nurse. Irmgard, the younger, alternated smiles with apprehension. Her father was coming! But two years is forever in the life of a child, and he was that long estranged. Everard chewed his moustache with the unease of a man left two years in charge of his master’s estate. Klaus, who was maier for the village, stood beside him with an indifference that betokened either an innocent heart or one more confident in its misappropriations.

  Max had drawn the castle guard up in two lines, and sixteen men presented their arms in a shout and a clash of metal as their lord rode between them. Even Dietrich, who had seen more splendid displays than this in towns and cities far more grand, was stirred by the spectacle.

  The herald dismounted planted the Hochwald banner — vert, a boar passant below an oak tree, all proper. Manfred reined in before it and his horse reared and pawed the air. The harvesters, who had rambled up the hillside, cheered the horsemanship, but Theresia whispered, “Oh, the poor beast, ridden hard.”

  If the horse had been ridden hard, so had the men. Dietrich noted the signs of a forced march beneath the brave show. Weary eyes; tattered livery. There were fewer than had marched forth, and some strange faces had been added — the discards and left-behinds of some battlefield, hungry for a lord to feed them. Hungry enough, indeed, to leave their homelands behind.

  Eugen, the jung-herr, dropped to the ground, staggered and grabbed hold of the snaffle rein to steady himself. The horse shied and pawed the ground, tossing up a clot with his foot. Then Eugen stepped smartly to his lord’s stirrup and held it while the Herr dismounted.

  Manfred touched knee to ground before Dietrich, and the pastor placed his left hand on the Herr’s brow and drew the sign of the cross over him with his right, announcing public thanks for the troop’s safe return. Everyone crossed themselves, and Manfred kissed his fingers. Rising, he said to Dietrich, “I would pray a while in private.”

  Dietrich could see creases around the eyes that hadn’t been there before, a greater and more pallid gray in the hair. The long, lean face framed sorrow. These men, he thought, have come a long, hard way.

  Passing to the church, the lord clasped hands with his steward and with Klaus and told them both to come in the evening to the manor house for the accounts. His two daughters, he embraced with much feeling, removing his gauntlets to stroke their hair. Kunigund, the older, giggled with delight. Each one he greeted — priest, steward, maier, daughter — the Herr studied with deep concern; and yet it had been Manfred absent and unheard from these two years.

  The Herr paused at the church door. “Good old Saint Catherine,” he said, running a hand along the curve of the saint’s figure and touching a finger to her sad smile. “There were times, Dietrich, when I thought I would never see her again.” After a curious glance at Joachim, he strode inside. What he told God, what boon he asked or thanks he gave, he never afterward said.

  * * *

  The Herrenhof, the lord’s manor house, sat within its curial lands atop a hill across the valley from the church, so that lord and priest oversaw the land from their separate perches and warded the folk between them, body and soul. There were other symbolisms behind the separation, playing — in miniature — dramas that elsewhere had shaken thrones and cathedrals.

  Upon the crest, Burg Hochwald warded the Oberreid road. The outer wall was a small affair, embracing curia as well as castle; but it and the moat were meant only to keep wild animals out and domestic ones in and so was of no military significance. The inner wall, the Schildmauer, was prouder and of more warlike intent. Rearing behind the shield-wall was the tower of the Bergfried, the redoubt which had anciently housed the lords of the high woods when Saracen and Viking had roamed at will and each dawn might see a Magyar horde lining the horizon. The castle was a machine designed for defense and could be held, like most, by only a small garrison; but it had been tested only once, and then not to the limit. No army had marched from the Breisgau since Ludwig the Bavarian had bested Friedrich the Fair at Mühldorf; so the drawbridge was down and the portcullis up and the guards non
e too vigilant.

  The curia spread across an acre and a half around the manor house, crowning the hill with dairy, dovecote, sheepfold, malting house, a kitchen and bakery, a great timber barn of twelve bays to store the grain harvest from the lord’s salland; a stable grunting with cows, horses, oxen. To the rear, more noisome, the curial privy. Elsewhere, an apple orchard, a vineyard, a pound for stray animals that had wandered innocently onto the salland. In generations past, the manor had produced for itself everything needful; but much now lay abandoned. Why weave homespun when finer cloth could be had in the Freiburg market? In the modern age, pack peddlers trekked from the Breisgau, braving for the sake of profit the chance of von Falkenstein’s regard.

  No serfs were about. By long custom, the harvest day ended with the meal served in the fields and the lord could demand no work afterward. No monastic sexton, appraising his water-clock to mark the canonical hours, ever gauged time so finely as a manorial serf. Matters differed among the freeholders. Dietrich had noted much late activity in shed and garden and within walls by candlelight in his passage through the village. But a man who labored on his own account did not watch the sun as closely as one who labored for another’s.

  Dietrich’s entry into the curial grounds was met with much indignation by the resident geese, who harried and chivvied the priest as he made his way to the Hof. “Next Martinmas,” Dietrich scolded the birds, “you will grace the Herr’s table.” But the chastisement had no effect and they escorted him to the doors of the hall, announcing his arrival. Franz Ambach’s cow, impounded for trespass on the salland, watched placidly while she awaited her ransom.

  * * *

  Gunther, the maier domo, conducted Dietrich to a small scriptorium at the far end of the hall, where the Herr Manfred sat at a writing table below a slit window. Through the window drifted the woodsmoke of evening meals, the cries of hawks circling the tower battlement, the clanging of the smithy, the slow toll of Joachim at the Angelus bell on the other side of the valley, and the amber remains of the afternoon light. The sky was deepening to indigo rimmed by bright orange on the underside of the clouds. Manfred sat in a curule chair fashioned of gracefully curved rosewood whose slats ended in the heads of beasts. His pen scratched across a sheet of paper.

  He glanced up at Dietrich’s appearance, bent once more to his writing, then put quill aside and passed the sheet to Max, who stood a little to the side. “Have Wilimer make fair copies of this and see it sent to each of my knights.” Manfred waited until Max had gone before turning to Dietrich. His lips twitched into a brief smile. “Dietrich, you are prompt. I’ve always admired that in you.” He meant “obedient to a summons,” but Dietrich forbore from pointing it out. It might not even be true, but neither of them had tested it as yet.

  Manfred indicated a straight-backed chair before the desk and waited until Dietrich had seated himself. “What’s this?” he asked when the priest placed a pfennig before him.

  “The fine for Ambach’s cow,” he said.

  Manfred picked up the coin and regarded Dietrich for a moment before placing it in a corner of his desk. “I’ll tell Everard. You know if you always pay their fines for them, they’ll lose their dread of delinquency.” Dietrich said nothing, and Manfred turned to his coffer and removed a bundle of parchments wrapped in oiled skin and tied up in string. “Here. These are the latest tractates from the Paris scholars. I had them copied by the stationers while we idled in Picardy. Most of them are direct from the masters’ copies, but there were a few from the Merton calculators, who interest you so much. Those are from secondary copies, of course, brought over by English scholars.”

  Dietrich paged through the bundle. Buridan’s On the heavens. His Questions on the eight books of physics. A slim volume On money, by a student named Oresme. Swineshead’s Book of calculations. The very titles conjured up a swarm of memories and Dietrich recalled for a blinding moment of unbearable longing lost student days in Paris. Buridan and Ockham and he arguing the dialectic over tankards of ale. Peter Aureoli scowling and interrupting with the petulance of age. The free-for-all quodlibets, with the master determining on questions thrown up by the crowd. Sometimes in the rustle of the spruces that surrounded Oberhochwald, Dietrich thought he could hear the disputations of doctors, masters, inceptors, bachelors, and wondered if peace and seclusion had been too high a price to pay.

  He found his voice with difficulty. “Mine Herr, I hardly know what…” He felt himself as one of Buridan’s famous asses, uncertain which manuscript to read first.

  “You know the price. Commentaries, if you think ’em useful. Suitable for a ‘kettle-head’ like me. You must have your own tractate—”

  “Compendium.”

  “Compendium, then. When it is finished, I will have it sent to Paris, to your old master.”

  “Jean Buridan,” Dietrich said reflexively. “At the school called Sorbonne.” But did he really want to remind Paris where he was?

  “So.” Manfred steepled his hands under his chin. “I see we have a Franciscan about.”

  Dietrich had been expecting the inquiry. He laid the manuscripts aside. “His name is Joachim of Herbholzheim, from the Strassburg friary, living here now since three months.”

  He waited for Manfred to ask why the Minorite was staying in a backwoods parish rather than in the bustling cathedral town of the Elsass, but instead the lord cocked his head and placed a finger alongside his cheek. “A von Herbholz? I may know his father.”

  “His uncle, that would be. His father’s the younger brother. But Joachim forswore his inheritance when he took the vow of poverty.”

  Manfred’s lip quirked on one side. “I wonder if he gave it up faster than his uncle cut him off. He won’t give me any trouble, will he? The boy, I mean; not the uncle.”

  “Only the usual denunciations of wealth and display.”

  Manfred snorted. “Let him protect the high woods without the means to support a troop of armsmen.”

  Dietrich knew all the counter-arguments and saw in the lord’s quickly narrowed gaze that Manfred remembered that he did. The rents and services from the peasantry supported more than armsmen. They supported fine clothing and banquet-feasts and clowns and minnesingers. Manfred kept a household suited to his station and was lavish in its maintenance; and if protection was needed, it lay at the lower end of the valley, at Falcon Rock, far nearer than Mühldorf or Crécy. “I will keep him on a check-rein, sire,” he assured the Herr before old matters could be resurrected.

  “See that you do. The last thing I want is an exploratore asking questions and distressing people.” Again, he paused and gave Dietrich a significant look. “Nor you, I should think.”

  Dietrich chose to misunderstand the resurrection. “I try not to distress people, but I cannot help asking questions now and then.”

  Manfred stared a moment, then he reared his head and laughed, smacking the table with his palm. “By my honor, I’ve missed your wit these past two years.” He sobered instantly and his eyes seemed to look somewhere else without actually turning. “By God, if I have not,” he said more quietly.

  “It was bad, then, the war?”

  “The war? No worse than others, save that Blind John died a fool’s death. I suppose you’ve heard that tale by now.”

  “Charged into the melee roped to his twelve paladins. Who hasn’t heard that tale? An imprudent act for a blind man, I would say.”

  “Prudence was never his particular strength. All those Luxemburgers are mad.”

  “His son is German King, now.”

  “Yes, and Roman Kaiser, too. We were still in Picardy when the news reached us. Well, half the Electors had voted Karl anti-king while Ludwig was still alive, so I don’t suppose they were seized by any great hesitation once he was dead. Poor old Ludwig — to survive all those wars with Hapsburg, and then fall off his horse while hunting. I suppose old Graf Rudolf — no, it’s Friedrich now, I’ve heard — and Duke Albrecht have sworn their oaths, so that settles matt
ers for me. Do you know why Karl did not die with John at Crécy?”

  “Were I to guess,” Dietrich said, “I would say he had no ties to his father.”

  Manfred snorted. “Or a rope uncommonly long. When the French chivalry charged the English longbows, Karl von Luxemburg charged in the other direction.”

  “Then he was a wise man, or a coward.”

  “Wise men often are.” The Herr’s lip’s twitched. “It’s all that reading that does it, Dietrich. It takes a man out of the world and pushes him inside his own head, and there is nothing there but spooks. I hear Karl is a learned man, which is the one sin that Ludwig never committed.”

  Dietrich made no reply. Kaisers, like Popes, came in diverse sorts. He wondered what would happen now to those Franciscans who had fled to Munich.

  Manfred rose and walked to the lance window and stared out. Dietrich watched him brush idly at the grit of the window stone. The evening sun bathed the lord’s face, giving his skin a ruddy cast. After a silence, he said, “You haven’t asked why it’s taken me two years to return.”

  “I imagined you had difficulties,” Dietrich said with care.

  “You imagined I was dead.” Manfred turned away from the window. “Assumption’s natural when you think how thick the dead lie between here and Picardy. Night’s coming on,” he added, inclining his head toward the sky outside. “You’ll want a torch to see you safely back.” Dietrich made no response, and after another moment, Manfred continued.

  “The French-Reich is in chaos. The King was wounded; his brother killed. The Count of Flanders, the Duke of Lorraine, the King of Majorca… And the fool King of Bohemia, as I’ve said… All dead. The Estates have met and scolded Philip handsomely for losing the battle — and four thousand knights with it. They voted him new monies, of course, but fifteen deniers will not buy what three once did. It was a close thing, our returning. Knights are selling their lances to whoever will hire them. It was… a temptation, to throw off all responsibility and seize whatever a strong right arm might seize. When princes flee battle, and knights turn free-lance, and barons rob pilgrims, what value has honor?”