Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  The Kratzer said, “Each knowledge uses always.” Dietrich did not think the utterance was meant for him and kept a blank face — although blank faces might convey weighty matters to such an expressionless folk as the Krenk. The servant who groomed the talking head turned a little and, while his great faceted eyes never looked on anything squarely, Dietrich had the uncanny feeling that the servant had glanced his way to gauge his reaction. The servant’s soft upper and lower lips came together and parted in a slow, silent version of what the priest had come to consider krenkish laughter.

  I do believe that I have seen one of them smile. The thought came unbidden, and left him with a curious sense of comfort.

  “The two-fold number is the smallest piece of knowledge,” the Kratzer instructed him.

  “I disagree,” said Dietrich. “It is not knowledge at all. A sentence may impart knowledge; even a word may. But not a number that represents a mere sound.”

  The Kratzer rubbed his forearms together in what appeared an absent-minded fashion, and Dietrich thought that the act signified something like what a man would mean by scratching his head or rubbing his chin. “The fluid that drives the talking head,” the Kratzer said after a moment, “differs from that which drives your mill, but we may know something of the one by a study of the other. Do you have a word that signifies this? Analogy? Many thank. Hear this analogy, then. You may break a pot into shards, and these shards into fragments, and the fragments into dust. But even the dust can be broken into the smallest possible pieces.”

  “Ah, you must mean the atoms of Demokritos.”

  “You have a word for this?” The Kratzer turned to Herr Gschert and, in another aside, translated by the talking head, said, “If they know such matters, there may yet give help.” But the Herr replied, “Say nothing of it.” On hearing this, Dietrich glanced curiously at the servant.

  “The analogy,” said the Kratzer, “is that the two-fold number is the ‘atom’ of knowledge, for the least you can say about a thing is that it is — which is one — or it is not — which is null.”

  Dietrich was unconvinced. That a thing existed might well be the most one could say of it, since there was no reason save God’s grace for anything to exist at all. But he said nothing of these doubts. “Let us then use the term bißchen for this two-fold number of yours. It means a ‘little bite’ or a ‘very small amount,’ so it may as well mean a small bite of knowledge. No one has ever seen Demokritos’ atoms, either.” The metaphor of a ‘bit’ amused him. He had always thought of knowledge as something to drink — the springs of knowledge — but it could as well be something to be nibbled.

  “Tell me more,” said the Kratzer, “about your numbers. Do you apply them to the world?”

  “If appropriate. Astronomers calculate the positions of the heavenly spheres. And William of Heytesbury, a Merton calculator, applied numbers to the study of local motion and showed that, commencing from zero degree, every latitude, so long as it terminates finitely, and so long as it is acquired or lost uniformly, will correspond to its mean degree of velocity.” Dietrich had spent many hours reading Heytesbury’s Rules for solving sophismas, which Manfred had presented him, and had found the proof from Euclid very satisfying.

  The Kratzer rubbed his forearms together. “Explain what means that.”

  “Simply said, a moving body, acquiring or losing latitude uniformly during some assigned period of time, will traverse a distance exactly equal to what it would have traversed in an equal period of time if it were moved uniformly at its mean degree.” Dietrich hesitated, then added, “So wrote Heytesbury, so nearly as I recollect his words.”

  Finally, the Kratzer said, “It must be this: distance is half the final speed by the time.” He wrote on a slate and Dietrich saw symbols appear on the Heinzelmännchen’s screen. His heart thudded as the Kratzer assigned to each symbol distance, speed, and time. Here was Fibonacci’s idea, letters used to state the propositions of al jabr so succinctly that entire paragraphs could be said in one short line. He pulled a palimpsest from his scrip and wrote with a charcoal, using German letters and the Arab numbers. Ach, how much more clearly it could be said! His vision blurred, and he wiped his eye. Thank you, O God, for this gift.

  “So, we see the fruits of the Holy Ghost,” he said at last.

  “The Heinzelmännchen is unsure. ‘Ghost’ is when you breathe out, and what has this to do with motion?”

  “There was a great question for us: Does a man participate in unchanging Spirit more or less, or does Spirit itself increase or decrease in a man. We call that ‘the intension and remission of forms,’ which, by analogy, we may apply to other motions. Just as a succession of forms of different intensities explains an increase or decrease in the intensity of color, so the succession of new positions acquired by a motion may be considered as a succession of forms representing new degrees of that motion’s intensity. The intensity of a velocity increases with speed, no less than the redness of an apple increases with ripening.”

  The giant grasshopper shifted in his seat and exchanged looks with the servant, saying something which the mikrofoneh did not this time translate. An exchange between the two escalated, growing louder, with the servant half-rising from his seat and the Kratzer smacking his forearm against the desk top, while Herr Gschert looked on with no change in his posture save the slow rhythmic scissoring of his horny side-lips.

  Dietrich had grown accustomed to these wild arguments, although they unnerved him with their sudden vehemence. They were like thunder-weather, blowing up from nowhere, and passing just as quickly. The Krenken were a choleric race, like the Italians, or they were under some great strain.

  When the Kratzer had reachieved his balance, he said, “This has been said by another.” Dietrich knew he meant the servant. “’You speak a word. The Heinzelmännchen repeats it in our tongue. But has it spoken what has been said?’”

  “That is a great problem in philosophy,” Dietrich admitted. “The sign is not the signified, nor may it convey the entire significance.”

  The Kratzer threw his head back briefly in a gesture whose meaning Dietrich had not yet plumbed. “Now we hear it,” the Krenk complained. “The poor Heinzelmännchen is speechless. What is a ‘problem’? What is a ‘philosophy’? How can the ripening of a fruit or your ‘holy breath’ be like the speed of a falling body?”

  The servant spoke again, and this time the box translated his words: “The box-that-speaks stands the word ‘philosophy’ not in the German tongue.”

  “Philosophy,” Dietrich explained, “is a Greek word. The Greeks are another people, like the Germans, but more ancient and learned, save that their great days were long ago. The word means ‘love of wisdom’.”

  “And ‘wisdom’ is what meaning?”

  All at once Dietrich felt pity for Zeno’s Achilles, running forever after the tortoise, coming always incrementally closer, yet never in fact reaching it. “’Wisdom’ is… Perhaps, having the answers to a great many questions. Our ‘philosophers’ are those who seek answers to such questions. And a ‘problem’ is a question to which no one yet knows an answer.”

  “How well we know that significance.”

  Gschert stood away from the wall and the Kratzer turned to face the servant, by which acts Dietrich knew that it had been the servant who had last spoken, and that the servant had spoken out of turn. Whether Gschert or the Kratzer cried, “Silence!” was unclear, but the servant was unfazed. “You could ask him.”

  With that, the Herr Gschert sprang across the room. The leap was lightning-quick, vaulting the furniture and, before Dietrich had quite grasped what had happened, the lord was beating the servant with his rasping forearms, raising cuts and welts with each blow. The Kratzer, too, had turned his anger on the servant of the talking head and pummeled him with kicks.

  Dietrich sat speechless for a moment before, without thinking, he cried, “Stop!” and interposed himself between the combatants. The first blow to the side of his head was
enough to render him insensible, so he never felt the others.

  * * *

  When he came again to his senses, he found himself still in the same apartment, lying as he had fallen. Of Gschert and the Kratzer, there was no sign. However, the servant sat on the floor beside him with his great long legs drawn up. Where a man might have rested his chin upon his knees, these knees actually topped his head. The servant’s skin was already discoloring with the dark-green bruising of his folk. When Dietrich stirred, the servant chattered something and the box on the desk spoke.

  “Why took you the blows on yourself?”

  Dietrich shook his head to rid it of the ringing, but the sensation in his ears did not go away. He placed a hand on his brow. “That was not my purpose. I thought to stop them.”

  “But why?”

  “They were beating you. I did not think that good.”

  “ ‘Think’…”

  “When we speak sentences inside our heads that no one can hear.”

  “And ‘good’…?”

  “It does me sorrow, friend grasshopper, but there is too much noise inside my head to answer so subtle a question.” Dietrich struggled to his feet. The servant made no move to help him.

  “Our cart is broken,” the servant said.

  Dietrich tried his shoulder and winced. “What?”

  “Our cart is broken, and its Herr is dead. And we must stay here and die and never see our homeland again. The steward of the cart, who rules now, said that to reveal this would show our weakness, and so invite an attack.”

  “The Herr would not…”

  “We hear the words you speak,” the Krenk said. “We see the things you do, and all the words for these things the Heinzelmännchen has mastered. But the words for what is here…” And the creature laid a gracile, six-fingered hand across his stomach. “…these words we do not have. Perhaps we can never have them, for you are so very strange.”

  VII. September, 1348

  The Apparition of Our Lady of Ransom

  Some in the village, when they saw the bruises that their priest had endured at the hands of those he had sought to help, wished to drive the ‘lepers’ from the Great Woods; but Herr Manfred von Hochwald declared that none might trespass there save by his grace. He stood a squad of armsmen on the Bear Valley road to turn back any who, from curiosity or revenge, sought the lazaretto. In the following days, Schweitzer’s men turned back Oliver, the baker’s son, with several other young men of the village; Theresia Gresch and her basket of herbs; and, to Dietrich’s astonishment, Fra Joachim of Herbholzheim.

  The motives of young Oliver and his friends were easily known. The deeds of knights were their bread and ale. Oliver grew his hair to shoulder length to ape his betters, and wore his knife tucked sword-like into his belt. The love of a good fight quickened them, and revenge for their pastor provided but a finer-sounding reason for fist and cudgel. Dietrich gave them a tongue lashing and told them that if he could forgive those who struck him, they could do likewise.

  The motives that drove Theresia toward the Great Wood were at once more transparent and more opaque, for in her herb basket she had placed with the rue and the yarrow and the pot marigold, certain obnoxious mushrooms and the keen knife that she sometimes used to let blood. Dietrich questioned her on these items when Schweitzer’s men had returned her to the parsonage, and proper answers could indeed be found in Abbess Hildegarde’s Physica; yet Dietrich wondered if she had had other employments in mind. The thought troubled him, but he could not logically ask her motives when he had not yet established her purpose.

  As for Joachim, the friar said only that poor and landless men needed God’s word more than most. When Dietrich replied that the lepers needed succor more than sermons, Joachim laughed.

  * * *

  When Max and Hilde went to the lazaretto on St. Eustace Day, Dietrich pleaded that he was still too sore and repaired instead to the refrectory of his parsonage, where he ate an oat porridge that Theresia had cooked in the outbuilding. Theresia sat across the table from him, absorbed in her needlepoint. He had beside the porridge a breast of hazel-hen that had been rubbed with sage and bread and a little wine and boiled. The hen was dry in spite of all, and every time he bit into it, his mouth would hurt because his jaw was swollen and a tooth on that side had come loose.

  “A tincture made of clove would help the tooth,” Theresia said, “were clove not so dear.”

  “How well to hear of absent treatments,” Dietrich muttered.

  “Time must be the healer,” she answered. “Until then, only porridges or soups.”

  “Yes, ‘O doctor Trotula’.”

  Theresia shrugged off the sarcasm. “My herbs and bone-setting are enough for me.”

  “And your blood-letting,” Dietrich reminded her.

  She smiled. “Sometimes blood wants letting.” When Dietrich looked at her sharply, she added, “It’s a matter of balancing the humors.”

  Dietrich could not penetrate her sentence. Had she intended revenge on the Krenken? Blood for blood? Beware the rage of the placid, for it smolders long after more lively flames have died.

  He took another bite of hazel-hen and placed a hand against his jaw. “The Krenken deal mighty blows.”

  “You must keep the poultice in place. It will help the bruising. They are terrible people, these Krenken of yours, to treat you so, dear father.” The words tugged at his heart. “They are lost and afraid. Such men often lash out.” Theresia attended her needlepoint. “I think brother Joachim is right. I think they need another sort of aid than that which you — and the miller’s wife — have been bringing them.”

  “If I can forgive them, so can you.”

  “Have you, then, forgiven them?”

  “But naturally.”

  Theresia laid her needlepoint in her lap. “It is not so natural to forgive. Revenge is natural. Strike a cur and it will snap. Stir up a wasp-nest and they will sting. That was why it took such a one as our blessed Lord to teach us to forgive. If you have forgiven those people, why have you not gone back, while the soldier and the miller’s wife have?”

  Dietrich laid the breast aside, half-eaten. Buridan had argued that there could be no action at a distance, and forgiveness was an action. Could there be foregiveness at a distance? A pretty question. How could he move the Krenken to depart if he did go to them? But the krenkish ferocity terrified him. “A few days more rest,” he said, postponing the decision. “Come, bring the sweetcakes now by the fire, and I will read to you from De usu partium.”

  His adopted daughter brightened. “I do so love to hear you read, especially the books of healing.”

  * * *

  On the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, Dietrich limped to the fields to assess the plowing on the tithe-lands — which he farmed to Felix, Herwyg One-eye, and others. The second planting had begun and so the lowing of oxen and the neighing of horses mixed with the jingle of harness and whippletree, the curses of the plowmen, and the whapping of mattocks and clodding beetles. Herwyg had broken the field in April and was plowing more deeply now. Dietrich spoke briefly with the man and was content with his labors.

  He noticed Trude Metzger behind the plow on the neighboring manse. Her oldest son, Melchior, tugged the lead ox by a strap while her younger son, a stripling, swung a mattock not much smaller than he was. Herwyg, turning his own team about on the headland, volunteered the wisdom that the plow was man’s work.

  “It’s dangerous for a boy so small to lead the oxen,” Dietrich said to his farmer. “That was how her husband was trampled.” A roll of distant thunder echoed from the Katerinaberg and Dietrich glanced up at a cloudless sky.

  Herwyg spat into the dirt. “Thunder-weather,” he said. “Though I’ve smelt no rain. But ’twas a horse what trampled Metzger, not an ox. Greedy fool worked the beast too long. Sundays, too, though I’d not speak ill of the dead. Your ox, he comes on steady, but a horse can take a mind to rear and kick. That’s why I drive oxen. Hai! Jakop! Heyso! Pu
ll!” Herwyg’s wife goaded Heyso, the lead ox, and the team of six began to plod forward. The wet, heavy clay slid off the plow’s mouldboard, forming a ridge on either side of the furrow. “I’d help her,” Herwyg said with a toss of his head toward Trude. “But her tongue be no sweeter nor her man’s ever were. And I have my own manses to plow yet, after I finish with yours, pastor.”

  It was a courteous invitation to leave; so Dietrich crossed the berm to Trude’s land, where her son still struggled to turn the team. Each time the ox shifted its stance, Dietrich expected the lad to be crushed underfoot. The younger boy had sat down on the ridge and was weeping from weariness, the mattock fallen from numb and bleeding fingers. Trude, meanwhile, lashed the oxen with her whip and her boy with her tongue. “Pull him by the nose, you lazy brat!” she cried. “Left, you doodle, to the left!” When she saw Dietrich, she turned a mud-streaked face on him. “And what do you have, priest? More useless advise, like old One-eye?”

  Metzger had been a surly man, given to drink and excess, though he’d been a fair plowman. Trude hadn’t his cunning at the plow, but owned a portion of his surliness.

  “I have a pfennig for you,” Dietrich said, reaching into his scrip. “You can hire a gärtner to work the plow for you.”

  Trude lifted her cap and swiped a hand across her red brow, leaving another streak of dirt across it. “And why should I share my wealth with some lackland?”

  Dietrich wondered how his pfennig had become her wealth. “Nickel Langerman can use the work and he has the strength for the plow.”

  “So why has no one else hired him?”

  Dietrich thought, because he is as ill-tempered as yourself, but held his tongue from prudence. Trude, perhaps suspecting the imminent withdrawal of the pfennig, snatched it from Dietrich’s fingers, saying, “I’ll speak to him tomorrow. He lives in the hut by the mill?”