Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  “You may have right,” said Tarkhan ben Bek. “Master, he travel many years, see only pollution. Though master is think he seeing you before, when he much younger.”

  * * *

  The troubling thought that he had been recognized stayed with Dietrich, and he gave thanks that Malachai was safely segregated in the Lower Woods and would not see Dietrich again before he departed for Vienna.

  * * *

  At mid-day on the Feast of St. Barnabas, a lone rider, astride a jennet mule and clad in the brown robes of a Minorite, worked his way up the track from St. Wilhelm and entered the manor house.

  “I’ll not go back,” Joachim sneered when Dietrich mentioned the stranger. “Not while Strassburg’s prior is a truckling Conventual who has forgotten every humility that Francis taught.” Later, as they went to clean the church, he pointed across the notch that separated the two hills. “He’s coming here. If he is a Conventual, I’ll not kiss his hairy -.”

  The stranger monk studied the crest of Church Hill, pausing when he caught sight of the two watchers. There seemed no face within the cowl, only a black emptiness, and the notion sprang irresistibly to Dietrich’s mind that this was Death, now these dozen years overdue, treading a weary mountain trail in search of him. Then a flash of white showed within the shadow and Dietrich realized that it was only the angle of the sun that had made that hood seem so empty. Immediately another apprehension replaced it: namely, that the rider was an exploratore sent by the Strassburg bishop to question him.

  His unease grew as the inexorable mule plodded to the hill top. There, the rider threw back his cowl, revealing a thin face, long in the chin and crowned by a laurel of tangled white hair. There was something of the fox in it, and of the deer surprised by a hunter, and the lips seemed those of a man who had lately mistaken for new wine a jar of old vinegar. Though time had aged him, had drawn him out more gaunt than ever, had spotted his northland-pale skin, five-andtwenty years sloughed off in an eye-blink and Dietrich gasped in surprise and delight.

  “Will!” he said. “Is it truly you?”

  And William of Ockham, the venerabilis inceptor, bowed his head in mock humility.

  * * *

  Resigned by now to the periodic intrusions of strangers, the Krenken had absented themselves from the public space; but perhaps having grown bored, they played this time a precarious game of hide-and-seek, keeping themselves just out of sight rather than flying off to the Great Wood.

  As Dietrich escorted his visitor about the village, he marked, from the corner of his eye, the sudden leap of a Krenk from one concealment to another.

  The church walls held Will Ockham’s tongue mute, a feat no Pope had yet accomplished. He stood before them some time before he began to circuit the building, exclaiming with delight over the blemyae, complimenting the peredixion tree and the dragon. “Delightfully pagan!” he declared. Some Dietrich must explain: the Little-Ash-Men of the Siegmann Woods, or the Gnurr of the Murg Valley, which seemed to emerge from the woodwork itself. Dietrich named the four giants supporting the roof. “Grim and Hilde and Sigenot and Ecke — the giants slain by Dietrich of Berne.”

  Ockham cocked his head. “Dietrich, was it?”

  “A popular hero in our tales. Mark you Alberich the Dwarf in Ecke’s pedestal. He showed King Dieter to the lair where Ecke and Grim lived. Giants don’t like dwarves.”

  Ockham thought about that for a moment. “I shouldn’t think they’d even notice them.” He regarded the dwarf further. “At first, I thought him grimacing in his effort to hold the giantess up; but now I see that he is laughing because he is about to toss her over. Clever.” He studied the kobolds under the eaves. “Now those are surpassingly ugly gargoyles!”

  Dietrich followed his gaze. Five Krenken perched nude under the roofline, frozen in that preternatural stillness into which they sometimes fell, and pretended to uphold the roof. “Come,” Dietrich said quickly, turning Ockham about. “Joachim will have prepared our meal by now.” As he chivvied his guest along, he glanced backward over his shoulder and saw one of the Krenken open and close his soft lips in the krenkish smile.

  * * *

  Dietrich and Ockham passed the evening over a supper of pumpernickel and cheese and wholesome amounts of ale. News of the great, wide world drifted through the High Woods on the lips of travelers; and Ockham had been at the center of that world.

  “I was told,” Dietrich said, “you are to make your peace with Clement.”

  Will shrugged. “Ludwig is dead, and Karl wants no quarrel with Avignon. Now that all the others are dead — Michael, Marsiglio, and the rest — why pretend that we were the true Chapter? I sent the Seal of the Order back, the one that Michael took with us when we fled. The Chapter met on Pentecost and told Clement of my gesture, and Clement sent to Munich offering better terms than Jacques de Cahors ever did. So we will kiss and pretend that all is well.”

  “You meant Pope John.”

  “The Kaiser never called him anything but ‘Jacques de Cahors.’ He was a religious man.”

  “Ludwig, religious!”

  “Certainly. He created his own pope. You can’t get more religious than that. But when you have said ‘hunting’ and ‘feasting’ and ‘bohorts,’ you have limned the man in all his essentials. Oh, and securing his family’s good fortune. A simple man, easily guided by his more subtle advisors — he would never have gone into Italy but for Marsiglio’s wheedling — but his stubbornness could rebut the subtlest of reasoning. Karl, on the other hand, is much taken with the arts, and intends a university for Prague to rival Montpelier or Oxford, if not Paris itself. A place free of the rigid orthodoxies of established scholars.”

  He meant free of Thomists and Averröeists. “A place where they may pursue nominalism?” Dietrich teased.

  Ockham snorted. “I am no nominalist. The problem with teaching the Modern Way is that lesser scholars, excited by the novelty, seldom bother to master my insights. There are lips on which I heartily wish my name had never rested. I tell you, Dietl, a man becomes a heretic less for what he writes than for what others believe he has written. But I will outlive all my enemies. The false pope Jacques is dead, and that old fool Durandus. One hopes the odious Lutterell will soon follow. Mark me. I shall dance on their graves.”

  “ ‘Doctor Modern’ was hardly an ‘old fool’…,” Dietrich ventured.

  “He sat on the tribunal that condemned my theses!”

  “Durandus himself once faced the tribunal,” Dietrich reminded him. “Peer-review is the fate of all philosophers worth reading. And he did exert his influence favorably on two of your propositions.”

  “Out of fifty-one on trial! Such a mewling favor is more insult than the honest hostility of the odious Lutterell. Durandus was a falcon that had choosen not to fly. He would have been less a fool had he been less brilliant. One does not criticize a stone for falling. But a falcon? Come, who else did we know at Paris?”

  “Peter Aureoli… No, hold. He was raised archbishop, and died the year before you came.”

  “Is an archbishopric often so fatal?” Ockham said with amusement.

  “You and ‘Doctor Eloquent’ would have found much in common. He shaved with your razor. And Willi is archdeacon now in Freiburg. I posed him a question this past market.”

  “Willi Jarlsburg? The one with the pouty lips? Yes, I remember him. A second-rate mind. An archdiaconate suits him, for there he will never be called upon to utter an original thought.”

  “You are too harsh. He always treated me kindly.”

  Ockham regarded him for a moment. “His sort would. But a kindly man may yet own a second-rank intellect. The assessment is no insult. The second rank is far more than what most scholars achieve.”

  Dietrich recalled Ockham’s agility in taking shelter behind his precise words. “The Herr brought me a tract by a young scholar now at Paris, Nicholas Oresme, who has a new argument for the diurnal motion of the earth.”

  Ockham chuckled. “So, you
still debate the philosophy of nature?”

  “One does not debate nature; one experiences nature.”

  “Oh, surely. But John Mirecourt — you will not have heard of him. They call him ‘White Monk.’ A Capuchin, as you might suppose. His propositions were condemned at Paris last year — no, it was in ’47 — by which accolade we know him for a thinker of the first rank. He has shown that experience — evidentia naturalis — is an inferior sort of evidence.”

  “Echoing Parmenides. But Albrecht said that in investigations of nature, experience is the only safe guide.”

  “No. Experience is a poor guide, for tomorrow one may have a contrary experience. Only those propositions whose contrary reduces to a contradiction — evidentia potissima — can be held with certainty.” Ockham spread his hands to invite rebuttal.

  Dietrich said, “A contradiction in terms is not the only sort of contradiction. I know that grass is green from experience. The contrary can be falsified by experientia operans.”

  Ockham cupped his ear. “Your lips move, but I hear Buridan’s voice. Who can say but that, in some far-off place, one may not find yellow grass?”

  Dietrich was brought short by his recollection that, in the krenkish homeland, the grass was indeed yellow. He scowled, but said nothing.

  Ockham pushed himself to his feet. “Come, let us proof your proposition with an experience. The world turns, you said.”

  “I did not say that it did turn; only that, loquendo naturale, it might. The motion of the heavens would be the same in either case.”

  “Then why seek s second explanation? Of what use would it be, even were it true?”

  “Astronomy would be simplified. So, applying your own principle of the least hypothesis -”

  Ockham laughed. “Ah. Argument by flattery! A more potent argument by far. But I never intended entities in nature. God cannot be bound by simplicity and may choose to make some things simple and others complex. My razor applies only to the workings of the mind.” He was already striding toward the door and Dietrich scurried to catch up.

  Outside, Ockham studied the indigo sky. “Which way is east? Very well. Let us apply experience. Now, if I move my hand rapidly, thus, I feel the air pushing against it. So, if we are moving toward the east, I should feel an east wind on my face, and I -.” Closing his eyes, and spreading his arms. ” — feel no wind.”

  Joachim, climbing Church Hill, stopped in the path and gaped at the scholar, who seemed to have adopted the attitude of the Crucified.

  Ockham turned toward the Lesser Wood. “Now, if I face north…” He shrugged. “I feel no change in the wind whichever direction I face.” He paused expectantly.

  “One must arrange the experience,” Dietrich insisted, “so that all matters affecting the conclusion are accounted for, which Bacon called experientia perfectum.”

  Ockham spread his hands. “Ah, so the common senses are insufficient for this special sort of experience.” Grinning as if he had triumphed in a quodlibet, he returned to the parsonage, Dietrich again in his wake. Joachim, following, latched the door and went to the pot for a stein of ale. He sat at the table beside Dietrich and tore a piece of bread off the loaf and listened with a smirk.

  Dietrich pressed the argument. “Buridan considered the objections to a turning earth in his twenty-second Question on the heavens, and found a response for each, save one. If the entire world moves, including earth, water, air, and fire, we would no more feel a resisting wind than a boat drifting with the current feels the motion of the river. The one compelling objection was that an arrow loosed straight up does not fall west of the archer, which it would if the earth were turning underneath it, for an arrow moves so swiftly that it cuts through the air and thus would not be carried along by it.”

  “And this Oresme has resolved the objection?”

  “Doch. Consider the arrow at rest. It does not mover. Therefore, it begins already with the motion of the earth and, when loosed, possesses two motions: a rectilinear motion up and down, and a circular motion toward the east. Master Buridan wrote that a body impressed with motion, will continue in its motion until the impetus is dissipated by the body’s gravity or other resisting forces.”

  Ockham shook his head. “First the earth moves, then the people move with it to explain why they do not constantly stumble; then the air must move with it to answer a second objection; then the arrow, to answer another; and so further. Dietl, the simplest explanation for why the stars and the sun appear to circle the earth is that they do circle the earth. And the reason why we feel no motion in the earth is that the earth does not move. Ah, ‘Brother Angelus,’ why waste your powers on such trivia!”

  Dietrich stiffened. “Do not call me that!”

  Ockham turned to Joachim and said, “He would be at his readings before the morning bells and stayed at it by candlelight after the evening bells, so the other scholars called him—”

  “That is a long time since!”

  The Englishman tilted his head back. “May I still call you doctor seclusus?” He grunted and sought another bout of ale. Dietrich retreated into silence. He had thought to share a fascinating idea, and Will had somehow created a disputatio. He should have remembered that, from Paris. Joachim glanced from one to the other. Ockham returned to the table. “This is the last of the ale,” he said.

  “There gives more in the kitchen,” Dietrich answered.

  They discussed the ‘calculators’ at Merton and the death of Abbot Richard of Wallingford, who had invented a new “triangular” geometry and an instrument, the rectangulus, much favored by navigators. “And to speak of navigators,” Dietrich added, “the Spanish have discovered new islands in the Ocean Sea.” He had the tale from Tarkhan, who had it in turn from his master’s agents. “They lie off the coast of Africa, and boast great flocks of canaries. So it may be that a ‘new way’ across Ocean may be found, leading to the ‘oversea lands’ on Bacon’s map.”

  “One may more easily explain Bacon’s Land by a cartographer’s imagination and the lure of blank spaces.” Ockham smiled and added, “Much as your rustic woodcarvers here have filled in the walls of your church with giant grasshoppers and the like.”

  Joachim had a slice of pumpernickel in his mouth and nearly choked until Dietrich had helped him to swallow some ale to help it down. Ockham rose, saying, “I’ll fetch more ale from the kitchen.” But Joachim gasped, “No, there waits also a giant grasshopper.”

  Unsure of the jest, Ockham barked puzzled laughter.

  * * *

  XIX. June, 1349

  At Nones, The Commemoration of Bernard of Menthon

  Manfred styled his banquet “a symposium,” and promised a quodlibet between Dietrich and Ockham as the post-prandial entertainment. But as some entertainments were not to everyone’s taste, this did not supplant Peter’s singing or the dwarf’s acrobatics or the juggler’s display of plates and knives. The dwarf’s trained dog drew but a pursed lip from Will Ockham; but Kunigund and Eugen laughed hugely, especially when the dog tugged the dwarf’s hose down to reveal his bare ass. Einhardt, like Manfred, paid more particular attention to the singing. “Einhardt has held me ill,” Manfred had confided earlier to Dietrich, “for missing the bohorts, so this is my peace to him.” Dietrich, having verified the knight’s famous stink, gave thanks that his corpulent wife, Lady Rosamund, sat between them.

  The sideboard was laden with game birds and aged venison, and continually refreshed by a never-ceasing bustle of servants bearing platters, retrieving empty trenchers, and spreading on the floor fresh rushes mixed with flowers to surrender their scents when stepped upon. Behind each seat a page awaited the diner’s every need. Tarkhan ben Bek, brushed and combed into respectability, did service for his master, for Malachai’s rites did not permit him to eat of Manfred’s bounty, but only of his own provisions, prepared under his supervision. Normally, two of Manfred’s hounds would prowl the room, scavenging scraps that fell from the table; but, from respect for the Jew’s se
nsibilities, the animals had been barred from the feast. Their piteous howling could be heard faintly from the kennels outside.

  Eugen sat at Manfred’s right and Kunigund, his left. Beside them were Dietrich and Will, with Malachai the Jew to Will’s right. Malachai’s wife and daughter remained in seclusion, disappointing Eugen, who had anticipated the exotic sight of veiled women. Lady Rosamund was hardly compensation.

  To Einhardt’s left, at the table’s foot sat Thierry von Hinterwaldkopf. The knight had already delivered his required service-days, but Manfred hoped to induce him to serve additional days from love to help hunt the outlaws.

  In the corner beside the fireplace, Peter Minnesinger sat with his two assistants. “If it please mine Herr,” he said, twisting his strings until they sang true, “I would sing from Parzival.”

  “Not that horrid French tale!” Einhardt complained.

  “No, lord knight.” Peter draped his hair and settled the lute upon his lap. “I would sing Wolfam von Eschenbach’s version, which all men know is the noblest rendition of the story.”

  Manfred waved a hand. “Something less weighty,” he said. “Something touching love. Play Falcon Song.” A devotee of the New Art, Peter oft complained of Manfred’s fondness for the old-fashioned minnesong, in which all was figure and symbol, and would have preferred a more modern lyric, in which real people moved through real landscapes. Falcon Song was, however, artfully constructed, and no line could be changed without spoiling its symmetry. Its author, anonymous as poets of olden days often were, was known only as “He of Kürenburg.”

  “I raised me a falcon for more than a year

  When I had him tamed as I’d have him be

  And I’d dressed his feathers with rich golden bands,

  Aloft high he soared and flew to other lands.

  Since then have I seen him gracefully flying: