Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  * * *

  XX. June, 1349

  From the Commemoration of St. Herve

  The Herr found him there, prostrate on the flagstones, and turned and sat on the sanctuary step beside him. “I’ve sent Max and his men to fetch the Jew,” he said. “There are but few roads he could take, encumbered as he is with his cart. Max’s men are ahorse. He’ll bring him back.”

  Dietrich rose to his knees. “And then what?”

  Manfred leaned back on his elbows. “And then we’ll see. I’m improvising.”

  “You can’t hold him forever.”

  “Can’t I? No, I suppose the Duke will wonder. A factor for the Seneor family cannot simply disappear. But our worries run together, Dietrich,” he added. “Friedrich would have questions for me, as well. I took you in.”

  I could run, Dietrich thought. Yet, where would he run this time? What lord would take him in? The New Towns in the wild east were hungry for settlers, and asked few questions about a man’s past. Dietrich returned to his prayers, but his thoughts were now disturbed with self-love. So he employed recitations, hoping that the thought might follow the words. After a while, he heard Manfred rise and go.

  * * *

  The sun was lowering when the commotion drew Dietrich forth at last to gaze upon the party returning up the cleft between Church Hill and the castle. It was Max and his party, with a single prisoner bound and hoodwinked on a guided horse. Folk were streaming from their cottages or running in from the spring fields to learn what had befallen.

  Joachim came up behind Dietrich. “Is that the Jew?” he asked. “Why is he bound up like that? What does Manfred plan to do with him?”

  He plans to kill him, Dietrich thought. He cannot hold the man, for the Duke was sending an escort to bring him to Vienna; nor can he give the man his liberty, for the Markgraf would punish him for sheltering Dietrich these past twelve years. Dietrich remembered what Max had once said about serving two masters. But an accident… Death would be more convenient for everyone.

  Except Malachai, of course.

  “Where are you going?” Joachim asked him.

  “To save Manfred.”

  * * *

  He found the Herr on his high seat at the far end of the castle hall, beneath the Hochwald banner. As he entered, Dietrich heard the door to the bergfried slam closed and saw Manfred heave a troubled sigh.

  “Mine Herr!” Dietrich cried. “You must free the Jew!”

  Manfred, who sitting with his chin upon his fist, looked up in surprise. “Free him!” He sat back against the chair. “You know what would follow?”

  Dietrich clenched his fists by his side. “Ja. Doch. I know. But sin demands repentance, not further sin. A Jew is made in the image of God, no less than, than a Krenkl, and a remnant of them will one day be saved. God will accept Malachai for his faithfulness to the old dispensation, for His promise is from generation to generation. God made His people a covenant, and God does not foreswear Himself. Malachai sought our protection, and I swear what I swore at Rheinhausen that day when you found me: to no one who comes to me shall I allow harm. I swear it even should that vow place me between him and you.’

  Manfred’s face went cold. “You touch on my honor. Do you love the flames so much that you would weep over the torchbearer?”

  “He has good cause.”

  Manfred grunted. “And you accept the penance that would follow?”

  Old Rudolf Baden had been Markgraf during the uprising, but Friedrich might have inherited his father’s grudges along with his lands. The church courts would take Dietrich from the secular courts if he appealed; but that might only exchange noose for faggots. Yet, Carino had murdered his inquisitor, Peter of Verona, and ended his days in great saintliness in the priory of Forli — where the prior was Peter’s own brother. “I ask no indulgences,” he said.

  Manfred lifted his gaze toward the corner of the chamber. “You heard what he said?”

  “I heard.”

  Dietrich spun about, and there to his left stood Malachai the Jew, only somewhat battered, and by his side, a disheveled Tarkhan ben Bek. Malachai approached Dietrich and looked him closely in the eyes. Dietrich flinched, but then accepted the scrutiny with meekness.

  Finally, Malachai stepped away. “I was mistaken,” he said to Manfred. “This is not the same man.” Then he turned abruptly on his heel and strode for the door. “I will await the escort in Niederhochwald — and trust to my spells until then.”

  Tarkhan followed him out, but stopped where Dietrich stood. “You lucky man,” he whispered. “You very lucky man master never wrong.”

  * * *

  Dietrich found Max in the common room of the castle’s bergfried, where Theresia was sewing his cuts up. He looked up when Dietrich entered and gave him a grin.

  “Your Jews were fortunate,” Max said. “Had we not pursued, they were dead men, and the women worse. Ranaulf and his outlaws fell upon them two leagues past the Lesser Wood, where the Oberreid road passes through that narrow defile in the Dark Woods. A good place for ambush. I had marked it myself. Is that wine, woman? Wine’s for drinking, not for wounds!” He grabbed the cup from her and gulped a swallow.

  “Pfaugh!” He spat it on the ground. “That’s vinegar wine!”

  “Your pardon, soldier,” Theresia said, “but I understand the practice is recommended by the Pope’s physicians and the Italian doctors.”

  “Italians use poison,” Max said. “But as well the outlaws chose the defile,” he continued, “for they had no sign we were on the Jews’ heels until we had fallen upon their rear. Their lookout had abandoned his post to join in the looting. God was with us and—” Max looked about the guardroom and lowered his voice. “And that servant of his had a sword in his bundle, a great curved blade like the Turks use. That gave us another edge in the fight, so I’ll not argue the legalities of it.

  “I had marked my man: an ill-looking buggerer, more scar than skin. I could see he was no stranger to daggerwork, for he came at me with his weapon in the under-fist position, so I fell into the stance called ‘the unbalanced scales’.” He waved his arms, trying to demonstrate from a seated position, much inconveniencing Theresia. “But, damn me, if he didn’t overfist his dagger and reverse his stroke. A clever ruse.

  “Now a dagger is well and good to force a point between the links in a coat of mail, but it’s no good at all for slashing. My quillon took him off his guard, and instead of the forearm block he expected, I gave him a stroke across the belly. He had fast hands, though. I give him that. A daggerman wants quickness more so than strength.”

  Theresia clucked while she bandaged his arm. “Ach, the poor man.”

  Max scowled. “That ‘poor man’ and his fellows murdered twelve people since they fled Falcon Rock, including Altenbach and his entire family.”

  “He was a wicked man, I am sure,” she answered, “but he has now no chance of repentance.”

  “He has now no chance of another murder. You are too tender, woman.”

  Too tender, Dietrich thought, yet in some ways no more tender than flint; and in other ways less like flint than glass.

  * * *

  Dietrich stayed with Max after Theresia had left. “Manfred said that you took none captive, save Oliver.”

  Max was silent for a space, then he said, “It is a bad gambit to block a man’s dagger with your shoulder. I must remember that the next time.” He flexed his shoulder and winced. “I pray it does not stiffen on me. Would you tell God that at Mass? I will pay seven pence. Pastor…” He sighed. “Pastor, Oliver was ours to deal with. The others were carrion, but Oliver was one of us, and we must hang him with our own hands.”

  And so it was.

  Manfred summoned the jurors to the courtyard, where Nymandus the gärtner swore to Oliver’s presence among the outlaws and to his murder of the Altenbach boy. The young man made no response, but whispered, “I rode a horse and carried a sword. I struck blows for the poor and in honor of the queen of lo
ve and beauty.”

  No, Dietrich thought, you struck blows upon the poor — because your queen of love and beauty chose another. He wondered what the other outlaws had made of him. Had they, too, imagined themselves free men defying oppressive lords?

  None spoke in Oliver’s behalf, not even his father, who loudly disowned his son and cried that this was the fate of all those who aspired above themselves. But afterward, he returned to his bakery and sat for hours staring at the cold, cold oven.

  Only Anna Kohlmann wept for him. “It is all for cause of me,” she said. “He would only win my heart with daring feats.”

  And instead of winning a heart, he had lost a neck. “Mine Herr,” Dietrich said when Manfred had asked for any to speak, “if you hang him, he will have no chance for repentance.”

  “You see to the next life,” the Herr answered. “I must see to this one.”

  The Krenken who had crowded into the court clattered their agreement along with the other Hochwalders when the jurors returned their verdict and Manfred pronounced sentence of death. Gschert von Grosswald and Thierry von Hinterwaldkopf, who flanked Manfred on the bench, concurred in the judgment, Gschert with a simple scissoring of his horny lips.

  So the next morning at dawn, they led the prisoner forth, bound and gagged, bleeding from a dozen wounds, face blackened by countless blows. His eyes darted like two mice above the rag jammed into his mouth, seeking escape, seeking succor, finding nothing but dull contempt from those around him. His own father spat upon him as he was led down the high street toward the linden tree for judgement.

  * * *

  Later, when Dietrich went by Theresia’s cottage to see to her welfare, he encountered Gregor outside her door, nursing one hand with the other. “My little finger, I think,” the mason said. “It wants a splint. I jammed it between two stones.”

  Dietrich rapped on the doorpost and Theresia pulled open the upper door and, seeing Gregor, brightened into the first smile Dietrich had witnessed since the advent of the Krenken into the village. Then she caught sight of Dietrich. “Greet God, father,” she said before turning to address Gregor. “And how goes it by you, mason?”

  Gregor raised his bloody hand in mute appeal, and Theresia gasped and rushed him in. Dietrich followed, leaving the upper door open for the air. He watched Theresia cleanse the wound and bind it to a splint with a hemp bandage, although it seemed to Dietrich that the mason was not one to quail at such small hurts. Only after she had cared for Gregor did Theresia address Dietrich. “And are you then also wounded, father?”

  Yes, he thought. “I came only to see how matters go with you,” Dietrich said.

  “It goes well,” she said, turning up her eyes to his face.

  Dietrich waited for her to say more, but she did not; and so he took her by the shoulders and kissed her on the brow, as he had so often in her childhood. Unaccountably, she began to weep. “I wish they had never come!”

  Dietrich said, “Gottfried-Lorenz has assured me that they will soon go home.”

  “To one home or another,” Gregor said. “Two more died this past week. I think they die of homesickness.”

  “No one dies of homesickness,” Dietrich said. “The cold killed some — the alchemist, the children, a few others — but summer is come.”

  “It’s what Arnold once told me,” the mason insisted. “He said, ‘We will die because we are not at home.’ And again, he said, ‘Here, we eat our fill, but are not nourished.’”

  “That is senseless,” said Dietrich.

  The mason scowled, and glanced at Theresia, and then at the open doorway, through which the sounds of birds thrilled the morning air. “It puzzles me,” the big man admitted. “Your friend, the Kratzer, said once that he wished for half the hope that Arnold had. Yet, Arnold murdered himself, and the Kratzer did not.”

  “Their talking head may not understand such words as ‘hope’ or ‘despair.’”

  “What difference,” said Theresia, “whether they die or depart?”

  Dietrich turned and took her hand in his, and she did not pull away. “All men die,” he told her. “What matters in God’s eye is how we have treated one another in life. ‘Love the Lord with your whole heart and your whole soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.’ This command binds us to one another and saves us from the snares of vengeance and brutality.”

  “There is no shortage among Christians of vengeance and brutality,” Gregor observed.

  “Men are men. ‘By their fruits you shall know them,’ not by what name they call themselves. Sudden grace may come upon even the most wicked of men. Ja, even the most wicked of men… I have — I have seen this myself.”

  Theresia reached out and touched his cheek to brush away a tear. Gregor spoke: “You mean Gottfried-Lorenz. Grosswald called him choleric, and now he is the humblest of Krenken.”

  “Ja,” said Dietrich, glancing toward him. “Ja. I meant like Gottfried-Lorenz.”

  “But I think Grosswald intended no praise by it.”

  Theresia was weeping also and Dietrich returned her favor. “No, he would not,” he answered. “By him are forbearance and forgiveness weakness and folly. A man with power uses it; one without, obeys. But I believe all men thirst for justice and mercy, whatever is written in the ‘atoms of their flesh.’ We have saved six of his folk — perhaps seven, for of the alchemist I am uncertain.”

  “Justice and mercy,” said Gregor. “Both at once? Now, there stands a riddle.”

  “Father,” said Theresia suddenly, “can one love and hate the same man?”

  A bee had found its way into the cottage and hunted diligently among the herbs that Theresia grew in small clay pots on her windowsills. “I think,” Dietrich said at last, “that it may be not the same man, but rather two: the man he is now and the man he once was. If a sinner truly repents, he dies to sin and a new man is born. That is what it means to forgive, for it defies reason to blame one man for the deeds of another.”

  He feared to press the matter further and left the cottage shortly after with Gregor. Outside, the mason rubbed his injured finger absently. “She is a sweet woman, if a simple one. And she may not be entirely wrong about the demons. It may be as Joachim says — the supreme test. But who is tested? Do we lead them to humility, or do they lead us to vengeance? Knowing men, I fear the second.”

  * * *

  At breakfast the next morning, the Kratzer opened a flask that he kept in his scrip. The contents proved a murky broth, which the Krenk stirred into his porridge. He screwed the cork back into place, but sat frozen with the flask in hand for some time before returning it to his scrip. The Kratzer pulled a spoonful of porridge to his lips, hesitated, then returned spoon and contents to the bowl and pushed it away. Dietrich and Joachim exchanged puzzled glances, and the Minorite rose from his seat and went to the pot to check the porridge.

  “Does it fill, but not nourish?” Dietrich asked in jest, remembering what Gregor had said the day before.

  The Kratzer responded with that stillness in which his folk seemed to turn to stone. Always unnerving to Dietrich, the gesture became suddenly clear. Certain animals responded to danger by likewise remaining still. “What is wrong?” Dietrich asked.

  The Kratzer stirred his porridge. “I ought not speak of it.” Dietrich waited and Joachim watched with a puzzled frown. He ladled porridge into his own bowl but, although he had to reach past the Kratzer to do so, the Krenk did not move.

  “I have heard some among you,” the Kratzer said at last, “speak of a famine that befell many years ago.”

  “More than thirty years past,” Dietrich said. “I had been lately received into orders and Joachim was not even born. It rained mightily for two years and the crops drowned in the fields from Paris to the Polish marches. There had been small hungers before, but in those years there was no grain anywhere in Europe.”

  The Kratzer rubbed his forearms together forcefully. “I was told that people ate grass,” he said, “to fill their bellies
— but the grass did not sustain them.”

  Dietrich stopped eating and stared at the Krenk.

  “What?” Joachim asked, sitting down.

  Dietrich sensed the sidelong glance of the creature, who remained otherwise entranced by some inner vision. “How much longer,” he asked the Kratzer, “will your particular stores last?”

  “We have eked them out since the beginning, but drop-by-drop even the mightiest sea must one day empty. Some hold out great ‘hope,’ but their way is hard, perhaps too hard for some of us. It has pleased me,” he added, “that your ‘early time’ came before the end. I should have missed seeing your flowers bloom, and your trees come back to life.”

  Dietrich looked on his guest with horror and pity. “Hans and Gottfried may yet repair—”

  The Kratzer kratzled his forearms. “That cow comes not off the ice.”

  * * *

  Praying a horse from Everard, Dietrich sped to the krenkish encampment, where he found Hans, Gottfried and four others in the lower apartment of the strange vessel, clustered around a ‘circuit’ illustration, and making a great chitter of discussion. “Is it true,” Dietrich demanded bursting in, “that your folk will soon starve?”

  The Krenken paused in their work and Hand and Gottfried, who wore head harnesses, turned about to face the door.

  “Someone has told you,” Hans said.

  “’Jaws have hinges’,” Gottfried commented.

  “But is it true?” insisted Dietrich.

  “It has truth,” Hans said. “There give certain… materials — acids is your alchemic word — which are essential for life. Perhaps four score of these acids befall in nature — and we Krenken need one-and-twenty of them to live. Our bodies produce naturally nine, so we must from our food and drink obtain the others. That food which you have shared with us holds eleven of those twelve. One is lacking, and our alchemist found it nowhere in all the foodstuffs he proofed. Without that particular acid, there gives one… I must call it a ‘firstling,’ as it is the first building block of the body, though I suppose it should wear one of your Greekish terms.”