And there stood Odo Schweinfurt, from Niederhochwald, blinking dully in the setting sun. The old man searched up and down the high street, saw the mill, and set off in that direction. “No, the miller’s cottage is over there!” someone called out, and Odo turned uncertainly.
The commotion drew Hilde from her cottage. “My father is here?” Hilde asked. Then with delight more feign than fair, she cried, “Daddy!” But he stank of the pigs he tended and she came no closer than her nose allowed. Klaus stood behind her, still in his white-powdered apron from the mill, and regarded the old gärtner narrowly. He had not his wife’s disdain for the man’s calling, but his nose was no less gentle for that. “What do you want, Odo?” he asked, for he misdoubted any came to his door without some want.
“Dead,” said the old man.
“Bread? Does Karl not feed you? Such an ungrateful son!” He laughed, for Hilde’s brother was well-known as a pinch-pfennig.
“No,” said Hilde, wiping her hands in her coverslut. “He said ‘dead.’ Who is dead, Daddy?”
“All. Karl. Alicia. Gretl. Everyone.” He stared around at the press of villagers, as if searching, searching.
Hilde’s hand flew to her mouth. “His whole family?”
Odo sank to his wasted haunches in the dirt of the high street. “I’ve not slept for three days, nor eaten since yestermorn.”
Dietrich stepped forward. “What happened?” he demanded. Dear God, he prayed, let it be the murrain.
“The blue sickness,” Odo said, and those who stood close by groaned. “Everyone in the Lower Wood is dead. Father Konrad. Emma Bauer. Young Bachmann. All of them. Ach, God is cruel to kill my son and my grandchildren before my eyes — and spare me after.” He turned his face to the sky and shook both fists. “I curse God! I curse the God that did this!” Dietrich heard the word run through the crowd like a flight of arrows whisking through the air. The pest! The pest! Folk began to edge away.
Even Klaus stepped back. But Hilde Miller, with a countenance white as the clouds, took her villein father by the hand and led her toward her home. “He will be the death of us,” Klaus warned her.
“It is my penance,” she said, with a toss of her head.
“It’s a hard path up from the lower valley,” Herwyg One-eye told anyone who would listen. “Bad air cannot climb it.” But none answered him and each fled in silence to his own place.
* * *
In the morning, Heloïse Krenkerin flew over the Lower Wood and reported a pair of women living under a lean-to on the far end of the fields there. They had a small campfire and ran into the woods on catching sight of Heloïse. A third must have been hiding there, as well, for someone loosed a bolt when she swooped down for a closer look. At best, no more than a handful lived; unless others had fled to St. Peter or Bear Valley.
The Herr heard this report in his high seat and fingered an old scar on the back of his right hand. Dietrich studied his councilors, who sat along the black oak table in the manor hall. Eugen, pale and wide-eyed on his right; Thierry, who had ridden from Hinterwaldkopf on another matter and who sat now grim-visaged by his liege’s left; Everard, cheeks flushed and eyes dully glazed; Klaus, anxious and unable to hold himself still; Richart, his law-books useless in this matter, casting his attention here and there as others spoke. Dietrich and Father Rudolf represented the ghostly arm, and Hans spoke for the eight Krenken.
“Wiped out?” Manfred said at last. “Half my living gone, and we heard nought until now?”
Everard spoke low, though not so low as to go unheard. “When a man’s family dies, your living seem less weighty.” A rebuke from one so obsequious as Everard drew startled glances. The steward gave off a sharp, pungeant odor that Dietrich could not name. Drunk, Dietrich decided from the reddened cheeks, the slurred voice, the glazed look.
“Heloïse saw a body on the trail,” Max continued his report. “Perhaps they sent a man to notify you but he died on the way.”
“As well he did not succeed,” said Thierry, whose fists were stones on the table.
“Praying mine Herr’s grace,” Klaus said, “but my wife’s father says it was no more than three days from the first death to his flight.”
Manfred frowned. “I have not forgotten, maier, that you broke my curfew.”
“My wife bid him welcome…” He straightened. “Would you turn away your own father?”
Manfred leaned forward over the table, and spoke in measured tones, “In. An. Eye-blink.”
“But… He was amongst us before anyone knew he had come.”
“Beside which,” the schultheiss said, glad for something covered by law and custom, “those of each village have the right to visit the other.”
Manfred gave his lawman an astonished look. “There stands a time for rights,” he said, “and a time for what is needful. I gave orders that no one might enter this village.”
Richart was scandalized; Klaus genuinely puzzled. “But… But, this was only Odo!”
Manfred rubbed his face. “No one, maier. He may have brought with him the pest.”
“Mine Herr,” said Hans, “I am no scholar of these things, but the speed of the pest argues that the small lives quickly devour their… We would say ‘host,’ though the guest is unwelcomed. These small lives act so quickly that, did Odo carry them, he must show already the signs; and he does not.”
Manfred grunted and his bearing was yet skeptical.
Everard giggled and spoke to Klaus. “You are a fool, miller, and your wife rides you. And anyone else she can mount.”
Klaus darkened and rose from his seat, but Eugen raised a hand. “Not at mine Herr’s table!”
Manfred, for his part, snapped, “Steward, remove yourself!” When the man did not move, he cried, “Now!” and Thierry rose with a hand on his sword-hilt.
But Father Rudolf spoke in a querulous voice, “No, no, this will not do. This will not do. We mustn’t fight one another. We are not the enemy.” And he took Everard by the elbow and helped him to his feet. Everard squinted at the assembly as if only now seeing them. Rudolf guided him toward the door and he staggered out, blundering first into the doorpost. Max closed the door behind him. “He stinks,” the sergeant said.
“He is afraid,” Dietrich answered, “and drunk because he is afraid.”
Manfred’s eye was hard. “I will brook no excuses! Max?”
“There were fresh graves in the churchyard down there,” the sergeant continued, “but also bodies lying about — in the green, in the fields, one man dead even at the plough.”
“Unburied, you say?” Dietrich cried. Had it come upon them that suddenly?
A finger jutted from Manfred’s fist. “No, pastor! You will not go down there.”
“To bury the dead is one of the commands that the lord fastened upon us.” A great ball of ice had formed within Dietrich as he thought about what awaited there.
“If you go down the mountain,” Manfred told him, “I can not permit your return. The living here need your care.”
Dietrich formed an objection, but Hans interrupted, “It will by us go easier.”
“Then you, too, must be barred from returning,” Manfred said to the Krenk.
Hans worked his lips in a brief krenkish smile. “Mine Herr, my companions and I are forever barred from ‘returning.’ What is one lesser exile within a geater? But, the small lives that devour your folk would likely not attack mine. The… How do you say it when kinds change?”
“Evolutium,” suggested Dietrich. “An unfolding of potential into actual. An ‘out-rolling’ toward an end.”
“No, that is not the right term… But what it means, mine Herr, is that your small lives know not our bodies, and would lack the… the key to enter our flesh.”
Manfred pursed his lips. “Very well, then. Hans, you may bury the dead at Niederhochwald. Take only Krenken with you. When you return, wait at your former lazaretto in the woods for signs of the pest. If no signs appear in… in…” He cast about for so
me interval that might provide protection. “In three days’ time, you may return to the village. Meanwhile, no one may enter this manor.”
“And what of my wife’s father?” Klaus insisted.
“He must go. It sounds harsh, miller, but it must be. We must look to ourselves.”
* * *
Everard lay face down in the path near the curial gate. Klaus laughed, “The sot had puked his guts out.”
The sun was high but the breeze off the Katerinaberg carried with it enough chill to mitigate the heat. The roses had come into their time and their sharp tendrils had entwined themselves around the trellises of the Herr’s garden. But the earth here by the gate had been scuffed bare by countless obedient feet, and the yellows of the butterheads emerged more miraculaously from the barren ground.
Amidst the color, Everad twitched.
“He’ll be sore when he sobers up,” Max observcd, “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 mid-day 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 hot to the touch. 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 coverslut, 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 his junker 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.
* * *
After 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’ 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. 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, Di
etrich 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 afficted 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.
* * *
Gottfried 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.
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