Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  Friends and relatives paraded the couple from the church to a cottage that Volkmar had prepared for them, and watched them lie together in the bed, giving helpful last-minute advice all the while. Then the neighbors withdrew and waited outside the window. Dietrich, who had stayed behind at the church, heard the shout and the pot-banging all the way at the top of the hill. He turned to Joachim, who was helping him strip the altar.

  “It’s a wonder young people wed publicly at all, if that is what they must endure.”

  “Yes,” said Joachim with a hooded look. “A woods-marriage has its advantages.”

  By its tone, the Minorite’s remark was freighted with irony and Dietrich wondered what he had meant by it. The singular advantage of privately-spoken vows lay in their easy denial afterward. Absent witnesses, who could say what was promised, or whether consent was given? A marriage promised in the throes of passion could fade with that selfsame passion. To combat this evil, the Church insisted on public weddings. Even so, many couples still exchanged vows in the woods — or even in the bed itself!

  Dietrich folded the altar cloth in half, then in half again. He decided that Joachim had intended a humorous affirmation of Dietrich’s own remark and said, “Doch,” which earned a sharp glance, quickly suppressed, from the Franciscan.

  * * *

  The rebuilt cottages were blessed on the Commemoration of Pope Cornelius, still remembered as a friend to the poor and therefore an auspicious patron for such a blessing. Lueter Holzhacker led a troop of men into the Lesser Wood below Church Hill and there toppled a fir, perhaps twenty shoes tall, which they carried to the green with much ceremony. The men barked the trunk halfway to the top, leaving the uppermost branches untouched and liberating the sweet, piney scent of virgin wood. The remaining branches they decked with wreaths, garlands, and other ornaments, and a profusion of colored flags; and stood the tree in a post-hole prepared at the corner of Felix Ackermann’s cottage.

  Afterward, there was singing and dancing and tankards of beer and the flesh of a roast pig that Ackermann and the brothers Feldmann offered jointly as a love-gift to their neighbors. The festivities spread from the cottages down the length of the high street, spilling around the well, the oven, and into the meadow by the mill pond.

  The armsmen who had helped fight the fires came down from the Burg to join the celebration. They were a swaggering lot, older than their years and possessed of a hardness beside which the village youth seemed callow. More than one maiden found herself beguiled by tales of far lands and fell deeds, and more than one soldier found himself beguiled by fair maid. Fathers glowered with suspicion and mothers with disapproval. Such men seldom possessed land, and were poor matches for a peasant’s daughter.

  After solemnly blessed tree and cottages, Dietrich stood apart and observed the festivities, passing occasional greetings with those who came by. He loved solitude and contemplation — one reason he had come to this remote village. Buridan had often chastised him for this love. You live inside your head too much, the master had said, and while it is sometimes a very interesting head, it must also be a little lonely in there. The jape had much amused the visitor from Oxford who, on encountering Dietrich mulling over his copy book in solitary places about the university, had taken to calling him doctor seclusus. Ockham owned the most brilliant mind Dietrich had ever encountered, but his affections often had an edge to them. A man clever with words, he had shortly after found the world composed of more than words, for he had been summoned to Avignon to answer Questions.

  “They think you unfriendly,” said Lorenz, jostling him loose of memories. “You stand here by the tree when everyone else is over there.” He waved toward the sounds of fiddle and whistle and bagpipe, a congeries of noises with the seeming of familiar songs, yet attenuated a little by distance and the breeze, so that only snatches of tune remained sensible.

  “I’m guarding the tree,” Dietrich said with utter gravity.

  “Are you?” Lorenz turned his head up toward the bright decorations fluttering in the treetop. The breeze whipped the flags and garlands so that the tree, too, seemed to dance. “And who might steal such a thing?”

  “Grim, maybe; or Ecke.”

  Lorenz laughed. “What a fancy.” The smith sank to his haunches and leaned back against the wall of Ackermann’s cottage. He was not a large man — Gregor dwarfed him — but he was tempered like the very metal he worked: impervious to the strongest blows and as supple as the famed steel of Damascus. His hair was black, like an Italian’s, and his skin had been tinted by the smoke of his forges. Dietrich sometimes called him “Vulcan” for all the obvious reasons, though his features were exceedingly fine and his voice higher pitched than one might expect of a man with such a sobriquet. His wife was a handsome woman, larger and older than he, of strong features and chaste demeanor. God had not blessed their union with fruit.

  “I always loved those stories when I was young,” the smith confessed. “Dietrich of Berne and his knights. Fighting Grim and the other giants; outwitting the dwarves; rescuing the Ice Queen. When I see Dietrich in my mind, he always looks like you.”

  “Like me!”

  “Sometimes I imagine new adventures for Dietrich and his knights. I thought I would write them myself, had I my letters. There was one — I set it during the time the hero spent with King Etzl — that I thought especially fine.”

  “You could always recite your tales for the children. You don’t need your letters for that. Did you know Etzl’s real name was Attila?”

  “Was it? But, no, I would never dare recite my stories. They wouldn’t be true, only fancies I had made up.”

  “Lorenz, all of the Dietrich tales are fancies. Laurin’s helm of invisibility, Wittich’s enchanted sword, the mermaid’s bracelet that Wildeber wore. Dragons and giants and dwarves. When have you ever seen such things?”

  “Well, I’ve always supposed that in this base age we have forgotten how to make enchanted swords. And as for the dragons and giants — why, Dietrich and the other heroes killed them all.”

  “Killed them all!” Dietrich laughed. “Yes, that would ‘save the appearances’.”

  “You said Etzl was real. What of the Goth kings — Theodoric and Ermanric?”

  “Yes. They all lived in the Frankish Age.”

  “Since so long!”

  “Yes. It was Etzl who killed Ermanric.”

  “There. You see?”

  “See what?”

  “If they were real — Etzl and Herman and Theodor — then why not Laurin the dwarf or Grim the giant? Don’t laugh! I met a pack peddler from Vienna once, and he told me that when they were erecting the cathedral there, the builders found huge bones buried in the earth. So the giants were real — and their bones were made of stone. They named the portal The Giants’ Gate because of it. They couldn’t have done that if they had been only fancies.”

  The priest scratched his head. “Albrecht the Great described such bones. He thought with Avicenna that they had been turned to stone by some mineral process. But they may be the bones of some great animal lost in the Flood and not of giant men.”

  “Perhaps the bones of a dragon, then,” Lorenz suggested slyly, leaning close and placing a conspiratorial hand on his arm.

  Dietrich smiled. “Do you think so?”

  “Your tankard is empty. I’ll fetch another.” Lorenz pushed to his feet, and hesitated halfturned away. “There is talk,” he said after a pause.

  Dietrich nodded. “There generally is. What of?”

  “That you go too often into the woods with the Frau Müller.”

  Dietrich blinked and looked into his empty stein. He wondered why he should be surprised to learn of the gossip. “Bluntly put, my friend, but the Herr has established a lazaretto-”

  “- in the Great Wood. Ja, doch. But with the Frau Müller we know also which way the rabbit runs and if she truly is caring for lepers, that would be a second pair of boots.”

  Dietrich, too, wondered that so sel
fish and prideful a woman had persisted in her charity. “Rash judgment is a sin, Lorenz. Besides, Max the Schweitzer goes often with us.”

  The smith shrugged. “Two men in the woods with his wife will hardly reassure the miller. I’ve only said what I’ve heard. I know…” He paused and turned the tankard over in his hand. It was as if his soul had retreated from the two windows in his face. The dregs of the beer dribbled out onto the dirt unseen. “I know the sort of man you are, so I believe you.”

  “You could try believing with greater certitude.” Dietrich said sharply, so that Lorenz turned a startled face on him, then hurried off on his errand. The smith was a gentle man — surprisingly so, given his strength — but he was a woman for gossip.

  Felix and Ilse came to give him a pair of hens for the blessing of the house. Dietrich would have refused them, yet winter would be coming and even priests must eat. The eggs would be appreciated and, later, the stew. In return, Dietrich reached into his scrip and pulled out the wooden doll and gave it to their little girl. He had polished it to remove the scorches, and had replaced the charred arms and legs with fresh sticks he had found. The hair, he had cut from his own head. But Maria dropped the doll into the dirt and cried, “That isn’t Anna! That isn’t Anna!” And she ran inside the rebuilt cottage, leaving Dietrich crouching in the dust.

  Sighing, he replaced the doll into his scrip. It wasn’t the doll, he thought. The doll was only a construction of sticks and rags. There was nothing precious about such things. He stood and picked up the wooden cage with the clucking chickens. “Come now, sister hens,” he said, “I know a rooster who is anxious to meet you.”

  Something repaired, he thought as he returned to the parsonage, is never quite what it was before. Whatever other parts were replaced, the memories could never be.

  * * *

  Two years before his death, while praying fervently on Mount Alvernia, Saint Francis of Assisi received on his body an impression of the sacred wounds of Christ. Three-quarters of a century later, Pope Benedict XI, a sickly, scholarly, peace-loving man, uneasy outside the company of his Dominican order, established the feast as a token of good-will to the rival order. So, although Hildegarde of Bingen was the saint for that day, Dietrich read the Mass Mihi autem to honor Francis and as a brotherly gesture toward his house guest. This may have disappointed Theresia, for the Abbess Hildegarde, author of a well-known treatise on medicines, was a special favorite of hers; but if so, she made no protest.

  The Mass had barely concluded when Joachim threw himself face down on the freshly-washed flagstones before the altar. Dietrich, putting the vessels away, thought the display unseemly. He slammed the storage cabinet and made a show of stepping around the prostrate monk as he crossed the sanctuary. “In Galatians today,” he said, “Paul told us that it matters not whether we bear visible marks, so long as we become a new man.”

  Joachim’s prayers cut off abruptly. After a moment, the man rose to his knees, crossed himself, and turned around. “Is that what you think?”

  “In Galatia, those Jews who had not accepted Christ criticized those who had, because the Galatian pagans who had also been saved did not follow the Law of Moses. So, the Jewish Christians urged the Galatian Christians to become circumcised, hoping to use that outward sign to mollify their accusers. But the Galatians had a horror of bodily mutilation; so much turmoil resulted. Paul wrote to remind everyone that outward signs no longer mattered.”

  Joachim pressed his lips together and Dietrich thought he would launch some retort; but after a moment, he rose to his feet and straightened his robe. “I wasn’t praying for that.”

  “What, then?”

  “For you.”

  “Me!”

  “Yes. You are a goodly man, I think; but you are a cold one. You would rather think about the good than do it, and you find it more congenial to debate angels and pin-heads than to live the true life of poverty of the companions of the Lord — which you would know, if you thought about what Paul meant in his letter.”

  “Are you so holy, then?” Dietrich said with some heat.

  “That men’s hearts do not hold always what their lips proclaim, I am heartily aware — ja, from childhood! Many a whitened sepulcher proclaims Jesus with his tongue, and crucifies Him with hands and body! But in the New Age, the Holy Spirit will guide the New Man to perfect himself in love and spirit.”

  “Ja doch,” said Dietrich. “ ‘The New Age.’ Was it Charles of Anjou or Pedro of Aragon who was to have started it? I’ve forgotten.” The New Age had been prophesied by another Joachim — he of Flora. Paris had reckoned him a fraud and “a dabbler in the future,” for his followers had prophesied that the New Age would begin in 1260, then in 1300, as political winds in the Two Sicilies shifted. Flora’s teaching that St. Francis had been a reincarnation of Christ Himself struck Dietrich as both impious and logically flawed.

  “’The man of the flesh persecutes those born of the spirit,’” Joachim quoted. “Oh, we have many enemies: the Pope, the Emperor, the Dominicans…”

  “I should think Popes and Emperors enemies enough without taking on the Dominicans.”

  Joachim threw his head back. “Mock on. The visible church, so corrupted by Peter with Jewish falsifications, has always persecuted the pure church of the spirit. But Peter fades, and beloved John appears! Death stalks the land; martyrs burn! The world of fathers will be replaced by a world of brothers! Already, the Pope is overthrown, and Emperors rule in name alone!”

  “Which still leaves the Dominicans to deal with,” Dietrich said dryly.

  Joachim lowered his arms. “Words hang like a veil before your understanding. You subordinate spirit to nature, and God Himself to reason, and so cannot see. God is not being, but above being. He is in all places at all times, in times and places we cannot know save by looking within ourselves. He is all things because he combines all perfections, in a way past all understanding. But when we see past the limitations of such creaturely perfections as ‘life’ and ‘wisdom,’ that which remains is God.”

  “Which does not seem beyond understanding, at all, and reduces God to a mere residuum. You preach Platonism warmed over like yesterday’s porridge.”

  The young man’s face closed. “I am a sinful man. But if I pray that God will forgive my sins, is it so terrible that I include yours, too?” He bent and rose again with a sprig of hazel in his fingers that had fallen from Theresia’s herb basket. The two parted with no further words.

  * * *

  Dietrich always found his meetings with the Krenken unnerving. “It is the fixity of their features,” he had told Manfred. “They lack the capacity for smiles or frowns, let alone expressions more subtle; nor are they given to much display or gesture, and that bestows on them a menacing mien. They seem like statues come to life.” That had been a special terror of his from boyhood. He remembered sitting beside his mother in the cathedral church at Köln, staring at the statues in their niches, and he remembered how the flickering candlelight made them seem to move. He had thought that if he stared at them too long, they would become angry and step down from their niches and come for him.

  Dietrich had concluded that it was not the Heinzelmännchen that spoke, but the Kratzer who spoke through him, and he had learned the difficult trick of perceiving the words of the talking head as coming from the giant grasshopper instead — although whether boxes or grasshoppers spoke was in either case wonderful. He said as much to the Kratzer, who explained that the box remembered words as numbers.

  “A number may be expressed a word,” Dietrich responded. “We have the word eins to signify the number one. But how can a word be expressed as a number? Ach… You mean a code. Merchants and imperial agents use such methods to keep their messages secret.”

  The Kratzer leaned forward. “You have this species of knowledge?”

  “The signs we use to signify beings and relations are arbitrary. The French and the Italians use different word-signs than we do, for example; so to assign
a number is not in principle different. Yet, how does the Heinzelmännchen… Ach, I see. He performs an al-jabr of some sort on the code.” Then he had to explain what al-jabr was — and then who the Saracens were.

  “So,” the Kratzer said finally. “But these numbers use only two signs: null and one.”

  “What a poor sort of number! There gives often more than one of a species.”

  The Kratzer rasped his forearms. “Attend! The… essence-that-flows… Fluid? Many thank. The fluid that drives the talking head flows through innumerable small mill races. One tells the Heinzelmännchen to open a sluice gate so the fluid may run down a particular race. Null tells him to leave the gate closed.” The creature drummed rapidly on the desk-top, but Dietrich was unsure what mood this represented. In a man, it might signify impatience or frustration. It was clear that the Kratzer sought to communicate certain thoughts that fit poorly within the vocabulary that his talking head had thus far provided, and so Dietrich must tease the meaning from the words much as thread is teased from wool.

  The Herr Gschert had been listening to the byplay from his usual position, leaning casually against the far wall. Now he buzzed and clacked and the talking head picked up some of what he said through the “small-sound” automaton to which Dietrich had given the Greek name mikrofoneh. “How does this discussion use?”