“The Markgraf’s, you mean!” Volkmar shouted. “Murder is for the high justice.”
“No. See! Your son breathes. It wants only the scalp sewn back in place and a little rest.”
“Not by you,” Volkmar replied. “Your tender-heartedness to these demons is a scandal.”
What might have happened then remained unknown, for Max arrived with a half-dozen armsmen and imposed the Herr’s peace upon them; and Manfred, when he arrived much put out at the late hour, ruled the matter accidental and declared that a full trial of the facts would await the annual court at Michaelmas.
The crowd sullenly dispersed, some giving Volkmar a slap on the shoulder, others giving him a look of disgust. Gregor said to Dietrich, “Volkmar’s not a bad man, but his tongue can slither out of his food-hole before he knows it. And he says things with such certitude that he cannot after deny them without seeming foolish.”
“Gregor, at times I think you are the cleverest man in Oberhochwald.”
The mason crossed himself. “God forbid, that is no great feat.”
* * *
When the revelers had dispersed and Dietrich was alone with Hans and Gottfried, Hans said, “The Herr is a clever man. In three months, sits the court, and long before, all questions are moot.
Gottfried touched Dietrich in the shoulder, startling him. “Father, I have sinned,” the Krenkl said. “Sepp taunted me, and I struck without thinking.”
Dietrich regarded his convert. “Guilt may be altered by circumstances,” he allowed. “If your instinctus overcame you—”
“Striking him was not my sin.”
“What, then?”
“Afterward…, I was happy.”
“Ah. That is serious. How did he provoke you?”
“He taunted me. He called himself happy that we would soon be gone.”
Dietrich cocked his head. “Because you starve? He hoped for your death?”
“No, he meant our ship. I did not think. He might have meant a ‘fare well.’ He could not have known of our failure.”
Dietrich stopped and grabbed Gottfried by the arm, which caused the Krenk to freeze and check an instinctive blow. “Failure?” Dietrich demanded. “What means this?”
“The wire will not serve,” he said. “There is a measure… You know how a rope will snap if too much weight pulls on it? Our electronik mill snaps also, though in a different way. With each proofing, it grows less strong. We cast the sums and…”
Gottfried fell silent and Hans touched him several times about the torso. “But the doctrine of chances, brother,” he told Gottfried, “gives no certainty. There gives yet a chance of success.”
“There gives yet a chance that Volkmar Bauer will caress me,” Gottfried answered. He faced Dietrich directly, after the human fashion. “The weakening is such that our ship can drop into the abyss between the worlds, but will likely lack the power to climb back out on the farther shore. A hard fate.”
“Or an easy one, brother,” said Hans. “Who has ever come back to tell us which?”
Gottfried batted Hans’ arm away and sprang down the hill. Dietrich watched him go. Then he turned on Hans.
“You always knew you would fail.”
Hans’ eyes were unreadable. “A schlampig device like that? Wire drawn with pliers by a boy on a swing? No clothing for the wire to contain its fluids? We made the work as sound as we could, but it is more rags and patches than that coat of Manfred’s jester. I thought failure likely from the start.”
“Then…, why the pretense?”
“Because you were right. When the alchemist failed, my folk might have seen nothing before them but lingering death. We gave them something else these past five moons. Hope may be a greater treasure than truth.”
* * *
Returning to the parsonage, Dietrich found the Kratzer lying upon his pallet, his soft lips opening and closing, though too slowly to signify laughter. He recalled that Hans had made once the same sign beneath an anonymous sky. He is weeping, Dietrich thought, and found it oddly affecting that, for Krenk as for man, the outward appearance of tears was so like that of laughter.
The Kratzer was a materialist. Was that why he wept? All men naturally feared death. Yet a materialist, holding naught beyond the threshold, might dread the passage more. He leaned over the Krenkl’s pallet, but saw only his own myriad reflections in those strange, golden eyes. There were no tears, could be no tears and, lacking them, how could the melancholic humor be bled?
The Krenkl’n were impaired in all expressions; their humors heightened by containment, like the black powder in one of Bacon’s paper tubes. They wept more deeply, angered more brightly, celebrated more wildly, idled more slowly. But they knew no poems, and sang no songs.
And yet, as a man might be happy who knew of naught else — happy before waterwheels and eye-glasses and mechanical clocks, when life was harder than in these more modern times — so too could the Krenken live content until finding themselves in the Hochwald.
Dietrich crossed to the outbuilding to obtain some grain with which to make a porridge. Upon the window sill, above the grain sack, sat the Kratzer’s flask. It was fashioned of a white, semi-opaque material that the Kratzer had named “rock-oil,” and the sun, passing through the clarified oilskin that served as a light in that window, cast the contents in shadow. Dietrich took the flask in hand.
He was not mistaken. The level had diminished.
Returning to the parsonage, Dietrich gazed down at the philosopher. I know now why you weep, my friend. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak, and the Kratzer’s dread had pulled the stopper that his revulsion had meant to keep sealed. “Do you know what he drank?” Dietrich asked the monk, who knelt in prayer.
Joachim’s murmurs stopped, and he nodded, once. “With this very spoon, I fed him. I poured into him his friends and companions. God moves mysteriously.” Then he sat back on his heels. “The body is but a husk; only the spirit is real. We respect our body as the image of God, but their bodies are not God’s image, and so might be used in ways not permitted to us.”
Dietrich did not contest the casuistry. He watched the Minorite scoop up the fine, dark-green granules that the Kratzer’s body expelled and pour them into a waste-bucket. “But if the body is consumed,” he asked, “what remains for the ressurection of the dead?”
Joachim wiped the creature clean. “What remains when worms consume it? Do not limit God. With Him, are all things possible.”
* * *
Shortly after the Nativity of John, a peddler arrived from the direction of Bear Valley, leading a pack mule full of goods. He prayed the Herr’s leave to set up a stall on the village green for a few days. A swarthy man with wide, thick moustaches, and with bangles on his wrists and two hoops of gold in his ears, he fired his tin-pot up and promised miracles of repair. He displayed also ornaments he had procured in the East. He gave the name of Imre and claimed Hungarian blood. He did a brisk business on sundry trifles, and mending pots and pans.
At Angelus the following day, Dietrich approached him as he packed his goods away for the night. “You have something, I fix?” the man asked.
“You are far from home,” Dietrich suggested.
That elicited a cheerful shrug. “Man stay home, man no peddler,’ the other replied. “Only Soprón shopkeeper. Sell to neighbors, what profit? What I make, they make. Here, when you see these things like I bring?” He dipped into a coffer and emerged with a white pallium done up in fishes and crosses and edged in bright colors of red and blue. “When see the scarf so fine?”
Dietrich pretended to study the material. “You’d fetch a better price for it in Vienna or Munich than in a little hill dorp.”
The man licked his lips and glanced to the side. He tugged on his moustache. “City guilds no like the peddlers; but here, how often see one?”
“More often than you may think, friend Imre. Freiburg is no great trek.” He did not mention that tales of demons had kept such traffic at
bay of late. That Imre might spy an incautious Krenk was a chance to which Dietrich had resigned himself. “Now, if you would return to me Volkmar’s brooch, I will give you a word of advice. Substitutions of base metal are too bald for so small a village, where each man knows his few gauds with greater intimacy than do your city folk.” Imre grinned and dug into his scrip, retrieving the ornament. Dietrich checked the clasp on the back and saw that it had been repaired with considerable skill. “A man of your craft need not resort to such petty theft.” He handed over the tin piece that the peddler had substituted. “If you are once marked a thief, who will trade with you?”
Imre dropped the false brooch into his scrip with a careless shrug. “Men of skill must also eat. Think vogt want me sell for him brooch in Freiburg. Fool wife, keep money.”
“You would be advised to leave,” Dietrich told him. “Volkmar will talk to the others.”
Again, the man shrugged. “Peddler come, peddler go. Otherwise, no peddler.”
“But do not go to Strassburg or to Basel. The pest has appeared there.”
“Oho…” The Magyar looked east, toward Bear Valley. “So. Then I no go those places.”
* * *
* * *
The peddler returned to Oberhochwald three days later, although Dietrich did not learn of it until after noon. Manfred himself, riding at exercise with Eugen and one of the castle knights, came upon him on the track from Niederhochwald. Imre declared that he had private words for the Herr, and Manfred led him a little to the side. Eugen sat his horse close by and, on hearing the Herr gasp and thinking him treacherously struck, rendered the peddler senseless with the flat of his sword. This proved an injustice, as Manfred related to a council hastily called afterward in the great hall.
“The pest is come into the Breisgau,” he announced without preamble.
XXII. June, 1349
Until Nones, The Seven Holy Brothers
The pest is stalking us, Dietrich thought. It had crept incrementally closer, from Berne to Basel to Strassburg, turning now to Freiburg. Would it come next into the mountains? It had crossed the Alps, so climbing the Katerinaberg would be no great feat.
“This Imre had reached the glade at Church-Garden,” Manfred continued, “where he encountered a party of Freiburgers riding at the canter toward the gorge. There were a dozen, all told: a merchant by his surcoat, his lady, maids and servants in livery, and a few others. They would have trampled our peddler down, had he not pulled his mules aside in haste. A bag fell from their pack horse as they passed, and the merchant ordered a servant to reharness the load, even as he and the others pressed on. The servant worked in terrible haste, spilling clothing and other goods and gathering them up again in clumsy fingers. Imre helped him re-secure it.”
“More likely he yanked it loose as it passed,” said Klaus, and the others tittered nervously.
Manfred did not smile. “That was when the servant told him of the pest, and that hundreds were each day dying in the Freiburg.”
“Did he verify the servant’s tale, mine Herr?” Everard insisted. “Perhaps the man exaggerated. Servants are notorious liars.”
Manfred spared him a curious glance. “Imre reasoned that if a man as educated as a guildmerchant deemed it wise to flee east, he would be a great fool himself to continue west. The servant with the pack horse quickly outdistanced Imre’s mules, yet Imre came upon his load shortly after, scattered along the trail up the gorge. He supposed that the roughness of the trail had caused the pack to come loose again and, lacking his master’s voice in his ear, the servant had this time abandoned all and fled. Imre thought the clothing too fine to lie deserted so he gathered them into his own pack.”
Klaus said, “I misdoubt he helped tie the man’s bundle with that very end in view.” He spoke too quickly and too sharply and rubbed one hand with the other as he looked at each councilor in turn.
“A little farther on,” Manfred continued grimly, “he came upon the body of the merchant’s lady, lying as she had fallen from her horse. Her face was deep blue and distended in agony, and she had vomited black bile over herself. Beside which, her neck was broken in the fall.”
Klaus had no quip his time. Everard had gone pale. Young Eugen caught his lip between his teeth. Baron Grosswald did not move. Dietrich crossed himself and prayed God’s mercy for the unknown woman. “And her husband stopped not to aid her?” he asked.
“Nor the servant. Imre says that in pity he placed over her form a blanket from the abandoned bundle, daring naught else. But,” and Manfred slumped a little in his high seat, “I have not said all. The peddler confessed that he had come west in flight. The pest was in Vienna already in May and in Munich this month, but he kept silence for fear we would expel him.”
At that, there were many exclamations. Everard cursed the peddler. Klaus exclaimed that Munich was, after all, many leagues distant, and the malady might travel north into Saxony, rather than west into Swabia. Eugen worried that the pest was surrounding them, east and west. Dietrich wondered about the Jews, who had set off in that direction with the Duke’s escort.
Baron Grosswald, silent until now, spoke up. “Illness stems from countless creatures, too small for thought and borne in divers ways — by touch, on the breath, in the shit or piss, in the spit, or even on the breeze. It matters not which way the roads wind.”
“Such foolishness!” Eugen cried.
“Not so,” said Dietrich, who had heard already this thesis from Hans, as well as from the krenkish physician. “Marcus Varro once proposed that very thing in De re rustica…”
“Which is very interesting, pastor,” said Klaus in a high, tight voice, “but this pest is not like other afflictions, and so may not spread like those of the monsters.” To Gschert: “Can you swear that what you say of your small-lives is true of us? I’ve heard your folk remark more than once on our differences.”
Gschert tossed his arm. “’What may be, may be; but what is, must be.’ I have other concerns than this mal odour of yours. You may live or you may die, however you may deny it, as the luck of the small-lives have it. As for us, we may only die.” The affectless tones of the talking head endowed his pronouncement with a fatal chill. Dietrich wanted to tell the monster that his reasoning had failed, had asserted the consequent. What must be is; but what is need not be, but can through the grace of God be changed.
But Manfred struck the table with the pommel of his dagger. Dietrich marked how white the knuckles were that held it. “Could your physician not mix for us a medicine?” the Herr asked. “If the pest is natural, then the treatment must be natural, and we have no theriac in the village.”
But Gschert shook his head in the human fashion. “No. Our bodies — and yours, I must suppose — have naturally many small lives within, with whom we live in balance. An ‘anti-life’ compound must take careful aim so that only the invader is slain. Your bodies are too strange to us; and we would not know friend from foe among your small-lives, even did our physician know the art. Subtle skills are called for in fashioning a compound to hunt and destroy an invading small-life. To create a new one from whole cloth, and for creatures whose bodies he does not know, is beyond him.”
Silence fell, and Manfred sat still for a time while the others watched. Then he pressed both palms to the table and pushed himself to his feet, and all eyes but Gschert’s turned to him.
“This is what we shall do,” Manfred announced. “Everyone knows it is death to have contact with the sick. So. We must cut ourselves off and have nothing to do with the outside. No one may use the road through the village. Any who come hither from Freiburg or elsewhere must pass around, through the fields. Anyone trying to enter the village will be turned away — by force of arms, if need be.”
Dietrich took a slow breath and studied his hands. Then he looked up to Manfred. “We are commanded to show charity to the sick.” A low sigh ran around the table. Some cast eyes down with shame; others glared at him.
Manfred rapped the t
able with his knuckles. “This is not uncharity,” he declared, “since we can do nothing to help them. Nothing! All we can do is allow the pest among us.”
That drew loud exclamations of assent from all save Dietrich and Eugen.
“There are rumors,” Manfred added, “that we harbor demons. Very well. Let it be known. Let the Krenken fly about at will. Let them be seen in St. Blasien and St. Peter; in Freiburg and Oberreid. If folk are too frightened to come here, we may yet keep this… this Death at bay.”
* * *
That evening, Dietrich organized a penitential procession for the morn to pray the intercession of the Holy Virgin and St. Catherine of Alexandria. The procession would be barefoot and in rags and the penitents would wear blessed ashes on their brows. Zimmerman would take the great cross down from above the altar and Klaus would carry it on his back. “A bit late for that, priest!” Everard complained when he was told of it. “You were sent to tell us God’s will! Why’d you not warn us of His anger years ago?”
“It is the end of the world,” Joachim said quietly, and perhaps even with satisfaction. “The end of the middle age. But the new age arrives! Peter departs; John comes! Who will be worthy to live through these times?” Yet, the monk’s eschatology perhaps meant no more than Everard’s complaints, or Klaus’ jokes, or Manfred’s severity.
After making the arrangements, Dietrich knelt in prayer in his room. Be mindful, O Lord, of thy covenant, he prayed, and say to the destroying angel: Now hold thy hand, and let not the land be made desolate, and destroy not every living soul. When he raised his eyes, he saw Lorenz’s strange iron crucifix and bethought himself of the smith. A strange and gentle man in whom God had blended both strength and mildness; a man who had died trying to save a monstrous stranger from an unseeable peril. What had God intended by that? And what had God intended by moving a violent and wrathful Krenk to take Lorenz’ name — and as much of his mildness as the krenkish nature could assume?
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