Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  But whatever the miller had been about to say was lost to his hesitation, for Hilde rose from her sickbed and stood suddenly upright. At first, Dietrich thought it a miracle; but the woman began to turn and spin and sing la-la-la, flailing her arms. Klaus clutched at her, but her arm struck him a mighty blow to the cheek that nearly felled him.

  Dietrich went to the pallet’s other side and tried to grab one arm while Klaus grabbed the other. He took hold of her wrist and used his own weight to bear her down. Klaus did the same. Hilde continued to twist side to side, singing wordlessly. Then, abruptly, she ceased and lay still. Klaus’ head snapped up. “Has she…?”

  “No. No, she breathes.”

  “What does it mean? The dancing.”

  Dietrich shook his head. “I know not…” Her pustules were grown large, but there were yet no streaks of poison on her arms. “May I see her legs?” Wordlessly, Klaus lifted Hilde’s skirt, and Dietrich studied her groin and thighs and was relieved to see no streaks there, either. “Gottfried,” he called, “bring the old wine.”

  Klaus dipped his head. “Ja, ja, I need also a drink. Will she rest now?”

  “It’s not to drink. I must wash my lance.”

  Klaus laughed suddenly, then reverted to morose silence.

  Gottfried brought a pot of vinegar and Dietrich washed the blade in it. Then he held it in the smithy fire until the handle became hot. He would not chance the soporific sponge this time. Those he must save for ones like Everard, where the chance of life and the risk of death were more closely balanced.

  “Hold the bowl,” Dietrich said to Gottfried, handing him a clay basin. “When I lance the pustule,” he added to Klaus, “the pus must drain into the bowl. Ulf said that we must not let our flesh contact it, but the Krenkl do not believe it affects them.”

  “There is but one way to discover that,” said Gottfried.

  “He is a wise demon, then.” Klaus studied the Krenkl. “She took care of them; now they take care of her. I understand the one act no better than the other.” He stared at the knife.

  “Fear not,” Dietrich said. “De Chauliac told Manfred that this course was often effective, if not delayed too long.”

  “Cut then! I could not bear it should she—”

  Dietrich had honed the lance to razor-keenness. He brought it through the pustule with a clean stroke. Hilde gasped and arched her back, though she did not scream as Everard had. Dietrich had firm hold of her arm and the putrescence spilled into Gottfried’s bowl. He looked to see if it contained blood and was relieved to see that it did not.

  Though less vile than Everard’s eruptions, the pus stank badly enough. Klaus gulped and retained his stomach by sheer will, though he did recoil.

  Soon, the grim effort was over. Dietrich poured more of the vinegar over the wounds. He was uncertain why this might be efficacious, but medical doctors had taught so since the great age of Aquinas. Vinegar burned, so perhaps the element of fire burned out the small-lives.

  * * *

  Afterward, Dietrich walked with Klaus to Walpurga Honig’s cottage, where they sat on the bench before it. Klaus rapped his knuckles on the window shutter and, a moment later, the alewife opened it and shoved a pot of ale into his hands. She glanced at Dietrich, reappeared with a second pot; then slammed and bolted the shutter. The sudden noise started little Atiulf Kohlmann, sitting in the dirt across the street, and he cried out for his mommy.

  “Everyone is afraid,” Klaus said, with a gesture of the pot. He took a sip, closed his eyes and began to weep, the pot dropping from nerveless fingers and spilling his ale in the dirt. “I don’t understand,” he said after a time. “Has she wanted for anything? Her mere word was its purchase. Brocades, girdles, wimples. Silken small-clothes one time in the Freiburg — Italian work, and did that not cost me? ‘French paint’ for her face. I put food on her table, a roof over her head — and not a hut like her father’s. No, a wooden building with a stone fire-place and a chimney to heat the bed-loft. I gave her two fine children and, while God saw fit to call the boy back too young, I saw our ‘Phye fairly wed to a Freiburg merchant. Only God knows how Freiburg fares this day.” He studied his hands and wrung one with the other. He looked east, toward the lowlands.

  “Yet she seeks other men,” he said. “Everyone knows it, but I must pretend otherwise — and take my little revenges when I weigh out the meal. I jested when I lifted her skirt for you. But I think now you really were the last man in Oberhochwald to see that sight; though I did not think so at one time. I thought you went into the woods to be with her, pastor. Priest though you are, you’re a man. So I followed one day. That was when I saw the monsters for the first time. Yet they were not so terrible a sight as my Hilde, splayed upon a bed of forest leaves while that crude sergeant entered her.”

  Dietrich remembered one of the miller’s horses tethered in the clearing and thinking then that it was Hilde’s. “Klaus -,” he said, but the miller continued with no indication of having heard.

  “I’m an agile man in the marriage bed. Not so agile as in my spring, but I’ve had no complaint from others. Oh, yes, I’ve swyved other women. What choice had I? Your choice? No, I burn like your Paul. I don’t know why she turns from me. Do other men speak sweeter words? Are their lips more agreeable?”

  And now the miller raised his eyes to look at Dietrich squarely. “You could tell her. You could make it a commandment. But… I don’t want her submission. I want her love, and I can’t have that, and I don’t know why.

  “I saw her first in her father’s swineyard, feeding the pigs. Her feet were bare in the muck, but I saw the princess in the mire. I was apprenticed to old Heinrich — Altenbach’s father, that was — who held the Herr’s mill before me, so my prospects were good. My Beatrix had died in that terrible winter of ’15, and all our children with her, so my seed would die with me, unless I wed again. I proposed a marriage to her father and paid merchet and the Herr consented. No woman here ever had so fine a wedding-feast, save only the Herr’s own Kunigund! I learned that night that she was no virgin, but what woman is by that age? It did not bother me then. Perhaps it should have.”

  Dietrich laid a hand on Klaus’ shoulder. “What will you do now?”

  “He was not gentle with her, that pig sergeant. For him, just another ‘loch.’”

  “Wanda Schmidt has died.”

  Klaus nodded slowly. “That sorrows me. We were good friends. We shared the same lack, but filled it with each other. I know it was a sin, but…”

  “A small sin,” Dietrich assured him. “There was no evil, I think in either of you.”

  Klaus laughed. His thick-set body shook like an earthquake in a barrel, and tears started in the corners of his eyes. “How often,” he said when the laughter had settled into melancholy, “in your dry, scholastic sermons, have I heard you say that an ‘evil’ is the lack of a ‘good’? So, tell me, priest,” and the eyes he turned on Dietrich overflowed with emptiness, “what man had ever lacked as much as I have?”

  They sat in silence. Dietrich handed the miller the pot of ale he held and the miller drank from it. “My sins,” he said. “My sins.”

  “Everard is dead also,” Dietrich told him, and Klaus nodded. “And Franzl Long-nose from the castle. They put his body outside the walls this morning.” He looked toward the towers behind the battlements. “How fares Manfred?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Klaus set both pots on the sill for Wanda to take back. “I wonder if we ever will.”

  “And the Unterbaums are gone,” Dietrich said. “Konrad, his wife, their two surviving children…”

  “Toward Bear Valley, I hope,” said Klaus. “Only a fool would hie for the Breisgau with the pest in Freiburg. Where is Atiulf’s mother?”

  They stood and crossed to the boy crying in the dirt. “What is it, my small?” Dietrich asked, kneeling beside the lad.

  “Mommi!” Atiulf howled. “Want mommi!” He ran out of breath and sucked in for a great bellow
that ended in a paroxysm of phegmy coughing.

  “Where is she?” Dietrich asked.

  “Don’t know! Mommi, I don’t feel good!”

  “Where is your father?”

  “Don’t know! Vatti, make it stop!” Then the couging racked his body once again.

  “And your sister, Anna?”

  “Anna’s sleeping. Don’t wake her! Mommi said.”

  Dietrich looked at Klaus, and Klaus looked at him. Then they both looked at the cottage door. The maier set his jaw. “I suppose we must…”

  Klaus opened the door and stepped inside, and Dietrich, with the boy in hand, followed.

  There was no sign of Norbert and Adelheid, but Anna lay on a pallet of straw, with a countenance of peace and contentment.

  “Dead,” Klaus announced. “Yet not a sign on her. Not like poor Everard.”

  “Atiulf,” said Dietrich sternly, “was your sister ill when you went to bed last night?” The boy, still whimpering, shook his head. Dietrich looked to Klaus, who said, “Sometimes the murrain strikes people so, when it enters the mouth instead of the skin. Perhaps the pest acts the same way. Or she has died from grief over that boy.”

  “Bertam Unterbaum.”

  “I would have thought better of Norbert,” Klaus said, “than that he left his boy to die.”

  Reason would have told him to fly, Dietrich thought. If the boy was doomed, what purpose was served by staying — and falling himself victim? And so all reasonable people had fled — from ancient Alexandria, from Constantine’s plague-wracked army, from the Paris Hospital.

  Klaus picked the boy up in his arms. “I will take him to the hospital. If he lives, he will be my son.” Norbert had acted contrary to his temperament, but Klaus’s offer was astonishing. Dietrich offered a blessing and they parted company. Dietrich continued toward the Bear Valley end of the village for no other reason than that he had started out in that direction.

  A cottage door flew open and Ilse Ackermann ran from it with Maria in her arms. “My little Maria! My little Maria!” she shrieked over and over. The girl was a blackened figure soiled with vomit, with lips and tongue dark blue, and blood flowing freely from her mouth. She exuded the pest’s peculiar odor. Before Ilse could say more, the girl spasmed and died.

  The woman cried out one more time and dropped her daughter to the ground, where she lay like the blackened doll that the selfsame girl had rescued from the fire. The pest seemed to have invaded every thumb’s-length of her body, rotting it from within. Dietrich backed off in horror. This sight was more dreadful than Hilde with her delerium, or even Wanda with her blackened, lolling tongue. This was Death in all his awful majesty.

  Ilse threw hands to her face, and ran off toward the autumn field where Felix labored, leaving her daughter in the dirt behind her.

  * * *

  Death had buffeted Dietrich from all sides and too quickly. Everard, Franzl, Wanda, Anna, Maria. Peaceful or agonizing; long or short; rotting with stench or simply falling asleep. There was no order to it, no lawfulness. Dietrich quickened his pace. The pest, after three days rest, had redoubled its efforts.

  Vile fruit dangled from the linden tree in the green: a human figure twisted in the hot July breeze. It was Odo, Dietrich saw as he edged closer, and he thought first of suicide. But the rope was tied to the trunk and there was nothing under his feet from which he might have jumped. Then he understood. Returning to his son-in-law’s house, Odo had been waylaid and killed for the sin of bringing the pest.

  Dietrich could endure no more. He ran. His sandals clapped against the wooden planks of the mill stream bridge and found the Bear Valley road. The track was baked hard in the sun, except where it ran between the swell of the land. Here, the rivulet had turned it to mud, which splattered Dietrich’s legs as he splashed through it. At the bend, he came upon one of the Herr’s rouncies, a gray one, fully saddled and caparisoned, nibbling from some succulent bush by the pathside.

  A sign! he thought. God had sent a sign. Seizing the reins, he scrambled up the bank and settled himself into the saddle. Then, without a look behind, he directed the unwilling horse eastward.

  * * *

  8. Now: Sharon

  The subconscious is a wonderful thing. It never sleeps, no matter what the rest of the mind does. And it never stops thinking. No matter what the rest of the mind does. Sharon was in the middle of her galactic structure class — seven upper-class physics majors — when, in turning about after making a point, her eyes fell on the poster-sized chart of the distribution of red-shifts.

  Of course.

  She fell silent, and the student who had just answered her question shifted uneasily in his seat, wondering where his answer had gone wrong. He tapped his stylus staccato on the table top and looked for support to his classmates. “What I meant…,” he temporized, hoping for a hint.

  Sharon turned around. “No, you were quite right, Girish. But I just realized… Class dismissed.”

  Now the singular difference between the graduate species and his undergraduate cousin is that the graduate student may be discontent with such an unexpected boon. For the most part, they are there because they want to be, and not because society says they ought to be. And so they filed out of the seminar room buzzing to one another while Sharon fled to her office, where she scribbled furiously.

  When Hernando entered half an hour later and tossed his cap on the book shelf and dropped his backpack beside his desk, she was so deep into it that she never noticed him. He stared at her for a while before he settled himself to sort out his lecture notes for his nucleonics lecture.

  “It’s because time is quantized,” Sharon said, drawing Hernando out of his own contemplation.

  “What? Time is quantized? Yeah, I suppose. Why not?”

  “No, it’s the red-shifts. Why the galaxies are receding at discrete velocities. The universe sputters.”

  Hernando spun his chair to face her. “Right.”

  “Okay, vacuum energy. Einstein’s lambda, the one he called his biggest blunder.”

  “The cosmic fudge factor he threw in so he could get the result he wanted.”

  “Right. So, Einstein was a genius. Even when he made a mistake it was brilliant. Lambda is pushing the galaxies apart faster and faster. But the amount of energy in the vacuum depends on the speed of light — and vice versa.”

  “That’s what your theory seems to suggest.”

  She ignored his doubts. “If light speed drops, it reduces the amount of energy the vacuum can hold. So where does the excess energy go?”

  Hernando pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. “Outside the universe?”

  “No, inside the universe. Into ordinary radiation and matter. Into dust clouds and microwaves, stars and planets and galaxies, into whales and birds and college professors.”

  The post-doc whistled. “The Big Bang itself…”

  “And with no wacky inflaton field needed as an epicycle. Quantized time is the only thing that explains the redshift gaps.”

  “Measurement resolution?” Hernando suggested. “Limited samples? Unrepresentative samples?”

  “That’s what they told Tifft when he discovered it. And… they were right about a lot of it; but they were also champions of orthodoxy clinging to the existing dogma. Look, light is quantized, space is quantized, what makes time so special? It’s just another dimension of the continuum.”

  “Oh, that’s a convincing argument. Besides, if you’re right, it’s not exactly a continu-um.”

  “And that’s why there are gaps in the redshifts. What looks like a continuous motion picture is really just a series of frames. The universe has ‘cracks’ in it.”

  The muscular young man laughed. “And what’s in those cracks?”

  “Oh, wouldn’t we love to know! Whole other universes, I think. Parallel worlds.”

  Hernando cocked his head and looked thoughtful. “Objective evidence?” he said after a time.

  “That’s where you come in.”
r />   “Me?” He looked alarmed, as if Sharon was about to send him into one of those parallel worlds.

  “You need to build me a chronon detector.”

  “Sure, my afternoon is free after my two o’clock lecture. I suppose a chronon is…”

  “A ‘quantum’ of time.”

  He thought about it. “Cool beans. But how do you detect something like that?”

  “You and me, Hernando, we’re going to figure that out. Think of it. Someday, you may walk on another planet, or on a parallel world.”

  The post-doc snorted. “I got something to do that weekend.”

  Sharon leaned back in her chair, certain now that she had his skeptical mind hooked. Every enthusiast needs a skeptic, or she would run out of control.

  * * *

  XXV. July, 1349

  Ferial Days

  The gray was disinclined to flight, and her stubborn walk was a compromise between Dietrich’s desire to gallop and her own desire not to move at all. When they reached the stretch by the meadow gate where the bushes gave way to open land, and the mare saw untied, windscattered sheaves of half-mown hay, she turned off the road and tried to nuzzle the rope from the gate-post. “If you are that hungry, sister horse,” Dietrich conceded, “you’ll not last the journey.” Leaning down, he undid the latch and the horse quickstepped into the meadow like a child shown his birth-day cake.

  While Dietrich waited impatiently for the gray to feed, curiosity turned his mind to the saddle bags, and he wondered to whom beside God he owed this boon. Searching, he found a linen maniple, dyed bright green and embroidered in thread-of-gold with crosses and the chi-rho. Below that were stuffed other priestly vestments of surpassing beauty. He settled himself in the saddle. What more sign could he ask that the horse had been sent for him to find?

  When the mare had eaten her fill, Dietrich turned her toward the shade of the Great Wood. There was a stream there, he remembered, where the horse could drink, and the canopy would be relief against the awful heat.