Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  Hans flapped his lips. “Perhaps he does. The Herr-from-the-sky is often whimsical. But see how he shows his neck to the sky. He invites the Swooper to take him. This was an old rite, practiced among Ulf’s folk on their far island in the Eastern Sea of Storms. Gottfried’s folk and mine alike thought them foolish and vain, and Shepherd’s folk tried to suppress them. Indeed, the rite has long passed out of use, even on the Great Isle; but in times of peril, a man may turn to the ways of his forefathers and stand exposed in an open field.”

  Hans unfolded from his perch, staggered, and nearly fell from the rock. Dietrich seized him by the arm, pulling him to safety. Hans laughed. “Bwah! There is an ignoble end! Better to be taken by Ulf’s Swooper than a clumsy tumble, though I would prefer a quiet death in my sleep. Ach! What is this?”

  One of Manfred’s loosed falcons had come to rest on Ulf’s outstretched arm! The bird sheered, and Dietrich and Hans heard its distant cry. But when Ulf did not provide the expected morsel, the bird spread its wings and soared into the sky once more, where it circled thrice before departing.

  Hans fell to a sudden squat and hugged his knees, his side jaws agape. In the far field, Ulf leapt into the air in the manner of krenkish dance. Dietrich looked from one to the other in bewilderment.

  Hans stood erect and brushed absently from his leather-hose the grass and dirt. “Ulf will take our baptism now,” he said. “The Swooper has spared him. And if It can show mercy, why not swear fealty to the very Herr of mercy?”

  * * *

  “Pastor, pastor!” It was little Atiulf, who had taken to following Klaus about and calling him Daddy. “Men! On the Oberreid road!”

  It was the day after Ulf’s baptism, and Dietrich had been digging graves atop Church Hill with Klaus, Joachim, and a few other men. They joined the boy at the crest and Klaus fetched him up in his arms. “Perhaps they bring word that the pest has gone,” the miller said.

  Dietrich sook his head. The pest would never go. “By his cloak, it is the Markgraf’s herald, and a chaplain. Perhaps the bishop has sent a replacement for Father Rudolf.”

  “He’d be a fool to come here,” Gregor suggested.

  “Or overjoyed to leave Strassburg,” Dietrich reminded him.

  “We do not need him here, in any case,” said Joachim.

  But Dietrich had taken only a few steps down the hillside when the herald’s horse reared and nearly overthrew him. The rider fought the reins as the terrified beast pawed the air and whinnied. A few paces behind him, the chaplain found his mount also fractious.

  “Ach,” said Gregor under his breath. “That’s done it.”

  The two riders retreated into the pass between the hills before the herald wheeled his horse and, standing in the stirrups, tossed his right arm in what Dietrich mistook for the krenkish gesture of dismissal. Then the shoulder of the hill cut them off from sight, and only a dust haze lingered to show where they had been.

  They found Hans in the open space between the smithy and Gregor’s stoneyard gazing down the high road toward Oberreid. “I thought to warn them off,” he said, swaying slightly. “I had forgotten that I was not one of you. They saw me and…”

  It was Klaus, of all people, who placed his hand on the Krenkl’s shoulder and said, “But you are one of us, brother monster.”

  Gottfried stepped from the shadows of the clinic. “What matter if they saw? What can they do but release us from this? The one in the fancy cloak threw something in the dirt.”

  Gregor trotted down the road to retrieve it. Hans said, “It sorrows me, to betray you, Dietrich. By us is motionlessness hard to see. I forgot myself and stilled. Habit. Forgive me.” And so saying, he collapsed into the dust of the crossroads.

  Klaus and Lueter Holzhacker carried the twitching body into the hospital and laid it on a pallet there. Gottfried, Beatke, and the other surviving Krenkl’n gathered round him. “He was sharing his portion with us,” Gottfried said. “I did not learn of it until yesterday.”

  Dietrich stared at him. “He sacrificed himself, as the alchemist did?”

  “Bwah-wah! Not as the alchemist did. Arnold thought the extra time would gain us the repairs. Well, he was not a man of the elektonikos, and who is to say he was wrong to hope? But Hans acted not from carnal hope, but from love of us who served him.”

  Gregor had come up with a parchment bound up in string. He handed it to Dietrich. “This is what the herald dropped.”

  Dietrich untied the string. “How long…?” he asked Gottfried. The servant of the elektronik essence shrugged his shoulders as a man might. “Who can say? Heloïse went to the sky in but a few days; the Kratzer lingered for weeks. It is as with your pest.”

  “How reads the bill?” Joachim asked, and Dietrich pulled his spectacles from his scrip.

  “If there be no priest among us,” he announced when he had finished, “laymen are authorized to hear one another’s confessions.” He raised his head. “A miracle.”

  “What miracle,” said Klaus. “That I should confess my sins to the mason, here? That would be a miracle.”

  “Na, Klaus,” said Lueter. “I’ve heard you confess after a couple of steins of Walpurga’s brew in you.”

  “Archdeacon Jarlsberg writes that there are no more priests to send.”

  “A miracle indeed,” said Klaus.

  “Half the benefices in the diocese are vacant — because their priests did not run off like Father Rudolf. They stayed with their flocks and died.”

  “Like you,” said Klaus. And Dietrich laughed a little at the comment.

  Gregor frowned. “Pastor isn’t dead. He isn’t even sick.”

  “Nor you, nor I,” said Klaus. “Not yet.”

  * * *

  Dietrich sat by Hans’ pallet all day and slept there at night. They spoke of many things, he and the monster. Whether a vacuum existed. How there could be more than one world, since each would try to rush toward the center of the other. Whether the sky was a dome or a vast empty sea. Whether Master Peter’s magnets could make a machine that would never stop, as he had claimed. All those matters of philosophy that had so delighted Hans in happier days. They spoke, too, of the Kratzer, and Dietrich was convinced more than ever that, if love had any meaning in the hidden hearts of the Krenkl, that Hans and the Kratzer has loved one another.

  In the morning, the portcullis of the castle opened with a clatter of chains and Richart the schultheiss, with Wilifrid the clerk and a few others galloped furiously down Castle Hill and out the Bear Valley road. Shortly thereafter, the bell in the castle chapel tolled once. Dietrich waited, and waited; but there came no second stroke.

  * * *

  That afternoon, the villagers held an irregular court under the linden and Dietrich asked the gathering which of them Ulf had found free of the small-lives. About half raised their hands, and Dietrich noted that they sat for the most part at a distance from their neighbors.

  “You must leave Oberhochwald,” he said. “If you stay, the small lives will invade you, as well. Take, also those whose fever has broken. When the pest has gone, you may return and set things aright once more.”

  “I’ll not return,” cried Jutte Feldmann. “This place is accursed! A place of demons and sorcery.” There were mutters of approval, but some, like Gregor and Klaus, shook their heads and Melchior Metzger, grown suddenly old, sat on the grass with a grim look on his face.

  “But, where would we go?” asked Jakob Becker. “The pest lies all about us. In the Swiss, so also in Vienna, in Freiburg, in Munich, in…”

  Dietrich stopped him before he could enumerate the whole world. “Go south and east into the foothills,” he said. “Shun all towns and villages. Build shelters in the forest, keep fires burning, and stay near the fires. Take flour or meal, so you will have bread. Joachim, you will go with them.”

  The young monk stared at him open-mouthed. “But… What do I know of the forest?”

  “Lueter Holzhacker knows the forests. And Gerlach Jaeger has ranged
about hunting deer and wolves.” Jaeger, who had been hunkered down a little to the side of the group whittling on a limb, looked up and spat. “By m’self,” he said, and resumed whittling.

  Everyone looked at everyone else. Those whose blood harbored the small-lives, but who had not yet fallen ill, hung their heads, and a few stood and walked off. Gregor Mauer shrugged and looked at Klaus, who tossed his arm krenkishly. “If Atiulf gets well,” he suggested.

  When the villagers had dispersed, Joachim followed Dietrich to the mill pond, just above the sluiceway to Klaus’ mill. The wheel turned in bright splashes of water, but the stones were silent, which meant the cam was disengaged. The mist cooled, and Dietrich welcomed the relief from the heat. Joachim faced the gurgling water where it jostled into the sluice, so that he and Dietrich stood with their backs to each other. For a time, the hissing water and the groaning wheel were the only sounds. Turning, Dietrich saw the young man staring at the bright, criss-crossed lines of sunlight that quartered the choppy stream. “What is wrong?” he asked.

  “You send me away!”

  “Because you are clean. Because you have a chance yet to live.”

  “But, you, also…”

  Dietrich silenced him with a gesture. “It is my penance…, for sins committed in my youth. I have nearly fifty years. How few I have to lose! You have not yet twenty-five, and many years more remain in service to God.”

  “So,” the young man said bitterly. “You would deny me even the martyr’s crown.”

  “I would give you the shepherd’s staff!” Dietrich snapped. “Those folk will be filled with despair, with denial of God. Had I given you the easy task, I would keep you here!”

  “But I, too, wish the glory!”

  “What glory in changing bandages, in lancing pustules, in wiping up the shit and the vomit and the pus? Herr Jesu-Christus! We are commanded all these things, but they are not glorious.”

  Joachim had edged away from his diatribe. “No. No, you are wrong, Dietrich. It is the most glorious work of all, more glorious than plumed knights spitting men on their lances and bragging on their deeds.”

  Dietrich remembered a song the knights used to sing in the aftermath of the Armleder. Peasants live like pigs/And have no sense for manners… “No,” he agreed, “the deeds of knights are not always so glorious, either.” They had returned hate for hate, and abandoned all sense of that chivalry for which they had once been renowned — if that renown had ever been more than lies on the lips of minnesingers. Dietrich glanced toward Castle Hill. He had asked once of Joachim where he had been when the Armleder passed through. He had never asked Manfred.

  “We have been found wanting,” Joachim said. “The demons were our test, our triumph! Instead, most escaped unchristened. Our failure has brought God’s punishment upon us.”

  “The pest is everywhere,” Dietrich snapped, “in places that have never seen a Krenk.”

  “Each to his own sin,” Joachim said. “To some, wealth. To others, usury. To others still, cruelty or rapaciousness. The pest strikes everywhere because sin is everywhere.”

  “And so God slays all, giving men no chance to repent? What of the Christ-taught love?”

  Joachim’s eyes turned dull and sullen. “The Father does this; not the Son. He of the Old Dispensation, whose gaze is fire, whose hand is a thunderbolt and whose breath is the storm wind!” Then, more quietly, “He is like any father angry with his children.”

  Dietrich said nothing and Joachim sat for a while longer. After a moment, the monk said, “I have never thanked you for taking me in.”

  “Monastic quarrels can be brutal.”

  “You were a monk once. Brother William called you ‘Brother Angelus.’”

  “I knew him at Paris. It was a sly gibe of his.”

  “He is one of us, a Spiritual. Were you?”

  “Will cared naught for the Spirituals until the tribunal condemned his propositions. Michael and the others fled Avignon at the same time, and he threw in with them.”

  “They would have burned him.”

  “No, they would have made him rephrase his propositions. To Will, that was worse.” Dietrich found a small smile in the jest. “One may say anything, if only it is framed as an hypothesis, a secundum imaginationem. But Will holds his hypotheses as matters of fact. He argued Ludwig’s case against the Pope, but to Ludwig he was a tool.”

  “No wonder we are smitten.”

  “Many a good truth has been upheld by wicked men for their own purposes. And good men have caused much wickedness in their zealotry.”

  “The Armleder.”

  Dietrich hesitated. “That was one such case. There were good men among them.” He fell silent, thinking of the fishwife and her boy in the Freiburg market.

  “There was a leader among the Armleder,” Joachim said slowly, “called ‘Angelus’.”

  Dietrich was a long time silent. “That man is dead now,” he said at last. “But through him I learned a terrible truth: that heresy is truth, in extremis. The proper object of the eye is light, but too much light blinds the eyes.”

  “So, you would compromise with the wicked, as the Conventuals do?”

  “Jesus said the weeds would grow with the wheat until the Judgement,” Dietrich answered, “so one finds both good men and bad in the church. By our fruits we will be known, not by what name we have called ourselves. I have come to believe that there is more grace in becoming wheat than there is in pulling up weeds.”

  “So might a weed say, had it speech,” said Joachim. “You split hairs.”

  “Better to split hairs than the heads beneath them.”

  Joachim rose from his rock. He skipped a stone across the mill pond. “I will do as you ask.”

  * * *

  The next day, four score villagers gathered on the green under the linden, prepared to leave. They had tied their belongings into bundles, which they carried on their backs or in a sack on the end of a pole slung across their shoulder. Some had the stunned look of a calf at slaughter and stood unmoving in the press with their eyes cast down. Wives without husbands; husbands without wives. Parents without children; children without parents. Folk who had watched their neighbors shrivel and blacken into stinking corruption. A few had already started out alone on the road. Melchior Metzger went to Nickel Langermann, who lay on a pallet in the hospital, and embraced him one last time before Gottfried shooed him away. Langermann was too far in delerium to recognize the caress.

  Gerlach Jaeger stood to the side and watched the assembly with no small displeasure. He was a short, thickset man with a wiry black beard and many years of the forest in his face. His clothing was rough and he carried several knives in his belt. His walking staff was a thick oak limb, trimmed and whittled to his pleasure. He stood now with both hands cupped over the top of it and his chin resting on his hands. Dietrich spoke to him.

  “Will they fare well, do you guess?”

  Jaeger hawked and spat. “No. But I’ll do what I can. I’ll train ’em up in makin’ snares and traps, and there’s one or two might know which way the bolt sits in the crossbow’s groove. I see Holzhacker has his bow. And his axe. That’s good. We’ll need axes. Ach! We don’t need a casket full of klimbim! Jutte Feldmann, what are ye thinkin’! We’re goin’ in the Lesser Wood and up the Feldberg. Who d’ye think’ll carry that thing? Herr God in Heaven, pastor, I don’t know what people have in their heads.”

  “They have grief and tragedy in their heads, hunter.”

  Jaeger grunted and said nothing for a time. Then he raised his head and took his staff in hand. “I guess I count myself lucky. I’ve no woman or kin to lose. That’s luck, I s’pose. But the forest and the mountain, they won’t care about grief, and you don’t want to hie into th’wilderness with half a mind. What I meant is that they don’t need to take everything with ’em. When the pest has gone, we’ll come back and it will all be here waiting.”

  “I’ll not be coming back,” Volkmar Bauer snarled. “This place i
s accursed.” And he spat for good measure. He was pale and unsteady yet, but stood among those leaving.

  Others took up Volkmar’s cry and some threw clods of dirt at Gottfried, who had come also to watch them go. “Demons!” some cried. “You brought this on us!” And the crowd growled and surged. Gottfried snapped his horny side-lips like a pair of scissors. Dietrich feared his choleric nature coming to the fore. Even in his weakened condition, Gottfried might slay a dozen attackers with his serrated forearms before sheer weight of numbers brought him down. Jaeger lifted his staff and brandished it. “I’ll have order here!” he cried.

  “Why did they stay when their countrymen left?” shouted Becker. “To show us our doom!”

  “Silence!”

  That was Joachim, employing his preacher’s voice. He strode onto the green, threw back his cowl, and glared at them. “Sinners!” he told them. “Do you want to know why they stayed?”

  He gestured toward the Krenkl. “They stayed to die!” He let the words echo from the surrounding cottages and Klaus’ mill. “And to give us succor! Who among you has not seen the sick comforted, or the dead buried by them? Who, indeed, has not been nursed by them, save by your own obstinancy? Now you are invited to a greater adventure than any minnesinger’s invention. You are invited to be the New Israel, to pass a time in the wilderness, and possess as your reward the Promised Land. We will bring in the New Age! Unworthy, we are, but we will be purified by trials as we await the coming of John.” Here he dropped his voice and the murmuring crowd fell silent to catch his words. “We will live apart for a time, while Peter leaves and the middle age passes away. There will be many trials; and some among us may be found wanting. We will experience privation and heat and hunger and perhaps the wrath of wild beasts. But it will strengthen us against the day of our return!”

  There was a ragged, subdued cheer and a few amens, but Dietrich thought they were more cowed than convinced.

  Jaeger took a breath. “Right, then. Now that everyone is here… Lütke! Jakob!” With a great deal of profanity and one or two swipes of his staff, he started his flock moving. “’Children of Israel,’” he muttered.