Eifelheim

“Have the boils appeared?”

The maier shook his head. “I know not.”

“If I may lift her gown up to inspect…?”

The miller stared at Dietrich for a moment, then began to laugh. They were great rolling laughs that shook his frame and died abruptly. “Pastor,” he said gravely, “you are the only man in this dorp who has prayed my grace before looking.” He moved aside.

Dietrich lifted the night gown and was relieved to find no swellings in her groin, though reddish spots near her secret place showed where they intended their appearance. When he tried to look at her chest and under her arms, the gown caught and she flailed about. “Max!” she said. “Send for Max! He will protect me!”

“Will you give her the last rites?” Klaus asked.

“Not yet. Klaus…,” he hesitated, but then said nothing about Wanda. The miller would not leave his wife in this condition. When he rose, and Hilde clutched at his robe. “Fetch Dietrich,” she begged him.

“Ja doch,” Dietrich answered unfastening her grip. “I go now to fetch him.”

Outside, he paused for breath. God was a clever sort. Dietrich had run from the pest in one house, only to find it in another.

Hans and Gottfried had helped him move Wanda to her bed. When Dietrich returned to the parsonage, Joachim took one look at his face. “The pest!” he said. At Dietrich’s nod, he threw his head back and cried, “O God, I have failed You!”

Dietrich laid a hand on his shoulder. “You have failed no one.”

He shrugged off the touch. “The Krenken are gone back to Hell unshriven!”

When Dietrich turned away, Joachim snatched his sleeve. “You ca

“I know. I go to Manfred to pray his grace for a hospice.”

He found the Herr in the great hall, sitting between a roaring fire in the hearth and a second built in a large cauldron placed on the other side of the room. The entire household had huddled there, even Imre the peddler. Servants came and went, bearing wood to feed the fires. They left slowly and returned quickly.

Manfred, who sat at the council table scratching with a pen on a sheet of parchment, spoke without looking up. “The fires worked for your pope. De Chauliac recommended it when I bespoke him in Avignon. The element of fire destroys the bad air…” He waved the pen in dismissal. “…somehow. I leave science to those trained in it.” His eyes darted to the corners of the room, as if he might spy the pest lurking there. Then he bent once more to the parchment.

Fire might be effective, Dietrich thought, since it loosened the stiffened mass of bad air and caused it to rise. Bells, too, might break up the mass by shaking the air. But if the pest was carried by i

“I know. Heloïse Krenkerin warned us by the farspeaker. What do you want of me?”

“I pray your grace to establish a hospital. Soon, I fear, too many will lie ill to—”

Manfred tapped the pen against the table, blunting its point. “You stand too much on ceremony. A hospital. Ja, doch. So be it.” He waved a hand. “For what good it may do.”

“If we ca

“A great comfort that must be. Max!” He dusted the parchment and folded it in quarters. In a gobbet of wax poured off a candle, he impressed his signet. He studied the ring afterward, twisting it a little on his finger. Then he looked to little Irmgard who stood close by with her nurse, snuffling through her tears, and he smiled briefly at her. He handed Max the letter and another that he had already finished. “Take these to the Oberreid road and give them to the first respectable-looking travelers you see. One is for the Baden Markgraf, the other for the Hapsburg Duke. Freiburg and Vie

Max looked unhappy, but he bowed his head and, pulling his gloves from his belt, strode toward the door. Gunther followed, looking, if possible, even less happy.

Manfred shook his head. “I fear death is in this house. Everard fell after he exited this very room. How fares he?”

“Quieter. May I move him to the hospital?”

“Do what you think needful. Do not ask my permission again. I am taking everyone to the schloss. I barred folk from entering the village and none heeded me. Now Odo has brought this on us. The schildmauer at least I can bar against intruders. Each man must look now to his own house and to his own kin.”

Dietrich swallowed. “Mine Herr, all men are brothers.”

Manfred made a long, sad face. “Then you have much work ahead.”

Dietrich called on Ulf and Heloïse to carry Everard to the make-shift hospital in the smithy. Neither Krenkl had yet accepted Christ. They had stayed, Hans had suggested, because their fear of death in the “gap between the worlds” exceeded their fear of death by starvation. But when he asked Ulf about this, the Krenk only laughed. “I fear nothing,” he bragged over the private canal.

“Krenk die. Men die. One must die well.”

“With charitas in the heart.”

An arm toss. “There is no ‘charitas,’ only courage and honor. One dies without fear, in defiance of the Swooper. Not that one believes, naturally, in the Swooper, but it is a saying of ours.”

“Then why did you stay behind when your vessel left, if not from dread of this ‘Gap’?”

Ulf indicated the Krenkerin striding ahead of them. “Because the Heloïse stayed. I promised our spouse -. Understand you our man-woman-nurse? Good. The nurse stays always at the nest. I swore a… a blood-oath to it that I would by our Heloïse stay. Some truth-seekers claim that the Gap lacks time, and so prolongs death forever. The Heloïse feared that above all. By me, is all death the same, and I snap my jaws at it. I stayed because of my oath.”

The stench, when they entered Everard’s cottage, was a palpable thing. The steward lay naked upon his bed, save for a dry, filthy rag placed over his brow. Dark blue-black lines ran up his limbs from from the groin and armpits. Of Yrmegard or Witold, there was no sign. Dietrich bent over Everard, thinking him dead, but the man’s eyes flew open and he half-rose in the bed. “Mother of God!” he cried.

“I must lance the boils before we move him,” Dietrich said to Ulf, gently pressing the steward supine. The black rivers of poison ru

“Mother of God!” The steward clawed at himself, raking his skin with his nails, and shrieking. Then, abrubtly, he lay back quietly, panting and gasping, as if he had repelled an assault from the ramparts and was resting now for the next attack.

Dietrich had washed the knife already in sour wine, and Ulf suggested heating it in the fire as well. The hearth smoldered in sullen red embers. No firewood stood ready. She has fled, Dietrich thought. Yrmegard has abandoned her husband. He wondered if Everard knew.

The boils were as large as apples, the skin stretched tight and shining around them. He chose the one under the right arm and touched it with the point of his scalpel.