Eifelheim

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 Kohlma

“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, A

“A

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 A

“Dead,” Klaus a

“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 Ackerma

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.