Eifelheim

“What is it?” Joachim asked, only half-awake.

“The enemy.”

But it was one thing to know the face of the enemy, and quite another to slay him. Arnold Krenk might have succeeded, or so Ulf said. “Yet, we have not his skills. We can but proof a man’s blood and say if the enemy is present within him.”

“Then,” said Joachim, “all who do not yet bear this mark of Satan must flee.”

Dietrich rubbed the stubble on his chin. “And the ill can be restrained from flight, lest they spread the small-lives farther abroad.” He glanced at Joachim, but said nothing of logic. “Ja, doch. It is little enough, but it is something.”

Max was the natural leader of such a flight. He knew the forests better than any but Gerlach the hunter, and was more accustomed to leading men than was Gerlach.

Dietrich went to the Herr’s stables and saddled a sleek, black courser. He had tightened the cinch and was proposing that the beast accept the bit when Manfred’s voice said, “I could have you flogged for your presumption.”

Dietrich turned to find the Herr behind him, bearing a great hunting bird on his left forearm. Manfred nodded toward the horse. “Only a knight may ride a courser.” But when Dietrich began to remove the bridle, he shook his head. “Na, who will care? I came forth only because I remembered my birds, and thought to free them before they starved. I was in the rookery when I heard you fumbling around. I plan to unbar the ke

The ease of the supposition angered Dietrich, not least because it struck too truly; but he said only, “I go to find Max.”

Manfred raised his gauntlet and stroked the falcon, which craned its head, side-stepped a bit on the thick, leather glove, and screeched. “You know what the gauntlet means, don’t you, precious one? You yearn to spread your wings and fly, aren’t you? Max has flown, too, I suppose, or he would have returned ere now.” Dietrich made no answer, and Manfred continued. “But it is bred into his character to return to me. Not Max; this beauty. Max, too, now that I think on it. He’ll circle and circle, searching for the welcoming arm below and will not see it. Is it right to release him to such sorrow?”

“Mine Herr, surely he will adjust to his new circumstances.”

“So he will,” Manfred answered sadly. “He will forget me and the hunts we carried out together. That is why the falcon symbolizes love. You ca

“Or ‘fly to other lands’.”

“You know the term? Did you study falconry? You are a man of parts, Dietl. A Paris scholar. Yet, you know horsemanship and perhaps hunting with birds. I think you were gently born. Yet you never speak of your youth.”

“Mine Herr knows the circumstances in which he found me.”

Manfred grimaced. “Most delicately put. Indeed, I do. And had I not seen you stay the mob at Rheinhausen, I would have left you there. Yet it has, on the whole, been well. I have copied many of our conversations in memoranda. I never told you that. I am no scholar, though I think myself a practical man, and I have always delighted in your ideas. Do you know how you make a falcon return to you?”

“Mine Herr…”

“Dietrich, after all these years, you and I may ‘duzen,’ and dispense with formalities.”

“Very well,… Manfred. One ca

“Would that more lovers knew that art, Dietrich.” He laughed and then, in sudden silence, his face grew long. “Eugen has the fever.”

“May God save him.”

Manfred’s lips twitched. “His death is the end of my Gundl. She’ll not live without him.”

“May God deny her wish.”

“Do you think God hears you any more? I think He has gone away from the world. I think He has grown disgusted with men and will have no more to do with us.” Manfred stepped outside the mews and, with a sweep of his arm, launched the falcon. “God has flown to other lands, I think.” He watched for a moment, admiring the bird’s beauty, before he ducked back inside the mews. “I hate to break troth with him in such a ma

“Manfred, death is but a falcon launched to ‘fly to other lands’.”

The Herr smiled without humor. “Apropos, but perhaps too easy. When you return with the black, give him hay, but do not stable him. I must see to the other beasts.” He turned, hestitated, then spread his arms. “You and I may never meet again.”

Dietrich took the embrace. “We may, should God grant us both our hearts’ desires.”

“And not our deserts! Ha. So we part on a jest. What else can a man do amidst such sorrow?”

Dietrich did not at first notice Max, save that the heavy buzz of flies under the summer heat led him to the spot. He hunched his shoulders and slid from the horse’s back, tying the beast with special care to a nearby oak. Procuring a kerchief, he plucked blossoms from patches of wildflowers and crushed them within the cloth to release their perfume before tying the kerchief to his face. He broke off a branch from a hazel bush and, using it as a broom, swept it across the sergeant’s body, dispersing its aerial diners. Then, with as much dispassion as he could muster, he looked upon the carcass of his friend.

The anatomists of Bologna and Padua had made anatomies on bodies dried in the sun, or consumed in the earth, or submerged in ru

Max had been stabbed in the back. His jerkin was rent there, at the kidneys, and a great gout of blood had issued forth. He had fallen forward, in the act of drawing his quillon, for he lay upon his right arm with the handle of the long dagger in his death-hardened grip and the blade half out of its sheath.

Dietrich staggered to a nearby stone, a block that had tumbled countless years before from the escarpment overhead. There, he sobbed — for Max, for Lorenz, for Herwyg One-eye and all the others.

Dietrich returned to the hospital after vespers. For a time, he watched Hans and Joachim and the others walk among the sufferers, applying cool cloths to fevered brows, spooning food into indifferent mouths, washing the bandages used to cover the sores in tubs of hot, soapy water and laying them out to dry, a practice Hugh de Lucca and others had commended.

At last, Dietrich stepped inside where Gregor watched over his ailing son. “Everyone says he has my face,” Gregor said, “and maybe that’s true when he’s awake and tries to be like me; but when he’s asleep, he remembers that he is her first-born, and her shade looks out at me from inside his heart.” He was silent for a moment. “I must look after Seybke. The two of them fought. Always scuffling like two bear cubs.” Gregor craned his neck. “Gregerl’s not a pious boy. He mocks the church, despite my scolds.”

“The choice is God’s, not ours, and God acts not from petty spite, but from boundless love.”

Gregor looked around the smithy. “Boundless love,” he repeated. “Is that what this is?”

“It is no comfort,” Hans interjected, “but we Krenken know this. There is no other ma