Eifelheim

Joachim stalked away from him, but turned after a few paces. “It was still a good thing to say.” He left, and Dietrich gave thanks that the younger man had not asked the same question of him. Where were you, Dietrich, when the Armleder passed through?

A motion to his right drew his attention, but his eyes were dazed by the torch and he could make out nothing but a shape that leapt from behind the church. Dietrich ran to the crest of the hill and held his torch high to illuminate the rocky slope behind, but he saw only the rustle of a wild raspberry bush and a stone that clattered down the hill.

Another movement, this one behind him — . He whirled suddenly, caught a glimpse of great glowing eyes, then the torch was knocked from his grasp, and he was tripped to the ground. He cried out over the snapping of twigs and the rustling of leaves as the second intruder fled.

In moments, Joachim and Theresia were at his side. Dietrich assured his rescuers that he was unhurt, but Theresia explored his skull and arms for injuries anyway. When her fingers reached the back of his head, he winced. “Ach!”

Theresia said, “You’ll have a lump there in the morning, but the bone is not fractured.”

Joachim had retrieved Dietrich’s torch and held it so Theresia could see what she was doing. “Are you a chirurgeon, then?” he asked.

“Father taught me herbs and medicines and bone-setting from his books,” Theresia told him. “Put something cold against it, father,” she added to Dietrich. “If you have a headache, take some ground peony root with oil of roses. I’ll blend a compound tonight and bring it to you.”

When she had gone, Joachim said, “She called you ‘father.’”

“Many do,” Dietrich answered dryly.

“I thought she meant… something more.”

“Did you. Well, she was my ward, if you must know. I brought her here when she was ten.”

“Ach. Were you then her uncle? What befell her parents?”

Dietrich took the torch from him. “The Armleder killed them. They burned the house down with everyone in it. Only Theresia escaped. I taught her what I had learned of healing in Paris, and when she turned twelve and became a woman, Herr Manfred granted her the right to practice the craft on his manor.”

“I had always thought…”

“What?”

“I had always thought they had a just grievance. The Armleder, I mean, against the wealthy.”

Dietrich looked into the flames of the torch. “So they had; but summum ius, iniuria summa.”

On Monday, Dietrich and Max set out for the Great Woods to look after Josef the charcoal burner and his apprentice, neither of whom had been seen since the Sixtus day fires. The day broke hot, and Dietrich was sodden with his own sweat before they had walked half the distance. A thin haze mitigated the sun’s intensity, but it was small dispensation. In the spring fields, where the harvest army labored on the lord’s salland, Oliver Becker idled in the speckled shade of a broad oak, unmindful of the scowls of his peers.

“The gof,” Max said when Dietrich pointed him out. “Grows his hair long as if he were a young Herr. Sits on his ass all day and watches everyone else do the work because he can pay the shirking-fine. In the Swiss, everyone works.”

“It must be a wonderful country, then, the Swiss.”

Max cast him a suspicious glance. “It is. We have no ‘mine Herrs.’ When a matter needs settling, we gather all the fighting men and take a show of hands, with no need for lords.”

“I thought the Swiss lands were Hapsburg fiefs.”

Schweitzer waved a hand. “I expect Duke Albrecht thinks so, too; but we mountain folk have a different opinion… You look pensive, pastor. What is it?”

“I fear the hands of all those neighbors, raised together, may impose one day a tyra

Max snorted. “Bring a lord to account?”

“Four years since, the village brought suit against the steward when Manfred enclosed the common greenway.”

“Well, Everard…”

“The lord must save his honor. It’s a legal fiction, but a useful one. Like that quillon of yours. One thumb longer, and it would be a sword, which would be above your station.”

“We Swiss like them,” he said, laying a hand on the pommel and gri

“What I mean is, Manfred could then chastise his steward for doing what he had told him to do, and everyone pretends to believe it.”

Max made a curt gesture. “Moorgarten rendered a more vigorous verdict. We brought the Hapsburg Duke to account there, I tell you.”

Dietrich looked at him. “Anything too vigorous ends with peasants dangling from trees. That’s a fruit I’d not see harvested again.”

“In the Swiss, the peasants won.”

“And yet here you are, serving the Hochwald Herr, who serves both the Baden Markgraf and the Hapsburg Duke.” To this, Max made no response.

They crossed over the mill-brook bridge and took the road toward Bear Valley. The fallow fields lay on the left and the autumn fields on the right, the ground swelling higher and edging into the dirt track, pinching it until it seemed more trench than road. Hedgerows and briar-bushes, meant to keep cows and sheep from wandering into the croplands, provided a bit of inadvertent shade to the walkers — and seemed veritable trees by reason of the height of the land from which they sprouted. The road, muddy through this stretch from a rivulet tributary to the mill brook, meandered first this way, then that, as slope and pitch dictated. Dietrich had wondered at times what sort of place Bear Valley might be that travelers seemed disinclined to go straight there.

Near the common pasture, the road shed its subterranean aspect and emerged onto the shoulder of the hill, a gentle swell of land that marked the first pitch into the Katerinaberg. The sun was more unremittingly present here, with even the small shade of the hedgerows gone. Someone had opened the gate between the commons and the autumn fields so that the village cows could graze on the stubble and deposit their manure for the fall planting.

From the higher ground of the meadow, yellow with goose-blooms, they spied Heinrich Altenbach’s homestead on the track to Stag’s Leap. Altenbach had left the manor several years since to drain some marshland. Being waste, the marsh had been claimed for no lord’s manor, and Altenbach had built on it a cottage so he would not have to walk each day to his fields.

“I suppose every man would rather live on his own land,” Max suggested when Dietrich had remarked the farmhouse. “If he owned his own plow and beasts, and had no wish to share them with his neighbor. But it is a far run to the castle should an army pass this way, and those neighbors might not open the gate to him.”

On the far side of the meadow, the forest glowered softly black. Thin streamers of white smoke twisting among the birch and pine and oak. Dietrich and Max paused under a solitary oak to drink from their water-skins. Dietrich had some chestnuts in his scrip, which he shared with the sergeant. The latter, for his part, studied the plumes of smoke with great attention, juggling the nuts in his hand like a set of knucklebones.

“Easy to get lost in there,” Dietrich commented.

“Stay to the game trails,” Max said, half-distracted. “Don’t hare off into the brush.” He popped the meat from a chestnut and threw it into his mouth.

The forest was cooler than the open meadow. Sunlight penetrated only in shattered fragments, dappling the hazel bushes and bluebells underneath the canopy. A few strides and Dietrich was swallowed up. The harvest sounds grew distant, then muffled, then ceased entirely to argue with the silence. He and Max passed among the oaks and larches and black spruce on grumbling carpets of last year’s leaves. Dietrich soon lost all sense of direction and stayed close by the sergeant.