Eifelheim

The air reeked of stale smoke and ashes and, overlaying it, a sharp smell, like salt and urine and sulfur all mixed together. They came soon to burnt land. There, hot wood glowered within split trunks, awaiting only a blast of air to unravel again into flames. The seared corpses of small animals lay tangled in the brush.

“Holzbre

“How did you — ?”

“You were thinking too loudly. I would not have asked you to accompany me, but Josef has not been seen since the fires and Lorenz fears for him and his apprentice.”

Max grunted. “The smith fears ru

“The wind was not supernatural,” Dietrich insisted, but with no great conviction.

The ruin grew more extensive the farther they walked. They saw trees broken off, uprooted, toppled, leaning one upon the other. Sunlight poured through holes in the canopy. “A giant has played at jack-straws,” said Dietrich.

“I’ve seen destruction like this,” Max said.

“Like this? Where?”

Max shook his head. “Only not so vast. Look how the trees lie here and how they lie over there, as if they have all fallen outward from some center.”

Dietrich gave him a look. “Why?”

“At the siege of Cividale down in the Friuli, nearly — oh, near twenty years ago, I think. Christ, I was young and stupid, ru

What quarrel was that of mine? Two of the German knights brought a pot-de-fer with the black powder. Well, it helped us carry the city, but one of the barrels burst while they were mixing the powder — they always do the mixing in the field, and I can see why. There was a crack like thunder and the wind-blast scattered men and equipment all about.” He looked again at the fallen trees. “Like those.”

“How large must a barrel of the black powder be to do so much damage?” Dietrich asked.

Max did not answer. A chittering sound, like the buzzing of locusts, filled the air — though it was the wrong year for locusts. Dietrich looked at the fallen trees and thought, The impetus came from that direction.

Finally, the sergeant blew his breath out. “Right, then. This way.” He turned away to follow the trail toward the kiln.

The clearing was a shallow pit fifty paces across and floored with a layer of ash and beaten earth. In the flattened center stood the kiln itself: a mound of earth and sod five long paces in diameter. But the earthen seal had been ripped away on one side, exposing the wood inside and allowing the wind to blast the fire. The sparks had been scattered into the woods, setting the fires whose remnants they had lately passed.

The Sixtus’ Day wind had rung the church bells on the far side of the valley. Here, it must have blown a hundred times stronger — harrowing the trees that surrounded the clearing, scattering the windbreaks that regulated the airflow into the kiln, peeling the earth from the kiln, gouging a cha

Dietrich stepped around the ruined kiln. A fan of burnt timbers and thatch marked where the charcoal-makers’ cottage had once stood. At the end of that spray, against the sagging trees on the far side of the clearing, Dietrich found Josef and his apprentice.

Their charred torsos lacked arms and legs and, in the lad’s case, a head. Dietrich searched his memory for the boy’s name, but it would not come. Both bodies had been smashed and broken, as if they had fallen from a great cliff, and both were skewered with splinters of wood. Yet, what wind could be so strong? Farther off, he saw a leg wedged in the fork of a cracked beech. He searched no further, but put his back to the terrible sight.

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” Max asked from the other side of the kiln. Dietrich nodded and, bowing his head, recited a short prayer in his heart. When he crossed himself, Max did the same.

“We’ll need a horse,” the sergeant said, “to carry the bodies out. Meanwhile, the kiln will serve for a crypt.”

It took only a few minutes, in the course of which Dietrich found the boy’s head. The hair had been burned off and the eyes had melted, and Dietrich wept over the charred remnant of the lad’s beauty. Anton. He remembered the name now. A comely lad, with much promise in his eyes. Josef had loved him greatly, as the son his solitary life had never granted.

When they had finished, they arranged the loose sod around the opening to provide as much protection as they could from animals.

Schweitzer jerked suddenly about and took a step toward the smoky woods behind him. A snapping of twigs faded rapidly in the distance. “We are watched,” he said.

“It didn’t sound like footsteps,” Dietrich suggested. “It sounded more like a deer, or a rabbit.”

The sergeant shook his head. “A soldier knows when he’s being watched.”

“Then, whoever these people are, they’re timid,” Dietrich told Max.

“I don’t think so,” Max answered without turning. “I think they are sentries. They run to take word back or to remain unseen. It’s what I would do.”

“Outlaw knights?”

“I doubt it.” He tapped the pommel of his Burgundian quillon. “France has employment enough. They needn’t live like poachers in a place like this.” After a few more minutes, he said. “He’s gone, at any rate. The Herr will be back on the morrow. We’ll see what his wishes are.”

IV. August, 1348

The Feast of St. Clare of Assisi

In the shimmering heat of an August afternoon, the Herr Manfred von Hochwald danced his palefridus up the Oberreid road to the amazement and delight of the peasants bent over the grain. First, came Wolfram the herald, astride a white je

In spring-sown fields now sagging with wheat, the women unbent from the reaping, sickles dangling from their numbed hands, and the men turned from sheaves half-bound to gape at the procession. They paused, mopped brows with kerchief or cap, traded uncertain looks, questions, guesses, exclamations, until all — villein and free, man and woman and child — drifted in one accord toward the road, gathering speed as they went, excitement building upon itself, splashing through the brook that bordered the fields, voices swelling from murmur to shout. Behind, atop the wagons, the wardens of autumn seethed over the lost afternoon, for the grain would ripen with or without the sickle. But the wardens, too, waved their caps at the noble procession, before tugging them firmly back into place.