Eifelheim

Hilde stared at the sergeant with a peculiar intensity. “What sort of man enjoys killing?”

“A living one.”

That utterance was greeted by silence from both the priest and the miller’s wife; and in that silence they heard through the continuo of chittering locusts, the sound of distant hammers. Max craned his neck. “That way. Close. Move quietly. Sound carries in a forest.”

Nearing the source, Dietrich heard a chorus in an arrhythmic but not unpleasing mix. Drums, perhaps. Or rattles. Beneath it all, rasping and clicking. One sound, he could identify: the chunk of ax on tree, followed by the peculiar crackling rush of a toppling fir. “Now,” said Max, “we can’t have that. Those are the Herr’s trees.” He waved the others back and crept forward on cat feet to the edge of the screen of trees that marked the top of the ridge. There, he stiffened and Dietrich, who had come up behind him, whispered, “What is it?”

Max turned and cried, “Run, for your soul’s sake!”

Dietrich instead grabbed the sergeant and said, “What…,” before he too saw what lay below.

A great, circular swathe had been cut out of the forest, as if a giant had swung a scythe through it. Trees lay broken in all directions. In the center of the fall was a white building, as large as an abbot’s tithe barn, with doors along its side lying open. A dozen figures in suspended activity stared up the ridge at Max and Dietrich.

They were not landless men, at all, Dietrich saw.

They were not men.

Spindly, gangly, misjointed. Bodies festooned with ragged strips of cloth. Gray skin suffused with blots of pale green. Long, hairless torsos surmounted by expressionless faces lacking nose and ear, but dominated by huge, golden, globular eyes, faceted like diamonds, that looked nowhere but saw everything. Ante

Only their mouths showed expression: Working softly, or hanging half-open, or shut into firm lines. Soft, moist lips parted two ways at either end, so that they seemed to smile and scowl at once. Twin strips of some horny substance lay in the folds at either end of the lips and a broken sound lifted from them as of distant locusts.

One creature was supported by two of its fellows. It opened its mouth as if to speak; but what issued forth was not words, but a yellow pus that dribbled down its chin. Dietrich tried to shriek, but his throat was choked with fear. Nightmares arose from childhood of the great stone gargoyles of the Köln Minster come alive in the night to steal him away from his mother’s bed. He turned, flight in mind, only to find that two more of the creatures had come up behind him. He smelled the sharp tang of urine and his heart pounded like the Schmidmühlen trip-hammers. Were these monsters the folk that spread the pest?

Max whispered, “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” over and over. Otherwise, all was hushed. Birds silent, only the low susurrus of the wind. The forest beckoned, its bracken and recesses a lie of safety. If he ran, he would become lost — but was that not better than to stay and be lost for all eternity?

Yet he was all that stood between these apparitions and his two companions, for only he had been consecrated with the power to cast out demons. From the corners of his eyes he saw Max’s fingers frozen on the hilt of his quillon.

Dietrich’s right hand inched up his chest and gripped his pectoral, holding the Crucified One before him like a shield. A demon responded by reaching slowly toward a scrip that hung from his belt — only to have his hand stayed by his companion. The hand had six fingers, Dietrich noticed, not a comforting number. He tried to speak the words of exorcism — I, a priest of Jesus Christ, do abjure you unclean spirits… - but his throat was spitless.

A shrill buzz pierced the air, and every head turned toward the barn, from which another creature had emerged, this one dwarfish and with an oversized head. It ran toward them and one of the taller demons let out a clacking ululation and charged after it. To do what? To rip their souls from their very bodies?

At that, the tableau broke.

Dietrich cried out.

Max drew his quillon.

The demon behind them pulled a strange, shiny tube from his pouch and pointed it at them.

And Hildegarde Müller staggered down the ridge toward the demons below.

She stopped once and looked back, locking gazes with Dietrich. Her mouth parted as if to speak; then she set her shoulders and continued forward. Oddly, they drew back from her.

Dietrich seized his fear and watched the unfolding drama with dreadful concentration. God, grant me the grace to understand! He felt that much depended on his understanding.

Hildegarde halted before the demon spewing pus from his mouth and she extended both hands to him. The hands clenched, drew back, opened again. And the demon fell into her arms and collapsed against her.

With a thin, high cry, she went to her knees in the dust and ashes and wood chips and cradled the creature on her lap. The greenish-yellow ichor stained her clothing and gave forth a sweetish, sickly odor. “Welc—” She stopped, swallowed and began again. “Welcome, pilgrims, to the hospitality of my home. It pleases — . It pleases me that you might abide with us.” She stroked the thing’s head gently, looking much like the Sorrowful Mother in those Vesperbilden that had lately grown popular, save that her eyes were squeezed shut and she would not look on what she comforted.

Everything came clear for Dietrich in a sudden, dizzying rush. The monster cradled by the miller’s wife was badly injured. The effluvium that issued from him was a humor of some sort. The strips of cloth the demons wore were the torn and burnt remnants of clothing employed as bandages around limbs and torsos. Their bodies and faces were smoke-smudged and the motley of their skin signified dull-green bruises and scratches. And do hellish creatures suffer earthly torments? As for the smaller creature who had charged them buzzing like an angry hornet…

A child, Dietrich knew. And demons had no children; nor did they run and snatch them up into their arms as did the second creature racing close behind.

“Pastor?” said Max. His voice trembled. He was on the point of breaking, and with his hand on a knife. “What ma

“Not demons, sergeant.” Dietrich had seized hold of Max’s wrist. He glanced at Hildegarde — and the injured one. “Men, I think.”

“Men!”

Dietrich held fast. “Think, sergeant! Are there not centaurs, half-man and half-horse? And what of the blemyae of which Pliny wrote — men with their eyes in their torsos? Honorius Augustodenensis described and sketched dozens of such.” The words tumbled and fought each other, as if they fled from his own tongue. “Stranger beings than these grace the very walls of our church!”

“Creatures more talked of than seen!” Yet Dietrich felt the man untense, and so released his knife arm. The sergeant backed away a step, and then another. One more step and he runs, Dietrich thought.

Then would tales run through the village and down the mountainside to pool in the ears of Freiburg; and a commotion would ensue in this quiet fleck of earth. Preachers would find God or Devil in the hearing and a

A woodleafsinger trilled from the treetop and Dietrich noticed how the monsters shrank from an i