Eifelheim

Albrecht had written, Experimentum solum certificat in talibus. Experiment is the only safe guide.

He silhouetted the woolen sleeve of his gown before the candle flame, and a smile slowly creased his lips. He felt that curious satisfaction that always enveloped him when he had reasoned his way to a question and then coaxed an answer from the world.

The woolen fibers of his sleeve stood also upright. Ergo, he thought, the impetus impressed upon his hair was both external and material, as a woolen cassock had no ghostly part to be frightened. So, the nameless dread that troubled him was no more than a reflection of that material impression upon his soul.

But the knowledge, however satisfying to the intellect, did not quiet the will.

Later, as Dietrich crossed to the church to pray the morning Mass, a whine drew his gaze to the shadowed corner beside the church steps and, in the flickering light from his torch, he saw a black and yellow dog cowering with its front paws crossed over its muzzle. The spots on its fur blended into the shadows so that it looked like some mad creature, half dog and half Swiss cheese. The cur followed Dietrich with hopeful eyes.

From the crest of Church Hill, Dietrich saw a lustrous glow, like the pale cast that bleached the morning skies, suffusing the Great Woods on the far side of the valley. But it was too early — and in the wrong sky. Atop the church spire, blue-flamed corposants swirled around the cross. Had even those asleep in the cemetery been aroused by the dread? But that sign was not promised until the last days of the world.

He uttered a hasty prayer against occult danger and turned his back on the strange manifestations, facing the church walls, seeking comfort in their familiarity.

My wooden cathedral, Dietrich had sometimes called it, for above its stone foundation St. Catherine’s oak walls and posts and doors had been whittled by generations of earnest woodsmen into a wild congeries of saints and beasts and mythic creatures.

Beside the door, the sinuous figure of St. Catherine herself rested her hand upon the wheel whereon they had thought to break her. Who has triumphed, her wan smile asked? Those who turned the wheel are gone, but I abide. Upon the doorposts, lion, eagle, man, and ox twisted upward toward the tympanum, in which the Last Supper had been carved.

Elsewhere: Gargoyles leered from the roof’s edge, fantastic in horns and wings. In spring, their gaping mouths disgorged the flow of melting snows from the steep-pitched tiles of the roof. Under the eaves, kobolds hammered. On lintels and window jambs, in panels and columns, yet more fantastic creatures were relieved from the wood. Basilisks glared, griffins and wyverns reared. Centaurs leaped; panthers exuded their sweet, alluring breath. Here, a dragon fled from Amaling knights; there, a sciopod stood on his single enormous foot. Headless blemyae stared back from eyes affixed to their bellies.

The oaken corner-posts of the building had been carved into the images of mountain giants upholding the roof. Grim and Hilde and Sigenot and Ecke, the villagers called them; and Ecke, at least, seemed a proper name for a corner-post. Someone with a sense of humor had worked the pedestal of each column into the form of a weary and irritable dwarf upholding the giant and glaring with resignation at passers-by.

The wonderful riot of figures, emerging from the wood but never entirely separate, seemed indeed to be a living part of it. Somewhere, he thought, there are creatures like these.

When the wind blew hard or the snow lay heavy upon the roof, the menagerie would whisper and groan. It was only the shifting and bending of joists and rafters, yet it often seemed as if Sigenot rumbled and dwarfish Alberich squeaked and St. Catherine hummed a small tune to herself. On most days, the murmuring walls amused him, but not today. With the unease that lay upon him, Dietrich feared that the Four Giants would suddenly unburden themselves and bring the whole edifice down upon him.

More than one cottage below the hill now showed a flicker of candle light behind its windows, and atop Manfred’s keep on the other side of the little valley, the night watch paced in unwonted alertness, peering first one way then another for the approach of some unseen enemy.

A figure stumbled toward him from the village, recovered, slipped in the dirt, and a thin sob carried in the early morning air. Dietrich raised his torch and waited. Was the heralded menace even now slouching brazenly toward him?

But even before it fell to its knees breathlessly before him, the figure had resolved itself into Hildegarde, the miller’s wife, bare-footed and with her hair a tangle, a hasty cloak thrown over her night smock. Dietrich’s torchlight glimmered on an unwashed face. A menace she may have been, but of another and long-familiar sort. For the miller’s wife to come before her pastor in this state, the matter must be urgent indeed.

“Ach, pastor!” she cried. “God has discovered my sins.”

God, Dietrich reflected, had not had far to look. He raised the woman to her feet. “God has known all our sins from the begi

“Then why has he awakened me today with such fear? You must shrive me.”

Eager to put walls between himself and the foreboding miasma, Dietrich led Hilde into the church; and was disappointed, if not surprised, to find his anxiety undiminished. Holy ground might hold the supernatural at bay until the end of time, but the merely natural intruded where it would.

In the stillness Dietrich heard a soft whisper, as of a small wind or a ru

The prayers cut off, and Joachim turned, rising in a quick, lithe movement. He wore a tattered, brown habit of long employment, carefully and repeatedly mended. The cowl shadowed sharply chiseled features: a small dark man with heavy brows and deep brooding eyes. He wet his lips with a quick motion of his tongue.

“Dietrich…?” the Minorite said, and the word quavered a little at the end.

“Don’t be afraid, Joachim. We all feel it. The beasts, too. It is some natural thing, a disturbance in the air, like silent thunder.”

Joachim shook his head and a curl of black hair fell across his brow. “Silent thunder?”

“I can think of no better way to describe it. It is like the bass pipe of a great organ that makes the glass shiver.” He told Joachim his reasoning with the wool.

The Minorite glanced at Hildegarde, who had lingered at the rear of the church. He rubbed both his arms under his robe and looked side to side. “No, this dread is God’s voice calling us to repentance. It is too terrible to be anything else!” He cried this in his preaching voice, so that the words came back from the statues that watched from their niches.

Joachim’s preaching favored gestures and colorful stories, while Dietrich’s own closely reasoned sermons often had a soporific effect on his flock. Sometimes he envied the monk his ability to stir men’s hearts; but only sometimes. Stirred, a heart could be a terrible thing.

“God may call,” he instructed the younger man, “by wholly materials means.” He turned the young man with a gentle pressure on his shoulder. “Go, vest the altar. The mass ‘Clamavérunt.’ The rubrics call for red today.”

A hard man to deal with, Dietrich thought as Joachim left, and a harder one to know. The young monk wore his rags with greater pride than the pope in Avignon his gilded crown. The Spirituals preached the poverty of Jesus and His Apostles and railed against the wealth of the clergy; but the Lord had blessed not the poor, but the poor in spirit — “Beati pauperes spiritu.” A clever distinction. As Augustine and Aquinas had noted, mere poverty was too easily attained to merit such a prize as Heaven.