Eifelheim

“Our cart is broken,” the servant said.

Dietrich tried his shoulder and winced. “What?”

“Our cart is broken, and its Herr is dead. And we must stay here and die and never see our homeland again. The steward of the cart, who rules now, said that to reveal this would show our weakness, and so invite an attack.”

“The Herr would not…”

“We hear the words you speak,” the Krenk said. “We see the things you do, and all the words for these things the Heinzelmä

VII. September, 1348

The Apparition of Our Lady of Ransom

Some in the village, when they saw the bruises that their priest had endured at the hands of those he had sought to help, wished to drive the ‘lepers’ from the Great Woods; but Herr Manfred von Hochwald declared that none might trespass there save by his grace. He stood a squad of armsmen on the Bear Valley road to turn back any who, from curiosity or revenge, sought the lazaretto. In the following days, Schweitzer’s men turned back Oliver, the baker’s son, with several other young men of the village; Theresia Gresch and her basket of herbs; and, to Dietrich’s astonishment, Fra Joachim of Herbholzheim.

The motives of young Oliver and his friends were easily known. The deeds of knights were their bread and ale. Oliver grew his hair to shoulder length to ape his betters, and wore his knife tucked sword-like into his belt. The love of a good fight quickened them, and revenge for their pastor provided but a finer-sounding reason for fist and cudgel. Dietrich gave them a tongue lashing and told them that if he could forgive those who struck him, they could do likewise.

The motives that drove Theresia toward the Great Wood were at once more transparent and more opaque, for in her herb basket she had placed with the rue and the yarrow and the pot marigold, certain obnoxious mushrooms and the keen knife that she sometimes used to let blood. Dietrich questioned her on these items when Schweitzer’s men had returned her to the parsonage, and proper answers could indeed be found in Abbess Hildegarde’s Physica; yet Dietrich wondered if she had had other employments in mind. The thought troubled him, but he could not logically ask her motives when he had not yet established her purpose.

As for Joachim, the friar said only that poor and landless men needed God’s word more than most. When Dietrich replied that the lepers needed succor more than sermons, Joachim laughed.

When Max and Hilde went to the lazaretto on St. Eustace Day, Dietrich pleaded that he was still too sore and repaired instead to the refrectory of his parsonage, where he ate an oat porridge that Theresia had cooked in the outbuilding. Theresia sat across the table from him, absorbed in her needlepoint. He had beside the porridge a breast of hazel-hen that had been rubbed with sage and bread and a little wine and boiled. The hen was dry in spite of all, and every time he bit into it, his mouth would hurt because his jaw was swollen and a tooth on that side had come loose.

“A tincture made of clove would help the tooth,” Theresia said, “were clove not so dear.”

“How well to hear of absent treatments,” Dietrich muttered.

“Time must be the healer,” she answered. “Until then, only porridges or soups.”

“Yes, ‘O doctor Trotula’.”

Theresia shrugged off the sarcasm. “My herbs and bone-setting are enough for me.”

“And your blood-letting,” Dietrich reminded her.

She smiled. “Sometimes blood wants letting.” When Dietrich looked at her sharply, she added, “It’s a matter of balancing the humors.”

Dietrich could not penetrate her sentence. Had she intended revenge on the Krenken? Blood for blood? Beware the rage of the placid, for it smolders long after more lively flames have died.

He took another bite of hazel-hen and placed a hand against his jaw. “The Krenken deal mighty blows.”

“You must keep the poultice in place. It will help the bruising. They are terrible people, these Krenken of yours, to treat you so, dear father.” The words tugged at his heart. “They are lost and afraid. Such men often lash out.” Theresia attended her needlepoint. “I think brother Joachim is right. I think they need another sort of aid than that which you — and the miller’s wife — have been bringing them.”

“If I can forgive them, so can you.”

“Have you, then, forgiven them?”

“But naturally.”

Theresia laid her needlepoint in her lap. “It is not so natural to forgive. Revenge is natural. Strike a cur and it will snap. Stir up a wasp-nest and they will sting. That was why it took such a one as our blessed Lord to teach us to forgive. If you have forgiven those people, why have you not gone back, while the soldier and the miller’s wife have?”

Dietrich laid the breast aside, half-eaten. Buridan had argued that there could be no action at a distance, and forgiveness was an action. Could there be foregiveness at a distance? A pretty question. How could he move the Krenken to depart if he did go to them? But the krenkish ferocity terrified him. “A few days more rest,” he said, postponing the decision. “Come, bring the sweetcakes now by the fire, and I will read to you from De usu partium.”

His adopted daughter brightened. “I do so love to hear you read, especially the books of healing.”

On the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, Dietrich limped to the fields to assess the plowing on the tithe-lands — which he farmed to Felix, Herwyg One-eye, and others. The second planting had begun and so the lowing of oxen and the neighing of horses mixed with the jingle of harness and whippletree, the curses of the plowmen, and the whapping of mattocks and clodding beetles. Herwyg had broken the field in April and was plowing more deeply now. Dietrich spoke briefly with the man and was content with his labors.

He noticed Trude Metzger behind the plow on the neighboring manse. Her oldest son, Melchior, tugged the lead ox by a strap while her younger son, a stripling, swung a mattock not much smaller than he was. Herwyg, turning his own team about on the headland, volunteered the wisdom that the plow was man’s work.

“It’s dangerous for a boy so small to lead the oxen,” Dietrich said to his farmer. “That was how her husband was trampled.” A roll of distant thunder echoed from the Katerinaberg and Dietrich glanced up at a cloudless sky.

Herwyg spat into the dirt. “Thunder-weather,” he said. “Though I’ve smelt no rain. But ’twas a horse what trampled Metzger, not an ox. Greedy fool worked the beast too long. Sundays, too, though I’d not speak ill of the dead. Your ox, he comes on steady, but a horse can take a mind to rear and kick. That’s why I drive oxen. Hai! Jakop! Heyso! Pull!” Herwyg’s wife goaded Heyso, the lead ox, and the team of six began to plod forward. The wet, heavy clay slid off the plow’s mouldboard, forming a ridge on either side of the furrow. “I’d help her,” Herwyg said with a toss of his head toward Trude. “But her tongue be no sweeter nor her man’s ever were. And I have my own manses to plow yet, after I finish with yours, pastor.”

It was a courteous invitation to leave; so Dietrich crossed the berm to Trude’s land, where her son still struggled to turn the team. Each time the ox shifted its stance, Dietrich expected the lad to be crushed underfoot. The younger boy had sat down on the ridge and was weeping from weariness, the mattock fallen from numb and bleeding fingers. Trude, meanwhile, lashed the oxen with her whip and her boy with her tongue. “Pull him by the nose, you lazy brat!” she cried. “Left, you doodle, to the left!” When she saw Dietrich, she turned a mud-streaked face on him. “And what do you have, priest? More useless advise, like old One-eye?”