Eifelheim

“Beings act always to their own gain: to obtain food or stimulate the senses, to win acceptance in one’s place, to reduce the labors needed to possess these things.”

“I ca

“Acceptance,” was the Krenk’s swift reply. “Her place in the village.”

“That won’t make the cabbage fat. A man in want of food may drain a swamp — or steal a furrow; in want of pleasure, he may love his wife — or fick another’s. The way to heaven is not found in partial goods, but only in the perfect Good. To help others,” he said, “is a good in itself. Our Lord’s cousin James wrote: ‘God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble,’ and, ‘Religion pure and undefiled is this: to give aid to orphans and widows in their desperation.’”

“Manfred’s cousin carries no weight with the Krenk. He is not — our — lord, nor is Manfred so strong as Gschert has feared. When his own folk defied him over the haycocks, he did not strike them as they deserved, but allowed — his servants — to decide the matter for him. The act of a weakling. And they came back, his own underlings, and said that the gärtners had right. Duty binds them to gather Manfred’s hay, but not to place the cocks in the carts.”

Dietrich nodded. “So stands it in the weistümer. It is the custom of the manor. ”

The Krenk drummed on the rafter and leaned into the ambit of the guttering candlelight so far that Dietrich thought he would topple off. “But that leaves next year the haycocks standing in the fields,” Hans said, “while the serfs wait in the curia to unload. That is — thought-lacking.”

A small smile crossed Dietrich’s lips as he recalled the muddle that had ensued in the court following the findings of the inquest. “We gain some small amusement from paradoxes. It is a form of entertainment, like singing or dancing.”

“Singing—”

“Another time I will explain that.”

“It is dangerous for one who rules to show weakness,” Joha

“I do not deny that Gschert is choleric in his humor,” Dietrich said dryly. Lacking true blood, the Krenken could not balance their choler properly with a sanguine humor. Instead, they possessed a yellow-green ichor; but as he was no doctor of the medical arts, Dietrich was uncertain which humor the ichor might govern. Perhaps one unknown to Galen. “But no worries,” he told Hans. “The hay cocks will be loaded into the carts again next mowing season, but the gärtners will do so not from duty but from charitas — or for a fee for the added labor.”

“Charity.”

“Ja. To seek the good of another and not your own.”

“You do so — question.”

“Not so often as the good Herr commanded; but yes. It gathers merit for us in heaven.”

“Does the Heinzelmä

“I would not phrase it so…”

“Then all fits.”

Dietrich waited, but Hans said nothing more. The silence lengthened and waxed oppressive, and he had begun to suspect that his stealthy visitor had stolen away — The Krenken were not long on the formalities of greeting and farewell — when Hans spoke once more.

“I will say now a thing, though it shows us weak. We are a mixed folk. Some belong to the ship, and its captain was their Herr. The captain died in the shipwreck and Gschert now rules.

Others form a school of philosophers whose task is to study new lands. It was they who hired the ship. The Kratzer is not their Herr, but the other philosophers allow him to speak for them.”

“Primus inter pares,” Dietrich suggested. “First among equals.”

“So. A useful phrase. I will tell him. In the third band are those who travel to see strange and distant sights, places where the well-known have lived or where great events have happened… What call you such folk?”

“Pilgrims.”

“So. The ship was to visit several places favored by pilgrims before bearing the philosophers onward to a new-found land. The ship’s company and the school of philosophers say always that on such journeys into the unknown there may be no return. ‘It has happened; it will happen.’ ”

“You have right,” Dietrich said. “In my father’s time, some Franciscan scholars sailed with the brothers Vivaldi to seek India, which Bacon’s map placed but a short distance westward across the Ocean Sea. But nothing was again heard of them after they departed Cape Non.”

“Then you have the same sentence in your head: A new voyage may fare one-way. But in the pilgrims’ heads there stands always a return, and our failure to reach the correct heaven must be from someone’s… I think your word is ‘sin.’ So, some pilgrims place our present failure on Gschert’s weakness, and even some of the ship’s company say that he is nothing beside he who was captain before. One thinking himself stronger may seek to replace him. And if so, Gschert will likely raise his neck, for it is in my head that he may think the same.”

“It is a grave matter,” Dietrich said, “to overthrow the established order, for who is to say but that the result may not be worse. We had such an uprising twelve years ago. An army of peasants laid waste the country-side, burning manor houses, killing lords and priests and Jews.”

And Dietrich recalled with sudden, unbearable immediacy, the swirling intoxication of being swept along by something greater and more powerful and more right than oneself, the safety and arrogance of numbers. He remembered noble families immolated inside their own houses; Jew moneylenders paid in full with hemp and faggot. There had been a preacher among them, a man of some learning, and he had exhorted the crowds with the words of James:

Woe to you rich! Your wealth has rotted, your fine wardrobe is moth-eaten.

Your gold and silver has tarnished and their corrosion is a testament against you!

Here, crying aloud, are the wages you withheld from the serfs who worked your fields! The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord. You lived in wanton luxury on the earth; you fattened yourself for the day of slaughter!

And the Armleder army — it called itself an army, with self-proclaimed captains, and wore leather brassards for livery — sweaty, lust-mad, impatient for loot, foreboding their own death-warrants, would join in the last, so that the shout, “Day of Slaughter!” hoarse from a thousand throats, were the last words many a wealthy lord or Jew heard in this life. Manor houses lit the night with their flames, so that a man might travel the Rhineland by their illumination as if by day. Merchant wagon trains plundered by the roadside. Itinerant peddlers, promoted by hue and cry to cosmopolitan Jew money-lenders, torn apart. Free-town burgers, fled within ancient walls, watching from the parapets while their guild-halls and ware-houses burned.

But Burg walls had withstood the undisciplined mobs, and rage faded to a realization that now only the gibbet awaited. From stone citadels had poured forth a river of steel: Herrs and knights; armsmen and guild militias and feudal levies; lances and halberds and crossbows hacking and piercing flesh and bone. Coursers swifter than the most eager of flying heels. A rag-tag of farm implements, clubs, knives, billhooks thrown down by the roadside. Chivalry in mail coats riding down peasants lacking so much as breeches beneath their smocks, so that they littered the highways with the shit and piss of their terror and showed their shriveled privates as they dangled from every tree limb in the Elsass and the Breisgau.