Eifelheim

Dietrich hesitated. “Manfred’s told you, hasn’t he? About the Krenken.”

Everard would not meet his eyes. “I don’t know which would be worse: to see them face to face, or to imagine them.” He shivered. “Yes, he’s told me about them; and Max, who uses his head for more than helmet padding, swears they are mortal. For myself, I have a wagon train to organize. Don’t bother me. Thierry and the others arrive on the morrow, and I’m not ready.”

Dietrich crossed the valley to the stables, where Gunther already waited with a fine roadhorse. “It sorrows me,” Gunther said, “that I ca

Je

On the road, Dietrich took his mount to a trot, enjoying the rhythm of the creature and the feel of the wind on his face. It had been a long while since he had ridden so fine a beast as this, and he lost his thoughts for a time in sheer animal pleasure. But he should not have let his pride master him. Gunther might wonder how a mere parish priest had won such horse skills.

Manfred no doubt had his reasons, but Dietrich wished he had not told Everard about the Krenken. Word would leak out in the end, but there was no point augering holes in the bucket.

At the place where the trees had been blown down, he spied the miller’s je

Although the day was high, he was soon enveloped in a green gloaming. Spruce and fir reached into the sky, while the more humble hazel, shorn now of their raiment, huddled naked beneath them. He had not gone far when he heard soft, womanly gasps echoing off the trees, as if the forest itself moaned. Dietrich’s heart beat faster. The forest, always menacing, took on a more sinister aspect. Groaning dryads reached to embrace him with dry, naked fingers.

I’m lost, he thought, and he looked about in panic for Max’s signs. He turned and a branch scratched his cheek. He gasped, ran, crashed into a white birch. He twisted away, desperate now to reach his horse. Coming to a swell of ground, he slipped and fell. He pressed his head against the ancient leafy mat and musky earth, waiting for the forest to grab him.

But the expected touch did not come, and he grew slowly aware that the moans had ceased. Raising his head, he saw below him, not the clearing where his horse awaited, but the brook where he and Max and Hilde had paused that first day. Tied to a spindly oak that twisted from the bank of the stream stood two rouncies.

Max and Hilde were there, lacing a codpiece in place, tugging a skirt back down. Max brushed leaves and dirt and fir needles from Hilde’s coverslut, squeezing her breasts while he did.

Dietrich crawled backward, unseen. Max had been right. Sound did carry in the forest. Then, rising, he scrabbled back among the spruce, blundering from clearing to copse until fortune showed him the blazes, and he followed them to where he had left the palfrey.

The je

Since Max was returning already to the village, Dietrich headed his mount also homeward, happy that he need not proceed to the lazaretto. But, coming to a bend in the trail, the beast balked. Dietrich clamped the barrel with his thighs until the horse had bolted a few paces back toward the kiln. At that, it calmed somewhat and Dietrich spoke soothingly. The palfrey rolled wild, round eyes and whickered nervously.

“Be still sister horse,” he told her. Fitting the head-harness in place, he said, “Hans. Are you on the kiln trail?”

Only the rustling of pine needles and dry branches fell upon his ears. That, and the inevitable, distant chitterings of the Krenken, which, being so natural a sound, seemed more a part of the forest than had the amorous cries of Hilde Müller in the arms of Max Schweitzer.

“Come no nearer,” said the voice of the Heinzlmä

Dietrich remained still. The sun was visible through the iron-gray lacework of trees, but stood already lower than he wished. “You bar my path,” Dietrich said.

“Gschert’s — artisans — want for two hundred shoe-lengths of copper wire. Know your kind the art of wire-drawing — question. It must be drawn to the fineness of a pin, with no cracks.”

Dietrich rubbed his chin. “Lorenz is a blacksmith. Copper may lie beyond his art.”

“So. Where finds one a coppersmith — question.”

“In Freiburg,” Dietrich said. “But copper is dear. Lorenz might do the task from charity, but not a Freiburg guildsman.”

“I will give you a copper brick we have mined from rocks near here. The smith may keep whatever is not used for the wire.”

“And this wire will further your departure?”

“Lacking it, we ca

“There are… risks.”

“So. There are then limits to this ‘charity’ of yours, to this rent you owe the Herr-from-the stars. When he returns, he will thrash those who failed to do his bidding.”

“No,” said Dietrich. “That is not how he rules. His ways are mysterious to men.” And what better proof than this encounter, he thought. He glanced once toward the clouds, as if he expected to see Jesus there, laughing. “Na. Give me the ingot and I will see to its drawing.”

But Hans would not approach him, and left the ingot on the trail.

The wagons set forth the next day across the plateau to the rendezvous point, where they were joined by the wagon from Niederhochwald. Thierry von Hinterwaldkopf commanded the three knights and Max’s fifteen armsmen. Eugen bore the Hochwald ba

Others joined them along the way: one, from an imperial holding by Stag’s Leap and another from the manor of St. Oswald’s chapel. The chapter provided two more armsmen and Einhardt, the imperial knight, brought his junker and five more armsmen. Thierry, seeing his small force thus augmented, gri

From above the gorge, Dietrich heard that eerie whisper in which distant valleys speak — a patois formed from the wind through the naked branches and evergreen needles below, from the rushing brook cascading off the escarpment, from a choir of grasshoppers and other insects.

The wagon track switchbacked down the face of the Katerinaberg. Inhospitable patches of gray stone and barren ground alternated with copses of desolate, wind-shorn beeches. The road ahead would only a few hundred feet below them, but across insuperably steep pitches, so that Dietrich sometimes spied the vanguard coming from the other direction. Footpaths ran off in directions wagons could not follow. He saw ancient stairs carved into the stone hillside and wondered who had cut them?