Eifelheim

“The Council of Vie

“Or seemed to. Poor Peter Aureoli. He tried so hard to reconcile that decree to the teachings of the Fathers, but that’s what happens when you let a committee of amateurs muck around in these matters. Now, Dietl, give me an embrace and I will part to consider your problem.”

The two wrapped arms for a few moments before granting each other the kiss of peace. “God be with you, Willi,” Dietrich said when they parted.

“You ought to visit Freiburg more often,” the archdeacon said.

Outside the minster, Dietrich craned his neck searching the gargoyles infesting the eaves until he found the one that Gregor had mentioned: a demon clinging to the walls with spindly arms limbs, but with its ass stretched over the plaza. Ru

Dietrich’s laughter attracted the attention of a frowsy dame selling smoked fish at a nearby booth in the minster-place. “Good day, t’ye, priest,” the woman said in the accents of the Elsass. “Nothin’ like the Ladychurch where you come from, I wager.”

“No. Nothing like it. But here there is nothing like where I come from, either.”

She gave him a peculiar look. “Contrary, are ye? I knew a man like that once, I did. I could show him a beautiful sunrise and he would quote some Paris high-and-mighty who thought it might be the Earth turning below the sun. Always had a second way to look at things.” She cocked her head and studied him. “I saw y’ before, and y’ favor him some… Here, put your hand here. One thing I’d never forget is the touch of his hand on my breast.”

Dietrich recoiled, and the woman laughed. “But he weren’t no cold fish,” she said. “No he never recoiled from these sweet things. Nor from this more tart one, eh?” She laughed again, but slowly fell quiet. When Dietrich turned away, her voice halted him before he had taken more than a few paces. “They looked for ’im,” she said. “Maybe more’n I did, for they wanted to hang ’im and I didn’t want near that much. I don’t suppose he was the right man for me, anyways, finespoken as he was. They don’t look for him no more, but they might still hang ’im, if they happen on ’im.”

Dietrich hurried across the square to Butter Alley, where he vanished into the nest of streets that led to the Swabian Gate. At the last, he glanced behind and saw that a boy had joined the fishwife — a dark-haired lad of perhaps twelve years, lithe and well-muscled and dressed as a fisherman. Dietrich hesitated a moment longer, but though the boy spoke to his mother, he never lifted his gaze and so Dietrich never saw his face.

Over the next few days, as the market bustled, Dietrich avoided Minster Place. He arranged with a coppersmith to draw the ingot. “Provided,” Dietrich told him, “you draw it fine enough to pass through this eye.” And he held up a device that the Krenk had given him.

The smith whistled. “The gage is surpassing fine, but naturally the finer the draw the less copper I use, so I certainly have the motive.” He laughed a little sharply. Behind him, his apprentice sat on a swing with the drawing pliers in his hand, watching his master negotiate.

“When will it be done?”

“I must draw the wire in several reductions so it does not harden. You see, first I soften it with fire, and hammer a bit of the material through a die-hole. Then my apprentice grips it with the pliers and swings back and forth, pulling with each swing more wire through the hole. But I ca

Dietrich was not interested in the finer points of coppersmithing. “So long as the breaks are not hammered together.”

The coppersmith studied the ingot with covert avarice. “Two hundred shoes… Three days.”

In three days, the market would end and Dietrich could leave this town of prying eyes. “That pleases. I will be back in that time.”

He bespoke also a glazier on the cost of repairing the broken church windows and secured a promise from the man to come up the mountain in the springtime. “I hear ye’ve got locusts up there,” the glazier said. “Poor harvest. A fellow down from St. Blasien said he heard locusts all over the Katerinaberg.” The man thought a little more, then added with a wink, “An’ he says the monks at St. Blaisien drove off a demon. Hideous lookin’ creature broke into the store-rooms to steal food. So the monks set a trap one night and repelled it with fire. The demon fled toward the Feldberg, but the monks burned down half their kitchen in the feat.” He tossed his head, laughing. “Burned down half their kitchen. Heh. You folks live near the Feldberg. You didn’t see the creature come to nest, did you?”

Dietrich shook his head. “No, we did not see that.”

The glazier winked. “I think the monks were celebrating the wine harvest. I seen plenty o’ demons that way, myself.”

When the market ended, the wagons departed for the Hochwald with bags of coin, bolts of cloth, and a satisfied smile on Everard’s face. Dietrich did not go with them, for the coppersmith’s promise had proven optimistic. “It just wants a different draw,” the man insisted. “The gauge is so fine that it keeps breaking.” It was a plea to accept a thicker wire, but Dietrich would not hear it.

He misliked tarrying, yet without the wire the Krenken would stay forever, and he had had a vision of what that would mean. They might still hang ’im, if they happen on ’im. He stayed in the chapter house at the minster, dining with Willi and the others, but he never left by the south doors and he never ventured toward the River Dreisam, where the fishermen’s huts lined the autumn-starved flow. He prayed for the woman and for her boy — and for her man, if she had found a new one — and he prayed that he might at least remember her name. Now and then, he wondered if he had mistaken a fishwife’s ribald jape. It had all happened somewhere else. It had all fallen into a shambles under the walls of Strassburg, trampled under the hooves of the Alsatian chivalry, far from the-Breisgau. It asked too much of coincidence that she be here. It demanded too much cruelty of God.

The wire was at last ready on the Commemoration of Pirminius of Reichenau, and Dietrich departed with a party of miners bound for the Ore Chest, accompanying them until their roads diverged and he took the northern route to Kirchgartner Valley. There he found a caravan from Basel, led by a Jew named Samuel de Medina, in the employ of Duke Albrecht.

Dietrich thought De Medina oily and arrogant, but he had a large body of armed guards hired in Freiburg and commanded by a Hapsburg captain with a writ of safe passage signed by Albrecht. Dietrich swallowed his pride and spoke to the Jew’s steward, Eleazar Abolafia who, like his master, spoke a Spanish corrupted by many words of Hebrew. “I don’t forbid you walking with us,” the man said with an air of vexation, “but if you ca

The caravan set forth the next morning with a jingle of bits and groaning of wagon wheels. De Medina rode upon a je