Eifelheim

Dietrich turned and cuffed him smartly. “Can demons die?” he cried. “Who has done this?” He looked from one to another of the small crowd. “Which of you killed this man?”

He received denials on all sides and Seppl’ rubbed his ear and glowered. “Man?” he cried under his breath. “Where is his ‘crowing rooster’? He sports no manhood.” And indeed, the creature proved more featureless than a eunuch.

Lorenz said, “I think he burrowed into the snow and the cold took him.”

Dietrich studied how the body lay and admitted that there was none of the pungent ichor that served the visitors for blood, no evidence of bruises. He recalled that Arnold was especially melancholic even among the Krenken, and given to solitude. “Has anyone summoned Baron Grosswald from the Hof? No? You, Seppl’, go now. Yes, you. Bring Max, too. Someone tell Klaus.” Dietrich turned away to find that Fra Joachim had come down from the parsonage to gaze upon the corpse with dismay.

“He was my best catechumen,” the monk said, dropping to his knees in the snow. “I thought he would be the first to come over to us.”

“And what demon,” said Volkmar Bauer gravely, “could live with that?”

Hans and the Kratzer had come with Joachim. The philosopher stood in frozen regard of his friend’s body, but Hans stepped forward and pulled the parchment from the alchemist’s grasp.

“What does it say?” Dietrich asked, but he may as well have asked the carving of St. Catherine, for Hans did not move for a long time.

Hans at last passed the parchment to the Kratzer. “It is part of your prayer,” he said. “’This is my body. Whoever eats it shall live.’”

At this evidence of piety, brother Joachim wept openly and ever after, he would name Arnold in the Meménto étiam of the Mass.

Both Hans and the Kratzer remained silent.

XIII. January, 1348

Rock Monday

The Monday after Epiphany — called Skirt Monday by the women, Plow Monday by the men — marked the end of the Christmas holy days. In most years, the men of the village contended in races to see who could plow a furlong the fastest but, with the ground snow-capped, the races were not held. But Skirt Monday went forward, and the women of Oberhochwald gleefully seized the men captive and held them for ransom. The name of the revel was a pun, for skirt and revenge sounded much the same on German tounges.

Dietrich tried, with little success, to explain the festivity to Hans and the other Krenken; but the delight of reversal escaped those bound to their estate by instinct. When Dietrich explained that on All Fools Day a gärtner would be chosen to rule as Herr for a day, they regarded him with incomprehension — and not a little horror.

Wanda Schmidt captured Klaus Müller and held him in her husband’s smithy to await a ransom that proved long in coming. Some said that it was a good match, for the miller and the smith’s wife were of a size and nearly of an equal strength. “Upper and nether millstone,” Lorenz joked as he was led away by Ulrike Bauer. “They’d grind away the likes of me between them.” The men of the village, for their part, sought capture by Hildegarde Müller. The miller’s wife, however, demanded only a donation toward the relief of the destitute. Trude Metzger took away Nickel Langerma

A fight broke out when A

Later, when Jakob and Bertha could not find their son to fire the oven, they found that both he and his meager belongings had vanished, and Jakob cursed the young man as a bummer.

Dietrich feared that the lad would carry tales of the Krenken to Freiburg, but Manfred refused to pursue him. “In that cold, through those drifts? No, he was a fool to run off, and likely a dead fool ere long.”

At that rebuke, Dietrich knelt in church for three evenings thereafter, chastising himself that he had worried over his own safety, and not that of the distraught young man.

At tierce, on the commemoration of Priscilla of the Catacombs, the Kratzer summoned Dietrich and Lorenz to meet in Manfred’s hall with Hans and a third Krenk whom Dietrich did not know, and from whose girdle depended many curious tools. The Krenken spread across the banquet table parchments richly illuminated with intricate figures; though for all their fine precision, the execution was poor, lacking both the color and brilliance of French work and the wild exuberance the Irish. Vines lay at precise angles and bore curiously geometric fruit: circles and squares and triangles, some with writing. Joachim, he thought, even with his indifferent draughting hand, could easily execute a more pleasing illumination.

“This drawing,” Hans explained, “is a -. What do you call it when something goes forth and comes back to its starting place?”

“A circuit, as when Everard makes a circuit of the Herr’s estate.”

“Many thank. This circuit helps move our cog through the inward-curling directions to the other world. Or so the ‘servant of the essence’ has said.” By this, he indicated the third Krenk, who bore the name Gottfried. “His more cu

This essence is contained in… storage barrels, but these barrels grow ever more depleted from lack of the generative power. This may restore them.”

Dietrich stared at the illumination. “This device will speed your departure?”

Hans did not turn his head. “It may not serve,” he admitted, “but it must be tried or we will be ‘saved by the alchemist’.” At this, the Kratzer scissored his mandibles sharply and the servant of the essence stiffened. Hans bent over the “circuit.” Dietrich had noticed how the alchemist’s suicide had affected his strange guests. They had become more subdued, but also snapped frequently at one another.

“Is the essence that runs through the copper,” Dietrich wondered aloud, “an earth, water, air, or fire?”

Hans said nothing, so the Kratzer answered. “We call those the… ‘four seemings of a material.’ Fire, I suppose. It can burn.”

“That is because fire atoms are tetrahedral, with many sharp points. It must move very fast, that being an attribute of fire.”

Hans, who had been “reading the circuit,” raised his head from the illuminated manuscript at that and parted his soft lips in the krenkish smile. “Yes, very fast indeed.”

“Fire seeks always its natural position, to move upward to the fourth sublunar sphere.”

“Well, this sort of fire seeks a lower position,” Hans said. “Or ‘potency,’ I think you say.”

“Then it must partake also of water, which moves toward a lower sphere — though fire and water, being contrary, do not easily mix. So, your fire-water must then flow through the copper cha