Eifelheim

“I have heard some among you,” the Kratzer said at last, “speak of a famine that befell many years ago.”

“More than thirty years past,” Dietrich said. “I had been lately received into orders and Joachim was not even born. It rained mightily for two years and the crops drowned in the fields from Paris to the Polish marches. There had been small hungers before, but in those years there was no grain anywhere in Europe.”

The Kratzer rubbed his forearms together forcefully. “I was told that people ate grass,” he said, “to fill their bellies — but the grass did not sustain them.”

Dietrich stopped eating and stared at the Krenk.

“What?” Joachim asked, sitting down.

Dietrich sensed the sidelong glance of the creature, who remained otherwise entranced by some i

“We have eked them out since the begi

Dietrich looked on his guest with horror and pity. “Hans and Gottfried may yet repair—”

The Kratzer kratzled his forearms. “That cow comes not off the ice.”

Praying a horse from Everard, Dietrich sped to the krenkish encampment, where he found Hans, Gottfried and four others in the lower apartment of the strange vessel, clustered around a ‘circuit’ illustration, and making a great chitter of discussion. “Is it true,” Dietrich demanded bursting in, “that your folk will soon starve?”

The Krenken paused in their work and Hand and Gottfried, who wore head harnesses, turned about to face the door.

“Someone has told you,” Hans said.

“’Jaws have hinges’,” Gottfried commented.

“But is it true?” insisted Dietrich.

“It has truth,” Hans said. “There give certain… materials — acids is your alchemic word — which are essential for life. Perhaps four score of these acids befall in nature — and we Krenken need one-and-twenty of them to live. Our bodies produce naturally nine, so we must from our food and drink obtain the others. That food which you have shared with us holds eleven of those twelve. One is lacking, and our alchemist found it nowhere in all the foodstuffs he proofed. Without that particular acid, there gives one… I must call it a ‘firstling,’ as it is the first building block of the body, though I suppose it should wear one of your Greekish terms.”

“Proteios,” Dietrich croaked. “Proteioi.”

“So. It puzzles me why you use different ‘tongues’ to speak of different matters. This Greekish for natural philosophy; the Latinish for matters touching your lord-from-the-sky.”

Dietrich seized the Krenk by his forearm. The rough spines that ran its length pricked his hand, drawing blood. “That makes nothing!” he cried. “What of this protein?”

“Without this acid, the protein ca

“Then we must find it!”

“How, my friend? How? Arnold spent sleepless nights searching for it. If it eluded his keen eye, how may we discover it? Our physician is skilled, but not in the arts of the laboratory.”

“So, you chewed upon the roses near Stag’s Leap? You robbed the monastery at St. Blasien?”

A toss of the arm. “As if one could know by tasting! Yes, some of our folk try this or that. But the best source of the protein lies at our journey’s end. The missing acid lies within our own particular food, which we eke out to supplement that which your people have provided.” Hans turned away. “Our ship will sail before the hunger grows acute.”

“What is in the broth that the Kratzer will not eat?”

Hans did not turn around, but his voice whispered in Dietrich’s ear as if he stood by his side. “There is one other meat that has this protein, and the supply of it is not yet exhausted.”

Dietrich did not understand for a long moment. Then Gottfried said, “This is my body, to be given up for us. Your words have given us hope,” and the full horror of the stranger’s situation fell upon him, nearly crushing him with its weight.

“You must not!”

Hans turned once more to face Dietrich. “Would you have all die, when some might live?”

“But—”

“You have taught that it is good to offer one’s body for the salvation of others. We have a sentence. ‘The strong devour the weak.’ It is a sign, a metaphor, but in times of great hunger in our past, it has befallen in fact. But you have saved us. It is the offer and not the eating that saves, and the strong too may offer themselves to save the weak among us.”

Dietrich returned to Oberhochwald numbed. Could he have mistaken the Krenken? It was not beyond reason. The Heinzelmä

Yet clearly the Kratzer was distressed by the thought. So much so that he would not even taste the broth. Dietrich shuddered anew at the memory. Of whom had that broth been distilled? Arnold? The children? Had any of them been hurried to their deaths to prepare the broth? That thought was most horrid of all. Would the krenkish instinctus move them willingly to the stewpot?

Arnold had given his own life. “This is my body,” he had promised the other Krenken in his death-note. A terrible parody, Dietrich now realized. Having failed in his search for the elusive acid, he had despaired and quit the struggle. And yet he had retained, like the legendary casket of Pandora, one last tenuous hope — that Hans and Gottfried might repair the ship and sail the Krenken back to their heavenly home. Anything that extended the needed foodstuffs would add that many days to the effort. Unwilling himself to follow the path he saw necessary, the alchemist had taken the only path he could, for the sake of others.

And so he had died a Christian after all.

The rider wore the livery of the Strassburg Bishop and Dietrich watched his approach from a crag overlooking the Oberreid road. Hans, who had warned him of it, perched beside him, clinging somehow to the very rock so that, although he leaned far beyond the precipice, he did not fall as a man might. A different center of gravity, he had explained once to Dietrich, showing him a trick with straws, a pfe

“’Put away your sword’,” Dietrich quoted self-consciously. “Your attack would hardly allay what fears they nurse.” Hans laughed then clacked into his farspeaker a warning to the others.

He watched the herald turn his mount up the track toward St. Catherine.

Looking about, Dietrich realized that Hans had departed without a sound, a krenkish ability eerily akin to ghostly vanishing. I must keep the herald from the parsonage, he realized, for the weakening Kratzer lay within. He gathered his skirts and hurried to the head of the path just as the herald reached its top, bringing the man to an abrupt halt. “Peace be with you, herald,” Dietrich said. “What mission brings you here?”

The man searched from side to side, glancing even above his head, and clutched his cloak more tightly about him, though the day was warm. “I carry a message from His Excellency, Berthold II, by grace of God bishop of Strassburg.”