Eifelheim

On the hill opposite, Joachim tolled the mid-day bell, a

Dietrich turned to him. “What would be?”

“This day. I thought it would be marked by terrible signs — lowering clouds, ominous winds, a crack of thunder. Twilight. Yet, it is so ordinary a morning that I grow frightened.”

“Only now frightened?”

“Ja. Portents would mean a Divine Mover, however mysterious His moves; and the wrath of an angry God may be turned away by prayer and penance. But it simply happened. Everard grew sick and fell down. There were no signs; so it may be a natural thing, as you have always said. And against nature, we have no recourse.”

In the steward’s cottage, they scattered ledgers and rolls from the table and placed Everard there, as if serving a suckling pig. His wife, Yrmegard, wailed and clutched at her hands. Everard had begun to kick and twitch, and his face was now sensibly hot to the touch. Dietrich pulled the man’s shirt away, and they saw the boils on his chest.

“The murrain,” said Klaus in relief.

But Dietrich shook his head. The resemblance was keen, but these were not the pustules of the “wool sorter’s illness.”

“Place cold rags on his forehead,” he told Yrmegard. “And touch not the boils. When he thirsts, allow no more than sips. Hans, Heloïse, let us move him to his bed.”

Everard howled when they picked him up and the Krenken nearly dropped their burden. “Heloïse will stay with him,” Hans a

“Shall I give my husband to the care of demons?” Yrmegard demanded. She wrung her hands in her coverslut, but made no movement toward the bed. Young Witold, her son, clung to her skirts and stared wide-eyed at his twitching father.

Outside the cottage, Klaus turned to Dietrich. “Everard never came near my father-in-law.”

Hans tossed his arm. “The small lives may be carried by the wind, like the seeds of some plants. Or they may ride on other animals. Each kind travels in preferred ways.”

“Then none of us is safe,” wailed Klaus.

Hooves clattered in the courtyard, and Thierry and his junker galloped past, leaping their horses across the low stone wall and jumping the moat that encircled the grounds. Klaus, Hans, and Dietrich watched them pass through the village and thence the fields, where lunching peasants marveled at the sight and, not yet knowing the cause, cried out in admiration for the horsemanship.

But by the evening Angelus, everyone had heard the news. Those returning from the fields slipped away to their cottages without a word. That night, someone threw a rock through the fine tinted glass light that Klaus had placed so proudly in the window of his house. In the morning, no one stirred from his dwelling. They peeked through wooden shutters at the deserted street, as if the poisoned breath of the pest waited to pounce on whoever might show himself.

After Dietrich prayed Mass the next morning to a congregation of Joachim and the Krenken, he walked to the crest of the hill to gaze upon the village emerging from the shadow of night. Below, the smithy was dark and cold. A rhythmic creak sounded in the morning air — Klaus’ mill wheel, disengaged and slowly turning. A cock noticed sunrise and the sheep in the murrain-infested flock bleated piteously at their brethren who had fallen during the night. A faint mist lay over the fields, white and delicate as spun flax.

Joachim joined him. “It is like a village of the dead.”

Dietrich made the sign of the cross. “May God avert your words.”

There was another silence before Joachim spoke again. “Do any need succor?”

Dietrich tossed his arm. “What succor can we give?”

He turned away, but Joachim seized him. “Comfort, brother! The body’s ills are the least of ills, for they end only in death, which is but a little thing. But if the spirit dies, then all is lost.”

Still, Dietrich could not proceed. He had discovered that he was afraid of the pest. Media vita in morte summus. In the midst of life we are in death, but this death terrified. He had seen men with their guts hanging in strings from a sword thrust into the belly, screaming and hugging themselves and soiling their clothes. Yet, no man went to battle without accepting that chance. But this sickness took no sense of risk or hope, and struck where and whom it willed. Heloïse had spied a man in Niederhochwald dead at his plough; and what man goes into his strips accepting that such a death might await him there?

Hans laid a hand on his shoulder, and he started at the touch. “We will go,” the Krenk said.

“A demon treading the high street calling out for the sick? There is comfort for those folk.”

“So, we are demons, after all?”

“Men afraid may see demons in the familiar, and direct their fear of the insensible to a fear of the sensible.”

“Thought-lacking!”

“So it is; but it is what folk do.”

Dietrich took a step down the path, hesitated, then continued unsteady to the bottom. Coming first to Theresia’s cottage, his call was answered by a shrill voice he barely recognized.

“Go away! Your demons brought this on us!”

The charge was illogical. The pest had wasted regions that had never seen a Krenk; but Theresia had never been swayed by keen reason. He continued to the smithy, where he found Wanda Schmidt already speaking with Joachim.

“You did not have to come,” Dietrich told the monk as the two proceeded on either side of the high street, but Joachim only shrugged.

And so they went, house by house until, at the far end of the village, they reached the gärtners’ huts. Entering the Metzger cottage, Dietrich assured himself that Trude suffered no more than the murrain. The black streaks on her arm showed that the poison was spreading in her. Trude will die, he thought, keeping the belief from his face and lips as he prayed a blessing on them.

He returned to the cusp where Church Hill and Castle Hill met, where he awaited Joachim, who crossed the meadow from the miller’s cottage. Sheep baa’ed at the Minorite as he passed among them. “Are they well?” Dietrich asked, indicating the cottages that lined the other side of the meadow, and Joachim nodded.

Dietrich let out a gust he hadn’t known he held. “None other, then.”

Joachim kicked a dead rat from the path and looked up Castle Hill. “There is yet the curia — and there is where the pest first showed itself.”

“I will ask among Manfred and his folk.” Impulsively, he embraced the monk. “You had no need to expose yourself. Care of this flock is mine.”

Joachim studied the sheep dying in the meadow, as if wondering which flock Dietrich had meant. “The vogt is derelict in his business,” he said. “Dead sheep ought to be burned, or the murrain will destroy the flock. My father’s sheep were once afficted so, and two of the shepherds died with them. It was my fault, of course.”

“Volkmar has now other worries than the village sheep.”

Joachim gri

In the end, Everard alone was ill, and he seemed to be resting now peacefully. Dietrich dared hope that it might go no further. Hans clicked his mandibles at this, but said nothing.

Gottfried and Winifred Krenk took two of the flying harnesses and flew to the lower valley to bury the unfortunate folk of that place. There were so many corpses that they used the thunder paste to dig the graves. Dietrich wondered if that were a proper way to dig a grave, but then reflected that a grave dug all at once might be proper for a village that had died all at once. He spoke the words over them using the far-speaker that Heloïse had taken with her.