Eifelheim

II. August, 1348 At Primes, The Commemoration of Sixtus II and His Companions

Dietrich stepped from the church to find Oberhochwald in turmoil: Thatch roofs blown askew; shutters loose on their hinges; sheep milling and bleating in the pen by the meadow gate. Women shrieked, or hugged crying children. Men milled about arguing and pointing. Lorenz Schmidt stood in the doorway of his smithy, a hammer tight in his grip, eyes searching for an enemy to strike.

Dietrich inhaled the dusty, urgent scent of smoke. From the portico’s edge, whence he could spy the village’s farther end, he saw thatch roofs ablaze. Farther off, across the common meadow, black clouds churned and roiled above the Great Wood where the lustrous glow had been.

Gregor Mauer, atop the carving table in his yard, shouted and pointed toward the mill pond. His sons, Gregerl and Seybke, hurried past with buckets hanging from their thick arms. Theresia Gresch ran from house to house, sending people to the stream. Across the Oberreid Road, the portcullis of Manfred’s castle rose with a clatter of chains, and a squad of armsmen dog-trotted down from Castle Hill.

“It’s the wrath of hell,” said Joachim. Dietrich turned to see the younger man sagging against the door post. The eagle of St. John, hovered in the door post beside him, beak and talons poised. Joachim’s eyes were wide with fear and satisfaction.

“It’s the lightning,” said Dietrich. “It has set some cottages on fire.”

“Lightning? With no cloud in the sky? Where is your reason, now?”

“Then it was that wind, toppling lamps and candles!” Dietrich, having no more patience, seized Joachim’s arm and sent him stumbling down the hillside toward the village. “Quickly,” he said. “If the flames spread, the village burns.” Dietrich tied the skirts of his alb up to his knees and joined the throng heading toward the mill pond.

The Minorite had fallen halfway down the path. “That fire is unnatural,” he said as Dietrich passed. Then he turned and scrambled back toward the church.

The gärtners’ huts, mean dwellings at best, were engulfed in flames and folk had given up any thought of saving them. Max Schweitzer, the sergeant from the castle, organized bucket lines to pass water from the mill pond to the burning freeholder cottages. Dispossessed animals barked and snorted and ran in panic. One billy scampered toward the high road, chased by Nickel Langermann. Schweitzer held a wand in his right hand and pointed here or pointed there, directing the effort. More buckets to Feldmann’s cottage! More buckets! He slapped the wand against his leather hose, and twisted Langermann by the shoulder to direct him back to the fires.

Seppl Bauer, straddling the roofbeam of Ackermann’s cottage, dropped an empty bucket and Dietrich snatched it up.

Dietrich made his way through the rushes and cat tails that bordered the mill pond to the head of the bucket line, where he found Gregor and Lorenz knee-deep in the water, filling the buckets and handing them ashore. Gregor paused and wiped an arm across his brow, leaving a muddy streak. Dietrich handed him the empty bucket. The mason filled it and gave it back. Dietrich passed it on to the next man as the line made space for him.

Gregor whispered softly as he drew another bucket through the water, “This is no natural fire.” Beside him, Lorenz showed with a glance that he had heard; but the smith kept his peace.

Others nearby also cast furtive glances in his direction. Sacred priest, annointed with holy oil. He would know the answers. Call down anathemas on the flames! Wave a shinbone of St. Catherine at them! For an instant Dietrich was angry, and longed for the cool, scholastic rationalism of Paris. “Why do you say that, Gregor?” he said mildly.

“I have never seen such things in my life.”

“Have you ever seen a Turk?”

“No…”

“Are Turks then supernatural?”

Gregor scowled, sensing a flaw in the argument but unable to root it out. Dietrich passed his bucket along, then turned back to Gregor, hands outstretched and waiting. “I can create a smaller version of the same lightning with only cat’s fur and amber,” he told him, and the mason grunted, not understanding the explanation, but taking comfort in an explanation’s existence.

Dietrich fell into the swaying rhythm of the work. The buckets were heavy and the rope handles rubbed his palms raw, but the fear of the morning’s occult events was smothered under the natural fear of fire and the homely, urgent task of fighting it. The wind turned and he coughed as the smoke momentarily enveloped him.

An endless procession of buckets passed through his hands, and he began to imagine himself as a cog in a complex water pump comprised of human muscle. Yet artisans could free men of such mind-numbing labor. There were cams, and the new-fangled cranks. If mills could be driven by water wheels and wind, why not a bucket line? If only one could — .

“The fires are out, pastor.”

“What?”

“The fires are out,” said Gregor.

“Oh.” Dietrich shook himself from his trance. Up and down the line, men and women sank to their knees. Lorenz Schmidt raised the last bucket and poured the water over his head.

“What damage?” Dietrich asked. He sank to his haunches in the reeds along the mill pond’s edge, too tired to climb up the embankment and see for himself.

The mason’s height gave him an advantage. He shaded his eyes against the sun and studied the scene. “The huts are lost,” he said. Bauer’s roof will want replacement. Ackermann has lost his house entirely. The two Feldmanns, as well. I count… five dwellings destroyed, perhaps twice that many damaged. And outbuildings, as well.”

“Were any hurt?”

“A few burns, so far as I can see,” said Gregor. Then he laughed. “And Young Seppl has scorched the seat from his trousers.”

“Then we have much to be thankful for.” Dietrich closed his eyes and crossed himself. O God, who suffers not that any who hope in Thee should be overmuch afflicted, but listens kindly to their prayers, we thank Thee for having heard our requests and granted our desires. Amen.

When he opened his eyes, he saw that everyone had gathered at the pond. Some were wading in the water, and the younger children — not comprehending the close brush with disaster — had seized the opportunity to go swimming.

“I have a thought, Gregor.” Dietrich examined his hands. He would have to mix a salve when he was back in his quarters, else there would be blisters. Theresia made such ointments, but she would likely run short today, and Dietrich had read from Galen in Paris.

The mason sat beside him. He rubbed his hands slowly back and forth, palm to palm, scowling at them, as if searching for signs and portents among the scars and swollen knuckles. The little finger of the left hand was missing, crushed off in a long ago accident. He shook his head. “What?”

“Affix the buckets to a belt moved by Klaus Müller’s wheel. It wants only Herr Manfred’s grace and the services of a skilled cam master. No. Not a belt. A bellows. And a pump, like the one used at Joachimstal.”

Gregor frowned and turned his head so he could see Klaus Müller’s water wheel downstream from the mill pond. The mason pulled a reed from the earth and held it dangling at arm’s length. “Müller’s wheel is out of plumb,” he said, sighting along the reed. “From that strange wind, do you think?”

“Have you ever seen a water pump?” Dietrich asked him. “The mine at Joachimstal is at the top of the hill, but the miners have fashioned a latticework of wooden spars extending up the hillside from the stream. It takes its power from a water wheel, but a cam translates the wheel’s circular motion into the lattice-work’s to-and-fro.” He moved his hands in the air, trying to show Gregor the motions he meant. “And that to-and-fro works the pumps up at the mine.”

Gregor wrapped his arms around his knees. “I like it when you weave these fancies of yours, pastor. You should write fables.”

Dietrich grunted. “These are not fables, but fact. Would paper be so plentiful without water mills to pound the pulp? Twenty-five years ago, a cam was fashioned to run a bellows; and I have lately heard that an artisan at Liege has joined the bellows to the hearth and created a new kind of iron furnace — one that uses a blast of air. For now eight years it has been smelting steel in the north.”

“These are wondrous times,” Gregor acknowledged. “But what of your bucket line?”

“Simple! Equip the bellows to throw water instead of air and attach it to a pump, as at Joachimstal. A few men holding such a siphon could direct a continual stream of water at the fire. There would be no need for bucket lines or—”

Gregor laughed. “If such a thing were possible, someone would have built one by now. No one has built one, so it must be impossible.” Gregor stuck his tongue in his cheek and looked thoughtful. “There. That was a logic, wasn’t it?”

“Modus tollens,” Dietrich agreed. “But your major premise is faulty.”

“Is it? I’d not make a good scholar. These things are all a mystery to me. Which is the major premise?”

“The first.”

“How is that faulty? The Romans and the Greeks were clever men. And the Saracens, heathen though they are. You told me yourself. What was that you called it? The one where they do the numbers.”

“Al-jabr. The cipher.”

“Algebra. That’s the one. And then that Genoese fellow when I was apprenticed down in Freiburg who claimed he walked to Cathay and back. Didn’t he describe arts that he had seen there? Well, what I mean is, with all these clever people, Christian, infidel and pagan, ancient and modern, inventing things since the beginning of the world, how could they have overlooked something as simple as you say?”

“There would be difficulties in the details. But mark me. One day, all work will be done by clever machines and people will be free to contemplate God and philosophy and the arts.”

Gregor waved a hand. “Or free to contemplate trouble. Well. I suppose anything is possible if we ignore the details. Didn’t you tell me that someone had promised a fleet of wind-driven war chariots to the king of France?”

“Yes, Guido da Vigevano told the king that wagons rigged with sails like a ship—”

“And did the French king use them in this new war with the English he’s gotten?”

“Not that I have heard.”

“Because of the details, I suppose. What of the talking heads? Who was that?”

“Roger Bacon, but it was only a sufflator.”

“That’s right. I remember the name, now. If anyone actually did fashion that talking head, Everard would use it to keep better accounts of our rents and duties. Then the whole village would be mad at you.”

“At me?”

“Well, Bacon is dead.”

Dietrich laughed. “Gregor, every year sees a new art. Only twenty years past, men discovered the art of reading-spectacles. I even spoke with the man who invented them.”

“Did you? What sort of mage was he?”

“No mage. Only a man, like you or I. One who tired of squinting at his psalter.”

“A man like you, then,” Gregor allowed.

“He was a Franciscan.”

“Oh.” Gregor nodded, as if that explained everything.

The villagers dragged their buckets and rakes home, or picked through the charred poles and smoking thatch to salvage what they could from the ruins. Langermann and the other gärtners did not bother. There had been little enough in their huts to make their ashes worth sifting. Langermann had however recovered his goat. The cows in the cattle pen, unmilked since morning, complained without comprehension.

Dietrich saw Fra Joachim, smudged black by smoke and gripping a bucket. Dietrich hurried after him. “Joachim, wait.” He caught up in a few steps. “We will say a mass in thanksgiving. ‘Spiritus Dómini,’ since the altar is vested already in red. But let us delay until vespers, so everyone can rest from the labor.”

Joachim sooty face showed no emotion. “Vespers, then.” He turned away; and again Dietrich caught his sleeve.

“Joachim.” He hesitated. “Earlier. I thought you had run off.”

The Minorite gave him a stiff look. “I went back for this,” he said, rapping the bucket.

“The bucket?”

He handed it to Dietrich. “The holy water. In case the flames proved diabolical.”

Dietrich looked inside. A residuum of water lay in the bottom. He gave the bucket back to the monk. “And since the flames proved material, after all?”

“Why then, one more bucket of water to fight them.”

Dietrich laughed and gave Joachim a slap on the shoulder. Sometimes the intense young man surprised him. “There, see? You do know something of logic.”

Joachim pointed. “And who does logic tell you hauled the buckets that put out the fires in the Great Woods?” A thin, gray pall lingered over the forest.

At that, he resumed his progress toward the church, and this time Dietrich let him go. God had sent Joachim for a reason. A trial of some sort. There were times when he envied the Minorite his ecstasies, the cries of joy he wrang from God’s presence. Dietrich’s own delight in reason seemed bloodless by comparison.

Dietrich spoke with those who had lost their homes. Felix and Ilse Ackermann only stared back dumbly. Everything they had salvaged from the ruin of their home they had wrapped into two small sacks, which Felix and his daughter Ulrike carried across their backs. The child, Maria, clutched a wooden doll, blackened and covered with a rag of scorched fabric. It looked like one of those African men that the Saracens sold at slave markets around the Mediterranean. Dietrich squatted beside Maria.

“No worries, little one. You will stay with your uncle Lorenz until the village can help your father build a new home.”

“But who will make Anna better?” Maria asked, holding the doll up.

“I will take her to the church and see what I can do.” He tried to take the doll gently from the girl’s grasp, but found he had to pry her fingers away.

“All right, you worthless sons of faithless wives! Back to the castle with you. Don’t straggle there! You’ve had yourselves a break in the routine and a bath in the mill pond — and high time, too! — but there’s still work wanting to be done!”

Dietrich stepped aside and let the men-at-arms pass. “God bless you and your men, Sergeant Schweitzer,” he said.

The sergeant crossed himself. “Good day to you, pastor.” He gestured toward the castle with a toss of his head. “Everard sent us down to help fight the fires.” Maximilian Schweitzer was a short, thick-shouldered man who, in disposition, reminded Dietrich of a tree stump. He had wandered down from the Alpine country a few years before to sell his sword, and Herr Manfred had hired him to take his foot soldiers in charge and act against outlaws in the high woods.

“Pastor, what—” The sergeant frowned suddenly and glared at his men. “No one told you to listen. Do you need me to hold your hands? There’s only the one street through the village. The castle is at one end and you’re at the other. Can you figure the rest out yourselves?”

Andreas, the corporal, bawled at them and they moved on in a rough line. Schweitzer watched them go. “They’re good lads,” he told Dietrich, “but they want for discipline.” He tugged at his leather jerkin to straighten it. “Pastor, what happened today? All morning I felt like — . Like I knew there was an ambush laid for me, but not when or where. There was a fight in the guardroom, and young Hertl broke down in sobs in the common room for no reason at all.

And when we laid hand to knife or helm — to anything metal — there would be a short, stabbing pain that—”

“Were any hurt?”

“By such a small dart? Not in the body, but who knows what damage was done to the soul? Some of the lads from back up in the forest, they said it was elf-shot.”

“Elf-shot?”

“Small arrows, invisible, fired by the elves — . What?”

“Well, the hypothesis ‘saves the appearances,’ as Buridan requires, but you are multiplying entities without need.”

Schweitzer scowled. “If that is mockery…”

“No, sergeant. I was but recalling a friend of mine from Paris. He said that when we try to explain something occult, we should not suggest new entities to do so.”

“Well…, elves are not new entities,” Schweitzer insisted. “They’ve been around since the forest was young. Andreas comes from the Murg Valley and he says it might have been the Gnurr playing tricks on us. And Franzl Long-nose said it was the Aschenmännlein out of Siegmanns Woods.”

“The Swabian imagination is a wonderful thing,” Dietrich said. “Sergeant, the supernatural lies always in small things. In a piece of bread. In a stranger’s kindness. And the devil shows himself in mean and shabby dealings. All that shaking this morning and the booming wind and burst of light — all that was too dramatic. Only Nature is so theatrical.”

“But what caused it?”

“The causes are occult, but they are surely material.”

“How can you be so—” Max froze and stepped onto the wooden footbridge that spanned the stream below the mill, peering toward the woods.

“What is it?” asked Dietrich.

The sergeant tossed his head. “That flock of acorn-jays took sudden flight from the copse on the edge of the woods. Something’s moving about in there.”

Dietrich shaded his eyes and looked where the Swiss had pointed. Smoke hung lazily in the air, like streamers of teased wool. The trees at the edge of the wood cast dark shadows that the climbing sun failed to dispel. Within the motley of black and white, Dietrich spied movement, though at this distance, he could make out no details. Light winked, as one sometimes sees when the sun glints off metal.

Dietrich shaded his eyes. “Is that armor?”

Max scowled. “In the Herr’s woods? That would be bold-faced, even for von Falkenstein.”

“Would it? Falkenstein’s ancestor sold his soul to the Devil to escape a Saracen prison. He has despoiled nuns and holy pilgrims. He badly wants a reining-in.”

“When the Markgraf grows irritated enough,” Max agreed. “But the gorge is too hard a passage. Why would Philip send his henchmen up here? Not for profit, surely.”

“Might von Scharfenstein?” He gestured vaguely toward the southeast, where another robber baron had his nest.

“Burg Scharfenstein’s taken. Hadn’t you heard? Its lord seized a Basler merchant for ransom, and that proved his undoing. The man’s nephew disguised himself as a notorious freelance they’d heard tale of and went to them with word of easy spoils a little ways down the Wiesenthal. Well, greed dulls people’s wits, so they followed him — and rode into an ambush laid by the Basler militia.”

“There’s a lesson there.”

Max grinned like a wolf. “’Do not vex the Swiss.’”

Dietrich studied the woods once more. “If not robber knights, then only landless men, forced to poach in the forest.”

“Maybe,” Max allowed. “But that’s the Herr’s lands.”

“What then? Will you go in and chase them off?”

The Swiss shrugged. “Or Everard will hire them for the grain harvest. Why hunt trouble? The Herr will be back in a few days. He’s had his fill of France, or so the messenger said. I’ll ask his will.” He stared a while longer at the woods. “There was a strange glow there, before dawn.

Then the smoke. I suppose you’ll tell me that was ‘nature,’ too.” He turned and left, touching his cap as he passed Hildegarde Müller.

Dietrich saw no more movement among the trees. Perhaps he had seen nothing earlier, only the swaying of saplings within the forest.