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CHAPTER 1
AUGUST, 1348
At Matins, The Commemoration of Sixtus II and His Companions
Dietrich awoke with an uneasy feeling in his heart, like a bass voice chanting from a darkened choir loft. His eyes flew open and darted about the room. A night candle guttering in its sconce cast capers over table and basin, prie-dieu and psalter, and caused the figure upon the crucifix to writhe as if trying to tear itself down. In the corners and angles of the room, shadows swelled enormous with their secrets. Through the east window, a dull red glow, thin as a knife across a throat, limned the crest of the Katerinaberg.
He took a long, stilling breath. The candle told Matins anyway; so, throwing the blanket aside, he exchanged nightshirt for cassock. Goose bumps puckered his skin and the short hairs rose on his neck. Dietrich shivered and hugged himself. Something will happen today.
By the window stood a small wooden table with a bowl and aquamanile upon it. The aquamanile was of chased copper and had the form of a rooster, with the feathers worked into it by a coppersmith's clever awl. When he tipped it, the water ran from the beak over his hands into the bowl. "Lord, wash away my iniquities," he murmured. Then he dipped his hands into the bowl and splashed the cold water onto his face. A good dousing would scatter the night fears. He broke a piece of soap off the cake and rubbed it on his hands and face. Something will happen today. Ach, there was prophecy! He smiled a little at his fear.
Through the window he noticed a light moving about at the base of the hill. It would appear, move a short space, then disappear, only to rematerialize after a moment and repeat the dance. He frowned, not quite knowing what it was. A salamander?
No. A blacksmith. Dietrich became aware of his tension only in the moment of its release. The forge lay at the bottom of the hill and the smith's cottage beside it. The light was a candle moving to and fro before an open window: Lorenz, pacing like a caged beast.
So. The smith — or his wife — was awake also, and evidently in a nervous state.
Dietrich reached for the aquamanile to rinse the soap off and a needle stabbed him in the palm. "Sancta Katherina!" He stepped back, knocking bowl and water pitcher to the floor, where the soapy water fanned across the flagstones. He searched his hand for wounds and found none. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he knelt and retrieved the aquamanile, handling it gingerly, as if it might bite him once again. "You are a froward rooster," he told the pitcher, "to peck me like that." The rooster, unmoved by the admonition, was returned to his place.
When he wiped his hands on a towel he noticed that his hairs stood away, as a dog's fur might bristle before a fight. Curiosity wrestled with dread. He pulled the sleeve of his cassock back and saw how his arm hairs rose also. It reminded him of something, long ago, but the memory wouldn't come clear.
Recalling his duties, he dismissed the puzzle and crossed to the prie-dieu, where the dying candle sputtered. He knelt, crossed himself and, pressing his hands together, gazed at the iron cross upon the wall. Lorenz, that very smith who prowled at the base of the hill, had fashioned the sacramental from an assortment of nails and spikes and, although it did not look much like a man upon a cross, it seemed as if it might, if only one looked deeply enough. Retrieving his breviary from the shelf of the prie-dieu, he opened it to where he had marked his morning office with a ribbon the day before.
"The hairs of your head are all numbered," he read from the prayer for Matins. "Do not be afraid. You are of more value than many sparrows ..." And why that prayer on this particular day? It was too appropriate by far. He glanced again at the hairs on the back of his hand. A sign? But if so, of what? "The saints will exult in glory," he continued. "They will rejoice upon their couches. Give us the joy of communion with Sixtus and his companions in eternal beatitude. This we ask of Thee through our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen."
Of course. Today was the feast day of Pope Sixtus II, and so the prayer for martyrs was called for. He knelt in silent meditation upon the steadfastness of that man, even in the face of death. A man so good as to be remembered eleven centuries after his murder — beheaded at the very celebration of the Mass. Above the tomb of Sixtus, which Dietrich himself had seen in the cemetery of Callistus, Pope Damasus had later inscribed a poem; and while the verses were not so good a poem as Sixtus had been a man, they told his story well enough.
We had better popes in those days, Dietrich thought and then immediately chastised himself. Who was he to judge another? The Church today, if not overtly persecuted by kings themselves nominally Christian, had become a plaything of the French crown. Subordination was a more subtle persecution, and so perhaps a more subtle courage was called for. The French had not cut Boniface down as the Romans had Sixtus — but the Pope had died from the manhandling.
Boniface had been an arrogant, contemptuous man with not a friend in the world; and yet, was he not also a martyr? But Boniface had died less for proclaiming the Gospel than for proclaiming Unam sanctum, to the great displeasure of King Philip and his court, whereas Sixtus had been a Godly man in an ungodly age.
Dietrich glanced suddenly over his shoulder, then chided himself for the start. Did he suppose that they would come for him, too? It was not beyond reason that they might. But what cause had the Markgraf Friedrich to seize him?
Or rather, what cause that Friedrich might know of?
Do not be afraid, the day's prayer had commanded, the most frequent command from the Lord's mouth. He thought again of Sixtus. If the ancients had not quailed even at death, why should his own heart, instructed by modern wisdom, harbor fear for no sound reason?
He studied the vagrant hairs on the back of his hand, brushed them flat, and watched them rise up again. How would Buridan have approached this problem, or Albrecht? He marked his place in the book for Lauds; then he placed a fresh hour-candle in the candlestick, trimmed the wick, and lit it with a taper from the stub of the old.
Albrecht had written, Experimentum solum certificat in talibus. Experiment is the only safe guide.
He silhouetted the woolen sleeve of his gown before the candle flame, and a smile slowly creased his lips. He felt that curious satisfaction that always enveloped him when he had reasoned his way to a question and then coaxed an answer from the world.
The woolen fibers of his sleeve stood also upright. Ergo, he thought, the impetus impressed upon his hair was both external and material, as a woolen cassock had no ghostly part to be frightened. So, the nameless dread that troubled him was no more than a reflection of that material impression upon his soul.
But the knowledge, however satisfying to the intellect, did not quiet the will.
*
Later, as Dietrich crossed to the church to pray the morning Mass, a whine drew his gaze to the shadowed corner beside the church steps and, in the flickering light from his torch, he saw a black and yellow dog cowering with its front paws crossed over its muzzle. The spots on its fur blended into the shadows so that it looked like some mad creature, half-dog and half — swiss cheese. The cur followed Dietrich with hopeful eyes.
From the crest of Church Hill, Dietrich saw that a lustrous glow, like the pale cast that bleached the morning skies, suffused the Great Woods on the far side of the valley. But it was too early — and in the wrong sky. Atop the church spire, blue-flamed corposants swirled around the cross. Had even those asleep in the cemetery been aroused by the dread? But that sign was not promised until the last days of the world.
He uttered a hasty prayer against occult danger and turned his back on the strange manifestations, facing the church walls, seeking comfort in their familiarity.
My wooden cathedral, Dietrich had sometimes called it, for above its stone foundation St. Catherine's oak walls and posts and doors had been whittled by generations of earnest woodsmen into a wild congeries of saints and beasts and mythic creatures.
Beside the door, the sinuous figure of St. Catherine herself rested her hand upon the wheel whereon they had thought to break her. Who has triumphed? her wan smile asked. Those who turned the wheel are gone, but I abide. Upon the doorposts, lion, eagle, man, and ox twisted upward toward the tympanum, in which the Last Supper had been carved.
Elsewhere: Gargoyles leered from the roof's edge, fantastic in horns and wings. In spring, their gaping mouths disgorged the flow of melting snows from the steep-pitched tiles of the roof. Under the eaves, kobolds hammered. On lintels and window jambs, in panels and columns, yet more fantastic creatures were relieved from the wood. Basilisks glared, griffins and wyverns reared. Centaurs leaped; panthers exuded their sweet, alluring breath. Here, a dragon fled from Amaling knights; there, a sciopod stood on his single enormous foot. Headless blemyae stared back from eyes affixed to their bellies.
The oaken corner-posts of the building had been carved into the images of mountain giants upholding the roof. Grim and Hilde and Sigenot and Ecke, the villagers called them; and Ecke, at least, seemed a proper name for a corner-post. Someone with a sense of humor had worked the pedestal of each column into the form of a weary and irritable dwarf upholding the giant and glaring with resignation at passersby.
The wonderful riot of figures, emerging from the wood but never entirely separate, seemed indeed to be a living part of it. Somewhere, he thought, there are creatures like these.
When the wind blew hard or the snow lay heavy upon the roof, the menagerie would whisper and groan. It was only the shifting and bending of joists and rafters, yet it often seemed as if Sigenot rumbled and dwarfish Alberich squeaked and St. Catherine hummed a small tune to herself. On most days, the murmuring walls amused him, but not today. With the unease that lay upon him, Dietrich feared that the Four Giants would suddenly unburden themselves and bring the whole edifice down upon him.
More than one cottage below the hill now showed a flicker of candlelight behind its windows, and atop Manfred's keep on the other side of the little valley, the night watch paced in unwonted alertness, peering first one way then another for the approach of some unseen enemy.
A figure stumbled toward him from the village, recovered, slipped in the dirt, and a thin sob carried in the early morning air. Dietrich raised his torch and waited. Was the heralded menace even now slouching brazenly toward him?
But even before it fell to its knees breathlessly before him, the figure had resolved itself into Hildegarde, the miller's wife, barefooted and with her hair a tangle, a hasty cloak thrown over her night smock. Dietrich's torchlight glimmered on an unwashed face. A menace she may have been, but of another and long-familiar sort.
"Ach, pastor!" she cried. "God has discovered my sins."
God, Dietrich reflected, had not had far to look. He raised the woman to her feet. "God has known all our sins from the beginnings of time."
"Then why has he awakened me today with such fear? You must shrive me."
*
Eager to put walls between himself and the foreboding miasma, Dietrich led Hilde into the church; and was disappointed, if not surprised, to find his anxiety undiminished. Holy ground might hold the supernatural at bay until the end of time, but the merely natural intruded where it would.
In the stillness Dietrich heard a soft whisper, as of a small wind or a running brook. Shading his eyes against the brightness of his torch, Dietrich discerned a smaller shadow crouched before the main altar. Joachim the Minorite hunched there, his hurried ejaculations rushing over themselves like a fleeing crowd, so that the words blended into an indistinct susurration.
The prayers cut off, and Joachim turned, rising in a quick, lithe movement. He wore a tattered, brown habit of long employment, carefully and repeatedly mended. The cowl shadowed sharply chiseled features: a small dark man with heavy brows and deep brooding eyes. He wet his lips with a quick motion of his tongue.
"Dietrich ...?" the Minorite said, and the word quavered a little at the end.
"Don't be afraid, Joachim. We all feel it. The beasts, too. It is some natural thing, a disturbance in the air, like silent thunder."
Joachim shook his head and a curl of black hair fell across his brow. "Silent thunder?"
"I can think of no better way to describe it. It is like the bass pipe of a great organ that makes the glass shiver." He told Joachim his reasoning with the wool.
The Minorite glanced at Hildegarde, who had lingered at the rear of the church. He rubbed both his arms under his robe and looked side to side. "No, this dread is God's voice calling us to repentance. It is too terrible to be anything else!" He cried this in his preaching voice, so that the words came back from the statues that watched from their niches.
Joachim's preaching favored gestures and colorful stories, while Dietrich's own closely reasoned sermons often had a soporific effect on his flock. Sometimes he envied the monk his ability to stir men's hearts; but only sometimes. Stirred, a heart could be a terrible thing.
"God may call," he instructed the younger man, "by wholly material means." He turned the young man with a gentle pressure on his shoulder. "Go, vest the altar. The Mass 'Clamavérunt.' The rubrics call for red today."
A hard man to deal with, Dietrich thought as Joachim left, and a harder one to know. The young monk wore his rags with greater pride than the pope in Avignon his gilded crown. The Spirituals preached the poverty of Jesus and His Apostles and railed against the wealth of the clergy; but the Lord had blessed not the poor, but the poor in spirit — "Beati pauperes spritu." A clever distinction. As Augustine and Aquinas had noted, mere poverty was too easily attained to merit such a prize as Heaven.
"Why is he here?" Hildegarde asked. "All he does is sit in the street and beg and rant."
Dietrich made no answer. There were reasons. Reasons that wore golden tiaras and iron crowns. He wished that Joachim had never come, for he could accomplish little else but draw attention. But the Lord had said, "I was a stranger, and you took me in," and He had never mentioned any exceptions. Forget the great events of the world beyond the woods, he reminded himself. They concern you no longer. But whether the world beyond the woods would forget him was another, and less comforting, thought.
In the confessional, Hildegarde Müller confessed to one small and petty act after another. She had damped the flour on the bags of grain brought to her husband for milling, the second worst-kept secret in Oberhochwald. She had envied the brooch worn by Bauer's wife. She had neglected her aged father in Niederhochwald. She seemed determined to work her way through the entire Decalogue.
Yet, two years past, this same woman had sheltered a ragged pilgrim on his way to the Church of St. Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Brian O'Flainn had walked all the way from Hibernia, at the very edge of the world, through a land in turmoil — for that year the English king had slaughtered the chivalry of France — only to be robbed of everything by the lord of Falcon Rock. Hilde Müller had taken this man into her house, nursed his sores and blisters; had given him new raiment from her scowling husband's garderobe, and had sent him on his way refreshed and hale. Against the theft and the jealousy and the covetousness, weight that in the pan, as well.
Sin lay not in the concrete act, but in the will. Behind the woman's recitation lay the cardinal sin of which these mean transgressions were but the visible signs. One could return a brooch or visit a parent; but unless the inner flaw were healed, repentance — however sincere the moment — would shrivel like the seed upon the bad ground.
"And I have taken pleasure with men who were not my lawful husband."
That being the worst-kept secret in Oberhochwald. Hildegarde Müller stalked men with the same cool deliberation with which Herr Manfred stalked the stags and boars that adorned the walls of Hof Hochwald. Dietrich had a sudden and disconcerting vision of what might dangle from Hildegarde's trophy wall.
Trophies? Ach! That was the inner sin. Pride, not lust. Long after the fleshly pleasures must have palled, the stalking and capture of men remained an affirmation that she could have whatever she desired whenever she desired it. Her kindness to the Irish pilgrim, too — not paradox but confirmation. She had done it for show, so that others could admire her generosity. Even her endless recitation of venial sins was a prideful thing. She was bragging.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Eifelheim"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Michael F. Flynn.
Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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