Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [102]
“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 snowcapped, 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 Langermann—to the amusement of all, for no one had forgotten that she had paid merchet on herself.
A fight broke out when Anna Kohlmann captured Bertram Unterbaum. Oliver Becker, who thought himself entitled to that fate, knocked Bertram to the ground and bloodied his nose. But instead of running to the victor, as Oliver had no doubt imagined, Anna ran to the prostrate lad and cradled his head in her lap, earning herself years in Purgatory by the names she called the baker’s son. Oliver turned pale and fled from her tongue, some said with tears of his own.
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 of 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,