Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [142]
“I’ll send Max out,” Manfred said, “but there are too many dells and meadows in those hills, and a small band might lurk unseen for a long time … Dietrich …” He hesitated. “The baker’s son was with them.”
“So. That was what Heinrich meant.”
“Nymandus heard his master call the boy by name. He’s hanged himself for certain now, the fool. It lacks now only his capture and a stout rope.”
“Evil companions led him astray …”
“They’ve led him to the gallows. Altenbach’s older boy—Jakop, was it?—raked him with a sickle and laid open his cheek.” He paused, perhaps reflecting on the similar wound, more honorably obtained by Eugen. “And it was Oliver who cut him down.”
Dietrich had noticed the two boys lying where they had fallen in the barnyard, a bloody sickle clasped in the elder brother’s hand. Had Oliver imagined himself a knight doing battle? He had owned a lively imagination, capable of imposing its fruits on the world about him. Now he was a murderer of children. Dietrich whispered a prayer—for Jakop and Jaspar, for Heinrich and Gerda, and for Oliver.
“Ja,” said Manfred, noting the gesture. “I don’t know if poor Altenbach saw them fall. I hope he died thinking his sons would carry on his blood.”
In the silence that followed, the sound of the distant bell came once more. Dietrich and Manfred looked at one another, but neither said what he thought the omen presaged.
XVIII
JUNE, 1349
At Tierce, The Commemoration of Ephraem of Syria
JUNE CAME and, in the timeless wheel of the seasons, the winter fields were harvested and the resting field plowed for the September planting. Fully half the plow-days were allotted to the Herr’s salland, so that while the weistümer called for rest from labors at eventide, the free tenants kept hand to plow on their own manses to make up the lost time. One of Trude Metzger’s oxen had died of a murrain the week before, and so she harnessed a cow to her team, though with marked lack of enthusiasm on the cow’s part.
Dietrich and Hans watched the villagers at work from a slab of granite at the edge of the Great Woods. In the rock’s crevices, Dietrich marked the large, blue flowers of adder-heads, and resolved to tell Theresia of their location. Nearby, the spring that ran near the Krenkish camp tumbled into the valley. “What foods grow you in your country?” Dietrich asked. “They must differ from those we grow here.”
Hans became as one with the granite slab on which he squatted. This absolute stillness into which the Krenken sometimes fell no longer frightened Dietrich, but he did not yet understand what the habit signified.
Then Hans’s antennae twitched and he said, “The terms do not overset well, but we grow plants much like your grapes and beans and turnips and cabbage. Your ‘wheat’ is something strange to us; and likewise our foods include some strange to you. Greatleaf! Twelvestem! Ach! How my throat longs for their smack!”
“May you taste them soon. Is your vessel yet ready to depart?”
A parting of the soft-lips. “You tire of my company?”
“Never that, but there will be … difficulties should you remain much longer.”
“Yes. I have heard you consort with demons.” Hans’s lips gaped and he made threatening gestures. “Perhaps I will fly to this Strassburg and frighten the bishop into surrender.”
“Pray, do not.”
“Rest easy. Soon, your ‘demons’ shall trouble you no more.” He hunched forward, as if poised to leap, and stretched forth his arm. “I see movement on the Bear Valley road.”
Dietrich shaded his eyes against the distance. “Dust,” he said at last. “Use your far-speaker and alarm Baron Grosswald. I fear he must hide his people once again.”
AT FIRST the travelers were shadows against the westering sun, and Dietrich, waiting in the road astride his rouncy, heard the weary clop of the hooves and the whining complaints of the axle well before he could discern their features.