Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [147]
“You may have right,” said Tarkhan ben Bek. “Master, he travel many years, see only pollution. Though master is think he seeing you before, when he much younger.”
THE TROUBLING thought that he had been recognized stayed with Dietrich, and he gave thanks that Malachai was safely segregated in the Lower Woods and would not see Dietrich again before he departed for Vienna.
AT MIDDAY on the Feast of St. Barnabas, a lone rider, astride a jennet mule and clad in the brown robes of a Minorite, worked his way up the track from St. Wilhelm and entered the manor house.
“I’ll not go back,” Joachim sneered when Dietrich mentioned the stranger. “Not while Strassburg’s prior is a truckling Conventual who has forgotten every humility that Francis taught.” Later, as they went to clean the church, he pointed across the notch that separated the two hills. “He’s coming here. If he is a Conventual, I’ll not kiss his hairy—”
The stranger monk studied the crest of Church Hill, pausing when he caught sight of the two watchers. There seemed no face within the cowl, only a black emptiness, and the notion sprang irresistibly to Dietrich’s mind that this was Death, now these dozen years overdue, treading a weary mountain trail in search of him. Then a flash of white showed within the shadow and Dietrich realized that it was only the angle of the sun that had made that hood seem so empty. Immediately another apprehension replaced it: namely, that the rider was an exploratore sent by the Strassburg bishop to question him.
His unease grew as the inexorable mule plodded to the hilltop. There, the rider threw back his cowl, revealing a thin face, long in the chin and crowned by a laurel of tangled white hair. There was something of the fox in it, and of the deer surprised by a hunter, and the lips seemed those of a man who had lately mistaken for new wine a jar of old vinegar. Though time had aged him, had drawn him out more gaunt than ever, had spotted his northland-pale skin, five-and-twenty years sloughed off in an eyeblink and Dietrich gasped in surprise and delight.
“Will!” he said. “Is it truly you?”
And William of Ockham, the venerabilis inceptor bowed his head in mock humility.
RESIGNED BY now to the periodic intrusions of strangers, the Krenken had absented themselves from the public space; but perhaps having grown bored, they played this time a precarious game of hide-and-seek, keeping themselves just out of sight rather than flying off to the Great Wood. As Dietrich escorted his visitor about the village, he marked, from the corner of his eye, the sudden leap of a Krenk from one concealment to another.
The church walls held Will Ockham’s tongue mute, a feat no Pope had yet accomplished. He stood before them some time before he began to circuit the building, exclaiming with delight over the blemyae, complimenting the peredixion tree and the dragon. “Delightfully pagan!” he declared. Some Dietrich must explain: the Little-Ash-Men of the Siegmann Woods, or the Gnurr of the Murg Valley, which seemed to emerge from the woodwork itself. Dietrich named the four giants supporting the roof. “Grim and Hilde and Sigenot and Ecke—the giants slain by Dietrich of Berne.”
Ockham cocked his head. “Dietrich, was it?”
“A popular hero in our tales. Mark you Alberich the Dwarf in Ecke’s pedestal. He showed King Dieter to the lair where Ecke and Grim lived. Giants don’t like dwarves.”
Ockham thought about that for a moment. “I shouldn’t think they’d even notice them.” He regarded the dwarf further. “At first, I thought him grimacing in his effort to hold the giantess up; but now I see that he is laughing because he is about to toss her over. Clever.” He studied the kobolds under the eaves. “Now those are surpassingly ugly gargoyles!”
Dietrich followed his gaze. Five Krenken perched nude under the roofline, frozen in that preternatural stillness into which they sometimes fell, and pretended to uphold the roof. “Come,” Dietrich