Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [163]
She reared her head and clacked her side-lips so fast as to make a buzzing that grew sensibly into a musical note, and a remote part of Dietrich’s mind was delighted to learn that a tone was a high frequency of clicks. She leapt away, not toward the fine cottage of Klaus and Hilde, where she had been staying, but out across the resting fields toward the Great Wood. Konrad Unterbaum said, “I never thought them like us before today. But I know her heart; that I do.”
JOACHIM SAT on a small stool by the Kratzer’s cot and spooned a little porridge into the creature’s mouth. Outside, weathercocks turned and dark clouds tumbled over one another as they raced across the sky. A distant cloud over the lowlands flashed. Dietrich stood by the open window and smelled rain in the air.
“Your weather pleases,” said a voice in the head-harness, and it seemed so hale that Dietrich needed a moment to mark it as the Kratzer’s. It ought to gasp and sound weak, as befit his estate, but the Heinzelmännchen’s art did not extend so far. “The change in the air caresses my skin. You do not have this sense. No, you do not feel the pressing of the air. But, ach! That tongue of yours! So supple an organ! We taste nothing so intensely as you. How fortunate that is! How fortunate. With a school of philosophers will I return to this place to study. Not since the bird-folk of Cliff-home World have I known any so fascinating as you.”
The Kratzer raved when he spoke of returning, since it was growing ever more evident that he would not be leaving—save in the manner that all men left this world. Dietrich felt a great wash of pity and he stood by the cot to carress the strange creature in his own strange way.
EACH DAY, Dietrich and Joachim prepared a meal for the weakening Kratzer, trying divers materials in the hope that one might contain the substance that his body craved. They made stews of unlikely fruits, and teas of doubtful herbs. Nothing could do more harm than doing nothing more. The philosopher had put aside untasted the flask containing the alchemist’s vile brew, and each day his horny skin grew more mottled. “He bleeds within,” explained the Krenkish physician, when Dietrich had called upon her skills. “If he will not drink the broth, there is naught I can do. And even should he drink,” she added, “it but prolongs the dying. All our hope is in Hans, and Hans has gone mad.”
“I will pray for his soul,” Dietrich said, and the physician tossed her arm for souls, for life, for death, for hope.
“You may believe that the energia can live without the body to support it,” the Krenkerin replied, “but ask no such foolishness from me.”
“You have the plow before the ox, doctor. It is the spirit that supports the body.” But the doctor was a materialist and would not hear it. Good in small things, as such folk often were, she esteemed the Krenkish body as but a machine, like a waterwheel, and gave no thought to the rushing waters that moved it.
WHEN, AFTER a week had gone by with no further word, the dread of the pest began to fade and people laughed at those who had shown so much fear before. By the Nativity of John, festivities drew them forth from their cottages. The tenants sent their tithe of meat to the parsonage and lit bonfires on the hills, even on the Katerinaberg, so that the vigil night was pocked with ruddy glows. Boys ran about the village drawing fiery arcs with their torches to chase away dragons. At the last, a great hoop of wood and brush was lit on the church green and rolled downhill, and a great sigh lifted from a hundred lips, for it toppled to its side halfway down. The children delighted in the flames and diversions, but their elders clucked over the bad luck thus signified. The fiery wheel more often reached the bottom without falling, the old women told the old men, who nodded without contradiction, although memory might run otherwise.
Hans parted his lips. “Underseeking your customs