Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [165]
“There gives yet a chance that Volkmar Bauer will caress me,” Gottfried answered. He faced Dietrich directly, after the human fashion. “The weakening is such that our ship can drop into the abyss between the worlds, but will likely lack the power to climb back out on the farther shore. A hard fate.”
“Or an easy one, brother,” said Hans. “Who has ever come back to tell us which?”
Gottfried batted Hans’s arm away and sprang down the hill. Dietrich watched him go. Then he turned on Hans.
“You always knew you would fail.”
Hans’s eyes were unreadable. “A schlampig device like that? Wire drawn with pliers by a boy on a swing? No clothing for the wire to contain its fluids? We made the work as sound as we could, but it is more rags and patches than that coat of Manfred’s jester. I thought failure likely from the start.”
“Then … why the pretense?”
“Because you were right. When the alchemist failed, my folk might have seen nothing before them but lingering death. We gave them something else these past five moons. Hope may be a greater treasure than truth.”
RETURNING TO the parsonage, Dietrich found the Kratzer lying upon his pallet, his soft lips opening and closing, though too slowly to signify laughter. He recalled that Hans had made once the same sign beneath an anonymous sky. He is weeping, Dietrich thought, and found it oddly affecting that, for Krenk as for man, the outward appearance of tears was so like that of laughter.
The Kratzer was a materialist. Was that why he wept? All men naturally feared death. Yet a materialist, holding naught beyond the threshold, might dread the passage more. He leaned over the Krenkl’s pallet, but saw only his own myriad reflections in those strange, golden eyes. There were no tears, could be no tears and, lacking them, how could the melancholic humor be bled?
The Krenken were impaired in all expressions; their humors heightened by containment, like the black-powder in one of Bacon’s paper tubes. They wept more deeply, angered more brightly, celebrated more wildly, idled more slowly. But they knew no poems, and sang no songs.
And yet, as a man might be happy who knew of naught else—happy before waterwheels and eyeglasses and mechanical clocks, when life was harder than in these more modern times—so too could the Krenken live content until finding themselves in the Hochwald.
Dietrich crossed to the outbuilding to obtain some grain with which to make a porridge. Upon the windowsill, above the grain sack, sat the Kratzer’s flask. It was fashioned of a white, semi-opaque material that the Kratzer had named “rock-oil,” and the sun, passing through the clarified oilskin that served as a light in that window, cast the contents in shadow. Dietrich took the flask in hand.
He was not mistaken. The level had diminished.
Returning to the parsonage, Dietrich gazed down at the philosopher. I know now why you weep, my friend. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak, and the Kratzer’s dread had pulled the stopper that his revulsion had meant to keep sealed. “Do you know what he drank?” Dietrich asked the monk, who knelt in prayer.
Joachim’s murmurs stopped, and he nodded, once. “With this very spoon, I fed him. I poured into him his friends and companions. God moves mysteriously.” Then he sat back on his heels. “The body is but a husk; only the spirit is real. We respect our body as the image of God, but their bodies are not God’s image, and so might be used in ways not permitted to us.”
Dietrich did not contest the casuistry. He watched the Minorite scoop up the fine, dark-green granules that the Kratzer’s body expelled and pour them into a waste-bucket. “But if the body is consumed,” he asked, “what remains for the ressurection of the dead?”
Joachim wiped the creature clean. “What remains when worms consume it? Do not limit God. With Him, are all things possible.”
SHORTLY AFTER the Nativity of John, a peddler arrived from the direction of Bear Valley, leading a pack mule full of goods. He prayed the Herr’s leave