Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [172]
Shepherd was the last. She stood halfway up the ramp and looked about the clearing. “Strange world; strange folk,” she said. “Lovely, but deadly. There worse shores on which to beach, but none so cruel.” She turned to go, but Dietrich held out the three head-harnesses.
“We won’t need these anymore,” he said, though Shepherd would not understand now that he had taken it off.
But Shepherd only touched the mikrofoneh with a fingertip and pressed them back on Dietrich, along with her own. At the head of the ramp, she chittered a last, untranslated statement, then she was inside and the door closed upon her and the ramp clanked into its recess.
DIETRICH INTENDED to watch the vessel out of sight, for he was consumed by a curiosity as to how it proposed to do so. Hans had insisted that it moved on a cushion of magnetism in a direction “inside of all direction.” Dietrich had read Pierre Maricourt’s Epistola de Magnete in Paris, and he remembered that magnets had two poles and that like poles repelled each other, so what Hans had told him was allowed by natural philosophy. But what had Hans meant when he said that these “inner directions” receded without regard to where one stood? Maricourt—Bacon’s “Master Peter”—had written also that an investigator “diligent in the use of his own hands … will in a short time correct an error which he would never do in eternity by his knowledge of natural philosophy and mathematics alone.” And so, Dietrich determined to watch the Krenkish ship recede and, if he and Max and Hilde watched from different points, test the proposition that it would recede in all directions at once.
Yet, after he had explained his experientia, and Max and Hilde went toward their assigned positions, several Krenken bounded down upon them and, seizing them in their long serrated arms, carried them away behind the far side of the ridge.
THE KRENKEN pinned them to the loam and held them motionless. Max shouted and tried in vain to reach his pot de fer. Hilde screamed. Dietrich’s heart beat against his ribs like a captive bird. The Krenk who held him to the ground ground his side-lips together, but Dietrich could make nothing of it without the head-harness. Hilde subsided into heaving sobs.
“Hans?” said Dietrich, for the Krenk who held him to the earth wore leather hose and a loose blouse of homespun that fit ill on his frame. The Krenk had opened its mandibles, perhaps to answer, perhaps to bite Dietrich’s neck in two, when a sudden wind swayed the upper reaches of the spruces and birch. Limbs creaked, birds took wing. Deer bolted through the underbrush. An odd tension gripped Dietrich and he sucked in his breath and waited. It was like the morn when the Krenken arrived, only not so strong.
Terror and unease flowed through him like the millstream over the wheel. The wind rose to a howl and lightning snapped like bolts from a crossbow, striking trees all about and causing branches to burst. The thunderclaps echoed off the Katerinaberg, piled one upon the other, died slowly away.
The brief storm ended. The trees bowed for a moment, then steadied. The Krenken who had pinned Dietrich and his companions to the earth straightened and stood very still while their antennae waved about. Dietrich, too, sniffed the air and detected a faint odor at once metallic and pungent. The Krenkish heads moved fractionally and Dietrich understood that they were looking at one another. Hans clicked something and Gottfried stepped forward from where he had been waiting in the trees with several large coffers and sundry equipments and climbed to the top of the slope.
From there, he chittered something short and intense and those holding Max and Hilde and four others waiting in the woods bounded toward the top of the ridge, where, after several loud rounds of clacks, they poked one another with stiffened fingertips.
Dietrich and Max climbed to their feet. A moment longer, and Hilde joined them. They followed the eight Krenken to the ridgetop.
The clearing below lay empty.
All that remained of the great vessel