Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [18]
“Pastor, what …” The sergeant frowned suddenly and glared at his men. “No one told you to listen. Do you need me to hold your hands? There’s only the one street through the village. The castle is at one end and you’re at the other. Can you figure the rest out yourselves?”
Andreas, the corporal, bawled at them and they moved on in a rough line. Schweitzer watched them go. “They’re good lads,” he told Dietrich, “but they want for discipline.” He tugged at his leather jerkin to straighten it. “Pastor, what happened today? All morning I felt like … Like I knew there was an ambush laid for me, but not when or where. There was a fight in the guardroom, and young Hertl broke down in sobs in the common room for no reason at all. And when we laid hand to knife or helm—to anything metal—there would be a short, stabbing pain that—”
“Were any hurt?”
“By such a small dart? Not in the body, but who knows what damage was done to the soul? Some of the lads from back up in the forest, they said it was elf-shot.”
“Elf-shot?”
“Small arrows, invisible, fired by the elves. What?”
“Well, the hypothesis ‘saves the appearances,’ as Buridan requires, but you are multiplying entities without need.”
Schweitzer scowled. “If that is mockery …”
“No, sergeant. I was but recalling a friend of mine from Paris. He said that when we try to explain something occult, we should not suggest new entities to do so.”
“Well … elves are not new entities,” Schweitzer insisted. “They’ve been around since the forest was young. Andreas comes from the Murg Valley and he says it might have been the Gnurr playing tricks on us. And Franzl Long-nose said it was the Aschenmännlein out of Siegmanns Woods.”
“The Swabian imagination is a wonderful thing,” Dietrich said. “Sergeant, the supernatural lies always in small things. In a piece of bread. In a stranger’s kindness. And the devil shows himself in mean and shabby dealings. All that shaking this morning and the booming wind and burst of light—all that was too dramatic. Only Nature is so theatrical.”
“But what caused it?”
“The causes are occult, but they are surely material.”
“How can you be so—” Max froze and stepped onto the wooden footbridge that spanned the stream below the mill, peering toward the woods.
“What is it?” asked Dietrich.
The sergeant tossed his head. “That flock of acorn-jays took sudden flight from the copse on the edge of the woods. Something’s moving about in there.”
Dietrich shaded his eyes and looked where the Swiss had pointed. Smoke hung lazily in the air, like streamers of teased wool. The trees at the edge of the wood cast dark shadows that the climbing sun failed to dispel. Within the motley of black and white, Dietrich spied movement, though at this distance, he could make out no details. Light winked, as one sometimes sees when the sun glints off metal.
Dietrich shaded his eyes. “Is that armor?”
Max scowled. “In the Herr’s woods? That would be bold-faced, even for von Falkenstein.”
“Would it? Falkenstein’s ancestor sold his soul to the Devil to escape a Saracen prison. He has despoiled nuns and holy pilgrims. He badly wants a reining-in.”
“When the Markgraf grows irritated enough,” Max agreed. “But the gorge is too hard a passage. Why would Philip send his henchmen up here? Not for profit, surely.”
“Might von Scharfenstein?” He gestured vaguely toward the southeast, where another robber baron had his nest.
“Burg Scharfenstein’s taken. Hadn’t you heard? Its lord seized a Basler merchant for ransom, and that proved his undoing. The man’s nephew disguised himself as a notorious freelance they’d heard tale of and went to them with word of easy spoils a little ways down the Wiesen valley. Well, greed dulls people’s wits, so they followed him—and rode into an ambush laid by the Basler militia.”
“There’s a lesson there.”
Max grinned like a wolf. “‘Do not vex the Swiss.’”
Dietrich studied the woods once more. “If not robber knights, then only landless men, forced to poach