Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [180]
“The murrain,” said Klaus in relief.
But Dietrich shook his head. The resemblance was keen, but these were not the pustules of the “wool sorter’s illness.”
“Place cold rags on his forehead,” he told Yrmegard. “And touch not the boils. When he thirsts, allow no more than sips. Hans, Heloïse, let us move him to his bed.”
Everard howled when they picked him up and the Krenken nearly dropped their burden. “Heloïse will stay with him,” Hans announced. “Yrmegard, come no closer. Small-lives may travel in the spit, others from touch or the breath. We do not know which may be the case here.”
“Shall I give my husband to the care of demons?” Yrmegard demanded. She wrung her hands in her cover-slut, but made no movement toward the bed. Young Witold, her son, clung to her skirts and stared wide-eyed at his twitching father.
Outside the cottage, Klaus turned to Dietrich. “Everard never came near my father-in-law.”
Hans tossed his arm. “The small-lives may be carried by the wind, like the seeds of some plants. Or they may ride on other animals. Each kind travels in preferred ways.”
“Then none of us is safe,” wailed Klaus.
Hooves clattered in the courtyard, and Thierry and Imein galloped past, leaping their horses across the low stone wall and jumping the moat that encircled the grounds. Klaus, Hans, and Dietrich watched them pass through the village and thence the fields, where lunching peasants marveled at the sight and, not yet knowing the cause, cried out in admiration for the horsemanship.
But by the evening Angelus, everyone had heard the news. Those returning from the fields slipped away to their cottages without a word. That night, someone threw a rock through the fine tinted glass light that Klaus had placed so proudly in the window of his house. In the morning, no one stirred from his dwelling. They peeked through wooden shutters at the deserted street, as if the poisoned breath of the pest waited to pounce on whoever might show himself.
AFTER DIETRICH prayed Mass the next morning to a congregation of Joachim and the Krenken, he walked to the crest of the hill to gaze upon the village emerging from the shadow of night. Below, the smithy was dark and cold. A rhythmic creak sounded in the morning air—Klaus’s mill wheel, disengaged and slowly turning. A cock noticed sunrise and the sheep in the murrain-infested flock bleated piteously at their brethren who had fallen during the night. A faint mist lay over the fields, white and delicate as spun flax.
Joachim joined him. “It is like a village of the dead.”
Dietrich made the sign of the cross. “May God avert your words.”
There was another silence before Joachim spoke again. “Do any need succor?”
Dietrich tossed his arm. “What succor can we give?”
He turned away, but Joachim seized him. “Comfort, brother! The body’s ills are the least of ills, for they end only in death, which is but a little thing. But if the spirit dies, then all is lost.”
Still, Dietrich could not proceed. He had discovered that he was afraid of the pest. Media vita in morte summus. In the midst of life we are in death, but this death terrified him. He had seen men with their guts hanging in strings from a sword thrust into the belly, screaming and hugging themselves and soiling their clothes. Yet, no man went to battle without accepting that chance. But this sickness took no sense of risk or hope, and struck where and whom it willed. Heloïse had spied a man in Niederhochwald dead at his plough; and what man goes into his strips accepting that such a death might await him there?
Hans laid a hand on his shoulder, and he started at the touch. “We will go,” the Krenk said.
“A demon treading the high street calling out for the sick? There is comfort for those folk.”
“So, we are demons, after all?”
“Men afraid may see demons in the familiar, and direct their fear of