Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [186]
Dietrich shook his head. How could he say that the boy was wrong?
WHEN DIETRICH left the parsonage to ready the church for Mass, he saw One-eyed Herwyg, Gregor and his sons, and others were on their way to the field, hoes or mowing scythes across their shoulders. Jakob’s oven was lit, and Klaus’s mill turning. Only the forge stood yet cold and silent.
Dietrich remembered how Lorenz would stand by the anvil, sweaty in his apron, and wave to him from below. Perhaps Wanda had found a man’s task at last too much. Or perhaps she lacked for charcoal.
He made his way downhill, past the sheepfold, where stood a bare handful, all uncertain and with a sickly mien. The decimation of the village beasts had passed barely remarked for the greater dread of the pest. Cattle and sheep had fallen to the murrain. Rats, too, lay about, though that was a blessing. Herwyg’s dog barked, sat, and scratched furiously at his fleas.
Dietrich stepped inside the open-walled smithy, picked up a hammer that lay upon the anvil, and cradled it in his two hands, finding it curiously heavy. Lorenz had swung it one-handed high over his head, yet Dietrich could barely lift it. A barrel of ox shoes and another of horseshoes stood nearby. In the quenching barrel, a green film had grown on the suface of the water.
A raven’s cry drew his attention. He watched it circle, drop into the smithy’s back garden, then rise again. And circle.
Dropping the hammer, Dietrich rushed out the rear exit, and there he found Wanda Schmidt sprawled upon her back amidst the beans and cabbage, arms waving as if reaching toward the sky. Her tongue, black and swollen, protruded from dry cracked lips. The raven swooped again, and Dietrich chased it off with a stick.
“Water,” the prostrate woman gasped. Dietrich returned to the smithy, found a cup by the quenching barrel, and filled it. But when he extended the cup to the stricken woman, her thrashing arms batted it away. Her face was red with fever, so he found a rag, soaked it in water, and laid it across the woman’s brow.
Wanda shrieked, arching her back and flailing her arms until she had knocked the cloth aside. Retrieving it, Dietrich found the rag already dry. He crumpled the rag in his hands, and sank to his haunches. Why, O Lord? he pleaded. Why?
Yet that was an impious thought. This pest comes not from God, he reminded himself, but from some mal odor borne on the wind. Everard had breathed it; now Wanda had, too. She had had no late contact with the steward, so the Krenkish theory of small-lives jumping from man to man seemed now proven false. Yet there must be reason to it. God had “ordered all things by measure, weight, and number,” and so by measuring and weighing and numbering, mere men could learn the “eternal ordinances by which He set the courses of the stars and the tides of the sea.”
Wanda cried out, and Dietrich edged away. The mere glance of a stricken one could infect. Blue flames shot forth from the eyes. The only safety lay in flight. He scrabbled to his feet, and backed through the smithy to the high street, where he stood breathing rapidly.
Without, all seemed in order. He heard the rasping saw from Boettcher’s cooperage, the sheering cry of a hawk circling high over the autumn fields. He saw Ambach’s pig rooting through the garbage along the high road, the flash off the water dripping from the mill’s paddle wheel. He felt the wind’s hot breath on his cheek.
Wanda was too large a woman to move alone. He must run for help, he told himself. He ran first to the stoneyard, but Gregor had taken his sons out to mow hay. Then, recalling that Klaus and Wanda had lain together, he ran to the eastern end of the village.
ODO SWUNG the upper door open, but gazed at Dietrich without recognition. “The curse is complete,” the old man said, a riddle he forebore explaining. Dietrich reached past him and, unlatching the lower door, pushed his way inside. “Klaus!” he shouted. Old Schweinfurt stood by the open door, gazing upon the empty street. A groan issued from above, and Dietrich scrambled up