Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [192]
They sat in silence. Dietrich handed the miller the pot of ale he held and the miller drank from it. “My sins,” he said. “My sins.”
“Everard is dead also,” Dietrich told him, and Klaus nodded. “And Franzl Long-nose from the castle. They put his body outside the walls this morning.” He looked toward the towers behind the battlements. “How fares Manfred?”
“I don’t know.”
Klaus set both pots on the sill for Wanda to take back. “I wonder if we ever will.”
“And the Unterbaums are gone,” Dietrich said. “Konrad, his wife, their two surviving children …”
“Toward Bear Valley, I hope,” said Klaus. “Only a fool would hie for the Breisgau with the pest in Freiburg. Where is Atiulf ‘s mother?”
They stood and crossed to the boy crying in the dirt. “What is it, my small?” Dietrich asked, kneeling beside the lad.
“Mami!” Atiulf howled. “Want mami!” He ran out of breath and sucked in for a great bellow that ended in a paroxysm of phegmy coughing.
“Where is she?” Dietrich asked.
“Don’t know! Mami, I don’t feel good!”
“Where is your father?”
“Don’t know! Vati, make it stop!” Then the couging racked his body once again.
“And your sister, Anna?”
“Anna’s sleeping. Don’t wake her! Mami said.”
Dietrich looked at Klaus, and Klaus looked at him. Then they both looked at the cottage door. The maier set his jaw. “I suppose we must …”
Klaus opened the door and stepped inside, and Dietrich, with the boy in hand, followed.
There was no sign of Norbert and Adelheid, but Anna lay on a pallet of straw, with a countenance of peace and contentment.
“Dead,” Klaus announced. “Yet not a sign on her. Not like poor Everard.”
“Atiulf,” said Dietrich sternly, “was your sister ill when you went to bed last night?” The boy, still whimpering, shook his head. Dietrich looked to Klaus, who said, “Sometimes the murrain strikes people so, when it enters the mouth instead of the skin. Perhaps the pest acts the same way. Or she has died from grief over that boy.”
“Bertam Unterbaum.”
“I would have thought better of Norbert,” Klaus said, “than that he left his boy to die.”
Reason would have told him to fly, Dietrich thought. If the boy was doomed, what purpose was served by staying—and falling himself victim? And so all reasonable people had fled—from ancient Alexandria, from Constantine’s Plague-wracked army, from the Paris Hospital.
Klaus picked the boy up in his arms. “I will take him to the hospital. If he lives, he will be my son.” Norbert had acted contrary to his temperament, but Klaus’s offer was astonishing. Dietrich offered a blessing and they parted company. Dietrich continued toward the Bear Valley end of the village for no other reason than that he had started out in that direction.
A cottage door flew open and Ilse Ackermann ran from it with Maria in her arms. “My little Maria! My little Maria!” she shrieked over and over. The girl was a blackened figure soiled with vomit, with lips and tongue dark blue, and blood flowing freely from her mouth. She exuded the pest’s peculiar odor. Before Ilse could say more, the girl spasmed and died.
The woman cried out one more time and dropped her daughter to the ground, where she lay like the blackened doll that the selfsame girl had rescued from the fire. The pest seemed to have invaded every thumb’s-length of her body, rotting it from within. Dietrich backed off in horror. This sight was more dreadful than Hilde with her delirium, or even Wanda with her blackened, lolling tongue. This was Death in all his awful majesty.
Ilse threw hands to her face, and ran off toward the autumn field where Felix labored, leaving her daughter in the dirt behind her.
DEATH HAD buffeted Dietrich from all sides and too quickly. Everard, Franzl, Wanda, Anna, Maria. Peaceful or agonizing; long or short; rotting with stench or simply falling asleep. There was no order