Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [195]
“They are fearful places,” Dietrich agreed. “What brings you here?”
“My folk find … quiet-inside-the-head in places like this. It has … what is your word … Maze. Balance.”
“Arnold used to sit there so,” Dietrich said. “I spied him once.”
“Did you … He, too, was of the Great Isle.” She threw another stone into the pond, refreshing ripples that had begun to subside. Dietrich waited, but she said no more until he turned to go.
“When you stand still,” Heloïse said, “you seem to vanish. I know that is the way our eyes are fashioned, and the Ulf tried to explain how yours were different; but he is only … one-who-labors-with-machines-for-physicians, and not a physician himself.” She tossed another stone. “But that makes naught.” The stone struck directly in the center of the fading ripples, and Dietrich thought that each of her tosses had struck precisely the same spot. Was it the motion of the water that drew her aim? Humans gauged distance more exactly than Krenken; but Krenken gauged motion more exactly. Thus God assigned to each folk gifts suitable to their being.
“How fares Ulf?” the Krenkerin asked. “Shows he the spots?” And she extended her arm so that Dietrich could see the dark-green mottling that presaged the strange starvation of his guests.
“Not that I have seen.”
She ran a finger around a large blemish. “Tell me, is it better to die quickly or slowly?”
Dietrich looked down while he scuffed the dirt with his foot. “All beings seek naturally to live, so death is an evil, never to be sought for its own sake. But all beings seek also to avoid pain and terror. As to die quickly lessens these, a quick death is therefore, if not a ‘good,’ at least a lesser defect of the good. But a quick death gives also no chance for repentance and expiation to those one has wronged. So, a slower death may also be thought a lesser evil.”
“It is true, what is said of you.” A fifth stone followed the others. “The Ulf stayed because Hans asked for his particular skills, and he obeyed as if Hans had been a … one-set-above.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“I could not leave him. Yet, each day I smell my death step closer. That is not right. The Death ought to swoop like your hawk; not stalk like your wolf. ‘So it was; so it is.’”
“Death is but a doorway to another life,” Dietrich assured her.
“Is it.”
“And our Herr, Jesus Christ, is the gate.”
“And how pass I through this gate-that-is-a-man?”
“Your hand is already on the latch. The way is love, and you have shown that already by your acts.”
So also had her husband. It wondered Dietrich, as he returned to his horse, that both had stayed because each believed the other would. Thus does one turn from care because it is a duty to duty because one cares. He stepped into the stirrup and seated himself. “Come to me when you return to the village,” he said, “and we will talk.” With that he tugged the reins and headed the gray toward the trail.
The horse had indeed been a sign, and a miracle as well. The sign had been to lead him here, so that God might gently admonish him through the mandibles of a stranger. The cup would pass from Heloïse no more than it had passed from the Son of Man in the Garden, so what presumption it was to think that it could pass from him! “Lord,” he prayed, “When did I see You sick or in distress and fail to comfort You?”
He leaned forward and stroked the horse’s head and she gave him a whicker of pleasure. “You are a miraculous horse,” he told her, for God had permitted her to come into the presence of a Krenkl without panic.
Along the way back, he said a prayer for the repose of the soul of Father Rudolf. God had presented Dietrich the means of flight, and with it a warning of the rewards awaiting flight.
THE HORROR built much like a rainstorm: first a few, then a period of quiet when folk believed the menace past, then a few more, until at last a torrent. Folk cowered in their homes. In the fields, crops rotted and hay wilted unscythed. A few