Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [198]
The physicians of Bologna and Padua had made anatomies on bodies dried in the sun, or consumed in the earth, or submerged in running water, but Dietrich did not think they had ever done so on a body in this state. His stomach leapt through his mouth, and so visited a final indignity on the man. When he had recovered, and had refreshed his “flower-pocket,” Dietrich confirmed what he had glimpsed.
Max had been stabbed in the back. His jerkin was rent there, at the kidneys, and a great gout of blood had issued forth. He had fallen forward, in the act of drawing his quillon, for he lay upon his right arm with the handle of the long dagger in his death-hardened grip and the blade half out of its sheath.
Dietrich staggered to a nearby stone, a block that had tumbled countless years before from the escarpment overhead. There, he sobbed—for Max, for Lorenz, for Herwyg One-eye and all the others.
DIETRICH RETURNED to the hospital after vespers. For a time, he watched Hans and Joachim and the others walk among the sufferers, applying cool cloths to fevered brows, spooning food into indifferent mouths, washing the bandages used to cover the sores in tubs of hot, soapy water and laying them out to dry, a practice Hugh de Lucca and others had commended.
At last, Dietrich stepped inside where Gregor watched over his ailing son. “Everyone says he has my face,” Gregor said, “and maybe that’s true when he’s awake and tries to be like me; but when he’s asleep, he remembers that he is her firstborn, and her shade looks out at me from inside his heart.” He was silent for a moment. “I must look after Seybke. The two of them fought. Always scuffling like two bear cubs.” Gregor craned his neck. “Gregerl’s not a pious boy. He mocks the church, despite my scolds.”
“The choice is God’s, not ours, and God acts not from petty spite, but from boundless love.”
Gregor looked around the smithy. “Boundless love,” he repeated. “Is that what this is?”
“It is no comfort,” Hans interjected, “but we Krenken know this. There is no other manner in which the world could be fashioned that would bear life. There are … numbers. The strength of the bonds that hold the atoms together; the … the strength of the elektronik essence; the attraction of matter … Ach!” He tossed his arm. “The sentences in my head wander; and it was not my calling. We have shown that these numbers can be no other. The smallest change in any, and the world would not stand. All that happens in this world, follows from these numbers: sky and stars, sun and moon, rain and snow, plants and animals and small-lives.”
“God has ordered all things,” Dietrich quoted from the Book of Wisdom, “by weight and measure and number.”
“Doch. And from those numbers come also ills and afflictions and death and the pest. Yet had the Herr-in-the-sky ordered the world in any other way, there would be no life at all.”
Dietrich remembered that Master Buridan had compared the world to a great clock that God has wound, and which swung now by its own instrumental causes.
“You are right, monster,” Gregor said. “It is no comfort.”
HELOÏSE KRENKERIN died the next day. Hans and Ulf carried her body to the church and laid it out on a bench that Joachim had prepared. Then Dietrich left them alone for the private rites that he had implicitely condoned. Afterward, in the parsonage, Hans held his flask up to the window.
“This many days only remain,” he said, tracing the level with his fingertip. “I will not see you through to the end.”
“But after the end, we will see each other again,” Dietrich told him.
“Perhaps,” the Krenkl allowed. He placed his flask carefully upon the shelf, then walked outside. Dietrich followed, and found him balanced upon the outcropping where he liked to perch. Dietrich lowered himself to the grass beside him. His legs complained and he rubbed his calf. Below them, the shadows were long from the setting sun, and the eastern sky had deepened already to cobalt. Hans extended his left arm. “Ulf,” he said.
Dietrich followed the gesture to the weed-choked autumn