Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [22]
“Four years since, the village brought suit against the steward when Manfred enclosed the common greenway.”
“Well, Everard …”
“The lord must save his honor. It’s a legal fiction, but a useful one. Like that quillon of yours. One thumb longer, and it would be a sword, which would be above your station.”
“We Swiss like them,” he said, laying a hand on the pommel and grinning.
“What I mean is, Manfred could then chastise his steward for doing what he had told him to do, and everyone pretends to believe it.”
Max made a curt gesture. “Moorgarten rendered a more vigorous verdict. We brought the Hapsburg Duke to account there, I tell you.”
Dietrich looked at him. “Anything too vigorous ends with peasants dangling from trees. That’s a fruit I’d not see harvested again.”
“In the Swiss, the peasants won.”
“And yet here you are, serving the Hochwald Herr, who serves both the Baden Markgraf and the Hapsburg Duke.” To this, Max made no response.
THEY CROSSED over the millbrook bridge and took the road toward Bear Valley. The fallow fields lay on the left and the autumn fields on the right, the ground swelling higher and edging into the dirt track, pinching it until it seemed more trench than road. Hedgerows and briar bushes, meant to keep cows and sheep from wandering into the croplands, provided a bit of inadvertent shade to the walkers—and seemed veritable trees by reason of the height of the land from which they sprouted. The road, muddy through this stretch from a rivulet tributary to the millbrook, meandered first this way, then that, as slope and pitch dictated. Dietrich had wondered at times what sort of place Bear Valley might be that travelers seemed disinclined to go straight there.
Near the common pasture, the road shed its subterranean aspect and emerged onto the shoulder of the hill, a gentle swell of land that marked the first pitch into the Katerinaberg. The sun was more unremittingly present here, with even the small shade of the hedgerows gone. Someone had opened the gate between the commons and the autumn fields so that the village cows could graze on the stubble and deposit their manure for the fall planting.
From the higher ground of the meadow, yellow with goose-blooms, they spied Heinrich Altenbach’s homestead on the track to Stag’s Leap. Altenbach had left the manor several years since to drain some marshland. Being waste, the marsh had been claimed for no lord’s manor, and Altenbach had built on it a cottage so he would not have to walk each day to his fields.
“I suppose every man would rather live on his own land,” Max suggested when Dietrich had remarked the farmhouse. “If he owned his own plow and beasts, and had no wish to share them with his neighbor. But it is a far run to the castle should an army pass this way, and those neighbors might not open the gate to him.”
On the far side of the meadow, the forest glowered softly black. Thin streamers of white smoke twisted among the birch and pine and oak. Dietrich and Max paused under a solitary oak to drink from their water-skins. Dietrich had some chestnuts in his scrip, which he shared with the sergeant. The latter, for his part, studied the plumes of smoke with great attention, juggling the nuts in his hand like a set of knucklebones.
“Easy to get lost in there,” Dietrich commented.
“Stay to the game trails,” Max said, half-distracted. “Don’t hare off into the brush.” He popped the meat from a chestnut and threw it into his mouth.
THE FOREST was cooler than the open meadow. Sunlight penetrated only in shattered fragments, dappling the hazel bushes and bluebells underneath the canopy. A few strides and Dietrich was swallowed up. The harvest sounds grew distant, then muffled, then ceased entirely to argue with the silence. He and Max passed among the oaks and larches and black spruce on grumbling carpets of last year’s leaves. Dietrich soon lost all sense of direction and stayed close by the sergeant.
The air reeked of stale smoke and ashes and, overlaying it, a sharp smell, like salt and urine and sulfur all mixed