Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [23]
“Holzbrenner’s kiln is deeper in, I think,” Dietrich said. “That way.” Max said nothing. He was trying to look everywhere at once. “The charcoal burner is a solitary man,” Dietrich continued. “He would have made a fine contemplative.” But Max was not listening. “It was only lightning,” Dietrich said, and the sergeant flinched, turned at last to look at him.
“How did you—?”
“You were thinking too loudly. I would not have asked you to accompany me, but Josef has not been seen since the fires and Lorenz fears for him and his apprentice.”
Max grunted. “The smith fears running short of charcoal. Klaus tells me that this Josef only comes into the village when he has charcoal to sell or duties to pay the Herr, and then he nearly always sends the boy. That supernatural wind toppled his kiln and set the woods on fire, and he’s been digging a new one. That’s why we’ve not seen his smoke.”
“The wind was not supernatural,” Dietrich insisted, but with no great conviction.
THE RUIN grew more extensive the farther they walked. They saw trees broken off, uprooted, toppled, leaning one upon the other. Sunlight poured through holes in the canopy. “A giant has played at jack-straws,” said Dietrich.
“I’ve seen destruction like this,” Max said.
“Like this? Where?”
Max shook his head. “Only not so vast. Look how the trees lie here and how they lie over there, as if they have all fallen outward from some center.”
Dietrich gave him a look. “Why?”
“At the siege of Cividale down in the Friuli, nearly—oh, near twenty years ago, I think. Christ, I was young and stupid, running off that way. To help the Austrians fight the Venetians? What quarrel was that of mine? Two of the German knights brought a pot-de-fer with the black powder. Well, it helped us carry the city, but one of the barrels burst while they were mixing the powder—they always do the mixing in the field, and I can see why. There was a crack like thunder and the wind blast scattered men and equipment all about.” He looked again at the fallen trees. “Like those.”
“How large must a barrel of the black powder be to do so much damage?” Dietrich asked.
Max did not answer. A chittering sound, like the buzzing of locusts, filled the air—though it was the wrong year for locusts. Dietrich looked at the fallen trees and thought, The impetus came from that direction.
Finally, the sergeant blew his breath out. “Right, then. This way.” He turned away to follow the trail toward the kiln.
THE CLEARING was a shallow pit fifty paces across and floored with a layer of ash and beaten earth. In the flattened center stood the kiln itself: a mound of earth and sod five long paces in diameter. But the earthen seal had been ripped away on one side, exposing the wood inside and allowing the wind to blast the fire. The sparks had been scattered into the woods, setting the fires whose remnants they had lately passed.
The Sixtus’ Day wind had rung the church bells on the far side of the valley. Here, it must have blown a hundred times stronger—harrowing the trees that surrounded the clearing, scattering the windbreaks that regulated the airflow into the kiln, peeling the earth from the kiln, gouging a channel through the forest like a river in flood. Only the strongest trees remained upright, and many of those were shattered and bent.
Dietrich stepped around the ruined kiln. A fan of burnt timbers and thatch marked where the charcoal-maker’s cottage had once stood. At the end of that spray, against the sagging trees on the far side of the clearing, Dietrich found Josef and his apprentice.
Their charred torsos lacked arms and legs and, in the lad’s case, a head. Dietrich searched his memory for the boy’s name, but it would not come. Both bodies had been smashed and broken, as if they had fallen from a great cliff, and both were skewered with splinters of wood. Yet, what wind could be so strong?