Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [31]
“So that is how the fellow bought himself free of the boon-work. But, why?”
Hilde drew herself up and stood straight. “It is my penance before God.”
Max snorted. “You should not have come here alone.”
“You said there were landless men here. I heard you.”
Dietrich said, “Landless men can be dangerous.”
“More dangerous than this doodle?” Hilde jerked her head toward Max. “They’re timid folk. They wait until I leave before they take the offering.”
“So you thought to hide and have a look at them?” the sergeant said. “Womanly thinking. If they’re serfs off their manor, they’ll not wish to be seen.”
She turned and wagged a finger at Schweitzer. “Wait until I tell my Klaus, the maier, how you handled me!”
Max grinned. “Will that be after you tell him how you go into the woods to feed poachers? Tell me, do you bite and scratch as well as you punch?”
“Come closer and learn.”
Max smiled and took a step forward to Hilde’s step back. Then, his gaze traveled past her, and the smile froze. “God’s wounds!”
Dietrich glimpsed a stealthy figure darting into the woods with the food bundled up into the kerchief. He was a spindly sort—arms and legs too long for his body, joints too far down his limbs. He wore a belt of some shining material, but wore it too high to mark a waist. That much, and grayish skin through strips of colorful cloth, was all that Dietrich saw before the figure had disappeared into the brush. Hazel twigs rustled; an acorn-jay complained. Then all was still.
“Did you see him?” Max demanded.
“That pallor …” said Dietrich. “I think he must be a leper.”
“His face …”
“What about it?”
“He had no face.”
“Ah. That oft happens in the last stages, when the nose and ears rot off.”
They stood irresolute, until Hildegarde Müller stepped into the brush. “Where are you going, you ignorant slattern?” Max cried.
Hilde cast a bleak look on Dietrich. “You said they were landless men,” she said in a voice like an overtuned lute string. “You said it!” Then she took two more steps into the hazelwood, stopped, and looked about.
Max closed his eyes and let out a breath. Then he pulled his quillon from its sheath and set after the miller’s wife. “Max,” said Dietrich, “you said we should stay on the game trails.”
The sergeant hacked an angry blaze into a tree. “The game has better sense. Stand still, you silly woman! You’ll get yourself lost. God save us.” He squatted and ran some branches from a raspberry bush through his hand. “Broken,” he said. “That way.” Then he set off without looking to see if the others followed.
Every few steps, Max would stoop and examine the ground or a branch. “Long steps,” he muttered at one point. “See where the shoe has come down in the mud? Its fellow was back there.”
“Leaping,” Dietrich guessed.
“On deformed feet? Mark the shape. When have you ever heard of cripples leaping?”
“Acts,” said Dietrich. “Chapter three, verse eight.”
Max grunted, stood, and brushed his knees. “This way,” he said.
He led them by stages deeper into the forest, blazing at times a tree or arranging rocks upon the ground as a sign for which way they had come. They pushed past thickets and brambles, stepped over felled trees that had buried their heels in their path, stumbled down sudden ravines. “Lover-God!” said Max when he had found the footprints once more. “He leapt from one bank to the other!”
The trees grew taller and farther apart, their branches arching overhead like the vaulting of a cathedral. Dietrich saw what Max had meant about the game trails. Here, protected by a ridge, no trees had fallen to the blast and every direction looked the same. Bushes and smaller trees had abandoned the field to their triumphant seniors. A mat of leaf-fall, years thick, softened their footsteps. Nor was there cue from the sun. Light was present only in shafts that, arrow-like, pierced the foliage above. When Max hacked a tree, muffled echoes spoke from every direction,