Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [43]
But the Herr checked its swing and made another gesture entirely, a tossing motion that Dietrich had no difficulty interpreting as a dismissal, conceding whatever point had been in contention. The other creature tilted its head back and spread its arms and Herr Gschert clicked its side-jaws once, sharply, whereupon the other resumed its seat.
Dietrich could not conjugate precisely what had just happened. There had been an argument, he thought. The first creature had challenged its lord—and had in some fashion triumphed. What then was the status of the seated one? To raise a challenge implied that the party had honor, which a commoner could not possess. So. A priest, perhaps? A powerful vassal? Or the man of another lord whom Gschert wished not to offend? Dietrich decided to call this one the Kratzer, because of the gesture it had made with its arms.
Gschert leaned back against the wall and the Kratzer resumed his seat. Then, facing Dietrich, it began clicking its horned side-lips. In the midst of the insect buzz, a voice said, “Greet God.”
Dietrich started and looked to see whether somone else had entered the room.
The voice said again, “Greet God.” It issued undisputedly from within a small box on the table! Through the loose weave of a cloth stretched tightly across its face, Dietrich could discern a drum head. Did the creatures have a Heinzelmännchen trapped within? He tried to look through the curtain—he had never actually seen a brownie—but the voice said, “Sit thee.”
The command was so unexpected that Dietrich could think of no other response but to comply. There was something like a chair nearby, and he fit himself—badly—into it. The seat was uncomfortable, shaped to fit a different ass than his.
Now, a third time, the voice spoke. “Greet God.” This time, Dietrich merely answered. “Greet God. How goes it by you, friend Heinzelmännchen?”
“It goes well. What means this word Heinzelmännchen?” The words were toneless and fell like the beat of a pendulum. Did the sprite make fun? The little people were wont to pranks, and while some, like the brownies, were reputedly playful, others, like the Gnurr, could be petty and malicious. “A Heinzelmännchen is one like yourself,” Dietrich said, wondering where this dialogue was going.
“Know you then others like myself?”
“You are the first I have met,” Dietrich admitted.
“Then, how know you that I be a Heinzelmännchen?”
Oh, clever! Dietrich could see that a battle of wits was about. Had the creatures captured a brownie and required now Dietrich’s offices to speak with it? “Who else,” he reasoned, “could fit inside a very small box but a very small man?”
This time there was a pause in the reply, and Herr Gschert made wa-wa sounds again, to which the Kratzer, who had been staring at Dietrich throughout, made the dismissive toss-gesture. It clicked its lips together—and the sprite said, “There is no small man. The box himself speaks.”
Dietrich laughed. “How can that be,” he asked, “when you have no tongue?”
“What means ‘tongue’?”
Amused, Dietrich stuck his tongue out.
The Kratzer reached its long arm out and touched the picture frame, and the picture changed to a portrait of Dietrich himself, fully rendered in depth in the act of sticking his tongue out. In some manner, the tongue in the portrait glowed. Dietrich wondered if he had been wrong about the demonic nature of these beings. “Is this tongue?” the Heinzelmännchen asked.
“Yes, that is doch the tongue.”
“Many thanks.”
“IT WAS when it thanked me,” Dietrich told Manfred later that evening, “that I began to suspect that it was a machine.”
“A machine …” Manfred thought about that. “You mean like Müller’s camshaft?” The two of them stood by a credence table near the fireplace in the great hall. The remnants of the dinner had been cleared, the children sent to bed with their nurse, the juggler thanked and dismissed with his pfennig, the other guests escorted to the door by Gunther. The hall