Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [47]
After solemnly blessing tree and cottages, Dietrich stood apart and observed the festivities. He was solitary by nature—one reason he had come to this remote village. Buridan had often chastised him for this love. You live inside your head too much, the master had said, and while it is sometimes a very interesting head, it must also be a little lonely in there. The jape had much amused the visitor from Oxford who, on encountering Dietrich mulling over his copy book in solitary places about the university, had taken to calling him doctor seclusus. Ockham owned the most brilliant mind Dietrich had ever encountered, but his affections often had an edge to them. A man clever with words, he had shortly after found the world composed of more than words, for he had been summoned to Avignon to answer Questions.
“They think you unfriendly,” said Lorenz, jostling him loose of memories. “You stand here by the tree when everyone else is over there.” He waved toward the sounds of fiddle and whistle and bagpipe, a congeries of noises with the seeming of familiar songs, yet attenuated a little by distance and the breeze, so that only snatches of tune remained sensible.
“I’m guarding the tree,” Dietrich said with utter gravity.
“Are you?” Lorenz turned his head up toward the bright decorations fluttering in the treetop. The breeze whipped the flags and garlands so that the tree, too, seemed to dance. “And who might steal such a thing?”
“Grim, maybe; or Ecke.”
Lorenz laughed. “What a fancy.” The smith sank to his haunches and leaned back against the wall of Ackermann’s cottage. He was not a large man—Gregor dwarfed him—but he was tempered like the very metal he worked: impervious to the strongest blows and as supple as the famed steel of Damascus. His hair was black, like an Italian’s, and his skin had been tinted by the smoke of his forges. Dietrich sometimes called him “Vulcan” for all the obvious reasons, though his features were exceedingly fine and his voice higher pitched than one might expect of a man with such a sobriquet. His wife was a handsome woman, larger and older than he, of strong features and chaste demeanor. God had not blessed their union with fruit.
“I always loved those stories when I was young,” the smith confessed. “Dietrich of Berne and his knights. Fighting Grim and the other giants; outwitting the dwarves; rescuing the Ice Queen. When I see Dietrich in my mind, he always looks like you.”
“Like me!”
“Sometimes I imagine new adventures for Dietrich and his knights. I thought I would write them myself, had I my letters. There was one—I set it during the time the hero spent with King Etzl—that I thought especially fine.”
“You could always recite your tales for the children. You don’t need your letters for that. Did you know Etzl’s real name was Attila?”
“Was it? But, no, I would never dare recite my stories. They wouldn’t be true, only fancies I had made up.”
“Lorenz, all of the Dietrich tales are fancies. Laurin’s helm of invisibility, Wittich’s enchanted sword, the mermaid’s bracelet that Wildeber wore. Dragons and giants and dwarves. When have you ever seen such things?”
“Well, I’ve always supposed that in this base age we have forgotten how to make enchanted swords. And as for the dragons and giants—why, Dietrich and the other heroes killed them all.”
“Killed them all!” Dietrich laughed. “Yes, that would ‘save the appearances’.”
“You said Etzl was real. What of the Goth kings—Theodoric and Ermanric?”
“Yes. They all lived in the Frankish Age.”
“Since so long!”
“Yes. It was Etzl who killed Ermanric.”
“There. You see?”
“See what?”
“If they were real—Etzl and Herman and Theodor—then why not Laurin the dwarf or Grim the giant? Don’t laugh! I met a pack peddler from Vienna once, and he told me that when they were erecting the cathedral there, the builders