Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [52]
Dietrich had grown accustomed to these wild arguments, although they unnerved him with their sudden vehemence. They were like thunder-weather, blowing up from nowhere, and passing just as quickly. The Krenken were a choleric race, like the Italians, or they were under some great strain.
When the Kratzer had reachieved his balance, he said, “This has been said by another.” Dietrich knew he meant the servant. “‘You speak a word. The Heinzelmännchen repeats it in our tongue. But has it spoken what has been said?’”
“That is a great problem in philosophy,” Dietrich admitted. “The sign is not the signified, nor may it convey the entire significance.”
The Kratzer threw his head back briefly in a gesture whose meaning Dietrich had not yet plumbed. “Now we hear it,” the Krenk complained. “The poor Heinzelmännchen is speechless. What is a ‘problem’? What is a ‘philosophy’? How can the ripening of a fruit or your ‘holy breath’ be like the speed of a falling body?”
The servant spoke again, and this time the box translated his words: “The box-that-speaks stands the word ‘philosophy’ not in the German tongue.”
“Philosophy,” Dietrich explained, “is a Greek word. The Greeks are another people, like the Germans, but more ancient and learned, save that their great days were long ago. The word means ‘love of wisdom’.”
“And ‘wisdom’ is what meaning?”
All at once Dietrich felt pity for Zeno’s Achilles, running forever after the tortoise, coming always incrementally closer, yet never in fact reaching it. “‘Wisdom’ is … perhaps, having the answers to a great many questions. Our ‘philosophers’ are those who seek answers to such questions. And a ‘problem’ is a question to which no one yet knows an answer.”
“How well we know that significance.”
Gschert stood away from the wall and the Kratzer turned to face the servant, by which acts Dietrich knew that it had been the servant who had last spoken, and that the servant had spoken out of turn. Whether Gschert or the Kratzer cried, “Silence!” was unclear, but the servant was unfazed. “You could ask him.”
With that, the Herr Gschert sprang across the room. The leap was lightning-quick, vaulting the furniture and, before Dietrich had quite grasped what had happened, the lord was beating the servant of the talking head with his rasping forearms, raising cuts and welts with each blow. The Kratzer, too, had turned his anger on the servant and pummeled him with kicks.
Dietrich sat speechless for a moment before, without thinking, he cried, “Stop!” and interposed himself between the combatants. The first blow to the side of his head was enough to render him insensible, so he never felt the others.
WHEN HE came again to his senses, he found himself still in the same apartment, lying as he had fallen. Of Gschert and the Kratzer, there was no sign. However, the servant sat on the floor beside him with his great long legs drawn up. Where a man might have rested his chin upon his knees, these knees actually topped his head. The servant’s skin was already discoloring with the dark-green bruising of his folk. When Dietrich stirred, the servant chattered something and the box on the desk spoke.
“Why took you the blows on yourself?”
Dietrich shook his head to rid it of the ringing, but the sensation in his ears did not go away. He placed a hand on his brow. “That was not my purpose. I thought to stop them.”
“But why?”
“They were beating you. I did not think that good.”
“‘Think’ …”
“When we speak sentences inside our heads that no one can hear.”
“And ‘good’ …?”
“It does me sorrow, friend grasshopper, but there is too much noise inside my head to answer so subtle a question.” Dietrich struggled to his feet. The servant made no move to help him.
“Our cart is broken,” the servant said.
Dietrich tried his shoulder and winced. “What?”
“Our cart is broken, and its Herr is dead. And we must stay here and die and never see our homeland again. The steward of the cart, who rules now, said that to reveal this would show our weakness,