Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [58]
The creature raised its head to stare directly at Dietrich, who could neither move nor speak in the face of such vehemence. He need not return to the lazaretto to risk a beating by these fierce-tempered folk. The Krenken were quite capable of coming into the village, and had refrained so far only because they thought themselves too weak. Let them once suspect their own power and who knew what casual brutality they might inflict?
“There is,” he began to say, but he could not finish the utterance under that basilisk glare; and so he faced Lorenz’s crucifix above his prie-dieu. “There is another sort of strength,” he said. “And that is the ability to live in the face of death.”
The Krenk clicked its side-jaws once, emphatically. “You mock us.”
Dietrich realized what the emphatic click reminded him of—the two blades of a scissors cutting something off. He remembered that, when the sign had been used, the other party had exposed its neck. Dietrich’s hand rose by itself to his throat, and he put the table once more between himself and the stranger. “I intended no mockery. Tell me how I have offended.”
“Even now,” the Krenk responded, close by his ear though the room lay between them. “Even now—and I cannot say why—you seem insolent. I must tell myself always that you are not Krenkish and so do not know proper behavior. I have told you: Our cart is broken and we are lost, and so we must die here in this far place. So you tell us ‘to live in the face of death’.”
“Then we must repair your cart, or find you another. Zimmerman is a skilled wheelwright, and Schmidt can fashion whatever metal fixtures are needed. Horses dislike your smell, and the villagers cannot spare their ploughoxen to pull your cart; but if you have silver we may buy draft animals elsewhere. If not, then once the way is known, a steady walk will …” Dietrich’s voice trailed off as the Krenk beat his forearms arrhythmically against the wall.
“No, no, no. It cannot be walked, and your carts cannot endure the journey.”
“Well, William of Rubruck walked to Cathay and back, and Marco Polo and his uncles did the same more lately, and there is on this earth no farther place than Cathay.”
The Krenk faced him once more and it seemed to Dietrich that those yellow eyes glowed with a peculiar intensity. But that was a trick of the shadows and the candlelight. “No farther place on this earth,” the creature said, “but there are other earths.”
“Indeed there may be, but the journey there is no natural journey.”
The Krenk, always wooden in expression, seemed to stiffen the more. “You … know of such journeys—question.”
The Heinzelmännchen had yet to master expression. The Kratzer had told Dietrich that Krenkish languages employed rhythm rather than tone to indicate humor or query or irony. Thus, Dietrich could not be certain that he had heard hope in the machine’s translation.
“The journey to Heaven …” Dietrich suggested, to be sure he understood.
The Krenk pointed skyward. “‘Heaven’ is up there—question.”
“Ja. Beyond the firmament of the fixed stars, beyond even the crystalline orb or the prime mobile, the unmoving empyrean Heaven. But, the journey is made by our inner selves.”
“How strange that you would know this. How say you ‘all-that-is’: earth, stars, all—question.”
“‘The world.’ ‘Kosmos’.”
“Then, hear. The kosmos is indeed curved and the stars and … I must say, ‘families of stars,’ are embedded within it, as in a fluid. But in—another—direction, neither width nor breadth nor height, lies the other side of the firmament, which we liken to a membrane, or skin.”
“A tent,” Dietrich suggested; but he had to explain “tent,” as the Heinzelmännchen had never seen one named.
The Krenk said, “Natural philosophy progresses differently in different arts, and perhaps your people have mastered the ‘other world’ while remaining … simple in other ways.” It looked again out the window. “Could salvation be possible for us …”
The last comment, Dietrich suspected, had