Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [80]
OVER THE next few days, as the market bustled, Dietrich avoided Minster Place. He arranged with a coppersmith to draw the ingot. “Provided,” Dietrich told him, “you draw it fine enough to pass through this eye.” And he held up a device that the Krenk had given him.
The smith whistled. “The gage is surpassing fine, but naturally the finer the draw the less copper I use, so I certainly have the motive.” He laughed a little sharply. Behind him, his apprentice sat on a swing with the drawing pliers in his hand, watching his master negotiate.
“When will it be done?”
“I must draw the wire in several reductions so it does not harden. You see, first I soften it with fire, and hammer a bit of the material through a die-hole. Then my apprentice grips it with the pliers and swings back and forth, pulling with each swing more wire through the hole. But I cannot draw it so fine as this all at once or the strand will break.”
Dietrich was not interested in the finer points of copper-smithing. “So long as the breaks are not hammered together.”
The coppersmith studied the ingot with covert avarice. “Two hundred shoes … Three days.”
In three days, the market would end and Dietrich could leave this town of prying eyes. “That pleases. I will be back in that time.”
HE BESPOKE also a glazier on the cost of repairing the broken church windows and secured a promise from the man to come up the mountain in the springtime. “I hear ye’ve got locusts up there,” the glazier said. “Poor harvest. A fellow down from St. Blasien said he heard locusts all over the Katerinaberg.” The man thought a little more, then added with a wink, “An’ he says the monks at St. Blasien drove off a demon. Hideous lookin’ creature broke into the storerooms to steal food. So the monks set a trap one night and repelled it with fire. The demon fled toward the Feldberg, but the monks burned down half their kitchen in the feat.” He tossed his head, laughing. “Burned down half their kitchen. Heh. You folks live near the Feldberg. You didn’t see the creature come to nest, did you?”
Dietrich shook his head. “No, we did not see that.”
The glazier winked. “I think the monks were celebrating the wine harvest. I seen plenty o’ demons that way, myself.”
WHEN THE market ended, the wagons departed for the Hochwald with bags of coin, bolts of cloth, and a satisfied smile on Everard’s face. Dietrich did not go with them, for the coppersmith’s promise had proven optimistic. “It just wants a different draw,” the man insisted. “The gauge is so fine that it keeps breaking.” It was a plea to accept a thicker wire, but Dietrich would not hear it.
He misliked tarrying, yet without the wire the Krenken would stay forever, and he had had a vision of what that would mean. They might still hang ‘im, if they happen on ‘im. He stayed in the chapter house at the minster, dining with Willi and the others, but he never left by the south doors and he never ventured toward the River Dreisam, where the fishermen’s huts lined the autumn-starved flow. He prayed for the woman and for her boy—and for her man, if she had found a new one—and he prayed that he might at least remember her name. Now and then, he wondered if he had mistaken a fishwife’s ribald jape. It had all happened somewhere else. It had all fallen into a shambles under the walls of Strassburg, trampled under the hooves of the Alsatian chivalry, far from the Breisgau. It asked too much of coincidence that she be here. It demanded too much cruelty of God.
THE WIRE was at last ready on the Commemoration of Pirminius of Reichenau, and Dietrich departed with a party of miners bound for the Ore Chest, accompanying them until their roads diverged and he took the northern route to Kirchgartner Valley. There he found a caravan from Basel, led by a Jew named Samuel de Medina, in the employ of Duke Albrecht.
Dietrich thought de