Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [95]
“She ought not to be frightened of them,” Dietrich said.
But Joachim turned on him. “In the name of Christ, Dietrich! First, give comfort; then juggle your dialectic! Help me lift her out of there.”
“You are a handsome boy, brother Joachim,” Theresia said. “He was handsome, too. He came with the demons and the fire but he wept and he carried me away and saved me from them.” She had taken two more steps, supported by Joachim and Dietrich on either side, when she shrieked. Hans and the Kratzer had come to the kitchen door.
“I would observe this woman,” the Kratzer said through the talking head. “Why do some of your folk respond so?”
“She is not one of your beetles or leaves, to be studied and divided by genus and species,” Dietrich said. “Fright has awakened old memories in her.”
Joachim took Theresia under his arm, placing himself between the herb woman and the Krenken, and hurried her through the door. “Make them go away!” Theresia begged Joachim.
Hans clicked his horny lips and said, “You shall have your wish.”
He did not ask Dietrich to translate the remark for the girl, and the priest could not help but wonder if it had been an involuntary exclamation, not meant for overhearing.
THAT EVENING, Dietrich tramped into the Lesser Wood and cut down pine branches, which he wove into an Advent wreath for the coming Sunday. When afterward he looked into the kitchen, he saw Joachim’s quilted, goose-down blanket laid over the shivering body of Johann von Sterne.
XII
JANUARY, 1348
Before Matins, the Epiphany of the Lord
WINTER FELL like a shroud. The first snow had barely slumped under the pale sun when a second fell upon it, and path and pasture vanished alike into anonymity. The millstream and its pond froze clear to the bottom, and fish could be spied mid-wriggle in the wintry glass. Peasants in their cottages, employed in mending and repair, threw another log on the fire and rubbed their hands. The wider world had been emptied out and a pall of gray woodsmoke hung over the silence.
The Krenken huddled miserably before their hosts’ firesides, seldom venturing out. The snow had halted all thought of repair to their ship. Instead, they talked about how they would someday repair it.
But after a time, even the talk ceased.
THE COMPLINES of St. Saturnius brought a wind to buffet the parsonage’s shuttered windows. A low sussurus moaned through chinks in the planking. Hans had gone to the outbuilding to prepare special Krenkish foods for himself and the Kratzer. Joachim hunched over the refectory table where, under the Kratzer’s critical eye, he whittled Balthazar from a bough of black oak, to add to his crèche figurines.
The door flew open, and the alchemist burst into the room and hopped immediately to the fireside, where he opened Gregor’s fur coat and luxuriated in the flames. “In Germany,” Dietrich said as he went to close the door, “the custom stands that we knock on the doorpost and await permission to enter.” But the alchemist, whom they had named after Arnold of Villanova, made no answer. He clacked some announcement to the Kratzer, and the two fell into an animated discussion which the Heinzelmännchen did not translate.
Dietrich took up the stew pot that he had earlier hung to simmer over the fire and served Joachim. The Krenken were a rude and ill-mannered folk. Small wonder they quarreled so among themselves.
Hans returned from the outbuilding with two plates in his hands. At sight of the alchemist, he hesitated, then handed one to the alchemist and the other to the Kratzer. He sat himself across the table from Joachim.
“That was kindly done,” Joachim said, curling another shaving from Balthazar’s back.
Hans tossed his arm. “Were but one morsel left, it would be Arnold’s to swallow.”
Dietrich had noticed that even Gschert deferred to the alchemist, though Arnold was clearly an underling. “Why?” He spooned some soup into a wooden bowl and gave it to Hans, along with a stick of little-bread.
Instead of answering, Hans picked up the Christ-child that