The party crossed the valley. Feet and hooves drummed the brook bridge; armsmen shouted greetings to sweet hearts and wives long unswyved (as they hoped). Fathers called to sons happily returned (and grown unaccountably older) amid wails for husbands, sons, brothers missing from the ranks. Hounds gave tongue and chased alongside the file of men. Glitter in the air as Eugen tossed small coins to the throng. Booty taken from dead English knights, or ransomed off live ones. Men and women scrabbled for coppers in the dirt, praising their lord for his generosity, and biting the coins.
The procession trudged up Church Hill, where Dietrich, Joachim, and Theresia awaited. Dietrich had vested for the occasion in a gold chasuble, but the Minorite wore the same patched robe as always and watched the approaching lord with a mixture of wariness and contempt. More of the former and less of the latter, Dietrich thought, might serve the man better. Beside them, less quiet, more uncertain, the Herr’s daughters chattered with their nurse. Irmgard, the younger, alternated smiles with apprehension. Her father was coming! But two years is forever in the life of a child, and he was that long estranged. Everard chewed his moustache with the unease of a man left two years in charge of his master’s estate. Klaus, who was maier for the village, stood beside him with an indifference that betokened either an innocent heart or one more confident in its misappropriations.
Max had drawn the castle guard up in two lines, and sixteen men presented their arms in a shout and a clash of metal as their lord rode between them. Even Dietrich, who had seen more splendid displays than this in towns and cities far more grand, was stirred by the spectacle.
The herald dismounted planted the Hochwald banner — vert, a boar passant below an oak tree, all proper. Manfred reined in before it and his horse reared and pawed the air. The harvesters, who had rambled up the hillside, cheered the horsemanship, but Theresia whispered, “Oh, the poor beast, ridden hard.”
If the horse had been ridden hard, so had the men. Dietrich noted the signs of a forced march beneath the brave show. Weary eyes; tattered livery. There were fewer than had marched forth, and some strange faces had been added — the discards and left-behinds of some battlefield, hungry for a lord to feed them. Hungry enough, indeed, to leave their homelands behind.
Eugen, the jung-herr, dropped to the ground, staggered and grabbed hold of the snaffle rein to steady himself. The horse shied and pawed the ground, tossing up a clot with his foot. Then Eugen stepped smartly to his lord’s stirrup and held it while the Herr dismounted.
Manfred touched knee to ground before Dietrich, and the pastor placed his left hand on the Herr’s brow and drew the sign of the cross over him with his right, announcing public thanks for the troop’s safe return. Everyone crossed themselves, and Manfred kissed his fingers. Rising, he said to Dietrich, “I would pray a while in private.”
Dietrich could see creases around the eyes that hadn’t been there before, a greater and more pallid gray in the hair. The long, lean face framed sorrow. These men, he thought, have come a long, hard way.
Passing to the church, the lord clasped hands with his steward and with Klaus and told them both to come in the evening to the manor house for the accounts. His two daughters, he embraced with much feeling, removing his gauntlets to stroke their hair. Kunigund, the older, giggled with delight. Each one he greeted — priest, steward, maier, daughter — the Herr studied with deep concern; and yet it had been Manfred absent and unheard from these two years.
The Herr paused at the church door. “Good old Saint Catherine,” he said, running a hand along the curve of the saint’s figure and touching a finger to her sad smile. “There were times, Dietrich, when I thought I would never see her again.” After a curious glance at Joachim, he strode inside. What he told God, what boon he asked or thanks he gave, he never afterward said.
The Herrenhof, the lord’s manor house, sat within its curial lands atop a hill across the valley from the church, so that lord and priest oversaw the land from their separate perches and warded the folk between them, body and soul. There were other symbolisms behind the separation, playing — in miniature — dramas that elsewhere had shaken thrones and cathedrals.
Upon the crest, Burg Hochwald warded the Oberreid road. The outer wall was a small affair, embracing curia as well as castle; but it and the moat were meant only to keep wild animals out and domestic ones in and so was of no military significance. The inner wall, the Schildmauer, was prouder and of more warlike intent. Rearing behind the shield-wall was the tower of the Bergfried, the redoubt which had anciently housed the lords of the high woods when Saracen and Viking had roamed at will and each dawn might see a Magyar horde lining the horizon. The castle was a machine designed for defense and could be held, like most, by only a small garrison; but it had been tested only once, and then not to the limit. No army had marched from the Breisgau since Ludwig the Bavarian had bested Friedrich the Fair at Mühldorf; so the drawbridge was down and the portcullis up and the guards none too vigilant.
The curia spread across an acre and a half around the manor house, crowning the hill with dairy, dovecote, sheepfold, malting house, a kitchen and bakery, a great timber barn of twelve bays to store the grain harvest from the lord’s salland; a stable grunting with cows, horses, oxen. To the rear, more noisome, the curial privy. Elsewhere, an apple orchard, a vineyard, a pound for stray animals that had wandered innocently onto the salland. In generations past, the manor had produced for itself everything needful; but much now lay abandoned. Why weave homespun when finer cloth could be had in the Freiburg market? In the modern age, pack peddlers trekked from the Breisgau, braving for the sake of profit the chance of von Falkenstein’s regard.
No serfs were about. By long custom, the harvest day ended with the meal served in the fields and the lord could demand no work afterward. No monastic sexton, appraising his water-clock to mark the canonical hours, ever gauged time so finely as a manorial serf. Matters differed among the freeholders. Dietrich had noted much late activity in shed and garden and within walls by candlelight in his passage through the village. But a man who labored on his own account did not watch the sun as closely as one who labored for another’s.
Dietrich’s entry into the curial grounds was met with much indignation by the resident geese, who harried and chivvied the priest as he made his way to the Hof. “Next Martinmas,” Dietrich scolded the birds, “you will grace the Herr’s table.” But the chastisement had no effect and they escorted him to the doors of the hall, announcing his arrival. Franz Ambach’s cow, impounded for trespass on the salland, watched placidly while she awaited her ransom.
Gunther, the maier domo, conducted Dietrich to a small scriptorium at the far end of the hall, where the Herr Manfred sat at a writing table below a slit window. Through the window drifted the woodsmoke of evening meals, the cries of hawks circling the tower battlement, the clanging of the smithy, the slow toll of Joachim at the Angelus bell on the other side of the valley, and the amber remains of the afternoon light. The sky was deepening to indigo rimmed by bright orange on the underside of the clouds. Manfred sat in a curule chair fashioned of gracefully curved rosewood whose slats ended in the heads of beasts. His pen scratched across a sheet of paper.