“Why, all the more, seeing how rare it has become.”

Manfred laughed without humor, then resumed his study of the sunset. “The pest reached Paris this past June,” he said quietly.

Dietrich started. “The pest!”

“Yes.” Manfred crossed his arms and seemed to become smaller. “They say half the city lies dead, and I think it but plain fact. We saw… things no man should see. Corpses left to rot in the street. Strangers denied hospice. Bishops and lords in flight, leaving Paris to fend for herself. And the church bells tolling funeral upon funeral until the town council bade them stop. Worst, I think, were the children — abandoned by their parents, dying alone and uncomprehending.”

Dietrich crossed himself three times. “Dear God have mercy on them. As bad as Italy, then? Did they wall up families into their houses, as the Visconti did in Milan? No? Then some shred of charity remained.”

“Ja. I was told the sisters in the Hospital stayed at their posts. They died, but so fast as they died, others took up their place.”

“A miracle!”

Manfred grunted. “You have a grim taste in miracles, my friend. The English fare no better in Bordeaux. And it reached Avignon in May, though the worst was over by the time we passed there. Don’t worry, Dietrich. Your Pope survived. His Jew physicians bade him sit between two fires and he never even fell sick.” The Herr paused. “I met a brave man there. Perhaps the bravest man I shall ever meet. Guy de Chauliac. Do you know him?”

“Only by reputation. He is said to be the greatest physician in Christendom.”

“That may be. He is a large man with the hands of a peasant and a slow, deliberate way of speaking. I would not have marked him a physician had I found him in the fields. After Clement left the city for his country house, de Chauliac remained — ‘to avoid the infamy,’ he told me, though there is no shame in fleeing such an enemy. He fell ill himself of the pest. And all the while he lay abed, wracked with fever and pain, he described his symptoms and treated himself in divers ways. He wrote everything down, so that any who came after him would know the course of the disease. He lanced his own pustules, and recorded the effect. He was… He was like a knight who stands his ground against his enemy, whatever wounds he has received. Would I had six men with such courage by my side in battle.”

“De Chauliac is dead, then?”

“No, he lived, praise God, though it is hard to say which treatment saved him — if indeed it was anything more than the whim of God.”

Dietrich could not understand how sickness could travel such distances. Plagues had broken out before — inside town walls or castles, among besieging armies — but never since the time of Eusebius had it consumed whole nations. Some invisible, malevolent creature seemed to stalk the land. But it was bad air, all the doctors were agreed. A mal odour, or malady.

An alignment of the planets had caused deep earthquakes in Italy, and the chasms had exuded a vast body of stiff, bad air, which the winds then moved from place to place. None knew how wide the malady was, nor how far it would travel before it finally broke up. Folk in sundry towns had tried to sunder it with loud noises, church bells and the like, but to no avail. Travelers had marked its progress up the Italian peninsula and along the coast to Marseilles. Now it had gone to Avignon, and so to Paris and Bordeaux.

“It has passed us by!” he cried. “The pest has gone west and north!” Dietrich knew shameful joy. He did not rejoice that Paris had suffered, but that Oberhochwald had been spared.

Manfred gave him a bleak look. “No sign among the Swiss, then? Max said not, but there is more than one road out of Italy since they hung that bridge across St. Gothard’s Pass. It worried us on the march that we would find you all dead, that it had passed through here before reaching Avignon.”

“We may be too high for the malady to reach,” Dietrich told him.

Manfred made a dismissive wave. “I am only a simple knight, and leave such notions as malady to scholars. But in France, I bespoke a knight of St. John, lately come from Rhodes, and he said that the pest came out of Cathay, and the story is that the dead there lie without number.

It struck Alexandria, he told me, and his brotherhood at first deemed it God’s judgment on the Saracens.”

“God has not such poor aim,” Dietrich said, “as to lay Christendom waste while smiting the infidel.”

“They’ve been burning Jews over it, all the way from the Mediterranean north — save in Avignon, where your Pope protects them.”

“Jews? That makes nonsense. Jews die also of the pest.”

“So said Clement. I have a copy of his Bull that I obtained in Avignon. Yet Jews travel all about Europe; as also does the pest. The story is that the kabbalists among them have been poisoning the wells, so it may be that the good Jews themselves know nothing about it.”

Dietrich shook his head. “It is bad air, not bad water.”

Manfred shrugged. “DeChauliac said the same, though in his delerium, he wrote that rats brought the pest.”

“Rats!” Dietrich shook his head. “No, that cannot be. Rats have been always about, and this pest is a new thing on earth.”

“As may be,” said Manfred. “But this past May, King Peter put down a pogrom in Barcelona. I had the news from Don Pero himself, who had come north looking for glory in the French war. The Catalans ran wild, but the burger militia protected the Jewish quarter. Queen Joanna sought likewise in Provence, but the folk rose up and expelled the Neapolitans. And last month Count Henri ordered all the Jews in the Dauphine brought into custody. To protect them from the mob, I think; but Henri’s a coward and the mob may ride him.” Manfred curled his right hand into a fist. “So you see that it was no such simple thing as a war that kept me at bay these past two years.”

Dietrich did not want to believe it true. “Pilgrim tales…”

“…may grow in the telling. Ja, ja. Maybe only two Jews have been burned and only twenty Cathayans died; but I know what I saw in Paris, and I would as soon not see it here. Max tells me there are poachers in my woods. If they bring the pest with them, I want them kept away.”

“But people do not carry bad air with them,” Dietrich said.

“There must be a reason why it spreads so far and wide. Some towns, Pisa and Lucca among them, have reported good fortune by blockading travelers, so travelers may well spread it. Perhaps the malady clings to their clothing. Perhaps they really do poison the wells.”

“The Lord commanded we show hospitality to the sick. Would you have Max chase them off, to the peril of our souls?”

Manfred grimaced. His fingers drummed restless on the table top. “Find out, then,” he said. “If they are hale, the wardens may use them in the grain harvest. One pfennig the day plus the evening meal and I overlook any trapping or fishing they may have done in the mean time. Two pfennig if they forego the meal. However, if they need hospitality, that is your affair. Set up a hospital in my woods, but none may enter onto my manor or into the village.”

In the morning, Max and Dietrich went in search of the poachers. Dietrich had prepared two perfumed kerchiefs with which to filter the malady, should they encounter it, but he did not think much of Manfred’s theory that clothing could carry bad air with it. There was nothing in Galen; nor had Avicenna written of it. All that clothing customarily carried were fleas and lice.

When they came to the place where the trees lay toppled like mown hay, Max hunkered down and sighted along a trunk. “The sentry ran off in that direction,” he said, holding his arm out. “Past that white beech. I noted its location at the time.”