This time there was a pause in the reply, and Herr Gschert made wa-wa sounds again, to which the Kratzer, who had been staring at Dietrich throughout, made the dismissive toss-gesture. It clicked its lips together — and the sprite said, “There is no small man. The box himself speaks.”

Dietrich laughed. “How can that be,” he asked, “when you have no tongue?”

“What means ‘tongue’?”

Amused, Dietrich stuck his tongue out.

The Kratzer reached its long arm out and touched the picture frame, and the picture changed to a portrait of Dietrich himself, fully-rendered in depth in the act of sticking his tongue out. In some manner, the tongue in the portrait glowed. Dietrich wondered if he had been wrong about the demonic nature of these beings. “Is this tongue?” the Heinzelmännchen asked.

“Yes, that is doch the tongue.”

“Many thanks.”

“It was when it thanked me,” Dietrich told Manfred later that evening, “that I began to suspect that it was a machine.”

“A machine…” Manfred thought about that. “You mean like Müller’s camshaft?” The two of them stood by a credence table near the fireplace in the great hall. The remnants of the dinner had been cleared, the children sent to bed with their nurse, the juggler thanked and dismissed with his pfennig, the other guests escorted to the door by Gunther. The hall was now sealed and even the servants sent away, leaving only Max to guard the door. Manfred filled two maigeleins with wine by his own hand. He proffered both, and Dietrich chose the one on the left. “Thank you, mine Herr.”

Manfred grinned briefly. “Should I suspect now that you, too, are all gears and cams?”

“Please, I was conscious of the irony.” They walked together from the credence table to stand near the fire. The ruddy embers hissed, and licked occasionally into flame.

Dietrich rubbed his hand across the roughly textured glass of his wine-bowl while he considered. “There was no cadence to the voice,” he decided. “Or, rather, its cadence was mechanical, without rhetorical flourishes. It lacked scorn, amusement, emphasis, … hesitation. It said ‘many thanks’ with all the feeling as a shuttlecock flying across a loom.”

“I see,” said Manfred, and Dietrich raised a finger post.

“And that was another convincing point. You and I understand that by ‘see’ you signified something other than a direct impression on the sense of sight. As Buridan said, there is more to the meaning of an utterance than the precise words uttered. But the Heinzelmännchen did not understand figures. Once it learned that the ‘tongue’ is a part of the body, it became confused when I referred to ‘the German tongue.’ It did not comprehend metonymy.”

“That’s Greek to me,” Manfred said.

“What I mean, my lord, is that I think… I think they may not know poetry.”

“No poetry…” Manfred frowned, swirled his wine cup, and threw down a swallow. “Imagine that,” he said. For a moment Dietrich thought the Herr had spoken sarcastically, but the man surprised him when he continued almost to himself, “No King Rother? No Eneit?” He lifted his cup and declaimed:

By God, I cannot hear those lines sung without a shiver.” He turned to Dietrich. “You will swear that this Heinzelmännchen is only a device and not a real brownie?”

“Mine Herr, Bacon described such a ‘talking head,’ though he knew not how one might be fashioned. Since thirteen years the Milanese built a mechanical clock in their public square that rings the hours with no man’s hand intervening. If a mechanical device can speak the time, why cannot a more subtle device speak of other matters?”

“That logic of yours will get you into trouble one of these days,” Manfred cautioned him. “But you say it already knew some phrases and words. How was that come by?”

“They placed devices about the village to listen to our speech. They showed me one. It was no bigger than my thumb and looked like an insect, for which reason I call them ‘bugs.’ From what he overheard, the Heinzelmännchen deduced somehow a meaning — that ‘How goes it?’ signified a greeting, or that ‘swine’ signified that particular animal, and so forth. But he was limited by what the mechanical bugs saw and heard, much of which he did not properly understand. So, while he knew that swine were sometimes called ‘sucklings’ or ‘yearlings,’ he did not grasp the distinction, let alone that between the first, second and third pen or between breeding and leader sows — by which I deduce that these folk are not swineherds.”

Manfred grunted. “You still call it a Heinzelmännchen, then.”

Dietrich shrugged. “The name is as good as any. But I coined a term in Greek to signify both the brownie and the bugs.”

“Yes, you would have…”

“I call them automata, because they are self-acting.”

“Like the mill-wheel, then.”

“Very like, save that I know not what fluid impresses an impetus on them.”

Manfred’s eyes searched the hall. “Might a ‘bug’ listen even now?”

Dietrich shrugged. “They placed them on Laurence-eve, just before your return. They are subtle, but I doubt they could have slipped into the Hof or the Burg. The sentries may not be the most alert, but they might have marked a skulking, five-shoe tall grasshopper.”

Manfred guffawed and slapped Dietrich on the shoulder. “A five-shoe grasshopper! Ha! Yes, they would have noticed that!”

In the parsonage, Dietrich examined his rooms carefully and finally found a bug no larger than his least finger-digit nestled in the arms of Lorenz’s cross. A clever perch. The automaton could observe the entire room and, dark-colored as it was, remain unseen.

Dietrich left it in place. If the strangers’ intent was to learn the German tongue, then the sooner that was accomplished, the sooner Dietrich could explain the need for them to depart.

“I will fetch a fresh hour-candle,” he announced to the listening instrument. Then, having obtained one from the casket, concluded, “I have fetched an hour-candle.” He held the candle so that it faced the bug. “This is called an ‘hour-candle.’ It is composed of…” He pinched a piece off the edge. “…of bee’s-wax. Each numbered line marks one twelfth-part of the day, from sunrise to sunset. I gauge the time by how far down the candle has burned.”

He spoke self-consciously at first, then more in the manner of an arts master giving a cursory. Yet, what listened was not a class of scholars, but one of Bacon’s talking heads and he wondered to what extent he was understood by the device, or even whether in this instance understanding had any meaning.