Silence lingered. Gunther replaced the wine flagon and carefully left. Then Manfred raised his head and speared Dietrich with his gaze. “But you’d know something of that, would you not?”
Dietrich turned away. “Enough.”
“You’ve friends among the Krenken,” he heard Manfred say. “Explain to them what duty means.”
At dawn, those serfs who owed service as messengers donned cloaks with the Hochwald arms and bore the news to the lower valley and to the knight-fiefs. From Church Hill, Dietrich watched the horses dance along the snow-filled roads.
The snow that had lain thick all winter around the manor, a barrier keeping at bay the turmoil beyond the woods, was melting. Already tracks had been trampled through it. The men who carried messages would carry also rumors, and odd tales about Oberhochwald’s guests would begin to circulate.
Two weeks to the day, on the first Monday in Lent, horses pawed at the mud below the castle walls and snorted bright vapors in the cool March breeze. Colorful, snapping banners marked the knights who had mustered from their fiefs. Armsmen checked weapons and hitched their burdens for the trek into the valley. Wagons creaked; donkeys neighed; dogs barked. Children shouted with excitement or kissed fathers who waited afoot with solemn faces. Women, steadfast, refused to weep. The expected summons had arrived from the Markgraf, and the Herr of Oberhochwald was going to the wars.
Manfred’s palefridus was raven-black and speckled over with white dots, as if lately bathed with soap. Its thick mane was parted on the left side of its neck, and its headgear splendidly decorated with the Hochwald colors. Hardly had Manfred mounted than it reared from joy, delighted at its master’s weight in its saddle. Two of Manfred’s hounds came running — behind the horse, ahead of it, behind it once more — leaping with excitement. They were trackers and they thought that this would be a hunt.
Manfred had covered his armor with a surcoat bearing his arms. His helm, slung behind his saddle for the journey, shimmered in the sunlight. His sword hilt was covered with gold. Around his neck he wore a strap with a horn shaped like a griffin’s talon that measured nearly half an armlength. Its thicker end flared into a bell and, where it tapered toward the tip, the device was decorated with pure gold and held in place with deerskin thongs. It was lustrous, like a precious stone, and when he blew on it, “it sounded better than all the echoes in the world.”
His body servant was less splendidly mounted and, for saddle, he used an old feedbag. Over his right shoulder he carried the Herr’s travel-bag, packed with the sundries of camp, and over his left, his lord’s shield, slung in piggy-back fashion. With the quiver also in his right hand and the spear tucked under the shield, he seemed more fearsomely armed than the man he served.
“It pleases,” Manfred said to Dietrich, who stood beside the black horse in the trampled muck of dirt and melting snow. “The Duke had called on me for six and a half men, and I dislike choosing which to send home early. They maneuver for the privilege, y’know, but never openly. Whoever receives the grace earns the enmity of his peers, and more often than not overstays his obligation rather than be thought cowardly. Now I can add the Duke’s half-man to the Markgraf’s half-man and so obtain a whole one.” He threw his head back and laughed, and Dietrich mumbled some response. Manfred cocked an eye at him.
“You think a jest unseemly? What else might a man do marching toward possible death?”
“It is no light matter,” Dietrich answered him.
Manfred slapped his gauntlets against the palm of his left hand. “Well, I’ll pray my penance afterward, as a soldier must. Dietrich, much as I would tend my manor in peace, peace needs the consent of all, while one alone may raise a war. I swore an oath to protect the defenseless and punish peace-breakers, and that includes peace-breaking Herrenfolk. You priests say to forgive your enemy, and that is well, or revenge follows revenge until eternity. But between a man who will stop at nothing and one who will hesitate at anything, the advantage is generally to the former. The pagans had right, too. It is a false peace to be overforgiving. Your enemy may read forbearance as weakness and so be drawn to strike.”
“And how do you determine the question?” Dietrich asked.
Manfred grinned. “Why, that I should fight my enemy — but fairly.” He twisted in his saddle to see whether his corps was yet assembled. “Ho! Eugen, to the fore!” The junker, astride a white Wallachian, galloped past the cheering assembly with the Hochwald banner planted in his stirrup.
Kunigund ran to Eugen’s horse and, having grabbed the check reins, cried, “Promise me you’ll come back! Promise!” Eugen begged a kerchief from the girl to wear as a favor. This, he tucked in his girdle, declaring that it would keep him from harm. Kunigund beseeched her father. “Keep him safe, father! You won’t let anyone harm him!”
Manfred leaned to touch Kunigund on either cheek. “As safe as my arm and his honor permit, sweetling, but all lies in God’s hands. Pray for him, Gundl, and for me.”
His daughter ran to the chapel before any could see her weep. Manfred sighed after her. “She listens overmuch to the minnesingers, and holds all farewells as in the romances. If I should not return,” he added, but the sentence dangled. Then, more quietly, “She is my life. I mean for Eugen to wed her, once he has won his spurs, and that he should protect Hochwald in her name; but should he… Should neither of us return… If that befalls, see that she weds well.” He turned his gaze on Dietrich. “I entrust her to you.”
“But, the Markgraf…”
“Graf Friedrich would keep her unwed, the longer to milk my land for his own pocket.” His face clouded. “Had the boy lived, and Anna with him… Ach! There’d be none to gainsay that woman were she my burgvogt! There was a wife worthy of a man! Half of me died when I heard the midwife’s wail. These past years have been empty.”
“Is that why you went off to the French wars?” Dietrich asked. “To fill them?”
Manfred stiffened. “Mind your tongue, priest.” He yanked on the bridle reins but, looking up, checked his turn. “Ho! What have we here?”
A clamor had gone up from the waiting knights and their attendants. Some in the encampment were pointing to the sky and cheering. Others shrieked in terror as five Krenken in flying harnesses settled like fallen leaves from the sky onto the horse-pawed field. They carried hand-held pots-de-fer strapped round their middles and long, slim tubes slung over their shoulders. Dietrich recognized Hans and Gottfried — and thought it passing strange that the Krenken had once seemed so alike to him.
Wails rose from those who, having come from remote holdings, had not yet seen a Krenk. A camp-follower from Hinterwaldkopf waved in the air a reliquary she wore round her neck. Others slipped off with fearful backward glances. Franzl Long-nose slapped some of the retreating camp-followers with his staff. “What, would ye run from a handful of grasshoppers?” he laughed. Some knights half-drew their swords, and Manfred called out in his battle-voice that the strangers were travelers from a distant land who had come to lend their aid with their cunning weapons. Then he added sotto voce to Dietrich, “My thanks for persuading Grosswald.”
Dietrich, who knew how ineffective his pleas had been, said nothing.
The familiarity with which the local garrison greeted the fresh arrivals quieted many. Some muttered about “welcoming demons,” but none of the country knights dared gallop off while their brothers from the Burg stood fast. When Hans and Gottfried knelt before Dietrich, drew the sign of the cross upon themselves, and prayed the priest’s blessing, the murmurs faded like water sucked into the thirsty earth. Reflexively, many of those who had shouted the loudest alarums also crossed themselves, and took heart, if not ease, from this sign of piety.