Gottfried fell silent and Hans touched him several times about the torso. “But the doctrine of chances, brother,” he told Gottfried, “gives no certainty. There gives yet a chance of success.”
“There gives yet a chance that Volkmar Bauer will caress me,” Gottfried answered. He faced Dietrich directly, after the human fashion. “The weakening is such that our ship can drop into the abyss between the worlds, but will likely lack the power to climb back out on the farther shore. A hard fate.”
“Or an easy one, brother,” said Hans. “Who has ever come back to tell us which?”
Gottfried batted Hans’ arm away and sprang down the hill. Dietrich watched him go. Then he turned on Hans.
“You always knew you would fail.”
Hans’ eyes were unreadable. “A schlampig device like that? Wire drawn with pliers by a boy on a swing? No clothing for the wire to contain its fluids? We made the work as sound as we could, but it is more rags and patches than that coat of Manfred’s jester. I thought failure likely from the start.”
“Then…, why the pretense?”
“Because you were right. When the alchemist failed, my folk might have seen nothing before them but lingering death. We gave them something else these past five moons. Hope may be a greater treasure than truth.”
Returning to the parsonage, Dietrich found the Kratzer lying upon his pallet, his soft lips opening and closing, though too slowly to signify laughter. He recalled that Hans had made once the same sign beneath an anonymous sky. He is weeping, Dietrich thought, and found it oddly affecting that, for Krenk as for man, the outward appearance of tears was so like that of laughter.
The Kratzer was a materialist. Was that why he wept? All men naturally feared death. Yet a materialist, holding naught beyond the threshold, might dread the passage more. He leaned over the Krenkl’s pallet, but saw only his own myriad reflections in those strange, golden eyes. There were no tears, could be no tears and, lacking them, how could the melancholic humor be bled?
The Krenkl’n were impaired in all expressions; their humors heightened by containment, like the black powder in one of Bacon’s paper tubes. They wept more deeply, angered more brightly, celebrated more wildly, idled more slowly. But they knew no poems, and sang no songs.
And yet, as a man might be happy who knew of naught else — happy before waterwheels and eye-glasses and mechanical clocks, when life was harder than in these more modern times — so too could the Krenken live content until finding themselves in the Hochwald.
Dietrich crossed to the outbuilding to obtain some grain with which to make a porridge. Upon the window sill, above the grain sack, sat the Kratzer’s flask. It was fashioned of a white, semi-opaque material that the Kratzer had named “rock-oil,” and the sun, passing through the clarified oilskin that served as a light in that window, cast the contents in shadow. Dietrich took the flask in hand.
He was not mistaken. The level had diminished.
Returning to the parsonage, Dietrich gazed down at the philosopher. I know now why you weep, my friend. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak, and the Kratzer’s dread had pulled the stopper that his revulsion had meant to keep sealed. “Do you know what he drank?” Dietrich asked the monk, who knelt in prayer.
Joachim’s murmurs stopped, and he nodded, once. “With this very spoon, I fed him. I poured into him his friends and companions. God moves mysteriously.” Then he sat back on his heels. “The body is but a husk; only the spirit is real. We respect our body as the image of God, but their bodies are not God’s image, and so might be used in ways not permitted to us.”
Dietrich did not contest the casuistry. He watched the Minorite scoop up the fine, dark-green granules that the Kratzer’s body expelled and pour them into a waste-bucket. “But if the body is consumed,” he asked, “what remains for the ressurection of the dead?”
Joachim wiped the creature clean. “What remains when worms consume it? Do not limit God. With Him, are all things possible.”
Shortly after the Nativity of John, a peddler arrived from the direction of Bear Valley, leading a pack mule full of goods. He prayed the Herr’s leave to set up a stall on the village green for a few days. A swarthy man with wide, thick moustaches, and with bangles on his wrists and two hoops of gold in his ears, he fired his tin-pot up and promised miracles of repair. He displayed also ornaments he had procured in the East. He gave the name of Imre and claimed Hungarian blood. He did a brisk business on sundry trifles, and mending pots and pans.
At Angelus the following day, Dietrich approached him as he packed his goods away for the night. “You have something, I fix?” the man asked.
“You are far from home,” Dietrich suggested.
That elicited a cheerful shrug. “Man stay home, man no peddler,’ the other replied. “Only Soprón shopkeeper. Sell to neighbors, what profit? What I make, they make. Here, when you see these things like I bring?” He dipped into a coffer and emerged with a white pallium done up in fishes and crosses and edged in bright colors of red and blue. “When see the scarf so fine?”
Dietrich pretended to study the material. “You’d fetch a better price for it in Vienna or Munich than in a little hill dorp.”
The man licked his lips and glanced to the side. He tugged on his moustache. “City guilds no like the peddlers; but here, how often see one?”
“More often than you may think, friend Imre. Freiburg is no great trek.” He did not mention that tales of demons had kept such traffic at bay of late. That Imre might spy an incautious Krenk was a chance to which Dietrich had resigned himself. “Now, if you would return to me Volkmar’s brooch, I will give you a word of advice. Substitutions of base metal are too bald for so small a village, where each man knows his few gauds with greater intimacy than do your city folk.” Imre grinned and dug into his scrip, retrieving the ornament. Dietrich checked the clasp on the back and saw that it had been repaired with considerable skill. “A man of your craft need not resort to such petty theft.” He handed over the tin piece that the peddler had substituted. “If you are once marked a thief, who will trade with you?”
Imre dropped the false brooch into his scrip with a careless shrug. “Men of skill must also eat. Think vogt want me sell for him brooch in Freiburg. Fool wife, keep money.”
“You would be advised to leave,” Dietrich told him. “Volkmar will talk to the others.”
Again, the man shrugged. “Peddler come, peddler go. Otherwise, no peddler.”
“But do not go to Strassburg or to Basel. The pest has appeared there.”
“Oho…” The Magyar looked east, toward Bear Valley. “So. Then I no go those places.”
The peddler returned to Oberhochwald three days later, although Dietrich did not learn of it until after noon. Manfred himself, riding at exercise with Eugen and one of the castle knights, came upon him on the track from Niederhochwald. Imre declared that he had private words for the Herr, and Manfred led him a little to the side. Eugen sat his horse close by and, on hearing the Herr gasp and thinking him treacherously struck, rendered the peddler senseless with the flat of his sword. This proved an injustice, as Manfred related to a council hastily called afterward in the great hall.
“The pest is come into the Breisgau,” he announced without preamble.