Eifelheim by Michael Flynn Read Free Book Online Page B

gray pall lingered over the forest.
    At that, he resumed his progress toward the church, and this time Dietrich let him go. God had sent Joachim for a reason. A trial of some sort. There were times when he envied the Minorite his ecstasies, the cries of joy he wrang from God’s presence. Dietrich’s own delight in reason seemed bloodless by comparison.
    D IETRICH SPOKE with those who had lost their homes. Felix and Ilse Ackermann only stared back dumbly. Everything they had salvaged from the ruin of their home they had wrapped into two small sacks, which Felix and his daughter Ulrike carried across their backs. The child, Maria, clutched a wooden doll, blackened and covered with a rag of scorched fabric. It looked like one of those African men that the Saracens sold at slave markets around the Mediterranean. Dietrich squatted beside Maria.
    “No worries, little one. You will stay with your uncle Lorenz until the village can help your father build a new home.”
    “But who will make Anna better?” Maria asked, holding the doll up.
    “I will take her to the church and see what I can do.” He tried to take the doll gently from the girl’s grasp, but found he had to pry her fingers away.
    “All right, you worthless sons of faithless wives! Back to the castle with you. Don’t straggle there! You’ve had yourselves a break in the routine
and
a bath in the millpond—and high time, too!—but there’s still work wanting to be done!”
    Dietrich stepped aside and let the men-at-arms pass. “God bless you and your men, Sergeant Schweitzer,” he said.
    The sergeant crossed himself. “Good day to you, pastor.” He gestured toward the castle with a toss of his head. “Everard sent us down to help fight the fires.” Maximilian Schweitzer was a short, thick-shouldered man who, in disposition, reminded Dietrich of a tree stump. He had wandered down from the Alpine country a few years before to sell his sword, and Herr Manfred had hired him to take his foot soldiers in charge and act against outlaws in the high woods.
    “Pastor, what …” The sergeant frowned suddenly and glared at his men. “No one told you to listen. Do you need me to hold your hands? There’s only the one street through the village. The castle is at one end and you’re at the other. Can you figure the rest out yourselves?”
    Andreas, the corporal, bawled at them and they moved on in a rough line. Schweitzer watched them go. “They’re good lads,” he told Dietrich, “but they want for discipline.” He tugged at his leather jerkin to straighten it. “Pastor, what happened today? All morning I felt like … Like I knew there was an ambush laid for me, but not when or where. There was a fight in the guardroom, and young Hertl broke down in sobs in the common room for no reason at all. And when we laid hand to knife or helm—to anything metal—there would be a short, stabbing pain that—”
    “Were any hurt?”
    “By such a small dart? Not in the body, but who knowswhat damage was done to the soul? Some of the lads from back up in the forest, they said it was elf-shot.”
    “Elf-shot?”
    “Small arrows, invisible, fired by the elves. What?”
    “Well, the hypothesis ‘saves the appearances,’ as Buridan requires, but you are multiplying entities without need.”
    Schweitzer scowled. “If that is mockery …”
    “No, sergeant. I was but recalling a friend of mine from Paris. He said that when we try to explain something occult, we should not suggest new entities to do so.”
    “Well … elves are not
new
entities,” Schweitzer insisted. “They’ve been around since the forest was young. Andreas comes from the Murg Valley and he says it might have been the Gnurr playing tricks on us. And Franzl Long-nose said it was the
Aschenmännlein
out of Siegmanns Woods.”
    “The Swabian imagination is a wonderful thing,” Dietrich said. “Sergeant, the supernatural lies always in small things. In a piece of bread. In a stranger’s