Eifelheim Read Free Page A

Catherine hummed a small tune to herself. On most days, the murmuring walls amused him, but not today. With the unease that lay upon him, Dietrich feared that the Four Giants would suddenly unburden themselves and bring the whole edifice down upon him.
    More than one cottage below the hill now showed a flicker of candlelight behind its windows, and atop Manfred’s keep on the other side of the little valley, the night watch paced in unwonted alertness, peering first one way then another for the approach of some unseen enemy.
    A figure stumbled toward him from the village, recovered, slipped in the dirt, and a thin sob carried in the early morning air. Dietrich raised his torch and waited. Was the heralded menace even now slouching brazenly toward him?
    But even before it fell to its knees breathlessly before him, the figure had resolved itself into Hildegarde, the miller’s wife, barefooted and with her hair a tangle, a hasty cloak thrown over her night smock. Dietrich’s torchlight glimmered on an unwashed face. A menace she may have been, but of another and long-familiar sort.
    “Ach, pastor!” she cried. “God has discovered my sins.”
    God, Dietrich reflected, had not had far to look. He raised the woman to her feet. “God has known all our sins from the beginnings of time.”
    “Then why has he awakened me today with such fear? You must shrive me.”

    E AGER TO put walls between himself and the foreboding miasma, Dietrich led Hilde into the church; and was disappointed, if not surprised, to find his anxiety undiminished. Holy ground might hold the supernatural at bay until the end of time, but the merely natural intruded where it would.
    In the stillness Dietrich heard a soft whisper, as of a small wind or a running brook. Shading his eyes against the brightness of his torch, Dietrich discerned a smaller shadow crouched before the main altar. Joachim the Minorite hunched there, his hurried ejaculations rushing over themselves like a fleeing crowd, so that the words blended into an indistinct susurration.
    The prayers cut off, and Joachim turned, rising in a quick, lithe movement. He wore a tattered, brown habit of long employment, carefully and repeatedly mended. The cowl shadowed sharply chiseled features: a small dark man with heavy brows and deep brooding eyes. He wet his lips with a quick motion of his tongue.
    “Dietrich …?” the Minorite said, and the word quavered a little at the end.
    “Don’t be afraid, Joachim. We all feel it. The beasts, too. It is some natural thing, a disturbance in the air, like silent thunder.”
    Joachim shook his head and a curl of black hair fell across his brow.
“Silent
thunder?”
    “I can think of no better way to describe it. It is like the bass pipe of a great organ that makes the glass shiver.” He told Joachim his reasoning with the wool.
    The Minorite glanced at Hildegarde, who had lingered at the rear of the church. He rubbed both his arms under his robe and looked side to side. “No, this dread is God’s voice calling us to repentance. It is too terrible to be anything else!” He cried this in his preaching voice, so that the words came back from the statues that watched from their niches.
    Joachim’s preaching favored gestures and colorful stories, while Dietrich’s own closely reasoned sermons oftenhad a soporific effect on his flock. Sometimes he envied the monk his ability to stir men’s hearts; but only sometimes. Stirred, a heart could be a terrible thing.
    “God may call,” he instructed the younger man, “by wholly material means.” He turned the young man with a gentle pressure on his shoulder. “Go, vest the altar. The Mass ‘Clamavérunt.’ The rubrics call for red today.”
    A hard man to deal with, Dietrich thought as Joachim left, and a harder one to know. The young monk wore his rags with greater pride than the pope in Avignon his gilded crown. The Spirituals preached the poverty of Jesus and His Apostles and railed against the