Free Eifelheim by Michael Flynn

with much promise in his eyes. Josef had loved him greatly, as the son his solitary life had never granted.
    When they had finished, they arranged the loose sod around the opening to provide as much protection as they could from animals.
    Schweitzer jerked suddenly about and took a step toward the smoky woods behind him. A snapping of twigs faded rapidly in the distance. “We are watched,” he said.
    “It didn’t sound like footsteps,” Dietrich suggested. “It sounded more like a deer, or a rabbit.”
    The sergeant shook his head. “A soldier knows when he’s being watched.”
    “Then, whoever these people are, they’re timid,” Dietrich told Max.
    “I don’t think so,” Max answered without turning. “I think they are sentries. They run to take word back or to remain unseen. It’s what I would do.”
    “Outlaw knights?”
    “I doubt it.” He tapped the pommel of his Burgundian quillon. “France has employment enough. They needn’t live like poachers in a place like this.” After a few more minutes, he said, “He’s gone, at any rate. The Herr will be back on the morrow. We’ll see what his wishes are.”

IV
AUGUST , 1348
The Feast of St. Clare of Assisi
    I N THE shimmering heat of an August afternoon, the Herr Manfred von Hochwald danced his
palefridus
up the Oberreid road to the amazement and delight of the peasants bent over the grain. First, came Wolfram the herald, astride a white jennet, bearing the banner with the Hochwald arms and crying the lord’s return to the harvest army. There followed a troop of men-at-arms, with their pikes resting upon their shoulders and their helmets glinting like the sun offthe tumbling mill stream. Then came the captains and the knights, then chaplain Rudolf and Eugen the jung-herr, then the Herr himself: tall and splendid, well-seated, gorgeous in his surcoat, with his helm crooked in his arm and his hand raised in beneficent greeting.
    In spring-sown fields now sagging with wheat, the women unbent from the reaping, sickles dangling from their numbed hands, and the men turned from sheaves half-bound to gape at the procession. They paused, mopped brows with kerchief or cap, traded uncertain looks, questions, guesses, exclamations, until all—villein and free, man and woman and child—drifted in one accord toward the road, gathering speed as they went, excitement building upon itself, splashing through the brook that bordered the fields, voices swelling from murmur to shout. Behind, atop the wagons, the wardens of autumn seethed over the lost afternoon, for the grain would ripen with or without the sickle. But the wardens, too, waved their caps at the noble procession, before tugging them firmly back into place.
    The party crossed the valley. Feet and hooves drummed the brook bridge; armsmen shouted greetings to sweethearts and wives long unswyved (as they hoped). Fathers called to sons happily returned (and grown unaccountably older) amid wails for husbands, sons, brothers missing from the ranks. Hounds gave tongue and chased alongside the file of men. Glitter in the air as Eugen tossed small coins to the throng. Booty taken from dead English knights, or ransomed off live ones. Men and women scrabbled for coppers in the dirt, praising their lord for his generosity, and biting the coins.
    The procession trudged up Church Hill, where Dietrich, Joachim, and Theresia awaited. Dietrich had vested for the occasion in a gold chasuble, but the Minorite wore the same patched robe as always and watched the approaching lord with a mixture of wariness and contempt. More of the former and less of the latter, Dietrich thought, might serve the man better. Beside them, less quiet, more uncertain, the Herr’s daughters chattered with their nurse. Irmgard,the younger, alternated smiles with apprehension. Her father was coming! But two years is forever in the life of a child, and he was that long estranged. Everard chewed his moustache with the unease of a man left two years in