Free Eifelheim by Michael Flynn Page B

Friedrich the Fair at Mühldorf; so the drawbridge was down and the portcullis up and the guards none too vigilant.
    The
curia
spread across an acre and a half around the manor house, crowning the hill with dairy, dovecote, sheepfold, malting house, a kitchen and bakery, a great timber barn of twelve bays to store the grain harvest from the lord’s salland; a stable grunting with cows, horses, oxen. To the rear, more noisome, the curial privy. Elsewhere, an apple orchard, a vineyard, a pound for stray animals that had wandered innocently onto the salland. In generations past, the manor had produced for itself everything needful; but much now lay abandoned. Why weave homespun when finer cloth could be had in the Freiburg market? In the modern age, pack peddlers trekked from the Breisgau, braving for the sake of profit the chance of von Falkenstein’s regard.
    No serfs were about. By long custom, the harvest day ended with the meal served in the fields and the lord could demand no work afterward. No monastic sexton, appraising his water clock to mark the canonical hours, ever gauged time so finely as a manorial serf. Matters differed among the freeholders. Dietrich had noted much late activity in shed and garden and within walls by candlelight in his passage through the village. But a man who labored on his own account did not watch the sun as closely as one who labored for another’s.
    Dietrich’s entry into the curial grounds was met with much indignation by the resident geese, who harried and chivvied the priest as he made his way to the Hof. “Next Martinmas,” Dietrich scolded the birds, “you will grace the Herr’s table.” But the chastisement had no effect and they escorted him to the doors of the hall, announcing his arrival. Franz Ambach’s cow, impounded for trespass on the salland, watched placidly while she awaited her ransom.

    G UNTHER, THE
maier domo
, conducted Dietrich to a small scriptorium at the far end of the hall, where the Herr Manfred sat at a writing table below a slit window. Through the window drifted the woodsmoke of evening meals, the cries of hawks circling the tower battlement, the clanging of the smithy, the slow toll of Joachim at the Angelus bell on the other side of the valley, and the amber remains of the afternoon light. The sky was deepening to indigo rimmed by bright orange on the underside of the clouds. Manfred sat in a curule chair fashioned of gracefully curved rosewood whose slats ended in the heads of beasts. His pen scratched across a sheet of paper.
    He glanced up at Dietrich’s appearance, bent once more to his writing, then put quill aside and passed the sheet to Max, who stood a little to the side. “Have Wilimer make fair copies of this and see it sent to each of my knights.” Manfred waited until Max had gone before turning to Dietrich. His lips twitched into a brief smile. “Dietrich, you are prompt. I’ve always admired that in you.” He meant “obedient to a summons,” but Dietrich forbore from pointing it out. It might not even be true, but neither of them had tested it as yet.
    Manfred indicated a straight-backed chair before the desk and waited until Dietrich had seated himself. “What’s this?” he asked when the priest placed a pfennig before him.
    “The fine for Ambach’s cow,” he said.
    Manfred picked up the coin and regarded Dietrich for a moment before placing it in a corner of his desk. “I’ll tell Everard. You know if you always pay their fines for them, they’ll lose their dread of delinquency.” Dietrich said nothing, and Manfred turned to his coffer and removed a bundle of parchments wrapped in oiled skin and tied up in string. “Here. These are the latest tractates from the Paris scholars. I had them copied by the stationers while we idled in Picardy. Most of them are direct from the masters’ copies, but there were a few from the Merton calculators, who interestyou so much. Those are from secondary copies, of course, brought