Eifelheim (13 page)

She remained standing hipshot, with the carton. “I don’t mean to keep you from your work. I only wanted to ask you …” She hesitated. “Oh, it’s probably obvious.”

“What is?”

“Well, you’re researching a village called Eifelheim.”

“Yes. The site is an unexplained void in the Christaller grid.” That was a deliberate test on Tom’s part. He wanted to see what she would make of it.

She raised her eyebrows. “Abandoned and never resettled?” Tom nodded confirmation. “And yet,” she mused, “the locus must have had affinity or it would never have been occupied in the first place. Perhaps a nearby site…. No? That
is
odd. Perhaps their mines were depleted? Their water dried up?”

Tom smiled, delighted at her perception, as much as her interest. He’d had a difficult time convincing Sharon that there even was a problem, and all she’d come up with was a common cause, like the Black Death. This young woman at least knew enough to suggest local causes.

After he explained his problem, the librarian frowned. “Why haven’t you searched for information from
before
the village’s disappearance? Whatever caused its abandonment must have occurred earlier.”

He swatted the carton. “That’s why I’m here! Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.”

She ducked her head to the storm. “But, you’ve never referenced Oberhochwald, so I …”

“Oberhochwald?” He shook his head in irritation. “Why Oberhochwald?”

“That was Eifelheim’s original name.”

“What!” He stood sharply, knocking the heavy reading chair backward. It hit the floor with a bang and the librarian dropped her carton, folders skittering across the floor. She clapped a hand to her mouth, then stooped to gather them up.

Tom darted around the table. “Never mind those now,” he said. “It was my fault. I’ll pick them up. Just tell me how you know that about Oberhochwald.” Lifting her to her feet, he was surprised at how short she was. Sitting, he had thought her taller.

She pried her arm from his grasp. “We’ll both pick them up,” she told him. She set the carton on the floor and dropped to her hands and knees. Tom knelt beside her, handed her a folder. “Are you certain about this Oberhochwald place?”

She stacked three folders into the carton and looked at him and he noticed that her eyes were large and brown. “You mean you
didn’t know?
I learned only by accident, but I thought you … Well, it was a month ago, I think. A brother in the theology school asked me to find a rare manuscript for him and scan it into the database. The name
Eifelheim
caught my eye because I had already scanned several items for you. It was a marginal gloss on the name Oberhochwald.”

Tom paused with several more folders in his hand. “What was the context?”

“I don’t know. I read Latin, but this was in German. Oh, if I’d only known, I would have sent you an e-mail about it. But I thought—”

Tom placed a hand on her arm. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Do you have it here? The manuscript the brother asked for. I need to see it.”

“The original is at Yale—”

“A copy is fine.”

“Yes. I was about to ask you that. We kept a copy of the pdf scan in our own database, and df_imaging comes in once a month and organizes the archives for us. I can call it up.”

“Could you do that for me?
Bitte sehr?
I mean, pretty please? I’ll finish this.”

He reached under the table to retrieve another wayward folder. Hot damn! Another blow struck for serendipity! He piled two more folders atop the ones he had. No wonder he
hadn’t found any contemporary references to Eifelheim.
It hadn’t been called Eifelheim yet
. He glanced at the librarian, busy at the keyboard in her office.

“
Entschuldigung
,” he called. She paused and turned. “I haven’t even asked your name.”

“Judy,” she told him. “Judy Cao.”

“Thank you, Judy Cao.”

I
T WAS
a slim lead, a loose thread dangling from an old tangle of facts. At some unspecified time in the fourteenth century a wandering Minorite named Fra Joachim had evidently preached a sermon on “the sorcerers at Oberhochwald.” The text of the sermon had not survived the centuries, but Brother Joachim’s oratorical fame had, and a commentary on the sermon had been included in a treatise on homiletics against witchcraft and devil worship. A later reader—sixteenth century to judge by the calligraphy—had added a marginal gloss:
Dieses Dorp heißt jetzt Eifelheim
. This village is now called Eifelhiem.

And that meant …

Tom groaned and laid the printout on the table.

Judy Cao laid a hand on his arm. “What’s wrong, Dr. Schwoerin?”

Tom batted the sheet. “I’ve to go back through all these files.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Oh well.
Povtorenia—mat’ uchenia.”
He pulled the carton closer to him.

Judy Cao took a folder from the carton and, eyes cast down, turned it over and over in her hands. “I could help,” she suggested.

“Oh …” He shook his head distractedly. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

“No, I’m serious.” She looked up. “I volunteer. There’s always a lull on the server after eight
P.M
. The hits from California drop off and the early morning hits from Warsaw or Vienna don’t pick up until later. The math, I can’t do, but research and documentation … I’ll have to check these cartons in real time, of course; but I can also mouse around the Net.”

“I can run a search engine,” Tom said.

“No offence, Dr. Schwoerin, but no one can mouse the Net like a master librarian. There is so much information out there, so poorly organized—and so bogus—that knowing how to find it is a science in itself.”

Tom grunted. “Tell me about it. I run a search and I get thousands of hits, most of it
Klimbim
, which I’m damned if I can figure out how they made the list.”

“Most sites aren’t worth the paper they’re not written on,” Judy said. “Half of them are set up by cranks or amateur enthusiasts. You need to boole your searchstring. I can write a worm to sniff out not only citations of Oberhochwald, but citations of any key words associated with the place. Like …”

“Like Johannes Sterne? Or the Trinity of Trinities?”

“Or anything. The worm can be taught to screen for context—that’s the hard part—and ignore items that aren’t relevant.”

“All right,” Tom said. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll pay you a stipend from my grant money. It won’t be much, but it’ll give you a title. Research Assistant. And your name will go on the paper after mine.” He straightened his chair. “I’ll key you a special access code for
CLIODEINOS
so you can dump into my files whenever you find anything. Meanwhile, we … What’s wrong?”

Judy pulled back from the table. “Nothing.” She looked away briefly. “I thought we might meet here periodically. To coordinate our activities.”

Tom waved his hand. “We can do that easier over the Net. All you need is a smart phone and a modem.”

“I have a smart phone,” she told him, tugging on the string that bound the folder she held. “My phone is smarter than some people.”

Tom laughed, not yet getting the joke.

T
HE TWO
cartons they already had on the table were as good a place as any to start, so Tom took one and gave Judy the other and they went through them, folder by folder.
Tom was reading the same items for the second time that night, so he forced himself to concentrate on the words. Searching for “Oberhochwald,” his eyes were snagged by any word starting with an “O”—or even a “Q” or a “C.” The manuscripts were penned in a disheartening variety of hands; mostly Latin, but some Middle High German, a few French or Italian. A motley assortment, with nothing in common but their donors.

Three hours later, and two hours after Judy’s shift on the help desk had ended, his eyes red and his brain muzzy, Tom came up for air clutching a single manuscript page.

Judy was still there, and she had found one, too.

T
HAT JUDY
could read Latin surprised Tom. He found it curious that a Southeast Asian should be interested in the culture and history of Europe, although the converse would not have puzzled him in the least. So while Tom learned little about Eifelheim that night, you could not say he learned nothing. In fact, he was a little mistaken about Judy Cao’s interests.

“Moriuntur amici mei
…”

While Judy read, Tom listened with his eyes closed. This was a trick of his whenever he wanted to concentrate on what he heard. By shutting down one information channel, he thought to heighten his attention on the other. However, he was never known to put his fingers in his ears when he wanted to see something especially clearly.

Tom once told me that we Germans keep our verbs in our pockets, so that the meaning does not “until the end of the sentence appear.” Latin can scatter words like candy at
Fasching
, trusting to its suffixes to maintain discipline. Fortunately, the medievals had imposed a word order on Latin—one reason the humanists detested them—and Tom had a bent for language.

That was all. Just a fragment of a journal. No author. No date. “Sometime between 1348 and 1350,” Tom guessed, but Judy pinned it down more closely.

“Mid-to-late 1349. The Plague reached Switzerland in May of 1349 and Strassburg in July, which puts it at the edge of the Black Forest.”

Tom, reflecting that narrative history did have its points, handed her a second sheet. “I found this in the other carton. A petition for redress from a smith in Freiburg to the Herr Manfred von Hochwald. He complains that a copper ingot, left by Pastor Dietrich of Oberhochwald as payment for drawing some fine copper wire, had been stolen.”

“Dated 1349, Vigil of the Feast of the Virgin.” She handed the page back.

Tom made a face. “Like that pins it down … Half the medieval year was taken up by Marian feasts.” He made another note in his palmtop, tugged on his lip. There was something about the letter that bothered him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. “Well …” He gathered the hard copies together, stuffed them into his briefcase, and snapped it shut. “The exact date doesn’t matter. I’m trying to learn why the place was abandoned, not whether its priest stiffed a local artisan. But,
alles gefällt
, I’ve learned the one thing that’s made this whole trip worthwhile.”

Judy closed one of the cartons and initialed the log printed on its lid. She gave him a brief glance. “Oh? What was that?”

“I may not be exactly hot on the trail; but at least I know that there
is
a trail.”

H
E LEFT
the library to find the night far advanced and the campus deserted and quiet. The classroom buildings blocked the traffic noises from Olney and the only sound was the soft rustling of the branches overhead. Their shadows writhed in the moonlight. Tom hunched his shoulders against the insistent breeze and headed for the campus gate. So, Oberhochwald had changed its name to Eifelheim …
Why Eifelheim?
He wondered idly.

He was halfway across the quadrangle when it suddenly hit him. According to the
Moriuntur
document, the village had been called Oberhochwald right up until the Black Death swept through and wiped it from the Earth.

Why would a village that no longer existed change its name at all?

V
AUGUST
, 1348
The Feast of St. Joachim

S
EPPL BAUER
delivered the goose-tithe on St. Mary’s Day: two dozen birds, short and tall, white and dun and dappled, heads at all inquisitive angles, complaining and strutting with the unfeigned arrogance of the goose-clan. Ulrike, with her longish neck and undershot chin looking not unlike a goose herself, ran ahead of the flock and held the gate open while Otto the goosehound chivvied the birds into the yard.