“What a curious way to phrase it: ‘the place we call Eifelheim’.” Sharon thought Tom was bragging as much as complaining, as if he had come to love the brick wall against which he was butting his head. Fair enough. Both were made of similar material. She was reminded of her mother’s endless litanies of medical complaints. Not that her mother had enjoyed being sick, but she had taken not a little pride in the insurmountable nature of her illnesses.
Sharon flipped idly through the printouts, wondering if there were some way to get Tom out of the apartment. He was spinning his wheels and making her life miserable. She handed him back the folder. “You need more data.”
“Bozhe moi, Sharon. Ya nye durák! Tell me something I don’t know! I’ve looked and I’ve looked. CLIO’s chased down every reference to Eifelheim in the entire Net.”
“Well, not everything’s in the Net,” she snapped back. “Aren’t there musty old papers in archives and the back rooms of libraries that no one’s ever read, let alone scanned? I thought that’s what you historians used to do before you got computers — root around in dusty shelves, blowing off cobwebs.”
“Well…,” he said doubtfully. “Anything off-line can be scanned in by request…”
“That’s if you know the document exists. What about uncatalogued stuff?”
Tom pursed his lips and looked at her. He nodded slowly. “There were a few marginal items,” he admitted. “They didn’t sound too promising at the time; but now… Well, like they say: Cantabit vaceus coram latrone viator.” He grinned at her. “A penniless man sings before the robber,” he explained. “Like me, what can he lose?” He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, pulling absently on his lower lip. Sharon smiled to herself. She knew that habit. Tom was okay, but he was like an old motorcycle. You had to kick hard to get him started.
Later, after Tom had gone to the library, Sharon noticed CLIO’s screen still lit and sighed in exasperation. Why did Tom always go off and leave things running? Computers, electric lights, stereos, televisions. Tom left a trail of perking appliances behind him wherever he went.
She crossed the room to turn his PC off, but paused with her finger over the track pad while she stared at the empty cell. Eifelheim… A sinister black hole surrounded by a constellation of living villages. Something horrible must have happened there once. Something so wicked that seven centuries later people shunned it and had forgotten why.
Abruptly, she cleared the machine. Don’t be silly, she told herself. But that made her think of something Tom had said. And that made her wonder, What if…? And nothing was ever the same again.
II. August, 1348
At Primes, The Commemoration of Sixtus II and His Companions
Dietrich stepped from the church to find Oberhochwald in turmoil: Thatch roofs blown askew; shutters loose on their hinges; sheep milling and bleating in the pen by the meadow gate. Women shrieked, or hugged crying children. Men milled about arguing and pointing. Lorenz Schmidt stood in the doorway of his smithy, a hammer tight in his grip, eyes searching for an enemy to strike.
Dietrich inhaled the dusty, urgent scent of smoke. From the portico’s edge, whence he could spy the village’s farther end, he saw thatch roofs ablaze. Farther off, across the common meadow, black clouds churned and roiled above the Great Wood where the lustrous glow had been.
Gregor Mauer, atop the carving table in his yard, shouted and pointed toward the mill pond. His sons, Gregerl and Seybke, hurried past with buckets hanging from their thick arms. Theresia Gresch ran from house to house, sending people to the stream. Across the Oberreid Road, the portcullis of Manfred’s castle rose with a clatter of chains, and a squad of armsmen dog-trotted down from Castle Hill.
“It’s the wrath of hell,” said Joachim. Dietrich turned to see the younger man sagging against the door post. The eagle of St. John, hovered in the door post beside him, beak and talons poised. Joachim’s eyes were wide with fear and satisfaction.
“It’s the lightning,” said Dietrich. “It has set some cottages on fire.”
“Lightning? With no cloud in the sky? Where is your reason, now?”
“Then it was that wind, toppling lamps and candles!” Dietrich, having no more patience, seized Joachim’s arm and sent him stumbling down the hillside toward the village. “Quickly,” he said. “If the flames spread, the village burns.” Dietrich tied the skirts of his alb up to his knees and joined the throng heading toward the mill pond.
The Minorite had fallen halfway down the path. “That fire is unnatural,” he said as Dietrich passed. Then he turned and scrambled back toward the church.
The gärtners’ huts, mean dwellings at best, were engulfed in flames and folk had given up any thought of saving them. Max Schweitzer, the sergeant from the castle, organized bucket lines to pass water from the mill pond to the burning freeholder cottages. Dispossessed animals barked and snorted and ran in panic. One billy scampered toward the high road, chased by Nickel Langermann. Schweitzer held a wand in his right hand and pointed here or pointed there, directing the effort. More buckets to Feldmann’s cottage! More buckets! He slapped the wand against his leather hose, and twisted Langermann by the shoulder to direct him back to the fires.
Seppl Bauer, straddling the roofbeam of Ackermann’s cottage, dropped an empty bucket and Dietrich snatched it up.
Dietrich made his way through the rushes and cat tails that bordered the mill pond to the head of the bucket line, where he found Gregor and Lorenz knee-deep in the water, filling the buckets and handing them ashore. Gregor paused and wiped an arm across his brow, leaving a muddy streak. Dietrich handed him the empty bucket. The mason filled it and gave it back. Dietrich passed it on to the next man as the line made space for him.
Gregor whispered softly as he drew another bucket through the water, “This is no natural fire.” Beside him, Lorenz showed with a glance that he had heard; but the smith kept his peace.
Others nearby also cast furtive glances in his direction. Sacred priest, annointed with holy oil. He would know the answers. Call down anathemas on the flames! Wave a shinbone of St. Catherine at them! For an instant Dietrich was angry, and longed for the cool, scholastic rationalism of Paris. “Why do you say that, Gregor?” he said mildly.
“I have never seen such things in my life.”
“Have you ever seen a Turk?”
“No…”
“Are Turks then supernatural?”
Gregor scowled, sensing a flaw in the argument but unable to root it out. Dietrich passed his bucket along, then turned back to Gregor, hands outstretched and waiting. “I can create a smaller version of the same lightning with only cat’s fur and amber,” he told him, and the mason grunted, not understanding the explanation, but taking comfort in an explanation’s existence.
Dietrich fell into the swaying rhythm of the work. The buckets were heavy and the rope handles rubbed his palms raw, but the fear of the morning’s occult events was smothered under the natural fear of fire and the homely, urgent task of fighting it. The wind turned and he coughed as the smoke momentarily enveloped him.
An endless procession of buckets passed through his hands, and he began to imagine himself as a cog in a complex water pump comprised of human muscle. Yet artisans could free men of such mind-numbing labor. There were cams, and the new-fangled cranks. If mills could be driven by water wheels and wind, why not a bucket line? If only one could — .