Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  “Christaller’s original survey,” said Tom, who had not noticed her sortie. “Land Württemburg, 19th century.”

  Sharon spared the screen a cursory glance. “All right—” Then, almost against her will, she leaned toward the computer. “Another honeycomb,” she said. “Is that a common pattern?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead he showed her a series of maps. Johnson’s study of Late Uruk settlements around Warka. Alden’s reconstruction of Toltec polities in the Valley of Mexico. Skinner’s analysis of Szechuan villages. Smith’s anomalous study of western Guatemala that found two grids, Indio and Ladino, superimposed on each other like parallel universes.

  “Now check out this map. Verified sites of ancient Sumerian and Elamite pueblos.”

  To her own annoyance, she found herself intrigued. One such map might be an oddity; two or three, a coincidence; but not this many. “Why is that dot red?” she asked.

  Tom regarded the screen with indulgence. “My claim to fame. There was no known pueblo at that site. But ancient writings are full of references to places we’ve never pinned down. So, I sent old Hotchkiss an e-mail, telling him to move his dig. That made him mad — he’s an oldschool microhistorian. But what really ticked him off was when he finally found the ruins, two years later, right where I’d told him they would be.”

  So his patterns had predictive value, too. Patterns were interesting. They could lead, like astrology, to real science. “There has to be a cause,” she said.

  He gave her a satisfied nod. “Ochen khoroshó.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What is it?”

  He tapped a fingernail against the display. “You’re looking at the equilibrium of a reaction-diffusion process. Each locus provides some degree of bio-psychological reinforcement to its inhabitants. Rich bottomlands, a vein of silver, a plentiful supply of guano, anything. Andere Lände, andere Sitte. The intensity of that reinforcement defines a potential function over the landscape, and the gradient of that potential is a force we call affinity.”

  Sharon withheld comment. She had never considered Tom’s ‘forces of history’ as anything more than a metaphor. She was a physicist, and physicists dealt in real forces.

  “If affinity were the only force,” Tom continued, “the entire population would be sucked into the local maximum. But population density itself creates a second potential because, cæteris paribus, people prefer wide open spaces to getting someone’s elbow in their ear. So there’s a counter tendency for the population to spread out evenly across the landscape in a kind of cultural heat death. The interaction between these two forces generates the differential equations for a reaction-diffusion process. Population accumulates at the equilibrium sites, with settlement sizes distributed according to Zipf’s rank-size law. Each settlement generates a cultural potential field whose strength is proportional to its wealth and population and which diminishes with the square of the distance. Geographically, these settlements and their hinterlands form hexagonal patterns called Christaller grids. Ert, Nagy kisasszony?”

  “Ertek jol, Schwoerin ur,” she answered. Sharon wasn’t entirely convinced, but if she argued the point, they’d be up all night, settle nothing, and she’d never get back to Janatpour space. Besides, the model did account for that remarkable consistency of settlement patterns. She pursed her lips. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get sucked into solving his problem instead of her own. “So, where does this Eifelheim of yours fit in?”

  Tom flipped his hands up. “It doesn’t.” He called another map onto the screen. “Here’s the Black Forest. Notice anything odd?”

  After all those maps, the empty cell fairly jumped out at her. Sharon touched the screen, her finger dancing from village to village. Bärental, Oberreid, Hinterzarten, St. Wilhelm… The roads all twisted around the blank spot, some doubling back on themselves to avoid it. She frowned. Tom was right. There should be a village there.

  “That,” he announced sourly, “is Eifelheim.”

  “The little town that wasn’t there,” she murmured. “But how can a town that isn’t there have a name?”

  “The same way that the Elamite pueblo had a name. Enough references in various sources to triangulate its location. Attendez.” Another command entered. “The same region in the Early Middle Ages, reconstructed from LANDSAT photos.” He cocked his head. “C’est drôle, mon cherie. Up close, you wouldn’t see a damned thing; yet from miles above, the ghosts of vanished villages stand out clearly.” He looked at the screen and pointed. “There’s Eifelheim.”

  The little dot stared back at her from the previously empty hex. “Then I don’t get it. You’ve discovered another ‘lost city,’ like in Sumeria.”

  But Tom shook his head. “No,” he said sadly, gazing at the screen. “Settlements are abandoned because their affinity drops, or technology changes the effective distances. The silver mines play out, or an Interstate runs through. That’s not the case here. Affinity should have caused a successor-village to coalesce within a generation somewhere inside that hex. Look at the way Baghdad followed Seleucia, Babylon, and Akkad in the same hex in Mesopotamia.”

  “Do your satellite photos tell when this Eifelheim disappeared?”

  “Based on the pattern of stripping — the ‘furlongs’ — I’d guess the Late Middle Ages, probably during the Black Death. Land usage patterns changed after that.”

  “Weren’t a lot of places depopulated then? I read somewhere that a third of Europe died.” She actually thought she had explained something. She actually thought she had seen something that Tom had overlooked. No field of knowledge is so transparently simple as another’s.

  Tom was deaf to her triumph. “Yeah,” he said off-handedly, “and the Middle East, too. Ibn Khaldûn wrote… Well, it took two hundred years for the population to rebound to medieval levels, but every other abandoned village was eventually either reoccupied or replaced by a new settlement nearby. Você accredita agora? People lived there for over four hundred years, and then — no one ever lived there again.”

  She shivered. The way he said it, it did sound unnatural.

  “The place became tabu,” he continued. “In 1702, Marshal Villars refused to march his army past the place to join his Bavarian allies.” Tom opened a slim manila folder on his desk and read from a sheet of paper. “This is what he wrote to the Elector: ‘Cette valée de Neustadt que vous me proposez. C’est le chemin qu’on appelle le Val d’Enfer. Que votre Altesse me pardonne l’expression; je ne suis pas diable pour y passer.’ This was the route he rejected, up the Höllenthal — Hell Valley.” His finger traced a path on the map screen, running northeast from Falkenstein past Eifleheim, below the Feldberg. “There wasn’t even a road through that tanglewood until the Austrians built one in 1770 — so Marie Antoinette could travel to France in comfort, which also turned out to be a bad idea. Even after the road was put in, it was a bad place to travel through. Moreau’s Retreat down the valley was such a feat that, when he finally reached the lower end, he was nearly hailed a victor. Then here…” He rummaged again in his folder. “…I have a copy of a letter by an English traveler named Hughes, who writes in 1900: ‘I pressed on to Himmelreich, lest darkness catch me on the malign ground of Eifelheim.’ He’s being a little tongue-in-cheek — a snooty Edwardian Englishman winking at ‘quaint’ German folktales — but you notice he didn’t stay the night. And Anton Zaengle — you remember Anton — he sent me a newspaper clipping that… Here, read it yourself.” He handed her the manila folder. “Go ahead. It’s right on top.”

  If a cosmologist learned anything, it was that the shortest route was not always a straight line. Opening the folder, Sharon found a clipping from the Freiburger Wochenbericht with an English translation stapled to it.

  DRACULA CULT FINDS NEW GRAVE

  (Freiburg i/Br.) Although officials discount it as superstition, some US soldiers on maneuvers here believe they have found the tomb of Count Dracula, hundreds of miles from Transylvania. A spokesperson for the US Third Infa
ntry Division acknowledged that something between a cult and a fad had emerged among the soldiers over an obscure medieval headstone decorated with the carving of a demonic face.

  The grave lies in a region of the Black Forest called Eifelheim.

  The region is heavily forested and the soldiers refuse to divulge the precise location, claiming that curious tourists would offend the grave’s inhabitant. This suits nearby farmers, who have a superstitious dread of the place.

  Monsignor Heinrich Lurm, a spokesman for the Diocese of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, is concerned about possible desecration of the cemetery by curiosityseekers, even though it is centuries old. “I suppose you can’t stop these young fellows from believing what they want,” he said. “Facts are much less exciting than fables.”

  The monsignor also downplayed the possible connection between the carving the soldiers have described and local folk-tales of flying monsters, called the Krenkl. “After a few hundred years of wind and rain,” he said, “my own face would not look so good, either. If modern American soldiers can make up stories about a carving, so can medieval German peasants.”

  Sharon returned the clipping. “There’s your answer. Krenkl. They’ve got their own version of the Jersey Devil flying around.”

  He gave her a look of pity. “Sharon, this is the Black Forest. There are more demons, ghosts and witches per square mile than anywhere on the face of the earth. These ‘Flying Krenkl of Eifelheim’ sit on the shelf next to the ‘Feldberg Demon’ and the ‘Devil’s Pulpit’ and the witches covens on the Kandel and Tannhäusser’s secret cave and all the rest. No, Schatzi. History happens because of material forces, not mystic beliefs. The abandonment caused the stories, not the other way around. People don’t wake up one morning and suddenly decide that the place they’ve lived in for four centuries is suddenly verboten. Das ist unsinnlich.”

  “Well… The Black Death…”

  Tom shrugged. “But the Death was a ‘common cause.’ It affected all the villages. Whatever the answer is, it has to explain not only why Eifelheim was abandoned forever, but why only Eifelheim was abandoned forever.” He rubbed his eyes. “Trouble is, there’s no data. Nada. Nichts. Nichto. Nincs. A few secondary sources, nothing at all contemporary to the events. The earliest reference I found was a theological treatise on meditation, written three generations later. That’s it there.” He jabbed a finger at the folder.

  Sharon saw a scanned image of a Latin manuscript. Most of the page was occupied by an ornate capital D supported by a trellis of vines twisted into a complex pattern that broke out here and there into leaves and berries, odd triangles and other geometric figures. A vague feeling of deja vu stole over her as she studied it. “Not very pretty,” she said.

  “Positively ugly,” said Tom. “And the contents are worse. It’s called ‘The Attainment of the Other World by Searching Within.’ Gottes Himmel, I’m not kidding. Mystical drivel about a ‘trinity of Trinities’ and how God can be in all places at all times ‘including times and places we cannot know save by looking inside ourselves.’ But…!” And Tom held his index finger up. “The author credits the ideas to — and I quote — ‘old mason Seybke, whose father knew personally the last pastor at the place we call Eifelheim.’ Unquote.” He crossed his arms. “How’s that for first hand data?”

  “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 g
ärtners’ 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?”