Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  · From a hodge-podge of “Baconalia” at Oxford: an aide memoire of the local knight of Hochwald recounting a discussion with “the pastor of St. Catherine” regarding the theories of Fra Roger Bacon: seven league boots, flying machines, talking mechanical heads.

  · Preserved among the papers of Ludwig der Bayer in the Fürstenfeld Museum: a tantalizing reference in the writings of William of Ockham to “my friend, the doctor seclusus in Oberhochwald.”

  · Buried in the Luxembourg collection at the Charles University in Prague: a mention of “Sir Manfred von Oberhochwald” among the companions of the King of Bohemia at the battle of Crecy.

  · A comment in the Annals of St. Blaisien that “the Feldberg demon,” having eluded attempts to capture him by fire, had “escaped in the direction of the Hochwald” after setting a larger fire that almost engulfed the monastery.

  · A levy dated 1289, in the Generallandesarchiv Baden, by Markgraf Hermann VII of Baden on Ugo Heyso of Oberhochwald for six and a half foot soldiers and one and a half horse soldiers.

  · A similar levy on Manfred in 1330 by Duke Friedrich IV Hapsburg of Austria.

  · A copy of an episcopal letter in the archives of the Lady Church of Freiburg-im-Breisgau addressed to Pastor Dietrich, affirming the doctrine that “the body’s appearance does not reflect the state of the soul.”

  · A anonymous compendium, MS.6752, in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, on natural philosophy, “unusual for its wide range and systematic organization,” attributed in a gloss on its 237th folio to “my quondam student, Seclusus,” supposedly added by the great Arts Master, John Buridan.

  If a man cannot get drunk on such sips as this, he is doomed to eternal sobriety. Why, the question of how a vassal might supply six and a half soldiers to his liege is one to occupy a salon of Jesuits.

  Sharon was happy for him, for this steady conduit from Judy meant that he was less in her hair, and she consequently had more time for physics and could shampoo less often. She thought this was what she had wanted and derived some welcome contentment from it. The major drawback, as she saw it, was that Tom would immediately share with her whatever sparkle of data he had been given, which she would acknowledge in a distracted and sometimes irritable manner. She was sure the information was fascinating in its own way but, like head cheese or scrapple, its enjoyment was an acquired taste.

  One evening, while dining at a neighborhood Italian restaurant, Tom “shared” with her a Christmas fruitcake of facts that Judy had stumbled across in a doctoral dissertation on medieval village life. Among the records cited were a few from Oberhochwald in the 1330’s. These were mostly those villagers unfortunate enough to come to the attention of the manorial courts, but some were happier cases of boons and grants. Almost as soon as he was off the cell phone and before the red clam sauce could stain his lips Tom was reciting particulars.

  He had learned the names of actual people who had lived in “his” village. Being more accustomed to the broad abstractions of cliology, he had seldom encountered any of the folk behind his equations and models. He didn’t know it yet, but he was being seduced by Judy Cao. He was beginning to delight in narrative history.

  Thus, one Fritz Ackermann had been fined three pfennig in 1334 for “withdrawing himself from the lord’s common oven” — meaning he had dared to bake his own bread at home. And in 1340, one Theresia Gresch had been granted the right to gather herbs in the common meadow and in the lord’s woods.

  Sharon thought the three-pfennig fine a sign of the tyranny of feudalism and said so in greater irritation than the size of the fine warranted, or indeed than Ackermann had probably expressed in paying it. Tom thought of correcting her equation of feudalism with manorialism, but said only, “Try buying your liquor across the bridge in New Jersey and you’ll learn what fine the Lords of Pennsylvania levy for breaking their monopoly if they catch you at it.”

  But the lukewarm reception of his glad tidings was something of a damper and Tom felt as if he had been dumped unceremoniously into a cold stream.

  The other thing about Judy’s calls that sometimes irritated Sharon was their odd timing. They were as apt to come at one hour of the day as any other. Did that girl never sleep? And of course Tom would leap to answer the ring. It didn’t matter much what he was doing. Clearing the dinner dishes? They could wait. Driving the car? That’s why God invented cell phones. Sharon was the sort who regarded any great display of eagerness as unseemly. Laid back or cool, they used to say, and meant it as compliment. Tom’s grin began to annoy her. A little gravitas would not hurt.

  * * *

  One evening, while Tom was deep into a travel book on the customs and legends of the Black Forest — one never knew where unexpected gold might lie unearthed — Sharon appeared in front of his recliner, wagging his cell phone at him.

  “It’s your new girl friend,” she said. “Again.”

  Tom closed the book on his finger. Sometimes he wasn’t sure how to take Sharon. He would admit this now and then, after a few beers, and if Sharon were not around. They kidded each other a lot, but at times he thought her comments had an edge to them — a thin and delicate edge, because he didn’t always feel the slice right off. “She’s not my girl friend,” he said.

  He and Sharon had been together longer than most married couples and so certain customs had grown up between them, much as moss will accumulate on a damp rock or ivy creep up the walls of hallowed halls. They had long ago agreed that possessiveness had no place in their relationship, and so regarded any show of it with a sort of horror. But that was theory. Practice was something else, for too little possessiveness may also have its hazards. Moss may be a soft and comfortable thing upon which to rest, but it is also a very same sort of thing and its flowers require a certain subtleness of thought to admire. Now and then, Tom wished that Sharon would loosen up, and Sharon that Tom would grow more steady.

  Sharon, who had not meant the comment all that seriously, jiggled the phone a little in her hand as she appraised his reaction. “Turn that thing to vibrate,” she told him, handing it over. “And keep it with you. That’s the whole point of a portable phone.” Without another word, she crossed to her sofa, where she curled up like the hidden dimensions of the multiverse. She found it difficult to concentrate at first on Janatpour space, which she attributed to the residuum of the interruption.

  Tom acknowledged the command with an absent wave. “Did you hear that, Judy?” he asked the grainy image on the cell-phone’s screen. “Sharon thinks you’re my new lover.”

  Judy frowned and said. “Maybe I should not call you at home.”

  Sometimes the stuffy propriety of the younger generation was a little hard to take. “Oh, Sharon doesn’t mind you calling.” He dropped his voice when he said this so that he would not disturb the physicist on the sofa. “Everything’s fine. What do you have for me?” In truth, he looked forward to these exchanges. Judy scratched his curiosity where it itched. She and I click, he had told Sharon already. She knows historical research, which databases to tap, which archivists to contact. She knows what I’m looking for, so I don’t have to explain things twice.

  And Sharon had answered, She’s a treasure, all right.

  “I think I know why the village’s name was changed,” Judy announced.

  “Das geht ja wie’s Katzenmachen!” Tom exclaimed — which did disturb the physicist on the sofa and earned him a glare, which he did not notice. “Meine kleine Durchblickerin! Schau mir diesen Knallfekt.”

  Judy had gotten used to that sort of thing by then. She had no idea what he had said, but did have a good idea what he wanted, so a translation was not needed. She did something off the screen and the image of a manuscript replaced her face.

  It is not possible to hop out of a recliner, but Tom managed it anyway. He hurried to CLIODEINOS, where he inserted his phone into the docking station, and the manuscript appeared at a more readable magnification on the monitor. The handwriting was fourteenth century work. The
Latin was awful; Cicero would have wept.

  “I used the Soundex to look for variant spellings,” Judy explained voice-over while he skimmed the document. “That casts a wider loop, of course, and it takes longer to sort through the… the…”

  “The Krempl. The junk. What am I looking at?”

  “It’s a bull from 1377 against the Brethren of the Free Spirit. It seems that Oberhochwald’s new name was not originally Eifelheim at all, but—”

  “Teufelheim.” Tom had skimmed ahead, and his finger now touched the screen lightly where the name appeared: Devil-home. He chewed on his thumb knuckle while he considered that. What sort of people had lived there, he wondered, to have earned such a name from their neighbors?

  “Shun the works of Satan,” he read aloud, “as we shun the unholy soil of Teufelheim. Pastor Dietrich was tried and found wanting. Be you not also found wanting, sick with heresy and sorcery. Et cetera, et cetera.” Tom sat back in his chair. “The writer doesn’t much care for our friend Dietrich. I wonder what he did that was so terrible — besides stiffing that coppersmith.” He saved the file to his drive and Judy’s face reappeared on the screen.

  “The connection seemed clear to me,” she said.

  “Yes. Why mention Dietrich in the next sentence unless Teufelheim was Oberhochwald. Although…” He rubbed his ear with his finger. “In all of Swabia, I suppose there could be two Dietrichs.”

  “Dr. Wegner in the Language Department said that the corruption of ‘Teufelheim’ to ‘Eifelheim’ was linguistically natural.”

  “Ja, wenn man spricht an dem Teufel, er kommt.” Tom called up the area map on a split screen and double-clicked on the village’s icon so he could add the latest gloss on the name. This version of the map showed the actual geography, with landforms in shadowed relief. The village sat on a spur of the Feldberg by a steep ravine leading into the Höllental. And what better route might there be to “Devil’s Home” than through “Hell Valley”? At the lower end of Hell Valley sat none other than Himmelreich — “Kingdom of Heaven.” It was a topsy-turvy sort of nomenclature, with the Devil on the mountain top and heaven down below.

  Tom saved the new information, but with a mild feeling of anticlimax, or perhaps of a slight hangover. “We still don’t know why the place was abandoned, but I guess we’re one step closer.”

  “But we do know,” Judy told him. “Demons. ‘Devil-home.’”

  Tom was not convinced. “No,” he said. “It’s one more place-name in the Schwartzwald named after the devil. Like Teufelsmühle near Staufenberg, or the Devil’s Pulpit… There are two ‘Devil’s Pulpits,’ one by Baden-Baden and the other on the Kniebis. Plus Hex Valley and Hell Valley and—”

  “But did you read the descriptions of the devils that this Dietrich supposedly conjured?”

  He hadn’t, but he recalled the file and this time read past the comment on the name. “Ugly sons of bitches weren’t they?” he said when he had found the passage. “Yellow, bulging eyes. Gibbering incantations. Driving men mad. ‘They danced naked, but sported no manhood.’ ” The color control on the monitor, he noted, was fine enough to show Judy’s blush. “I don’t suppose demons ever won beauty contests.”

  “They flew, too. This must be what started those folk tales about the Krenkl.”

  “A few sentences in a bull? No, the writer was repeating a story already in circulation. He expected his readers to understand the reference, just as he expected them to know who ‘Pastor Dietrich’ was. I wonder if Krenkl comes from Kränklein — South German shortens ‘-lein’ to ‘-l.’ ”

  “I thought…”

  “What?”

  “Well, the descriptions of the demons were so detailed, so vivid… Their appearance. Even the way the villagers behaved. Some ‘saved themselves and their souls.’ Others ‘befriended the demons and welcomed them unto their very hearths.’”

  Tom dismissed her suggestion even before she could nerve herself to make it. “All it takes is a little imagination and a bit of hysteria. The medievals were great believers in mythic beasts. They heard vague tales of the rhinoceros and imagined a unicorn out of it. The horsemen of the steppes became centaurs. They had kobolds and dwarves and… I saw a drawing in a psalter, in the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, that showed two weird creatures — one like a stag, the other like a big cat — walking on their hind legs and carrying a pall-draped bier between them. And there’s a fresco in the crypt of the Freiburg Francziskanerkirche that shows giant grasshoppers sitting at a banquet table, probably a metaphor for the way locusts could consume entire harvests. And a carved doorpost in the Cloisters in New York portrays—”

  “All right!”

  The vehemence in her voice surprised him. After a moment, he said quietly, “This isn’t the Middle Ages, you know. There’s always a natural explanation for ‘supernatural’ events.”

  * * *

  Afterward, Tom remained at the PC, pulling on his lip. If bizarre visions had been the reason for the taboo, there would have been Teufelheims all up and down the Rhineland.

  The Medieval collapse had spawned horrors enough to depopulate a thousand Eifelheims. Cannibalism followed the famines of 1317 and 1318, when the crops drowned from incessant rains. “Children were not safe from their parents,” one chronicler had written. But no villages had been shunned on that account. Peasant bands had roamed the countryside, espousing poverty and free love, sacking manors and monasteries and lynching Jews to make their point. But those who fled soon returned, even the Jews. A century of war and banditry in France destroyed the mystique of the knight, the tourney, the minstrel, and courtly love. Cynicism and despair replaced hope and anticipation. Witchcraft and heresy; flagellants and plague. The macabre cult of death, with its dancing skeletons. Absurdism, nihilism, eventually, death camps. A new world order so closed, so paranoid, so repressive, so stunned by meaningless death that people forgot completely that there had ever been a different and more open world before it.

  So amidst these shambles, why had Eifelheim alone remained anathema?

  He pulled out the project folder and carried it to the kitchen table, where he spread the hard copies out, scrutinizing each one, as if he could wrest answers from them by sheer concentration: Manorial records of the vassals of the Margraves of Baden and the earlier Dukes of Zähringen; the knight’s memoire; the religious treatise on the ‘inner world’ with its awkward illuminated capital; seignorial approvals of marriages and vocations, of fines and grants; enfoeffments encompassing Oberhochwald and feudal levies upon its knight; the newspaper clipping Anton had sent him; an ecstatic prayer citing ‘eight secret paths to leave this earth of sorrows’ and attributed at third hand to a ‘Saint Johan of Oberhochwald’; the episcopal letter addressed to Pastor Dietrich.

  There were also the usual monkish chronicles — from Freiburg, St. Peter, St. Blasien, and elsewhere — of harvests, fairs, gossip, noble doings. One spectacular event, a lightning strike in August 1348, had set several acres of forest (and not a few superstitious minds) ablaze. The plague was then just spreading north from the coast, and the bolt had in retrospect been read as Lucifer’s advent. (Had the village burned? No, the Moriuntur document and the business with the smith had come later.)

  The bits and pieces were accumulating into a fuller picture, or at least into a sketch. The manor of Oberhochwald was one of two possessed by its knight (the other being in the gift of the Austrian Duke). The last knight to hold the fief was named Manfred, and his father had been named Ugo. The pastor at the time of the village’s demise had been named Dietrich, who may have been the “doctor seclusus” mentioned by Ockham and who had written the compendium in the Bibliotheque. There was an herb-woman named Theresia (he imagined her as a gray-haired hag with a face as ragged as the Black Forest itself), a farmer named Fritz, a smith named Lorenz, and a few others whose names had wound up in that doctoral thesis. Peel back the research onion another layer, locate the originals that the doctoral candidate had used, and even more names
would likely surface.

  I could almost write a complete history of this village, he thought. Harvest and tax records would let him estimate economic and demographic growth. The fief records showed how it fit into the local feudal structure. The knight’s memoire and the bishop’s letter even gave him a glimpse into the village’s intellectual life, such as it was.

  In fact, he realized glumly, the only thing missing from the village’s history was the one thing that made it worth writing — why it had so abruptly and so completely come to an end.

  What if it’s not there? he wondered. What if the key document had been lost? Burned to ashes in the struggles between Mercy and the Bernadines at the rag-tail end of the Thirty Years War; or during Moreau’s Retreat down Hell Valley; or in the campaigns of Louis or Napoleon or a dozen other strutting would-be conquerors. Eaten by mice or mold, consumed by fire or rain or flood, crumbled in neglect.

  What if it had never been written down at all?

  “Tom, what’s wrong? You look pale.”

  He glanced up. Sharon stood in the kitchen archway, a freshly brewed cup of tea in her hands. The odor of rosehips and chamomile wafted through the room.

  “Nothing,” he said. But he’d had the sudden, dreadful sensation that he already had a key piece of information in his hands; that he had read it several times already; and that it had meant nothing to him.

  * * *

  And so came I into the affair, although at first in only a peripheral way. I was teaching still at the Albert-Louis, and Tom sent me an e-mail asking me the manorial records for Oberhochwald to find. These were supposed to be in our University collection. I replied, Was that a personal supposition, a material supposition, or a simple supposition? And Tom responded ‹LOL?› because he did not understand the joke. He supplied a list of key words and a request to search our manuscripts and incunabula for references pertaining to Oberhochwald, which I suppose was fit punishment for my attempt at medieval humor. Supposition theory is not much funny, especially as we don’t really know what they meant by it all. They used many of the same words as we do — motion, intuition, realism, natural, occult — but their meanings lay often at odd angles to ours. Still, I promised to rummage around as best I could and, a week later, I sent him what little I had found.