Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [12]
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 offhandedly, “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 vallée 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 Eifelheim, 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 Infantry Division acknowledged that something between a cult and a fad had emerged among the soldiers