Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [177]
He blinked again. “Instantaneous interstellar travel?”
She shook her head. “As near as makes no difference. Tom, we wouldn’t need spaceships, at all. We could drive our cars to the stars. With protective suits, probably, we could walk! A single stride would cover interstellar distances.”
“Seven league boots! Sounds like you’ve discovered hyperspace.”
“No. Hypo-space. Topology is conserved. The eight hidden dimensions are inside the universe, remember? To travel to other worlds, we have to travel inside.” She laughed, but this time he was oddly quiet. “Tom?”
He shook himself. “Nothing. I just had the oddest feeling of déjà vu, is all. As if I’d heard all this before.”
XXIII
JULY, 1349
The Feast of St. Margaret of Antioch
JOACHIM WAS tolling the Angelus bell when Dietrich left Nickel Langermann’s hut, where he had lanced malignant pustules on Trude Metzger’s arms and on the back of little Peter’s hand. The pustules worried him. The “wool-sorters’ disease” was often fatal. Lost in such thoughts, he blundered into a press of chattering villagers returning from their fields. “Come to visit your daughter, old man?” he heard people call. “Ach, Klaus! Klaus! Here comes your father-in-law!” “That is a hard path for a frail old man; are you well?”
And there stood Odo Schweinfurt, from Niederhochwald, blinking dully in the setting sun. The old man searched up and down the high street, saw the mill, and set off in that direction. “No, the miller’s cottage is over there!” someone called out, and Odo turned uncertainly.
The commotion drew Hilde from her cottage. “My father is here?” Hilde asked. Then with delight more feign than fair, she cried, “Daddy!” But he stank of the pigs he tended and she came no closer than her nose allowed. Klaus stood behind her, still in his white-powdered apron from the mill, and regarded the old gärtner narrowly. He had not his wife’s disdain for the man’s calling, but his nose was no less gentle for that. “What do you want, Odo?” he asked, for he misdoubted any came to his door without some want.
“Dead,” said the old man.
“Bread? Does Karl not feed you? Such an ungrateful son!” He laughed, for Hilde’s brother was well-known as a pinch-pfennig.
“No,” said Hilde, wiping her hands on her coverslut. “He said ‘dead.’ Who is dead, Daddy?”
“All. Karl. Alicia. Gretl. Everyone.” He stared around at the press of villagers, as if searching, searching.
Hilde’s hand flew to her mouth. “His whole family?”
Odo sank to his wasted haunches in the dirt of the high street. “I’ve not slept for three days, nor eaten since yester-morn.”
Dietrich stepped forward. “What happened?” he demanded. Dear God, he prayed, let it be the murrain.
“The blue sickness,” Odo said, and those who stood close by groaned. “Everyone in the Lower Wood is dead. Father Konrad. Emma Bauer. Young Bachmann. All of them. Ach, God is cruel to kill my son and my grandchildren before my eyes—and spare me after.” He turned his face to the sky and shook both fists. “I curse God! I curse the God that did this!” Dietrich heard the word run through the crowd like a flight of arrows whisking through the air. The pest! The pest! Folk began to edge away.
Even Klaus stepped back. But Hilde Müller, with a countenance white as the clouds, took her villein father by the hand and led him toward her home. “He will be the death of us,” Klaus warned her.
“It is my penance,” she said, with a toss of her head.
“It’s a hard path up from the lower valley,” Herwyg One-eye told anyone who would listen. “Bad air cannot climb it.” But none answered him and each fled in silence to his own place.
IN THE morning, Heloïse Krenkerin flew over the Lower Wood and reported a pair of women living under a lean-to on the far end of the fields there. They had