Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [209]
Sharon shook her head. “I’m still asleep. I don’t get it.”
Tom was suprised to discover how reluctant he was to say his thoughts aloud. “All right,” he said. “About seven hundred years ago, sentient beings from another world were stranded near Oberhochwald, in the Black Forest.”
There. He’d said it. He held up a hand to forestall Sharon, whose mouth had dropped open. “Their vessel malfunctioned. I think it traveled through Nagy hypospace. They weren’t killed, but it was enough to start a forest fire and injure some of them.”
Sharon had found her voice. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What proof …”
“Let me finish. Please.” Tom gathered his thoughts and continued. “The aliens’ sudden appearance out of nowhere and their physical features—yellow, bulging eyes, for example—frightened many of the villagers, who fled, spreading rumors of demons to the nearby towns. Others, including the village priest, Pastor Dietrich, saw that the aliens were creatures in need of help. Just to be safe, he obtained a carefully worded ruling from his bishop; something he could do in Latin without giving the show away.
“The aliens lived in Oberhochwald for many months. While Fra Joachim and others were accusing them of sorcery and demon worship, the villagers tried to help the aliens repair their damaged vessel. I should have seen that in the business with the copper wire. What possible use would that have been to earthly travelers? They also flew. Were they winged creatures? Did they have anti-gravity? Perhaps they had a way to harness that vacuum energy you talk about. In his letter, Pastor Dietrich carefully denied only that his guests flew by supernatural means.”
He had run out of breath. He studied Sharon’s face for a hint of her reaction.
“Go on,” she said.
“The aliens were immune to the Plague—different biochemistry—and repaid the villagers’ kindness by caring for them. At least some did. Others, I’m sure, had succumbed to apathy by then. Dietrich even converted a few. We have a record of at least one baptism. Johannes Sterne? Oh, he knew where his guests came from. He knew.
“The aliens, too, began to die. Not from Plague, but from the lack of some vital nutrient. That different biochemistry again. ‘They eat, but take no nourishment’ was how Dietrich put it. When his friend Hans died—this is a guess, now. When Hans finally died, Dietrich buried him in the churchyard and had a carving of his face put on the stone so that future generations would know. Only he didn’t realize how many generations that would be; or that the village itself would vanish.
“The taboo? Easy. There really were ‘demons’ there. And shortly after Joachim cursed the place, it was struck by Plague. Impressive enough for superstitious peasants. Were the demons really dead, or just sleeping? Waiting for new victims? People shunned the place and passed the proscription on to their children. If you don’t obey Mama, the flying devils will come and take you away. Shortly, Joachim’s tag of Teufelheim was euphemised to Eifelheim, and the original name of Oberhochwald was gradually forgotten. All that was left was a custom of avoiding the location, vague folktales of flying monsters, and a gravestone with a face on it.”
There it was. All out in the open now. A lot of it was surmise, inference. He had no primary sources on Brother Joachim, for example, but I had found him a memoir by an abbot at the Strassburg friary which quotes Joachim as saying, “The great failure at Oberhochwald brought the most terrible of curses on their heads, about which I had warned them repeatedly,” which seemed clear enough evidence of his