Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [215]
I glanced around, but no one else had noticed. They continued to pace slowly forward, searching the forest floor. I made my way across and found her kneeling next to a sunk and broken stone. Soil action had claimed the lower half of the stone, but it had sunk at such an angle that the face on it had been partially protected from the elements.
“Is this it?” I asked quietly.
She gasped and sucked in her breath. She turned and saw me and relaxed visibly. “Dr. Zaengle,” she said. “You frightened me.”
“I am sorry.” I crouched beside her, my old bones protesting. I studied the face on the stone. It was worn, as only the breezes of seven centuries can wear. Its outlines were faded with time, obscure and barely visible. How had the soldiers ever noticed it? “Is it the grave?” I asked again.
She sighed. “I believe so. At least, it is the one that the soldiers found.” She held up a cigarette butt to show how she knew. “The inscription is nearly illegible, and parts of the top are broken off; but see here? The letters? … HANNES STE …” She traced them with her fingers.
“Johannes Sterne,” I said for her. “John from the Stars. The name he was baptized under.” I looked around us. “Do you realize how many graves there must have been? And this is the one we find.”
“I know. I’m scared.”
“Scared? Of what?”
“When we dig him up. He won’t be the right shape. He’ll be something wrong.”
I did not know how to answer her. Burgher or alien, whatever the shape, it would be wrong in one sense or another. “Gus found another headstone,” I told her. “So did Heinrich. Both were smashed. Tom thinks that when the Plague swept through here the neighboring villagers came and destroyed the gravestones of the ‘sorcerors.’ Yet, this one—presumably the one that most frightened them—was not touched. Why?”
She shook her head. “There is so much we do not know, and never will know. Where did they come from? How many were there? Were they brave explorers or bewildered tourists? How did they and Dietrich establish communications? What did they talk about, those last few months of life?” Her face, when she turned it up to me, verged on tears.
“I imagine,” I said as gently as I could, “that they talked of going home and the great things they would do when they got there.”
“Yes,” she said more quietly. “I suppose they would have. But those who could have told us are long dead.”
I smiled. “We could hold a seance and ask them.”
“Don’t say that!” she hissed. Her fists, clenched tight, pressed on her thighs. “I’ve been reading their letters, their journals, their sermons. I have been inside their heads. They don’t feel dead to me. Anton, most of them were never buried! Toward the end, who was left to turn the shovel? They must have lain on the ground and rotted. Pastor Dietrich was a good man. He deserved better than that.” There were tears on her cheeks now. “As we were walking through the forest, I was frightened that I would meet them, still alive. Dietrich or Joachim or one of the villagers or—”
“Or something horrible.”
She nodded silently.
“That’s what frightens you, isn’t it? You are a rational, secular, twenty-first-century woman, who knows absolutely that alien creatures would look different and smell different; and yet you would run screaming like any medieval peasant. You are afraid you would act as badly as Fra Joachim.”
She smiled a faint, small smile. “You are almost right, Dr. Zaengle.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “Hay cu’ú giúp tôi. Cho toi su’c manh. I am afraid I would not act as Pastor Dietrich did.”
“He shames us all, child,” I said. “He shames us all.” I looked around at the tall oaks and the wildly beautiful mountain flowers—the woodmasters and butterheads—and listened to the rattle of the woopeckers. Perhaps Dietrich had had a fine burial, after all.
Judy took a deep breath and dried her tears. Then she said, “Let’s tell