Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [85]
Through the midst of this confusion, Eugen stepped his palfrey, kicking up sprays of snow, drawing silence in his wake, until he came at last before Dietrich. Only Theresia and the children remained shouting and oblivious to his appearance.
“Pastor,” Eugen said, striving to keep his voice deep, “the villagers must come to the castle.”
“Why?” shouted Oliver Becker. “We’re no serfs, to be ordered about!” He made to throw a snowball at the junker, but Joachim, who was standing beside him, placed a hand on his arm.
Dietrich looked to Eugen. “Are we attacked?” He envisioned Philip von Falkenstein leading his men in a snowy charge to seize the escaped pastor. We should have built the snow-forts higher …
“The … the lepers …,” and here Eugen’s voice did fail him. “They’ve left the woods. They’re coming to the village!”
4
NOW
Tom
DURING THE Middle Ages, on the Rogation Days, the peasants of a village would tour the borders of their manor and throw their children into brooks or bump their heads on certain trees so that the youngsters would learn the boundaries of their lives. Had he studied narrative history, Tom would have known that.
Consider the calls that Tom received from Judy Cao—a manuscript traced and located, or a reference newly discovered, or his approval needed on access fees levied by sundry archives and databases. There was a certain intoxication to these calls, much as a man hiking in the mountains might feel an exhilaration at the approach of a crest—not that he saw the world laid out below him, but that he saw the promise of such a horizon just beyond. To Tom, the steady trickle of information from Judy was like a cold spring in an arid place and, if a man can become drunk on water, it is in small sips of this Pierian sort.
Items had been appearing regularly in his Eifelheim file, all properly beribboned and pedigreed like dogs at a kennel show. Judy was a meticulous researcher. She had located monastic annals, uncovered manorial accounts, unearthed tantalizing odds and ends—the haphazardly preserved detritus of a vanished world. “The documents of everyday life,” reliable precisely because they had not been recorded with posterity in mind.
From a hodgepodge 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 Crécy.
A comment in the Annals of St. Blasien 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.”
An anonymous compendium, MS.6752, in the Bibliothèque 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,