Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [87]
Sharon, who had not meant the comment all that seriously, jiggled the phone a little in her hand as she appraised his reaction. “Turn that thing to vibrate,” she told him, handing it over. “And keep it with you. That’s the whole point of a portable phone.” Without another word, she crossed to her sofa, where she curled up like the hidden dimensions of the polyverse. She found it difficult to concentrate at first on Janatpour space, which she attributed to the residuum of the interruption.
Tom acknowledged the command with an absent wave. “Did you hear that, Judy?” he asked the grainy image on the cell-phone’s screen. “Sharon thinks you’re my new lover.”
Judy frowned and said, “Maybe I should not call you at home.”
Sometimes the stuffy propriety of the younger generation was a little hard to take. “Oh, Sharon doesn’t mind you calling.” He dropped his voice when he said this so that he would not disturb the physicist on the sofa. “Everything’s fine. What do you have for me?” In truth, he looked forward to these exchanges. Judy scratched his curiosity where it itched. She and I click, he had told Sharon already. She knows historical research, which databases to tap, which archivists to contact. She knows what I’m looking for, so I don’t have to explain things twice.
And Sharon had answered, She’s a treasure, all right.
“I think I know why the village’s name was changed,” Judy announced.
“Das geht ja wie’s Katzenmachen!” Tom exclaimed—which did disturb the physicist on the sofa and earned him a glare, which he did not notice. “Meine kleine Durchblickerin! Zeig’ mir diesen Knallfekt.”
Judy had gotten used to that sort of thing by then. She had no idea what he had said, but did have a good idea what he wanted, so a translation was not needed. She did something off the screen and the image of a manuscript replaced her face.
It is not possible to hop out of a recliner, but Tom managed it anyway. He hurried to CLIODEINOS, where he inserted his phone into the docking station, and the manuscript appeared at a more readable magnification on the monitor. The handwriting was fourteenth-century work. The Latin was awful; Cicero would have wept.
“I used the Soundex to look for variant spellings,” Judy explained while he skimmed the document. “That casts a wider loop, of course, and it takes longer to sort through the … the …”
“The Krempel. The junk. What am I looking at?”
“It’s a bull from 1377 against the Brethren of the Free Spirit. It seems that Oberhochwald’s new name was not originally Eifelheim at all, but—”
“Teufelheim.” Tom had skimmed ahead, and his finger now touched the screen lightly where the name appeared: Devil-home. He chewed on his thumb knuckle while he considered that. What sort of people had lived there, he wondered, to have earned such a name from their neighbors?
“Shun the works of Satan,” he read aloud, “as we shun the unholy soil of Teufelheim. Pastor Dietrich was tried and found wanting. Be you not also found wanting, sick with heresy and sorcery. Et cetera, et cetera.” Tom sat back in his chair. “The writer doesn’t much care for our friend Dietrich. I wonder what he did that was so terrible—besides stiffing that coppersmith.” He saved the file to his drive and Judy’s face reappeared on the screen.
“The connection seemed clear to me,” she said.
“Yes. Why mention Dietrich in the next sentence unless Teufelheim was Oberhochwald? Although …” He rubbed his ear with his finger. “In all of Swabia, I suppose there could be two Dietrichs.”
“Dr. Wegner in the Language Department said that the corruption of ‘Teufelheim’ to ‘Eifelheim’ was linguistically