Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [88]
“Ja, wenn man Teufel spricht, kommt er.” Tom called up the area map on a split screen and double-clicked on the village’s icon so he could add the latest gloss on the name. This version of the map showed the actual geography, with landforms in shadowed relief. The village sat on a spur of the Feldberg by a steep ravine leading into the Höllental. And what better route might there be to “Devil’s Home” than through “Hell Valley”? At the lower end of Hell Valley sat none other than Himmelreich—”Kingdom of Heaven.” It was a topsy-turvy sort of nomenclature, with the Devil on the mountaintop and Heaven down below.
Tom saved the new information, but with a mild feeling of anticlimax, or perhaps of a slight hangover. “We still don’t know why the place was abandoned, but I guess we’re one step closer.”
“But we do know,” Judy told him. “Demons. ‘Devil-home.’ ”
Tom was not convinced. “No,” he said. “It’s one more place-name in the Schwarzwald named after the Devil. Like Teufelsmühle near Staufenberg, or the Devil’s Pulpit … There are two ‘Devil’s Pulpits,’ one by Baden-Baden and the other on the Kniebis. Plus Hex Valley and Hell Valley and—”
“But did you read the descriptions of the Devils that this Dietrich supposedly conjured?”
He hadn’t, but he recalled the file and this time read past the comment on the name. “Ugly sons of bitches, weren’t they?” he said when he had found the passage. “Yellow, bulging eyes. Gibbering incantations. Driving men mad. ‘They danced naked, but sported no manhood.’” The color control on the monitor, he noted, was fine enough to show Judy’s blush. “I don’t suppose demons ever won beauty contests.”
“They flew, too. This must be what started those folktales about the Krenkl.”
“A few sentences in a bull? No, the writer was repeating a story already in circulation. He expected his readers to understand the reference, just as he expected them to know who ‘Pastor Dietrich’ was. I wonder if Krenkl comes from Kränklein—South German shortens ‘-lein’ to ‘-l.’ ”
“I thought …”
“What?”
“Well, the descriptions of the demons were so detailed, so vivid … Their appearance. Even the way the villagers behaved. Some ‘saved themselves and their souls.’ Others ‘befriended the demons and welcomed them unto their very hearths.’ ”
Tom dismissed her suggestion even before she could nerve herself to make it. “All it takes is a little imagination and a bit of hysteria. The medievals were great believers in mythic beasts. They heard vague tales of the rhinoceros and imagined a unicorn out of it. The horsemen of the steppes became centaurs. They had kobolds and dwarves and … I saw a drawing in a psalter, in the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, that showed two weird creatures—one like a stag, the other like a big cat—walking on their hind legs and carrying a pall-draped bier between them. And there’s a fresco in the crypt of the Freiburg Franziskanerkirche that shows giant grasshoppers sitting at a banquet table, probably a metaphor for the way locusts could consume entire harvests. And a carved doorpost in the Cloisters in New York portrays—”
“All right!”
The vehemence in her voice surprised him. After a moment, he said quietly, “This isn’t the Middle Ages, you know. There’s always a natural explanation for ‘supernatural’ events.”
AFTERWARD, TOM remained at the PC, pulling on his lip. If bizarre visions had been the reason for the taboo, there would have been Teufelheims all up and down the Rhineland.
The medieval collapse had spawned horrors enough to depopulate a thousand Eifelheims. Cannibalism followed the famines of 1317 and 1318, when the crops drowned from incessant rains. “Children were not safe from their parents,” one chronicler had written. But no villages had been shunned on that account. Peasant bands had roamed the countryside, espousing poverty and free love, sacking manors and monasteries and lynching Jews to make their point. But those who fled soon returned, even the Jews. A century of war and banditry in France destroyed the mystique of the knight, the tourney, the minstrel, and courtly love.