Eifelheim

“Max,” he said. “Hurry to the parsonage and fetch my bag of salves and my copy of Galen. It’s bound in dark brown leather and has a drawing of a man’s body on the cover.” He doubted Galen had much to say on injuries to demons, but he could not let anyone vomit his life into the dirt without some attempt to save him. “And, Max,” he said, calling after the man. “Tell no one what we have seen. We want no panic. If anyone asks, say that… that these strangers may carry the pest.”

Max gave him a serious look. “You’d warn them of the pest to stay a panic?”

“Then tell them something else. Leprosy. Only keep them away. We have need of cool heads. Now hurry — and bring my salves.”

Dietrich slid down the face of the ridge to where the creatures stood, now in a compact mob. Some held axes and mallets at the ready, but others bore no arms at all and shrank from him. A stack of logs had been placed to the side of the strange white building, and Dietrich realized that they had been clearing the broken trees from around it. Yet how could such a large building have been erected in the midst of the forest without a clearance to begin with?

He knelt beside the creature that Hilde comforted and moistened his fingers with spit. “On the condition that you have led a just and good life, I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” He traced a cross on the thing’s brow. “Amen,” said Hildegarde.

Dietrich rose and brushed his habit off, wondering whether he had committed sacrilege. Held Heaven a place for such creatures? Maybe, had they souls. He could make nothing of the injured one’s featureless gaze; could not, indeed, know if it was gazing or not, as there were no lids to the faceted hemispheres. The others had not turned a head while he gave their fellow a conditional baptism. Yet he had the uneasy feeling that they were all looking directly at him. Their strange, bulging eyes did not move. Could not move, he guessed.

Discovered now, what would these creatures do? That they had sought to remain hidden boded well, for their u

2. Now: Tom

Tom Schwoerin was no hermit. He was the sort of man who liked company and, while hardly boisterous, he enjoyed a song and a drink, and there were clubs in town where he had once been a Known Man.

That was before he met Sharon, of course. It would not be fair to call Sharon a wet blanket, but she did put a damper on things. This is not entirely bad. Carbon rods are dampers, too, and to good purpose. There had been something frivolous about Tom before she took him in hand. A grown man ought not wear so much grease paint. Sharon put a stop to that, mostly, and some of her seriousness had rubbed off on him.

So Tom, when on the scent, could give a credible imitation of a hermit — albeit one with a more chatty disposition than most. He liked to make his ideas real, and this meant talking about them aloud. Sharon usually played the unwilling role of Ear — often very unwilling, as on that particular evening — but it was the talking that mattered, not the hearing. Tom would have talked to himself in a pinch, and sometimes did.

He knew quite well that he had been thrown out of the apartment. He was not especially alert to the subtle cues of human relationships, but it was hard to miss the old heave-ho, and a man need not be particularly sensitive to feel a little vexed over the matter. Visiting the archives really was the sensible thing to do when seen from the clear, cold heights of logic; but logic wasn’t in it.

The medieval collection in the Teliow Memorial Library had started with a small art collection, housed in a gallery decorated to resemble a medieval hall. There were some fine pieces there: triptychs, altar fronts, and the like. There followed: bibles, psalters and other incunabula, pipe rolls and cartularies, registers and estate papers, ledgers and accounts — the raw materials of history. Primary sources bought at auctions or found in troves or bestowed by tax-weary donors; never edited, never published, grouped loosely by source into folders, tied in stacks between pieces of heavy cardboard, and hidden away to await a scholar sufficiently desperate to wade through them. They had been lying in wait for Tom and had caught him fair.

Tom had prepared a list. He was not the methodical sort, but even he knew better than to dive headfirst into uncharted waters. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he did know what sort of thing he was looking for, and that was half the battle. So he scrutinized the contents of each carton, setting aside certain documents for more careful perusal. Along the way, he acquired stray bits of the trivium and the quadrivium, for he was the sort of man who ca

Amidst the chaff already wi

Not exactly hot on the trail.

He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead and contemplated surrender. He might have packed it in then, had it not been for a nudge from an unlikely direction.

“You know, Doctor Schwoerin,” said the nudge, “we don’t get many live ones in here.”

Paul on the Damascus highway could not have been more startled apprehending a sudden voice. The librarian, who had dutifully shopped cartons for him all night in silent obscurity, stood by table with the carton he had just finished braced against her hip. She was a fine-featured woman, decked with a long print dress and adorned by large, plain glasses. Her hair met behind her in a tight bun.

Lieber Gott, Tom thought. An archetype! Aloud, he said, “I beg your pardon?”

The librarian flushed. “Usually researchers phone their requests in. One of the staff scans it into the computer, charges the cost against the appropriate grant, and that’s that. It can be terribly lonely, especially at night, when all we do is wait for requests from overseas. I try to read everything I scan, and there’s my own research of course. That helps some.”

That was the nexus. A lonely librarian wanted a human conversation, and a lonely cliologist needed a break from his fruitless hunt. Otherwise, no words at all might have passed between the two of them that whole night.

“I needed to get out of the apartment for a while,” Tom said.

“Oh,” the young woman told him, “I’m glad you came. I’ve been following your researches.”

Historians do not normally acquire groupies. “Why on earth would you do that?” Tom said in surprise.

“I majored in analytical history under Doctor LaBret at Massachusetts, but differential topology was too tough for me; so I switched to narrative history instead.”

Tom felt much as a molecular biologist might upon encountering a “natural philosopher.” Narrative history wasn’t science; it was literature. “I remember my own problems with Thom’s catastrophe surfaces,” he ventured. “Sit down, please. You’re making me nervous.”