Eifelheim

A snow-ball struck Dietrich on the chest. Joachim gri

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 Phillip von Falkenstein leading his men in a snowy charge to sieze 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 an 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 ke

· From a hodge-podge 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 Crecy.

· A comment in the A

· A levy dated 1289, in the Generallandesarchiv Baden, by Markgraf Herma

· 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.”

· A anonymous compendium, MS.6752, in the Bibliotheque 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,” supposedly added by the great Arts Master, John Buridan.

If a man ca

Sharon was happy for him, for this steady conduit from Judy meant that he was less in her hair, and she consequently had more time for physics and could shampoo less often. She thought this was what she had wanted and derived some welcome contentment from it. The major drawback, as she saw it, was that Tom would immediately share with her whatever sparkle of data he had been given, which she would acknowledge in a distracted and sometimes irritable ma

One evening, while dining at a neighborhood Italian restaurant, Tom “shared” with her a Christmas fruitcake of facts that Judy had stumbled across in a doctoral dissertation on medieval village life. Among the records cited were a few from Oberhochwald in the 1330’s. These were mostly those villagers unfortunate enough to come to the attention of the manorial courts, but some were happier cases of boons and grants. Almost as soon as he was off the cell phone and before the red clam sauce could stain his lips Tom was reciting particulars.

He had learned the names of actual people who had lived in “his” village. Being more accustomed to the broad abstractions of cliology, he had seldom encountered any of the folk behind his equations and models. He didn’t know it yet, but he was being seduced by Judy Cao. He was begi

Thus, one Fritz Ackerma

Sharon thought the three-pfe

But the lukewarm reception of his glad tidings was something of a damper and Tom felt as if he had been dumped unceremoniously into a cold stream.

The other thing about Judy’s calls that sometimes irritated Sharon was their odd timing. They were as apt to come at one hour of the day as any other. Did that girl never sleep? And of course Tom would leap to answer the ring. It didn’t matter much what he was doing. Clearing the di

One evening, while Tom was deep into a travel book on the customs and legends of the Black Forest — one never knew where unexpected gold might lie unearthed — Sharon appeared in front of his recliner, wagging his cell phone at him.