Eifelheim (70 page)

Heinrich had rented two Japanese pickup trucks. Two men with drooping moustaches waited beside them, talking quietly. There were picks, shovels, and other paraphernalia in the bed of the first truck. When the men saw us coming, they climbed into the bed of the second.

“I think there is an old logging road that will take us close to the site,” Heinrich told me. “It cannot be too far a walk from there. I will drive the first truck. Anton, you take the second.
Fräulein
Cao,” he turned to her. “You may ride with me. Since I am celibate, you will be safer than with these two old goats.” He grinned at me, but I pretended not to notice.

W
E TOOK
the Schwarzwald-Hauptstrasse into the mountains, turning off at Kirchzarten. The road began climbing as we drove into the Zastiertal. I rolled the window down and let the cool mountain air blow into the cab. In the back, the workmen laughed. One of them began singing an old country song.

“Too bad that Sharon could not come,” I said.

Tom looked at me briefly. Then he faced forward again. “She’s working on another project. The one I told you about.”

“Ja
. The circuit diagram. That was the most remarkable thing of all. Never again will I look at a manuscript illumination in the same way. Think of it, Tom. Could you or I ever have recognized it for what it was, let alone what it meant? Pfaugh.” I waved a hand. “Never. And Sharon. Would she ever have seen it? Medieval manuscripts. No, physicists do not do such things. Only because the two of you were together could it ever have happened the way it did. And if she had not thought of that comment of Sagan’s just before she looked …?”

Tom looked out the side window at the trees whipping past. “It was the wildest sort of coincidence. Who knows what else may be out there, lying in archives and libraries, unrecognized because the right people haven’t looked at it in the right way? Things for which we’ve found safe, acceptable,
believable
explanations.”

A few kilometers past Oberreid the road became rough and I paid all my attention to my driving. The Feldberg loomed high on our right. Shortly, the Monsignor honked and his arm jabbed out of the leading truck, pointing left. I saw the old logging road and honked to show that I understood. I pulled the floor shift to put us in four-wheel drive.

Heinrich drove like the lunatic he was. He seemed unaware that the road was no longer paved. Our truck bounced and shook as I followed him and I wondered if we would lose the two workmen clinging to the back. I silently praised the Japanese quality-control workers who had helped make our shock absorbers.

T
HE SUN
was already high when we reached the area where Eifelheim had once stood. There was no sign of it. I had copies of the satellite images in my hand but, close up, everything looked different. Nature had reclaimed its own; and the trees had had seven centuries in which to grow and die and grow again. Tom bore a bewildered expression as
he turned round and round. Where had the village green been? Where the church? We might have walked past the place entirely, except that the American soldiers who had stumbled upon the site had thoughtfully left behind their empty beer cans to mark it.

Heinrich took charge and the rest of us fell quickly into the roles of his assistants. But then he was a field man and we were not.

From among the equipment in his rucksack he took a GPS transceiver. Within moments he had pinpointed our location. He marked the map with a grease pencil, then pointed with it. “The church must be buried under a cruciform mound atop that small hill. The graveyard is most likely to the rear of the chancel; although it might also lie to the side.”

We found the mound quickly enough and split into three teams, each searching the ground in a different direction from the chancel end. It was not long before one of the workmen, Augustus Mauer, found what might have been a headstone, smashed to rubble. We could not be sure. Perhaps they were natural rocks. We resumed our search.

J
UDY FOUND
the grave. I could see her off to my right when she stopped and stared down at the ground. She did not call out, but only stood quietly for a time. Then she crouched and I could no longer see her through the brush.

I glanced around, but no one else had noticed. They continued to pace slowly forward, searching the forest floor. I made my way across and found her kneeling next to a sunk and broken stone. Soil action had claimed the lower half of the stone, but it had sunk at such an angle that the face on it had been partially protected from the elements.

“Is this it?” I asked quietly.

She gasped and sucked in her breath. She turned and saw me and relaxed visibly. “Dr. Zaengle,” she said. “You frightened me.”

“I am sorry.” I crouched beside her, my old bones
protesting. I studied the face on the stone. It was worn, as only the breezes of seven centuries can wear. Its outlines were faded with time, obscure and barely visible. How had the soldiers ever noticed it? “Is it the grave?” I asked again.

She sighed. “I believe so. At least, it is the one that the soldiers found.” She held up a cigarette butt to show how she knew. “The inscription is nearly illegible, and parts of the top are broken off; but see here? The letters? …
HANNES STE
…” She traced them with her fingers.

“Johannes Sterne,” I said for her. “John from the Stars. The name he was baptized under.” I looked around us. “Do you realize how many graves there must have been? And this is the one we find.”

“I know. I’m scared.”

“Scared? Of what?”

“When we dig him up. He won’t be the right shape. He’ll be something wrong.”

I did not know how to answer her. Burgher or alien, whatever the shape, it would be wrong in one sense or another. “Gus found another headstone,” I told her. “So did Heinrich. Both were smashed. Tom thinks that when the Plague swept through here the neighboring villagers came and destroyed the gravestones of the ‘sorcerors.’ Yet, this one—presumably the one that most frightened them—was not touched. Why?”

She shook her head. “There is so much we do not know, and never will know. Where did they come from? How many were there? Were they brave explorers or bewildered tourists? How did they and Dietrich establish communications?
What did they talk about, those last few months of life
?” Her face, when she turned it up to me, verged on tears.

“I imagine,” I said as gently as I could, “that they talked of going home and the great things they would do when they got there.”

“Yes,” she said more quietly. “I suppose they would have. But those who could have told us are long dead.”

I smiled. “We could hold a seance and ask them.”

“Don’t say that!”
she hissed. Her fists, clenched tight, pressed on her thighs. “I’ve been reading their letters, their journals, their sermons. I have been inside their heads. They don’t feel dead to me. Anton,
most of them were never buried!
Toward the end, who was left to turn the shovel? They must have lain on the ground and rotted. Pastor Dietrich was a good man. He deserved better than that.” There were tears on her cheeks now. “As we were walking through the forest, I was frightened that I would meet them, still alive. Dietrich or Joachim or one of the villagers or—”

“Or something horrible.”

She nodded silently.

“That’s what frightens you, isn’t it? You are a rational, secular, twenty-first-century woman, who knows absolutely that alien creatures would look different and smell different; and yet you would run screaming like any medieval peasant. You are afraid you would act as badly as Fra Joachim.”

She smiled a faint, small smile. “You are almost right, Dr. Zaengle.” She closed her eyes and sighed.
“Hay cu’ú giúp tôi. Cho toi su’c manh
. I am afraid I would not act as Pastor Dietrich did.”

“He shames us all, child,” I said. “He shames us all.” I looked around at the tall oaks and the wildly beautiful mountain flowers—the woodmasters and butterheads—and listened to the rattle of the woopeckers. Perhaps Dietrich had had a fine burial, after all.

Judy took a deep breath and dried her tears. Then she said, “Let’s tell the others.”

H
EINRICH GAVE
directions for the dig. “After so long, the coffin will have disintegrated. Everything will be filled with clay. Dig until you find wood fragments; then we will switch to the trowels.”

Gus and Sepp, the other workman, began their digging a little ways out from the grave. Because the remains would have sunk over the centuries, they would have to dig deep.
They wanted the sides of the hole to slope inward so that they would not collapse. Both men were of old Breisgau families. Gus’s folk had been stoneworkers for many generations; and Sepp Fischer was descended from a long line of fishermen along the River Dreisam.

It was already late afternoon when the digging began, but Heinrich had come prepared with gas mantles to work into the evening. There were also tents and bedrolls. “I would not want to try and find my way back in the dark,” he said. “Remember Hänsel and Gretel.”

It was only when the evening sun was setting that we discovered how the soldiers had discovered the face. The light streamed through a gap in the trees, stiking the stone and throwing the carving into sharp relief. Through some accident of weathering, it was only when lit from that angle, in the growing gloom of twilight, that the features stood out, as if it were a hologram projected into the stone. Gus and Sepp were bent over their shovels and did not notice; but Heinrich was stooped just beside it and, hearing Judy’s gasp, turned and stared.

It was a mantis’s face and it wasn’t. The eyes were large and bulging and the stone carver had given them a hint of faceting, so that they sat like gemstones in the alien countenance. (Those eyes would have been yellow, I knew.) There were traces of lines that might have been antennae or whiskers or something else entirely. Instead of insectlike mandibles, there was a mouth of sorts; a caricature of human lips and chin. Judy grabbed my arm. I could feel her nails dig into my skin. Tom was tugging his lip. It was the face from the church crypt.

Heinrich paused and stared at the stone without speaking. It was obvious that this was no weathered distortion of a human face. It was a demon. Or something like a demon. Heinrich turned and looked at us, gauging our reactions. Already the sun had moved and the visage was fading. “I think,” he said, “perhaps I should take a rubbing.”

T
HE MOON
was a ghost drifting through the treetops when Gus finally struck wood. The gas lanterns hissed and sputtered, embedding a shifting circle of brightness in the dark of the forest. Judy was kneeling by the edge of the hole, her eyes closed, sitting on her heels. I don’t know if she was praying or sleeping. I could barely see the heads of the men in the pit.

Tom came and stood next to me. He held Heinrich’s rubbing of the alien’s face.
Hans
, I reminded myself. Not “the alien” but Johann Sterne, a person, someone who died a long time ago; far from home, in the company of strangers. What had he felt near the end, when all hope had been lost? What emotions had washed through that alien mind? Did my question even mean anything? Did strange enzymes coursing his blood play the role of adrenaline? Had he even had blood?

Tom pointed to the sky. “Full moon,” he said. “Wrong time to dig up Dracula’s grave.” He tried to smile to show that he was joking. I tried to smile to show him that I knew. I shivered. It was cooler in the mountains than I had thought it would be.

Sepp called out and we all jerked like puppets. Judy came suddenly alert and leaned forward over the pit. Tom and I walked to the edge of the hole and looked in.

Sepp and Gus were standing to one side while Heinrich probed in the clay with a trowel. There was something shiny and smooth protruding from the earth. Pale. Not bone-white, but yellow and brown. He excavated around it and removed it, earth and all. Then he sat back on his haunches and scraped at it with a putty knife, cleaning it; his own face set as solidly as any carved in stone.

He knows
, I thought.

A face emerged gradually from the embrace of the clay. Gus gasped and dropped his shovel. He crossed himself hastily three times. Sepp remained calm, watching with narrowed eyes. He nodded solemnly, as if he had always known the soil of Eifelheim would yield unearthly fruit.

It was a skull, and not a skull, and no earthly mind had
ever sat within it. Soil chemistry had been at work on it, but our worms and bacteria had for their part found it unappetizing. The eyes were gone, of course, and two enormous sockets set on either side of the head gaped empty; but whatever had served him for skin was still largely intact. It was a mummy’s head.

Heinrich held it out and Judy took it gingerly. Tom stood behind her, inspecting it over her shoulder. Heinrich climbed from the pit and sat on its edge with his feet dangling in the hole. He took his pipe from his pocket and lit it; though I noticed his hands trembled a bit with the match. “So, Anton. Now will you tell me what I have gotten into? I have a feeling Bishop Arni will not like it.”