“There was plenty of arguing about both of them, up-time,” Matt said. “Not that I ever heard the Latin for it. “My dad used to say that back during the Viet Nam war....”
Vittoria threw in a maxim from St. Thomas Aquinas.
Marcie countered with a loosely paraphrased section from the Catholic catechism that she and Matt had learned in their CCD classes. “There were four. I’m sure of it. Not two or three. Four. Pretty strict ones. The things that the aggressor was doing had to be really bad; nothing else you tried to make him stop had worked; I don’t remember the third one; and, I think, whatever you did or were going to do shouldn’t cause more damage than what the other guy was already causing. That had to do with atomic and hydrogen bombs, mostly. We saw a movie about Hiroshima.”
That explanation took a while.
Claude brought up preventive war against a tyrant who is about to attack.
Marcie asked whether anyone knew more than she did about Quaker pacifism. What kind of influence was Caroline Platzer going to have on Princess Kristina?
Since none of the down-timers knew either what a Quaker was or that the princess’ governess was one, that required even more explanation, which was followed by universal astonishment that the emperor of the USE and high king of the Union of Kalmar was letting a woman who held those views anywhere near the education of his only child.
Matt stood up and started to pace. “Well, aside from Quakers and a few other types who are pretty absolute about non-violence, the Amish for example, most people do agree that it’s okay to go to war for self-defense. Yeah, I’m talking about the Ottoman onslaught. Nobody’s really raising any question that it’s not okay to fight the Ottomans. Fighting the Poles, though–just because the king is from another branch of the Vasa family and the emperor despises him–that could get tricky if you were a soldier who took the just war theory seriously.”
“I find it rather comforting that Luther concluded that a soldier can be saved, as long as he follows the just war principles,” Bismarck said.
“Well, honestly,” Ruvigny answered, “neither Luther or Calvin broke with Augustine and Aquinas on this. They differ on a few details, but basically they’re all in agreement.”
✽ ✽ ✽
“...your headdresses,” Vittoria said.
Sophia reached up to her head. “Want to know a secret?”
Two distinctly Medici eyebrows raised up toward the ceiling.
“My hair is just as dark as yours.” She pulled off the bit of pleated velvet froufrou that Susanna Allegretti had designed. “I’m letting it go back to the natural color and it looks just horrid while it’s in between.”
“Fascinating. Who...?”
“A little seamstress I met while we were in Besançon for a few weeks. She served the queen in the Netherlands already when she was still in Vienna, followed her to Brussels, and as I understand is now in Burgundy on her way back to her mother. I can assure you that she is just as good as any court tailor in France.”
“This design is ingenious.” Vittoria turned the little cap inside out, studying it more closely.
“Her mother served one of Grand Duchess Claudia’s ladies-in-waiting who came to Tyrol with her, from Florence. The contessa Violante. Perhaps...”
“Oh, yes, she recently returned. The contessa is much more the age of my grandmother, though, than of my mother and no longer comes to court much. Wait! This ‘little seamstress’ is Lucretia Capino’s daughter?”
“I have no idea. I could ask the grand duchess, though, when we get back. Or you could write to her. You’re her daughter.”
“That might be preferable. I...would like to get to know my mother better. What is the seamstress’ name?”
✽ ✽ ✽
“Sure, I want children,” Marcie said the next afternoon. “If Matt and I ever manage to spend more than six weeks under the same roof, which we haven’t since we got married three years ago, we might have one. Or two. This trip will be the longest time at a stretch that we’ve shared a bedroom since we got married. Which, now that I think about it, when we get back to Burgundy, I may just point out to Grand Duchess Claudia. We got married almost three and a half years ago. So now I’m almost 30, and we really ought to be getting on with it.” She huffed. “The grand duchess is only three or four years older than I am and she’s working on her eighth kid.”
“But,” Claude asked, “would you and M. Trelli be willing to give up the work you are doing? Either of you or both of you?”
“Nope,” Marcie shook her head. “There’s no way that, up-time, I’d ever have gotten a job a tenth as interesting as what I’ve been doing here. We do sort of get jerked around. Go here, if you please. Or, to tell the truth, even if you don’t please. Just go. She started to sing:”
Children go where I send thee,
How shall I send thee?
Well, I’'m gonna send thee one by one
One for the little bitty baby
Who was born, born, born in Bethlehem.
“What’s that song?” Sophia asked.
“Um, I guess you’d call it a folk song. It’s one of those count-down songs, like Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall. We all learned it in school.”
Children go where I send thee,
How shall I send thee?
Hey, I'’m gonna send thee two by two
Two for Paul and Silas
One for the itty bitty baby
Who was born, born, born in Bethlehem.
“I had understood,” Claude said, “from what I read that the up-time schools did not teach religion.”
“Well they didn’t. Not unless they were parochial schools. But public schools could teach about it. And they could sort of even teach it if it was ethnic, because that made it cultural. This song was African-American, I think, but it was Peter, Paul, and Mary–that was a folk music group – who made it popular. Matt had a record of it by Kenny Rogers, so I guess you could think of it as ‘country music’ too. ”
“The counting just went on and on. Where was I? Three for the Hebrew children...”
“Which Hebrew children?”
Marcie’s face went blank. “Maybe the ones in the fiery furnace? Or were they in the lions’ den with Daniel?” she suggested. “Nobody ever said, exactly who they were. That’s the way it is, with folk songs. Nobody specific writes them, so you can’t figure out what anybody specific was thinking.”
“Four for the four that stood at the door... Evangelists, maybe? There were four of those, but what door were they standing at? Five for the gospel preachers... I don’t know which ones. Six for the six that never got fixed... I never understood that one. Unless someone in the Bible took cats and dogs to the vet? If they did, it never came up in catechism class.”
The ladies digressed into the issue of spaying and neutering small domestic animals. Because down-timers only did large ones, gelding horses, neutering work oxen, etc. Why would anybody bother when it was small pets? Wouldn’t it make watchdogs less aggressive?
“Anyway,” Marcie continued. “Seven for the seven that never got to heaven... There are a lot more than seven of those, if you ask me. Eight for the eight that stood at the gate... No idea who they were. Nine for the nine all dressed so fine... No idea about them, either.” She took a deep breath. “Ten for the ten commandments... That one’s obvious, at least. Eleven for the eleven deriders... What’s a derider? Or should that be that riders? Any way, no idea who they were. Twelve for the twelve apostles... Also crystal clear. And that’s the end. Except that if you kept adding verses ad hoc, it could last a school bus full of kids all the way to an out of town football game.”
Everyone knew what a school bus was, because of the famous Croat raid. And football, because the truly immense Tom Simpson was not thought to be large enough to play it successfully.
“I used to babysit for the Thornton and Carstairs kids,” Marcie continued. “They had a tape with a whole different set of lyrics on it. Same counting, but
counting different things, involving someone named Lehi. The Thorntons are still in Bamberg, last I heard. There and Fulda seem to be where the LDS missionaries are having the most luck.”
Which led into a discussion of what LDS might be, since the activity of the missionaries had not yet affected any of the subsections of the European map that concerned the rest of the group.
“Anyhow,” Marcie summed up, “there’s no way that I’d give up what we’re doing now, down-time. But exactly what are we doing? What would you call it? It’s not as if it’s just one thing. It flips around from day to day, but somehow it all hangs together.”
When they added the gentlemen to the group later that evening, she picked up the discussion again.
“Mrs. Thornton would say that we need a collective noun to describe it,” Matt said. “To describe what our employment is. It doesn’t precisely come with a neat job description.”
This in turn required explanation that Mrs. Thornton had been their high school English teacher. “For senior world lit. and senior English lit. But she didn’t neglect grammar or spelling. Nothing but nothing got by her in an essay or on the final term paper. And she did make us do term papers–boy, did she ever!”
“What is a collective noun?” Claude asked. “My English is very poor.”
“Uh. Groups of things that belong together. There are herds, of course; herds of cattle and flocks of sheep.”
“If cattle are moving, they’re a drove. Horses are a herd, too.”
“Does a yoke of oxen count? That’s just two.”
“You can yoke more than two oxen together,” Bismarck pointed out. “But, then why isn’t a ‘harness of horses’ rather than a team?”
“Game birds.” Sophia had picked up some English because of her Aunt Anne’s marriage to James I of England. There had been a fair number of English around the Danish court. “Game birds, like quail and partridges, are a covey.”
“A murder of crows and an army of ants.”
“A pride of lions, I think.”
“It’s not just animals. There’s a fleet of ships and a crew of sailors.”
“Yeah, there’s a bunch of them for people. A troupe of actors.”
“A host of angels and a pantheon of gods. Is there a collective noun for theologians in general? I don’t think so.”
“There’s an odium theologicum,” Ruvigny said, “but that’s for when they have nasty controversies.” He had some English because of his sister’s marriage to Lord Southampton.
Matt laughed. “I heard someone suggest a ‘pontification of priests’, once.”
“Let’s not get back into theology, huh? Just for a change.”
“So what have we been dealing with?”
“I think our collective noun would have to be ‘a continuation of diplomacies’,” Matt grinned. “Because it just goes on and on. I suppose that we’ll continue to continue, no matter where our employers send us. Or where fate leads us.”
“That’s what diplomacy is, basically,” Ruvigny said. “A continuation. A mostly tedious string of separate negotiations that get knotted together, like the pearls on a necklace.” He waved toward the rope of large pearls that Vittoria was wearing. “All designed to get as much as possible for your side while fending off anyone who just wants to grab the whole necklace, break the string, send the beads flying all over the floor, and ruin the whole thing to the point that it will take forever and a day to pick them up and put them back together again. When that happens, there will always be some of the beads that no one can find. Some opportunity you can’t retrieve. Lost and gone forever.”
He leaned back. “August, I think I told you once, way back, that in the other world, my son became an English general, so I found myself mentioned in their encyclopedia.”
Bismarck nodded.
“I had a couple of lines. I spent my life as advocate for the Huguenots in France, at the court of their version of King Louis XIV. He wasn’t Anne of Austria’s baby, the one in Brussels now. Theirs wasn’t born for several more years. At the end of all my efforts, he revoked the Edict of Nantes and I went into exile. He offered me an exemption because he knew me, personally. I refused it and left with my co-religionists. That’s what became of my life’s work.”
“Vanity of vanities,” Nicholas-François said. “‘all is vanity.’ In the first verse of Ecclesiastes, Solomon in all his wisdom shows us the ultimate pointlessness of human endeavor.”
“There’s a poem,” Marcie said. “Mrs. Thornton made us read it. A poem about a conquering king with nothing left, centuries after, except a sand-blasted statue in a desert. If I ever get back to Grantville, I’ll look it up and send you all a copy.”
“But still,” Claude replied, “I don’t think that we should stop trying. Christ also made it clear that we should employ the talents that God gives us rather than burying them.”
“You know who I admire?” Bismarck said. “Frederik Hendrik, up in the Low Countries. He’s tenacious, stubborn, determined to hold the string together. He’s willing to work behind the scenes, under the table, even if sometimes, out front and on the surface, it looks like he’s not doing anything. If he has to do some things that cause him to lose face with the gung-ho types, he’ll put up with it.”
Chapter 49
“T
hat was fun, yesterday evening,” Vittoria said the next afternoon. “Just the talking about words and things, without a half dozen undertones to keep track of while you’re trying to figure out what the other people in the conversation want from you.”.
She waved a permission to sit down to the other ladies. A footman appeared with a heavy tray. There being no Italian equivalent of the tea etiquette that had later developed in England in another world, she left pouring the coffee to the maid, who then withdrew.
“Good grief,” Marcie said. “The cook must have had that pot boiling. Look at the steam. Don’t burn your tongues. Or do you want me to ask for a fresh pot?”
“It will cool,” Vittoria said. “Now, there is something I have been thinking I want to know. Can you tell me more about this Amideutsch. How does such a language actually work?”
“Not very well, as far as I’ve heard,” Marcie answered. “I haven’t been back to the USE in three years. At least, it doesn’t get used much outside of Grantville and the surrounding towns such as Kamsdorf and Saalfeld, even over to Rudolstadt and a little up to Jena, in Bamberg now that it’s the capital of the USE, and Magdeburg to a considerable degree since the population there comes from all over and have more trouble understanding one another’s local dialects than they do in understanding Amideutsch. It’s really just Thuringian German with a radically simplified grammar, especially dropping almost all case and gender, getting rid of irregular plurals, and using a mixed vocabulary. Anywhere outside of those three cities, there aren’t enough people in any single town or village for it to turn into an independent language, so it becomes more of a matter of Germans continuing to speak whatever dialect is their custom, but using up-time terms and words when they are talking about something like radio, where German doesn’t have any words at all.”
“Papa says,” Sophia added, “that the more books that are published, the more the vocabulary mixing will happen. Probably in Latin as well as German, particularly for science and engineering.”
“It’s scarcely something new,” Claude commented. “I think it is absurd that France has founded the new Académie française to attempt to freeze the formal written language and keep it ‘pure.’ In any case, the French of Paris doesn’t have much resemblance to the regional dialects that most of the people of the kingdom speak. It would be a rare peasant from Languedoc or Provence who could make himself understood to a food seller along the banks of the Seine. Much less one from Lorraine.”
Vittoria nodded. “Castiglione–not my cat, the author–in his Book of the Courtier, set in my ancestors’ own court of Urbino well over a century ago, wrote concerning Boccaccio, who in turn had written
much earlier, that he used so many words from France, Spain, and Provence that if they were omitted, his book would have been far shorter than was actually the case. Modern Tuscan speech uses words from other cities in the peninsula–both the speech of the gentle classes and that of the vulgar. You know this book? No? Well, come with me, I will show you. There is a beautifully bound copy in the duke’s library. An original edition: not the expurgated one published in Spain 50 years ago, which nevertheless has landed on the Index of Forbidden Books as well.” She picked the cat up off her lap, put him down in the chair, and led off. The others joined her for a long trek through the marble hallways, the two footmen who had been stationed outside the door trailing behind them.
Proper admiration of the binding and the contents took nearly an hour. Sophia, her Amsterdam spectacles perched firmly on her nose, concentrated on complimenting the binding. The glasses helped her a lot in seeing things but not at all in making out words. Nevertheless, not having headaches all the time had been worth the price she paid for them.
“Much as the French of Lorraine differs from that of Paris,” Claude said, “I remember that Castiglione himself wrote that he was writing as a Lombard rather than as a foreigner who spoke Tuscan too precisely and carefully, and pointed out that language changes–that Boccaccio had used many terms that were no longer current in his day. Let me see if I can find that passage. It’s close to the beginning.” She turned a few pages.
“That’s right,” Vittoria said. “He in turn used many words that are no longer current in these modern times. Of course the book was written over a century ago. The court of Urbino that he depicted was so different from modern ones. More, oddly, like we have spoken with one another during this visit. There was laughter. There were informal conversations, banter, and jokes. There are some indelicacies, of course. Some mentions of relying on Lady Fortuna rather than the Holy Mother.” She looked at Claude. “Yet when did our manners become so stiff, and why? Is this sternness maybe, at least in Catholic countries, partly a reaction against the Reformation?”
Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence Page 37