Ring of Fire IV

by Eric Flint

  She wondered where he was, and wished he were there with them. That thought produced another flush of pride and pleasure. Quiet Eva, with her pox-scarred face. Who would have imagined the adventures she’d get herself into?

  Not she herself, for a certainty, until she’d met the captain.

  “Isn’t life grand?” she said.

  Coincidentally, that statement came just as she finished cleaning the knife. The look Missy gave her almost made her laugh again. “I didn’t mean because I get such a thrill out of gutting a pig!” she protested.

  * * *

  By sundown, Litsa hadn’t returned. They made ready to spend another night in the woods. They’d be quite a bit more comfortable, at least. Barbeline had spent all day gathering various items to improve their shed—moss, twigs and grass, which she used to seal the interior and improve their bedding. The girl seemed indefatigable.

  Matija had improved, too. He’d recovered from the shock and was no longer at risk of losing his life. The biggest problem he faced now was the pain caused by his wounds. But, as you’d expect from a man with his history, he handled it with silent impassiveness.

  He spoke little. Just lay there with his eyes usually closed—but with his pistol again at his side, which obviously gave him a great deal of reassurance. Barbeline had found it lying in some brush and returned it to him.

  Matija had recovered enough that he could take the first watch this night, allowing Eva and Missy to get more sleep than they had the previous one. As Eva lay on her side with Barbeline cuddled tightly against her, a sudden thought occurred to her.

  “Do you know how to read and write, girl?”

  “No,” said Barbeline.

  “I’ll teach you.”

  “Do you really think I can learn?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  * * *

  Help finally arrived just before noon the next day, although Litsa herself wasn’t with the people who came. It was a party of two men, a boy about twelve years old, and three women. Two of the women looked to be in their twenties; the other was a woman in her forties who, from appearance, seemed to be the mother of one of them.

  None spoke any language other than a dialect of French that was close enough to Barbeline’s for the girl to be able to translate.

  “They say Litsa came to their village and told them about us. But she didn’t stay. She went on to see if she could reach a bigger town. Maybe even Nancy.” Barbeline shook her head. “None of them have ever been to Nancy, though. They say it’s far away.”

  That didn’t mean very much. Rural folk like this were often illiterate—semi-literate, at best—and rarely traveled any great distance from their village. “Far away” could mean a hundred miles—or ten.

  There was another exchange between Barbeline and the villagers. Frowning, the girl turned to Eva and Missy. “They say Litsa told them you’d pay them if they helped you. They want to see the money. They’re not very trusting of strangers.”

  That, too, was pretty much a given. Missy went back into the shed and emerged with some silver coins in her hand. In the meantime, Eva had offered the carcass of the pig as a gift to the villagers.

  They were appreciative of the pig, but seemed almost dazzled by the coins. They would have handled currency very rarely.

  Within a short time, cannibalizing some of the large branches from the shed, they had a litter jury-rigged. Once Matija was placed on it, they set out from the meadow, with the litter carried between two of the horses. The villagers had no horses themselves, so neither Missy nor Eva chose to ride. They would walk like all the others.

  The journey was not particularly arduous, but it was very hard on Matija since there was no way to keep the litter from jostling. They’d soon left the road, such as it was, and were making their way across open ground. The forest was more in the nature of interconnected woods than the sort of forest one would encounter in North America or Russia, and the villagers took care to avoid the worst parts. Still, it was fairly rough terrain.

  By late afternoon, they reached the village. It was very small, just half a dozen huts, three on each side of an open space that could be called a “street” only by the most charitable of souls. A few faces peered at them from open doorways, insofar as the term could be applied to cloth flaps. Only one of the huts had an actual wooden door, and it looked to be ancient.

  The huts were about as primitive as such rural dwellings could get. All of them had thatch roofs and wooden walls, which were plastered with wattle and daub. The edifices were about thirty feet long and half as wide. None of them had windows.

  The villagers led them to one of the huts, which turned out to be uninhabited. Inside there was nothing but a small hearth at one end of the hut, with a chimney leading up to the roof. The floor was covered with straw.

  Thankfully, the odor inside wasn’t as bad as it would be in mid-summer. On the other hand, it would be cold tonight. The hearth was designed for cooking, not heating. There was no wood in it anyway. From the looks of things, the hut had been abandoned for some time. Months, maybe even a year. The people who’d lived there once had probably died. If not all of them, enough that the few survivors would have been taken in by other families. Villages like this were close-knit. Everyone who lived in it would be related to each other except for spouses who came from a nearby village—and they were probably related also, if not as closely.

  The bigger of the two men, the one who seemed to be in a position of some authority among the villagers, spoke to Barbeline. The girl translated.

  “He says we can stay here tonight. Tomorrow night, too, if Litsa doesn’t bring help from a town soon. After that, we’ll have to pay more.”

  He did not offer any food or drink. Eva wasn’t concerned about that, in itself. They still had some food left in their sacks and she wouldn’t have wanted to drink the village’s water anyway. Even without Missy’s sometimes-ghastly admonitions, Eva had read enough about up-time medical practices to understand the danger of contaminated water. Fortunately, there’d been a stream not far from the meadow where she’d refilled all the canteens.

  Still, the village headman’s failure to offer food bothered her. The fare wouldn’t have been much, to be sure: a small loaf of coarse rye bread, with perhaps one or two onions. But hospitality was something rural folk normally took quite a bit of pride in. At least, the ones where she’d grown up did. Perhaps customs were different here in Lorraine.

  Then, finally, she realized what had been nagging at her.

  “There aren’t any dogs,” she said. “They must have eaten them all.”

  Missy stared at her. “Which means…”

  “They’re desperate. That’s why they haven’t offered us any food. They don’t have enough even for themselves—although that pig will keep them for a while.”

  Missy chewed on her lower lip for a few seconds. “If I’m interpreting that damn steely-calm demeanor of yours properly, what you’re saying is that we’re in trouble.”

  “Probably…yes.”

  “But…why did they help us at all? Why not just rob us right away—and kill us so there wouldn’t be any witnesses.”

  Eva shook her head. “These villagers aren’t criminals, Missy. Certainly not hardened ones. They’re just desperate people, who needed time to work themselves up for something like this.”

  Missy leaned over to see how Matija was doing. He was asleep now.

  “He’s not going to be much help, I don’t think. Not for days.”

  “Where’s his pistol?”

  “I have it in my bag.”

  “Give it to Barbeline.”

  Missy looked at the French girl, whose eyes were now very wide. “Why? She’s only eight.”

  “Exactly. They won’t see her as a danger.”

  “But—”

  Eva shook her head. “Missy—think. We’re not going to have a—what do you call it?—a ‘shoot-out’ with them.” She glanced to the side of the hut, where Missy had propped
her shotgun against the wall. “How many shells do you have left?”

  “At least a dozen.” The American suddenly looked both apprehensive and chagrinned. “Uh…well, there are two in the chambers. But the rest are still in the saddlebags.”

  Eva smiled. “Don’t feel bad. I left my boar spear out there too.”

  They’d left their horses in a meadow just beyond the village limits, where the animals could graze.

  Missy hurriedly started digging into her bag. As she did so, she looked at the thick cloth covering the door. “Maybe…”

  “If we’re in trouble, it’s already started. The horses won’t be there any more. They’ll have moved them somewhere else.”

  Missy found the pistol and brought it out. Then, checked the magazine. “It’s full, looks like.”

  Eva shrugged. “And so what? We can keep them from charging into this hut, certainly. But we can’t escape. Even a village as poor as this one will have some firearms. Old matchlocks, most likely. But at close range they’ll be deadly enough if we try to escape”—she nodded toward the doorway—“and that’s the only way out.”

  “It’ll be a stand-off, then. At least…” Missy looked around the interior of the hut. “How easily does something like this burn?”

  “The walls, not very easily. But unless it’s rained recently, it won’t be hard to set fire to the roof.”

  Missy made a face. “So what do we do?”

  “Give the pistol to Barbeline.”

  “I don’t know how to use it,” the girl protested.

  “I don’t want you to use it. Just be ready to give it to someone when the time comes.”

  “How will I know that?”

  “I’ll tell you. Other than that, we just wait.”

  “For what?” asked Missy.

  “For who, you should say. Someone will come looking for us.”

  “Harry Lefferts, you mean.” Missy rolled her eyes. “That’s likely to be a mixed blessing, you know.”

  Chapter 14

  Early the next morning, Eva’s apprehensions were confirmed. Just after sunrise, a woman’s voice outside the hut called out something which Eva was able to translate without Barbeline’s help.

  “Hey, in there!”

  She pulled back the cloth flap that served as a door and stuck her head out. One of the younger women was standing about twenty feet away from the hut. Off to the side, Eva could see the large man who seemed to be the leader of the small group of villagers crouching by the next hut over. He had a matchlock in his hands, with the fuse lit.

  He looked unhappy but determined. The young woman—Eva thought she was his wife, but she wasn’t certain—looked unhappy and scared. But…also determined.

  “What do you want?” Eva asked. She motioned with her hand for Barbeline to come forward in case she needed translation—and Matija’s pistol. Eva didn’t think she could hit anything with the pistol, except by luck, but it was an up-time weapon. One of the ones they called an “automatic” pistol. The term meant that, whatever else, Eva could fire off several shots quickly if she needed to. That would probably be enough to scare off the villagers for a while.

  Not for long, though, and they wouldn’t run far. For all that Eva was angry at them for posing a threat, she also understood their situation and was even sympathetic. The problem was that she didn’t see a good solution that would satisfy everyone.

  The woman half-shouted something. Now crouched next to Eva, Barbeline whispered: “She said—”

  “We have to give them all our money. I understood her.” Eva had gotten familiar enough with the local dialect to be able to translate most of it into the court French she’d learned from a tutor.

  “If it were only that simple…” she murmured. The problem was that the money they had on them wouldn’t do more than tide the villagers over for a few weeks—two or three months, at most.

  That wouldn’t be enough. This little collection of huts wasn’t even a village. There was no church, not even a building that could serve as a church. There was no linden tree, either, under which village council meetings could be held—although that German custom might not hold sway here in Lorraine. Eva wasn’t sure.

  What she was now sure of, however, was that this settlement had once been a hamlet attached to some village in the area, which had been abandoned. The people now living in it were themselves refugees from somewhere else. Squatters, not residents.

  The legalities aside, what that almost certainly meant was that they had neither the tools nor the seed necessary to put in a harvest. So what good would it do them to be tided over the spring—even spring and summer? They’d just starve in the fall; they’d certainly not survive another winter. Several of the weaker ones and young children had probably died this past winter.

  “Tell them we don’t have enough for what they need,” she said to Barbeline. Eva could have probably made herself clear, but this was no time to risk possible mistranslation.

  After hearing what Barbeline shouted out, the woman’s expression grew uncertain. She looked over to the man with the gun, obviously seeking guidance.

  He wasn’t the only one with a gun. Eva had been studying the area and had already spotted the other man who’d helped them the day before. He was crouched next to a hut on the other side and also had a gun with a lit fuse. From the looks of the thing, it was a relic from the Schmalkaldic Wars of the previous century.

  Antique or not, the weapon looked deadly enough. It wouldn’t be accurate beyond ten yards—if that—but the hut he was crouched next to was about that far away. In any event, she was more worried about the still younger man she could see—a teenager, from his appearance—who was crouched in the doorway of the same hut. He had a crossbow in his hands which would be more accurate than either of the firearms. If the boy knew how to use it, at any rate—which he probably didn’t, at least not well, or they’d have been hunting game themselves.

  But he didn’t need to use it well. If Eva and Missy charged out of their hut blasting away with the shotgun and pistol, they’d certainly drive off their besiegers. And then what? Their horses would be hidden and Matija couldn’t walk. If they tried to carry him on a litter they’d soon get exhausted—and, in any event, they’d be easy prey for ambushers. Barbeline was too little to carry one end of a litter, so she’d have to be their guard. And as determined and sometimes ferocious as the little girl was, the operative term was “little.” She couldn’t even fire the shotgun or the pistol, much less hit anything with them.

  They could abandon Matija, true enough. But Eva wasn’t willing to do that and she didn’t think Missy would be either. Leaving everything else aside, by now Eva knew Harry Lefferts well enough to know that if she abandoned one of his companions under these circumstances, he wouldn’t criticize her for it. But that would be the end of their relationship, too. And while Eva had no idea where that relationship was headed, what she was quite sure of was that she wanted to find out—and take plenty of time in the finding.

  A siege, then. And they’d have to send for the captain. Eva didn’t know how Harry could resolve the conflict, since he had no more money than they did. But she was confident that he’d find a way.

  “Translate for me again, Barbeline. This is going to be more complicated and difficult.”

  The French girl nodded. “I can do it.”

  “Tell them that I am Eva Katherine von Anhalt-Dessau.” She waited for Barbeline to shout out the sentence. The name itself wouldn’t mean anything to the villagers, but the “von” part of it would.

  “Now tell them that my brother—no, say it’s my father—is the prince of Anhalt-Dessau.”

  Barbeline shouted out that sentence as well, in the local dialect. The German term Fürst did not mean exactly what the term “Prince” meant in English, and the French version of the title that Barbeline was using could mean several different things. But the fine distinctions didn’t matter, certainly not to people as far down the social hierarchy as these peasa
nts. All that mattered was that it sound very prestigious—and very rich.

  “All right, Barbeline. Now tell them that my ransom will be very large, as long as—”

  “What’s a ‘ransom’?”

  Eva hadn’t foreseen that problem. Would the villagers know the word, either? From the way the big man was holding his gun, Eva thought he probably had some military experience. If so, he’d certainly know the term. Capturing a wealthy officer and collecting his ransom was the surest way—almost the only way—for a common soldier to get rich.

  “Just use the word the way I say it.” She’d have to hope the local dialect wasn’t too different. “Tell them that my ransom will be very large, as long as none of us is hurt. My father will be very angry if I’m hurt. Or any of my friends.”

  She waited for Barbeline to translate. And then waited while the villagers had time to digest the idea.

  When she gauged the time was right, Eva rose to her feet. “You come with me, Barbeline. Missy, watch over me—no, you have another expression—”

  “Cover me,” Missy supplied. “Or ‘I’ve got your back.’” She hefted the shotgun, looking very fierce. “Go ahead—and I sure hope you know what you’re doing, girl.”

  Eva laid the pistol down next to Missy, swept aside the cloth and strode outside of the hut, doing her best to seem absolutely confident. Even a bit arrogant, although she didn’t want to overdo it. Just enough to convince the villagers that she was really, really, really a princess with a really, really, really powerful and rich father.

  She walked straight toward the big man. Seeing her come, he rose to his feet. She was relieved to see that he didn’t aim the gun at her. He kept it in his hands but moved the barrel to one side.

  His expression was still determined, but as she drew near it became shaded with some other emotion. Somewhere between shame and self-pity, she thought.

  “I understand that you are desperate,” she said. “But there is no need to do anything you will regret for the rest of your life.”

  Barbeline translated, but Eva thought the man already understood what she’d said. When the girl finished, he said something in response.