1634: The Ram Rebellion

by Eric Flint

  Johnnie F. thought about it. “A little on the whimsical side, too, it would appear. But don’t kid yourself.” He made a little nodding gesture with his head, indicating the square in front of them. “Take a look. Take a close, careful look.”

  Noelle did so. After about a minute she said, “This town’s under martial law, isn’t it? Not ours.”

  “Not... quite.” Johnnie F. studied several of the men who were sitting at a small table outside the entrance to the town hall’s Ratskeller. To all outward appearances, they were simply workmen enjoying a lunch. But the beers in front of them were only being sipped, and there was too much keen observation in the way they kept an eye on the square.

  “Not quite,” he repeated. “Not ‘martial law’ so much as civil law. But it’s a very hard hand, and it’s very much in control. That’s become obvious to me over the last week. And the city council’s essentially disappeared. The official one, I mean.”

  Again, he gestured with his head. This time, toward the town hall. “There are still men meeting in there. Every evening, in fact. But none of them are on the council.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Most of them, from what I’ve been able to find out, are from the guilds.” He grinned. “Not a single member of the printers’ guild, which I’ll explain to you later. A lot of men from guilds with ties to the rural areas - fishers, boatmen, carters. More from the craft guilds than you would normally expect to see on the inner council; fewer merchants, but some. The real difference is that they aren’t all masters. It includes some journeymen who never could afford to start their own shops. And a few members of the old Protestant patrician families who were thrown out in the 1620s. Vasold, Dittmayer. Steiner, I think. Getting some of their own back, even if they have to support a revolution to do it.”

  “In a word, it’s authoritative.”

  “Very. Don’t kid yourself, Noelle. For all practical purposes, Bamberg is already under the control of this ‘Ram’ we keep hearing about. Even if we ordered out the small Swedish garrison we have in Bamberg, I think we’d get flattened. Worse than Suhl, if we were dumb enough to do what Horton did instead of Anse.”

  “But they’re taking pains—considerable pains—to avoid clashing with us.”

  “Yes. I think it’s more than that, in fact. I think they’re using us as their figurehead. Well, not that, exactly. Brillo is their figurehead. We’re sorta their fig leaf. Official cover, so to speak.”

  Noelle was now studying the men sitting at the table. They returned her gaze. Not in an unfriendly way, just...

  Impassively. As if they were simply waiting.

  “Winter’s coming,” she said abruptly. “The Ram will use those slow months to keep building support. It’ll all come to the surface in the spring and summer of next year.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes. Is this what you wanted to show me?”

  “Part of it. But we’re going somewhere else.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later, they entered a street that seemed to be Bamberg’s “Printers’ Row.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I want to introduce you to somebody. One of the printshop owners. Frau Else Kronacher.”

  Noelle raised an eyebrow. “A woman? Heading up a printshop?”

  Johnnie F. grinned. “She’s having a battle royal with the guild. As you can imagine. Although that seems to have settled down, this past week. As you can also imagine.”

  Both of Noelle’s eyebrows were up, now.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Johnnie F. “I’m not sure yet, but I think she’s real close to the ‘Ram.’ Helmut himself, unless I miss my guess.”

  They’d reached the entrance to one of the shops. Johnnie F. turned to face Noelle squarely, his face very solemn.

  Johnnie F. was never solemn.

  Noelle rolled her eyes. “Let me guess.”

  “Yup. Your mission, should you decide to accept it...”

  “Cut it out, Johnnie!”

  “Mindrot comes in lots of flavors. I loved that show. Should you decide to accept it...”

  Chapter 3:

  “The Natives Are Restless”

  Wuerzburg, Early October, 1633

  Meyfarth stood watching. He had furnished the auditors with temporary quarters the day that they arrived. Now they were standing impatiently outside the doors of considerably more spacious ones. The Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion in the Franconian Prince-Bishoprics and the Prince-Abbey of Fulda was preparing to wind up its work and return to Grantville with its wagon load of accumulated paper.

  Well, two wagon loads. The commissioners should have left the first week of September. However, Phil Longhi’s prediction of the need for a wagon and team to transport paper had turned out to be inadequate. Paul Calagna had only budgeted for one wagon. When they started to load, they had to scrounge around for a second wagon and team to transport the paperwork that their efforts had generated. Finally, however, the teamsters were bringing out the last crates and barrels.

  Relations between the two sets of officials would have been more strained if the special commissioner who provided inadequately for its transport needs hadn’t been Willa’s son-in-law. As it was, Estelle and Maydene had bowed to the need to be understanding about the delay.

  It was Meyfarth’s opinion that the up-timers’ theories about administration and the way it really worked among them in practice were far from the same. Ties of blood appeared to be as effectual for them as for the down-timers.

  The three women were talking in English about what happened to Willard and Johnnie F. in Bamberg the month before. The five men were talking in German about what happened to Herr Thornton and Herr Haun in Bamberg. It seemed as though everybody in Wuerzburg was talking about Bamberg.

  Meyfarth had to do some serious thinking about Bamberg. And some serious praying. He would schedule it into his daily routine.

  * * *

  After Willard Thornton recovered from the flogging, he went home to Grantville. Not permanently, but the bigwigs in the LDS church there wanted to hear from his own mouth what had led up to it.

  Johnnie F. Haun, after introducing Noelle Murphy to Frau Kronacher, just went back to work. Harvest time was not the right season for an ag extension agent to be lollygagging around as an invalid. He pulled his “hearts and minds” team together and sent them out into the villages to demonstrate improved techniques in hand threshing. He would love to have them demonstrate threshing machines, but there weren’t going to be any threshing machines in Franconia for a long time yet. There were, however, easier and faster ways to separate the grain from the chaff than beating it with a flail.

  * * *

  Johann Friedrich Krausold found it difficult to work with these up-time women. He had a clear vision of the duty of an auditor. It was to make sure that the government received every Pfennig in dues, taxes, and labor services that was coming to it, while preventing local administrators from siphoning any of it off into a project of making their private fortunes.

  The women had no objection to that. Indeed, Frau McIntire showed an admirable concentration on tracking down graft and corruption, wherever it might be found. She told him that before the Ring of Fire, she had been a “data input clerk” for the Fraud Division of the “IRS.” This Internal Revenue Service would be well worth a man’s time to learn about. When he advised her where, in a given Amt, the siphoning would most likely be occurring, she burrowed into the records until she found it, documented it, and drew up a report on it. Krausold did not yet clearly grasp what a “data input clerk” might have been, but he found her descriptions of the internal culture of the “IRS” fascinating. Their conversations were most illuminating.

  But Frau Fodor! She had another vision in addition to this auditing assignment, apparently formed by her background in her husband’s “small business.” As she went around from Amt to Amt, she constantly told merchants and artisans, farmers and landlord
s, ordinary subjects, that they should be careful not to pay the government one more red cent than it was entitled to by law.

  Frau Utt was, if anything, even worse. It appeared that she had for some years of her life worked for a corporation whose whole purpose was to minimize the tax obligations of the government’s subjects. With handbooks from this “H&R Block,” she conducted seminars, after her regular work day, designed to teach ordinary people to understand the “rights of citizens” under the tax code.

  There was no doubt that their ideas were contaminating the four trainees. Krausold couldn’t do anything about it. Under the terms that Herr Bellamy had established for this project, he was the auditors’ subordinate.

  He could, however, collect his grievances and send reports on them to the proper Duke of Saxe-Weimar. To Wilhelm Wettin, as he was calling himself now. He also complained a lot to Johann Matthaeus Meyfarth who could, as a fellow down-timer, be expected to understand.

  * * *

  Meyfarth understood, all right. He also summarized every conversation with Krausold and, with Steve’s approval, sent the summaries on to Arnold Bellamy and ultimately, he presumed, to Don Francisco Nasi or to Michael Stearns. His proper duke had been Johann Casimir of Saxe-Coburg, who had assigned him to these up-timers. The old duke had died just recently, in July. Meyfarth had regretted not being able to attend the funeral. Childless in his body, Johann Casimir had been a true father to his subjects.

  Childless. Meyfarth’s mind wandered. His own wife and children had died in Coburg the previous year - the summer before the NUS administrators came to Franconia. Plague. Because of that, he had been free to come. No hostages that he had given to fortune. No one, any longer, on whose behalf conscience could make a coward of him. It had been good to have a demanding new task. More than a year now, his family had been gone. To a better place, he reminded himself firmly. More than a year..

  Since the duke’s death, however, Meyfarth served no master. He worked for the government of the New United States. It was a strange feeling, in some ways. Naked and unprotected. Liberating.

  * * *

  The two wagons that the Special Commission was using pulled out of Wuerzburg. There were guards up in front, and a hired driver for the first wagon. The Special Commission’s personnel were in the second wagon, which had considerably better springs, with Reece Ellis driving. He let the others ride in peace for a couple of miles. Comparative peace, anyway, since Paul and Lynelle’s two-year-old was squalling her little head off. The two older kids were playing a game in the back. Finally, Reece decided that he couldn’t put it off any more. Shifting the reins to his left hand, he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, brought out an envelope, and said, “Guys, I’ve got news for us. Sealed orders, but I know what’s in them, pretty much. We’re not going back to Grantville.”

  Phil Longhi said, “What the hell?”

  “Matz Meyfarth brought the idea up. I took it to Steve and he took it to Arnold Bellamy. Whence the orders. It’s too good a chance to miss. We’re spending the winter in Coburg.”

  Phil reached out to take the envelope.

  “Why?” Paul Calagna sounded only mildly curious.

  “Because Matz’s duke died.” Reece was the only one of them who had gotten on first-name terms with the German clergyman. “He didn’t have any children. The heir to the property will be his brother. That’s Duke Johann Ernst, the Saxe-Eisenach one. But he’s sixty-six years old and doesn’t have any children either. When he goes, both little duchies will be up for grabs among the other Wettins. If we let them be.”

  “What do you mean, ‘if we let them be?’,” Phil asked.

  “Matz was explaining about oaths. These German states being what they are, there isn’t any of that business about, ‘The king is dead; long live the king.’ When even the emperor dies, for goodness sake, if they haven’t already elected an heir, it’s up for grabs. Even when the duke or count who died does have a son to inherit, it’s not absolutely automatic. The new guy makes a tour all around the county or duchy and his subjects come in and take something called a Huldigungseid. I guess the closest thing would be an oath of allegiance. It doesn’t have anything to do with knights or fealty or stuff like that. A Huldigungseid goes right down to your ordinary farmers and artisans. They come in to a big meeting and promise to obey him; he promises to protect and shield them; then they all have dinner. Usually, it’s a big outdoor picnic, really. Then he goes on to the next Amt and does it again.”

  “So?” Lynelle asked.

  “So, at the moment, old Johann Ernst has been too tired and sick to come over and collect oaths. The people in Saxe-Coburg aren’t oathbound to anyone, right now. We’re not going to be messing around with the Wettins’ properties. They keep their money and their estates. But we’re stepping in and taking a Huldigungseid from everybody in Saxe-Coburg, directly to the constitution of the New United States. And if it works—okay, I know that’s quite a bit of an ‘if,’ but if it does—we’ll do it again in Saxe-Eisenach when Johann Ernst dies. And, gradually, beyond. Just like we did for the folks who got themselves annexed to Grantville because the count of Gleichen had died without heirs. Remember Birdie Newhouse and the people in the village where he’s farming now? If we keep at it, slow but sure, eventually the NUS won’t be this loose confederacy with lords and things. We’ll have something like a country, with every single person owing allegiance to the constitution, not to some lordship.”

  Paul Calagna reached for the squalling kid and said, “Smooth.”

  “So we’re going to Coburg and we’ll spend the rest of the fall, maybe into the winter, collecting these oaths. The wagon up front,” Reece nodded, “actually does have the Special Commission’s stuff. You didn’t really miscalculate, Paul. This wagon has stuff for the Coburg project. We sort of sneaked it into the storeroom. Steve didn’t want any leaks. Lynelle and the kids can go on to Grantville with the first wagon, and . . .”

  Lynelle said, “Over my cold, dead body.”

  Reece stared at her.

  “Look, Reece,” she said in a level voice. “There’s no more risk of smallpox in Coburg than in Wuerzburg; there’s no more risk of plague in Coburg than in Wuerzburg, there’s no more risk of anything in Coburg than in Wuerzburg. The kids won’t be in a bit more danger in Coburg than they have been for the last few months while your Special Commission did its thing.”

  “But what about getting them into school?” Paul asked.

  “If I could home-school them in Wuerzburg, which I did last spring, I can home-school them in Coburg this fall. And I can do more than that. You can deputize me and I can take oaths. Show these folks that a woman can be a citizen as well as a man. Remember what Saunders Wendell said that Johnnie F. figured out, up in Bamberg. You can’t just tell people something. You have to show them. Show them that we mean it.”

  “Lynelle,” Reece said, “I’m not going to do that.”

  “Why not?” Over the summer, Lynelle had had a little more of Reece Ellis than she could endure gracefully. “Since when are you the only one who decides things? Do you think I’m too weak? Do you think that you can wrap me up in cotton batting and stick me on a shelf somewhere the way you try to do with Anne Marie when it’s not handy for you to have a wife around? Listen to me, Mr. High-and-Mighty-very-old-settler-Protestant-son-of-a-DAR-member-Mr.-Ellis. My grandparents, all four of them, were the first ones born in the U.S. of A. My great-grandparents went through a lot, really a lot, so they could get out of horrible places in the Balkans and come to better places in Pennsylvania and West Virginia so people like you could spend their spare time looking down their noses at them...”

  “Lynelle!” Paul said faintly.

  “Well, somebody ought to say it. We’ve all thought it often enough.”

  The subsequent discussion was rather painful. From Coburg, the front wagon went on to Grantville without Lynelle.

  Wuerzburg, Late October 1633

  “If they can do it in Co
burg,” Johnnie F. asked, “then why can’t we do it here? At least for the people who are living on lands that used to belong directly to the two bishops and the abbot? We’ve taken those over. There’s never any use in leaving one of your opponents the financial resources to mount an opposition. Since we’re here for the NUS, and we’re certainly willing to promise, on its behalf, to protect and shield them... Hell, that’s what we’re down here for. Isn’t it?”

  Steve Salatto looked a little doubtful. “I’m not one hundred percent sure what the legal status is. We’re—that is, the NUS—is supposed to be administering Franconia on behalf of Gustavus Adolphus. I’m not so sure that we’re supposed to be incorporating the people into the NUS itself by taking oaths of allegiance from them to our constitution.”

  “The suggestion came from Arnold Bellamy, himself,” Scott Blackwell pointed out. “And it’s in writing. We’re covered.”

  “Well, at least it came to us under Arnold’s signature.” Steve looked at the letter again. “But there’s something sort of, um, mischievous, about this idea. I just don’t see it as the sort of thing that Arnold would come up with. Now I could suspect Ed Piazza of it, if he had time. But since last spring, when would he have had the time?”

  Johnnie F. grinned. “There’s always Noelle Murphy. It’s the sort of thing she would think of and sneak into a memo if she had the chance.”

  Anita tended to tire of the tendency of the guys to analyze the underlying significance of their orders endlessly. Or, at any rate, tediously. “The point is, are we going to do it?”

  The men looked at her.

  “Or not?” she added.

  “Do we have any idea what the response would be, out in the countryside?” Steve looked at Johnnie F.

  “I’m not sure. I could ask around. One thing is pretty sure, though. It would make the farmers on the estates of the other little lords, the imperial knights and the petty nobles, just as jealous as could be. Not necessarily because the ex-episcopal farmers will want to take the oath. Not even because the other farmers would want to take the oath, necessarily. But because we would be giving them the chance. The grass is always greener, and suchlike. When it comes to the farmers who are subjects of other lords, it would sort of double, maybe triple, the effect of what we did when we abolished the remaining obligations of serfdom on the ex-episcopal estates.”