1634: The Ram Rebellion

by Eric Flint

  Meyfarth paused. Then he suggested cautiously. “Perhaps, if the up-timers are not familiar with this... Just in case it has not occurred to Don Francisco Nasi to bring it to the attention of the prime minister...”

  Meyfarth’s hesitancy was a constant irritant to Saunders Wendell. He spit out, “Get to the point, man.”

  “Ah. Well.” Meyfarth continued. “This is one of the reasons that Ferdinand II may not be able to throw his full forces against Wallenstein. You do realize that? If he strips Austria of troops, there will be another uprising among the farmers, as large as that of 1626. That is not a hypothesis. That is just the truth. If the Austrian farmers think that they have even a hope of support from the King of Sweden and the USE, they will revolt again.” He looked up at the ceiling of Wuerzburg’s episcopal palace, with its elaborate, gilded, plaster moldings. “Franconia could put as many peasants into the field as Lower Austria, you know.”

  Somewhere, maybe in a Monty Python movie, Steve had once heard the line, “The peasants are revolting.” It was supposed to be a funny pun, in the movie. According to Meyfarth, it was the literal truth, a lot of the time. Mama Salatto’s little boy Stevie had not signed up for a major in public administration expecting to deal with enough revolting peasants to constitute a major army by the standards of the seventeenth century. Dissatisfied civic associations were about his speed. He had spent his pre-Ring of Fire days helping people establish Neighborhood Watch associations in the Baltimore suburbs. If he hadn’t given in to Anita’s plea to attend her folks’ fortieth wedding anniversary party in Grantville, he would still be establishing Neighborhood Watch associations in the suburbs of Baltimore. And he would be a happy man.

  He sipped at his wine. Then he asked, “Do you know what the epitaph of a successful civil servant is?”

  Meyfarth made his face carefully noncommittal. “No.”

  “He never did anything that got his name in the paper.”

  Saunders Wendell guffawed.

  Steve said, “Don’t laugh. If we manage things right, maybe the damned sheep banners won’t make the news at all, except locally. If they make a really big splash in the national news, that means that we failed to manage things right. If your name gets in the paper, you’ve screwed up. The bigger the headlines, the bigger the screw-up.”

  On that thought, he went to bed.

  * * *

  Dave Stannard, who had been supervising the NUS’ voter registration project in Franconia since the fall of 1632, had a word with Steve on the way into staff meeting next morning. So Steve recognized him first.

  “I think that Johnnie F. is right. We should do this. It’s been hanging fire too long.” Dave waved at the letter from Arnold Bellamy, which was back on the table, carefully quarantined in the middle where it couldn’t seem to be claiming any one administrator as its patron. “We use the voter registration lists. We’ve got those. It won’t take the Amtmaenner an hour to cross out anyone who has died and add on anyone who has turned eighteen since last summer. Then we blitz them.”

  “Why bother blitzing?” Anita asked.

  “Because we’ve left it too long,” Dave answered, “so we’ve made ourselves a problem. We should have started earlier, like the commissioners did in Coburg. If we had, a few teams could have handled it and we’d have been done by now. Or close to done. Leaving it this late, unless we do it all at once, we’ll get into bad weather and have to stop. Then the folks in Unterpicklesdorf will start complaining that we valued the folks in Oberrelishhausen more than them, because we took the oaths of all the Relishes before the bad weather and left the Pickles unsworn for a whole season. No point in letting people manufacture grievances. God knows, they have enough real ones that we need to deal with.”

  Everyone at the table nodded. The Swedes had pretty well devastated this region during their campaign in 1631.

  Dave continued, “As Dad always said, ‘People don’t need an important issue to fight about. They’ll take anything available and inflate it to the size they need.’ So just do it all at once. Every single one of us, in Bamberg, in Fulda, here in Wuerzburg. Out into the Aemter and take the oaths. Before the Pickles get their feelings hurt.”

  He grinned. It was a remarkably predatory grin. Dave was another Masaniello cousin from the out-of-town crew who had been at Vince and Carla’s wedding anniversary. He’d been a Baltimore County child welfare officer before the Ring of Fire; his father Archie had been a fire department battalion chief. Dave had cut his teeth on Baltimore local politics. “Consider it a pre-emptive strike on the ‘moan and groan’ contingent. And invite the guys in the villages who aren’t eligible to take the oath to the ceremony. Feed them dinner, too. Let ‘em hear all the great speeches about citizenship and patriotism.”

  “All of us?” Steve asked.

  “Yeah, all. I mean the army privates and the copy clerks. The ground is frozen, but we haven’t had a lot of snow yet. The roads are passable. If we start tomorrow, we can get it done before Christmas.”

  There was consensus.

  “I suggest,” Dave added, “that you radio Fulda and Bamberg tonight, as soon as we get a window of opportunity, and tell them to do it the same way and the same time. Total stand-down for the ordinary routine; everybody out into the field.”

  “I suggest,” Meyfarth interjected in a very soft voice, “that you use the auditor team as well as the permanent staff. I have determined that they are not contractors, but are indeed employees of the NUS. Or of whatever you are going to call it, now. Then your permanent staff will not complain that you have given the auditors special privileges or exempted them from an onerous duty. As you said about not giving people the chance to manufacture grievances...”

  Chapter 5:

  “Prophesy To The Breath—”*

  Bamberg, early November 1633

  There was a ladder leaning against the side wall of Kronacher’s print shop. Noelle Murphy tilted her head against the sun, which was, if thin and watery, at least out for a change. Hanna, Else Kronacher’s far-from-young maid, was up on the ladder, scrubbing the morning mixture of mud and manure off the wall. The diamond-pane windows were partially open. Through them, the unmelodic sound of Frau Else screaming at her sons came out to join the other noises in the alley.

  The screeching was followed by a clatter; then by a crash. Either Melchior, who was seventeen, or Otto, just turned fifteen, had apparently been grabbing type from a bin and throwing it at his brother. Or, possibly, they had been throwing it at one another. That wasn’t at all unlikely. The crash was probably one or the other of them upsetting a bin. Or shoving his brother, who fell and upset a bin. In either case, lead type would be scattered all over the floor of the working part of the shop the way up-time kids tended to strew Legos.

  Noelle walked around the corner and entered by the front door, wrinkling her nose at the odor of the boiled linseed oil that constituted the base for printer’s ink. “Good morning, Martha. Chaos reigns, I take it.”

  Martha Kronacher pressed the heels of her hands to her temples. “Oh, the boys are fussing again that no other printer will apprentice them because of Mutti’s fight with the guild. That no other printer will ever be willing to apprentice them. That even if Mutti succeeds in her fight with the guild and keeps running the shop, they won’t have had their proper apprenticeship and journeyman years and therefore the guild won’t let them take it over when they are old enough.”

  “Oh, yecchh! Are they all the way back to casting you in the role of the sacrificial lamb—moaning that they just can’t understand why Frau Else wasn’t willing for you to marry the guild’s candidate because at least that would have kept it in the family more or less?”

  “Melchior’s position is that it isn’t as if I wanted to marry anyone else in particular. Otto’s position is that it isn’t as if anybody else is ever likely to want to marry me.”

  “Don’t listen. They’re just being brothers.” Noelle plopped her tote bag down on the sales counter.
/>
  “Both of them have decided that Mutti wasn’t really doing it for them, but because she’s selfish and just didn’t want to give the management over to a son-in-law. That if she’d been willing . . .”

  “If she’d been willing, there’s not a single guarantee that your husband would have helped either of them to open a shop of his own when the time came. There’s also no prospect that either of them could have married into a shop by way of a widow or only daughter. They’re daydreaming.” Noelle picked up a guide rule and slammed it down. “Honestly, though, if things are that bad between your brothers and your mom, why doesn’t she just send them off to help the Ram?”

  Frau Else, her ample figure covered by an apron and ink stains on her hands, pushed open the curtain between the shop and the sales room. “Because I can’t get any one else to work for me as apprentices or journeymen, that’s why! But having my sons at home is insane. Everybody in the world knows that it is insane.”

  Noelle’s eyebrows went up. “What’s insane?” A flicker went through her mind of Gretchen Richter’s—Gretchen Higgins’—frequent proclamations that this or that Grantville custom was wahnsinnig, absolut wahnsinnig.

  “To try to deal with your own children at this age. Nobles foster them to the courts of higher-ranking nobles. Then they hire tutors to take them away for a grand tour for two or three years. Merchants and craftsmen apprentice the boys and send the girls to the households of friends. Bureaucrats send them away to live with relatives in other towns and attend a good Latin school. Laborers and peasants put them out into service by the time they are fourteen or fifteen. No parent who has the slightest amount of Herr Thomas Paine’s famous ‘common sense’ keeps them at home during the stage of youth. They are too unruly. Where do you think the term ‘unruly apprentices’ comes from?”

  Frau Else waved her hands in the air. “At the very least, any other master would beat them for the way they are behaving this morning. Even better, Otto and Melchior would be apprenticed to different masters and therefore would not be available to fight with each other. But can I do that? No. No other master will take them. In any case, I can’t do without them. If I send them to the Ram, no one else will work for me. Martha and I don’t have the strength to handle the presses by ourselves, and someone must be available for the sales room. Someone has to take orders. Someone has to keep the books.”

  Noelle had heard all this before. And knew that “someone” was Martha. Good, reliable, Martha. When it came to Otto and Melchior, Frau Else was writing her own version of the Book of Lamentations. She shook her head. “Speaking of unruly apprentices, I saw Hanna on the stepladder in the alley. The printers’ apprentices are still throwing filth at the shop, I presume?”

  “Only in the alley, now. The front to the street is well enough patrolled since the power changed in the city council. There are no more cobblestones. No more open threats. Just noises in the night. Shit in the morning. The guild masters piously say to anyone from the Ram who confronts them that they do their best to control the boys, but what can one expect? With much more of the same.” Frau Else picked up an old rag and wiped off her hands.

  Noelle pushed aside the curtain and went into the back of the shop. “Melchior, shame. Poor Hanna is not young and yet you let her stand on a ladder while you are wasting time here fighting with your brother. Get out there, right now, and clean the wall if you expect to have food at noon. Otto, I heard you. Turn that bin right side up and sort the type. Don’t waste any time. Now, now, now!”

  “Didn’t I say it?” Frau Else inquired of the ceiling. “Anyone but a mother. Anyone but a mother or father and boys will do what they are told. Anyone else. Anyone at all.” When Noelle came back into the sales room, she repeated herself.

  “I do have a reason for being here,” Noelle said finally.

  Frau Else snapped her mouth shut.

  “Duplicating machines from Vignelli in Tirol. They started coming on the market in March. He is now producing them in fairly large numbers. I have ordered a dozen. They will be shipped from Bolzano, Bozen you call it, this week; they should arrive here in January. One, you may keep in your shop. It will be useful. The remainder are to go to the Ram for quick reproduction of pamphlets and broadsides in places where the movement doesn’t have print shops accessible. And in places where quick mobility is desirable.”

  “Who is paying for this?” Frau Else was not so revolutionary as to ignore her bottom line. “Not I.”

  Noelle frowned at her. “They are prepaid. I will give the paperwork to Martha.”

  Frau Else nodded.

  “About the boys . . .” Noelle waved her hand at the curtain. “Once things settle down a bit, why don’t you send them to Grantville to learn the new printing technology? It’s not covered by the guild regulations.” Yet, she thought. There was no real reason to assume that the guilds wouldn’t be scrambling to catch up. There was also no real reason to bring that up at this very moment.

  “The whole reason for what I have done is to keep this business for my sons.”

  Noelle ran a hand through her sandy blonde hair. The basic truth was that Frau Else didn’t really want to overthrow the system. She just wanted to be part of it. “Could you—maybe—just think outside the box for a minute?”

  That required quite a bit of explanation.

  Ending with a repeat of Frau Else’s protest that she couldn’t send her sons away because no trained journeyman printer would work for a woman who was not a master. And since she was not a master, she could not accept apprentices even if there were parents who were willing to send their sons to her. Not that any reasonable parent would be willing to waste money paying a master when the boy would not be eligible to enter the guild at the end of not. Not to say . . .

  Blast it! Luckily that was inside Noelle’s head and not coming out of her mouth.

  “Ah. Well, maybe we could kill two birds with one stone. Something to keep Melchior and Otto occupied. Someone to work for you in the shop.”

  “There’s no way.”

  The world does not end at the borders of Bamberg. Noelle hadn’t said that, either. Though she had come close.

  “I’ll see about having them organize a Committee of Correspondence in Bamberg. Maybe, given their age, a kind of ‘junior chapter’ with a lot of training involved. They’ll need mentors. Something like Boy Scout leaders, I guess.”

  Martha looked skeptical. “Where would these mentors come from?”

  “That’s the other end of my idea. I’ll see if they”—she left “they” undefined quite deliberately—“can send a couple guys down from Magdeburg. CoC members who are printers and will be willing to work for Frau Else. Create a liaison with Helmut. Organize a junior chapter at the same time.”

  Frau Else crossed her arms over her ample chest. “I will not turn my shop over to any other master. Not to one from Magdeburg any more than to a guild master from Bamberg.”

  “Journeymen. Working for you. There won’t be any masters from Magdeburg who are interested in a project like this, anyhow.” Noelle laughed. “It’s the nature of revolutions to be rather short on wise old elders. Mike Stearns is seriously frustrated at the shortage of Red Sybolt types.”

  That required more explanation also.

  By the end of the conversation, Noelle wasn’t too sure about just how far this fledgling Franconian revolution was going to go. Her mind skipped to the passage in Ezekiel where God told the hapless prophet to “prophesy to the breath.” In her limited experience, it just wasn’t exactly a snap to put flesh on dry bones. Much less raise the dead.

  A second image rose up. She saw herself fanning the flames of a wood fire in an old-fashioned cooking range to make them burn more hotly. Blowing upon them. Someone would have to breathe more life into this revolt before anyone could prophesy to the breath.

  Frau Else marched back through the curtain with a firm, “I can’t just stand around talking all day. There’s work to be done.”

  For one
morning, Noelle thought, she had probably done as much as she could.

  Martha rubbed her temples again. “I won’t marry one of them, either.”

  “What on earth?”

  “If you bring journeymen from Magdeburg. I won’t marry one of them, either. I don’t intend to be anyone’s sacrificial lamb.” She glared at Noelle. “Not for my brothers. Not for anyone else, either.”

  “Look, honey.” Noelle put an arm around Martha’s shoulder. Martha was a little older, twenty-five to Noelle’s “going to be twenty-three next month.” Equal stubbornness was the main foundation of their rapidly growing friendship. “People are just teasing when they call you the ‘ewe lamb’ and say that since your mom is the Ewe, you’re destined to marry Helmut. Whoever he may be in real life. Nobody really expects you to marry him. Or one of these guys, whoever they turn out to be.”

  “Some of them are serious.” Martha circled her shoulders. She had spent most of the morning cleaning display cases. “I’ve got to be realistic. Mutti has turned into a revolutionary. That’s fine, I suppose. We need a revolution. About some things, at least.”

  Noelle laughed. Martha was far less of a flaming radical than her mother. Whose radicalism also had very sharp limits. “Realistic about what?”

  “Well, people do tend to marry inside their own trade. There’s some marrying across guild lines, but especially in the highly skilled trades—glass making, printing, lens grinding, and the like—families are a lot more likely to arrange marriages into the same trade, even if it means looking outside of your own town. We—the family, I mean—aren’t really printers any more in the sense that we’re part of the guild. We’re revolutionaries. So it’s not that odd that people are thinking that she’ll find a revolutionary for me to marry. That someone like Helmut would make a suitable match.”

  “So what do you have against the idea?”

  “He’s... Well, I don’t care whether he’s been to the university or not, he’s just crude,” Martha proclaimed. “He can speak Latin, but he’s just as crude in Latin as he is in German. Not all the time, but a lot of it. When he’s not being a public person. He’s been teaching out in that village in the Steigerwald so long that he’s practically become a peasant himself. That’s... I don’t want a husband like that. I want one who is just as cultured at home as he is when he’s speaking in the city council chamber.”