by Eric Flint
Steve said that he was delighted to hear it.
He didn’t know what Dr. Lenz had been expecting, but it clearly wasn’t that.
Steve really was delighted to get the full list of signers. It was the first really concrete information he had about which of the knights and lords were not going to budge from their objections to what the administration was doing. Not to mention external confirmation that Krausold had not just been griping to Meyfarth but was actively involved in undermining the administration.
Weckherlin saw Dr. Lenz out.
Steve wished he had a buzzer. But he didn’t, so he got up to walk down to the auditors’ office, where once the special commissioners had sat. He looked around. The coast was clear.
“Maydene,” he said. “You may have a little problem in your bailiwick.”
The gals promised to get right on it.
* * *
Within a minute after she stopped by to visit Eddie at Frau Kronacher’s print shop, Noelle was having to fight down laughter.
She wasn’t entirely successful, either—which drew a quick glare at her from Eddie, where he was standing at the front of the little storeroom that served him as an impromptu classroom for the apprentices.
“No, Melchior,” he said, “I know it’s pronounced the same way. But”—here he pointed to a small slate chalkboard propped up against the far wall—“in English, it’s actually spelled women. W-O-M-E-N. Not wimmin.”
“Makes no sense,” protested Melchior’s brother Otto. “That should be pronounced ‘Woe-men.’”
The glare now fell on Otto. “And you think our German doesn’t have plenty of quirks, when it comes to spelling?”
“Not as many as English,” Otto countered stoutly.
Noelle got the sense this was an old and long-running argument. Eddie shook his head, a bit wearily, and went on.
“Never mind. Let’s run through the verses again. Just the first six.”
Obediently, the small group of apprentices began chanting in English:
“Once upon a time there were three Brillo Rams Gruff – a little baby ram lamb, a medium-sized ram lamb, and their great big, sturdy, strong, daddy ram.
“Every day they trotted over to the field where there was sweet green grass and all the wimmin. Sometimes there was a fence, but that wasn’t much of a problem. The daddy Brillo ram would give the fence such a PINCH, and it would tumble over.
“One day, a bridge and a set of tracks were laid on the way to the field with the sweet green grass and plenty of wimmin. That was no problem, because the three Brillo Rams Gruff just made a nice trit-trot sound on the tracks as they went to the field with the sweet green grass and all the wimmin.
“They went to the field with the sweet green grass and all the wimmin every day. Every afternoon, the Flo lady would take them back to their own place. First she would take the daddy Brillo ram, then the medium-sized Brillo ram lamb, and last of all the little baby Brillo ram lamb.
“One day, a terrible troll blocked the tracks. It puffed and steamed with terrible smoke, and it made a loud chuffing sound, and it rattled its terrible noisy tail. It even made a terrible screeching sound, and had a terrible tinkly bell sound.
“The three Brillo Rams Gruff wouldn’t let that troll stop them from going to the field with the sweet green grass and all the wimmin."
Later, as they went out to share lunch at a nearby tavern, Noelle did start laughing. “Why in the world do you use those Brillo fables? Even by English standards, the spelling in them is crazy. Most of that stuff is supposed to be a joke.”
Eddie sighed. “Yes, I know. But the Brillo fables are the one thing that is always sure to interest them. Especially these new ones, about Brillo and the railroad people.”
“Why’s that?”
“You need to ask? Ever since the Suhl Incident, Germans in Franconia associate everything involving your American railroad people with things they find favorable about you. Well, the farmers and most of the poorer townspeople, anyway. The guild-masters aren’t too fond of you, of course.”
Noelle thought about it, for a moment. “Still seems odd. In every one of those fables I’ve heard, Brillo’s pretty much at odds with TacRail people.”
Eddie shrugged. “Yes? So much the better. They like the interchange, you might say. Yes, Brillo is at odds with the railroad people—but it usually gets sorted out in the end, to everyone’s reasonable satisfaction. There’s a political lesson there, if you think about it.”
They walked on a very more steps. Then, Eddie added:
“Your Anse Hatfield is now quite a hero, for many people here in Franconia. Not so much because they think he is one of them, you understand. Just... that he is someone strong, whom they can deal with without fear.”
Noelle laughed again.
“What’s so funny?”
“Without fear! You do know who Anse was named after, don’t you?”
Eddie shook his head.
“Ah, wonderful. A whole new set of American fables you need to learn.” They’d arrived at the tavern. “But you’ll need to brace yourself, first. A stein of beer and a good sandwich. Then I’ll tell you about the Hatfield-McCoy feud. And the man they called ‘Devil Anse Hatfield.’”
* * *
On their way back to the print shop, Eddie said to her, “I don’t think I’ll tell the apprentices about Devil Anse.”
“What a good idea.”
* * *
“Do you have time to ride out with me again, Scott?” Johnnie F. asked. “For a few days, not just a short run.”
“Why?”
“Sort of like last fall. I’d just feel easier in my mind if somebody brought along another set of eyes to look at what I think I’m seeing.”
“What do you think you see?”
“I’d rather not say. That’s why I want fresh eyes.”
Franconia, mid-March, 1634
Scott recognized that village. They were up in the back of beyond, it had a funny church tower, and the biggest ram banner he had seen anywhere in Franconia.
His nose was cold. His toes were cold.
“We’ll be there,” Johnnie F. was saying, “in time for the meeting.”
“Johnnie F.,” Scott said pleadingly, “will you tell me. Where in hell are we?”
“Right up against the border with Coburg. As far as we can go and still be inside our part of Franconia. The border stones march right along the crest of those hills behind the village; half of its fields are in the USE.”
Johnnie F. smiled. “I spent one summer while I was in college in Washington, DC, you know. Of all stupid-seeming places for an ag major to intern, but I was working for the Forestry Service at the USDA-Department of Agriculture, that is.
“There were reports in the paper all the time. Gangs, shooting at one another. Then jumping into another jurisdiction. Out of DC and across the street, into Prince George’s County in Maryland. Different jurisdiction; cops come to a screeching halt at the border, the perps thumb their noses and disappear. And so forth. There must have been a dozen little jurisdictions around there, in a space no bigger than the Ring of Fire, really.”
“So?”
“So, it’s a handy kind of place to be, right on a border. If you think that somebody might be coming after you.”
Johnnie F. looked down into the valley, at the village strung out along the creek.
“We’ll be going to a meeting, tonight, after we eat. If you just keep quiet, I think that maybe you’ll get to meet the ram. The Big Bad Brillo, himself.”
“No Ewegenia?”
Johnnie F. didn’t even smile. “No. She’s in Bamberg.”
Scott looked at him. “You know who she is?”
“Sure,” Johnnie F. said mildly. “Once it occurred to me that they had a press in one of the larger cities, it wasn’t any real trouble to find out.”
“Inclined to tell me?”
“Depends. Do you really need to know?”
* * *
“It was, once upon a time,” Johnnie F. scribbled back. “The tune is the same, but the words go off from the second verse, ‘Our fathers’ God to Thee, author of liberty, to Thee we sing’ and it’s real different.”
Gott uns’res Vaterlands,
der Freiheit, des Verstands,
Dich loben wir.
Leih’ uns die Moeglichkeit,
Dein’ Liebe, dein Geleit,
Von Deiner Ewigkeit,
Justiz von Dir.
Scott sat quietly, trying to translate as he listened. The German seemed like it had sort of been crammed into the tune, by someone writing too fast to make it a good match. The heavy Franconian accented German of the singers wasn’t helping, either. A lot of the village dialects didn’t bear much resemblance to what was spoken in Wuerzburg.
“God of our fatherland, of freedom, of reason, we praise you.” Was that right?
“Give us the possibility.” Did that make sense, or did it mean something else?
“Your love,” then—a “Geleit” for a soldier was a military escort, “from eternity, justice from you.”
The singers were well into the second verse, now.
Gib uns das taeglich’ Brot,
Spar’ uns des Elends Not,
Dich ehren wir.
Wende den Kriege ab,
Bis wir den Frieden hab’
Nie mehr des Hochmuts Raub,
Das beten wir.
“Give us our daily bread, spare us the famine of suffering. We honor you.” Okay. “Avert war until we have peace, no longer the loot of arrogance. We pray that.”
Johnnie F. leaned over and whispered: “There’s several more verses in the whole thing, mainly a run through the beatitudes, but they mostly only sing those two to open a meeting. Must be a cinch to write verses in a language where most of the abstract nouns end in either “heit” or “keit” and can be made to rhyme with one another.”
“It’s sort of... calming, as revolutionary songs go.”
“I told you all that Meyfarth wasn’t writing stuff that cries for vengeance and bloodshed. You can’t expect him to be a re-run of Spartacus, either. He’s a preacher, for Pete’s sake. He’s bound to use a lot of religious stuff in what he writes. None of the ‘be a revolutionary atheist’ gig for him.”
“Meyfarth, again?”
“Yeah. Some of the farmers have written other verses that say rude things about tithes and taxes, but this is the ‘official’ version. As far as Orville and Stew and I know, they, the Ram people, are opening all of their meetings with it.”
A middle-aged man got up. A quite ordinary man, a person might think, aside from the booming voice that emerged from his thick body. The kind of voice that could be heard by a couple of thousand people gathered in an open field.
He was holding a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order, and proceeded to conduct the meeting in accordance with it. Starting with a pledge of allegiance to the flag of the State of Thuringia-Franconia. Ending, a couple of hours later... something was so familiar. Scott’s mind went back to that meeting last fall.
Scott scribbled again. “Did Meyfarth really translate the ‘Concord Hymn’ into German?”
“Yeah. And they’ve all memorized it. They sing it to the tune of ‘From Heav’n Above, To Earth I Come.’ That’s a children’s Christmas song that Martin Luther wrote. Same number of syllables in each line and everybody knows the tune.”
“In Aprils Luft entfalten sich die Flaggen."
* * *
In the “few days” that Johnnie F. had asked for, they attended several more meetings. The man with the booming voice was speaking at most of them. Carefully guarded by a dozen Jaeger wearing the ram badge on their armbands. They let Johnnie F. and Scott approach him.
“Who am I?” he asked. “Why, who but an actor on this stage that is life? A pupil in the Coburg Gymnasium when I was much younger than I am now. A scholarship boy, brought in from a border village by the duke’s charity, because the pastor recommended me. A failed university student, once upon a time, a would-be-lawyer who had to leave because he not only got a baker’s daughter pregnant, a bad enough scandal, but married her—a far worse one in the academic world. A village schoolmaster in Frankenwinheim, more recently. A thinker of thoughts and a dreamer of dreams.”
He looked at the pamphlet in his hand and laughed uproariously. “Now a pupil of inspired fools. A student who takes what they say and shapes it so that the farmers of Franconia understand.”
Blackwell looked over the man’s shoulder. The man was reading Common Sense, by Thomas Paine.
“Will we meet you again?”
“Probably, very probably. Unless it should happen that I am unlucky.”
Chapter 10:
“Just A Truce In A Little Corner Of It”
Wuerzburg, late March, 1634
“I think they’ve harnessed it,” Scott said to the morning briefing. “This Common Sense guy, using Meyfarth and the Thorntons. If they haven’t accomplished miracles, then at least near-miracles. I’m not going to try to tell you how deeply it has all sunk in, or how widely. They’ve had, what, a few months? On top of grievances and grudges that have been building for years. But the stuff is all over the place. It’s being read, and sung, repeated in this guy’s speeches, talked about. They’ve made us a harness.”
“So now,” Scott said, “we get to ride the ram.”
“Speaking of which...” Johnnie F. tossed a newspaper on the table. It was one of the ones printed in Franconia. “Have you seen ‘Brillo’s Little Red Rider’? They’ve got Princess Kristina riding Brillo in that one. You’ve all got to read it.”
“Later,” Steve said firmly. “Right now, we need to deal with the petition that the knights and lords have sent to Gustavus Adolphus. This is what I’ve gotten back from Ed and Arnold in Grantville. And from Mike Stearns.”
“They’re different?”
“Mike’s language is considerably more colorful, and...”
“And?” Scott asked.
Steve sighed. “We have an intervention from Margrave Christian of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. Diplomatic, at the moment. Very diplomatic. Just asks us to consider the difficulty in which our policies are placing the Protestant nobility of Franconia. Doesn’t say anything about a military action, not even obliquely. Dr. Lenz, however, the agent representing the Freiherr Fuchs von Bimbach, claims that the margrave is prepared to undertake an invasion of Franconia in support of the petitioners.”
David Petrini interrupted. “Of course, they’re trying to take advantage of the fact that Gustav Adolf himself is very busy in the north dealing with the League of Ostend, so they presume that they’re really appealing to Oxenstierna. Who, in his heart, believes that the nobles really should rule.”
“Aren’t they forgetting,” Anita asked, “that he’s all the way up in Stockholm and unless someone radios the petition to him, he isn’t going to get it very soon?”
“Unless it’s really meant for Wilhelm Wettin—a stick he can use against Mike,” Steve answered.
“Oh, holy shit!” Scott said. “I go out of town for a few days and all hell breaks loose!”
“Brandenburg-Bayreuth?” Johnnie F. asked. “I’d just heard it called Bayreuth before. Brandenburg, I know, turned into Prussia later on. But what are the Hohenzollerns doing down here?”
“The Hohenzollerns started ‘down here’,” Weckherlin answered. “These men, now, Margrave Christian in Bayreuth and his nephews in Ansbach, are a cadet line of the family represented by Margrave George Wilhelm up in Berlin, who is a brother of Gustavus Adolphus’ wife. The Hohenzollern family though, back in the middle ages, began here. As the Burggrafen in Nuernberg, holding the big castle there for the Holy Roman Emperors. Acquisitive bunch, overall.”<
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He hesitated a moment; then, added: “This is perhaps more serious than you may assume. By themselves, the knights and small lords will have a difficult time getting organized. They will not hesitate to become violent, but the violence is likely to be disjointed. For a fact, it seems to me, the farmers are much better organized. Better led, too, from what I can determine.”
“Who’s leading the knights?” Scott asked. “This von Bimbach character?”
Weckherlin waggled his hand. “To a degree, yes; to a degree, not. He is certainly the most prominent figure. But he is not really very popular among the knights. His arrogance and overbearing manner is not something which only the farmers resent. And the nickname of ‘Pestilenz’ is applied to his agent by knights as often as it is by farmers and townsmen.”
“But you’re saying it could still get serious?” asked Steve.
“If the Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth chooses to intervene, yes,” replied Weckherlin, nodding. “Very serious. He is not a small lord, and his geographic position makes him important to Gustavus Adolphus. The Emperor can ignore a pack of unruly knights. He cannot ignore Margrave Christian.”
Kulmbach, Bayreuth, late March, 1634
Margrave Christian of Brandenburg-Bayreuth was at the Plassenburg, in Kulmbach. He had moved his official residence to Bayreuth in 1625, but when he needed to think, he still went back to the Plassenburg. He had left Marie and the children in Bayreuth; they were safer there, right now.
He hated war and all that war meant. When he was a child, his tutors had shown him what Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades had done to Bayreuth and the rest of Franconia with his feuds. Not just told him; that madman had died less than thirty years before his own birth. His tutors had been able to show him the scars on the land, the burned villages never rebuilt, the ancient churches sacrificed upon the altar of ambition and greed.