by Eric Flint
"I think these pamphlets you brought, both the Abrabanel one, which you say that according to ben Elnathan came from Magdeburg, and the one that showed up in Fulda, were produced on these new 'duplicating machines.'"
"That means?"
"I tell you, Martin, these new stencil systems will be running small printers out of business. If I don't manage to get hold of one of these 'duplicating machines' pretty soon, my own business is going to fold. It's not as if I make my money printing large editions of thick academic books. And Escher so far hasn't even let slip the name of the man he bought it from."
"Put an ad in the paper," Martin suggested.
"For what?" Merga asked. "Crispin isn't trying to sell something."
"Say you want to buy one. Escher and Freytag may not want to tell the rest of you where they bought them, but I'd say it's pretty likely that the maker would like to sell more."
The expression of Merga's face became quite predatory. "I'm going down to the post office right now." Which she did.
"While she's gone . . ." Crispin said.
Martin looked up. It wasn't like Crispin to sound so hesitant.
"This pamphlet that the Gelnhausen rabbi loaned to you . . . the one naming Rebecca Abrabanel . . ."
"Yes."
"I don't even like to suggest it. Jews get enough trouble in this world without my adding to it. But the way that it is written. I can't help but wonder about the possibility of an apostate—a convert—writing it. First generation—one born and educated in Judaism. That pamphlet, and some of the others the rabbi had collected. They rely quite a lot upon Talmudic tropes. If not an apostate, then perhaps a university-educated Hebracist."
"Either possibility is less desirable than the other."
"You might just mention them to the rabbi, though. Rabbis are trained to think their way through unpleasant possibilities. That's part of what they do."
* * *
He couldn't leave without going upstairs and saying goodbye to his mother. Or he could, but he would regret it later.
"About settling down," she was saying.
"Look, Mutti," he said patiently. At least he made the effort to sound as if he were saying it patiently.
"It isn't just that I like being on the road, though I do like being on the road. I like it a lot. But working as a private messenger is a lot less subject to political vicissitudes than working for the imperial postal system used to be. Or, for that matter, than working for the Swedish postal system is now."
She looked skeptical.
"I wasn't dependent upon Johann van den Birghden's favor to get my job, which is just as well. I sort of doubt that van den Birghden would have hired the son of a man who worked for his main rival."
That was true enough—something that his mother couldn't argue with. Van den Birghden was not only the postmaster but also the newspaper publisher. It was the Frankfurter Post-Avisen. The only one, now. Martin's late father had worked as an itinerant salesman for Egenolph Emmel, a bookseller and van den Birghden's rival newspaperman. He had started the Frankfurter Journal in 1615.
Then van den Birghden had come to Frankfurt to run its newly established central post office for the Thurn und Taxis in Brussels. In 1617 he had founded the other paper. Emmel sued. In the course of the litigation, Birghden asserted that postmasters had a legal right to a monopoly on publishing newspapers.
"I've stayed out of the postmaster's way," Martin continued. "Van den Birghden is a busy man. Reminding him that my father ever worked for Emmel would not be a clever move. Even as a private courier, I have to work with the post offices, but it's not hard for me to avoid him. An ordinary person hardly ever has any reason to encounter the head of the postal system, especially not now that he is so busy establishing new routes. He's speeding up the field post system for the Swedish army. He's setting up alliances with the other postmasters working for the Swedes such as Wechlen in Leipzig and Stenglin in Augsburg. He's trying to speed up the links from Mainz to Hamburg and from there to Stockholm."
"Every one of those," his mother answered, "offers an opportunity for a man who is ready to settle down."
She looked at him.
"But," she said, "if you will not, perhaps you will not. Nonetheless, you could get married even if you continued to ride the Imperial Road. It is not likely, now, that Crispin and Merga will ever have children. I want to be a grandmother before I die."
He fled down the stairs. Mutti's new thought could be dangerous. Never, never before, had she separated the ideas of "getting married" and "settling down." Always before, one had gone with the other.
The Wheels of the Gods
July 1633
Gelnhausen
It wasn't pleasant, Zorline Neumark thought. The community had not just split since David Kronberg left. It had shattered into a dozen pieces. It wasn't clear that it could ever be put back together. The only people who didn't seem to be involved, one way or another, were Zivka zur Sichel and her daughter, who had kept completely out of it.
Though they would probably be drawn in once Zivka's husband Simon came back from his current trip. Whenever he was in Gelnhausen, he made up part of the minyan.
Now, though, the Wohls were not speaking to her husband. Salman and Daertze were trying to keep the peace between Meier and Abelin. Some of the Zons in-laws weren't speaking to any of them. The parents of Feyel Wohl's betrothed were said to be having second thoughts after Jachant's very unsuitable statements. Feyel and her betrothed, who really did want to marry one another, now blamed Jachant. Hindle was shrewish.
Zorline was very glad to see the arrival of Menahem ben Elnathan. In a way, she was glad to see him riding with the Gentile courier. It sent a signal that Samuel Wohl, parnas or not, would not have things all his way. The president of a Jewish community was not a dictator.
* * *
"He's back," Riffa reported to her mother. "The courier. He brought the Hanauer rabbi, then went to the post office again."
"Get your basket, then. I have hired the teamster to come for the rest of it the day after we have left. He has the key to the lock. The current rent we have paid for the cottage with the sickle expires the day after that. We will follow the rider to Fulda."
Barracktown bei Fulda
"Can you believe it?" David Kronberg asked earnestly. "It was a competition, but still. Only forty-two hours from Berlin to Hamburg. They say that the Brandenburg messengers are regularly covering Königsberg-Berlin in four days, now; Berlin-Cleves in six days when there aren't any armies in the way."
Three or four other post riders were gathered at the table, talking shop.
Not that David was a post rider, exactly, although he did have a job. He had happened to arrive in Fulda in the middle of a dispute between the NUS administration, the Swedes, and the city fathers over whether the city gates would be opened to allow passage of post riders in the night, since the main road led right through the city and the post office and change station with the remounts were inside the walls.
Since the city fathers would not budge from their stance that any proper set of gates remained closed from sunset to sunrise, the Swedes and the NUS moved the post office to Barracktown and surfaced a riding path around the city walls. David had ended up as a postal clerk, accepting, sorting, bagging, and routing the mail.
Since the up-timers had made this suggestion right after his first attempt to ride a horse a diligence for the whole length of a fifteen-mile posta, he seemed to be settling in happily enough. He still got to hang around a post office. That had been his real ambition.
Martin Wackernagel listened to the riders unhappily. None of the men sitting around the table seemed to have any doubts about the glories of riding short-distance posta lengths. None of them seemed to have any doubts about the wisdom of enforcing a government monopoly on mail handling.
Except Veit Huss. He was a teamster, not a post rider. Visions of stagecoaches danced in his head. Post chaises. Based on a novel, of all things, telling
about life in England two hundred years in the future. A world in which the roads were so good that the mails were transported by coaches that also carried passengers.
"It will be decades before the roads permit anything like that," one of the riders said. "Especially in the Rhoen region. Can you imagine trying to take one of those 'post chaises' at any speed from Huenfeld to Kassel by way of Hersfeld. Or from Fulda to Wuerzburg? Just along that old heights-road that follows the Doellbach upwards to Motten . . ." He started drawing a map with his finger in the moisture that the beer steins had dripped onto the table. "I've talked to some of the Frammersbach teamsters and they say . . ."
"Except, maybe, right around that Grantville place." Another man picked up his stein. "I've actually seen the roads they brought back in time. Even the down-time roads they are improving would carry coaches easily most of the year."
"My cousin Hans . . ." Huss began.
"Is a road contractor," the rider retorted. "He has visions that the New United States will pay him money to make the roads around Fulda look like the roads around Grantville. Fat chance."
"It wouldn't have to be all the roads. They could just start by improving the main mail routes to that standard . . . Some are already fairly good. Think about that comfortable stretch from the monastery of Thulba as far as Hammelburg on the Franconian Saale out at the edge of the Abbey's lands."
Martin's thoughts wandered.
Maybe, now that the king of Sweden and his new up-timer allies wanted more than just a field post system for the army, van den Birghden would become a consultant to many of the king of Sweden's allies. Maybe, the post office would need many more civilian carriers who would do for the CPE what the Thurn and Taxis did for the Holy Roman Empire
Unless politics got in the way. There were advantages to being an independent courier. Sometimes, it was better not to work for the government. Martin had kept right on riding the Imperial Road in 1627 when the fortunes of war and pressures of politics had forced van den Birghden out as postmaster in Frankfurt.
Van den Birghden was a Protestant. Before the war started, it had been acceptable for a Protestant to hold an important job in the imperial system. Van den Birghden had enemies. The charge was that he had been spying for the Protestants—telling them what was in confidential letters that important imperial officials and commanders sent through the postal system. He had fought being fired, of course. It had taken them several months and several hearings to get rid of him. Ferdinand II replaced him with a Catholic, even though a lot of influential people from the archbishop-elector of Mainz to General Tilly himself had advised the emperor to keep him on.
Martin had kept on riding the Imperial Road when the king of Sweden's forces swept through in the fall of 1631 and reinstated van den Birghden.
While it was all going on, while the politicians fought over control of the postal system, Martin had kept riding. He might not be as fast, but his customers knew him and trusted him. Riding this route was a lot more than a living. Riding this route was his life.
"Across the top of that pass before you get to Speicherz . . ."
"Over another mountain in order to reach the Schondra . . ."
"Additional teams needed at Brueckenau . . ."
"New bridge across the Sinn . . ."
The voices ran over and into one another.
"David," he said. "I hate to interrupt this thrilling conversation, but there's something you may want to know."
"My father has changed his mind?"
"Not exactly. Zivka zur Sichel and her daughter Riffa are at the Hartkes."
David Kronberg practically flew out of his seat.
* * *
Martin had deliberately built enough time into this run that he could stop and talk to Veit Huss and his cousin. Mail coaches would not be practical for a long time, Veit admitted, so what alternative was there to a mail monopoly? A regular freight wagon, such as Veit himself drove, was not suitable for the mails. It was simply too slow. The roads would not be ready for post chaises for a long time.
He kept thinking. The imperial cities had tried to hang onto their own messenger systems. It hadn't worked, because of the pressure that the grant of an imperial monopoly to Thurn and Taxis had placed on them.
Some of the territorial rulers still ran their own messenger services. Brandenburg, on the eastern edge of the CPE with interests far to the east in Prussia, outside the Holy Roman Empire, had its own good-sized office with over two dozen riders. Even inside the CPE, the electors of Brandenburg felt safer sending important correspondence between the branches of the Hohenzollerns in Berlin and those in Franconia by way of people whom they paid themselves. Not everyone was entirely sure that van den Birghen had been innocent of those charges of spying, after all.
But working for Brandenburg would take him off his beloved Imperial Road. If necessary, maybe things could be managed, but he would rather not.
Or maybe he could hire on with a freight line. The official postal system carried letters, sometimes whole sealed bags full of letters, but it didn't carry packages. If he located a long-haul line that carried from Frankfurt to Erfurt, he would move back and forth along the road more slowly, but at least he would move.
What would customers pay for the transport of light packages? Light enough that a man on horseback could carry several? Packages that did not really need a wagon and team, but were too bulky for a mail bag? Urgent packages?
Martin laughed, imagining a woodcut that depicted him on a horse with ten or a dozen lightweight packages tied to his back and his saddle, sticking out in all different directions. One hanging from his ear, perhaps. For a lot of horses, that would take some getting used to. A man would need the right kind of horse, steady and reliable.
What kind of customer would want a small or light package, too big for the mail bags but not heavy or bulky enough to require a freight wagon, taken somewhere fast? Who would want it enough to pay a tenth or twelfth of the cost of running the route and still leave the rider a decent profit?
Maybe there wouldn't be a new post office monopoly. The king of Sweden might not object to establishing one, but the Grantvillers were very enthusiastic about what they called "free enterprise."
Something to think about. Some way to keep riding the Imperial Road.
End of the Road?
Gelnhausen, August 1633
Simon zur Sichel came into Gelnhausen from a resupply stop in Frankfurt as he made his rounds. He found that Zivka and Riffa were gone and nobody in the community knew where.
When, they could guess, Zorline Neumark told him.
She and Meier zum Schwan were going back to Frankfurt. That was the general gossip. Meier had a business to run and there did not seem to be any sign that the feud in the Kronberg family would abate any time soon.
Samuel Wohl and Hindle Kalman had sent their daughter Jachant to cousins in Worms. The parents of Feyel's fiancé had made that a condition of continuing the betrothal.
When he found out that a teamster had emptied the cottage under the sign of the sickle out neatly and driven away with the goods, Simon started to feel much better.
No one in the community knew who the teamster had been.
He asked at the post office. "Veit Huss," the postmaster said. "He drives from Fulda to Frankfurt. He was on his way to Fulda when he drove out that day."
Simon zur Sichel decided to head for Fulda. If Zivka had gone there, she would have had a good reason.
"If you are going," the Hanauer rabbi said, "may I accompany you? I would like to observe the changes that the up-timers have made in Fulda for myself."
Barracktown bei Fulda, September 1633
The Barracktown Council agreed to accept Simon zur Sichel as one of the approved resident sutlers. He requested permission to throw out the front of the cottage by about ten feet to make the front room into a "general store." After some discussion of the concept, the council, chaired by Dagmar, agreed to the proposition.
Menahem
ben Elnathan and Simon zur Sichel discussed the heavy responsibilities of matrimony with David Kronberg, who said that he would be quite ecstatic to assume them, thank you. At least, he qualified, if they involved Riffa zur Sichel.
Then he asked Simon what name he intended to carry now that his family was no longer living in the sickle cottage in Gelnhausen. This proved to be such a successful distraction that it spared him from further embarrassment for all the rest of the evening.
Zivka did the same for Riffa, who indicated a high degree of reciprocal enthusiasm.
David said that he did not think that his parents would agree. The rabbi said that if they were patient, he would see to it, so they all relaxed.