1635-The Tangled Web

by Virginia DeMarce

  Late October, almost into November, was an iffy time for anyone to start traveling. The river was still clear of ice, so to expedite matters, Brahe told them to take a boat as far as Koblenz. If things looked quiet there, they should split into two parties and take separate boats as far as Honnef and walk into Bonn divided into three different parties, of uneven numbers, but each of them having a radio. There they were to ask around in taverns and rooming houses—inconspicuously ask around in taverns and rooming houses—until they found someone who had an least an idea where the Irish colonels had gone. At that point, reunited by the divine, or up-time, boon of radio communications, they should follow the tracks of the four colonels. Nobody had the slightest hope of finding the tracks of Gruyard himself, but the pragmatic association was that he had been with one of them when they arrived in Bonn.

  "At a minimum," Brahe said, "the plan has the advantage of simplicity."

  "Well," Utt agreed, "its simple until we get to the point when they leave Bonn. After that, I can think of multiple possible ways for it to go wrong."

  "It could go wrong well before Bonn," Botvidsson commented. "For example, the boat could sink between here and Koblenz. They could contract pneumonia and lose all the radios when it sank."

  Brahe nodded. "Thank you, Johan. I think. Tell Sven to bring us some wine if you would be so kind. He may also ask Lady Anna Margareta and Lady Kerstin to join us for the remainder of the evening." He turned to Utt. "My wife has expressed great interest in the notion that your wife is a lawyer. She feels that legal training would be of immense assistance to women whose destiny it is to administer large estates while their husbands are away 'playing soldier.' "

  Barracktown bei Fulda, November 1634

  Tata didn't really think that going with the posse would have been more fun than staying comfortably in Barracktown, but she had more sense than to express this opinion to Eberhard, Friedrich, Simrock, and Theo. Even though at some level they knew why they were not appropriate to the task of the posse, in a spectacular display of the theological principal that abstract knowledge of a principle is not the same thing as believing in it as an article of faith, all four of them had their noses somewhat out of joint.

  Euskirchen, Archdiocese of Cologne, November 1634

  The inhabitants of Euskirchen were not particularly happy, honored, delighted, or cheered by the decision of the archbishop of Cologne to reside in their town for the winter. "Miserable" and "depressed" would have been better terms to describe the prevailing mood. On good days, perhaps, at least as far as the city council was concerned, an observer could have used "resigned."

  The city council would have been more resigned if he had not brought four regiments of Irish dragoons with him. These—the officers, rather, and the more privileged of the noncoms—were quartered in the town, as were the archbishop's administrative staff, personal servants, and assorted hangers-on, along with their staff, servants, and assorted hangers-on, if any. The remaining portion of the regiments were bivouacked outside the walls.

  That wasn't equivalent to being besieged, of course. Quite. Peddlers with their wares, peasants with their produce and occasional pig or sheep for sale, and travelers moved in and out through the gates.

  Unfortunately, so did the dragoons. Their ideas of what was entertaining did not necessarily agree with what the fathers and shopkeepers of Euskirchen considered to be an afternoon or evening's harmless amusement.

  Even more unfortunately, the archbishop was suffering from financial reverses. More plainly, Ferdinand of Bavaria was flat broke. He was not able to pay his mercenaries (or his staff or his personal servants, but they tended to be less of a problem for the city watch).

  Since he was not paying the dragoons, a distressing number of peasants with produce and livestock for sale never made it as far as the city gates. The items they were transporting were, as the current terminology went, "conscripted" before they got that far. Conscripted meant that the dragoons confiscated them—without pay, other than promissory notes. The dragoons interpreted the entire situation as equivalent to a license to forage without exerting themselves to go anywhere. They waited for the villagers to come to them.

  The arrangement was satisfactory only from their perspective.

  Occasionally, of course, the officers ventured out and made their men let food vendors into the town. This happened most frequently when the household cooks and landlords who provided food for the officers quartered upon them were running short of provisions. Otherwise? At other times? Well, after all, the men had to eat.

  The unfortunate city councilman who dared to protest that the civilian population of Euskirchen also needed to eat was handled appropriately. They fed his tongue to the dogs.

  That was a suitable punishment, of course, but not particularly visible. Public relations were always important, so they tacked his pickled ears to the front door of the city hall.

  Walter Deveroux entertained himself by using the point of his dirk to drill a small hole in the arm of an expensive chair in the parlor of the house where Butler had taken rooms for the winter. "If you ask me, we need to talk to Johann Schweikhard von Sickingen. He's in town with the archbishop."

  Butler looked toward the stairs leading to the upstairs rooms. "My wife"—he waved in that general direction—"ran into his wife at mass last Sunday. They had a long conversation, much to the annoyance of the priest."

  Deveroux stayed on topic. "Sickingen's men—some of them at least—actually ran into a small company of Brahe's forces on his own lands, down by Nannstein. Some little village called Weselberg."

  MacDonald looked up blearily. "Where's that?"

  "Southern Palatinate region, generally. The Sickingen territories are intermixed with those of the Elector Palatine. What's important is that Brahe's men locked Sickingen's riflemen into a granary for several days. It was good and strong, but it had ventilation of course, being a granary, so they managed to watch what was going on."

  "Wouldn't it make more sense to talk to those men rather than talk to von Sickingen?"

  "Undoubtedly, if we knew where they were. Sickingen, probably, has some idea of where they are. The Swedes released them on parole."

  "What's the point?" MacDonald slammed his stein down. "There are Hessians outside of Bonn, not Swedes from Mainz. If the archbishop sends us back to the Bonn region in the spring, we'll be fighting Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel, not Nils Brahe. The king in the Netherlands is looking over our other shoulder. If the archbishop sends us west in the spring, that would put us fighting the Dutch and any Spanish troops he still has, not Nils Brahe. Why worry about Brahe now?"

  Geraldin slammed down his fist, harder than MacDonald had slammed the stein. "Think, Dennis. Think. Brahe's men had radio. Brahe was over by Merckweiler when the fight went down. He got a medic and part of another company to that small detachment inside of two days. Sickingen's men watched them. The Swedes—well, they were Germans, but in Brahe's regiment—threw a wire over trees. I've heard that much. We need to find out what else they saw. With Gustavus's treaty with Don Fernando and the fact that Hesse-Kassel is an ally . . . Think. I get very nervous thinking about facing opponents who pretty well always know where all their units are. If you don't, you're even drunker than you look."

  MacDonald looked up. "It's thinking about that kind of thing that makes me drink."

  * * *

  "Ursula Kämmerer von Worms-Dalberg is one of the few noblewomen near my age in this godforsaken town, Walter. She is the wife of the Freiherr von Sickingen. I invited her for an afternoon visit. We used our host's parlor. You use it for your meetings with Deveroux and the others. Is that too much to ask, that I should have some female companionship? I sent Dislav with the invitation. I spent a little of my gold—which is my gold, I remind you, that I brought with me from Bohemia—to purchase a few refreshments."

  "You spent enough on those 'few refreshments' to provide plain food for you, for me, and for your precious Dislav for the next month. Almonds
. Coffee. Dates. Where in hell did you even find them?"

  "Dislav has his ways. I believe he obtained them from the cook for one of the city councilmen. The household is in mourning, so will not be entertaining this winter. She was happy to get the money. The civilians here say that food is getting very expensive because so little is coming into the town through the camp."

  "It's not just going to be expensive for the civilians, you little idiot. It's just going to be plain expensive. That goes for us. I may be able to skim off some of what the men procure in the camp, but by spring, there won't be much of that. There are nearly three thousand men out there, eating. That's as many people as normally live in godforsaken Euskirchen. Can't you get it through your silly head that even if the peasants sell just as much as they usually do, either everybody will end up eating half as much, or everybody will run out of food halfway through the winter."

  "Surely," Anna Marie von Dohna said, "we can just buy it somewhere else."

  Sergeant Helmuth Hartke perched on a bale of dried peat and shook his head. "We know where they are, sure. But we can't get hold of them. If the general and the colonel just wanted them killed, maybe we could risk it. It wouldn't be smart, if you ask me, but we could. Go into Euskirchen, hang around, use any window of opportunity that presents itself to cut a throat, garrote a neck, put a dagger into a spinal cord . . ." He sighed, thinking how many lovely chances for close-in mayhem the world offered a man in the course of a normal day.

  "But." He shook his head again. "General Brahe and Major Utt want them alive. They were very specific about this. Precise. Clear. So damned fucking clear that I can't even pretend that I misunderstood their orders. They don't want them dead at all. No, that's not quite true. They want them dead, real bad. But they want to put them on trial first, with a lot of publicity. Then they want to hang them."

  Sergeant Lubbert Nadermann shook his own head, just as dolefully. "Not very practical, if you ask me. I've never understood officers. Me, I say, if you want to be rid of someone, then go ahead and get rid of him."

  "That's why they make policy and we don't." Hartke looked back at the rest of the posse. "Pay attention now. The real point is that if we went in and just picked them off, we could leave the bodies there. But Brahe and Utt want them alive. It's a very different thing to bring a live body, no matter how tied up and gagged, through a guarded city gate, and then out through the camp where the dragoons are. Somebody's bound to ask, 'What's that?' Now I know that there are classic ways to smuggle live bodies around. One night, I remember, years ago, some Scotsman was telling a great tale around the fire about an queen from ancient Egypt, or maybe it was an ancient gypsy queen, who was rolled up in a rug."

  Heisel nodded. "I heard that story myself. She was being smuggled in, though, not out, so she had time to plan and make arrangements. In the real world, trust me, you can't ever count on finding the right size of rug handy, and when you're going after somebody, carrying a rug with you is a real encumbrance. Awkward. It takes a pretty big rug, not one you can just roll up under your arm."

  The younger soldiers sat wide-eyed, soaking in these words of wisdom from their elders.

  "I 'accidentally' ran into that paddy in Geraldin's regiment—the one I used to know. We had a couple of beers and congratulated each other on still being alive." Heisel did his best to pat himself on the back. "He's not done too well, though. Pegleg. He's learned to be a farrier. He's willing to take on a boy to learn the trade from him. Not village blacksmith—just horse-shoeing and harness work having to do with the metal bits. That should place one of you."

  Schild, one of the radio operators, stuck up his hand. "My dad's a blacksmith. Well, he was before he died. I was eleven, but I used to hang around the forge. I know what the words they use mean, at least."

  Hartke nodded. "Heisel, introduce them tomorrow. But don't give the tuna tin transmitter to the blacksmith's apprentice. The paddy will be too interested in machinery. Anyone else?"

  Bauer stuck up his hand. "I did good."

  "How?"

  "Colonel Butler's wife has this footman. He hates Butler—thinks that he's mean to his lady. The way this guy, Dislav is his name, thinks about the lady, it's like she was his daughter. If we can leave someone behind doing anything in Euskirchen, just as long as he can get to the tavern where this Dislav goes when he has time off, he'll be able to hear a lot."

  Sergeant Nadermann shifted restlessly. "Nobody in the town is hiring strangers, though. Everyone's short of money, but the food is more of a problem. If they need someone, they hire a nephew or a godson or their friend's cousin's stepbrother's former student—someone from Euskirchen who'll be eating there anyway."

  "The general gave us some money," Hartke said. "Is anyone game just to go into Euskirchen and hang around, paying his own way?"

  "I can try giving the impression, no matter who asks me, that I'm working for some other of the archbishop's out-of-town hangers-on." Caspar Zeyler grinned. "My mother always said that she'd never known such a natural-born liar in her life."

  An hour later, they had things sorted out. Hartke, as a matter of caution, did not leave the tuna tin transmitter with the natural-born liar, either. He gave it to one of his own men, a seasoned veteran from the Fulda Barracks regiment, with orders to report back to Mainz whenever either the colonels or the dragoons showed signs of moving. "You and Heisel stick together. Don't use it unless they do move, though. No point in taking risks. Somebody might see you throwing the antenna. As far as I'm concerned, no news is just no news. No point in telling General Brahe that nothing has happened."

  "You know, Sarge, what's weird, here in Euskirchen, compared to Fulda and Mainz?" Heisel asked.

  "What?"

  "I haven't seen a single newspaper reporter the whole time we've been here. I've hardly seen a newspaper."

  Hartke nodded. "The Bavarian authorities, and this archbishop fellow is about as authoritarian a Bavarian as they come, are famous for having strong opinions concerning freedom of the press. They don't think there should be any. Censorship is big business in Bavaria."

  The veteran grimaced. "Nor freedom of opinion either, I guess, considering those ears on the city hall door. Of course, I've seen heads on city gates, and bodies that have been up on the gallows for a couple of years, and a man pulled in pieces by four horses tied to his arms and legs. Once, up in Pomerania, we needed some information, so we tied a man to a board, tilted it so his head was down, and pissed into his nose and mouth until he broke. Lots of interesting stuff. Just losing a couple of ears really isn't so bad." The honorable holder of the tuna tin trotted off in the direction of his winter assignment, whistling.

  The rest of the posse went back to Mainz.

  Mainz, November 1634

  "General?"

  Nils Brahe slipped off the stool on which he was perched, moved away from his slanted desk-surface, and stretched his arms above his head. "Yes, Johan."

  "There are some men here. They are Jews from Worms. They are requesting that you give them permission to talk to Wamboldt von Umstadt now that he has returned to the archdiocese."

  "Why do they need my permission?"

  "It has to do with imperial rights and prerogatives, I believe. In fact, their main concern seems to be whether or not Gustavus Adolphus is going to assume whatever authority the Holy Roman Emperor used to wield in the imperial cities, in regard to protection of the Jewish population. They are also submitting a petition for tax remissions, both because of the pestilence in 1632 and because of the heavy exactions to which their community has been subjected since the—ah—the problems in 1615."

  "Problems?" Brahe pushed his hair back from his forehead and raised his eyebrows.

  "Ah, yes. Problems. You became familiar with the history of the Fettmilch revolt in Frankfurt and the current anti-Jewish agitation there during the Dreeson tour this fall?"

  "Yes."

  "Similar, very similar. In Worms, there was forced emigration because of a guild-led r
evolution against the city council, demolition of the synagogue, laying waste to the cemetery, destruction of the tombstones. Just the usual things. The Elector Palatine—Frederick, the Winter King—put down the uprising and the emperor ordered that the Jews be readmitted and their imperial privileges reinstated. Now they wish to know if Gustavus plans to continue the imperial order now that the city is in the USE. If not, they would like to talk to the archbishop, in hopes that he will discuss the matter, firmly, with the bishop. They believe that his influence in the matter would be helpful. There has been a certain resurgence of anti-Semitic unrest in the wake of all the changes. The leaders of the artisans' guilds seem to think that they can take advantage . . ."

  "Who are these men?"

  One of them is named Salomon zur Trommel. The other, David Ballin, is traveling with him, but does not appear to be particularly happy about it. They are accompanied by another Jew, one from Frankfurt-am-Main, called Meier zum Schwan, who appears to have some connection to the up-timers in Fulda. They are here on behalf of two Worms Jews, a scholar named Eliyahu Baal Shem and prosperous merchant called Abraham Aberle Landau, who did not—or, perhaps, if I understood their accents—could not travel for this purpose. Ballin is some relation to Landau's wife."

  "Tell them that, in case they haven't noticed, the USE constitution establishes freedom of religion. Then send them off to the archbishop with my full permission. They can tell him about all of their problems at length."

  "Maybe having the archbishop back won't be all bad. All that practice in hearing confessions, you know. His extended-problem-listening skills should be pretty good."

  He yawned.

  "Come to think of it, Johan. If anything else comes along that you think I can safely palm off on the archbishop, let me know. 'The devil finds work for idle hands,' and all that. It will help keep him out of mischief."