1635-The Tangled Web

by Virginia DeMarce

  "Why?"

  "The introduction says that he's from Tipperary." Simrock disappeared out the door.

  "He's lucky that Brahe put him in the Fulda Barracks Regiment," Hartke commented. "In any other unit, he'd have been flogged to death by now. But he's really sort of useful, in his own way. Not as a soldier, exactly, but in his own way."

  Utt smiled his agreement. Not that the Fulda Barracks Regiment had ever been, precisely, famous for its strict attention to military protocol. He was pretty sure that not even the most wildly radical CoC regiment could be worse at that.

  "There's something I did notice," Hartke said. "Gruyard wasn't with the bunch we routed. That means he has to be with the batch that made it into Schorndorf."

  "Both of them are dead," Theo said. "Papa and Friedrich. During the night."

  "It wasn't unexpected." Eberhard stared at his boots. "Did he forgive them?"

  "No," Theo said. "But he will."

  Tata raised her eyebrows. "How can a dead man forgive?"

  " 'Like a fluttering sparrow or a darting swallow an undeserved curse does not come to rest.' That is part of the wisdom of Solomon. I am not going to leave Margarethe to live under an undeserved curse." Theo straightened his shoulders. "She's going to get a letter from me, saying that they died in the same hospital tent, on neighboring cots. Which is perfectly true. The letter will also say that I exercised my persuasive powers to the utmost to bring Papa to a change of heart. That is also true. If she concludes that I succeeded . . . I'm not going to feel the slightest obligation to correct her assumption and I certainly hope . . ." He looked directly at Simrock, "that no one else ever will, either."

  "Stuttgart," Eberhard said. "It isn't far from here to Stuttgart. Friedrich can be buried with our parents."

  Tata put her head on his shoulder.

  "I don't have the money to send Papa's body back to Hesse," Theo said. "He'll have to be buried here, like the other casualties, in unconsecrated ground."

  Eberhard made a negative gesture. "Send him to Stuttgart with Friedrich. Bury him with our family. It's a Lutheran church and he's a Calvinist minister, but we own the crypt and for all practical purposes, we appoint the pastor. Pistor may turn over and over in the grave I give him, but it will probably make Margarethe feel better, so I decree that it will happen. Occasionally, there are advantages to simply being the boss."

  "Eberhard," Tata said.

  "What?"

  "They shouldn't radio this to Mainz. They shouldn't radio this or put in a newspaper. Margarethe shouldn't find out that way. At the very least, they should let Theo send her a letter first."

  He sighed. "It doesn't work that way. Whoever gets the news first will plaster it all over."

  "Up-time," Joel said, "the army notified the next of kin. I've seen pictures, from the second world war. Two soldiers, walking up to a house, to tell the wife or mother."

  "That was then. Now . . ." Eberhard looked out at the camp. "For half our men, probably, we don't even know who they really are, or where they come from."

  "We know for Friedrich," Tata said stubbornly. "We know for Chaplain Pistor. Make them let me use the radio. I'll send a message to Papa. Someone in the CoC can tell her—not just some headline or broadcast. I'll make sure to say that Theo is alive and will be writing to her right away."

  Section Five: See, I have given you this land.

  Schorndorf, Württemberg, May 1635

  "That was an outright catastrophe," Butler proclaimed. "We've lost nearly half the effectives we had when we left Euskirchen, two colonels, and a half-dozen other officers, before we have even reached Bavaria. Duke Maximilian is not going to be a happy man."

  "And when Maximilian is unhappy, everybody is unhappy." Deveroux looked up. "Where did that phrase come from? It's been making the rounds for months."

  "I greatly fear," Anna Marie von Dohna said, "that it originates from a comedy routine that is performed on the Voice of America."

  Deveroux subsided.

  "Where did you hear the Voice of America, O charming spouse of mine?"

  "Dislav told me."

  "At least we made it into Schorndorf."

  "Barely."

  "Once more," Brandt said. "The tuna tin is very weak, but I want to try just once more."

  "Where am I going to throw the antenna, here inside a town?" Heisel asked.

  "We are in the garrets, on the top floor of the castle. If you can lean out the window, after dark, and swing the wire with the rock on the end out a little and then up, over the roof tiles . . ."

  "I don't think it's a good idea. What can be so important? Brahe has to know that the Irishmen are in here. He's right outside the walls. With a lot of new friends."

  "One more time, with where the various units are quartered and how much ammunition they have. Our commanders do not know about the gunpowder in the city armory. Once more, only."

  "I guess we might as well try it. This opening isn't very big, though."

  Heisel tossed out the rock tied to the end of the wire and started to swing it, aiming for enough momentum to get it over the roof. Ten feet or so below the window, the wire caught on a spike that someone, at an unknown date, for a long-forgotten reason, had pounded partway into the mortar about six inches above the window on the floor below. The rock jerked back, breaking the window.

  The window happened to belong to the room assigned to Father Taaffe, who called a guard. That guard called some more guards, one of whom had a clever idea. He went outdoors and looked up while father Taaffe signaled from the window. Then he counted from the end of the building and identified the window above the priest's chamber. He identified the ones on either side of it, too, just to be on the safe side.

  "Go," Brandt said. "My quarters are in this room. Yours are not. Go."

  Heisel, a sensible man, went.

  A group of guards caught Brandt, and hauled him in front of Butler, who turned him over to Gruyard for questioning. After some time, under extreme stress, he revealed Heisel's name.

  Heisel's reaction to his own arrest was, "Well, tough shit."

  Butler concluded that much of the "bad luck" that plagued him throughout this entire campaign had really been caused by these men and their tuna tin. He demanded information on when they were embedded with him, by whom, why, and what they were doing all along."

  Gruyard went contentedly back to work.

  Butler was truly astonished to hear that all this trouble and fuss was being made about the death of Schweinsberg and the raid into Fulda the autumn before.

  "Talk about ancient history," he complained to Deveroux.

  "Keep at them," he said to Gruyard.

  The answers the two men reluctantly provided during the next session directed the interviewers toward Countess Anna Marie von Dohna's favored servant Dislav.

  There was considerable discussion among those present in the torture chamber about whether or not Colonel Butler would really want to know this.

  The conclusion was that even though he might not want to, he really needed to.

  This was followed by considerably more discussion on the general topic of belling the cat.

  Eventually they bucked it up the chain of command to Deveroux.

  Butler was furious.

  Butler's wife was even more furious when the guards came to arrest Dislav and transport him to the torture chamber.

  Two of Deveroux's more mechanically inclined aides stared at the tuna tin.

  "I am not an engineer, nor did I ever wish to be one," Turlough O'Brien said.

  Ned Callaghan shook it. "The man whom Gruyard is questioning told the truth about one thing, at least. The object is dead."

  "It certainly seems to be. It should be safe to open it, I guess."

  An hour later, they stared at numerous small, oddly shaped, pieces of . . . unidentifiable stuff.

  "Perhaps we shouldn't have taken it apart after all," Callaghan said. "Or, at least, maybe we should have taken notes and drawn a picture
of how it looked when we first opened it."

  "Maybe we should try to put it back together."

  "Let's at least put it all back in the tin. After all, Colonel Butler doesn't have any idea what it looked like inside before we removed the lid."

  Neither of them connected the tuna tin with the rock on a wire that had broken Father Taffe's window. Irish dragoon regiments in the service of Bavarian dukes were not exactly hotbeds of cutting edge technology.

  Then it occurred to O'Brien to take the tuna tin to Geraldin's farrier, who was known to have a mechanical turn of mind. "Maybe he can figure it out," he said.

  The farrier was in the middle of shoeing a horse, so they left it with his apprentice. Peter Schild realized right away that something really bad must have happened to Heisel and Brandt.

  "I don't have the slightest idea what it is," he said. "You'll have to wait until Master Nugent can look at it." His bewilderment seemed very sincere. Caspar Zeyler might be a natural-born liar, but Schild was no slouch. What's more, he had been practicing the skill for months, now.

  "Does this strike you as sort of, 'meanwhile, back at the ranch'?" Jeffie asked Hertling. "Just camping here and staring at a set of walls after we've been chasing all over the map?"

  "We can only hope the ones you call 'the high mucky-mucks' are plotting something good. Something outstanding or excellent, even. I thought you enjoyed talking to your friends who came with you in the Ring of Fire."

  "Old home week, high school reunion, and a beanfest, all in one. I haven't seen some of these Grantville guys who are with Horn for two or three years. Yeah, it's been nice to catch up. The local news columns in the Grantville paper tell me who's getting hatched, matched, and dispatched, but they don't usually say who was hitting on whose wife at someone else's wedding. Not unless it ends up in the 'Arrests' column."

  "Those walls are fairly new, aren't they?" Jeffie asked.

  Eberhard nodded. "They were built by the first Duke Ulrich close to a century ago, when people were just beginning to use the new designs. The old curtain walls were already irregular in shape. He rebuilt and added the bastions at the angles."

  "What's the circumference?"

  "About a mile. The ditching complicates things, of course. In some places, it's a good forty yards wide."

  "Even so, once we get Horn's artillery up here," Hertling said, "we can make a fine mess." He was perched on a rock up on the Ottilienberg that overlooked the city.

  "Ja. It's going to take a great deal of heaving and hauling, though. Damn," Hartke said, leaning over. "Look at the town. Something's on fire."

  "Sure is," Hertling agreed. "Not good. Not on a windy day like this. Do you suppose anyone inside the walls has noticed?"

  "If they had, they'd be running around like ants."

  "They're starting to."

  "By the bowels of Christ!"

  "For shame, Gutzler. For shame to blaspheme so. If anyone hears you, the magistrate will fine you a stiff one." Barbara Mahlin shook her fist over her cart of well-picked-over second-hand clothing.

  "My hat. Look at it blow. It's only for work—not worth much more than those rags you sell. Some damned Irishman took my good one right off my head last market day, though, so now it's the only one I have. I want it back." Gutzler went dashing down the side of the square.

  "Sure looks stupid, doesn't he, bouncing along like that with his pot belly flopping?" Johann Leylins guffawed. Then, "Great God Almighty! What was that? It looked like Gutzler's been swallowed by a ball of hellfire blowing out of the cook shop doorway."

  Inside the cook shop, a fourteen-year-old apprentice, his hair singed off, picked himself up from against the back wall and looked in horror at the torch that, less than a minute before, had been his master. For less than half a half minute, he froze in place, remembering. The gust of wind, causing a blow-back down the chimney, scattering coals and sparks at old Master Steiss, who had just been putting the poker to the green wood. He'd jumped back and tripped. He'd tripped over . . . that cauldron of hot lard where they had just finished cooking funnel cakes, and the lard had gone flooding into the fireplace.

  If nothing else, the apprentice was agile on his feet. He dived over the closed bottom half of the double door, out into the alley, landed with a somersault, stood up, and screamed "Fire!" at the top of his lungs.

  "Who's that yelling?" Hans Frinck called from next door.

  "That no-good young Michael Haug who works in the cook shop."

  "Somebody should teach that boy not to cry 'wolf.' "

  "He's . . ." Frinck's wife Agnes poked her head out the door. "Fire!" she shrieked. "Fire on a windy day. Fire!"

  Frinck ran for his buckets.

  Young Haug was running down the street calling "Fire watch! Fire watch!"

  Melchior Schiffer had the fire watch functioning in ten minutes. They drilled for this. Bregenzer at the well pump, with Leylins's younger son trading off with him. A chain of women to pass the filled buckets. He counted. Here came Greiners, dashing toward him from the square, calling that Minder would have to take Gutzler's place, because Gutzler was dead. Reisch. Kapffer. Ensslin. They went to work in a practiced rhythm.

  "Schiffer." The apprentice was jumping up and down. "Schiffer!"

  "Get out of our way, boy."

  "Schiffer, I have to go back in."

  "Nobody goes back into a burning building. Get out of our way. We have to wet down the ones on each side. More, in this wind."

  "But, Schiffer—"

  He found himself flat on his back in the street.

  "What I was going to say, if you'd have let me," Michael Haug said, "was that Master Steiss had an open barrel of flour in there. From the funnel cakes."

  Ensslin was picking himself up. Reisch never would again.

  Hess and Hirschman rounded the corner and slid to a stop.

  Barbara Mahlin ran, abandoning her cart of old clothes in the middle of the square.

  "Wet the farther buildings," Schiffer yelled. "Haug, you're nimble. Get up on Kunkel's roof and look for sparks. Hirschmann, you go up too. We'll throw you the bucket rope and you can pulley up some water."

  They all worked together, just as they were supposed to, but just then the wind whipped around, first from due south and then for a few minutes from due west, before settling back to its original direction. Frinck's pewter shop caught, but luckily Haug and Hirschmann made it down the ladder before Kunkel's did. Then the potter's shop next beyond it. Schiffer stepped back as he watched the flames jump the alley. Kugler's, Burckhardt's, Weisser's, Reitter's, Palm's, Aichmann's. The saddlery. The cook shop just had to be in the southwest quadrant. The wind was blowing the fires toward all the rest of the town.

  "Give it up," he called. "Give it up. Evacuate."

  Jakob Breidner, the night watchman, came running. "They won't let us out. The gate guards. The cursed Irishmen. They say there's a siege on. They won't open the gates to let the women and children out."

  "Get a couple of barrels of gunpowder, light fuses, and roll them to the damned gates. They'll open them then, I bet. Then . . ."

  "Then get the rest of the gunpowder out through the gates," Breidner screamed. "As soon as you get a gate open, roll the barrels of gunpowder out, upwind, through the south gate. We've enough in store to do more damage to ourselves than the Swedes can possibly manage with no more than the few guns that Horn brought."

  Schiffer was thinking. What was flammable? Wood, of course—the timber in the Fachwerk houses. Flour, as they had just had cause to observe. Wheat, oats, hay, linen, bedding, clothing, paper . . . and there went the apothecary's shop.

  And, of course, it couldn't be helped that lot of people were trying to rescue possessions from their own houses that were in the path of the flames rather than contributing to stopping the fire overall. That always happened.

  Neuhauser and Besserer. Members of the city council at last. Where were the four Bürgermeisters? Given how firmly the town's patricians excluded its ord
inary people from a role in its government, the least they could do was belly up to the bar themselves when they were needed.

  "We've been up at the castle, talking to the Irish officers," Besserer panted. Volz is still there. They don't understand about the wind at this season. Steinbock says . . ."

  Schiffer never heard what Steinbock, the appointed ducal administrator of the city and district of Schorndorf, said. A muffled roar told him that one of the townsmen had managed to get a barrel of gunpowder up against the south gate before the fuse died.

  "Open it," he screamed. "Open it with your bodies. If the guards shoot, die for your city. The rest of you, if someone falls, you keep going. Die a hero instead of just dying in the fire. That's what we'll all do if they keep us packed in here like chickens roasting on a spit. Go!"

  The fire wasn't crackling any more. It was starting to roar.

  The master of the Latin school had his boys organized, their arms full of books, and was herding them towards the south gate.

  Here came Volz, down from the castle with two of the Irish officers.

  He heard the ominous sound of a stone cracking from the heat and added to his list of things that would burn. Plaster, whitewash, lime mortar.

  "The church roof has caught," someone called. "We need to try to save the vestments, the altar cloth. The chalice and patens."

  "There's no way we can save the building. Just the height of it makes it impossible. We simply can't get up there." Schiffer turned around. "What are the Irishmen doing?"

  "Opening the gates—finally opening the gates—and trying to get their horses out. They won't let us Schorndorf people near them, except for the south gate that we blew. One of them shot Barbara Mahlin when she tried to push her way through with their horses."

  "Their horses," someone said. "And our money. All the 'contributions' we have paid to keep them from plundering through the town. Controlled robbery instead of uncontrolled robbery, systematic instead of random. The officers are taking out the money chests."