1635-The Tangled Web

by Virginia DeMarce

  "Go to the jail," Besserer called. "Let the prisoners loose—the ones the Irish locked up. Maybe they'll be grateful enough to help us fight the fire, but even if they aren't, we can't just let them broil there if the wind turns."

  "It was good of them to bring the keys, but I'm not certain that I can walk." Julius Brandt tried to stand, but stumbled. "Leave me here and find Gruyard. He was in the jail when the fire broke out. You must take him to your Colonel Utt."

  "No, Julius, my friend. Come. Walk. I will not leave you to the fire. I will support you." Heisel pulled one of Brandt's arms over his shoulders.

  "You must forgive me. I betrayed you. I gave them your name."

  "There is nothing to forgive. Anyone would have done the same. I gave them Dislav's name. I find that it is far easier to make proclamations about being stoic under torture when you are not being tortured right at that moment. I have seen unpleasant things before. Even experienced them. In his own way, though, Gruyard is an artist." Heisel turned his head. "What is happening down the hall?"

  "The man with the keys let some other prisoners out. He was offering clemency if they would come fight the fire."

  "Scarcely feasible for us, I fear. I am not in shape to fight a field mouse."

  "If we can only get to the Swedish lines . . ."

  "The horses," Timothy Nugent screamed. "The horses. I can't hold them."

  "I'll take a couple," Caspar said. He grabbed for the reins.

  "Not that way."

  "I'll come after you as soon as I can. I need to help a couple of old friends."

  Zeyler headed for the jail.

  The noise at the other end of the hall got louder. Letting Brandt down on the floor, Heisel limped toward the source of the disturbance."

  "Dislav? What?"

  "Maybe you promised to bring this human slime to the up-timers for a fair trial as they see it," Dislav said. "I did not. See the pretty thumbscrews? I thought this was a quite original way to use them."

  Heisel gagged.

  Dislav shook his head. "The colonel beat my dear young lady when he found out that I was your friend. That was neither fair nor just."

  "Uh. Dislav. Maybe we should get out of here. Shorndorf is burning."

  The Czech shook his head. "The wind's blowing the other way. The castle will be all right, and the countess is in her quarters upstairs. I can't leave without her. Besides, I'm busy right now."

  Schiffer had found a bullhorn. "The Swedes are coming in, some of them, at least. They're helping fight the fire. Look for orange uniforms and work with them. Otherwise, the Swedes still outside are picking off the Irish, one by one, as they come out with their mounts."

  "What was that last noise we heard?"

  "The church roof. The heat weakened the beams so much that it plunged right down into the sanctuary."

  "This is going to have to be the last load."

  The old man nodded his head. "But, wait. I still don't have the portable baptistry." He headed toward the sacristy.

  "Aus! Jetzt! The roof is about to fall."

  "I am the pastor of this parish, the Dekan of the parish of Schorndorf. Who are you to say 'Out! Now!' to me or order me around?"

  The stocky young man in the orange uniform grabbed the Dekan by the waist and threw him down the church steps, followed by a clatter of miscellaneous silver plated vessels on the stone steps.

  "By my authority as a called servant of God . . ."

  The roof fell.

  "We'll never get out," Heisel said. "Look what's happening. Our men outside figure that anyone on a horse is an Irishman trying to escape. But Julius can't walk—the wounds on his legs just keep bleeding and his legs shake so. Maybe Gruyard got in a hurry and cut more muscle than he intended to. I don't think I can walk, either, even though Gruyard didn't slice me up quite so badly. At least, I didn't think so right after he finished the last session. I thought he was holding back, saving something for the next time."

  "Leave it to me," Zeyler answered. "I'll think of something. Maybe some of Brahe's men who have come inside the walls will recognize us."

  "It's getting dark." Merckel wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  "We'll be watching the fire all night."

  "Why doesn't it ever rain when you could use it? All that mud over by Germersheim, and now this dry wind. It's enough to make a man believe in hell."

  "What it reminds me of," Jeffie Garand said, "is that Jerry Lee Lewis song. 'Great Balls of Fire.' " He went back to scooping earth on smouldering embers.

  "Merckel," someone called. "Ludwig Merckel. Over here."

  "Heisel," he said. "God be praised."

  "So far, the walls have contained the fire, Colonel Utt. I wouldn't count on it for tomorrow, though. It could still jump them if the wind really picks up." Moritz Klott, one of Horn's aides-de-camp eyed the embers of Schorndorf with a wary expression. "We know that your men are exhausted, but better keep them on alert."

  "What's left? Anything more than I can see from here, that is?" Utt asked. They were standing at the south gate.

  "Outside of the walls, there's a little suburb to the north—maybe three hundred people live there and it has a couple of inns." Klott checked his stack of paperwork. "We're using that for emergency housing for the survivors. The cemetery is outside the walls and has a little chapel. We'll hold the funerals there. Butler had given orders to have all that leveled so his men would have a clear view from the walls, but they hadn't gotten it done yet. We're lucky, in a way, that we were so close behind them. If they'd had a couple of weeks to dig in . . ."

  "There are a lot of 'ifs.' If they had artillery, if, if, if. We have to deal with what is." Derek shook his head, looking at the young officers who were awaiting further instructions.

  "Overall, though," Simrock said, "that was quite a roundup. Butler and Deveroux are in custody."

  "Do we have Gruyard?" Derek was far from forgetting Schweinsberg's death and the popular reaction to it in Fulda and Grantville.

  "We have what we are told is his body," Klott said. "Or the remnants of it. Searchers found it in the prison. It will be turned over to you."

  "What else do I need to know?"

  "Butler's wife is demanding to be allowed to leave. She rode out the fire on the far side of the castle and has her own staff, including a big, tough footman who seems to have been badly injured. Rather than accompany her husband to Fulda and stand by him during the trial, she wants to go back to Bohemia."

  "Using what for money?"

  "Some of Butler's accumulated loot, probably." Klott looked at Utt. "Have you dealt with her?"

  "Not personally, no."

  "General Horn has. She was demanding to be assigned one of the houses in the little suburb for her own personal use on the grounds that her chambers in the castle are all sooty. He's reached the conclusion that whatever she makes off with, it will be money well spent just to get rid of her."

  "There sure isn't much of it left," Merckel said. "Great buildings turned into heaps of stones, into dust and ashes."

  "The back part of the church. What's it called? Where the priests pray." Kolb sucked on his pipe. "That's still standing."

  "The chancel. That back part is called a chancel. The front part is called a nave."

  "Where'd you ever learn all that stuff, Lutz?"

  Merckel looked away. "My father was a pastor. Back in Saxe-Weimar."

  Kolb drew on his pipe again. "There are two complete houses standing. Count 'em. Two, both over against the wall, on the side the wind was coming from. Quite a few partials on the west side of town. Maybe some of them can be shored up."

  "We're using the standing ones for infirmaries. After dark last night, we ran into a little old man in a black robe, standing by one of them and hugging a batch of old records. He is—was—the clerk at the Holy Spirit Hospital. That's all he managed to save—he said the whole civil archives, with people's wills and such, went up in smoke."

  "Captain Duke Eberhard got t
he marriage and baptism records out of the church. That's what he was doing when . . ." Kolb looked down at his feet.

  "And the castle. It's still there. Ugly clunker, with those big round towers at each end. If nobody had ever built a castle here to start with . . ."

  Kolb shook his head. "In this location, right on the east border of the duchy? Nah. If it hadn't been our dukes, it would have been somebody else. It's a place that just begs for someone to plunk a fort down in it."

  "It was a pretty enough town. Do you suppose they'll ever be able to build it all back?"

  "Our duke!" the Dekan exclaimed in horror. "The young man who was so severely injured in saving me is truly our duke?"

  "You got it in one, man," Jeffie Garand answered. "Eberhard saved your stinking hide." Then he switched to German. "The medics say they won't be able to save him. If he hadn't breathed in so much smoke that his lungs are bad, he might have a chance to get over the trauma of a double above-the-knee amputation. If his legs hadn't been crushed by that beam, he might have survived the smoke inhalation. He'd have had serious long-term lung damage, but he would have lived. As things stand, though . . ." Jeffie gave the Dekan a hard look. "If I were you, I'd go back, sort through all the things you swore absolutely had to be gotten out of your church building, and hope you have your funeral book."

  The Dekan rose.

  "Even better, if I were you," Jeffie added, "I'd make myself scarce before Hertling, Merckel, Kolb, and Heisel find you. Not to mention Colonel Utt. I wouldn't describe anyone in the Fulda Barracks regiment as being real happy right now."

  A tent outside Schorndorf

  "It's odd," Eberhard rasped. "Even after von Sickingen's men killed Ulrich, even after the Irishmen killed Friedrich, I didn't really expect to die. Not yet. Not now. Not so soon."

  Tata nodded.

  "Do you have my Montaigne? Where were we in the reading?"

  "In the middle of the essay about cannibals."

  He nodded.

  Tata smiled. "Ah, yes. 'Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of the courage and the soul; it does not lie in the quality of our horse or our weapons, but in our own. He that falls obstinate in his courage—' " Her voice trailed away. She looked down toward the far end of the cot. " 'Si succiderit, de genu pugnat.'—I learned that much Seneca from you in this last year. Sometimes, I think you love Seneca even more than you do Montaigne. Maybe even more than the Bible, though you shouldn't."

  " 'If his legs fail him, he fights on his knees.' That presumes, of course, that he has knees left. I feel weirdly calm about this whole thing, not that I ever expected to be a philosopher. Maybe I'm not entirely in this universe the theologians think the Ring of Fire created. Maybe some essential part of me was left behind, with that other Eberhard, in the universe where we were born. Maybe we're only echoes of what we would have been."

  He tried to push himself up against the pillows, wincing when Tata put her hands under his armpits to help him.

  "No, don't give me any more of the opium. I need to have my mind clear enough that nobody can deny that I know what I'm doing. What are those next lines?

  ". . . he who, for any danger of imminent death, abates nothing of his assurance; who, dying, yet darts at his enemy a fierce and disdainful look, is overcome not by us, but by fortune; he is killed, not conquered; the most valiant are sometimes the most unfortunate. There are defeats more triumphant than victories."

  "It wasn't a defeat, though," Tata said. "Not even a triumphant defeat like that of Leonidas and the Spartans. We won."

  "At the expense of the destruction of one of my towns and most of its people. What's left of the people? Less than a hundred men, I'd guess. More women and children, but it's still in the hundreds rather than the thousands. How are they going to live? What kind of a Landesvater have I been to my children to bring this fate down on them?"

  "Victory is victory. At least, since the Irishmen had quartered themselves here, they didn't destroy everything in the fields. The people who still live will eat next winter."

  Eberhard shook his head.

  Tata stood up and shook her fist at him. "It would have been a lot worse to let four cavalry regiments owing their allegiance to Maximilian have free range to raid through Swabia with the USE people chasing after them. That would have been right back to the bad old days, before the Ring of Fire came. That's what kind of a father you have been to your country. That's what Papa used to say to me when I was a naughty child and he whipped me—that it would be worse for me in the long run if he didn't use the rod when I needed it."

  "All right. It's a victory. I won't be enjoying it, though. Has that damned clerk finished writing up the clean copies?"

  "Almost."

  "I wish I'd been able to see Friedrich and Margarethe's baby."

  "Your sister will take care of them. She has gone from Strassburg to Mainz since Friedrich was killed. Papa radioed to us. She took your little sisters with her. From what I've heard of Antonia, anybody who tries to keep her from taking care of them will be very, very sorry."

  "General Horn will make the emperor understand, won't he? Everything that was personally Friedrich's is to go to Margarethe and the baby, no matter what our uncles try to grab?"

  "He was here when you dictated the will. He'll be back to witness when you sign it. Colonel Utt is here, and Duke Bernhard's man, the colonel they call Raudegen."

  "Given under Our hand and seal at Schorndorf in Our duchy of Württemberg this twenty-eighth day of May in the year of our Lord 1635." Widerhold finished his reading.

  Horn looked at Utt.

  "You are certain that this is your will and testament?" Horn asked.

  "Yes." Eberhard grinned. "All five copies."

  "You are fully aware of the complications that may ensue—no, that certainly will ensue?"

  "As our friend Colonel Utt here would be likely to say," Duke Eberhard grinned again. Every time, it looked more like a skull smiling. ". . . quoting his lawyerly wife, 'to the best of my knowledge and belief,' I am aware. Am I the omniscient deity to say that I am fully aware? Just let me sign."

  "Your personal properties to be divided in four shares, one each to your sisters and one to Agathe Donner, here present, as life incomes. Absolutely to any heirs of their bodies, should they have such; in default of heirs of their bodies, to your brother Friedrich's child; in case such child should die without heirs of his or her body . . ."

  "Yes, yes, yes. The quill, please."

  "The duchy itself . . ."

  Since Horn's clerk was still delaying, Tata dipped the quill and passed it to him. She turned to the quartermaster and other witnesses. "You heard him. All of you heard him."

  Eberhard signed.

  Widerhold's voice went on:

  "The duchy of Württemberg itself, independent and separate from any arbitrary provisions that were made at the Congress of Copenhagen in June of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and thirty-four, in regard to the establishment of a Province of Swabia as one of the component political divisions of the United States of Europe under the governance of Gustavus II Adolphus, king of Sweden and emperor of said United States of Europe, said provisions having been made without regard to or consultation with the will of the people of said duchy—"

  Eberhard interrupted him. "I leave the duchy with all its parts and dependencies, rights and responsibilities to its people. My people. I leave to the people of the duchy, now its citizens rather than its subjects, the right to govern themselves and not be disposed of, willy-nilly, by emperors or prime ministers or diplomatic congresses. With a lot of legal language to ensure that I've done everything I can to make it happen. And copies not just to the official representatives of Gustavus Adolphus, but also . . ."

  Tata handed one of the signed copies to Derek Utt and another to Widerhold. "All hail Johannes Althusius and the sovereignty of the people."

  In the silence of the room, Utt laughed.

  Tata joined in the laughter.
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  At last, so did Eberhard. "The king of Sweden can make what he wants of it. I wish him joy. I wish the prime minister of the United States of Europe joy. I wish my greedy uncles joy. I wish Margrave Georg Friedrich of Baden, supposed imperial administrator of a united Province of Swabia joy, and advise him to worry about Augsburg and the Bavarians, Tyrol and the Breisgau, with particular attention to Egon von Fürstenberg, instead of Württemberg." His voice weakened, grating. "Hell, Tata, I even wish your father joy. Hail to Reichard Donner, to the Horn of Plenty, and the hapless, hopeless, helpless Mainz Committee of Correspondence. Ave atque vale."

  The others went back to the things they had to do. Agathe stayed.

  "Lift me, Tata. I'm sliding down."

  She put her hands under his armpits again and pushed up.

  "There's no window in here."

  "I can open the tent flap."

  "Do. Go stand in the sunshine."

  She stood there a few minutes, looking out at the movement and listening to the noise of an army in camp.

  "Joy, Tata. I wish you joy."

  She waited a few minutes more before she called the chaplain.

  Afterword by Eric Flint

  I've been asked repeatedly, over the past few years, to provide fans of the 1632 series with a recommended order in which to read the various books in the series. And . . .

  I've always tried to evade the issue. Partly, out of a stubborn (and perhaps infantile) resistance to cursed rules and regulations and such. Mostly, though, simply out of laziness. Damnation, it's hard to figure out a neat and precise sequence for this series. In fact, it's downright impossible.

  That is so by design, not by accident. One of the things I'm trying to do with the 1632 series, to a degree never even attempted by any other alternate history series (including my own, such as the Belisarius series and the Sam Houston series), is to portray as far as possible the chaos and complexity of real history.