by Eric Flint
There was consensus.
“I suggest,” Dave added, “that you radio Fulda and Bamberg tonight, as soon as we get a window of opportunity, and tell them to do it the same way and the same time. Total stand-down for the ordinary routine; everybody out into the field.”
“I suggest,” Meyfarth interjected in a very soft voice, “that you use the auditor team as well as the permanent staff. I have determined that they are not contractors, but are indeed employees of the NUS. Or of whatever you are going to call it, now. Then your permanent staff will not complain that you have given the auditors special privileges or exempted them from an onerous duty. As you said about not giving people the chance to manufacture grievances…”
Chapter 5:
“Prophesy To The Breath-”*
Bamberg, early November 1633
There was a ladder leaning against the side wall of Kronacher’s print shop. Noelle Murphy tilted her head against the sun, which was, if thin and watery, at least out for a change. Hanna, Else Kronacher’s far-from-young maid, was up on the ladder, scrubbing the morning mixture of mud and manure off the wall. The diamond-pane windows were partially open. Through them, the unmelodic sound of Frau Else screaming at her sons came out to join the other noises in the alley.
The screeching was followed by a clatter; then by a crash. Either Melchior, who was seventeen, or Otto, just turned fifteen, had apparently been grabbing type from a bin and throwing it at his brother. Or, possibly, they had been throwing it at one another. That wasn’t at all unlikely. The crash was probably one or the other of them upsetting a bin. Or shoving his brother, who fell and upset a bin. In either case, lead type would be scattered all over the floor of the working part of the shop the way up-time kids tended to strew Legos.
Noelle walked around the corner and entered by the front door, wrinkling her nose at the odor of the boiled linseed oil that constituted the base for printer’s ink. “Good morning, Martha. Chaos reigns, I take it.”
Martha Kronacher pressed the heels of her hands to her temples. “Oh, the boys are fussing again that no other printer will apprentice them because of Mutti’s fight with the guild. That no other printer will ever be willing to apprentice them. That even if Mutti succeeds in her fight with the guild and keeps running the shop, they won’t have had their proper apprenticeship and journeyman years and therefore the guild won’t let them take it over when they are old enough.”
“Oh, yecchh! Are they all the way back to casting you in the role of the sacrificial lamb-moaning that they just can’t understand why Frau Else wasn’t willing for you to marry the guild’s candidate because at least that would have kept it in the family more or less?”
“Melchior’s position is that it isn’t as if I wanted to marry anyone else in particular. Otto’s position is that it isn’t as if anybody else is ever likely to want to marry me.”
“Don’t listen. They’re just being brothers.” Noelle plopped her tote bag down on the sales counter.
“Both of them have decided that Mutti wasn’t really doing it for them, but because she’s selfish and just didn’t want to give the management over to a son-in-law. That if she’d been willing . . .”
“If she’d been willing, there’s not a single guarantee that your husband would have helped either of them to open a shop of his own when the time came. There’s also no prospect that either of them could have married into a shop by way of a widow or only daughter. They’re daydreaming.” Noelle picked up a guide rule and slammed it down. “Honestly, though, if things are that bad between your brothers and your mom, why doesn’t she just send them off to help the Ram?”
Frau Else, her ample figure covered by an apron and ink stains on her hands, pushed open the curtain between the shop and the sales room. “Because I can’t get any one else to work for me as apprentices or journeymen, that’s why! But having my sons at home is insane. Everybody in the world knows that it is insane.”
Noelle’s eyebrows went up. “What’s insane?” A flicker went through her mind of Gretchen Richter’s-Gretchen Higgins’-frequent proclamations that this or that Grantville custom was wahnsinnig, absolut wahnsinnig.
“To try to deal with your own children at this age. Nobles foster them to the courts of higher-ranking nobles. Then they hire tutors to take them away for a grand tour for two or three years. Merchants and craftsmen apprentice the boys and send the girls to the households of friends. Bureaucrats send them away to live with relatives in other towns and attend a good Latin school. Laborers and peasants put them out into service by the time they are fourteen or fifteen. No parent who has the slightest amount of Herr Thomas Paine’s famous ‘common sense’ keeps them at home during the stage of youth. They are too unruly. Where do you think the term ‘unruly apprentices’ comes from?”
Frau Else waved her hands in the air. “At the very least, any other master would beat them for the way they are behaving this morning. Even better, Otto and Melchior would be apprenticed to different masters and therefore would not be available to fight with each other. But can I do that? No. No other master will take them. In any case, I can’t do without them. If I send them to the Ram, no one else will work for me. Martha and I don’t have the strength to handle the presses by ourselves, and someone must be available for the sales room. Someone has to take orders. Someone has to keep the books.”
Noelle had heard all this before. And knew that “someone” was Martha. Good, reliable, Martha. When it came to Otto and Melchior, Frau Else was writing her own version of the Book of Lamentations. She shook her head. “Speaking of unruly apprentices, I saw Hanna on the stepladder in the alley. The printers’ apprentices are still throwing filth at the shop, I presume?”
“Only in the alley, now. The front to the street is well enough patrolled since the power changed in the city council. There are no more cobblestones. No more open threats. Just noises in the night. Shit in the morning. The guild masters piously say to anyone from the Ram who confronts them that they do their best to control the boys, but what can one expect? With much more of the same.” Frau Else picked up an old rag and wiped off her hands.
Noelle pushed aside the curtain and went into the back of the shop. “Melchior, shame. Poor Hanna is not young and yet you let her stand on a ladder while you are wasting time here fighting with your brother. Get out there, right now, and clean the wall if you expect to have food at noon. Otto, I heard you. Turn that bin right side up and sort the type. Don’t waste any time. Now, now, now!”
“Didn’t I say it?” Frau Else inquired of the ceiling. “Anyone but a mother. Anyone but a mother or father and boys will do what they are told. Anyone else. Anyone at all.” When Noelle came back into the sales room, she repeated herself.
“I do have a reason for being here,” Noelle said finally.
Frau Else snapped her mouth shut.
“Duplicating machines from Vignelli in Tirol. They started coming on the market in March. He is now producing them in fairly large numbers. I have ordered a dozen. They will be shipped from Bolzano, Bozen you call it, this week; they should arrive here in January. One, you may keep in your shop. It will be useful. The remainder are to go to the Ram for quick reproduction of pamphlets and broadsides in places where the movement doesn’t have print shops accessible. And in places where quick mobility is desirable.”
“Who is paying for this?” Frau Else was not so revolutionary as to ignore her bottom line. “Not I.”
Noelle frowned at her. “They are prepaid. I will give the paperwork to Martha.”
Frau Else nodded.
“About the boys . . .” Noelle waved her hand at the curtain. “Once things settle down a bit, why don’t you send them to Grantville to learn the new printing technology? It’s not covered by the guild regulations.” Yet, she thought. There was no real reason to assume that the guilds wouldn’t be scrambling to catch up. There was also no real reason to bring that up at this very moment.
“The whole reason for what I have do
ne is to keep this business for my sons.”
Noelle ran a hand through her sandy blonde hair. The basic truth was that Frau Else didn’t really want to overthrow the system. She just wanted to be part of it. “Could you-maybe-just think outside the box for a minute?”
That required quite a bit of explanation.
Ending with a repeat of Frau Else’s protest that she couldn’t send her sons away because no trained journeyman printer would work for a woman who was not a master. And since she was not a master, she could not accept apprentices even if there were parents who were willing to send their sons to her. Not that any reasonable parent would be willing to waste money paying a master when the boy would not be eligible to enter the guild at the end of not. Not to say . . .
Blast it! Luckily that was inside Noelle’s head and not coming out of her mouth.
“Ah. Well, maybe we could kill two birds with one stone. Something to keep Melchior and Otto occupied. Someone to work for you in the shop.”
“There’s no way.”
The world does not end at the borders of Bamberg. Noelle hadn’t said that, either. Though she had come close.
“I’ll see about having them organize a Committee of Correspondence in Bamberg. Maybe, given their age, a kind of ‘junior chapter’ with a lot of training involved. They’ll need mentors. Something like Boy Scout leaders, I guess.”
Martha looked skeptical. “Where would these mentors come from?”
“That’s the other end of my idea. I’ll see if they”-she left “they” undefined quite deliberately-“can send a couple guys down from Magdeburg. CoC members who are printers and will be willing to work for Frau Else. Create a liaison with Helmut. Organize a junior chapter at the same time.”
Frau Else crossed her arms over her ample chest. “I will not turn my shop over to any other master. Not to one from Magdeburg any more than to a guild master from Bamberg.”
“Journeymen. Working for you. There won’t be any masters from Magdeburg who are interested in a project like this, anyhow.” Noelle laughed. “It’s the nature of revolutions to be rather short on wise old elders. Mike Stearns is seriously frustrated at the shortage of Red Sybolt types.”
That required more explanation also.
By the end of the conversation, Noelle wasn’t too sure about just how far this fledgling Franconian revolution was going to go. Her mind skipped to the passage in Ezekiel where God told the hapless prophet to “prophesy to the breath.” In her limited experience, it just wasn’t exactly a snap to put flesh on dry bones. Much less raise the dead.
A second image rose up. She saw herself fanning the flames of a wood fire in an old-fashioned cooking range to make them burn more hotly. Blowing upon them. Someone would have to breathe more life into this revolt before anyone could prophesy to the breath.
Frau Else marched back through the curtain with a firm, “I can’t just stand around talking all day. There’s work to be done.”
For one morning, Noelle thought, she had probably done as much as she could.
Martha rubbed her temples again. “I won’t marry one of them, either.”
“What on earth?”
“If you bring journeymen from Magdeburg. I won’t marry one of them, either. I don’t intend to be anyone’s sacrificial lamb.” She glared at Noelle. “Not for my brothers. Not for anyone else, either.”
“Look, honey.” Noelle put an arm around Martha’s shoulder. Martha was a little older, twenty-five to Noelle’s “going to be twenty-three next month.” Equal stubbornness was the main foundation of their rapidly growing friendship. “People are just teasing when they call you the ‘ewe lamb’ and say that since your mom is the Ewe, you’re destined to marry Helmut. Whoever he may be in real life. Nobody really expects you to marry him. Or one of these guys, whoever they turn out to be.”
“Some of them are serious.” Martha circled her shoulders. She had spent most of the morning cleaning display cases. “I’ve got to be realistic. Mutti has turned into a revolutionary. That’s fine, I suppose. We need a revolution. About some things, at least.”
Noelle laughed. Martha was far less of a flaming radical than her mother. Whose radicalism also had very sharp limits. “Realistic about what?”
“Well, people do tend to marry inside their own trade. There’s some marrying across guild lines, but especially in the highly skilled trades-glass making, printing, lens grinding, and the like-families are a lot more likely to arrange marriages into the same trade, even if it means looking outside of your own town. We-the family, I mean-aren’t really printers any more in the sense that we’re part of the guild. We’re revolutionaries. So it’s not that odd that people are thinking that she’ll find a revolutionary for me to marry. That someone like Helmut would make a suitable match.”
“So what do you have against the idea?”
“He’s… Well, I don’t care whether he’s been to the university or not, he’s just crude,” Martha proclaimed. “He can speak Latin, but he’s just as crude in Latin as he is in German. Not all the time, but a lot of it. When he’s not being a public person. He’s been teaching out in that village in the Steigerwald so long that he’s practically become a peasant himself. That’s… I don’t want a husband like that. I want one who is just as cultured at home as he is when he’s speaking in the city council chamber.”
“Cultured?”
“Music,” Martha said. “You know. Poetry. Literature. I know that Helmut does lesson plans, and he’s smart. Shrewd. He did the annotated version of Common Sense that we published.”
She elaborated, from her point of view. Helmut was not only crude, but loud. If Martha wanted loud, all she needed to do was stay home with her mother and brothers, who were loud enough to drive a person mad. Helmut had a voice that boomed. Which was good for giving speeches to large numbers of people in open fields, but would become terribly tiring if it were inside a small house.
Inadvertently, by listing all the reasons she didn’t in the least want to marry Helmut, she gave Noelle more information concerning the Ram than any other up-timer had. Everything, practically, but his name and the exact location of his headquarters.
* * *
Walking back up the alley, Noelle checked to see that it was Melchior rather than Hanna on the ladder. She wondered if she was legally or morally obliged to share what she had just learned with Vince Marcantonio and Steve Salatto and their various official subordinates. By the time she had reached the episcopal palace which was serving as administrative headquarters, she concluded that she wasn’t. What they didn’t know, they wouldn’t feel obliged to do something-anything-about. After some reflection she decided that she didn’t think she would even tell Johnnie F.
The Ram movement needed a little breathing room, was her sense of things. That had certainly been the gist of the private messages she’d gotten from Mike Stearns, when he’d been the President of the NUS. Now that he’d moved up to Magdeburg and become the prime minister of the new United States of Europe, she no longer had any direct contact with him. But the two messages she’d gotten since from the new President of whatever-the-NUS-would-wind-up-calling-itself, Ed Piazza, made it clear that nothing had changed.
Well, some subtleties, perhaps. Stearns had been more prone to relying on the Committees of Correspondence than Piazza seemed to be. But that hardly indicated any new formalization of affairs, as far as she was concerned. Ed Piazza simply substituted working through the Genevan fellow Leopold Cavriani instead. It had been Cavriani who had obtained, no doubt through his usual tortuous means, the duplicating machines.
It was obvious to Noelle that Cavriani often worked closely with the CoCs, in addition to being a revolutionary of some kind in his own right. So, she was still working very much in what, in a now-gone uptime world, would have been called “gray operations.”
Steve Salatto wouldn’t approve of what she was doing, of course. He’d be especially irate if he found out she was doing it behind his back. But his positi
on made him oblivious to a lot of things, anyway. The real problem was Johnnie F., who wasn’t oblivious to much of anything.
On the other hand…
Johnnie F. was also a past master at the art of looking the other way, when it suited him. Noelle was pretty sure he’d do it again here, if he found out.
Grantville, Late November, 1633
At first, the LDS church in Grantville had more or less decided that Willard Thornton ought to stay in town for the rest of the winter. It wasn’t the best traveling weather. That suited his wife Emma just fine. She would even be glad-delighted, ecstatic, and enthusiastic, she told her friends-to listen to him hum “Dry Bones” just as often as it crossed his mind. Just as long as he was home and safe.
Then the letter came from Bamberg. Frau Stadtraetin Faerber reported that her husband had been disabled by a stroke. She believed that it was apoplexy, brought on by the events of September. She had saved Herr Thornton’s bicycle, with the many copies of the Book of Mormon in the saddlebags. She had taken the liberty of giving some of them to her friends, since she knew that Herr Thornton had been giving them away.
The Frau Stadtraetin wrote further that she wished that the missionary would return to Bamberg. She and her friends would benefit from further explanation of many passages in the book. If she might be so bold, she advised that, if possible, he should bring his wife, since a woman could go many places that a man could not-at least, that a man could not go without arousing suspicion. She made an offer, and a joke. She would gladly be a Lydia to their Paul, providing them with hospitality in her home.
Howard Carstairs read the letter to the whole congregation. Because of his army service in Germany, he had become sort of Johnny-on-the-Spot for things like this. Reading the letter aloud, he realized that Willard’s reports had left the umlaut off her name, and it was not Farber. It was Faerber. Dyer. Symbolic.
No one said anything. His father and Willard’s father looked at one another. Those two, Levi Carstairs and Harold Thornton, were the senior men in the church. Logically, they should have been making the decisions. More and more, though, it seemed like they looked at one another and then looked at Howard.