by Eric Flint
Gretchen handed the sheaf to Tata, who was sitting next to her. “Start passing these around, please.” More loudly, so everyone could hear, she added: “This is a full report on what came out of the meeting.”
Kresse could refer to her session with Gustav Adolf as an audience, if he chose, but so far as Gretchen was concerned it had been a meeting between equals. Equals in the eyes of God and equals by the rights for all people she intended to spread across the Germanies, and then Europe, and then—although she probably wouldn’t live that long—across the entire world.
Not, admittedly, a meeting between equals in terms of immediate power and influence. But that was a matter of fact, not principle—and facts could be changed.
Eric Krenz was staring down at the sheaf in his hand with a look of distaste. The Saxon had an almost comical abhorrence of reading anything beyond technical manuals. “Can’t you just summarize what’s in it?” he asked.
“Quit whining,” said Tata, who was already starting to read the second page of the report. In sharp contrast to the man who shared her bed every night, the tavern-keeper’s daughter adored reading. She spent any spare money she had in one of the city’s two bookstores. Eric never complained about the habit, however. Whatever his own attitude toward reading might be, he was a firm adherent to that ancient piece of male wisdom: happy wife, happy life.
True, he and Tata were not married. But Eric would be the first to tell anyone that the principle had wide application. And Gretchen thought it was just a matter of time before he started pestering Tata to bring their relationship into greater alignment with the customs of men and the prescriptions of the Lord. For all their badinage and squabbling, the two of them did seem to get along well.
Tata flipped the page over and started on the next. “So far, it’s pretty straightforward and amazingly clear for an imperial decision. Point one. Saxony is recognized as a self-governing province of the United States of Europe. Direct imperial administration will remain in the hands of Ernst Wettin but only until the election is held and the results are tallied. Point Two. The structure of the province of Saxony shall be that of a parliamentary republic. The executive office of chancellor will be filled by whichever party or coalition of parties wins a majority of the vote. Point Three. The province of Saxony shall have a Lutheran established church supported by provincial revenues, with the understanding that all other denominations including Catholics and Jews may practice their faith openly with no penalties or restrictions and—oh, now this is fascinating!—if the chancellor of the province is of a different denomination than Lutheran then for the period the chancellor is in office that denomination will also be considered an established church and may share in the province’s revenues in proportion to its share of the population of the province.”
She looked at Gretchen. “Where did that come from? It’s sort of an upside down version of cuius regio, eius religio.”
Kresse was frowning, as he studied the page. “I don’t really see the point to it. We’re all Lutherans here.”
Anna Piesel gave him an elbow in the ribs. Startled, Kresse looked up.
“Oh,” he said. He gave Gretchen a slightly guilty look. “I forgot that…”
The frown returned. “But I thought you’d left the Catholic church. Surely you’re not thinking—”
Gretchen’s temper was rising a bit. Sometimes Kresse really got on her nerves. “Let me make something absolutely clear to you, Georg”—her eyes swept the room with a hard gaze—“and anyone else who has any doubts about it. If I choose to return to the Catholic church I will do so and if anyone thinks they can infringe upon my rights—” Her voice was starting to rise.
“Gui-llo-tine, gui-llo-tine,” Eric said, in a singsong voice, with a grin on his face.
Gretchen glared at him. He shrugged. “Just saying.”
Her swelling anger began to subside. She gave it a couple of seconds and then turned back to Kresse.
“No, Georg, I am not planning to return to the Catholic church. I have every right to do so, mind you. But…”
She ran fingers through her long, blonde hair. The sensation reminded her again of her vow to get it braided so as to keep it from getting in her way. The vow was only semi-serious, though. Jeff loved her hair the way it was, and while Gretchen wouldn’t go so far as to adopt the motto happy husband, happy life, she’d allow that there was quite a bit of truth to it.
“I want to belong to a church again,” she said quietly. “Some people are content without being part of a denomination, but I am not. The Catholic church…” She shook her head. “Is no longer an option for me. And I don’t care for most of the Protestant churches.”
She gave the people assembled in the room a look that fell just this side of hard. “That includes the Lutheran church, and if that offends any of you, so be it. I’ve thought about it a lot over the past year or two, and I decided I want to belong to an American church. So I chose the Episcopalians.”
Kresse’s frown was back. Could the man manage to let an hour go by without it? “The Episcopalians are an English church.”
To her surprise, Eric Krenz responded. “No, they’re not, Georg. They originated from the Anglican church but they’ve been independent for more than two centuries.” He waved his hand. “In that other universe, I’m talking about. What you have today in our universe is a complicated situation where over there”—he waved again, more or less in the direction of the British Isles—“you’ve got a big pack of down-time English clerics and kings and Puritans and whatnot squabbling with each other, and over here”—he now gestured more or less in the direction of Grantville—“you’ve got a very small pack of up-timers who share a lot of doctrine and most emphatically do not share a lot of attitude with the English.”
By now, everyone in the room was frowning—Gretchen too—trying to follow Krenz’s summary of religious evolution spanning two universes and twice that many centuries.
Which…
Wasn’t bad, actually.
“What he said,” stated Gretchen.
* * *
As she usually did, Tata remained behind after the meeting adjourned. More unusually, Eric did also.
“How do you come to know so much about the Episcopal church?” Tata asked him.
Eric’s expression became shifty-eyed. “Well…”
“Ha!” Tata didn’t quite curl her lip. The face she made indicated that she would have except the issue was not worthy of her outright contempt. “Tried to seduce an up-timer once, did you? It went badly, I imagine.”
Eric gave her a sulky look. “Anne Penzey. I met her in Magdeburg when Thorsten and I were training in the army. She was, ah, young at the time—”
“Young?” said Gretchen. “I know the girl! She couldn’t have been more than… That was what, two years ago? She’d have been no older than sixteen!”
“Seventeen,” Eric protested. “Almost eighteen, maybe.”
“It’s not worth getting worked up over, Gretchen,” Tata said. “It’s true that Eric is a lecher but he’s terrible at it so no harm is done.” The laugh that followed was more in the way of a giggle. “Look what happened there! Seventeen years old—practically a child, still—and she fended the clumsy lout off with a lecture on ecclesiastical history.”
She now moved to the issue actually at hand. “I’m curious myself, though. Why did you pick that American church?”
“It’s a little hard to explain. Most of the American churches are… how to say it?”
“Peculiar,” Eric provided. “Downright weird, some of them—especially the ones that call themselves pentecostal. There’s even one church in Grantville—so I was told, anyway; I didn’t investigate myself—where they speak in tongues and play with snakes.”
“I’m not sure that rumor is really true,” Gretchen said. “Although it might be. Some of the American churches seem a lot like Anabaptists.”
She shrugged. “I was raised Catholic. I like the… what to call it? The
way Catholics do things. I was told the Episcopalians are much alike, that way. Some of them, at least. The ones they call ‘high church.’”
She smiled, then, a bit wickedly. “Especially Admiral Simpson.”
“Simpson?” Eric and Tata were wide-eyed now. Clearly, both of them were trying to visualize Gretchen Richter and John Chandler Simpson worshipping in the same church and…
Having a hard go of it.
“He is on the side of the angels, these days,” said Tata. Dubiously.
“I think it’s more of a loan,” Eric cautioned. “Any day—you never know—Satan might call it in and demand his interest.”
* * *
Three days later, Tom Simpson came to Dresden. With him, he had in tow a young woman named Ursula Gerisch.
“I’m your bishop,” he told Gretchen. “Don’t ask me any questions, though, because I’m trying to study up on the job myself. Laud just gave it to me. I think mostly out of pique—probably some spite, too.”
Gretchen stared at him. “I thought someone named Robert Herrick was the bishop in the USE.”
Tom shook his head. “He’s headquartered in Magdeburg. Originally his diocese was named as the whole USE, but now it’s being divided. Herrick will wind up with everything that’s not part of the so-called ‘Grantville Diocese,’ as Laud is calling it.”
“Which covers what part of the country?” asked Gretchen, frowning.
“I don’t know yet. I don’t think Laud himself does. But apparently it’s going to cover Saxony. I wouldn’t worry about it, though. Between you and me, Herrick doesn’t really want the job anyway so he won’t be underfoot too much. Which is a good thing, from everything I’ve heard about him.”
Gretchen had received an earful herself on the subject of Robert Herrick’s shortcomings while she’d been in Grantville.
She moved aside from the doorway to let Tom and Ursula enter her apartment. It was quite a nice apartment, as you’d expect in the Residenzschloss. “I would offer you something to drink but I’m afraid I don’t have anything at the moment except some water. Although I could heat up some broth. I’ve been very busy lately and the boys”—the sounds of two young children playing in another room were quite audible—“don’t like coffee and tea. I don’t bother keeping it around unless I know Jeff is coming for a visit.”
She was babbling a little. A bishop? Tom Simpson—huge, affable, cheerful, friendly Tom Simpson, so unlike his father—was now a bishop?
Well, why not? They lived in an age of miracles again, as witness the great cliffs created by the Ring of Fire.
“I can’t stay long anyway, Gretchen. The only reason I came to Dresden is because we need some special equipment made to get the ten-inch rifles out of the river—never mind the grisly details—and this is the best place to get it done quickly. Grantville and Magdeburg have better facilities for the purpose but they’re so backlogged with work I decided to come here instead. But I’m leaving first thing tomorrow.”
He turned to Gerisch, took her elbow and hauled her forward. “Ursula is the best proselytizer we’ve got. She’s a whiz at it. She agreed to move here and my mother agreed to subsidize her for a while. And if you want to know why a Unitarian is willing to support an Episcopalian missionary, trust me, you really don’t want to know. My mother’s schemes can confuse the ghost of Machiavelli. Just accept that she is.”
He breezed right on, not giving Gretchen a chance to say anything—which didn’t really matter since she had no idea what to say anyway.
“We need a proselytizer here in Dresden because until you get enough people to form a congregation there’s no point my sending you a priest, which is good because I still have to study up on how I’d go about ordaining one in the first place. Hey, give me a break. I’ve been a good Episcopalian all my life but it’s not as if I paid a lot of attention to how the gears turned. I was a wannabe professional football player and then a soldier after the Ring of Fire.”
He finally broke off—for maybe two seconds. “So there we are. Can you put Ursula up for a few days until she finds a place of her own?”
Gretchen nodded.
“Great. I’m leaving, then. I’ll see you again… whenever. Probably not until we take Munich, though.”
And off he went.
Gretchen closed the door and looked at Ursula. The woman had an odd expression on her face. It seemed to consist mostly of unease combined with penance and perhaps a trace of defiance.
“I must warn you, Frau Richter, since you will no doubt hear of it soon anyway. My past is… not very reputable.”
Finally! A place to rest her anchor.
“Neither is mine,” Gretchen said, growling like a mastiff.
Chapter 17
Bavaria, just north of Zolling on the Amper River
General Ottavio Piccolomini lowered his spyglass. “You are certain of this, Captain? If I anchor my plans on your claim and you are mistaken, it could be a disaster. Almost certainly will be a disaster because I will have divided my forces.”
He spoke in Italian, not German. Most of the officers in the Bavarian army, like Piccolomini himself, were mercenaries and Italian had been something in the way of a lingua franca for such soldiers since the late Middle Ages. The transition of military practice from feudal levies to mercenaries employed by a centralized state had begun in Europe with the condottieri of the thirteenth and fourteenth century Italian city-states like Florence, Genoa and Venice. Many of those Italian traditions were carried on by those who practiced war as a profession, including the language, even after the rise to prominence of Swiss pikemen and German landsknechts in later centuries.
As was true of most mercenary captains, Piccolomini spoke German and Spanish as well as his native Italian—German fluently, albeit with a heavy Florentine accent, and Spanish passably. The reason he was using Italian as the common tongue of the Bavarian forces was not so much due to his own preferences as it was to the heavy Italian element in his army. His immediate staff and most of his commanders were German, but since they all spoke Italian reasonably well he had decided it would be wiser to use that language than run the risk that orders transmitted farther down the line in the course of a battle might be mistranslated.
The officer to whom he’d addressed his question was Johann Heinrich von Haslang, newly promoted from captain to colonel. Shortly after Piccolomini took control of Bavaria’s army he had begun a reorganization of the officer corps. Many of General von Lintelo’s favorites had been eased out, replaced by officers in whom Piccolomini had more confidence.
His judgment had generally been very good, thought von Haslang—even allowing for the obvious bias he had, being himself one of the beneficiaries of the new regime. Piccolomini was a humorless man, whose thick body and heavy face were a good reflection of his temperament. But he was competent and experienced and didn’t seem to suffer from the tendency of all too many mercenary commanders to play favorites with his subordinates.
“I can only give you a conditional assurance, General,” said von Haslang. He nodded toward the receding airship in the sky, still quite visible despite now being several miles away. “I have kept extensive and careful records of these vessels. The one we are watching now is the one they call the Pelican and it is the one which the USE has maintained in service here in Bavaria since the beginning of the conflict. But they have two others at their disposal should they choose to use them, the Albatross and the Petrel.”
He took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a sleeve. It was an unseasonably hot day this early in May. “Normally, they employ the Albatross as something of a general-purpose transport vehicle. It can be almost anywhere in central Europe on any given day. At the moment—but please keep in mind that these reports always lag days behind the reality because—”
He broke off. Because our pig-headed duke insists on keeping Bavaria’s few radios in Munich where they do no one any good at all instead of letting me give at least one of them to our spies… would b
e impolitic, even though Piccolomini himself probably would have agreed.
“—because they do,” he finished a bit lamely. “But for whatever it’s worth, the last reports I received placed the Albatross at Luebeck.”
Piccolomini grunted. “How fast could they get it back down here?”
Von Haslang shrugged. “That depends on how much urgency they felt, General. These airships operate with hot air and have a very limited range because of the fuel that needs to be expended to keep the air in the envelope heated. Eighty miles or so—a hundred miles, at the most. Luebeck is about four hundred miles to the north.”
Piccolomini frowned. “Much farther than that, I would think.”
“By road, yes. But I am speaking of the straight line distance which is more or less how these airships travel.”
“Ah. Yes.” Piccolomini pursed his lips, doing the calculations himself. “So, at least four legs to the trips; probably five or six.”
“Six, in this case, General. I know the specific stops they’d make. Each leg would take two to three hours, depending on the winds. If they had fuel ready to go at each stage and made a priority of refueling, they could be back in the air in an hour or so.”
“Can they fly at night?”
“Yes, but they try to avoid it whenever possible.”
“So, about two days, you’re saying.”
“Approximately. And unfortunately…”
“That’s quite a bit quicker than our spies can alert us”—Piccolomini’s heavy lips quirked into what might have been a smile of sorts—“since Duke Maximilian is unwilling to risk the few radios he has out in the field.”
He copied von Haslang’s hat-removal and use of a sleeve to wipe the sweat off his brow. Added to the heat of the day was the weight of the buff coat the general was wearing—as was von Haslang himself. Most cavalrymen favored buff coats, no matter the temperature. Risking a gaping wound in the torso or even on an arm was not worth the comfort of light clothing.
“And what about the third airship? The Petrel, was it?”