Ring of Fire

by Eric Flint

  Mazzare laughed. "Most of the usual patron saints for Catholic churches in the twentieth century are either still alive, not saints yet or not even born." He frowned again. "Or politically sensitive."

  "It must be difficult. No, to return to my confession of error, I had believed that His Eminence the Cardinal Richelieu was preparing to seek advantage from your presence. I had thought that he would seek a more general war with Spain."

  "He's not?"

  "No. It seems that between Grantville and its Jews, His Eminence feels Sweden is strong enough that France is better served by alignment with Spain. Which puts me in a hard place."

  "Oh?" Mazzare's face was suddenly still. Unlike Jones, he had been known to play the occasional hand of cards, and was good at it.

  "Yes. I am now in poor odor in Rome. With France and Spain now aligning, my efforts to hold a balance between them are no longer so highly thought of. I have been these past few months trying to keep on my political feet."

  Mazzare let out the breath he had been holding in a sigh. "That's nothing we hadn't heard, of course. We have a force out to—we have forces out. We suspected something of this kind must have happened. And His Holiness?"

  Mazarini nodded. "Can do nothing for fear of the Spaniards. So long as we were providing a, a—"

  "Level killing field?" Mazzare's tone was savage.

  Mazarini, in return, was gloomy. "Yes, yes, rem acu tetigisti. A phrase of the twentieth century?" He thought for a moment of what Mantua had looked like after three years of bloody stalemate.

  "Yes. An English diplomat," Mazzare spat the word, "sent to try and settle fighting in the Balkans."

  Mazzare barked a short laugh. "I can excuse him a harsh word or two, if he was sent to do that. Even the Turks have trouble there. No, now France and Spain no longer need their killing field, His Holiness has less need of peacemakers. These three months past I am recalled to Cardinal Barberini's court. It is said to me that I were better to keep quiet for a time, since I have tried to make trouble for France and keep her from Spain's throat, not knowing they were pissing in the same pot." He snarled the last words, his waxed mustachios quivering in indignation. "So," he sighed, "I am come here, at your invitation. Perhaps there is something I can do."

  Mazzare placed a hand on his shoulder. "We figured some of it out, you know, when Servien never turned up, or at least never announced himself. We'd heard he'd left Vienna after trying to make trouble for the Abrabanels and was on his way here, but we didn't have anyone on hand who'd recognize him." Mazzare's voice turned bitter. "All this time thinking the religion would cause the trouble."

  "I will admit it is worse than I imagined it would be. There is talk of witchcraft"—he held up a hand to stop Mazzare's hot interjection—"Flummery. The talk of witchcraft is a pretext, as it usually is. The real issue is France, Spain, and the Spanish Road. I had thought that Richelieu would take advantage against Spain, but it seems that His Eminence has made an error."

  "An error? We're a threat to him. We took his best ally against the Habsburgs and bought them out from under him."

  "Which Richelieu should have seen as an opportunity to undo Spain. The fool." Mazarini gave vent to a stream of language in an idiom four centuries older than Mazzare had learned in Chicago yet surprisingly comprehensible. "That could so easily have been repaired," he said when he had run out of splenetic force. "France and Spain guided into deadlock with each other, Sweden allowed just enough to stop Wallenstein. It could have been done. I could have done it. This war could have been ended!" This last a shout, at the heavens, clear and starry and moon-bright, the half moon low in the east obscuring the earth with silver-gray shadows.

  "And Rome?"

  Mazarini sighed again. "Rome is under Spain's thumb. Now Richelieu is in with Spain, Rome must needs no longer intrigue against France and France will not help Rome against Spain. We must allow France her head, and no doubt they will cease to move against Italy."

  "That isn't what I meant." Mazzare's voice was gentle, weary.

  "It is not?"

  "Where am I in all this?" Mazzare spoke quietly, pleading.

  Mazarini placed a hand on his arm. "I am sorry, Padre. I do not know. I truly do not. No one is paying mind to such petty matters as religion. Or peace."

  Silence fell. Mazarini made his excuses and retired to the presbytery's guest room.

  * * *

  Mazzare did not go to bed that night. Had anyone been up and about, they would have seen lights on in the church.

  For a little while, at least, sitting in the presiding chair on the sanctuary—itself an anachronism in this century—he could be seen to be at peace. Over his shoulder, the crucifixion scene behind the tabernacle. In his lap, his well-worn rosary.

  For some time after, sitting perfectly still, he stared across the sanctuary at the lectern, the missal open on it. Now he sat in a less composed fashion, his face closed and tight as he considered the sight of the book of liturgy.

  And when he could bear that no longer, he simply stared, eyes unfocused, into the empty pews, his face candid in its misery as he awaited a dawn that had still not come when he turned off the lights and left the church.

  * * *

  Mazarini, as was his habit, arose before dawn and descended to find Mazzare, Heinzerling and the redoubtable Frau Hannelore Heinzerling in the kitchen.

  Like breakfast tables since the dawn of time, there was little conversation among the adults while the children—three beefy little boys, the eldest about eight—chattered. Frau Heinzerling served up just about everything that it was possible to fry in heroic portions, and coffee and beer in similar quantities. Mazarini declined coffee and beer, but noted that Mazzare was drinking coffee like his life depended on it.

  "You like coffee?" Mazarini tried to open some form of conversation once breakfast had gone down and Frau Heinzerling had rounded the boys up for school. St. Mary's, it seemed, was a rich parish to afford schooling for three children.

  "Didn't sleep much, last night," was the mumbled reply.

  Mazarini noted a peculiar expression on Heinzerling's face. Reproach for his former master, concern for the American priest—it was hard to tell.

  Another gambit, then. "Perhaps we might discuss how I am to spend my time in Grantville?" Something was troubling Mazzare, it seemed, and Mazarini thought that perhaps a practical topic would concentrate his wits.

  At that, Heinzerling rose from the table. "I will go and open the church for morning mass, ja?" he said, and left.

  "Doesn't want to hear anything he'd have to report," said Mazzare. His voice was as tired as his face. "The man's torn."

  "You are troubled?"

  "Somewhat."

  "I will not pry. Perhaps I might presume upon you for introductions to Grantville's notables? If I can do nothing else, I can at least be plying my trade."

  "Already tried. I called Rebecca Stearns, but she's gone up to the school for the morning, I was told. Everyone else is out of town at the moment." With a sudden burst of vigor, Mazzare wrenched himself from his chair. "Come on, I'll give you the ten-dollar tour. Need some fresh air, anyway."

  * * *

  It was a fresh, bright September morning, the pale moon still showing in the west, the sun low in the east. The town of Grantville, seen only briefly the day before, had some intriguing novelty on every street and corner.

  The architecture was odd; severely plain in some instances, strangely fanciful in others and here and there, bizarrely, echoing classical Rome. Tastes in ornamentation were radically different from his own.

  Mazzare was clearly well known. Those up and about were, in the main, women and the elderly. Most with a greeting or a wave or a nod for the American priest.

  Children he saw assembling to be taken to school, and the notion of schooling for all was explained to him. It was more than even the Jesuits attempted.

  Then he saw the buses, and was startled almost out of his wits. He had read of the engine-vehicles
of Grantville, but the first encounter was a shock. In that shock, he made the mistake of asking Mazzare how the engine worked.

  Half an hour later, and dazed by the flood of information and the first genuine enthusiasm the American priest had evinced in his presence, Mazarini was, if no wiser about the operation of the internal combustion engine, at least ignorant in more detail than before.

  Their walk had taken them down by the creek that ran through Grantville when the alarms began to sound. It began with a wail, somewhere between a wolf and night wind in a chimney-cowl.

  "Trouble," said Mazzare.

  "What is that noise?"

  "Siren." He said the word in English. "No, not the mythical creature. A machine for making noise." Mazzare turned and lengthened his stride.

  "Oh." Mazarini had to walk more quickly to keep up with Mazzare, who stood a full hand-span taller than him. "Where are we going?"

  "Downtown. See what's going on."

  "We can help?"

  "Straight away, no. But we need to know where our action stations are."

  * * *

  Downtown turned out to be the name for the part of town with the tallest buildings in it, and there was the busy, determined chaos of a wasp's nest going on in it. Mazzare spoke to several people to get the story, and then translated for Mazarini. It was, indeed, a cavalry raiding party, sighted on the edge of town near the school.

  Mazarini followed Mazzare to help direct people as they came into the center of town. A man sporting a bronze badge had given the orders. He had been swearing sulphurously about the lack of warning. Apparently someone assumed that cavalry a hundred miles away two days before would not be a threat so soon and simply left a note on the desk of the Chief of Police—who had been too busy to notice it.

  "Wallenstein," said Mazarini.

  "You think so?" answered Mazzare. "No shortage of other bandits."

  "Not with Wallenstein around. Better opportunities for loot and a stipend when pickings are poor."

  "Whatever." Mazzare shrugged, began directing the streams of people toward doorways.

  Mazarini felt his eyebrows climbing when he saw the people coming to take shelter. "They're all armed!"

  Mazzare grinned over his shoulder, breaking off briefly from his work. "Welcome to America!"

  The weapons were different, the soldiers nothing like those Mazarini had led in the Valtelline. Nevertheless, the ambush taking shape around the plaza was as old as warfare.

  Heinzerling showed up at the head of a column of elderly women, half of them with the peculiar pistols the Americans favored.

  And then came a shout. "Father Mazzare! We need your help." It was another man with a badge.

  Mazzare strode off, Mazarini on his heels. The man with the badge strode along with him, explaining something in English, talking too fast for Mazarini to follow.

  They came to a building that was a whirl of activity, more men—and women, here, too, with badges. There was a thunder of shouting in English and German both. Many of those doing the shouting were shouting into little boxes with sticks on them. Like the telefon, he thought.

  Mazzare, oblivious to Mazarini now, had picked up a telephone and was talking into it, urgently but gently. Heinzerling had come along too. "Scheisse," he said, "typisch."

  "What?" Mazarini was still confused.

  "Frau Flannery. She was at mass this morning. She must have gone home instead of following me here."

  "Who?"

  In the background, Mazzare. "Irene, it's not safe, yes, I know, but you must . . ."

  Heinzerling went on. "Widow. Older than Satan and just as pleasant. Took it badly when Hannelore began cleaning the church. Thought Hanni was not good enough to set foot in a church. Called her a whore. Hanni called her some bad names, too. Father Mazzare couldn't get them to see reason. I told Hanni to forgive and forget, but Frau Flannery stopped talking to anyone but Father Mazzare."

  " . . . I know, Irene, but you'll be—yes, but there's no sense . . ."

  Mazarini, trying to follow two conversations at once, stopped staring at Mazzare and asked, over his shoulder, "Why?"

  Heinzerling's shrug was all but audible. "Who knows? She is a crazy old woman."

  " . . . yes, Irene, I know to the minute how long it's been, but I can hardly hear it over the phone, you should come . . ."

  "Is he doing what I think—"

  "Ja." Pause, for another shrug. "He feels bad that she feels unwanted, mein' ich. But Hannelore was fifty years younger and lives next to the church. She could still have helped, but—"

  From Mazzare, resignedly, the Latin words of absolution. He put the phone down, his face gray. "Penance hardly seemed worth it." Louder, to one of the badged men. "She won't come, Dan. Won't be driven out of her home, she says."

  "You did all you could, Father."

  "I should go—"

  The badged man, Dan, cut that off with a wave. "No, Father. Don't. She made her choice. Save those that want it." He strode away, barking orders—unmistakably in command.

  Heinzerling, now, with more tenderness than Mazarini had thought the Jesuit had in him. "We should find a position on the plaza, Father."

  * * *

  The battle itself was short, noisy and one-sided. The three priests took station in an upper room, awaiting the signal. Heinzerling turned out to have an American pistol, a huge brute of a thing by the standards of such, machined of some black metal. Mazzare frowned, but said nothing.

  Outside, Mazzare could see down the street to where the Croats were coming from, and saw Dan Frost the constable facing them down. Good, he thought, draw them in. There is a man with courage, to die for his people. Would that constables in other towns were so conscientious.

  The constable drew a pistol, leveled it at the front rank of Croats.

  The shooting, when it came, was a rattle of rapid fire, the crack and curls of blue smoke from the Americans answering the coughs and reeking clouds of the Croat pistols.

  Mazzare kept to the back of the room, where the unarmed sheltered, comforting the frightened. Mazarini stood in the window, ignoring the imprecations to keep his head down—every inch the captain he had once been—and watched the slaughter in the street below for some minutes.

  Like him, Heinzerling stood. Side on to the window in the classic duelist's stance, returning fire and grinning the savage, tusky grin of a boar with the drop on the hunters.

  The windows shattered in the storm of fire, the tinkle of glass inaudible in the rip of gunfire and the screams of wounded men and dying horses.

  When it was clear that the battle was won, the street outside a bloody, shrieking shambles, Mazarini turned to find Mazzare holding a blood-soaked cloth to the back of a woman's head.

  "Scalp wounds always bleed badly," offered Mazarini, "but are seldom serious."

  "She's concussed. That"—Mazzare stabbed a finger at a heavy, brass-framed icon in the Eastern style—"fell off the wall."

  Mazarini picked it up. It was painted on, of all things, black velvet. The saint's face was serene, slightly corpulent, and he was dressed in a white raiment adorned with jewels. The name written under the portrait was an odd one, the appellation even more so. Elvis—Still the King.

  "What saint is this?" he asked, able now to converse normally with the guns all but silent.

  It took some time to explain the slightly hysterical laughter to his satisfaction.

  * * *

  Irene Flannery's body was not found for hours. Cut down in her front yard, she had tried to drag herself back to her house to die, but had gotten only as far as a flowerbed. A riot of colorful growth like the rest of her garden, it had concealed her corpse from the first quick parties of searchers.

  She was found, eventually, and only on Father Mazzare's insistence was she brought to the church for burial.

  The order of service was stilted. The passages of scripture, the prayers and invocations echoed in the empty church. The badged man, the "Dan" who had spoken with Ma
zzare after he had tried to save the old woman's life, turned up for the requiem mass.

  He had taken no communion and left without speaking. The Protestant Jones had also attended and had followed the pitiful cortege to the graveside, his worried silence following Mazzare's grimness like the foam in the wake of a ship running before a storm wind.

  Mazzare had spoken the words of the requiem mass in a cold tone, an iron tone that hammered the flowing Latin syllables and drew them out as a glowing, hot wire of condemnation.

  His sermon had been harsher still, for all its quietness and plainness of manner.

  "The Ring of Fire was an Act of God," he had begun, "and in His Act he has done nothing so capricious as the act that has brought us here today. Irene Flannery, in her lonely old age, felt rejected. Rejected even by the church she made the second home of her thirty years of widowhood."

  Not, today, the literary form of the eulogy, deprecated in a catechism that would not be written for three hundred years.

  "She was not alone."

  There were only seven people and a corpse to hear him. Only the corpse did not flinch.

  "We have been brought to a world in which religion is no more than gang colors."

  The walk to the cemetery was silent. There had been neither gasoline nor spare horses for a hearse. Irene Flannery, birdlike in life like so many old women, scarcely outweighed her pine box, but the pallbearers' tread was heavy.

  "A world in which people kill and die and nations stand or fall by the canting of theologians and the greed of statesmen."

  Heinzerling had risen in the small hours to dig a grave in the pouring rain.

  "It is not enough to say that religion is not to blame. That it was only a pretext."

  Half of those present at the graveside wore vestments. The rain had made short work of all of them, and the wind flapped the sodden cloths in short, harsh volleys of cracks, the only salute Irene Flannery would get.

  "Nor is it enough to say that she will be missed by no one. That she left no living relatives behind in America, had no friends here. The same can be said of millions."