1636- the Flight of the Nightingale

by David Carrico

  Johann sighed. “Fräulein Anastasia Matowski,” he said reluctantly.

  “I thought you said she was an up-timer. Is she Polish?” Christoph wrinkled his forehead. “Russian?”

  “Up-timer,” Johann said, gritting his teeth. “And the up-timers use Fräulein as a common form of address for any unmarried woman, so do not be thinking she’s a child of rank or anything.”

  “So is she a musician, too?” Heinrich asked, his grin broadening.

  “No, not like Frau Marla. She’s a teacher. And that’s all I’m going to say for now. Now come on, we need to go talk to Herr Jere Haygood.”

  * * *

  It was evening, and Johann and his brothers had just stepped into the Green Horse. He was chewing the last of a piece of sausage he had bought from a street vendor who had been about to close for the evening. His hand was greasy, so he wiped it on the seat of his trousers.

  “Johann! Over here!”

  He could see Marla standing at the end of a table and waving at him. He waved back, but stopped first at the tavern keeper’s bar to acquire mugs of beer for himself and Christoph and Heinrich. Once they were all suitably equipped, he led the way toward Marla’s table.

  In addition to the musicians of Marla’s immediate circle, several other friends were there. Johann’s heart seemed to skip a beat when he saw Staci Matowski and her friend Casey.

  The two young women were wearing usual up-timer garb: trousers, rather snug-fitting sweaters, and caps that looked something like Staci’s baseball team cap only covered with many rows of small reflecting things that bounced light from the lamps and candles into Johann’s eyes. They had to be some form of sequin, he decided, albeit a bit smaller than he had ever seen before, and certainly more concentrated in quantity, since he could not see a bit of the bare fabric of the cap underneath them. Staci’s hat was a dark blue, and Casey’s was a brilliant red. Both were reflecting flashes of light around the interior of the tavern as they turned their heads in conversation and laughter. Staci’s hair had grown out some since the short cut she had gotten several weeks ago, but it was still rather short, which left a fringe of the hair sticking out from the bottom edge of the hat.

  Lights were also reflecting from the wire hoop earrings that Staci was wearing. They attracted Bach’s attention, as he had never seen such before. Studs that nestled against the earlobes, yes. Dangling earrings, yes. But hoops, now…those were new to him. But then his attention was caught by something else.

  Staci was sitting sideways on the end of a bench, left foot on the bench and arms wrapped around her left knee as she looked across the table at Casey and laughed at something her friend was saying. She was wearing a shoe much like a slipper which left the top of the foot mostly bare, since she wore no sock or hose on the foot. Johann’s first thought was that the shoe was a bit impractical for the season. His second came as he stopped and tilted his head in the realization that there was a large mark on the top of her foot.

  “Hi, Johann.” Staci had looked around and seen him standing there. She caught the direction of his gaze. “Like my tat?”

  “Your what?”

  “My tattoo.” She lifted her foot up and angled it so that the light shown across the top of her instep. “See? It’s a rose, and the stem runs up and circles above my ankle like a bracelet or anklet.”

  In the better light, Johann could see the artwork involved for what it was—a rather nice rendition of a scarlet rosebud, with a green stem complete with thorns that twined up the top of her foot until it reached her ankle and then circled her leg as she had described. The small shapely foot and slender ankle did stir him a bit.

  “Interesting artwork,” he said. “Do a lot of you up-timers have those?”

  “Some,” Staci said. “Don’t people do tattoos in the here and now?”

  “I think religious pilgrims may sometimes get some kind of symbol or icon when they do achieve a pilgrimage,” he said. “And of course, sailors and soldiers seem to have a lot of them. But the regular folk, no, not that I’ve seen.”

  Staci shrugged. “Same with us. Lots of military folks, lots of biker types, and some other side groups of society, but not a lot of the regular folks. This was actually my eighteenth birthday present to myself, and I caught hell from Mom and my grandma about it.” Johann raised his eyebrows at that, and Staci laughed. “Oh, for different reasons. Mom had a practical concern about it showing through any dance outfit I might wear. Dancers are in white and pastels so much that just wouldn’t cover something so dark. I had to prove to her that there are stage makeups and creams that are opaque enough to cover it. Once she saw that, she was okay with it.”

  “And your grandmother?” Johann asked.

  “I had to pull Reverend Jones in on that one,” Staci replied. “Like a lot of older church folks, she thought that the Bible teaches that tattoos are sinful because of one verse in the Bible somewhere in Leviticus. He was able to explain to her that the verse was specifically talking about the Jews not practicing pagan rituals about worshipping the dead, so that if the tattoo doesn’t match up with pagan worship, it’s okay from that standpoint. Then he told her that since we’re not Jewish, we’re not bound by that commandment anyway, especially since the Jerusalem council in Acts clarified that non-Jews are not bound by the Jewish law.” She grinned again. “I’m not sure that she really believed him, but she quit muttering about it, anyway.”

  “It is a nice piece of artwork,” Johann said, eyeing her foot again and admiring its smallness and slenderness.

  “Yeah, I had to go all the way to Morgantown to find a guy who was good enough to do it.” She shrugged as she dropped the foot back to the bench. “Cost me a pretty penny, too, but it was worth it.”

  “So does someone in Grantville not do tattoos? Is that why you traveled?”

  “No one I trusted back then,” Staci said. “I wanted to make sure that whoever did it was a good artist and kept his needles and equipment clean. I figured I was going to be living with whatever I did for a long time, so I wanted it to be good art, and I didn’t want to pick up an infection from it.”

  “Needles?” Christoph asked, eyebrows raised.

  “They use small-gauge needles to inject the color into your flesh,” Staci said with a moue of distaste.

  “That must have hurt.” Christoph again.

  “Not really.”

  Casey turned back toward the group. “It hurt like a big dog. Don’t let her kid you.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did so,” Casey retorted. “I was there, listening to every whimper you made, and holding hands with you until you about crushed mine. Watching you deal with it is one reason why I never got one.”

  Staci shrugged again. “Well, maybe it hurt a little. Tattooist said that it would probably hurt more there than if I’d done something on my arm because the tissue was so thin and there were so many nerves. But I wanted it on my foot.”

  Johann shook his head. “Does anyone in Grantville do it now?”

  She shrugged again. “There are a few folks doing it. But I’ve got the one I wanted, so I haven’t been thinking about it much.” Staci pivoted and put her foot on the floor. “Have a seat…and who’s that with you?”

  Johann sat down and slid over. “My brothers, Christoph and Heinrich.”

  “Hi, guys,” Staci said with a smile. “Sit down…I think there’s room.”

  The two brothers nodded at Staci and returned her smile. Christoph took the end of the bench by Johann, and Heinrich sat on the other side of the table by Casey.

  “Are you guys into music, too?” Casey asked.

  All three of the brothers laughed. “We are Bachs,” Christoph said. “Of course we are…how did you say it…‘into music.’”

  “There are Bachs scattered all through Thuringia,” Johann continued. “And everywhere you find us, we are mostly involved with music. There may be one or two who aren’t, but I do not know of them if there are.”

  “Wow,” S
taci said. “So you could make an all-Bach orchestra if you were all in one place.”

  “And a choir as well,” Heinrich said with a grin.

  “That’s cool,” Casey said. “My mom would have been thrilled at that kind of thing. So, Johann, did you ever figure out if you are related to Johann Sebastian Bach?”

  At that moment, Marla stood and moved to the piano that stood against one wall of the tavern, followed by Franz and her friends. Johann quickly pointed to himself, “Great-uncle,” to Heinrich, “Great-uncle,” to Christoph, “Grandfather. Later.”

  Casey and Staci both nodded, and everyone turned their eyes to where the musicians were assembling.

  “Good evening, everyone,” Marla announced. The room was mostly full by now, and there was a rumbled response of various forms of greetings. “Glad you’re here,” she continued. “We’re going to have some fun tonight, so hang on and let’s get started.” With that, she sat down on the piano bench and placed her hands on the keys.

  “Play some soul music, sistuh,” a voice drawled from the back of the room.

  Marla spun on the bench with a surprised look, which was replaced by perhaps the biggest grin Johann had ever seen. “Nissa? Nissa Pritchard, is that you?”

  “Ain’t nobody else, child,” came the response in a resonant voice that came from a Moorish woman who was dressed in up-timer clothing who made her way through the crowd.

  Marla jumped to her feet and met the other woman at the edge of the front table line. They embraced in a strong hug, then stood back. The other woman’s grin was as large as Marla’s, and her white teeth shone in the midst of her dark face. Johann judged her to be of rather mature years—there were wrinkles on her face—but as with many of the up-timers, he hesitated to judge her by down-timers’ standards. Best he could do was guess that she was over forty. Her face was strong, and that combined with her short curly, kinky hair gave her an exotic appearance for the middle of Germany. Everyone knew of Dr. Nichols and his daughter Sharon who had come back with Grantville in the Ring of Fire, but this was the first that Johann had heard that there had been anyone else of their race among the up-timers.

  “It’s good to see you, Nissa,” Marla said. “I’ve missed seeing you.”

  “That goes both ways, you know,” the older woman said with a laugh.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “Oh, Mayor Gericke brought me and Claude and a couple of the other power plant team guys up here to talk about building a big power plant in Magdeburg.”

  “Cool.” Marla’s eyebrows popped up, and her eyes gave an additional gleam. “Say, did you bring that mouth harp with you?”

  Nissa laughed and slipped a hand into an inside jacket pocket to bring out something that shone in the lamplight with a brassy golden gleam. “Now would I be anywhere without this?”

  “Great!” Marla enthused. She grabbed Nissa by the arm and dragged her over by the piano, where she looked around at Franz and the other musicians. “Sorry, boys, there’s been a change in plans.” She dropped onto the bench, and looked out at the room with another big grin. “Okay, folks, hold onto your hats. This is going to be like nothing you’ve heard before. Tonight we’re going to be doing some Southern music.”

  Johann was confused. Southern music? Swiss? Venetian? Roman? What did she mean?

  Casey turned back to the brothers and murmured, “Southern up-timer music. It’s good, but it’s probably pretty different from what you’re used to.”

  Marla played a few dissonant sounding chords, then looked up at Nissa. “What key are you doing ‘Steamroller Blues’ in this month?”

  Those white teeth flashed again in Nissa’s dark face. “Key of G sounds good to me.”

  What followed was an astonishing potpourri of some of the most unusual music Johann had ever heard. He was dumbfounded from beginning to end; when he looked at his brothers, they seemed to be even more astonished than he was.

  It was one song after another, frequently with no breaks at all between them as Marla would play two or three transition chords to move from one to another. And they were all music that just gripped him, even as he struggled to assimilate what he was hearing. The rhythms frequently so syncopated that he had trouble feeling the beat. The harmonies were frequently so dissonant that at times he almost lost the key feeling. Yet there was a power to the music, whether fast or slow, that just reached out and transfixed him.

  Song followed song: “Steamroller Blues,” “Crossroad Blues,” “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” “Rockin’ Chair Blues,” “Down By the River,” “Miss Brown to You,” “Go Down Moses,” “Preaching Blues,” and on and on. Most of them were sung by Nissa with additional lines on what Marla called a harmonica, but Marla sang a few, and added descants to a couple of others.

  Johann was almost exhausted by the time he felt they might be drawing toward a conclusion. They pulled into a slow-moving song where Marla took the lead. “Cry Me a River” was saddening in most ways, and the room grew quiet by the end. That was followed by Nissa doing one called “God Bless the Child” that the CoC members in the room seemed to appreciate, based on the thumps of fists on the table and boots on the floor when it concluded.

  “Yeeoowww!” Marla almost screamed out as she stood up and knocked her bench over backwards, startling Johann and most of the room. She started hammering the piano keyboard in an almost berserk manner, a very heavy syncopation, with both hands moving almost independently, bringing them to a point where she was repeating the same chord rapidly. Then she opened her mouth and began singing a song about some boy who lived in the woods down by New Orleans, wherever that was. Nissa was playing the harmonica along with her, and the other musicians were falling into place as they began to pick up the harmonies.

  They arrived at the chorus, which involved heavy chord repetition and syncopation again, and very simple words, repeating “Go!” and ending with “Johnny B. Goode.”

  Nissa took the second verse, they cycled through the chorus again, and Marla took the third and last verse. When they hit the chorus again, Nissa took the lead with Marla singing a descant over the top. The chorus was repeated a number of times, until they reached a place where Marla held the last word out for an extended time while she took the chords through another transition run into a final song. Nissa gave a short laugh when the chords resolved into the final pattern, but turned and faced toward the crowd to belt out the final song.

  Oh, when the saints go marching in

  Oh, when the saints go marching in

  Oh, Lord I want to be in that number

  When the saints go marching in

  They cycled through a number of verses before returning to the original. By now everyone in the room understood the melody, and they started singing along with the words as that verse was repeated over and over again. Fists were beating on tables, boots were stomping on the floor. Even as he sang along with the others, Johann kind of wondered if the tavern building could withstand much of this. He found he didn’t care. A glance out of the corner of his eye showed that Christoph and Heinrich were standing alongside him and singing at the top of their lungs as well.

  Oh, when the saints go marching in

  Oh, when the saints go marching in

  Oh, Lord I want to be in that number

  When the saints go marching in

  Marla brought the song to a crashing conclusion with bravura keyboard work up and down the black and white keys. When she took her hands off the keys and straightened, the room burst into applause, and Nissa grabbed her in a big hug. The two of them embraced, then stood together side by side, arms over each other’s shoulders, almost panting as they laughed together.

  Johann found he envied them…at least a little. He greatly enjoyed making music, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever had a time like this one, where he commanded such an outpouring of sound and energy and gathered the focused attention of so many people at once. That didn’t reduce the pace or strength at which he beat his hands
together, though.

  The din finally dwindled as Marla and her friends, including Nissa and a large up-timer, settled at the other end of the table. As the rest of the room sat back and the bar servers began scurrying around picking up empty mugs and replacing them with full ones, Johann and those at his end of the table just looked at each other, almost worn out with what they had just witnessed and been a part of.

  “Wow,” Staci said. “I’d kind of forgotten just how much energy Marla can pack into a performance.”

  “You mean she does that a lot?” Johann asked.

  “It doesn’t come through quite as strongly in her classical performances,” Staci said.

  “Classical?” That from Christoph.

  “Her serious stuff,” Casey said. “What she does with and for Mary Simpson and the Royal Arts League. It’s a different style of music, one more directly connected with the court music of this time.”

  “And the new stuff that Master Carissimi and Master Schütz write, too,” Staci said. “I just wish they’d write a ballet or two.”

  “Your mom still wants to stage the old standards,” Casey said.

  “I know,” Staci replied, “and I get that. I don’t want to see them fade away, either. They’re too important for dancers. But I think we need some new stuff, too.”

  “Ballet? Is that not something in France?” Heinrich asked.

  “Sort of,” Staci said, her mouth quirking for a moment. “But what we do is very different. It does involve a lot of dancing, a lot of very structured and choreographed movement by sometimes a lot of people.”

  “Dancing?”

  Casey leaned forward. “Staci’s mom was a professional dancer for a little while. Then she started teaching dancing to students. Since the Ring fell, she’s been teaching a lot of people, including a few daughters of Adel families.” She shrugged. “It’s really good physical exercise and conditioning, and it requires some real discipline to practice and develop.”

  “So do you do this ballet?” Heinrich asked.