by Eric Flint
Thomas was still talking as they got off of the bus. "Michael Stearns, the President of the UMWA was in command at the battle of Badenburg, and he had the place of honor in the procession. What I do not understand is why the Jewess they call Becky was also there. The Americans cheered her as if she was as much of a hero as Herr Stearns."
Yossie knew of Grantville's court Jews, members of the famous Abrabanel family. He'd heard Americans speaking of Rebecca Abrabanel, and he was curious to hear what Thomas might have to say about her.
Several mine officials were waiting for them as the bus emptied, so Yossie had no chance to probe Thomas's feelings about Jews. Yossie had begun to recognize some of the officials. Quentin Underwood was there, along with Ken Hobbs, representing the Miner's Guild. Ron Koch's German was by far the best, so as usual, he was their spokesman.
"Men," he said, as the empty bus pulled away. "You know we defeated an army a week ago, and we took hundreds of prisoners. We released most of them. I talked to some of them, to see if they could work at the mine. As soon as the bus gets back, we will welcome them.
"You remember your first days here. Now, you are the ones with experience. To these new workers, you are going to be seen as Americans. Be warned, though. All of them were soldiers, and all of them suffered a terrible defeat a week ago. They are tough, but some of them are still stunned by what happened.
"Many of our new workers are Catholics, and most of you are Protestants. We want you to remember one thing. Our law, our official policy and the rules of the United Mine Workers of America all agree. We do not draw lines between men based on the color of a man's skin, based on his religion, or based on the land of his origin. In our eyes, all men are equal, Catholics, Protestants or Jews. I want you to remember this."
* * *
Yossie's first job every morning was to fire up the forge. The coal they were burning was difficult to light, so Yossie began by lighting a wood fire on the hearth and then he gradually built it up with coal.
Thomas had mixed feelings about the forge the Americans had built. He loved the electric blower that did away with the need for a bellows, but he disliked the coal fire and the sulfur smell it gave off. But even Thomas had to admit that once it was burning properly, the coal fire was good enough to use.
Yossie had built a perfect pile of burning coal perched over the air jet from the blower when two strangers arrived at the forge.
"Thomas Schmidt? Joseph Hanauer?" the older of the two asked, speaking with a backwoods Bavarian accent. "They said we was to work with you."
"And you are?"
"Karl, and this is Fritz."
"Are you smiths?" Thomas asked.
"Till a week ago, we were soldiers," Karl said. "I'd a pike, Fritz a musket."
Thomas glared at them. "What help can you offer here?"
"I was a farrier's apprentice before the army, I've shod plenty of horses since."
"That's something," Thomas said, grudgingly. "And what about you?" he asked turning to the other man.
"Fritz can fix anything," Karl said. "I seen him take apart a wheel lock pistol and put it right."
"Can he speak for himself?"
Fritz nodded. "I speak," he said, slowly and precisely. "And I can't fix everything. These Grantvillers have stuff I can't figure out."
"What's wrong with him?" Thomas asked.
"Bit his tongue in battle," Karl said, with a bit of a grin. "Day ago, 'twas big as a sausage."
"Let's get to work," Thomas said. "Fritz, you tend the fire, try to keep a good mound of coal burning. Add new coal as soon as we take the work off the fire to start hammering, and keep the coal mounded over the air flow so that it is burning hot and clean by the time we finish hammering. Karl, can you follow hammer signals?"
Karl looked baffled, so Thomas had to explain how he would use his small hammer to direct the forging, and then he and Yossie demonstrated. Thomas, as the master smith, held the piece they were forging on the anvil while Yossie swung the long-handled sledge hammer. Thomas used a small hammer to direct each blow of the sledge, tapping the work to show where and how to strike it.
"What are we making?" Karl asked, after he'd taken a turn at the sledge.
"Tongs," Thomas said. "They want twenty pairs for lifting iron rails." He finished mounding the coals around the iron on the hearth and then picked up a finished pair of tongs. "Joseph, help me."
Yossie took one handle while Thomas took the other and then used them to lift a yard-long chunk of rail. "The Americans say this weighs a hundred pounds. The rails they want to move are more than ten times as long."
"So much iron?" Karl asked.
"Yes, and it's not just iron, it's fine steel," Thomas said, going back to the fire and poking at the coals. "There is an iron road to the electricity mill, and they want to connect it with this mine.
"Yossie, Karl," he said, pulling the glowing iron bar from the fire. "Now we will try something. Both of you take hammers, and each of you strike in turn. The work will go much faster."
Yossie had only learned to follow Thomas's hammer signals the week before and Karl was a complete newcomer. They made many mistakes, but by noon, they'd forged another pair of tongs. When the three of them did manage to work together smoothly, it seemed that the rain of hammer blows on hot iron was almost musical.
Yossie had experienced something similar during long press runs in the print shop in Hanau. When the printer, the pressman and the ink boy got into perfect rhythm, the work became like a dance. When that happened, they seemed to get far more done without working any harder than usual.
As they ate their noon meal, Yossie noticed that Fritz was eating very slowly and with extreme care. "You must have really hurt yourself," Yossie said.
Fritz nodded. "I was in the front ranks," he said, carefully.
"Everyone round him was shot down," Karl added.
"Man beside me exploded," Fritz went on. "Bit my tongue to stop scream." He shook his head ruefully. "American guns are horrible. Don't know why I'm alive."
Thomas had been silent, but now he spoke, in a low angry voice. "Were you at Magdeburg?"
"Yes," Fritz said, looking glum.
"The American guns were worse than what you did in Magdeburg? At least the Americans had the mercy to stop shooting when you were defeated."
"I wasn't there when the city fell," Karl said. "I was out foraging."
"And did you show any mercy to the villagers whose food you took?"
A tense silence fell over the group while they finished their meals. The two Bavarians sat apart from Yossie and Thomas, and several times. it seemed that Thomas was about to say something more to them.
When Yossie finished saying the grace after meals, he wanted to take a few minutes at the forge to work on a project of his own. He had a broken knife blade in his pocket, good steel, and he wanted to re-forge it into a punch. He'd helped cut type in Hanau, and in his spare time, he was slowly working on cutting his own Hebrew alphabet, a project that had begun when he'd complained about the letter shin in the Hanau type face.
When he got to the forge, he found Thomas stirring the coals with his back to the two Bavarians, pointedly ignoring them.
"So," Thomas said, turning abruptly. The look on his face was grim. "After Magdeburg, where did you go?"
"South to Halberstadt," Karl said, "We stuck it to the Jews there, then followed Father Tilly to Eisleben."
Yossie froze.
"Thale?" Thomas said. "Did you go through Thale?"
"I don't remember the names of the places we visited. Why do you care?"
"Because I come from Thale," Thomas barked. "I lived my whole life there, my smithy was there, until your accursed army drove me out."
Yossie hardly heard a word after the words "we stuck it to the Jews." Karl had said it in passing, as if it had hardly been important. Yossie knew Jews from Halberstadt. Two families had arrived in Hanau's Jewish quarter a decade earlier, bringing stories of mob violence to rival the h
orrors Yossie had survived as a small child in Frankfurt.
Yossie wanted to confront the Bavarian, but for a Jew to confront a Christian was to invite disaster. Just the day before, Yossie and Rabbi Yakov had spoken at length about whether it was time to tell people that they were Jews. The Americans of Grantville were proud that they didn't ask about a man's religion. Yossie and his companions hadn't set out to live like Spanish Marranos, hiding their Jewishness in fear of the Christian world. That is what they were becoming, and they didn't like it.
They were fairly certain that it was safe to tell the Adduccis that they were Jews. Shortly before the two Bavarians had arrived, Yossie had even begun to think that it might be safe to tell Thomas. Now though, the arrival of the Bavarians made it clear that there was no safety.
While Yossie recovered his composure, Thomas was losing his.
"Why d'you care 'bout this place, this Magdala?" Karl asked.
"Because I was there!" Thomas choked out. "For a month, I thought I'd found a new home on the road between Jena and Weimar, and then your damned foragers burned me out."
"I was just a pikeman!" Karl said. "Not a general."
Thomas grabbed Karl by the throat and shoved him hard against the chimney of the forge. "It was pikemen like you that killed my daughter!"
"Stop," Yossie shouted. "Karl didn't kill your daughter."
"No," Thomas said, slowly loosening his grip. As he let go and backed away, he looked almost as beaten as Karl.
Yossie found that he was shaking. As he offered a hand to Karl, he wondered what had come over him. From childhood, he'd been taught not to interfere in disputes between Christians, and he was fairly certain that Karl would be among the last to come to the aid of a Jew.
"We didn't go east of Weimar," Fritz said, in Karl's defense. "We were in Erfurt, then south to Ilmenau and Badenburg."
Thomas' anger at the Bavarians was a shock. Yossie had known that Thomas was avoiding talking about his family, but he had always seemed to be a very calm man.
"Come on, folks. We have tongs to make," Thomas said, with a sigh. "Work is easier than yelling at each other."
Shortly after they set to work, Bob Eckerlin stopped outside the forge to watch them. He stepped inside when they put the iron back in the fire to reheat. "Thomas, Joe, I need you to make something."
"Was?" Thomas asked.
"Can you come take a look?"
Thomas looked at the iron in the fire and then at Yossie. He hesitated for a moment, and then handed him the small hammer. "Joseph, see what you can do."
As Thomas walked away with Bob, Yossie realized that he'd just been promoted. He wasn't entirely sure he was ready to direct the work of the two Bavarians, but he had to try.
He took hold of the cold end of the bar they'd only begun to forge and pulled it from the fire, setting the hot end on the anvil and tapping it with the small hammer. They'd begun work beating the handle to shape, but it was still far from the long graceful taper that was their goal.
Even with the heavy leather glove he wore on his left hand, each hammer blow sent a shock up his arm. Only when he held the work-piece at exactly the right angle against the anvil was it bearable. The iron cooled quickly. After five blows of the heavy sledge, it was already time to put the work-piece back in the fire.
"How long you been with these foreigners, these Grantvillers?" Karl asked.
"I came here," he said, and then paused while using a piece of rebar to mound the burning coals over the iron. "It was a month ago, just before Pentecost," he finally said, remembering the conversation with Pastor Green that Sabbath afternoon.
"What d'you make of these Grantvillers? Do you believe their story about the Ring of Fire?"
"I have no reason to doubt it," Yossie said. "The first rumors I heard called it the pit of Hell, but that's because I came from the south-west." He pointed out the open side of the smithy toward the dark cliff of the ring wall. "To the folks living up there, one moment there was a high hill here, and then bang, they were looking down at Grantville."
"You believe that story, that it just happened with a bang?"
"I was on a hill outside Kissingen that Sunday afternoon. That's a town three or four days west of here. I saw something." He paused. He'd never told anyone this story. "It was a flash to the east, as bright as the sun, and as brief as a lightning bolt, but perfectly round, the size of an Imperial thaler sitting on the horizon. The iron is hot, let's get to work."
Thomas came back into the smithy as they were finishing forging the taper of the handle. He watched them until they finished hammering, and then took the cold end of the bar from Yossie and inspected their work.
"Not bad," he said. "Start forging the handle on another bar while I make what they need."
"What do they need?" Yossie asked.
"This broke," Thomas said, holding out two pieces of iron. "It was a brace for part of the coal-washing machine, and it broke because there was only one where there should have been two."
As Thomas went into the shop building to look for an iron bar, Fritz picked up a piece of coal from the bin beside the hearth. "They wash this?" he asked puzzled.
"That building is all for coal washing," Yossie said, pointing to a large building that seemed to be made entirely of rippled metal. "I don't understand how coal can be washed, but they are having some trouble making those machines work."
When Thomas came out of the shop building, Yossie, Karl and Fritz were hard at work. As soon as Yossie put his work-piece in the fire, Thomas took over the anvil, and for some time after that, Yossie and Thomas alternated at the anvil while Karl swung the hammer for both of them.
When they finally took a break, Yossie spoke. "Thomas. You never told me about your daughter." The question on his mind was an innocent one, but by the end of the day, he would regret speaking.
Part Three: All Creatures Stand in Judgment
Tenth of Tamuz, 5391 (July 10, 1631)
The trip by cart from Grantville to a wooded hillside above Magdala had only taken a day. Seen from the hillside, the village looked large. Yossie had expected Magdala to be a tiny place, but if it had been walled, he would have called it a small town without hesitation.
After a month's rest, the old horse had recovered from the trip east from Hanau. They had followed the good road north up the broad Saale valley almost to Jena. From there, they had turned west to climb up a side valley to the broad plains around Magdala. Where the slopes of the valley had been dominated by vineyards and orchards, the plains around Magdala were cropland, with hedgerows dividing fields. Aside from the trees along the stream north of Magdala, the only trees were on the low forested hills rising above the croplands.
Yossie had hoped that they would spend Wednesday night in Magdala, but Thomas had insisted that they stay in the woods to the east. Yossie had eaten cold meals and slept under the same cart often enough on the road from Hanau, but the night had been uncomfortable. After a month living with the Adduccis, he'd grown a bit spoiled.
"Tell me again," Yossie asked, as he and Thomas ate a breakfast of cold sausage and bread. "Why couldn't we spend the night in Magdala? Yesterday, that man in Bucha said that half the Imperials in Weimar had gone north to chase the Swedes."
"Right," Thomas replied. "But I don't believe him. He also said things were so bad that honest townsmen would rob a stranger for the shirt on his back. Foragers have stripped the land, and I'll bet that we're not far behind the stragglers who burned that village we passed. Best we not tempt anyone."
As they pulled out of the woods Thursday morning, Yossie remembered how the trip had started. "Those Papist scum murdered my Maria," Thomas had said, glaring at the two Bavarians who'd been assigned to the Murphy's Run forge.
"Where is she buried?" Yossie had asked, trying to be sympathetic.
"Buried!" Thomas had barked. "Do wolves bury their prey? I saw those beasts throw my poor Maria into a ditch." His voice had faded to a whisper. "I could do nothing, I tell you."
When Thomas had asked Yossie to help bury his daughter, Yossie hadn't said yes immediately. As they drove across the flat cropland toward Magdala, Yossie thought over the advice he'd received from his companions.
A passage from the Talmud had come to mind after Thomas had asked for Yossie's help. It was reprinted in the prayer-book at the start of the morning prayers.
"Of these things a man may eat the fruit in this world while the principal remains in the world to come: Honoring father and mother, acts of kindness, timely attendance at morning and evening prayers in the house of study, providing for guests, visiting the sick, providing for a bride, escorting the dead, deep prayer, and bringing peace between a man and his fellow, but the study of Torah is equivalent to all."
Escorting the dead to the grave, of course, was the subject that dominated Yossie's thoughts. He knew that it would also be an act of kindness to help Thomas, and that it could help make peace between Thomas and the two Bavarians.
When he'd asked his sister Basiya's advice, she'd shocked him. "Thomas' daughter was killed for kiddush ha-Shem," she'd said, flatly. The term referred to martyrs who'd died for the sanctification of God's holy name.
"But she was Lutheran," Yossie had objected.
"If soldiers had come to our home because we lived in the Jewish quarter, and if they'd murdered me, you'd say I died for kiddush Ha-Shem. Soldiers did come to his house because he lived in a Lutheran town and they did kill his daughter. How is it different?"
"So you want me to go?"
"No," she'd replied. "I'm afraid you'll be hurt. But I think I'd find it hard to say no if I was a man. Please be careful."
Yakov's advice had been no surprise. "These things have no fixed measure," the rabbi had quoted, and then changed the subject. That Talmud quotation was from the same section of the prayer-book that Yossie had thought of when Thomas first asked his help. The meaning was clear enough. Helping Thomas would be good, but Yossie was under no obligation.
When Randolph Adducci heard what Yossie was planning, he'd gone over to the locked cabinet where he kept his guns and returned with an American pistol, a revolver, he'd called it. Randolph had spent that evening and the next teaching Yossie to shoot the pistol and to care for the mechanism.