Ring of Fire II

by Eric Flint

  "Lighten up, Lizbeth. I haven't seen a single one coming through the pass who was a, a mercenary or b, someone who wanted to just sit on his butt. Lots of solid citizens in the making."

  "Hmpf," she grumped. "Increase the fire," she told the younger soldier. That he'd actually do it came as a revelation four weeks ago. They were both privates, he a 1631 graduate from Grantville High, technically senior to her. She, well, she was three years older than him. Back in the old days . . . She shook her head and smiled as she watched him. America has it better.

  Wade threw four more chunks of dry split wood on the fire. "Don't think we're going to get any more business tonight," he said, taking off his gloves to warm his hands directly on the fire.

  Elizabeth walked away from the fire in the moonlight to the edge of the clearing and looked to the south at the white snow. Had there been a dark spot to the left of those trees earlier? "Wade, komm hier!"

  "Papa, I'm cold," Drina complained, her six year-old hands, feet and legs bundled in pieces of an old blanket sewn together. Her teeth were chattering as she followed her father and older brother on the trail they'd broken through the snow.

  Three weeks ago her mother had died of illness in the village where they lived. It had taken Drina's papa two days to dig her grave. That night he told Joshua and her that the next day they were leaving the farm and going to find somewhere to live, somewhere the soldiers would not find them. Somewhere the memories would not hurt.

  So, with all the possessions they could carry on their backs, the family began moving carefully. They rarely traveled by the day even if it was warmer, reasoning that soldiers would be able to see them from a distance and at night, they would see the soldiers' campfires and avoid them. But mostly they traveled the trails high in the Thuringian forest.

  "We're all cold, Drina," her eleven-year-old brother briefly turned his head to say. Joshua wore an old coat of his father's covering his own clothing and like Drina, his hands were covered by mittens sewn together by his father two weeks ago. Also like her, he had outer trousers made from old woolen blankets.

  "Quiet, you two," Papa said, breaking the trail in the snow between the trees. "There are real wolves out here who'd like nothing better than to eat you. Not to mention the human wolves who are even worse."

  That was as much as Papa had said at one time while walking on the trail in the past two days, Drina thought. He was stumbling and was leaning on Joshua more and more often. They'd ground, boiled and eaten the last of their wheat a week ago. Before stopping each day, they set snares to catch rabbits and twice they had. They boiled it up with some grass and herbs in the small pot Papa carried. The last was three days ago and since then they had passed by two devastated villages.

  Papa had gone down into the villages looking for food, coming back empty-handed the first time and with a freshly killed dog yesterday morning. "It's food," he said briefly, silencing any opposition. "It had been tied up. It was starving but still alive. Better than the pigs the wolves fed on." Drina didn't understand but Joshua shuddered.

  "Did I tell you about Grantville?" Papa asked for the third time today, picking up Drina for a moment as Joshua took the lead. "I heard all about it when we were at that town a little over a week ago. The one where the bad man wanted to touch you, Drina."

  He'd only put his hand on her shoulder but she'd cried out immediately. Papa turned quickly and hit the man with his shovel. She didn't know why the man had touched her but he shouldn't have. That's why they left that town.

  "People in that town claimed that Grantville, no, it's not a French town, was populated by witches and wizards. Then I talked to a man from there who called himself an American. Grantville is filled with magic, he said, the good kind. Lights everywhere, machines that do the work of hundreds, all at your fingertips. Even carriages that didn't need horses. I asked about the streets of silver and he just laughed. Not silver, just black tar with stones in it. He said the people there are just like everyone else but each and every one went to school for ten or twelve years! They were all older than Joshua when they stopped, he said. Can you imagine? And it doesn't matter what your religion is, Catholic, Protestant or Jew, he said. All are equally welcome. That's where we're going."

  Papa put Drina down again. "Come on, we've got to catch up with Joshua," he said, taking her hand. "Grantville can't be far now. Probably just on the other side of that pass."

  Half an hour later Drina stumbled in the darkness and would have fallen if Papa hadn't grabbed her. "Just a little farther, darling. It's bound to be just over there. All we have to do is go up this pass and then down. Then you'll be warm and fed. Just a little farther," Papa said, breathing heavily in the cold mountain air.

  Shortly after that, Papa stumbled and fell. "Papa!" Joshua looked back to see his father come slowly to his hands and knees, Drina standing next to him.

  "Look, Papa," Joshua came back to him. "It's just over the hill. Not much farther now," he desperately urged. But Papa was slow to rise. The moon was out now and Joshua could see the hollows in his father's bearded cheeks. Suddenly he felt guilty for having taken that last piece of boiled dog. He knew it had been Papa's but he'd been so hungry.

  "I'm exhausted, Joshua." Papa spoke slowly with great effort. "We'll stop here for the night. Build a back wall before we make a fire. It'll help hide the light from any soldiers. We'll sleep until afternoon and then go through the pass. Grantville has to be on the other side."

  "But Papa, we don't have any food to eat," Joshua protested. "You'll just be weaker when you wake up."

  "I'll be weaker but I'll be rested. So will your sister. We'll make it easily tomorrow," Papa answered, not really seeing him. "Go to the top of the pass and find Grantville. There will be lights, many bright lights, far more than any town or village you can imagine. The people, men and women will be happy to see us and we'll be safe. Go, Joshua and I'll keep your sister warm inside my arms."

  Joshua knelt down, hugged and kissed his sister before rising and kissing his father on the cheeks. "I'll be back soon, I promise." His father hugged him and then turned to begin building a bank for shelter and to reflect the heat of the fire.

  The boy looked toward the pass and, using the hoe as his hiking stick, steadily began moving forward.

  "Found him passed out and he looks half-starved. Hope he doesn't have bad frostbite." Wade had carried the burden on his shoulder into the small cabin heated by a pot-bellied stove. He rolled the boy down onto one of the two bare cots. It wasn't the first time he'd brought in people unable to take the last few steps.

  "This one looks much more than half-starved," Elizabeth grunted. "Here, let me see if he will take a little of this warm broth. Come on, open your lips and let this warm you up inside," she crooned in German, putting the spoon to his mouth. The boy's lips twitched and unconsciously sucked in the nourishment.

  "Mama," he muttered.

  "Not quite. But with a lot of rest and feeding up you'll probably live."

  "Ever the optimist, aren't you, Lizbeth?" Wade looked over her shoulder at the boy.

  The boy's eyes popped open. "Papa, Drina! Where are they?"

  "Shit!" Elizabeth muttered in English. "He has family out there." Then switching to German, "This man behind me and I will find them and bring them here. Is it just the two of them or are more with you?"

  "No, only two. Only Papa and Drina." He struggled to get up but Elizabeth stopped him with a hand on his thin chest. "We will find them and bring them here. You drink this broth and rest. We will bring them."

  "Is Grantville?" the boy asked, looking around the small room.

  "This is Grantville," Wade responded. "The city is not far. We will find your family. We will bring them here."

  "Grantville." He sighed and laid back, relaxing into a sleep.

  "If he was the strongest, God help his father and sister," Elizabeth said, quickly dipping broth from the kettle into an insulated flask. "We will follow his trail back. Put on snowshoes and grab
some blankets."

  "Teach your grandma to suck eggs," Wade muttered inaudibly as he strapped on snowshoes. Damn bossy women! Only reason he . . .

  It was midmorning when the light shining through the single window in the small cabin hit Joshua's eyelids and woke him. Drina's small dark head was visible in the cot opposite his.

  "Awake, are you?" Elizabeth's feet were propped up and her chair tipped back in the corner of the room where she'd been dozing. She'd kept watch outside alone from midnight until dawn while Wade slept. Now Wade was on watch. She pushed a chamber pot towards Joshua with her boot. "Use this or go outside. Doesn't matter much up here but down in the city, well, you'll see the difference."

  "But where's Papa?"

  Elizabeth sighed and shook her head. "He didn't make it. We found your sister wrapped in his arms and the blanket that should have gone around both of them was doubled across her. It was a very loving thing he did for her. Just for the record, what was his name?"

  "Moses. Moses Amramsohn," Joshua answered and began sobbing.

  Two days later, the sky was a bright blue and the morning sun reflected off the snow into Wade's eyes. He stood with his arms folded next to the much shorter Elizabeth as they watched Joshua and Drina walk with the medic down the hill. "The folks at the synagogue will take them in."

  Wade took a breath and put his arm over her shoulders. "Going to America wasn't always easy," he slowly began. "Back when I was growing up you'd see reports of Haitians drowning, trying to cross a few miles of ocean to get to America. Chinese dying in cargo containers and Mexicans dying of thirst in the desert, all for the chance of a better life, mostly for their kids. The first generation of people coming in illegally generally had it really hard."

  He lightly gripped Elizabeth's shoulder and she looked up at him. After a short pause she said, "Our reliefs are coming up this afternoon for their week at the fire. I want a long shower, clean clothes, food I do not have to make and four large beers. What do you think?"

  Wade bent over, kissed her at the hairline and shook his head. "Two beers. You fall asleep after three."

  Malungu Seed

  Jonathan Cresswell-Jones

  A telephone rang in the seventeenth century.

  Nearly three years after his adopted town had changed times and changed a world, James Nichols heard an interruption, not a miracle. He laid aside a handful of Leahy Medical Center charts, reaching past his study's desk-clutter to the phone. "Yes?"

  "Good morning, Herr Doctor, it's Margritte. There is a man here, a new arrival, who wishes to see you."

  His Thuringian-born receptionist was cheerful, efficient, trilingual, and possessed of a voice that could melt men like taffy. Nichols' own German was serviceable and attractive—perhaps, to crows; he stayed with English. "Margritte, I have rounds this afternoon at the center. I am working on a public health plan for next spring . . ." He suppressed the edge that wanted to creep into his voice. His heart knew that he was sitting in an empty house shuffling paper, while Melissa was a king's prisoner in London. In his own time, that distance meant an hour's flight; here, a month of storms and bandits.

  "You know you must not call me—very much not call me at home—for every refugee and, and, carpetbagger that has a speech for me. That is what the bureaucracy is for. You must deal with it just as I do. You deal with it better than I do." He grabbed left-handed at a sliding chart, caught it.

  "I apologize, Herr Doctor. But he wears the robes of a Jesuit, and this man . . . well, he looks like you. And so rarely have I seen a man who looks like you."

  Nichols stared blankly at the chart he held. The white paper stood out sharply around the creased ebony skin of his thumb, cracked and rough from a surgeon's hygiene; as stark a contrast as his own color within this town, this province—this entire United States of Europe.

  So rarely have I seen a man who looks like you.

  "Herr Doctor?"

  He thought of the half-hour walk to the center, its noisy offices, the urgent to-do lists: Translate appendectomy procedure notes. Find paper clips. Stop bubonic plague.

  "Margritte," he said slowly, "you must almost never call me at home. Or bring anyone here to meet with me. I think this is one of the times you should do both." He set the chart down.

  "To your house? Like a fine guest? He is only a traveler, Herr Doctor—a lay Jesuit, not a Father. He arrived with no ceremony at all! That coachman with the beard brought him in; Heinrich, that is, the fellow who married my second cousin in the summer, after . . ."

  Nichols let his gaze drift across the study—formerly a living room, but the house wasn't large and his workload and cobbled-together library had swamped it. Borrowed books in a borrowed house; all that he'd once owned had been left in twentieth-century Chicago when the world changed. An ember popped in the fireplace, the only sound in silence. His daughter's hand-copied paramedic certificate hung over the mantel; Sharon was in Venice, stagnant lethal Venice, as far away as Melissa in London. Two travelers in foreign lands, with no safe home as he had.

  "There's room," he said softly. "Plenty of room."

  At the second knock, Nichols cracked the door onto freezing air and two backlit figures.

  Margritte nodded. "Herr Doctor." Beside her genial bulk, a taller, thinner man hunched in a tightly-wrapped coarse robe, probably once black but faded now to a scuffed brown lighter than Nichols' own complexion. October sun was not kind to him; that complexion showed chalky highlights where strong features shaped, sharp-cut shadows. The dark, bloodshot eyes seemed calm enough, intently focused, but something in them . . .

  Nichols' greatest pride—when he had time for pride—was that Grantville hadn't seen a refugee with that look for a year; they'd done that much good, at least. He'd seen thousands of eyes in 1631 and '32 with what he'd learned to call in his own time, in Vietnam, a thousand-yard stare. Not every wound hurt the body.

  The traveler waited with stoic patience, robe ruffled in the wind. Nichols realized something belatedly. "I speak an inferior Latin," he said. "Physician's knowledge."

  Hesitating a moment while he clearly parsed the words, the traveler inclined his head towards Nichols; a crucifix glinted in his robe at the motion. "Guten tag, Herr Doctor," he said in a soft-accented rumble. "Matthias Mbandi, via Asuncion. Sprechen sie Deutsch?"

  "Ah. Yes. Yes, I do." Nichols blinked. "Is that his?"

  Margritte hefted the satchel. "Yes, Herr Doctor. I have checked it, there are only clothes and a bag of spices. Is there anything I may help you with here?"

  Nichols knew from experience that Margritte's gifts included a love of gossiping over anyone not actually a patient. He couldn't help taking a harder look at the stranger, at Mbandi, checking shoulders and stance and hands; his own hands were chipped with marks much older than incessant scrubbing, older than his time in the Marines. Ten, fifteen years younger than himself, probably. Longer reach—but worn thinner than his robe. Mbandi returned the gaze without fear or challenge; Nichols eased to a smile, nodded, and glanced over. "No, thank you. I will see you at the center, and I will telephone if I need arrangements."

  "Ah." Her eyes cut sideways to the thin stranger. "Well, if you are certain—"

  Nichols' smile widened. The seventeenth century was a dangerous place at times, but assassins generally tried to blend in. "Here," he said, and took the satchel. "Now, please, at least one of us should be working. Thank you."

  He gestured Mbandi inside and closed the door, plunging the hallway into dimness. "Through to that room," he said, hooking a hand toward the study. "Please, go to the fire, for the warmth. Ah, tea?"

  "No, thank you," said Mbandi; but in the study, he stood against the mantel close enough to singe his robe. Another man's face might have dissolved into bliss. His did not.

  Nichols dropped the satchel on his desk, then sat behind the cluttered surface, half-amused at doing so. The doctor is IN. He remembered early days as a physician, the occasional doubt or hostility, the whisper to the receptionis
t—maybe someone else, ma'am, with you know, more experience? He hardly needed to impress himself on a man who'd come—

  "How far did you say? Asuncion. Is that in Spain?"

  Mbandi looked up from clasped hands—for warmth, Nichols saw, not piety. "No, it is across the great Atlantic. Six days up the river Parana from Buenos Aires."

  "Jesus H.—" Mindful of the robe, Nichols bit off the rest. "That is very, very far."