Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence

by Virginia DeMarce

  Madame explained her somewhat unusual career path with, “General, I just got so damned tired of the French foragers stealing everything the farmers on the estate managed to grow. Up in the backwoods, with Jean Jacques away for years on end, who was going to care whether I was wearing pants or not? Eventually, I hope, the war will end. I wanted to salvage something for our girls.”

  Chapter 17 Two of the Four Horsemen

  “Der hunger ist noch zur zeitt ihrer großter feind.”

  Württemberg

  May 1635

  “I

  really admired how Brahe, Utt, and Horn cornered the Irish dragoons and drove them into Schorndorf. It was an admirable display of military coordination,” Kenny Davidson said. He didn’t intend to sound condescending, but this was the first time he had been stationed outside of the immediate vicinity of the Ring of Fire. He wasn’t really any younger than the rest of them––at twenty-four, he was older, in fact, than Bob Barnes––but he was the newest up-time kid on Horn’s block.

  Horn’s head medic agreed, at least in part. “Ja, ist real gut de army finally gotten dem stoppt.” Heinz’s primary means of communication with the up-timers was a uniquely Swabian version of Amideutsch.

  “I wasn’t doing the cornering,” Gerry Pierpoint said. He didn’t want to spend his spare time, or what should have been his spare time, explaining all this. He was tired. Five or six more years than the younger men shouldn’t have been enough to make him constantly tired, but they did. What he really wanted to do was take a nap.

  “I wasn’t and you won’t be either, as long as you’re assigned to me. While their regiments were maneuvering to bottle the Irishmen up somewhere, we––the plague teams––went around to the northwest, in behind the path that the dragoons and Brahe’s men took. While the Fulda team dealt with the confirmed infection in the dragoons’ baggage train at Germersheim, and backtracked it, we’ve been following the dragoons’ path through Württemberg with teams of plague-fighters, looking for signs of infection inside the duchy. It’s frustrating, though. The population’s ordinary response to the appearance of soldiers is to flee if they can, for which I can’t blame them, but it means that since it looks like the dragoons did carry plague, it could be anywhere in the duchy by now.”

  “Have you found any?”

  “You have to be kidding. Here on the western border, a good half-dozen places with suspected or confirmed cases that have to be quarantined and treated. Barnes has found more over by Augsburg. The one bright spot, as far as I’m concerned, and Heinz here is concerned, is that the burning of Schorndorf may have had the effect of getting rid of whatever infection the Irish dragoons left inside the city. At least, I damned well hope so. Horn and Utt had the presence of mind to quarantine everyone who came out ahead of the fire.”

  “So that’s good. Or isn’t it?”

  Gerry sighed. “Think like a good ol’ country boy rather than someone whose family bought their groceries at Stephenson’s. It’s planting season, Kenny. Remember the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

  “Who?”

  “In the Bible.”

  “We never went to church, back up-time. Nobody in the family. Not any of us.”

  “Well, neither did we, but I came across them in a video game and had to bone up. One of them was Pestilence, which we’ve got plenty of with the plague, but another one was hunger. Famine. If we have to keep people cooped up for too long, they won’t get the fields and gardens sown. That means, for next year, shortages of food for both troops and civilians in the places where we identified plague this year.”

  “Maybe, with better transportation...”

  “Dearth, if not famine, then. Imported food gets expensive fast.”

  “Hunger,” Heinz said, pronouncing in the German way. More like an airplane hanger but with an ‘oo’ in it, like an owl hooting. At this time, hunger is our greatest enemy. His hands depicted the shrinking of his stomach. “Denn ein bigger Hunger comtt.”

  Schwarzach

  “I feel obliged to return to Lorraine personally.” Hands clasped behind his back, Bernhard paced around his office. “These various alleged sightings of Gaston are unsettling, to say the least.”

  “Taking with you?” Michael John pulled out a pad of paper and his favorite new metal-nibbed pen.

  “Two regiments of foot and one of cavalry. Bodendorf, I think. The horses for the regiments we had with us in the spring are badly in need of rest and the new grass is just beginning to come in.”

  “Which infantry?”

  “Pull Forbus and Schneidewind out of the Franche Comté. That will still leave Rohan with Moser and Hattstein at his disposal. He can reduce the garrison at Pontarlier––the one at Joux, too––to get more men available for deployment. Authorize him to recruit more aggressively and increase the signing bonuses. And, given the increasing reports of plague in Lorraine and the Province of the Upper Rhine, pull a team of the plague-fighters out of the Franche Comté to bring along as well.”

  “Provisions?”

  “Low, as always in the spring. But when my men are eating boiled turnips in the field, I’m prepared to eat boiled turnips along with them. Talk to Schaffelitzky.”

  Schaffelitzky, who was acting as general commissary now, was of the opinion that a willingness to eat turnips was noble, but bread was better. It was hard to keep hungry, unpaid, soldiers from marauding around the countryside. Foraging was sometimes a necessity, but it wasn’t efficient and in a land as long-fought-over as Lorraine, also not reliable. He wrote to Erlach, who sent Kanoffski off to Basel for a heart-to-heart with Rehlinger, the treasurer.

  Funds, remounts from the Swiss Fricktal, munitions, and––most importantly––provisions, were on the way. The grain was coming out of Savoy. Rehlinger would arrange to have it milled into flour and shipped, via the Rhine as far as possible and then overland.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “The grand duke says that it is very hard to find reliable subordinates to put in places where he can’t be himself.” Claudia frowned at the page of chicken scratches in front of her. “I think.”

  “The problem’s not unique to him,” Marcie said. “After all, Your Grace, Lake Wobegon is the only place where all the children are above average. In the real world, half of the people, by definition, are not brighter than your average bear.”

  These cultural references took some explanation.

  Claudia found the relationship between the mythical town’s Lutherans and Catholics quite interesting. Her real delight, however, came in response to the name of “Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility.”

  She paused in the middle of her laughter and looked at the young up-time woman. “Children,” she began. “Marriage...”

  Marcie waited.

  “Up-time, I understand, people were expected to marry for something called ‘love.’”

  Marcie nodded. “And then live ‘happily ever after.’ Half of them divorced, though.”

  “In this world, in this time, ‘love’ causes mainly tragedies, in literature, at least. Or absurdities, as in the case of the ducal family of Lorraine.” Claudia tapped her middle finger on the arm of her chair. “Did you and Herr Trelli marry for this love?” she asked abruptly.

  “Ah, well.” Marcie would have been just as happy to back off from this. “Sometimes it’s not that simple.”

  “Explain.”

  “I guess we were in love, back before the Ring of Fire. We’d been dating ever since high school. All the time we were in college. We got engaged. Nobody made us do it.”

  “This ‘dating’ is something I have read about. You had a strong––shall we say ‘voluntary preference,’ then?”

  Marcie grinned. “That would cover it.” She frowned. “Then the Ring of Fire came. As soon as that first frantic ‘how are we going to survive this?’ year was over, I went to Saalfeld to work at USE Steel and the army sent Matt to Bamberg. We wrote, of course, but that was a couple of years when we were doing entirely d
ifferent things. I can tell you I was one hundred percent totally loyal to being engaged to Matt. I know it for a fact. In my heart and on my honor, I’m just as sure that he was loyal to being engaged to me. Then, in December, he got out of the army and we both got the job contracts with Tyrol, so I went down to Würzburg last December to get married.

  “It was sort of like meeting a stranger. The same for him, I think. But what were we supposed to do? Anita Masaniello and the others had worked so hard to set up a nice wedding for us––the church, a priest, a reception, all that. I didn’t want to disappoint them.

  “And, honestly, I wasn’t about to run back to Grantville with my tail between my legs, and start all over with the process of looking for someone I might want to marry. Especially not when it would give my mom a chance to chant, ‘I’ve been telling you all along that you’ve wasted the best years of your life waiting for that Trelli boy.’ I’m older than Matt. Just a couple months, but, still, I turned twenty-six in January. If I want children, and I do want kids, I don’t have a lot of time to waste. My biological clock isn’t ticking all that loudly. Not yet. But here, down-time, with the medical conditions...”

  Marcie turned around impatiently. “Is that marrying for ‘love’? You tell me.”

  Claudia tapped her middle finger on the arm of her chair again. “What is a biological clock? Should the young men I send to Grantville study this also?”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “The grand duchess is sending me to Besançon to work with Bernhard’s engineering staff,” Marcie told Matt that evening after they had disentangled themselves from the process of being polite to the other people eating dinner at the table to which they had been assigned. “I’m leaving next week, when Lawrence Crawford starts back.”

  “You didn’t give me much warning on this.”

  “I didn’t get much warning. As in, she told me about three o’clock this afternoon. This is the first time I’ve seen you since––presuming you didn’t really want me to break the news in a bunch of other mid-level bureaucrats. It’s not as if we have telephones.”

  “I hear that Bernhard’s planning to install them in Besançon.”

  “That may be one of the reasons I’m going. I don’t know much about telephones, but I do at least understand modern engineering principles, and he’s brought in a half-dozen up-timers with construction experience. Apparently it occurred to his grand-dukeship that rapid communication between his citadel and the officers quartered on the other side of the river might come in real handy some day.”

  “And you agreed to this.”

  “She didn’t ask me. She told me. Just like she told you back in February. Casual disposition of my body and mind in time and place, with no consultation.”

  “So I get some of my own back. It makes a difference, doesn’t it, when it’s your bull that’s being gored.”

  “Matt...”

  “Oh hell, Marcie, why fight about it? His Grand Dukeship told me just this afternoon, about the same time, that he’s hauling me off to Lorraine to fight the plague. You just beat me to it in the order of telling.”

  “Working for down-timers has a lot in common with being in the army. The order is ‘jump’ and the answer is ‘how high’?”

  “They don’t make that much of a distinction, really. If you work for them, you work for them. They just aren’t into specialization––it must drive the paper pushers back in Grantville nuts––the ones who think you have to have some kind of certification for everything before you can be allowed to do it. Half the guys I’ve met here get moved back and forth from military duties to civilian projects and back to military again. Look at de Melon since we got out of Kronach.”

  Merkwiller-Pechelbronn, Province of the Upper Rhine

  “Hanau-Lichtenberg is one person you can ask for help,” Matt Trelli said. “The count, I mean, not the place––the guy the USE is leasing the oil fields from. He’s bound to have an interest in the region and even though his escort wore pretty clothes and rode pretty horses, I’m told that they were a big help when the Irish dragoons ran that raid here.”

  Orville Beattie kicked the tent pole. “If we don’t get supplies soon, with the refugees coming at us out of Lorraine, his pretty horses will turn into someone’s dinner. It’s going to be bad, I tell you. There’s some early garden produce starting to come in, but people mostly eat bread. That means grain. We need grain. Thousands upon thousand of pounds of grain every week. Tons of grain. I don’t care if it’s wheat, rye, oats, barley, spelt, or some combination of the above, just as long as it’s grain. I haven’t been working the ‘Hearts and Minds’ program in Fulda for the past three years––well, it’s nearly four years, now––without getting a pretty clear idea that feeding people bread is our first priority.”

  “Transportation costs...”

  “Food, Trelli, food. Cats and dogs for dinner will be the least of it. Do you want to see these people eating grass and rats? I’ve read the pages in the Thirty Years War history that tell what this stretch of country was like in that other time, after the big battle in the fall of 1634. Have you? It was page four hundred in the reprint that Piazza sent the Fulda administration. Acorns and goatskins in the soup pots. Women gnawing on the flesh of dead horses, sharing them with the ravens. People sitting on top of graves long enough that the starving didn’t dig up the corpses and eat them. People pulling the bodies of condemned criminals down off the gallows and eating them. Refugee camps where people were afraid that other refugees would kill and eat them. Have you read that? Have you? I damned well have.”

  Matt Trelli opened his mouth.

  “What’s the point in saving them from the plague if we let them starve? Who did the emperor appoint to run this godforsaken Province of the Upper Rhine, anyhow?”

  Francisco de Melon, whose original assignment to negotiate a pre-nuptial agreement between Bernhard and Claudia had morphed into a general kind of trouble-shooting for their activities in the Rhineland, waved a hand. “Wilhelm Ludwig of Nassau-Saarbrücken.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s the name of the administrator. He hasn’t made a lot of impact––his main qualification seems to be that he’s the son-in-law of the administrator in Swabia. He’s spending most of his time over there in Augsburg, helping his wife’s elderly papa. Who, I have to admit, needs it.”

  “What a fuck-up.”

  De Melon shook his head. “He’s appointed a deputy who’s pretty effective. Johann Moritz of Nassau-Siegen. In the other world, he was governor-general of Brazil and governor of a bunch of places in Europe after he came home. Interesting biography, right in the encyclopedia. You can work with him, but we’ll do better, I think, into trying to prod Nils Brahe in Mainz into action. He knows your Fulda people and respects them. Part of the problem, though, is that all this spring, here in the Rhineland, Brahe and the other administrators have been distracted by the Committees of Correspondence and their campaigns against the anti-Semites. There’s just too much all going on at once.”

  Matt nodded. “You know how short-staffed you are in Fulda. There’s honestly just so much that any single person can do and ‘bloated bureaucracy’ hasn’t made it into the down-time vocabulary yet. They run whole cities and provinces with fewer layers of bureaucracy than we used to have in the Grantville Fire Department.”

  “I’ve talked Johnnie F. Haun into coming over here from Würzburg and throwing his influence behind the feeding program. Get your wife who has such an in with Bernhard the traitor and the rest of the Burgundian rulers to put some pressure on them. She’s just across the river at Schwarzach with the guy’s wife, isn’t she?”

  “Hey now,” Matt protested. “Wait just a minute, Orville. That’s the husband of my boss you’re talking about. I can’t just stand here and let you call him a traitor.”

  “Just what would you call him, then? He wigged out on Gustavus Adolphus just when the emperor needed him the most and his tricks down in this corner of the map have kept Ho
rn tied up for years.”

  “That’s a very USE-centric point of view. Bernhard’s opinion is that it was Gustavus who insulted him and his brothers, so that his honor required him to resign. From his point of view, probably, Horn and his Abrabanel financier and his radio communications with Gustavus been keeping him tied up for years.”

  De Melon sighed and brought his diplomatic talents to bear on the discussion.

  Grantville

  Mary Kat Riddle kissed her grandparents. “Letter from my darling Derek. Not only did he leave men at Germersheim in March, but somehow, he has managed to persuade a reasonable portion of the Fulda Barracks Regiment still back in Buchenland that helping Brahe’s men at Merkwiller-Pechelbronn deal with that little pocket of plague infection that the Irish dragoons left behind when they raided is just as noble, manly, sturdy, and courageous as going off to chase the dragoons. He can’t go back to Fulda himself because of the plague in Swabia, so he’s going to take the companies he had with him in Württemberg back by way of the Province of the Upper Rhine and wait out the rest of the plague season by helping there.”

  She shook her head. “Getting down-time soldiers to go work on plague prevention. The man has a golden tongue.”

  Her grandmother looked up. “May God be with them.”

  Mary Kat sank down on the footstool next to her. “May God be with them, indeed.”

  Basel

  “Children,” Diane Jackson said. “They are behaving like children, so many of them. ‘If I can’t have the first turn, I won’t play.’ Or, ‘I don’t like the way you are acting, so I will pick up my marbles and go home.’ If I was the teacher in charge of this play group...”

  Chapter 18 May God Be with Us

  “Gott mit uns.”

  Magdeburg

  June 1635

  Mike Stearns had promised both himself and Becky that he would be good at the final transition meeting for the two USE administrations. Dignified. Gracious. So far, he had followed the prescribed pattern.