Ring of Fire IV

by Eric Flint

  “It’s my fault,” Gerry said. “If I hadn’t blown Raudegen’s hand up, we would be two hours ahead of him by now.”

  Candale looked into the carriage that was now occupied by two duchesses and one comatose colonel.

  “Shouldn’t you really be going back to your regiment?” Marguerite asked him. “I’m sure it misses you.”

  “If you people wake up this child or disturb Colonel Raudegen,” Susanna hissed through the window of the first carriage, “it will not matter because all of you will find yourselves dead before morning.”

  * * *

  Bismarck took Gerry up on the driver’s seat as they headed on through what was left of the night.

  “What were you chanting?” Susanna asked him when they stopped for a rest. “It sounded like you were chanting while you drove.”

  “I was reminding Gerry. ‘The just shall live by faith. Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, died for our sins and was raised again for our justification.’ He needs to remember that now and always.”

  “Do you believe it?” Marguerite asked. “Actually believe it?”

  “I do.” Bismarck bowed his head. “In joy and happiness, in suffering and sadness, help me at all times, Christ the salvation of my life.”

  * * *

  To avoid Candale, who usually paced his horse next to the duchess’ carriage, Marguerite decided to ride with Susanna.

  “Have you read the Bible?” she asked.

  “Mostly only the parts in my missal.”

  “People are supposed to read it for themselves. Grand-mère Rohan read a great deal of it to me when I was a child and of course the preachers read it in the Temple. You haven’t missed much. It’s a very disappointing kind of book.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s true. It’s supposed to be the story of God’s chosen people, but they were horrible, smiting one another all the time. The sons of Adam must have married their own sisters, because no one else was alive, and Abraham most certainly did, for it says so. There was the man who cut his concubine in twelve pieces and distributed them to the Twelve Tribes. They were supposed to be God’s people, but they were not one bit better than we are, and some of them were worse. Even Henri IV only had a dozen or so mistresses besides his wives and less than two dozen bastards that we know of. David and Solomon had lots more wives than two, and at the same time instead of divorcing the first one, plus all those concubines. If the preachers want to denounce libertines, then they ought to denounce those. Don’t you think?”

  Susannah was about to reply, but Tancrède woke up.

  “Are we there yet? Tell M. von Bismarck to stop the carriage, please; I gotta go. I’m hungry; when’s lunch? These turnips are really nasty. I’m a boy. I don’t care if you’re older; you’re nothing but a girl. I don’t want to sit still. Read me a story. Can I ride in the carriage with the lady who used to visit me at the LeBons? Why can’t I go visit the LeBons; they were always nice to me. Will you read me another story, please. I’m hungry; when are we going to stop for supper? I liked the first story better—read it again, pleeease! I gotta go. I don’t want to behave myself. If you had brought books with short words, I could read my own stories. Are we there yet? I gotta go right now.”

  Closer acquaintance only reinforced Marguerite’s already ingrained hostility toward Tancrède.

  “There are four of us,” Bismarck said while Susanna followed the boy to his chosen spot behind a tree. “Four boys born within a space of six years. With my sisters, eight of us born within twelve years. I believe that we may owe our lady mother an apology for existing.”

  “It’s a farce,” Marguerite proclaimed. “In a just world, Candale’s old valet would not have been surnamed LeBon. LeMal would make a lot more sense for this one.”

  Tancrède, by fate and fostering surnamed LeBon, showed up in time to regard her with a defiant pout. “I don’t like you. I want to ride with the other lady.”

  Marc put an end to the impasse by picking the boy up and plopping him in front of Candale, muttering, “I understand that you’re responsible for his existence, so you deal with him for a while and give Susanna a break.”

  “Merci, M. de Candale, for letting me ride your horse. Am I going to get to ride a horse the rest of the way? I like Susanna better than I like Marguerite. I want my own pony to ride. I wanted a pony before, but the LeBons always said that there is no room for a pony in Paris. Do you live in Paris? No? You’re in the army? Do you have armor? Do you have a sword? Do you have a pistol? Can I shoot it? Hey, look at those cows. I gotta go. Honest, M. de Candale, I gotta go right now. If you don’t let me go right now I won’t be able to hold it.”

  Candale did his best to ignore the child, but the boy wiggled. He squiggled, wriggled, and upon occasion lunged toward something that caught his eyes. Two hours later, he started to cry.

  “His legs hurt,” Bismarck said. “Marc, you can’t put a child who has never ridden on a horse and expect him to stay there all day.” He picked the boy off, motioned for the coachman to halt, followed him into the bushes for yet another “gotta go,” and returned him to Susanna.

  “Do you always pay him so little mind as on this trip?” he asked when he pulled his horse up next to Candale’s again.

  “There’s no way under the law that I can make him my heir and I have no intention of raising false expectations by making a fuss over him. It’s not as if I’m a king who can furnish his légitimés with titles and estates the way Henri IV did for Vendôme and the others. I’ve provided him with foster parents since he was born. I’ve paid LeBon and his wife. If the duchess wants to send him to Saumur when he gets a few years older, I’ll pay his school fees. Not,” he added, “that she can’t afford to pay them herself.

  “If my father ever dies and I succeed to the title, maybe I can do a bit more, a commission or something, but that will depend on the fates. My father may be immortal. The odds are against it, but he will manage it if any human can, or at least achieve a personal return to the era of Methuselah.”

  * * *

  “Well, if we aren’t there yet, when will be be there?” Tancrède squirmed his way up from the floor of the carriage and stuck his head out the window.

  “It’s about two hundred and fifty miles,” Susanna said. “We have been on the road for eleven days. I think it will take at least another week. We will be in the County of Burgundy, though before we come to Besançon. We will reach Dôle first and then follow the Doubs River, more or less, until we reach Grand Duke Bernhard’s capital city. It is a very twisty river.”

  “Will I be able to go fishing when we come to the river? I love to fish.”

  “Maybe once we get to Besançon, you can go fishing. I don’t think there will be time while we are traveling.”

  “What worries me most,” Marguerite said, “is that we are just driving along—well, the men are mostly riding along—without any opposition. We haven’t been pursued, as far as any of them can tell and all of them except Marc and Gerry are accustomed to military campaigning and knowing who is chasing you and finding the people you are chasing. Marc has been asking questions at every inn and stable. Even when we came through Auxerre, there was no more than the normal in the way of checkpoints.”

  “I noticed that we haven’t even had to use the elaborate fiction about being a household from Alsace.” Susanna nodded. “Why does this worry you?”

  “Because it’s likely, I think, that there must be problems in Paris that make even the disappearance of the Rohan heiress and her mother unworthy of the royal attention. Under the circumstances it is good to be insignificant, but I can’t imagine what is causing it. The only reason I can think of that the king would not have sent people to find us is that—well, I don’t know what may be causing it. How can I even guess, when I am riding and riding and riding in this carriage with no gossip at all?”

  Marguerite was not alone.

  “I haven’t heard a single word of news from the court,” the duchess told Ca
ndale. “Not a single word since we left Paris. I didn’t even manage to buy a measly, out-of-date, provincial newspaper when we came through Auxerre. Raudegen, curse him, says it would not fit with my persona. You could get one for me. Even the most countrified of country gentlemen might occasionally buy a newspaper. It’s maddening. I just know in my heart that Soubise is ruining everything. The next time I do hear something, it will probably be that Rohan has lost what minuscule remnants of royal favor that I had managed to retrieve for the family.”

  Candale ducked his head toward the carriage window. “Have you seen those new kaleidoscopes that are coming out of Augsburg?” he asked. “Fascinating. When I was in Nancy, I attended a lecture on how they are made. Mirrors, and a few little specks of colored glass. Every design is made with the same pieces, but it changes every time you turn the tube, which amounts to an object lesson on how the court functions. The pieces rarely change, but from one turn to another the picture alters a great deal. The Rohan piece will still be in the little compartment, no matter where it falls at each turn and another turn will always come.” He smiled. “Also, I think you underestimate your brother-in-law. It’s very possible that a lot of royal interest is currently directed toward the old Rohan holdings in Brittany.”

  * * *

  The conditions in eastern France had not changed significantly since Ruvigny and Bismarck had observed them on their first trip to Paris the previous October. The villages were still half-depopulated from plague that passed through the region in the summer of 1635. The road was better than it had been in January, if one considered dust better than half-frozen mud, but it was not better because anyone had been doing maintenance on it. Trade, Marc reported, was down.

  Innkeepers warned of wandering bands of ex-mercenaries, most of them men who left Lorraine after the grand duke and the king in the Low Countries started to make a real effort to restore order there. They weren’t huge bands of bandits, the townsmen emphasized, but rather mostly small groups, six to a dozen men, enough to steal some livestock or fall upon a farm wagon, but even a small village was safe enough from them if the inhabitants were determined and well armed, which most of them were, since after this many years of war almost every peasant had managed to steal some kind of a musket or take a long-barrel from a former soldier who lay passed out drunk. Never call it theft. The French were law-abiding people. However, the Lord assured his children that He would provide, and if he chose to provide by making soldiers careless with their weapons, who were they to question His will?

  “I don’t recall,” one innkeeper who doubled as a village maire commented to Marc, “that I’ve seen a single probate settlement in this district in the past five to ten years in which the deceased did not have a gun included in his inventory.” He looked the party over. “Three women and a child, but also six men, all mounted. Don’t worry about them. They won’t even think of coming near you.”

  The ambushers, when they came, were neither ex-mercenaries nor bandits. They were just desperate. The ambush did not take place in a dramatic vale with overhanging cliffs, nor in the face of an oncoming storm. The landscape did not feature abandoned medieval ruins; neither were they lured into it by a piteous cry for help. As Marc would say later, it wasn’t an ambush that would furnish anyone with a good after-dinner story. It took place in the middle of the morning, in full sunlight, on the edge of one of the half-depopulated villages. No riders on thundering mounts drove down upon them. In point of fact, they had halted, dismounted or gotten out of the carriages to stretch their legs, and were wandering around the vicinity of the well for one simple reason.

  “I have to go,” came the cry from the carriage.

  “If you ask me,” Bismarck commented to Gerry, “he’s figured out that having to go is a way of getting out of the carriage and running around for a bit.”

  “Well, can you blame him? It’s not natural for a boy to be cooped up like this. Dad let us run around and scream all we wanted to.”

  “Even if he is crying ‘wolf,’” Marc added, “nobody else has volunteered to run the risk after that interesting episode suffered by M. de Candale the second time the boy rode with him for a while.”

  “Again! How many times this morning does that make?” Marguerite asked.

  “The bright side,” Susanna said, “is that at least he doesn’t wet the bed.”

  “Anybody else who needs to go, go now,” Raudegen ordered, an implacable tone in his mild baritone voice. He looked at Ruvigny. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

  As a point of fact Tancrède was just behind a hedge, going.

  The attackers took out Candale and Ruvigny first. They were standing next to one another, just casually chatting, and got bashed on the head by villagers wielding a couple of pieces of window frame. They didn’t get bashed tremendously hard, nothing like a cavalryman with a saber could have done in battle, but it was enough to knock them down and daze them temporarily.

  Raudegen turned and, in spite of the practice he had been doing at every opportunity, automatically reached for his sword with his injured hand. Another attacker swept a bladeless scythe handle at his knees.

  Bismarck scrambled up, pushed the two duchesses into one of the carriages, and stood at the door, his weapon out.

  Marc, at the well where he had been lowering the bucket to get water for the horses, pulled the bucket up, pivoted, and threw the water on someone’s head; then ran to grab the reins of the horses on the front carriage, thinking in a disorganized way that if the riding horses spooked, they’d be able to chase them down eventually, but stampeding draft horses could destroy the carriages before anyone managed to catch them. Susanna came around from where she was standing in the bushes to keep an eye on Tancrède and grabbed the reins of the horses harnessed to the other carriage, the one that the duchess usually rode in. It was a neat trick, since she had to keep holding onto Tancrède with her other hand.

  Gerry, still in the coppice where he had retreated for his turn at taking care of private business, pulled his harmonica out of his shirt pocket and made it wail. “Ghost Riders in the Sky” produced a sound effect that bore no resemblance to the plinky little flutelike separate notes he had played to provide the melodies for the extravaganza, even when the instrument was in the hands of an utterly incompetent musician. He hoped profoundly that none of the attackers headed in his direction. He still had his pants down.

  Tancrède pulled his wrist out of Susanna’s grasp and ran toward Marc at the well. She was about to start after him, carriage horses or no carriage horses, when an appalling shriek arose from behind its low mortared wall, closely resembling the sound of a soul in torment, the drawing of fingernails over a slate board magnified by a thousand, or, perhaps, an untutored six-year-old blowing into a harmonica with all the power of his breath.

  With two sets of shrieks coming at them from opposite directions, Ruvigny picking himself up to come into the fray, Candale immobilizing the boy that Marc had drenched with water, Marc demonstrating the usefulness of a small but practical dagger, and Raudegen’s now having a businesslike sword in his functional hand, the attackers hesitated and faltered.

  Three middle-aged women, a boy who might have been as old as thirteen, two old men, one of them very old indeed, and a scrawny dog.

  “We need the horses,” one of the women explained. “We just saw you here. It’s not that we expected anyone to stop at our well this morning. It’s not as if we had time to plan. We just saw you, grabbed whatever we could find, and ran out.”

  “What do you want horses for? Not to ride, certainly.”

  “To sell,” one of the old men said. “To trade,” the other quavered. “To eat,” the strongest of the women answered.

  There weren’t any men. Between the war and the plague, they were gone. Because they were gone, most of the harvest had not been brought in last fall. Because they were starving, they butchered the last ox so that the rest of them might survive the winter, but that meant that this spring t
hey had not been able to plow, but only dug the kitchen gardens with spades, so there would be no grain, not that they had any seed to plant if they had an ox to plow with, because the previous fall’s harvest had rotted in the fields, as they had already told milords. The cows had been bred last year; two of the calves had survived, but the only bull calf had died, so there was no prospect of having them bred again even if they waited two or three years, which they had hoped to be able to do. They had no money to pay stud fees to the village three miles over, which still had a bull.

  “Yes, we knew we might have to kill you to get the horses,” the strongest woman said. “But what more right do you have to be alive than we do? How is it different for you to be dead than for the six of us and the children younger than Jean over there to be dead? If we don’t do something, we will all be dead by winter. Eight of you; thirteen of us counting the other children. We could survive for a year, live well for a year, on what you are taking with you on a drive down this road from some place we have never been to some place we will never go.”

  “You have fine animals,” the oldest man added. “Just one of your horses sold in Auxerre would bring the money for a blacksmith to put blades back on our tools, with some left over. The foragers stripped off all the metal. I know how to bargain. I don’t walk well, but Jean here could put me on the most docile one and lead us to Auxerre. The price of that one horse would buy us metal for the blacksmith and a donkey to bring me home. Then we would have a donkey.”

  “Why don’t you just leave?” Gerry asked.

  “What would we do?” The second man snorted. “We are serfs, yes, and tied to the land, but that means that this land is also tied to us and we have the right to farm it. If we leave, we won’t have a right to farm anywhere else. All we know how to do is farm.”

  * * *

  “We ought to have done something,” Gerry insisted that evening. “There was a man who fell among thieves…”

  He leaned back against the wall. This inn was surprisingly good for eastern France—clean and tidy, if not spacious. The proprietor, a German from the Palatinate, had managed to get out, with some of his money, enough to buy another inn, ahead of the Imperials back in 1622. He kept chickens and rabbits to feed his guests, a couple of goats for milk, and his wife cultivated a good-sized garden. The village was strong enough to keep random marauders away. Recent events, the death of the king and the troubles, though, had caused him to question his decision to settle in France, but in the end no man could successfully defy the will of God. If he was destined to die a pauper, then he was destined to die a pauper. At the moment, he delivered a second round of beer to the table.