Ring of Fire IV

by Eric Flint

  “All right,” Bismarck said. “We believe you. You blew.”

  “I tried to make out some trail,” Raudegen said, “but whoever it was headed back toward the outbuildings. It’s dark and there’s just too much of a mess of footprints in the loose dust behind the inn. The best thing to do is for the rest of you to go back to bed. Ruvigny, you stand guard on the ladies’ doors inside. I’ll take the outside.”

  “Let me take the outside watch,” Candale said, “since I have two hands available. If Susanna’s teeth did their work the way she describes, you and he would be evenly matched if he dares to come back, but I will have the advantage.”

  In the morning he was gone, and so was the duchess.

  “I could have told you if you asked me,” Tancrède said. “But you didn’t. I knew it was the lady I ride with sometimes who tried to take me out of my bed. She smelled just like she always does.”

  Bismarck predicted the worst possible vocational outcome for all of them if they turned up in Besançon without the duchess. Raudegen, who was, after all, on this particular venture, not responsible to Rohan for getting the duchesses to the duke but rather, along with Marc, for getting Susanna to someplace she would be safe, was inclined to let them go. Bismarck reiterated that Rohan would not like it. In his opinion, it could be a career-ruining event for Ruvigny—well, for him, too—to turn up without the older duchess.

  “Not,” Marguerite said, “if you bring me. Maybe only career-discouraging or at worst career-transferring. Henri can always go to Grand-père Sully and find another patron. And you work for the grand duke, not for Papa. Well, so does Henri, for that matter. Papa just borrowed you. I doubt that the grand duke will place so much importance on all of this.”

  Raudegen pointed to Gerry. “What did you tell me the night of the extravaganza? ‘If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all?’ Bismarck seems to be adopting it as his motto.”

  “Theme song, actually.” Gerry played a few notes. “Gloom, Doom, and Agony on Me.”

  “Up-time must have been a very strange world,” Marguerite said. “A world in which people turned deep, dark, depression and excessive misery into a joke.”

  “Some didn’t,” Gerry said. “They ended up doing stuff like committing suicide. If Magda and Pastor Kastenmayer, he’s the Lutheran pastor in Grantville, hadn’t talked to me, there was a point when I might have done something stupid like that myself after we came home from Rome. A person just has to keep going. It helps to laugh about it if you can. When you can. Sometimes it just all drops down on your head at once, but the rest of the time, you might as well make jokes.”

  “Melancholia,” Ruvigny said. “The ancients knew about it.”

  “More practically,” Raudegen said, “we might as well sell one of the carriages here, and those two horses as well. We don’t need two carriages without the duchess and it never hurts to have some additional resources. Especially since the duchess took most of the money, but I can’t honestly complain about that, since she provided it in the first place. At least Candale was decent enough to only take his own horse.”

  “Rohan didn’t send money to get them out?” Susanna asked.

  “Not enough to last Ruvigny and Bismarck in both directions. He expected his wife to pay her own way to join him. She has more money than he does. As for Marc and me, it’s been an expensive trip, especially the time in England. We cashed in the last bank draft from Cavriani in Brussels.”

  “Keep the little carriage,” Marc advised. “As we get up closer to the Jura, the roads aren’t meant for vehicles at all. We may end up selling it, too, in a couple of days, to someone who’s headed out in the other direction.”

  * * *

  The grand duke had guards on the Burgundy side of the border where the road crossed toward Dôle. Unfortunately, the king also had guards stationed on the French side.

  Raudegen dismounted, handing his reins to Gerry, and talked to them. He called up Marc, who also dismounted, handed his reins to Gerry, and talked to them. Raudegen produced paper. Marc produced more paper. The guards shuffled paper.

  Susanna, looking as nursemaidly as she could, stepped down from the carriage, lifted Tancrède down, shot the guards an apologetic smile, and said, “He has to go.”

  Gerry trotted after the two of them, leading the horses.

  “Hey you,” one of the guards yelled. “Come back here.” He was speaking French, but his gestures indicated what he meant in any known human language.

  Gerry answered. “I’m going that way”—he pointed—“and I’m in plain sight. I’m supposed to keep an eye on the kid.” His voice was sulky, his German accent was provincial, and his facial expression indicated that although his body was moving, his mind had never fully caught up with it.

  Just a dumb ol’ country boy, that’s me. He’d seen the role played up-time. He’d seen it played down-time. One of his classmates in Rudolstadt had been a genius of a mimic. He could probably do it in his sleep. He watched Susanna take Tancrède back to the carriage and then ambled over to the guard who had yelled, still leading the horses. “What’ya want?” It was bad Hochdeutsch in a dialect that probably couldn’t be understood ten miles from the speaker’s home village, but it was definitely some variety of down-time German. It was also amiable, cheerful, and unthreatening.

  “Go back, stupid.” The guard shoved him back towards the carriage.

  Tancrède started to screech, in French, of course, “Why are we stopped here? I want to go home. I’m tired. I want to go hoooome!” What he truly wanted was to go back to the LeBons in Paris, but there was no reason to mention that to the border guards. Let them assume that “home” was someplace in Burgundy.

  One of the senior guards looked up in annoyance and shuffled more paper. Marc walked back to the carriage, stuck his head in, and talked to Marguerite, with much waving of hands. “Marguerite,” Tancrède screeched, “I want to go home!”

  None of the alerts that the guards had received from Paris said anything about a child and they were supposed to be watching for an older woman and a young one, not two young ones. The alerts mentioned two army officers, but said nothing about four red-headed siblings from Alsace. They didn’t even adumbrate the personas of a bodyguard and assistant steward, though, naturally, no sensible man would send a young woman he cared for out traveling without such precautions. After more shuffling, the lieutenant handed the papers back to Raudegen and motioned them through.

  Bismarck flicked the reins in a disinterested manner, stuck his legs out straight as far as they would go, and slouched his shoulders, about as far away from the image of a smart city coachman as a driver could be unless he was in charge of a donkey cart. Raudegen and Marc climbed back on their horses. Gerry climbed back up to ride postilion. Ruvigny prayed that the two extra horses tied to the carriage, the one that Gerry usually rode and the one Bismarck rode when someone else took a turn driving, would be taken for spares. It wasn’t as if they were highly bred chargers. In accordance with the party’s original fairy tale, they were just utility horses, the kind that could be used for pulling something light or a servant could ride if he needed to keep pace with his betters. Only Raudegen and Marc rode halfway decent mounts and they were no prizes.

  Ruvigny rode ahead of the carriage and Marc next to it, with Raudegen bringing up the rear. Ruvigny was well into the space that separated the two sets of posts when Bismarck brought the carriage up to pass through. Suddenly, one of the indolent-looking guards gazed lazily into the window, stopped looking lazy at all, and cried out, “Stop them! I’ve seen that girl in Paris. She’s the one we’re looking for.” He leaped to grab the collar of the lead horse.

  Ruvigny started to turn back, but was blocked by another of the French guards. Bismarck jumped off the bench and onto the shoulders of the soldier who was gripping the collar. Marc, from the other side of the carriage, leaped off his horse and onto the bench, to take charge of the reins. Gerry, like a monkey, climbed up the back of th
e carriage, across the roof, and came down on another soldier who was heading toward the collar of the other horse. Raudegen yelled, “Go!” and Marc went, right toward the Burgundian border post. Not very rapidly, though, since each horse had a Frenchman on his collar, each Frenchman had a limpet on his back, trying to pull him off the collar and in the opposite direction, and the spare horses had no idea what was going on and were inclined to dig their feet in and refuse to move at all. The speed of Marc’s brave steeds was more comparable to that of two snails than to that of the legendary Pegasus as they dragged their burden along toward the border of the Grand Duchy of Burgundy, inch by reluctant inch.

  Two of the soldiers grabbed guns from the guardhouse. Old guns. Functional, but not the modern design. Those went to Turenne’s army—not to undistinguished infantry companies in regions of the country where nobody expected anything to happen right now. Of course, the officers here kept their men drilled. Something might happen here someday, just not in the immediately foreseeable future, and the French military establishment was in a constant budget crisis. Wherefore, they had to go through the whole, by current standards stupendously, excruciatingly, slow, routine of getting them ready to shoot. Which they did precisely as they had been trained to do. They might be on the far edge of what was happening, but their officers knew that could always change and some day they might be, on very short notice, in medias res. There was no such thing as a stable front in seventeenth-century warfare. Armies moved around.

  They aimed at the carriage. One shot grazed the flank of one of the spare horses, who reared and broke his lead, but not before slowing the progress of the carriage even more. The other man might well have made his shot except that Bismark, taking advantage of the delay caused by the slow fuse, dropped off the soldier he had been pulling down and ran directly toward the muzzle of the gun.

  Raudegen’s horse didn’t like any of this noise and confusion at all. He’d wrapped the reins around the wrist of his very incompletely healed hand, but that didn’t give him much control, and he’d had very little time to practice using his sword with the “wrong” hand since they left Paris. The horse refused to come around, much less move in the direction of loud noises. Raudegen threw the sword.

  It didn’t hit the shooter. No reasonable man could have expected it to, under the circumstances. It did flash by the side of his head, into his peripheral vision, the light reflecting off its blade, just close enough that he closed his eyes and flinched a few seconds before he was ready to pull the trigger.

  The shot would have hit the carriage, right where Marguerite was sitting. If she had still been sitting there, that was. She was on the floor with Tancrède. Susanna was on top of them. The carriage wasn’t very large.

  It did hit Bismarck, but, thanks to the flinch, not quite in the chest.

  Marc got the carriage onto Burgundian soil. Gerry dropped off the second soldier who had been hanging onto a horse collar, landing on his rear end with a thump. The soldier dropped off in turn, landed more adeptly, and ran back toward French soil before the Burgundian border guards could catch him.

  The rest of the escape party, being no fools, did not remain to conduct a brave and valiant rear guard action. They scrambled after the carriage as fast as they could, Raudegen dragging Bismarck, with his good hand, by way of a firm grasp on the other’s collar. He left the sword behind. It was just an ordinary sword. He could buy another one.

  * * *

  “You’re an idiot, you know,” Ruvigny said bracingly while Gerry patched Bismarck up. “Normal people don’t run directly at guns. At least not when they’re on foot. We’re all a little strange, I suppose, in that we’ve chosen a profession that causes us to run right out to get shot at, but we do it on horses, while we’re wearing armor. The infantry on foot don’t normally charge guns. At most, they just stand there and take it, hoping that one of the balls doesn’t have their number.”

  Gerry, although he was stoically continuing to swab the wound out, was going from pale to greenish. Ruvigny turned to him. “How did you do it? Tricking that soldier into thinking you were a down-time peasant when you’re an up-timer.”

  Gerry fought down his gag reflex. “Think about it. I was twelve when the Ring of Fire hit. I’ve lived nearly a third of my life down-time. Most of that time, I’ve been going to school with either a majority of down-timers in Grantville and now at the university in Jena or to a school where everybody else was a down-timer when I was at the Latin School in Rudolstadt.”

  He rearranged the tools he was using to probe at Bismarck’s shoulder. “This is going to take a surgeon, you know, once we find one.”

  After that bit of drama, the rest of the trip to Besançon was just a slog.

  Section V

  Besançon

  Rohan was not happy, but he was pragmatic. “Has she resumed her liason with Candale, then?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her,” Marguerite said.

  “I saw no sign of it while we were still in Paris last summer,” Ruvigny shook his head. “He was rarely around. On the way here, he shared a room with the other men every night.”

  “It’s probably political, then, but that’s really neither here nor there.” Rohan looked at Raudegen. “I’ll have a letter ready by morning. With Bernhard’s approval, if he will agree to continue to second you to me for a span of time, you will be on your way back to Soubise shortly thereafter. He needs to know that she is out there, somewhere, spinning her intrigues.”

  “You have probably been receiving more information here, through the radio connection to the USE, Your Grace, than we did the last two weeks we were in France. Do you have any sense where they might have gone?” Ruvigny asked. “We speculated, of course. Brittany? Back to Sully? To the USE to negotiate La Valette out of captivity?”

  “Back to Paris to make Uncle Soubise’s life miserable,” Marguerite contributed. She paused. “Why don’t you divorce her, Papa?”

  “No.” Rohan shook his head. “I won’t say never, but not as long as your grandfather is alive. I respect and admire him more, perhaps, than you can believe. In my estimation, Sully is one of the greatest men of our age with perhaps the greatest of political visions.”

  * * *

  “Do you believe, Henri?” Marguerite asked.

  “Believe what?”

  “The teachings of John Calvin. The tenets of the faith. What the theologians write and the preachers say?”

  “How come you ask?”

  “Because Susanna believes, I think. Bismarck believes. Gerry believes, in his way. But I’m pretty sure that Uncle Soubise does not believe, really, nor Papa even. Nor Maman, at least only that God’s favor has not fallen upon her and she is predestined to damnation, so she might as well do as she pleases on the way there. Do you believe?”

  “Sometimes…sometimes I think that we—Rohan, Sully, Coligny, Bouillon, the great Protestant houses and their clients—have been placed in France to defend the faith of those who do believe.” He paused. “I am prepared to expend my life’s blood defending the right of Huguenot believers to follow their convictions, without forced conversions, without expulsions, without confiscations. Is that belief? Make of it what you will.”

  * * *

  Ruvigny was standing, his back against the wall.

  “I hadn’t given it enough thought,” Rohan said to Marguerite. “Here you are and your presence will completely disrupt my bachelor household. You must have a mature woman as your companion, since the duchess did not come. How many ladies-in-waiting will you need? A personal maid. A chambermaid.” He ticked items off a list as he muttered. “It’s already September. There’s not a lot of time left to bring suitable persons here.”

  “If I may speak, Your Grace,” Ruvigny said, “you no longer have close personal ties with the major Huguenot families, and the constellations at court are changing every day. You can’t be sure that any woman you bring from France won’t be acting as an agent for Gaston. Or for the now-diverging interes
ts of her own father and brothers. Or for the duchess, as far as that goes.”

  “Then what do you recommend? She can’t stay here without a proper establishment.”

  “Temporarily, borrow someone from Archduchess Claudia.”

  “Her attendants are Catholic. Well, mostly—she has accepted a few Protestants as a concession to the grand duke, but they are all Lutheran.” Rohan chewed on his upper lip for a moment. “As for that, this girl who traveled with you…she’s Catholic, isn’t she?”

  “Betrothed to Cavriani’s son.” He steepled his fingers, briefly considering the relationship among the down-time equivalent of lies, damn lies, and statistics. “So it is possible that her Catholicism may be interpreted as a temporary or interim condition. We should certainly behave in such a way as not to discourage her from converting if or when the possibility should arrive. In addition to that…” Ah, he thought to himself. What would we do without the subjunctive case?

  “I know Cavriani. I enjoy conversing with him. However, I’m never entirely sure whether I’m on solid rock or shifting sand when I’m dealing with the man. Still…oh, well, yes. The girl can stay in Marguerite’s household until Cavriani sends for her and Marc. That doesn’t reduce the need for suitable Calvinist attendants.”

  * * *

  Rohan did not fully understand why they were all in his conference room. Why were all of them taking such an interest in Marguerite’s marriage? It wasn’t as if, aside from Ruvigny, they were Huguenots. The up-time boy had even stuck his hand up in the air and replied, “Present,” when he called the meeting to order.

  “Now, as to the Catholic nonentity to whom the crown married her according to the up-time encyclopedias, impelled by Anne of Austria and Cardinal Mazarin: he was a terrible mésalliance to be forced on the ducal house of Rohan. They married Marguerite off to a minor Poitevan nobleman, merely a seigneur with not even a title, of no special fortune. Nonetheless, I am having difficulties in locating matches of suitable rank among the Calvinists. Rupert of the Palatinate is out of play. Or even among the Lutherans.” He slammed his hand on the table, palm down. “By now, my minimum requirement is a Protestant nonentity.”