by Eric Flint
"I saw the parents of those children killed in front of their eyes. I saw the entrails of their parents smeared across the ground. They were wet with blood, and the burning buildings were reflected in the dirty gore. The middle one had a sister, maybe fifteen years old. She, I couldn't save."
Heinrich sat up, pleading. "I tried to stop it, I tried. Lieber Gott in Himmel, der er weiß, dass ich versucht habe." He gasped for air and began sobbing. "I killed. I killed those men, and tried to kill more. I killed a captain . . . what kind of a God does these things, Millie? What kind of a God allows such pain and agony in his name?" He sank down again.
"You have the children," said Millie. "You have lead them to safety. And you have helped us." The winter silence was long, and his quiet weeping slowed to a stop. Finally, she spoke. "I lived through a world war. It was devastating. Millions died in death camps, in combat, and of disease. You know Hamburg?" He nodded. "In Hamburg our aircraft killed forty thousand people in one night. The Germans did much the same and worse to the other side."
Heinrich was now looking at her. "God love him, I met John in that war, and I still have him. You are one man, Heinrich, one man who did what he could. This war has made you. Just like mine made me. For what it's worth, I think you are on the right track. Those kids need someone. They see you as a father."
She stood up slowly. "Thanks for coming onto my front porch, Heinrich von Fremd. I'm glad my goof ball husband didn't shoot you. Find what faith you have, young man. It's in there, hiding. Search for it. I know it's there. Mine was buried a long time ago, when I was very young, just a girl. It was the war. John rescued me. He is very gentle for all of his bluster and calluses. He found me and rescued me.
"Did you ever wonder why I asked you to stay with us that day when we first met?" she asked.
"You said you needed help with the farm?" He said very tentatively.
"No," said Millie. "It's something I saw in you. It reminded me of myself, many years ago. Until a dashing young American entered my life, I was you."
January, 1632
The heavy snow made some visits to town impossible. When it was cold the battery life was very low in the "town cart" as they named it. John had taken the West Virginia plate off the Buick and put it in the back of the cart in a moment of whimsy. Millie had been too weak to go out in the cart to town in January, so she stayed home.
The food was monotonous, but healthy enough. The diet helped Millie, but she continued to lose weight throughout the season. She grew weaker. By the time spring came, the medications were just about all gone, including some of the improvised herbs and medicines that Doc Adams had prepared for her. They were down to cutting pills into quarters.
April, 1632
As the days lengthened and the sun began to warm the earth, Millie felt better. The garden called to her from inside the house. It was a strong call for her, and one that kept her focused on spring. She wanted to plant. As soon as she was able, the garden would be revived. She would be revived with it.
She did as much of it as she could. John helped. But Heinrich and the children were the most help. Whenever Heinrich was not working, he was with Millie. Their late December night had created a special bond, and he took it upon himself to be her arms and legs, digging in the dirt as he had never done before. Millie could tell that he felt it satisfying, comforting to be in the garden. Millie sat next to him guiding his tasks. The initial plantings went well, and things were beginning to take shape. The spring and summer routine began to take over. Mornings in the garden, afternoon resting, enjoying the sun and the quiet.
June, 1632
John watched Millie closely as the summer began. He made a point of pulling Heinrich to the side to ask him something, away from Millie. They both disappeared into the back garden for the afternoon while Millie rested.
The next day, Millie went back to the garden in the morning, and saw what they had done. It was a beautiful spot, back near the fence, under the shade of an old tree. She immediately began to transplant some flowers, and arrange some plants in a new configuration that she knew would be pleasing, in time. That task, for which she refused all help, drained her. There was a week where she couldn't get out into the garden, she was too worn out.
The following week, however she rose, feeling some strength return. "I want to work in the garden," she declared. "It's a nice day by the looks of it so far." In the days before they would listen to the radio station and get the weather to plan their days. The small Japanese AM radio still sat at the end of the kitchen table, quiet. Next to it was the white basket. A nearly empty white basket. "Don't know how long I'll be able to do that."
"Do you need help with the cart?" John asked.
"No, I think I can make it to the side of the house." She smiled at him.
John nodded in the affirmative. They looked at each other across the table for a bit, and when the time seemed right, they both got up. The morning was glorious, birds were chirping, some of them she'd never heard before. There were sounds of the children running and screaming at each other from down the road. Bees had found the flowers in the front, she was glad of that. Sunny, beautiful. The smells of the damp earth and plants reminded her of her days on the family farm, and her mother, father, slew of brothers. They were all gone now, some to war, some to disease, some to accidents. It was a nice morning.
That day was the last for Millie in her garden. When she parked the cart on its little ramp at midday, she couldn't get up. They went back to full pills, and ran out of nearly all of them in a couple of days. Millie lapsed into a coma and died three days later. Quietly and peacefully in her own bed. John made her as comfortable as possible, and when the end came John held her hand, and it was calm and painless. She looked at peace, sharp shining dark eyes finally closed.
He cared for her as he remembered his mother caring for his father when he passed. It was when he was fourteen or fifteen, and his mother had cleared off the dining room table to wash his fathers' body. He had lost a lot of weight before he died, and John never forgot the emaciated body, pale and naked on the dining room table, his mother carefully washing it, and then wrapping it in a shroud. He did the same for Millie.
He had finished the pine coffin a day earlier. He had been working on it for a week prior. Heinrich, Maureen, the children and Father Mazzare helped to carry her out to the garden in the pine box. She'd planted the flowers around the grave, and had arranged the plants in a small circular pattern, with the grave in the middle. She'd even made some jokes about planting her own flowers over her grave. They had both laughed at the time. The flowers she'd planted were colorful and blooming. The spring was ending and summer arrived to this part of the world, in this strange time.
Summer still arrived.
Not At All The Type
By Virginia DeMarce
Summer 1634, Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia
"That was the year I broke my nose at the demolition derby."
Tina Marie Hollister pointed to the knot. She'd never bothered to have it repaired. Never had the money, to tell the truth. Probably wouldn't have bothered even if she'd been rich.
Kitty Chaffin looked across the desk. The personnel office of the State of Thuringia-Franconia would be hard up without Tina Marie. Her oldest son, Ray Lafferty, had married a German girl, Christina Zuehlke, up at Wismar last year. It had turned out that Christina had two unemployed older brothers with Latin school educations who would be willing to work for SoTF personnel in recruiting down-timers. Brothers from up north on the Baltic coast. Brothers who didn't have cousins, godsons, sons of godfathers, or in-laws of cousins all over central Thuringia. All of whom needed government jobs. Or wanted them, at least. If Kitty could have hired subordinates from Madagascar, she would have considered it a good deal.
Even so, sometimes the sheer raucousness of the other woman got on Kitty's nerves. Not that she was that much older than Tina Marie. Maybe twelve years. No more than fifteen. Tina Marie would be fiftyish to
Kitty's sixtyish. Maybe not quite fifty. She could look it up in the files here in the office if it was ever important.
Right now, the younger of the two Zuehlke men was looking at Tina Marie a little dubiously. They hadn't objected when Christina had married Ray Lafferty. At that point, up in Pomerania and Mecklenburg, the devastation had been so bad that they'd been happy enough that their sister had just found a husband who could afford to house and feed her.
Of course, that was in Wismar. Before they met Ray's mother.
But now, with regular jobs, their middle-classness was coming through. Kitty thought that it was hard to get much middle-classier than Johann Friedrich and Dietrich Zuehlke.
It was hard to get less middle-class than Tina Marie. She hadn't explained just what a demolition derby was, but Dietrich Zuehlke clearly realized that it wasn't a sedate music recital. He suspected that it was closer to a bear-baiting.
* * *
"It is not easy, Pastor Kastenmayer." Dietrich Zuehlke sat uneasily in the minister's study in the rectory of St. Martin in the Fields Lutheran church.
The church itself sat, almost as uneasily, just outside the borders of the Ring of Fire. While wanting to provide religious services to the many refugees of his own faith, Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt had concluded that they were capable of walking far enough to attend sermons delivered on land that was clearly still his own.
"All of us are living in her house," Zuehlke continued. "Frau Hollister's house. Given the situation with space and rents in Grantville, this is unavoidable."
"All?" Kastenmayer had seen Zuehlke with a group of other people at services, but there hadn't seemed to be so many of them.
"The house has three sleeping rooms. If, as Frau Hollister points out, you count the one that she made out of a side porch when her sons got to be noisy, rambunctious, teenagers."
"How many people?"
"Frau Hollister and her youngest daughter Carly Baumgardner in one room. Her daughter April Lafferty and my half-sister, Anna Sartorius, in the other. And on the 'porch' there are three sets of beds. My brother and I have one set. Frau Hollister's younger sons Vance Lafferty and Garrett Baumgardner have the second. The third—that depends on who is in town. Sometimes her son Ronnie Baumgardner. Sometimes my half-brother, Jacob Sartorius, when he is not in classes at the university in Jena. Sometimes my stepfather, Lucas Sartorius, since he is in Erfurt on business and comes down to visit us. The only family members who do not live there are Frau Hollister's oldest son Ray Lafferty who married my sister. Her name is Christina. They are up north still, in Wismar."
Pastor Kastenmayer thought. "These 'bunks' are two-level beds, set upon posts?"
Zuehlke nodded. "Frau Hollister sold off her up-time beds with box springs and mattresses, replacing them with down-time made bunks with rope slats and horsehair mattresses. She says that she gained, thereby, spare funds to pay for April's apprenticeship. That is another issue, apprenticing a girl to an artisan's craft. Plus, she has a couple of canvas cots that can be set up if they are needed."
"Where?"
"There is space for them in the two rooms used by the women. The rest of the house isn't all that big, either. A living room, an eat-in kitchen, and a bathroom. Which is a luxury, certainly. As is the natural gas heating system. Anna says that if we return to Wismar after this summer's campaign is over, presuming that the Swedes win the war, of course, she will greatly miss the natural gas 'range' in the kitchen."
Kastenmayer smiled. "And the refrigerator?"
"Refrigeration isn't a big worry up on the Baltic and North Sea coasts." Zuehlke's expression was quite serious.
Dietrich Zuehlke was always quite serious. At the age of thirty, he was a responsible sort of person. Responsible in a way for his older brother Johann Friedrich, who tended to lapse into frivolity and facetiousness if someone didn't keep an eye on him. Responsible for his younger half-sister and half-brother.
Jacob, who was just eighteen, was at the university in Jena most of the time, so that was a minor problem. But, Dietrich explained, he worried about the influence of Frau Hollister on his sister Anna, who was just twenty-three. Even more, he worried about the influence of nineteen-year-old April, now Christina's sister-in-law, on Anna.
Above all, he felt responsible because, under his influence and because of his urging, his stepfather, Lucas Sartorius, had come to Grantville for several visits.
"It is my fault," Dietrich said. "I practically dragged him down to Grantville so that he could see where his stepsons were working now. To show him that, given a reasonably stable interval in this eternal war, we are not wasting the money he spent on our education."
To Grantville, where he had fallen under the spell of this Jezebel.
Frau Hollister, in whose house Dietrich was necessarily living.
Erfurt, Summer 1634
"When can we expect the shipment to arrive?" Dennis Stull, Grantville's civilian head of procurement at the USE's main supply depot for Thuringia and the rest of the central Germanies, had been impatient for two weeks. He hated evasions. He expected a lot of them this morning.
"Never." The tall man seated opposite him—Lucas Sartorius was his name—reached across the desk and handed Stull a letter. "This came in yesterday evening from our firm's factor in Luebeck."
"Never?"
"At the direct orders of Emperor Gustavus Adolphus, all of the grain shipments we are managing to bring out of the Baltic are being diverted to supplying the armies in the north."
"Just how does he propose to feed the armies in the south? At Ingolstadt? In Swabia?"
Sartorius leaned back. "May I suggest that the king, ah, the emperor, is in the north himself and sees the need there directly."
"Is this some version of 'out of sight, out of mind'?"
"A universal proverb, more or less. In the same category as, 'there's no use in crying over spilt milk.'"
"I don't intend to have Baner foraging in Franconia. We have enough problems going in Franconia with the Ram Rebellion. And while I have no doubts at all that Horn has been foraging through Swabia just as ruthlessly as Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar has been foraging through Swabia, I'd really like to try to keep it within reasonable limits."
"So that, if he prevails, there will be something left in the region for you to govern?"
"Or for Gustavus Adolphus's allies to govern. Parts of the region, such as Wuerttemberg, are Lutheran."
Sartorius turned from political speculation to business. "You do realize that no firm has a great deal to offer right now. This year's crop of Polish grain is still in the field. It will be months before it can be harvested and transported to the Baltic ports. During my career, I have traveled as far as Koenigsburg regularly. Sometimes farther, up to Finland. Arranging exports and imports, contracts and sales. Every year, my main stop was Gdansk. Danzig, the Germans call it. I am not giving you an excuse. It is a fact. The only thing any factor can hope to find for the rest of this summer is grain that someone has, as you say, 'stashed' because he was hoping for a higher price. 'Hoarding' is what we call it."
"Well, then." Dennis steepled his fingers together, his elbows on the desk. "Found any good hoards lately?"
Grantville, Summer 1634
". . . absolutely outrageous," Dietrich Zuehlke finished.
Lucas Sartorius looked at him rather mildly. "Tina Marie and I merely went out for a pleasant evening at the Thuringian Gardens. Had a few beers with friends."
"And finished it off in her bed."
"It's not a bad bed," Sartorius said judiciously. "A little narrow and involving some hazards with the upper bunk. Overall, though, quite comfortable, and the absence of bedbugs is particularly delightful. I plan to take several containers of this DDT with me when I return north."
"You should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself. My mother. . . ."
"I was faithful to your mother," Sartorius said. Well, reasonably. She never knew anything to the contrary. Finland was a long w
ay from Wismar, after all. "But she has been dead for two years."
"The horrible example she is setting for Anna and April and Carly. . . ."
"None of whom were home. April and Anna were still at the Thuringian Gardens, with their own friends, when Tina Marie and I decided to leave. There is no reason for either of them to come into Tina Marie's bedroom in the middle of the night. Carly was having a 'sleepover,' which should—should—have guaranteed us a quite adequate level of privacy. If you had not chosen to follow us home."
