1634: The Ram Rebellion (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

Mostly near the larger cities, where they had their headquarters. Where their writ ran with some effectiveness.

  Up here, in a village near the border with Coburg, their writ had not yet made much impact. No villager in this region had ever seen any of the up-timers except the “Hearts and Minds” team. Who were, for them, the bringers of free newspapers and pamphlets. Newspapers, in particular, with Brillo stories.

  Which meant that both parties to the Schulte suit, rather than hiring expensive lawyers in Bamberg, had appealed to the ram to decide the issue.

  So Schulte’s appeal was on his table, under the pewter plate.

  And Herr Schulte was standing in the door of the room, expressing the opinion that Constantin Ableidinger could not reach an impartial judgment in the matter because he, like the other party to the suit, descended from Austrian exiles.

  Paine had covered a lot in that little pamphlet called Common Sense.

  In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise, and the worthy, need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious, or unfriendly, will cease of themselves unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.

  Ableidinger tried to follow the same principle in everything he wrote. For now, he kept his face impassive while he listened to Schulte rant.

  Dreaming of simplification.

  There was no need for the ram to make his call for restoration of “old, established” usages and rights. Even if, when one read it carefully, that was largely the way the American Declaration of Independence was couched.

  That was the path to a continuing nightmare. The more he thought about it, the surer he became.

  Thomas Jefferson’s logic was not the same as that of Thomas Paine. Jefferson had tried to graft natural rights onto the tree trunk of precedent.

  Paine had not. As he put it, “He who takes nature for his guide, is not easily beaten out of his argument . . .”

  Simplify.

  Alexander the Great had solved the Gordian knot by cutting it.

  Why couldn’t the farmers of Franconia do the same? Get rid of these thickets of traditional claims and cross-claims? Draw a line and start over? No more one-half of a village under one customary law, the other half under a second and different set, which let the lords constantly dispute over whose law applied to which lands and which tenants. Much less having the lordship fragmented into a dozen or more fractions, and the only recourse the farmers had some city lawyer whose main goal was to maximize the profits for the shareholders, the Ganerben.

  His mind wandered to his next pamphlet. Benefits for the current lessor. No more disputes over the possible dower rights of the lessor’s grandfather’s cousin’s widow’s second husband.

  Benefits for the current lessee. No more lawsuits over whether or not a century-past transfer from one party to another had been properly carried out and recorded. No more allegations that a lease for three lives had already expired because some lawyer’s clerk had search the church books and found that the father of the current holder had begotten an older son who was recorded as having been born and died on the same day. Since the long-dead priest had not specified that the child was stillborn, the pile of papers under the candlestick had been generated by the lessor’s claim that the child had possibly breathed, and thus extinguished the third life on the lease when it died.

  Somewhere. He had read it somewhere, in something published by the up-timers. He had no recollection where it had been or where he had read it. He would paraphrase the quotation from memory, as closely as he could. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the minds of the living.” Or, “The past lies as a nightmare upon the present.”

  The second way was better. Shorter. Pithier.

  The first version sounded too much like something that merino would say.

  The Franconians’ ram was Brillo.

  Schulte finished his presentation.

  Matthias indicated by a signal that he had gotten it all down in shorthand.

  Ableidinger rose and escorted Schulte to the door.

  He stood there for a moment, looking up at the ram banner waving from a flagpole at the edge of the village.

  He wished he could go out and enjoy the breeze. He wished he could go out into the glorious long day of autumn sunlight. The days were already getting shorter. Soon they would be in the grim, glum, winter again.

  But poor Matthias was obliged to stay in the office, transcribing everything that idiot Schulte had to say.

  Not to mention that there was still the pile of papers weighted down by the telescope.

  The young pastor Otto Schaeffer had left Frankenwinheim and taken a position in a parish under the patronage of one of the most intransigent imperial knights in Bayreuch. Fuchs von Bimbach, the name was. From that perch of safety, he was peppering Franconia with pamphlets asserting that Christianity required that believers who had been offended turn the other cheek and forgive seventy times seven.

  So. Back to Common Sense.

  But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

  Yet another pamphlet to write and send to Else Kronacher in Bamberg. He wouldn’t even be violating his principle against personal recriminations in political controversy. Paine had been writing in another future, nearly a century and a half from now. He had never heard of Otto Schaeffer, so certainly could not have called him a coward and a sycophant.

  Could he? No, of course not. It was just an academic quotation. Schaeffer couldn’t possibly take offense at the ram for including it.

  Else Kronacher. She was the only woman he could think of who was more intransigent than his housekeeper. She was writing pamphlets herself now. The ram had its ewe. Ewegenia, she used as her pseudonym. The last pamphlet she wrote, he thought, had been deliberately meant to tweak his own fondness for Paine. Frau Kronacher had started with a quotation from Common Sense in regard to kingship:

  But there is another and great distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of Heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.

  Else Kronacher did not care for the political implications of the statement that male and female were distinctions of nature.

  Perhaps he could get rid of his housekeeper by proposing to Frau Kronacher’s daughter Martha? He probably should remarry one of these days. The house would be very empty when Matthias left for the university.

  What university should the boy attend?

  He didn’t have time to think about that right now. He had a pamphlet to write. A speech to give. Or several of each.

  His time was too valuable now. So they said. Worse, they were right. Paine’s words belonged in Franconia this year:

  The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ‘Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province, or a Kingdom; but of a Continent-of at least one-eighth part of the habitable Globe. ‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.

  A different continent, but it was nonet
heless true.

  So, for now, his time was too valuable for him to step out into the breeze. He turned back to the table and picked up his pen. Placing the first sheet of paper over one printed with heavy black lines to provide guidance in keeping the lines of his handwriting straight, he entered the heading.

  The Past Lies as a Nightmare upon the Present.

  At least, he still knew better than to think his efforts were indispensable. If he were not writing pamphlets, somebody else would write pamphlets. Not precisely the same ones, saying precisely the same things, but close enough.

  If he ever forgot that, the ram might as well be a king.

  On Ye Saints

  Eva Musch

  April 1633: Grantville, Thuringia

  “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones; dem bones dem bones dem dry bones . . .” Willard Thornton’s perpetually off-key humming was starting to get on his wife Emma’s nerves.

  “Willard,” she lamented, “I have papers to grade. I honestly do. I am trying to grade these papers. Honestly I am. Please, Honey, please. Take the dry bones out and spade the garden, or something.”

  “I’ll be good,” he swore, hand on his heart. “I promise, Teacher. Please let me stay inside. If you look up from those papers and out the window you will see that . . .”

  “It’s raining.” Emma leaned over and kissed him on the back of the neck; then returned to the stack of senior English Literature essays.

  “Dem dry bones would be getting very wet.” Willard returned to hunting and pecking on the old manual typewriter that he had gotten back when he was in high school. “The toe bone’s connected to the foot bone, and the foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone . . .”

  Emma got up. After checking to see that each kid was about his or her assigned chores, she went into the kitchen to make meatloaf. Whatever it was, Willard would tell her about it when he got good and ready, but not one instant before.

  * * *

  Good and ready came on Monday evening.

  “I never did my missionary service,” Willard said, after he had led the family in their devotions. “Because, well, you know.”

  Emma knew. In 1980, Willard and Emma ran off and got married the night of their high school graduation, believing (quite rightly, in regard to Emma’s side) that both sets of parents would be profoundly opposed to their marriage. Immediate marriage meant that he would not do his stint as an LDS missionary as his parents thought he should; and her parents, whether the marriage might be now or later, considered LDS to be a cult. They were both eighteen, with no more sense than the average run of teenagers. Willard had really been afraid that if he left for two years, Emma’s parents would manage to change her mind. So they ran.

  They hadn’t taken their first baby on the honeymoon, if you could call three nights in a strip motel in Charleston a honeymoon, but they had certainly brought her back with them. She was born dead, barely seven months into the pregnancy. Emma, sobbing, had said that she looked like a little bird without feathers that had fallen out of the nest too soon.

  Then Emma had gone through a crisis, believing that this was some kind of divine punishment for the elopement-a punishment which she associated with not having honored her parents. Willard worked at the Home Center, sent her to college, and hung in there with great determination, studying LDS materials on his own. When Emma discovered that she was pregnant again, the same week that she received her M.Ed. degree and seven years to the day after the first baby’s death, she had interpreted this as a sign of divine forgiveness and joined the LDS. In which, she admitted to herself, she often still felt rather like a fish out of water, even after more than a dozen years of membership.

  Willard was drawing a deep breath. She knew that he had always hated the parts of school that involved standing up in front of the class and saying something.

  “You know how we’ve talked and prayed about how the events in the Book of Mormon are unlikely to happen that way in this timeline. And we’ve agreed they were inspired by God, and are as relevant to this timeline as to the old. We’re ready. The German version of the Book of Mormon is at the printer’s. We were certainly blessed that Howard Carstairs was stationed in Germany and kept all his materials after he came home. We’re ordering more of the little pamphlets we’ve been handing out to the refugees here, inside the RoF. The branch has to start its missionary program here, down-time, some time. It looks like the time is now. And, well, Howard wants me to be the one. It’s going to be one, to start with. Full time. There’s no one else who can go with me, to make a pair. But I’m not an eighteen-year-old kid, either. They can count on me to be responsible. Howard said that once I’ve sort of, well, pioneered the thing. Tested the water. After that, he said, they can send the boys out. We should pray about it.”

  Emma looked at her husband. In her heart, she thought that she knew what Howard Carstairs must be thinking. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Grantville-LDS, as it was generally called-had served a much wider geographical area than the Ring of Fire. It had come back in time with all of its buildings, but with only a small portion of its members.

  Howard was into conservation. He was going to change the way they do things. He wasn’t going to risk the young unmarried guys until they’d had a chance to marry; not until after they’d had their families. Willard . . .

  Was expendable.

  No, that’s mean, Emma chided herself. But Howard knew that she could support the kids and that Harold and Arthur, Willard’s father and brother, would give her back-up if the boys got out of hand. He could spare Willard. Everyone on Emma’s side of the family would say: “I told you so.” And Willard knew that never, in front of the children, would she break the united parental front.

  Oh, damn, damn, damn!

  “Well,” she said. “If you’ve been called to your missionary service, then you should do it . . . We’ll all miss you while you’re gone.”

  While, not when. Never when. Furiously, she stamped down the remembrance of Benny Pierce’s voice, as it lived in her mind, rendering, “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?” at the Fairgrounds last fall.

  While you’re gone. While. Willard Thornton, if you do not come back to me in Time, you’re going to regret it for every moment of the Eternity for which they sealed me to you. While.

  May 1633: Fulda

  Willard thought that, at least from a distance, Fulda was a pretty place. Getting there had been a pretty decent hike, though, for a guy who wasn’t as young as he used to be. At least, the branch had bought him one of Steve Jennings’ down-time bicycles. He couldn’t ride it a lot of the time, though it did surprisingly well on these plain dirt roads when they were dry and packed. Mud and ruts were different problems, but even then, it was a lot easier to push the thing than it would have been to carry everything he had brought with him on his back.

  Willard was transporting a hundred copies of the Book of Mormon. Plus quite a lot more paper, all carefully wrapped in waxed canvas. He didn’t have much more than that, but it was enough. Especially on the up-hill grades. If I had all this in a backpack, he thought to himself, I’d have had a heart attack at least twenty-five miles ago.

  The bicycle was good. But a grocery cart would have been even better. Willard could be trundling all his worldly goods with him, like some homeless person in the streets of Charleston.

  He headed for the city gate.

  The bicycle proved to be the focus of considerable popular interest. Willard had to admit that people of Fulda showed far more curiosity about it than they did about any message he tried to share with them.

  * * *

  Wesley Jenkins, the NUS civil administrator in Fulda, observed this with profound relief. Derek Utt, the military administrator, as a kind of precaution, tried to make sure that there was at least one up-time soldier in sight whenever Willard was out door-to-dooring.

  * * *

  By the time Willard left at the end of the month, he had distributed a lot of the one-page
flyers and two-page brochures. He didn’t know whether the families had kept them. No one at all had accepted a copy of the Book of Mormon or invited him for a follow-up visit. He believed that his missionary efforts had probably inspired only the placement of eleven orders at Jennings’ bicycle factory in Grantville.

  Oh, well.

  He dropped his letters for home off at the post office pickup station in the administration building, remembering Howard’s announcement that if they were going to be using mature men with families as permanent missionaries, then the rules about limiting contact with their families were out. That had been all right for young men just out of high school who needed to grow up in a hurry, but in this new universe it would be counter-productive.

  Wes Jenkins had seemed a little worried about bandits and the bicycle, the whole time Willard was in Fulda. About the middle of May, he had suggested that since he was sending Denver Caldwell down to headquarters to deliver some reports, Willard should leave when the kid did. Willard wasn’t finished yet, then. About a week later, Wes had suggested that he should to along with a group of down-time traders. Willard still wasn’t finished yet. When he finally decided that he had accomplished as much in Fulda as he probably could, Wes had given him a map the same afternoon.

  Shaking the dust of Fulda from his feet, Willard headed off toward the southeast.

  June-July 1633: Wurzburg, Franconia

  Wes’ directions on how to get from Fulda to Wurzburg were pretty good. Willard didn’t gotten lost, but there weren’t any good-sized towns along the route for him to visit, either. He picked up a packet of letters and newspapers that were waiting for him at the post office, caught up on the news from home, and went back to missionizing.

  A month later, Willard felt that Wurzburg had gone well. After four weeks of work, covering a city with twelve thousand or so residents nearly door-to-door, he was leaving behind not only another batch of flyers and brochures, but numerous small pamphlets and three copies of the Book of Mormon. That did mean, of course, if you reckoned it another way, that he would still be pushing ninety-seven copies of the Book of Mormon on the bicycle when he left. He leaned the bicycle against a tree and sat down to rest his feet.