by Eric Flint
“What a good idea.”
* * *
“Do you have time to ride out with me again, Scott?” Johnnie F. asked. “For a few days, not just a short run.”
“Why?”
“Sort of like last fall. I’d just feel easier in my mind if somebody brought along another set of eyes to look at what I think I’m seeing.”
“What do you think you see?”
“I’d rather not say. That’s why I want fresh eyes.”
Franconia, mid-March, 1634
Scott recognized that village. They were up in the back of beyond, it had a funny church tower, and the biggest ram banner he had seen anywhere in Franconia.
His nose was cold. His toes were cold.
“We’ll be there,” Johnnie F. was saying, “in time for the meeting.”
“Johnnie F.,” Scott said pleadingly, “will you tell me. Where in hell are we?”
“Right up against the border with Coburg. As far as we can go and still be inside our part of Franconia. The border stones march right along the crest of those hills behind the village; half of its fields are in the USE.”
Johnnie F. smiled. “I spent one summer while I was in college in Washington, DC, you know. Of all stupid-seeming places for an ag major to intern, but I was working for the Forestry Service at the USDA-Department of Agriculture, that is.
“There were reports in the paper all the time. Gangs, shooting at one another. Then jumping into another jurisdiction. Out of DC and across the street, into Prince George’s County in Maryland. Different jurisdiction; cops come to a screeching halt at the border, the perps thumb their noses and disappear. And so forth. There must have been a dozen little jurisdictions around there, in a space no bigger than the Ring of Fire, really.”
“So?”
“So, it’s a handy kind of place to be, right on a border. If you think that somebody might be coming after you.”
Johnnie F. looked down into the valley, at the village strung out along the creek.
“We’ll be going to a meeting, tonight, after we eat. If you just keep quiet, I think that maybe you’ll get to meet the ram. The Big Bad Brillo, himself.”
“No Ewegenia?”
Johnnie F. didn’t even smile. “No. She’s in Bamberg.”
Scott looked at him. “You know who she is?”
“Sure,” Johnnie F. said mildly. “Once it occurred to me that they had a press in one of the larger cities, it wasn’t any real trouble to find out.”
“Inclined to tell me?”
“Depends. Do you really need to know?”
* * *
Scott was constrained to be quiet, but Johnnie F. hadn’t told him not to write notes in school. As soon as the pipes struck up the melody, he scribbled, “Isn’t that ‘America’ – you know, ‘My Country ‘tis of Thee’?”
“It was, once upon a time,” Johnnie F. scribbled back. “The tune is the same, but the words go off from the second verse, ‘Our fathers’ God to Thee, author of liberty, to Thee we sing’ and it’s real different.”
Gott uns’res Vaterlands,
der Freiheit, des Verstands,
Dich loben wir.
Leih’ uns die Moeglichkeit,
Dein’ Liebe, dein Geleit,
Von Deiner Ewigkeit,
Justiz von Dir.
Scott sat quietly, trying to translate as he listened. The German seemed like it had sort of been crammed into the tune, by someone writing too fast to make it a good match. The heavy Franconian accented German of the singers wasn’t helping, either. A lot of the village dialects didn’t bear much resemblance to what was spoken in Wuerzburg.
“God of our fatherland, of freedom, of reason, we praise you.” Was that right?
“Give us the possibility.” Did that make sense, or did it mean something else?
“Your love,” then-a “Geleit” for a soldier was a military escort, “from eternity, justice from you.”
The singers were well into the second verse, now.
Gib uns das taeglich’ Brot,
Spar’ uns des Elends Not,
Dich ehren wir.
Wende den Kriege ab,
Bis wir den Frieden hab’
Nie mehr des Hochmuts Raub,
Das beten wir.
“Give us our daily bread, spare us the famine of suffering. We honor you.” Okay. “Avert war until we have peace, no longer the loot of arrogance. We pray that.”
Johnnie F. leaned over and whispered: “There’s several more verses in the whole thing, mainly a run through the beatitudes, but they mostly only sing those two to open a meeting. Must be a cinch to write verses in a language where most of the abstract nouns end in either “heit” or “keit” and can be made to rhyme with one another.”
“It’s sort of… calming, as revolutionary songs go.”
“I told you all that Meyfarth wasn’t writing stuff that cries for vengeance and bloodshed. You can’t expect him to be a re-run of Spartacus, either. He’s a preacher, for Pete’s sake. He’s bound to use a lot of religious stuff in what he writes. None of the ‘be a revolutionary atheist’ gig for him.”
“Meyfarth, again?”
“Yeah. Some of the farmers have written other verses that say rude things about tithes and taxes, but this is the ‘official’ version. As far as Orville and Stew and I know, they, the Ram people, are opening all of their meetings with it.”
A middle-aged man got up. A quite ordinary man, a person might think, aside from the booming voice that emerged from his thick body. The kind of voice that could be heard by a couple of thousand people gathered in an open field.
He was holding a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order, and proceeded to conduct the meeting in accordance with it. Starting with a pledge of allegiance to the flag of the State of Thuringia-Franconia. Ending, a couple of hours later… something was so familiar. Scott’s mind went back to that meeting last fall.
Scott scribbled again. “Did Meyfarth really translate the ‘Concord Hymn’ into German?”
“Yeah. And they’ve all memorized it. They sing it to the tune of ‘From Heav’n Above, To Earth I Come.’ That’s a children’s Christmas song that Martin Luther wrote. Same number of syllables in each line and everybody knows the tune.”
“In Aprils Luft entfalten sich die Flaggen."
* * *
In the “few days” that Johnnie F. had asked for, they attended several more meetings. The man with the booming voice was speaking at most of them. Carefully guarded by a dozen Jaeger wearing the ram badge on their armbands. They let Johnnie F. and Scott approach him.
“Who am I?” he asked. “Why, who but an actor on this stage that is life? A pupil in the Coburg Gymnasium when I was much younger than I am now. A scholarship boy, brought in from a border village by the duke’s charity, because the pastor recommended me. A failed university student, once upon a time, a would-be-lawyer who had to leave because he not only got a baker’s daughter pregnant, a bad enough scandal, but married her-a far worse one in the academic world. A village schoolmaster in Frankenwinheim, more recently. A thinker of thoughts and a dreamer of dreams.”
He looked at the pamphlet in his hand and laughed uproariously. “Now a pupil of inspired fools. A student who takes what they say and shapes it so that the farmers of Franconia understand.”
Blackwell looked over the man’s shoulder. The man was reading Common Sense, by Thomas Paine.
“Will we meet you again?”
“Probably, very probably. Unless it should happen that I am unlucky.”
Chapter 10:
“Just A Truce In A Little Corner Of It”
Wuerzburg, late March, 1634
“I think they’ve harnessed it,” Scott said to the morning briefing. “This Common Sense guy, using Meyfarth and the Thorntons. If they haven’t accomplished miracles, then at least near-miracles. I’m not going to try to tell you how deeply it has all sunk in, or how widely. They’ve had, what, a few months? On top of grievances and grud
ges that have been building for years. But the stuff is all over the place. It’s being read, and sung, repeated in this guy’s speeches, talked about. They’ve made us a harness.”
“So now,” Scott said, “we get to ride the ram.”
“Speaking of which…” Johnnie F. tossed a newspaper on the table. It was one of the ones printed in Franconia. “Have you seen ‘Brillo’s Little Red Rider’? They’ve got Princess Kristina riding Brillo in that one. You’ve all got to read it.”
“Later,” Steve said firmly. “Right now, we need to deal with the petition that the knights and lords have sent to Gustavus Adolphus. This is what I’ve gotten back from Ed and Arnold in Grantville. And from Mike Stearns.”
“They’re different?”
“Mike’s language is considerably more colorful, and…”
“And?” Scott asked.
Steve sighed. “We have an intervention from Margrave Christian of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. Diplomatic, at the moment. Very diplomatic. Just asks us to consider the difficulty in which our policies are placing the Protestant nobility of Franconia. Doesn’t say anything about a military action, not even obliquely. Dr. Lenz, however, the agent representing the Freiherr Fuchs von Bimbach, claims that the margrave is prepared to undertake an invasion of Franconia in support of the petitioners.”
David Petrini interrupted. “Of course, they’re trying to take advantage of the fact that Gustav Adolf himself is very busy in the north dealing with the League of Ostend, so they presume that they’re really appealing to Oxenstierna. Who, in his heart, believes that the nobles really should rule.”
“Aren’t they forgetting,” Anita asked, “that he’s all the way up in Stockholm and unless someone radios the petition to him, he isn’t going to get it very soon?”
“Unless it’s really meant for Wilhelm Wettin-a stick he can use against Mike,” Steve answered.
“Oh, holy shit!” Scott said. “I go out of town for a few days and all hell breaks loose!”
“Brandenburg-Bayreuth?” Johnnie F. asked. “I’d just heard it called Bayreuth before. Brandenburg, I know, turned into Prussia later on. But what are the Hohenzollerns doing down here?”
“The Hohenzollerns started ‘down here’,” Weckherlin answered. “These men, now, Margrave Christian in Bayreuth and his nephews in Ansbach, are a cadet line of the family represented by Margrave George Wilhelm up in Berlin, who is a brother of Gustavus Adolphus’ wife. The Hohenzollern family though, back in the middle ages, began here. As the Burggrafen in Nuernberg, holding the big castle there for the Holy Roman Emperors. Acquisitive bunch, overall.”
He hesitated a moment; then, added: “This is perhaps more serious than you may assume. By themselves, the knights and small lords will have a difficult time getting organized. They will not hesitate to become violent, but the violence is likely to be disjointed. For a fact, it seems to me, the farmers are much better organized. Better led, too, from what I can determine.”
“Who’s leading the knights?” Scott asked. “This von Bimbach character?”
Weckherlin waggled his hand. “To a degree, yes; to a degree, not. He is certainly the most prominent figure. But he is not really very popular among the knights. His arrogance and overbearing manner is not something which only the farmers resent. And the nickname of ‘Pestilenz’ is applied to his agent by knights as often as it is by farmers and townsmen.”
“But you’re saying it could still get serious?” asked Steve.
“If the Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth chooses to intervene, yes,” replied Weckherlin, nodding. “Very serious. He is not a small lord, and his geographic position makes him important to Gustavus Adolphus. The Emperor can ignore a pack of unruly knights. He cannot ignore Margrave Christian.”
Kulmbach, Bayreuth, late March, 1634
Margrave Christian of Brandenburg-Bayreuth was at the Plassenburg, in Kulmbach. He had moved his official residence to Bayreuth in 1625, but when he needed to think, he still went back to the Plassenburg. He had left Marie and the children in Bayreuth; they were safer there, right now.
He hated war and all that war meant. When he was a child, his tutors had shown him what Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades had done to Bayreuth and the rest of Franconia with his feuds. Not just told him; that madman had died less than thirty years before his own birth. His tutors had been able to show him the scars on the land, the burned villages never rebuilt, the ancient churches sacrificed upon the altar of ambition and greed.
For as long as possible, he had strived to keep this new war out of his lands. For years, he had succeeded. His brother, Margrave Joachim Ernst of Brandenburg-Ansbach, had died in 1625 after a career that involved helping to organize the Protestant Union in 1608, helping to dissolve the Protestant Union, and finally going into Imperial service. Christian had become regent for his nephews, Friedrich and Albrecht.
He had tried so hard to keep Bayreuth out of the war. So what if the more belligerent called it hesitancy, passiveness, a “wait and see” policy. Harsher things, some of them: vacillation, pusillanimity, cowardice. For years, though, while the rest of Franconia was burned and stripped, he kept foreign soldiers out of his lands. Away from his subjects.
In 1631, it had become impossible. The bishop of Bamberg, Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim, had been the hardest to deal with, right next door, threatening, declaring that he had to clarify his stance and make a final decision, either for the emperor and the Catholics or for the Protestants, for the Swede who had taken over the leadership of the Protestant cause in Germany.
Even then, he would rather not have done so. But the terms in which Fuchs von Dornheim had put it had made his decision inescapable. He could not abandon the Protestant cause. He and Friedrich had allied with Gustavus Adolphus. Friedrich was in the north now, with the Swedish army.
His people had taken the consequences, just as he had known they would. Bayreuth had suffered severely under the imperial forces. He had read the reports, report after report. In this village, a farmer thought that he had recognized his stolen horse in the nearby camp of some imperial soldiers. He had gone, with some of his fellow villagers, to demand it back. The soldiers had hanged every adult man in the village. In that village . . .
He had tried to keep Ansbach out of the war, too. Not so easy when the mother of his nephews was an aunt of Wilhelm V of Hesse-Kassel and the older boy itched to get into battle. Ansbach had suffered like Bayreuth.
He had sent people to Grantville to learn what they could from the notorious books and encyclopedias from that future universe. In that world, his nephew Friedrich had been killed in September of 1634, this very year, in a terrible battle at Noerdlingen that shattered Germany’s Protestants. Albrecht, the younger, had lived to rule Ansbach. Probably because he was still too young to fight in that battle.
In 1634, after Noerdlingen, Ferdinand II had deposed them from their principalities, entrusting the government to an imperial commission. A year later, Ferdinand’s son had negotiated a peace, called the Peace of Prague, and restored them. From then until 1648, the armies of both sides had passed back and forth through his lands.
He had sponsored services of joy and thanksgiving in all the churches of Bayreuth when the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648. He had tried to heal the wounds of war. The terrible wounds of war. He had not succeeded. It had been a century before Bayreuth began to recover.
He looked at the small piece of paper, the notes that his agent had made in Grantville. All that another world had remembered of him. So little for a long life. For a life that had lasted almost three-quarters of a century. He had built a new building for the Latin school in Bayreuth. He had abolished the laws that forbade peasants to marry or learn a trade without the permission of the lord whose serfs they had once been, or from whom they leased their lands.
He had forbidden the smoking of tobacco.
Almost, he smiled. He hated tobacco. The smell, the grime, everything associated with it. He would still forbid the smok
ing of tobacco, for all the good it would do. Mankind was afflicted by original sin; determined to drive itself into hell.
As was clearly demonstrated by the present petition that the Protestant nobility of Franconia had sent to Gustavus Adolphus. And which Fuchs von Bimbach was pressing him to support.
Bamberg, early April, 1634
Meyfarth shook his head. “I am no longer a diplomat, Herr Salatto. Nor a functionary of the secular arm. I am now a pastor. Even more, I am afraid that you are trying to recruit me because I am a Lutheran pastor and the margrave is a Lutheran prince. You want me to manipulate his religious scruples, genuine religious scruples, real enough religious scruples, to the advantage of the State of Thuringia-Franconia.”
Steve Salatto looked at his former chief of staff. He had used up all his arguments. After everyone he had sent to Bamberg had failed, he had come himself.
Meyfarth continued. “This is something that I cannot do.”
Steve nodded. This was it, then. Meyfarth simply refused to come back to work for the Franconian administration, even temporarily; would not serve as emissary to Margrave Christian. Even though he was the only person available who might really understand what the margrave was thinking. He rose.
“Please,” Anita said. “Please.” She handed Meyfarth a letter. “Please read this. Then listen to us. Please.”
Meyfarth read, slowly. Nothing that he expected. The first was a letter from the gracious lady to her daughters in Grantville. A simple letter. She had told him before, when he was in Wuerzburg, that the hardest thing that she had ever done in her life was to leave her daughters Emily, then four, and Mary Carla, then two, in Grantville with her parents when she and Steve agreed to take this assignment. Now they would be how old? It had been eighteen months since they all, Meyfarth too, came from Grantville to Wuerzburg in October of 1632, shortly after the Battle of Alte Veste. Still small children. So a simple letter.
What had she said to him then? “It would be different, if I hadn’t come here to work. If I could be with them here, they way Tania and Lynelle are with their kids. But the hours we keep, into the office at dawn and reading by a candle until we are exhausted. I wouldn’t see them here, either, so it was really a choice of having them grow up there, with family, or here, with a governess. Not much of a choice, really.”
