by Eric Flint
Another letter. “Dear Mom.” To her mother, then. “I understand, Mom. Really, I do. We waited to have the girls, and that means that since we were older parents, you and Dad are older grandparents. I can understand how they exhaust you, especially after you’ve managed the day care center at the plant all day. You’re right. Since Dominique is taking some time off anyway after the baby, it makes more sense for her to take them. Don’t feel bad about it. I know that everyone is doing the best he can. She can. I understand. I love you all.”
Meyfarth looked up.
Anita’s eyes were full of tears. “All right, maybe it is blackmail. But if you won’t go talk to him as a diplomat, then please go and talk to him because you’re a pastor. Not a Catholic priest, but a pastor. Because we’ve got to have some kind of a breakthrough, Herr Meyfarth. For our girls. And for all the rest of the children. My girls are going to live with Dominique and Marcus; by the time we see them again, they won’t know us. It was different, somehow, when they were with my parents. Even little children can tell Grandma and Grandpa from Mom and Dad. But now, for every real purpose, Dominique will be their mommy, Marcus will be their daddy, little Mark will be their baby brother, and . . . and I’ll be Auntie Anita who lives a long way away and they haven’t seen her for so long that they’re shy with her.”
She put her head down on the table and started to sob. Steve put his hands on her shoulders.
Finally she lifted her head up. “This isn’t a good time or place to tell you, Steve. There isn’t any good time or place to tell you. Not the way things have been going this spring, since the election. I’m pregnant, again. I’m sure, now. New Year’s Day, I guess.” She started to cry again; then forced herself to stop.
“Please, Herr Meyfarth. As a pastor. Help us make enough of a peace that we can bring our children to Franconia. Just that much. I’m not asking for eternal peace in the whole world. Just a truce in a little corner of it. Please.”
Chapter 11:
"Brillo, Four Feet Or Not, Is A Creature Of Free Will"
Bayreuth, mid-April, 1634
Margrave Christian appeared to be interested in discussing modern literature. If that was where he wanted to start, Meyfarth was quite willing to let him guide the conversation. Particularly since Weckherlin had come with him to Bayreuth. Eventually, they would get to the point. These things could not be forced.
The margrave and Weckherlin were deep into a discussion of one of Weckherlin’s sonnets. “To Germany.” Not, Meyfarth thought, really a bad place to start.
Break the yoke beneath which you are bound.
Not a bad first line, if one was really discussing peasants who had defied their lords and what should be done about it. No, not bad at all. Perhaps Margrave Christian had something to contribute to a resolution of this current problem.
O Germany, wake up; grasp your courage again,
the usage of your ancient heart. Resist the madness
which has overcome you and, through you, freedom itself.
Usage? Was that right in English. Customs, perhaps? The exact word was often hard to find. Germany. Teutschland. A concept of the humanists, not of the politicians. Could Germany do anything? No. Could the Germans, the dozens of varieties of them, do something? Perhaps.
Now punish the tyranny which has utterly shamed you,
finally wipe out the fire that is consuming you,
not with your own sweat, but with the foul blood
flowing from the wounds of your enemy and false brothers.
Meyfarth shuddered. He did not share Weckherlin’s vision in this. If this was carried through, it would only prolong the war.
Relying upon God, follow the princes
whom His right hand will, if you desire it, preserve,
to the consolation of the faithful and the wreck of the
faithless.
His just hand, perhaps, rather than His right hand? Gerecht, in a way, could mean either.
So abandon all fear; do not let the time slip by
and God will reveal to all the world that the enemy’s
treachery and pride are nothing but shame and disgrace.
Meineid. Perjury, perhaps, rather than treachery? But no, Weckherlin’s poem was well known, but for the ram’s purposes, it was worse than useless. Patriotic gore. Meyfarth examined his fingernails while the margrave and Weckherlin talked.
* * *
“The up-timers call it ‘sheep stealing’,” Meyfarth said. “You have heard, I am sure, that many different religious groups share the same town.”
Margrave Christian nodded.
“They have worked out rules-not laws, but informal understandings, generally shared-that permit them to live in harmony, most of the time. One of these prohibits ‘sheep stealing.’ One minister is not to raid the flock of another, taking away his members. A kind of ‘live and let live.’ I am not sure, myself, how it works. It is not, certainly, a universal principle. It is not uncommon, when a man and a woman of two different of these ‘denominations’ marry, for one to change.”
Margrave Christian cocked his head inquiringly. “There are no laws about whether it is the man or woman who changes? There are no laws requiring one of them to change, or prohibiting it?”
“No. It is regarded as a purely personal decision. One often leading to family dissension, to be sure, but still personal. And sometimes leading to odd results. The Catholic priest now has a member of his flock, such a convert, whose given name actually is ‘Calvin’.”
Weckherlin snorted his beer up his nose, spraying it on the table; Meyfarth pounded on his back, a little anxiously.
* * *
“What,” the margrave asked, “does this religious ‘sheep stealing’ have to do with the oaths that the up-timers are accepting from the Franconians who are subjects of the imperial knights and petty lords, first to the constitution of the New United States and now to their State of Thuringia-Franconia?”
Meyfarth looked a little uncomfortable. “Partly, I think, it was a joke when we started talking about it. The term ‘flock.’ The peasants’ use of the ram, Brillo they call him, as their emblem.” He paused. “Have you read the Brillo material that I obtained for you, Your Grace? The up-time Brillo, not the broadsides written in Franconia?”
It was Weckherlin who answered. “With great interest. Remarkable really. An entirely new set of fables such as the ones Aesop collected, developing before our very eyes.”
Margrave Christian smiled. “I very much enjoyed the newest one I’ve seen. The Three Brillo Rams Gruff, it’s called.”
Into the silence that followed, he added: “That one that mentioned railroads. I would be very interested in discussing railroads with someone from Grantville.”
“Anse Hatfield,” Weckherlin suggested. “The man who was commander in Suhl during the, ah, incident there. Or, perhaps, Captain Pitre herself? I’ll see to it.”
Margrave Christian nodded his thanks. Meyfarth continued with the topic he’d been discussing. “We thought about it. Decided to do it. Steal some sheep. Not, at first, in Franconia. Originally, as in Coburg, only those who were currently without a shepherd. To make them citizens, not subjects.”
“According to the petition,” Margrave Christian said, “it would appear that Herr Salatto and his subordinates have gone far beyond that.”
“I still say that the administration in Franconia has not rustled the sheep, not poached them, not stolen them from their owners. Unlike sheep with four feet, men do have free will. In secular matters,” Meyfarth said precisely, “if not in regard to the salvation of their souls, which is of course entirely dependent upon divine grace.”
Weckherlin laughed. “It would appear that this Brillo, four feet or not, is a creature of free will.”
“Which is, of course, why the up-timers like him so well. They believe greatly in free will. Often, I suspect, more strongly than they believe in God. So. The followers of the ram made the right of all Franconians to vote in the el
ection one of their Twelve Points. It was their initiative, to which the administration only responded.”
“You are arguing, then,” Margrave Christian said, “that the issue is, properly, not one between the nobility of Franconia and the USE’s administration there, but between the nobility of Franconia and their subjects, who first proposed the action that has become a point of contention.”
Neither Meyfarth nor Weckherlin had thought of this approach. They were, however, more than willing to listen to the margrave’s idea. A face-saving diplomatic out was a face-saving diplomatic out, no matter who thought of it first.
“Which would mean…” The margrave was starting to speculate in the subjunctive. “Would mean that it would not really be a matter in which the emperor should intervene directly, much less something that anyone could rightly interpret as providing sufficient grounds for changing the administration… Local, merely local, between each of two hundred minor lords and his subjects.”
He smiled. “Not something that I should be expected to do anything about, either.”
“No,” Weckherlin agreed, “not at all.”
Meyfarth nodded solemnly.
“But possibly,” Margrave Christian continued, “something that might be applicable in Bayreuth if…”
* * *
“I don’t think,” Weckherlin said, “that you were authorized to say those things.”
“I was asked,” Meyfarth answered, “to see if things could be so arranged that a small truce will ensue in Franconia in our time. I am carrying the margrave’s declaration that he will remain neutral in the dispute between the lords and knights of Franconia and its administration. I do not see that I could have been expected to obtain more than that.”
“You are also carrying,” Weckherlin pointed out, “knowledge of something that neither of us should know.”
“Ah. Then we do not know it. Or will soon have forgotten it.”
“If neither of us knows it, then how will the ram find out?”
“Somehow, the ram will learn. In Franconia, now, the ram soon knows everything. It is unlikely that he will miss this. Margrave Christian, I am sure, will somehow let it be known that he would be willing to accept oaths of allegiance from sheep belonging to the flocks of the imperial knights and petty lords whose lands lie within Bayreuth and Ansbach. And that he would be willing to grant a substantial number of the Twelve Points if the ram proved cooperative in the project of mediatizing the lower nobility. Should such a project occur, of course.”
“Surely, the good Lutheran margrave would never be guilty of stealing sheep,” Weckherlin said.
“Perish the very thought,” Meyfarth answered. “No more than the good Lutheran dukes of your Wuerttemberg were, once upon a time.”
For several minutes, Weckherlin did not reply. Then he asked, “What does the margrave intend to do with these oaths? If he should accept them?”
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, Herr Weckherlin. Tomorrow will have troubles of its own. Perhaps we should also ask what the farmers intend to do with them.”
Bamberg, mid-April, 1634.
“Good morning, Stew,” Janie Kacere said. “Sit down and chat.”
“No time.” He leaned one elbow on her pedestal desk. “The boss arrived in town yesterday evening late.”
“I didn’t know that Johnnie F. was due.”
“He wasn’t. I didn’t have any notice. He came in with Noelle Murphy trailing along after him. Or maybe he was trailing along with Noelle. Who knows? She was in town a month ago, but went back to Wuerzburg for a while.”
Janie whistled. “Did she ride in “with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes?"”
“She shall have music wherever she goes?” Stew asked, raising his eyebrows.
“More on the line of, ‘She shall cause trouble wherever she goes.’ Have you ever noticed that when our little special envoy turns up, even if she does smile and call herself a junior envoyette, things start to pop?”
“Hadn’t, really.” Stew leaned back. “But now that you mention it… yeah.”
“Darn right. Every time Little Miss Muffet sits her tush down on a tuffet, something happens to it. Firecrackers fizzle when faced with her mere presence.”
“Mother Goose on your mind this morning?” Stew chewed on the splinter he was using as a toothpick.
“I was baby-sitting for Stacey O’Brien’s kids last night. Tom’s out on patrol somewhere, doing his thing, and Stacey had a meeting of some kind at Else Kronacher’s. League of Women Voters, I think.”
“Doing his thing,” Stew echoed her.
Janie looked up at the elaborate ceiling. She put her right hand over her heart while her face assumed the vacuous expression of a Baroque cherub. “We keep reciting that the administration’s policy toward the Ram Rebellion is hands-off. Repeat after me, ‘The citizens of Franconia must exercise self-determination’ while Tom’s out there giving adult education lessons in the safe handling of explosives to ‘citizens’ who’ve been hand-picked by Walt Miller and Matt Trelli. Pardon me, please, while some butter doesn’t melt in my mouth.”
Castle Bimbach, near Bayreuth, late April, 1634
Looking up at Schloss Bimbach as she and Eddie Junker approached it, Noelle didn’t think it looked anything like what she imagined a “castle” ought to look like.
Well, okay. It was on top of a hill. It was big.
“Schloss,” my ass. Just a huge ugly stone barn, is what it is. A whitewashed stone barn.
She’d discovered, since she’d arrived in the seventeenth century in the Ring of Fire, that most German “castles” of the period fell between two stools. As far as her aesthetic sense was concerned, anyway.
Truly medieval castles-or at least ones with a major medieval element-could be pretty impressive, in their own way. She’d visited the Wartburg, after the reconstruction had begun repairing the damage caused by the napalm Mike Stearns had used on it to force the surrender of the Spanish army that had tried to use the castle for a refuge. Even with as much damage as it had sustained, she’d had no trouble understanding why so many Germans considered the Wartburg the archetypical castle of the Germanies.
Granted, the toilet facilities were a joke. But they were still a joke in castles built long after the Wartburg-and at least the Wartburg still had a certain primitive majesty to it.
On the flip side, although she’d never visited it, Noelle had seen plenty of photographs of Versailles, the enormous palace that the French “sun king” Louis XIV had built half a century in the “future.” That was impressive in a completely different way, even though she was pretty sure that the toilet facilities hadn’t improved much. If any.
But German castles in Thuringia and Franconia were generally what people considered “Renaissance”-using the term incredibly loosely. So far as Noelle was concerned, that meant they had been built after the farmers burned down some genuinely medieval castle a century earlier and combined Baroque with the grandiosity of a would-be miniature Versailles with all the stonepile ugliness of medieval construction.
She had no doubt an architect could explain how wrong she was. She also had no doubt that she didn’t care.
“Great ugly stone barn,” she muttered. “Not a turret or a moat in sight. All the architectural charm of a state office building.”
Walking next to her, Eddie grinned. “Please! You are offending my culture. I believe that is grossly-what is the term that Frau Carstairs explained to me?-ah, yes. ‘Politically incorrect’.”
Noelle sniffed. “We’re West Virginians, Eddie. Not much given to political correctness.”
The grin didn’t fade at all. “Indeed. So Frau Carstairs explained to me. In a manner I suspect was deeply incorrect.”
“And it’s still a great ugly stone barn.”
* * *
She was a little mollified once they reached the top of the hill and passed by the front entrance of the Schloss. That, at least, was fairly impressive.
In a great ugly sort of way. The door was immense, double-doored, and made out of some sort of heavy wood that had been painted dead black. Two black columns flanked it on either side, with some sort of semi-circular white stone carvings along the semi-circular top of the doors. She couldn’t remember what that was called. A “frieze,” maybe.
It looked as if it would take a team of mules to pull it open. Fortunately, they wouldn’t have to find out. The front entrance of a Schloss was not for the likes of them.
They continued past it, walking along the white stone walls toward the rear entrances used by servants and tradesmen. The stables were back there, too, judging from the smell. Far above their heads, she could see grilled windows. Nothing close to ground level, though-which meant there wasn’t much chance of any officious persons spotting them.
Even if they did, it probably wouldn’t matter. A Schloss like this was the center of local government, as much as it was a personal residence. Von Bimbach would have private apartments in one wing of the castle, but much of the edifice would be devoted to administration and record-keeping. Clerks, bureaucrats, tradesmen, cooks, servants-not to mention people just visiting for some sort of business-would come and go from the Schloss all hours of the day. Noelle and Eddie were dressed inconspicuously and were walking along in broad daylight as if they had every right to be there. As long as they didn’t presume to use the front entrance or enter the Freiherr’s private rooms, they would remain beneath notice.
To any except the Schloss’ staff, of course. But, for that, the Ram had already made arrangements.
She hoped, at least. So the letter she’d gotten from him had claimed.
* * *
The letter was accurate. Getting into the Schloss and situated in a small room set aside for them in the servants’ quarters went as smoothly as she could have asked for.
