by Eric Flint
Eddie’s eyes widened. “All of them?”
Noelle gave him a level gaze. “Yes, all of them. Along with maybe one-third of the rest of the Schloss’ staff. The ram is especially strong in the smithy and the stables. The maids… well, that’s harder. They come and go a lot, since most of them don’t have my status.”
“I’m impressed.”
Noelle’s face got a little pinched. “It wasn’t hard. Even by the standards of Franconian Freiherr, Fuchs von Bimbach is a pure son-of-a-bitch.” She nodded toward the kitchen. “He hung one of the cook’s sons two years ago. Along with three other boys. None of them was older than nineteen.”
Eddie grimaced. “Why?”
“Apparently the four of them got drunk one night in a local tavern and started mimicking his Bimboship. Just teenagers being disrespectful, the way teenagers will. But somebody reported them to von Bimbach, and he charged them with ‘petty treason.’ That’s a hanging offense, and he’s got the legal right on his lands to apply capital punishment. Halsgericht they call it-the ‘neck court.’”
“What a bastard.”
“Yup, he sure is. Two years before that, he had one of the blacksmith’s apprentices hung for stealing some copper. His Bimboship jacked up the value of the stolen goods high enough to make it a capital offense, even though it didn’t really come to much. The guy’s mother was sick and he was just trying to get her some medicine. What passes for it, anyway, in the here and now.”
Eddie wiped a thick hand over his face.
“The year before that-”
“Never mind. I understand.” He dropped the hand and looked out of the narrow door onto the kitchen. This time, though, it was a simple and straightforward gaze.
“You’re safe?”
Noelle shrugged. “As safe as you could expect, given that I live in a castle owned by a sociopath.”
He grimaced again. Noelle chuckled.
“Relax, Eddie. It’s really not that bad.” She made a little gesture, indicating her outfit. “It worked just about the way we figured it would. Judith Neideckerin agreed to hire me as one of her maids. His Bimboship doesn’t pay any attention to me at all, when he comes to visit her. Which he doesn’t do all that often, anyway. I get the feeling he forced her to become his mistress more for the bragging rights among his Freiherr buddies, than anything else. Judith’s good-looking, in a zaftig sort of way.”
Eddie seemed to relax still more. Again, Noelle chuckled. “No, that’s not a problem. I’m not having to fend off the lustful advances of the lord of the castle, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s never spoken so much as a single word to me, in the month I’ve been here. If you put me in a lineup wearing different clothes, I don’t think he’d even recognize me.”
She gestured, a bit impatiently. “And that’s enough about that. What does the ram want now?”
“Pretty much the same you’ve been providing him since you got established here. Information, mostly. The ram shares your opinion that von Bimbach will probably wind up being the key to the whole thing. I can’t say I really understand why the two of you seem so sure of that. From what you’ve told me-and what I’ve heard from others-he’s too arrogant and cocksure to make a very effective political leader.”
“That’s neither here nor there, Eddie. First of all, there isn’t a one of these little lords and knights that I think could win an election in the smallest county in West Virginia. Not for dog catcher. They’re all pretty much cut from the same cloth. The big difference with His Bimboship is pure and simple geography.”
She twisted her head, as if indicating the countryside beyond the walls of the Schloss. “His estates are nestled in among the lands controlled by Margrave Christian of Bayreuth. From a strategic point of view, looking at it from the ram’s side of things, this is what you might call a safe enclave for the counter-revolution. His Bimboship can organize from here, and there’s really not a damn thing the ram can do about it. Neither can Steve Salatto and his people. If they send any troops in-much less if the ram mobilized an army of farmers-the margrave would be almost sure to intervene. Just to keep the peace, if nothing else.”
Eddie scratched his chin. “Well… yes. And he’s an important ally of the USE’s emperor, too, political speaking. So even if Margrave Christian couldn’t handle it, he’d squawk to Gustavus Adolphus loudly enough that the Swedish army would come in. And wouldn’t that be a mess, as unpopular as they are in Franconia?”
“A stinking mess,” Noelle agreed. “Let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that. All right, Eddie, fire up that near-perfect memory of yours. Here’s the latest…”
Chapter 13:
“This Is Simply More Than We Can Tolerate”
Bamberg, June, 1634
“The ram will come today.”
Martha Kronacher looked at the Jaeger who made that comment while paying for a copy of the latest broadside. He was smirking.
“Thank you.” She did not feel called upon to say one word more than that to the man. Checking to see that there were no more customers, she went quickly into the back and notified her mother, not bothering with the codes. She loathed the fact that she was called the “ewe lamb” by the rebellion. She particularly loathed the little jokes and snide comments that came from those who thought that it was clever to pair her up with the ram.
“Mutti,” she said plainly, “Herr Ableidinger will be coming today.”
Martha kept her voice even. She did not like the school teacher from Frankenwinheim. She appreciated, she hoped, his organizational ability. His ability to take a set of diffused grievances and turn the people who held them into an orderly group which might accomplish something.
She was glad that he was going to be talking to the Bamberg apprentices, whose increasing unruliness was part of the reason that Mama would no longer let her walk the streets, even go to market, unless she had one of her brothers to accompany her.
But she didn’t like him. She thought that he was too loud; she thought that his speaking style was bombastic. She especially didn’t like the fact that he was a widower, which tended to bring that speculative gleam into her mother’s eye. Mutti was beginning to think that Martha was old enough to get married. Herr Ableidinger taught not far from where Papa had grown up, in the Frankenwald. The school furnished him with a residence. From Mutti’s perspective, he was eligible.
Martha, however, had no desire to spend the rest of her life with a man who made that much noise; just by existing, Constantin Ableidinger made a lot of noise. Whatever Mutti thought, and however much anyone smirked about the ram and the ewe lamb.
Message delivered, she went back into the front shop.
* * *
Frau Else Kronacher sent a couple of apprentices out to deliver messages; then picked up her latest campaign speech. She wanted Herr Ableidinger to review it. She just could not understand why Martha did not like him. He was such an invigorating man.
* * *
There weren’t any customers in the print shop at the moment. Martha started singing to herself. “Jerusalem, Thou City Fair and High.” No, she did not want to marry the ram, no more than she wanted to marry the third son of the master of the Bamberg printer’s guild. The world held a better husband for her than either of them. She was quite sure of it.
Hasslach Valley, Franconia, late June, 1634
“Vince,” Johnnie F. said, “I don’t think that you’ve been up here before.”
“I haven’t, no. My duties keep me pretty locked in to Bamberg most of the time. Stew Hawker has mentioned the place. So did Scott Blackwell, once, when he was up to Bamberg for a briefing, but…”
“But he wasn’t sure where it was. I don’t think I’ve ever,” Johnnie F. grinned, “seen a man who was so in love with having a piece of paper with a map on it in front of his nose. This is the Hasslachtal. That is, the little stream we’re riding next to is the Hasslach, so this is the valley of the Hasslach. You’ll note that most of these paths and little r
oads are well up away from the stream bed, even though that makes it more up-and-down over the hills. It floods in the spring. Most of these creeks do.”
“So where does it come from and go to?”
“Basically, it starts not much south of Kamsdorf-you know, where USE Steel has its mines and plant-and runs south. We’re north of Stockheim, now; almost to Rothenkirchen, which is licensed to hold a market. That last little village was Pressig. This is a sort of little peninsula of Franconia, if you want to think of it that way, sticking up into Thuringia. That’s why its called the Frankenwald, the Franconian Forest, rather than the Thueringerwald, the Thuringian Forest. Same forest, if you look at it from the viewpoint of the trees, I expect.”
Johnnie F. grinned. “It was a regular little checkerboard of feuding minor lordships until we oathed most of them to the NUS. Catholic and Lutheran all mixed together. Now it’s a regular little checkerboard of feuding small towns and villages, Catholic and Lutheran, all mixed together. No big change on the ground, Stew says. Same feuds, same cast of characters, pretty much. When we get up to the north end, where Margrave Christian of Bayreuth’s Lauenstein castle is, near Ludwigsstadt, we’ll only be about forty miles from home. From Grantville, I mean.”
Vince frowned. “Why don’t we come this way, then? Instead of going all the way over to the west, through Suhl.”
“Because there aren’t any decent roads. Not even by down-time standards; the country is pretty rugged, as you can see for yourself. If we could get a railroad through here…”
“I can see that. I can’t believe that there has been more coal, all along, as close as Stockheim, and nobody told us about it.”
“Well, even though it’s been mined for fifty years or at Reitsch, on the other side of the creek, they mostly just dig it out of little dogholes and use it locally,” Johnnie F. answered. “There’s no transportation for moving it any distance. They take some down to Lichtenfels on little rafts and skiffs. They aren’t mining commercially, if you call what Reitsch is doing commercial, right around Stockheim, yet. It was the Frankenwinheim mayor who mentioned it to me when I was up there a couple of weeks ago to check on what the ram rebellion was doing over that way. He said that their school teacher, a guy named Constantin Ableidinger, told him that we’d probably be interested. I don’t think that I’ve met Ableidinger. Not to be introduced to. I can’t put a face to the name.
“I did think that we ought to bring it to your attention, though. And mention it to Saunders Wendell, since he’s the UMWA man in Wuerzburg. Maybe Grantville could even send somebody from the geology survey down here. Anything to bolster up the Franconian economy. Even just a little.”
Vince Marcantonio added a hearty “amen.”
Mitwitz, Early July, 1634
“They’re doing pretty damn well, wouldn’t you say?” Scott Blackwell remarked. “Given that they don’t have any napalm.”
Sitting on a horse next to the USE’s military administrator in Franconia, Johnnie F. considered the irony of the situation. He was normally far more inclined toward what you might call “revolutionary activity” than Scott was. Here, though, where the farmers were quite literally running amok, it was Scott who was observing the scene with something approaching equanimity-and Johnnie F. who was doing his best not to shudder.
The castle at Mitwitz was an inferno, by now. Lacking napalm or not, the thousand or so farmers who were besieging the Schloss hadn’t had much trouble overwhelming the Freiherr’s few dozen mercenary troops. Those of his soldiers who hadn’t run away as soon as the mass of farmers appeared, that is, which had been most of them. Once the farmers got into the castle-helped inside by the servants, often enough-they’d set fire to it in at least a dozen places.
Stone walls wouldn’t burn, true. But any Schloss was full of incendiary materials. By the time the raging fires died out, hours from now, the castle would be a gutted ruin. Parts of it were already starting to collapse, where the stone work had depended on wooden supports.
There was no opposition, any longer, except from a knot of soldiers at the front gate. The only reason they hadn’t surrendered, Johnnie F was quite sure, was simply because they couldn’t. The farmers were taking no prisoners.
For a moment, Johnnie F.’s gaze drifted to the left, before he forcibly took his eyes away. He had a bad feeling he’d remember that pile of butchered corpses for the rest of his life. After killing every soldier they’d dragged out of the castle, the ram’s people had stacked their bodies in one place. More or less. He didn’t think a single one of those bodies was still intact. The farmers had used their tools-turned-into-weapons with a vengeance.
There was a sudden flurry of motion at the front gate. A body of horsemen was emerging, with four mercenaries in the lead.
Horse-people, rather. There was a woman in the center of the group, riding alongside a well-dressed man.
“That’ll be the Freiherr and his family, trying to escape,” Blackwell said, calmly. “He’s got one kid, if I remember right. A boy, somewhere around eight years old.”
The soldiers in the lead were trying to cut their way through the mob at the gate. One of them fired a wheel-lock pistol. A farmer stumbled to the ground, spilling a weapon that looked like a scythe blade attached to a long pole.
A big man stepped out from behind a tree, to their right. A Jaeger, from his clothing. He was perhaps sixty yards from the battle raging at the front gate. His rifle came up-
Johnnie F. hissed. That was no-
Crack!
The soldier who’d fired the wheel-lock was swept from his saddle. “That’s an up-time gun,” Johnnie F. muttered.
“Sure is,” agreed Scott. He leaned over his saddle and spit on the ground. “Don’t think we’ll ask where he got it, neither.”
Easily, fluidly, the big Jaeger worked the bolt on the rifle and brought it back up to his shoulder.
The Freiherr had now broken away from the soldiers and was driving his horse toward the road.
Crack! Down he went. Within seconds, half a dozen farmers had surrounded his body and were hacking him into pieces with axes and those ungainly-looking scythe-weapons.
Johnnie F. heard a woman scream. Several of the ram’s people had seized the reins of the Freiherr’s wife’s horse and were dragging the mount to a halt. He saw another farmer stab her in the side with a long spear. The woman screamed again and slid off the saddle.
Johnnie F. saw that she’d had her son perched on the saddle in front of her. The boy landed on the ground along with her. But, scampering like mad, he evaded the axes and scythes that were already butchering his mother and made his escape under the horse’s belly. Once clear of the knot of farmers around his mother, he raced for the nearby woods.
Eight or nine years old, sure enough. His face was pale, his eyes wide, his mouth open in a soundless scream.
Johnnie F. saw the big Jaeger tracking the boy with the rifle.
“Oh, Jesus.”
Crack! Then, after jacking another round into the chamber, he fired again. His first shot had probably killed the boy already. The second one, striking the prone little body, was just to make sure.
“Ever read much about peasant rebellions?” asked Scott, almost idly.
Unable to speak, Johnnie just shook his head.
“Well, I did.” Blackwell pulled out a small notepad and gestured with it to the burning castle. “This is pretty much SOP. Burn down the nobleman’s castle-making damn sure to eliminate all the tax and other records-and kill him and his entire family. Women, children, babies and all. Don’t leave a single one of them alive, who can inherit. If somebody does, it’ll have to be a cousin. Somebody who doesn’t really know much about the area or the people in it.”
Johnnie F.’s stomach heaved, but he managed to fight it down.
Scott started writing in the notepad. “Okay, scratch Mitwitz,” he said. “I have a feeling this is going to make my job a lot easier. You watch, Johnnie. Once the word spreads, you’ll see mo
st of the other Freiherren pulling in their horns. Right quick.”
He chuckled harshly. “Some of them’ll probably come racing into Wuerzburg and Bamberg, to put themselves and their families under our protection. Which we’ll be glad to give them, of course. But we won’t lift a finger to stop the farmers from torching their abandoned castles. As far as I’m concerned-speaking as a military man-the only good Schloss is a dead Schloss.”
Then, glancing over at Johnnie F., he shook his head. “Yeah, it’s ugly as all hell. On the other hand, when it’s over and done, I don’t expect the casualties to come to more than a few hundred people. You know how many people these stinking worthless knights and nobles massacred a century ago, when they put down the last big farmers’ rebellion?”
“Somewhere around a hundred thousand, people say.”
“Yeah. The number might be exaggerated, of course. But even it is, so what? Call it fifty thousand. That’s still a slaughter about two orders of magnitude greater than anything the ram will do.”
Blackwell’s tone of voice was cold. He pointed with the notepad to the small corpse in the distance. “Do you think the knights gave any more mercy to farmers’ kids? Dream on.”
Johnnie F. didn’t argue the matter. He agreed with Scott, in the abstract. He just didn’t, personally, have the stomach for it.
Looking away from the corpse, his eyes came to the boy’s killer. The big Jaeger had his up-time rifle slung back over his shoulder, and was returning Johnnie’s gaze with a level stare of his own.
It was not a threatening stare. But there was no give in it, at all. Not a trace of an apology in those eyes.
“Maybe this will end it, once and for all,” Johnnie F. said. Hoping.
“That’s what I figure. Let’s go. One Schloss down, and good riddance.”
Franconia, July, 1634
Freiherr Fuchs von Bimbach looked at his chancellor. Dr. Lenz hoped that he wasn’t about to kill the messenger.
