by Eric Flint
So… Colonel Hand was undoubtedly right. If Johan Baner was determined to press the matter, best to give him all the assistance possible.
"There are the mercenary units in Franconia," he mused. "I know for a certainty that Steve Salatto and Scott Blackwell would like to get rid of them. Given the situation with the Ram Rebellion, mercenary units of that nature are more trouble than they're worth. Ten times better at stirring up animosity among the populace than they are at squelching it."
"True. And what's better still, after Ahrensbok I think it's quite likely the emperor would agree to freeing up some of Torstensson's units and sending them down here."
The duke winced. "They'll be CoC regiments, Erik. CoC-influenced, at the very least. Hardly the sort of troops that would please Johan Baner."
"Fuck Baner," said Colonel Hand bluntly. "That's simply the price of his own ambition. He can't take Ingolstadt unless he can neutralize the Bavarian cavalry-and he doesn't have cavalry as good as that commanded by von Mercy and von Werth. He doesn't have captains who can match them, either. The regiments from Torstensson's army could make the difference, especially if you can persuade my cousin to release one of the flying artillery regiments. By all accounts, they were quite effective against the French cavalry."
Duke Ernst thought about it, for perhaps a minute. Then, nodded. "As you say… Well." He was not about to repeat the crude expression aloud, even if in the privacy of his own mind the sentiment fuck Baner came quite frequently. Even easily.
"We'll do as you recommend," he said. "Would you do me the favor of composing the message to the emperor? I'll have it sent out over the radio this evening."
"It would be my pleasure, Ernst. The truth is, I'm tired of those Bavarian bastards at Ingolstadt myself."
****
Mary Simpson had had an appointment to see Duke Ernst today, right after breakfast, to further discuss the prospects of fund raising for the normal school. She'd been looking forward to it, since Ernst Wettin was a man who positively loved the subject of education. In a happier world, he'd have been the Secretary of the USE's department of education-which still didn't exist, unfortunately-instead of the administrator of a province under military occupation. He was certainly competent at the task, but it was not one that really suited his temperament.
But the meeting had had to be cancelled. Just when the flurry of political and military activity triggered off by the news of Ahrensbok had seemed to be dying down, news came to Amberg from Dusseldorf of an event that was probably even more important to the Upper Palatinate, if not to the world as a whole. It seemed that Duke Wolfgang Wilhelm and his son and heir, Philip, had gotten themselves killed in the course of a stupid attack on the Republic of Essen while the duke was pushing his claims to his maternal inheritance of Julich, Berg, and parts of Ravensburg.
Westphalia would have to take care of itself now that Torstensson had so thoroughly trounced the French at Ahrensbok, but it would make a huge difference right here in the Upper Palatinate that the heir to Pfalz-Neuburg was no longer a nephew of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, but rather an infant. Duke Ernst and most of his advisers, including Colonel Erik Haakansson Hand, had been closeted for two days discussing the matter.
So be it. Mary would see to re-scheduling the meeting with the duke in due time. Meanwhile, she could relax in the comfort of the inn, savoring the knowledge that her husband John had come through the hard-fought naval campaign in the Baltic. Without so much as a scratch, so far as she could determine from the newspaper reports. He was certainly alive and not seriously injured. All the accounts agreed on that.
Her companion at the breakfast table did not share her insouciance, however. Veronica Dreeson slapped the newspaper down on the table. "Arrested! What was that idiot boy thinking?
She glared at Mary. It was one of those glares that was not simply rhetorical. Ronnie wanted an answer.
What to say…?
Reading between the lines of the newspaper stories-and all the newspapers were dwelling on this one; no, slobbering over it-the situation seemed clear enough. It was obvious that Eddie Cantrell had been nabbed in flagrante delicto -by the girl's father himself, to make things perfect-while engaged in activities with the daughter of the Danish king that the newspaper did not precisely delineate but were not hard to imagine.
"I suspect he wasn't thinking much at all, Ronnie," Mary said, as mildly as possible.
It was going to be a long day.
****
Amberg, Upper Palatinate
"Elbow room," Keith Pilcher exclaimed.
Leopold Cavriani raised his eyebrows.
Keith put his newspaper down. "Did anyone ever tell you about Daniel Boone?"
Leopold nodded a yes; Marc nodded a no. Keith turned toward the boy.
"He was a frontiersman. Not to start out with. His father was a settler in Pennsylvania, a weaver, with a big, comfortable house. All the amenities, like Huddy Colburn puts in the ads when he's trying to sell a house. A spring for fresh water, a cold room for keeping food fresh. Plastered walls. It's a park, now. Well, it was a park, then. Daniel Boone's birthplace, that is. Maxine dragged me to see it once."
Leopold raised his eyebrows again.
Keith looked back toward the older man. "I do have a point, here. Well, George Boone's little boy Daniel didn't take to amenities. He headed out to the frontier and he pretty much kept moving. Western North Carolina. Kentucky. Missouri. That's where he died, out in Missouri, on the other side of the Mississippi River. As far away from where he was born as… oh, as Muscovy, where Bernie Zeppi has gone, is from here. Maybe even farther. And when I was in fourth grade, we had to memorize a poem for a school program. I've forgotten most of it. Heck, I never learned most of it-I was just in the chorus that recited the refrain after the soloists went out front and gave a verse.
"Every time he made a move, it went: 'Elbow room,' said Daniel Boone."
"So?"
"So that's what Gustav has gotten for us. He's bought us a year, Cavriani. You and Count August, Duke Ernst, Ollie and me, and all the iron people here. He probably thinks that's what is important is that he beat Denmark and got his little girl betrothed to that prince, but I know better. We've got a year of elbow room before the next crunch comes down. A year to get things going again.
"Now we've got to get these guys to roll up their sleeves and show some elbow."
Chapter 25
Enchiridion Chirurgicum
Amberg, Upper Palatinate
Breakfast at the inn was usually when the men talked over what they had read in the newspapers-the war in the north, what Wallenstein was doing in Bohemia, anything that had been heard from Venice or Rome. Supper at the inn was when they compared notes on the day's work. What each of them learned separately was of far more use after it had been combined with the information that the others had collected. The reluctance of the mine owners to invest, for example, which they had made very clear, made a lot more sense in the light of what the Cavrianis had learned about cost/profit ratios and what Keith had found out about Bavaria's nationalization of the mines and the resulting uncertain legal status.
"But," Keith summed up, "I think it can be done. Not as fast or as easily as we were hoping. Duke Ernst is going to have to cut some knots. And hit some kind of a balance between total control and letting the entrepreneurs run wild with no supervision at all. It's not as if our-the SoTF's, I mean-laws are in effect here, covering labor relations and pollution and such. He's going to have to think about that, and some of it may have to go all the way up to the king, ah, emperor, for approval. I just hope that won't drag out too long. Otherwise, new technology will help a lot-stationary steam pumps for the big operations. Capital will help a lot, too-low cost loans for the smaller operations to buy the traditional pumps."
Marc started to open his mouth; then closed it again.
Keith waved at him. "Go ahead, kid. If you've got something to say, then say it."
Marc looked at his fath
er. "I'm, ah, here to watch. To observe. To learn. Not to say things."
"Say it, and I'll decide whether it was worth saying." Keith wasn't entirely joking.
"Well, sir, I don't think you're going to get younger men for the rebuilding of the metals trades once you have the ore. Not skilled workers, I mean. Oh, you can get plenty of unskilled workers. Ex-soldiers. Servants, even, from farms and towns, if they're strong enough for the work. Especially if they want to get married. The mines and mills and smelters never tried to limit their men's marriages, the way towns and farmers do. Oh, they had barracks for the unmarried guys. But there's no need for miners to "live in" the way servants do. And it's out in the country, not short on space the way walled towns always are. So the men can marry, build cottages; their wives can garden, keep chickens, cook for the unmarried men, do laundry. It works fine for them, as a system. They'll find that kind of worker. But skilled? I don't think so."
"Why not?" Keith was listening a little harder now.
"The whole Montanbereich has not really been working for fifteen years. That's… well, it's almost as long as I've been alive. The conditions described in the 1609 survey-that's several years longer than I've been alive. That's too long for a man to wait for a new job. They've left, if they could. I bet, if you look, you'll find them in mines and forges all over Germany, all the way to Silesia and Lusatia. In Austria and Bohemia. In northern Italy. Which means that they haven't been training apprentices here in the Upper Palatinate for that long, almost. So you're not going to find many younger masters and hardly any trained journeymen. Not even apprentices about to become journeymen-not except for just a few places, like the one Papa and I found out in the country. Plus, Duke Maximilian forced out a bunch more of the skilled workers who were Protestant, mostly grown men who naturally took their sons with them. Some have come back, but not many to stay. They've just come to get what they can and cut their losses. Then, of the ones who stayed in the 1620s, others have died of the plague and other epidemics since then. No, Herr Pilcher. I think, I really think-for the processing and finishing, it will be old men and untrained boys, at least to start with. That will slow things down. People may start to come back when things get going, but not… not right away."
Keith pursed his lips. "I'll file that away to think about. And mention it to Ollie."
Leopold Cavriani smiled to himself. His son had noticed this, thought about it, presented it clearly. Ahhhh! He would have to compliment Jacob Durre.
The waiter appeared with food. Quite a lot of it. They dropped business for eating. Especially Marc. His capacity for food astonished the rest of them.
Toby Snell was with them, for a change. Like Mary and Veronica, he was living in the Schloss. Not, by any means, in such luxurious quarters. He was sleeping in a cot in a small room on the top floor, next to the array of large blue bottles and annexed wires and stuff that constituted a down-time radio room.
He started talking about his girlfriend, back home. Dawn. Not, he pointed out, his fiancee. Half-seriously, he lamented that even if she did agree to marry him, he was never going to be able to live up to the images on the romance novels that she read by the jillion.
"You'd think," he finished, "that fate would have done us guys a favor. That eventually, after the Ring of Fire, the things would have worn out. But no. What do the down-timers do? Reprint them! Complete with woodcuts of all the hunks on the covers."
"If you get her to say 'yes'," Keith answered, "the rest of it is easy. If, that is, she's romantic enough."
Toby was inclined to listen. Keith's wife was a member of the same book club that Dawn had joined a while back.
"The hard part is having a wife who sees you the way you are. Hey, having one of those and keeping her in love with you is something of a challenge. If she notices that your hair is sort of thin on top" -he pointed to his own head- "and you're sort of sloppy about pruning the weigela bushes and sometimes you don't get around to taking out the garbage when she asks you to, how do you explain it? If she compares the waist size on your last set of briefs with the waist size on your new set of briefs, how are you supposed to persuade her that things aren't settling, so to speak? A realistic wife-that would be a problem."
Marc was listening with fascination.
"But a member of the Romance Readers book club. Hey, Toby, it's a cinch, if you do the husband business at a sort of minimum level. Basically, I mean, don't get hauled home sodden drunk very often. Usually get there for supper on time and call when you can't. Remember her birthday and anniversary with flowers. Which isn't that hard, in spite of all the jokes. I keep Max's birthday and our anniversary written on a note card on my machine. So, you see, just do that much. Your wife's imagination will take care of all the rest. You see, she really wants to have a romantic, hunky, husband. So she'll festoon you with all sorts of desired heroic qualities that you… ummn… may not actually have, like tinsel on a Christmas tree, and cheerfully ignore the fact that middle age is not just creeping up on you but has already arrived and taken up squatters' rights on your midsection."
Marc would have been happy to listen all evening, this being completely beyond anything he had thus far encountered in his rather sheltered Calvinist existence.
"You mean?" Toby was asking.
"Yup. Just don't deliberately disillusion the little thing, and she'll do all the rest of the work that needs to be done so she can have a Great Romance. Happily ever after. Guaranteed recipe, the old 'Pilcher special.'"
Toby pulled a little spray bottle and soft cloth out of his breast pocket and started to polish his glasses.
"Where did you get the cleaning fluid," Keith asked.
"Just vinegar. Like everything else. Some vinegar manufacturer in Badenburg must be making a fortune out of Grantville, the amount of the stuff that we use. That's where the crocks full of it come from. McNally says it won't hurt the lenses and these little spray bottles last and last." Toby cocked his head. "Speaking of lasting, how long have you and Max been together, anyway?"
Keith thought about it. "Well, Mom brought Lyman and me back from Detroit the summer after she and Dad divorced. That would have been, um, '83. I started high school in Grantville as a sophomore. And I took Max to the Halloween dance that year. That was our first date. We got married the summer of '89. So it sort of depends on how you figure it, I guess."
"You really never dated anyone else?"
Keith shook his head. "We pretty much figured out that we'd be getting married some day on the second date. But Max was a year behind me in school and we didn't want to frazzle her folks. Old man Maddox was an okay guy, but Max's mom could be a real PITA sometimes. Plus, I knew that when I turned eighteen, Dad would stop the child support, just as soon as he legally could. So I graduated and moved over to Fairmont, got a factory job and started on my A.A. in night classes. Kept right on, summers and all, so it only took me three years. Max graduated the next year and commuted to State; we got married between her sophomore and junior years."
Keith grinned. "Want some advice from a wise old man, Toby? Ninety percent of marriages that go on the rocks land there because of that 'first you say you do and then you don't' business like the song says. Pretty soon it's 'gloom, despair, and agony on me.' He's down at Tip's having one too many and she's at the county seat talking to a divorce lawyer. If you want to be married to Dawn, just make up your mind that you're married to her, and then stick to it. And if you don't really want to be married to her for good, don't marry her in the first place."
Toby thought that this sounded altogether too simple. Leopold Cavriani, though, was nodding in approval; Marc was watching his father.
The conversation meandered on. Eventually, Lambert Felser asked if anyone else had heard mention that there was a lot of sickness going around.
"Not a lot," Keith answered. "But Tanzflecker didn't show for the meeting today. Nadelmann said that one of his children died last night."
"One of the radio techs is sick," Toby contribut
ed. "He didn't feel well enough to get up this morning. I mentioned it to Mrs. Simpson and she came upstairs. Then she went and talked to Jake Ebeling and hauled Bill Hudson upstairs to look at him."
Jake was the military liaison from the up-time contingent in the USE military to Duke Ernst. Here to teach and to learn. Spent most of his time with Hand, the Swede. Bill was Willie Ray Hudson's grandson, trained since the Ring of Fire as an emergency medical technician. He was teaching and learning, too. Those two, with Dane Kitt and Mark Ellis, made up the whole body of up-time military assigned to Duke Ernst. The trade delegation had scarcely seen them since they'd been here. Kitt and Ellis weren't even in town. They had gone to Ingolstadt with Baner. Plus three "civilian advisors," one of whom, Bozarth, the UMWA man, was down in Regensburg schmoozing the city council, while the other two, Glazer and Fisher, were someplace out of sight doing something that no one had bothered to tell the trade delegation about. Probably something that no one was going to tell a trade delegation about.
"Plague?" Leopold Cavriani asked. It was the first thing that always came to mind. There had been plague in the entire Upper Palatinate since February 1632, when a passing army unit left a couple hundred infected soldiers behind; Amberg had been particularly hard-hit the previous winter.
Keith shook his head. "The local doctors say that it isn't. And, honestly, they ought to know. They can't cure plague, but they sure see enough of it to recognize it when it comes along."
****
