Ring of fire II (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  "The doctors?"

  "Naw. Peasant revolts."

  Vince could hardly wait for Matt Trelli to arrive. He'd been to Grantville for his first R amp;R in over a year. They'd sent Tom O'Brien up to Kronach to sub for him. When he came through, he would escort the doctors up to Kronach so Tom could come back and contribute his bit to handling the peasant revolt. However a munitions specialist chose to do that.

  Vince could hardly wait for the day that the three doctors departed hence into another place. Ever since they set foot in town, Dr. Guarinoni had treated the entire Bamberg administration, up-time and down-time, to large free helpings of his health advice. Bennett Norris would have called it "patented health advice" if they had patents.

  He never stopped. Stacey O'Brien told Janie that if the man had been born up-time, he would have found his calling as a motivational speaker holding success seminars at the Holiday Inn for twenty-five dollars a head.

  From Stacey, this didn't count as a compliment. She'd said it after Guarinoni gave a critique of her child-rearing methods.

  He didn't limit his efforts to the administration, either. He got out and around in the streets of the city. He even-since he turned out to be really and truly pretty famous in this time and place-got an invitation to address the city council.

  According to Else Kronacher, the Bamberg Committee of Correspondence had no particular objection to the health component of his message, but wasn't reacting well to the intransigence with which he wrapped it up in Catholic dogma.

  As long as they avoided theology, though, he got along great with Willard and Emma Thornton. Most of his practical policies-applied health practices, Vince supposed-fit right in with Mormon ideas about what was good for you.

  Weinhart and Gatterer spent their time following Matewski around, observing both his military medicine and his volunteer efforts at the orphanages and city hospital. He didn't seem to mind them. He might have minded Guarinoni, he said honestly to Wade Jackson, but that guy was too busy blowharding to hassle a man who had work to do.

  Matt made pretty good time coming up from Wurzburg. Vince sent him and the doctors on their way on a really fast turnaround. In spite of the tension, nobody bothered them, neither the peasants nor the imperial knights. That might be, Matt thought, because there were a lot more peasants than knights, and Vince had a kind of… understanding… with the Ram.

  On the Road to Kronach, Franconia

  April 1634

  Gatterer turned out to be a chatterer. Matt was just as pleased. Kronach was more than a little out of the loop, so he hadn't seen anywhere near as much data on these guys as Vince's inner circle had gotten.

  "Dr. Weinhart was a student of Mercurialis, you know."

  "Of who? I mean, of whom?"

  "A professor at Padua. He is dead, now, for a quarter century, but he was very famous for what up-time you call 'sports medicine.' He wrote De arte gymnastica which isn't about what you call gymnastics, though. It's about caring for the body during exercising it. Mostly, though, Dr. Weinhart writes about diseases of the eyes. He is mostly here because he is, as you say, committed to fighting the plague. And, of course, because he has enough influence with the duchess to get the project approved."

  Matt wondered vaguely just how Gatterer had come to hear of sports medicine. Then he thought of various reports about the number of down-time researchers combing through Grantville's books and encyclopedias and pushed it off into the category of not a problem. Of course there was stuff about sports medicine in the high school library and even if there hadn't been, Dr. Daoud, the chiropractor, loved to give classes and seminars.

  "Please try to be tactful with Dr. Guarinoni," Gatterer said.

  "Why?"

  "You must understand. His father, the late Dr. Bartolomeo Guarinoni, was the emperor's personal physician. Logically, one would assume, our Dr. Guarinoni would have started life in a position of advantage. Unfortunately, ah, his parents were not married to one another. Although his father acknowledged him and provided him with an excellent education…"

  "Narrow-minded folks talk."

  "Precisely. He accompanied his father to the imperial courts-that of Maximilian II and Vienna and that of Rudolf II in Prague. He studied at the University of Padua. Still, every now and then, there is a certain… condescension… that he must cope with. Therefore, if, sometimes, he seems a bit… excessive…"

  "Excessive? How?"

  "Not everyone appreciates the comedy skits with which he attempted to enliven his book on practical health. Many of them are taken from stage routines. Directly adapted from them, even. But when he tries to get people who have come to him for advice to stand up and act them out…"

  "I always hated that when my teachers made us do it. Both when I had to do it myself and when I had to watch other kids."

  "But it is a good technique for embedding a concept in the memory. Excellent." Gatterer nodded sagely.

  Near the Walls of Kronach

  May 1634

  Matt pointed down at the figure on the walls of the Rosenberg. The three doctors were taking fascinated turns with his up-time binoculars. "That's de Melon. Actually, he's expecting you. Inside the city, I mean."

  "How do you know?"

  "Well, we've set up the drop point. We keep the quarantine hard. No meetings with their people. No letting parties outside the walls to bury the dead. But… I'll show you. Over there-see? We've got that table in the middle of this field outside the walls. It's where their militia drills in normal times. We leave things on it and back off about the length of a football field. They come out and pick them up. They leave things on it and go inside again. We come down and pick them up."

  "Things?"

  "Information, mostly. Negotiations over this and that. So they know you're coming. We gave them a copy of the letters that came from your Duchess Claudia. And both of your books, Dr. Guarinoni and Dr. Weinhart."

  "De Melon will receive us?"

  "That's not the problem."

  Matt smiled at Dr. Weinhart, who shuddered.

  "There are two sides to this, you know. Not just 'will he receive you' but 'will good old Matt here let you go.' "

  "How can you make conditions? People's lives are at stake."

  "They've been at stake here ever since we came down to Franconia. If I don't finally get some kind of cooperation out of these stiff-assed…"

  "What conditions are you imposing on them?"

  "That if the three of you come into the city, I come too."

  Guarinoni gaped at him. Very few people, other than physicians and clergy, voluntarily walked into plague sites.

  "And then the quarantine comes down again. My guys don't lift it until they get a plain signal from me that we have an 'all clear.' Or… Look, I'm a realist. A plain signal from someone. The instructions are in my wallet."

  Bamberg, Franconia

  May 1634

  "Weinhart was right. Kronach let the doctors in." Vince Marcantonio's expression didn't match what should have been good news.

  "There's a catch." Bennett Morris made the obvious diagnosis.

  "Bound to be," Wade Jackson said. "What is it, Vince?"

  "Matt went in with them. Turned the command at Kronach over to Bachhausen, the lieutenant from Coburg, and went in with them. Without so much as a 'by your leave' to Cliff Priest or to me."

  "Well." Wade flipped his pencil around his thumb. "That much makes sense, at least. He must have known perfectly well that you wouldn't 'leave' him."

  "Yeah, he knew. He admits it straight out in the letter he sent us. And points out that this way we're spared from having to court-martial him for disobeying an order."

  "What got them in?"

  "Matt softened up de Melon and the city council with a lot of propaganda. Guarinoni's an author, too, beyond being a health nut. And a real religious bigot. Poetry. Lives of saints, real and imaginary. Steve Salatto's tame printer down in Wurzburg ordered some of his titles that the duchess-regent didn't s
end us so Stew Hawker's people could look at them. And an architect. He's designing and building a church dedicated to Saint Charles Borromeo. He's paying for it himself. Duchess Claudia was right about that much. The doctors are the kind of people who are heartily welcome in Kronach. Aside from this plague medicine stuff, all three of them are more Catholic than the pope."

  Bamberg, Franconia

  late June 1634

  "Vince, remember what you said about those doctors we sent up to Kronach being more Catholic than the pope?"

  "Yeah." Vince Marcantonio yawned. "God, I'm tired."

  "Given some of the news that's come in this week, that might not be hard right now." Cliff Priest read out the latest bulletin that Scott Blackwell had just sent up from Wurzburg.

  The meeting paused a moment in honor of the disconcerting notion that Larry Mazzare, the parish priest of most of the members of the administration, was now, unexpectedly, Lawrence Cardinal Mazzare, Cardinal Protector of the United States of Europe.

  Then, since there was nothing that any of them could do about it, they went back to work. Joe Matewski got together a batch of pamphlets and stuff to send up to Kronach. He looked at the latest arrival. In Amberg, down in the Upper Palatinate, Bill Hudson had been dealing with a diphtheria epidemic for the last six weeks or so. He'd sent an SOS to Grantville, where the doctors had said, basically, "chloramphenicol doesn't work." They'd also said, "we won't be making DPT vaccines or vaccines for any part of DPT for several years." So much for that, which took up the first two pages. The boiled-down message was that they didn't have anything to help a field medic who was faced with a diphtheria outbreak right now.

  The rest of the pamphlet was full of information, mostly from the retired docs, old Sims and McDonnell, on stuff that might help during diphtheria outbreaks if only they had the tools to make tools. Lots of woodcuts and illustrations of syringes and hypodermic needles. Diagrams of just what the problems were. Irrelevant. Whoever might have the tools to make tools, it wasn't him and it wouldn't happen in Bamberg. The plague doctors handled other epidemics, too. Maybe they'd be interested. He could always get another copy if he needed one. He tossed it into the pile for Matt.

  Kronach, Franconia

  July-August 1634

  Matt stopped just outside the door. It was one thing to have heard "sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind" as a proverb. Grandma Geraldine used to say it all the time before she died last winter.

  It was another thing to watch it in action. The segregation of entire families, the healthy members with the infected. The closing of markets and trade, with the unemployment that came from that. Not that Kronach had been trading anyhow, since it was under siege. Burning the furnishings and goods when an infected house was finally opened up again. Dealing with the kind of people for whom reopening plague-infected houses and burning the contents was an economic and social step up in the world. Maintaining enough oversight to keep that kind of people from stealing the infected stuff and selling it on the black market, where it would start the cycle again.

  The Pesthaus, the quarantine hospital for the sick, was obviously a good idea, if not exactly a new one. Pious Catholics didn't always think that something like requisitioning monasteries to serve as plague hospitals was such a wonderful idea, but as Weinhart had pointed out, one could hardly use the municipal hospital for plague victims, since it was, as usual, full of orphaned children, crippled people, various elderly who had no family members to care for them, the epileptic, the languid, and the lunatic.

  The "languid" had turned out to be those mentally ill who just sat there. Who'dathunkit?

  Getting DDT into all of Kronach's houses, rich and poor alike, hadn't been too much of a challenge, once the authorities swung into action. With the doctors from Padua there to direct things, the council had set up a Magistracy of Public Health on the Venetian model. Which didn't exactly involve separation of powers. The Health Board could legislate action to be taken, it could order the action carried out, and it was the judicial authority that heard noncompliance cases. Given the level of down-time medical knowledge, it was no surprise that, according to Dr. Guarinoni, the motto of plague doctors was, "prevention is much more noble and more necessary than therapy."

  It wasn't hard to get enough DDT. Matt had brought some with him when he came back from Grantville. They'd found an ample supplementary supply at the drop point within two weeks of asking for it.

  Yeah. While they were stuck in Kronach, the three doctors had absorbed the up-time medical knowledge about transmission vectors, so they'd directed a lot of their efforts toward persuading de Melon and the city council that the rats had to be eradicated. It hadn't been all that hard for Matewski to persuade them that the transmission vector was little bugs in the blood rather than nasty, sticky, bad-smelling, poisonous, atoms that emanated from infected sources such as stinking garbage in alleys and stuck to inanimate objects, animals, and people when the air was corrupted, or miasmic, rather than salubrious.

  After all, a person couldn't see either one. Matewski had promised them that after this was over, he'd somehow get hold of an up-time microscope from Grantville and let them take a look at plague bacilli. They were looking forward to this, particularly since he told them that up-time science had confirmed the existence of atoms, even if they were too small to see through a microscope.

  The doctors were particularly happy to hear that plague bacilli were made up of atoms, ultimately. Probably nasty, poisonous, ones. So maybe that wasn't the way Nichols or Adams or Shipley would have explained it to them, but Matewski had never claimed to be a doctor.

  They were also happy to hear that almost the first enterprise of every Italian health board when the plague struck-namely, cleaning up the smelly garbage-had been a good idea, even if the underlying theory was inaccurate. So was the custom of having the men from lay sodalities visit all the poor houses in the town, clean them thoroughly, and give them a fresh coat of whitewash, inside and out.

  At any rate, if Grantville had any luck at all, it was luck that it had made an ally of Venice. And not enemies, really, of Florence and Genoa. Those cities had developed plague-fighting as far as it could go with the knowledge and techniques that the seventeenth century had available. They'd had the organization, already. What they knew about medicine hadn't matched up to it, but… In Kronach, now, they were combining what Grantville knew about medicine with what plenty of Italians already knew about handling the, uh, bureaucracy of the thing. If it worked here, the new USE would put it into force in all the towns and cities.

  What the USE really needed was some sort of… pipeline… for hiring more Italians. It really did.

  Yeah, they'd gotten exemplary military and civilian cooperation on the rat eradication project.

  Even if that meant that the fleas went looking for other hosts-human hosts-faster than would ordinarily have been the case. At least they hadn't done the old-fashioned thing of killing off the dogs and cats. Dogs and cats not only caught rats, but gave the fleas a few more options. And Kronach wasn't starving. He'd seen to that himself. So the Kronacher weren't eating the cats and dogs. Much less plague-infected rats.

  The city had food. He was making the council pay for it, but it came in regular deliveries. He also made sure that the city council let the people know that the food was arriving because of his benevolent magnanimity. Or Vince's. Or Steve Salatto's. Or Grantville's. Or by sufferance of Mike Stearns and Gustavus Adolphus.

  Think nice thoughts about us, folks. After all, one of my jobs is to incorporate this town into a happy, democratic, tolerant, Franconia when the time comes. Sure. That's gonna work. Kronach and Coburg. The ranchers and the farmers should be friends. Yippee.

  He looked down at himself. In a world without latex, you did what you could, even if that meant that you swathed and robed yourself in waxed linen, with a breath mask over your face. The down-time theory was that it was harder for the nasty atoms to stick to waxed cloth. According to Gatterer, a slipp
ery silk ought to work, too, but it cost too much. Guarinoni had admitted that he had never previously had much faith in the usefulness of the waxed linen robes, thinking that they were a Frenchified affectation and that all they really did was keep most of the fleas that tended to infest pest houses off the physicians. Then he'd thought again about transmission vectors and added, "Well… Maybe there is some point to them, after all."

  They waxed the fabric on the stretchers that the attendants used to carry patients to the Pesthaus, too.

  That brought his mind back to the current state of the Pesthaus. Bursting at the seams. Grandma Geraldine had another saying. "The hotter the battle, the shorter the war." She'd gotten that from her own mother. With the help of a set of twins, Great-Grandma Anna had managed to have seven children in eight years before she stopped cold at age thirty.

  He hoped his great-grandmother was right.

  So he opened the door and went in. It always took him a pause and some thought before he managed to walk up and open that door.

  De Melon had become accustomed to the smoke. Something was always burning. When the Health Board had sent members of the council and the lay sodalities out to make a survey of the city, they had found many uninfected families sleeping on straw pallets that were filthy and fetid. That was scarcely surprising. That the poor had pallets at all was a sign of the comparative prosperity of the Germanies as compared to Spain.

  The Health Board had ordered them all confiscated and burned. Ordinarily, that would have left the poor sleeping on the ground. Not that this was a terrible hardship in the summer. De Melon had slept on the ground more than once.

  The order for a couple thousand clean, uninfected replacement pallets to be delivered to the drop-off point had put a big dent in his budget. Luckily, he hadn't had to pay cash. He had used bank drafts, duly countersigned by two members of the Magistracy for Health and payable in Wurzburg. If fortune smiled, he would be reimbursed. By someone. Given the events of the summer, it no longer seemed probable that Duke Maximilian of Bavaria would reimburse him. He was far from sure that the duke was still his employer.