1635-The Tangled Web Page 10

  The two sons howled with laughter.

  Gruyard smiled.

  Walter Butler didn't think it was that funny.

  Fulda, July 1634

  "What do you suppose this means?" Johann Bernhard von Schweinsberg asked. "Will Gustavus Adolphus allow the archbishop of Mainz to come back to his see? How does it affect the status of the Mainz possessions around Erfurt that voted themselves into the State of Thuringia-Franconia? Will there be a new appointment to the see of Bamberg? How will it change the status of the bishop of Würzburg? Does it mean that Thuringia-Franconia will be granted its own bishop? If so . . . that would be wonderful."

  "Why?" Harlan Stull asked.

  "Well, there would be someone who could ordain priests. And confirm children. None of that has been done in the Stift for three years. Unless the suffragan down in Würzburg has done confirmations in some of the southern parishes that the diocese claims are under its jurisdiction."

  "Why don't you ask him?"

  "If I asked him, he could interpret it that I was asking him for favors. He could perhaps even interpret it to mean that I was tacitly acknowledging that the abbey of Fulda is under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Würzburg."

  "Look," Harlan said. "You don't have the property any more. All you've got are a bunch of parishes with people in them. How about cutting out the turf wars?"

  Schweinsberg looked at him wearily.

  "Herr Stull, I have come to like and respect all of you. But in the course of the history of the church, Grantville has been a factor for only a short, a very short, time. The abbey of Fulda has been here for eight hundred years. I hope that it will still be here in another eight hundred years, if the last judgment does not intervene. I cannot and will not unilaterally renounce its rights."

  "The truth is, Schweinsberg," Wes Jenkins said, "that I quite honestly don't have the vaguest idea what this will really mean. I'll write to Ed Piazza. And I'll set up an appointment for you to meet with Henry Dreeson before he goes home. Once he gets here, that is."

  "I took a bunch of newspapers out to the barracks," Derek Utt said. "It should give them something to talk about besides peasant revolts. Distract their minds, sort of. I'm having them practice their new anthem, too. Mary Kat's grandma picked it out. The kid teaching school in Sergeant Hartke's loft translated it into German poetry for me and he is assigning the parts. Biehr, his name is."

  Dubious Saints

  Fulda, August 1634

  Andrea was feeling increasingly frazzled. She was the senior civilian administrator in Fulda. Someone else should have been back a couple of days ago. They couldn't all have been delayed. Or if they were, at least one of them should have sent in a message. Pushing her bangs out of her face, she started out into the hall.

  The land claims lawyer was just coming in, followed by his relatives, the school teacher and the speech writer. And by the little artist who lived in St. Severi church and painted murals.

  Andrea stopped and looked. They had an amazing resemblance to one another when they were lined up like that. All four of them, Etienne Baril, his nephew, the teacher, and the artist. No one could ever seem to remember their names. Maybe it was deliberate. Last night I met upon the stair, a little man who wasn't there, she thought to herself. These Calvinist refugees survived as a kind of professional migrant labor force, from France to Antwerp to Frankfurt, from Lucca to Geneva to Hamburg, from Scotland to Nuernburg to Hungary, making themselves inconspicuous as they worked away to make the bottom line come out even in the cracks and crannies of administrative back rooms all over the continent. Survival by invisibility.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  The lawyer nodded to the end of the line. "Paul says . . ."

  The little artist spoke up. "Felix Gruyard is in town. Or was. I saw him. He came to services at Saint Severi. I don't go out in the congregation, of course. I watch from the sacristy, so he did not see me."

  "Who is Felix Gruyard?" Andrea frowned. Something, right on the edge of her memory. Something to do with that obscene pamphlet. A Lorrainer.

  The little artist lifted up his loose tunic. The school teacher pointed to his legs.

  "He is the archbishop of Cologne's torturer," the speech writer said. "He is very good at what he does."

  The artist dropped his tunic. He held out his hands and arms, unscarred. "He is very careful in his work. The archbishop still wanted me to be able to paint, you see. Even though I am a Calvinist."

  Buchenland, August 1634

  "That went pretty smoothly," Geraldin said. They had the abbot of Fulda neatly trussed up and loaded on a small hay cart. Pretty fair hay, too.

  "What about the other one?" MacDonald asked.

  "Leave him down there. He's not going to be moving. Get back to where you were supposed to meet the boss. Shots attract attention and you don't want blood all over your clothes if you pass other people between here and there. I'm on my way."

  MacDonald shrugged and headed back to meet Butler and Deveroux at von Berlepsch's.

  Wes Jenkins had finally dealt with the way he couldn't help worrying about Clara Bachmeierin whenever she was out in the field by assigning her to ride with him while they tried to pacify the farmers. That way, he figured, he would only have to worry about her when it was absolutely necessary. That would help him keep his mind on other things, such as the importance of believing that railroad surveyors are your friends.

  Most of the farmers had a lot of trouble grasping even the basics of that idea. So did Wes, for that matter. He'd read a book once about some of those early railroad barons, back in American history. He expected that his spiel wasn't as convincing as it might have been.

  There were getting to be a lot of Brillo pamphlets and poems and songs around. Clara thought they were funny. Wes didn't think they were particularly funny. Oh, a couple of them were cute enough, but not anything that you could compare to Peanuts. Peanuts had always been his favorite comic strip. Once, Reverend Jones, Mary Ellen, that was, had taken the adult Sunday school class through a book called The Gospel According to Peanuts. That had been pretty good. He wondered if Clara would like it.

  About that time, someone jumped into the pony cart and hit him from behind, rather hard. The horse reared. Men started yelling. They pulled him out of the cart. Three of them were on him, tying up various pieces of his body to other pieces.

  "Leave his legs free," someone said. "We have to move them." Two men sat on him, one on each leg.

  Clara was yelling, too, until someone shoved a rag in her mouth.

  A man behind him was trying to get a blindfold on his eyes. He kept tossing his head up and down. He kept thinking that von Schlitz's sons had tried to blame the attack on the wagon going to Grantville on bandits. If so, it had been the only batch of bandits on that road in the last year and a half. Like this one. This was a perfectly safe road. He wiggled his head away from the blindfold again. That was von Schlitz's son. The older one. Fritz.

  "Hold still," someone said. "Hold still or I cut her."

  Wes looked up. A couple of men were holding Clara's arms. Another man was holding a wicked-looking knife right against her cheek, smiling sweetly.

  He let them put the blindfold on.

  It was hard to tell how long it took to get where they were going. The path, if he could trust the feel of the horse under him, had more curves than the climb to Pike's Peak.

  He'd gone to Pike's Peak with Lena and the girls, once. They had tried to hit all of the important national parks on family vacations. He wondered what Lena was doing now. Whatever it is, Lena, God bless you. He said goodbye to his wife.

  Nobody was talking except the man who had smiled as he held the knife against Clara's cheek. He seemed to find it entertaining to describe the things he planned to do to them if they did not answer the questions they would be asked.

  The sound behind them was probably a door closing. Wes thought that it made a depressingly solid sound. A well-built door, probably. Reinforced pane
ls and a good latch. Where was planned obsolescence when you really needed it?

  "They pulled out my gag," Clara was saying, "If you come over here and sit on the floor so that your head is about the height of my hands, I will try to untie your blindfold. That is the best place to start, I think. He put on yours before he put on mine. It is just rough hempcloth, so the knot can't be too tight. He didn't bother to dampen it."

  Wes felt his way across toward Clara's voice and slid down.

  "I'm really sorry about this, Ms. Bachmeierin," he started out. "I would have given anything to avoid exposing you to this mishandling."

  "I'm sure," Clara mumbled under her breath as her fingers fished around for the ends of the knot. "There, it's coming," she said aloud. She kept pulling.

  "It's called the terratio verborum," she said suddenly. "Terrorizing with words. That's what he was doing. Describing each instrument and its effect. It's the first stage of judicial torture. He's probably a professional, not having fun, just saving some time by talking while we rode."

  Wes stood up and blinked his eyes clear. "It's not a dungeon," he said. "Stone floor and walls, but the window is at the regular height. It's after dark, but it's lighter out than it is in here and I can see the outline. It's barred."

  "Untie my blindfold, would you?" Clara asked. "Then we can admire the scenery together."

  "Oh," Wes said. "Sorry." She sat down on the floor. He untied it. She stood up again and he started picking at the knots fastening her hands. That was just a length of rag, too, not a rope. It came loose pretty easily. Somebody hadn't belonged to the Boy Scouts. Either the soldiers who tied them up weren't taking this very seriously or they intended to be back pretty soon. He preferred the first thought.

  "It's a pantry. See the shelves, over there in back. Somebody's been living in here, I think," Clara commented after her eyes had adjusted.

  "Why?"

  "Because," Clara said, "there is a table. With a pitcher on it. She walked over and stuck her finger in it. Half full of water. She took a drink and handed it to Wes.

  "A chair. And a bed. A cot, but a real, live, genuine, bed with ticking and a stuffed straw mattress."

  "Fleas and bedbugs?"

  "Probably those too." She stood there, looking at the bed. "After this kind of a day, I'll risk it."

  "I'll sleep on the floor by the door, in case someone should—"

  Clara had had enough.

  "No," she said. "You won't."

  She started to take her clothes off.

  "I am getting ready to finally get into that bed with you. Before that nasty little man cuts me up in all the pieces he spent the afternoon telling us about so meticulously. So there. Even if it is too dark for you to see my body before it gets sliced and diced, at least you can feel it. And I can feel yours while it is still all there, since he is threatening to pull your fingernails out, too. And other things."

  "Ms. Bachmeierin . . ."

  "The name," she said, "is Clara. And you are Wesley. Now . . ." She pulled him down to sit next to her on the bed.

  "Clara," he said faintly. "We aren't married."

  She sighed with exasperation.

  "Here," she said. "Your left hand in my left hand. My right hand in your right hand. Now you say, in the present tense, 'I take you for my wedded wife.' "

  He complied.

  "Now. I take you for my wedded husband. That makes us married. Do you have anything that we can divide and share for a token. A coin or something. That makes it stronger."

  "I'm not the kind of strongman who goes around bending coins with his bare hands." Wes felt around in his pocket. "Would two links from my watch chain do?"

  "Superb."

  He pulled them off. They solemnly exchanged them.

  "Now," Clara said. "We are fully and completely married, to the entire satisfaction of ninety-five percent of the population of Europe." She kissed him again and kicked off her last petticoat. It was midsummer, after all, so she was only wearing three. All of them linen. And a pair of blue jeans under them, of course, since when she rode she now kilted her skirts and petticoats up around her waist.

  Wes started to unlace his shoes.

  "Ah, who are the other five percent of the population of Europe?"

  "Lawyers and bureaucrats!" Clara exploded. Then. "Wesley, if you stop unlacing those shoes, I am going to be very, very, annoyed."

  Joel Matowski started to wiggle his way out of the ditch and up onto the path, thinking that if he got out of this, he might just make a visit to the pilgrimage church up on top of a hill that Wes had handed back to the abbot. He hadn't always thought it was wonderful to have a mother who was a ballet teacher. If he got back to Grantville, he would apologize to his mom, ten times over, for all the occasions when he had been cranky about going to lessons or practicing. There were times in life when a lot of ballet training came in really useful. It turned a guy into something of a contortionist, not to mention developing stamina. Wiggle, hump, stretch. He fell back to the bottom twice, but kept pushing. The second night, it rained. He lay there on his back, his mouth open. Over three days after those guys had taken the abbot, by the time he had his legs onto the path and was making pretty good progress pushing the rest of himself upwards with his shoulders and elbows, a good Samaritan came along. Who happened to be a tenant of Ruprecht von Ilten.

  "Berlepsch, I think. Tann, Schlitz, and Buchenau for sure. The ones who let the Irishmen use their soldiers. So those castles should be where you will find your various officials. Of course, some of them have more than one castle, and they might use storage barns or other buildings." Von Ilten was looking very anxious.

  "None of the others?" the little lawyer asked.

  "Not as far as I have been able to determine."

  "Damn it, I'm not an invalid," Joel Matowski said. "Just a bit bunged up there and there. I'm riding out with the rest of them."

  "How about," Gus Szymanski suggested, "that before you ride out you make a little tour giving speeches to the different groups. First Fulda Barracks. Then the 'Hearts and Minds' team. Then the militia. They'll fan out and cover the villages."

  Joel gave a pretty dramatic speech. Ballet didn't require words, but it was really heavy on interpretive gestures.

  Shortly after Joel finished the third repeat, he fainted. The Barracktown school teacher held him on his horse, took him to St. Severi's and put him in the sacristy for the little artist to look after. It was either that or the nuns, since the up-timers' "EMT" was going to accompany the other soldiers, and Biehr didn't think that nuns would be a good idea. Not that he had ever met one, but Calvinists had their doubts about nuns just on general principles.

  Then Biehr hurried back to the barracks. The regiment would be marching out and he needed to be there to direct the anthem. When the men rode or marched, they would just sing the melody, but for when they were in barracks, he had set it up as a chorale and divided them into tenors, baritones, and basses.

  Sergeant Hartke had not gone along with Biehr's suggestion that he should reassign the men to the different companies on the basis of which part they sang, although it would make scheduling rehearsals easier. In fact, Sergeant Hartke's answer had been unreasonably brusque. Biehr thought with frustration that sometimes he just needed to work with them on one part. He saw no obvious reason that all the tenors should not be musketeers and all the baritones pikemen.

  He was vaguely dissatisfied, but he had done his best with the translation. Major Utt, of course, had as usual been overly busy. The only guidance he had given was, "Leave out the line about 'we feebly struggle; they in glory shine.' It projects the wrong image."

  Butler, Deveroux, and MacDonald interviewed Fred Pence and Johnny Furbee at Berlepsch's. They had planned to put the next three days to good use, riding from one castle to another and interviewing the captives the other parties had picked up. All of a sudden, though, every country road and cow path in Fulda was crawling with people. Soldiers, militiamen, farmers, kids, an
d a terrifying squadron of women. People who were, clearly, looking for other people.

  By mutual consent, they picked up Gruyard from Schlitz's and headed back toward Bonn. They were, after all, practical men, in this for money rather than glory.

  Fulda, August 1634

  "No, I am not too proud to ask for help. I am also not too stupid to ask for help. I do not care whether some galloping Rambo thinks I am a wimp because I ask for help. Somebody go down to Würzburg with this letter and get us some help. Now."

  Andrea had been on her feet for almost twenty-four hours for the second time in three days. Her hair, which usually got a half-hour of attention every morning before she let it appear in public, had gone limp. She had tried to pull it back into a pony tail. It was too short. Exasperated, she had parted it and put it into two pigtails, one behind each ear, tied with pink ribbons. There were three pencils and a pen stuck into various parts of it.

  Wes's speech-writer-cum-gofer looked at her. The hairdo's effect was remarkable. The closest classical analogy that came to his mind was Medusa.

  "I will take it myself," he said. "I don't know anybody else who knows the road and is still in town. They're all out looking for the others."

  Würzburg, August 1634

  Steve Salatto frowned. "Has Andrea gone off her rocker?"

  He meant it as a rhetorical question.

  Louis Baril, which was the speech-writer's name if anyone had ever been able to remember it, took it as serious. "It is quite true," he said. "All of it. At least, to the best of our knowledge in Fulda."

  "If I send a half dozen people up to Fulda, who's going to be available to help Anita in Bamberg?"

  Louis realized that the second question was rhetorical. He shrugged.

  "By the time I can get anyone up there, they will probably have already straightened things out. But I guess that the onus is on my shoulders."