1635-The Tangled Web Page 6

  "It's this van Beekx who's the snake," Wes spit out.

  "Yeah," Fred Pence said. "Pretty good caricaturist, though."

  "Or maybe someone sent them sketches. If that artist ever came out of the church and took a look at us, who would notice? He didn't look very happy about making a deposition. I've got an appointment, guys." Dropping that happy thought on the table, Orville left.

  They delegated the delicate task of acquainting Clara with the existence of the placards, all of which had been pulled down before the Special Commission returned from Neuenberg, and the pamphlet, to Andrea.

  "My goodness," Clara said. "How . . . unusual . . . to see my own face on a depiction of the Whore of Babylon. Because I speak with you foreigners, I suppose. The tower of Babel and all that. And the prioress is the Whore of Rome because she's a nun, I suppose."

  She giggled. "But the idea of depicting the abbot as a snake with a forked tongue is really rather ingenious. Considering what he is doing with it."

  "Aren't . . ." Andrea's voice quavered. "Aren't you even a little bit shocked?"

  "Well, I don't like the witchcraft accusation," Clara said pragmatically. "Those can be dangerous, over here in Franconia. But I've seen woodcuts like that all my life. With this kind of iconography."

  "Where?"

  Clara looked at her with surprise. "Illustrating Lutheran pamphlets about the nature of the pope as the anti-Christ, of course. We read some of them in confirmation class."

  Andrea started to make strangling noises.

  "Fourteen-year-olds have a rather crude sense of humor, of course. Our favorite was one of the pope. You could tell it was the pope because he was wearing a triple tiara, but he had breasts that drooped down to here"—Clara gestured expressively—"and a big swollen belly covered with fish scales and was giving birth to the Leviathan, that's the great beast from Revelations, while the devil stood behind him and . . ."

  "Stop," Andrea said. "I think I get the idea."

  Clara thought a moment. "I expect that they, the Catholics, make that kind of picture about us, too. But I wonder why Catholic propagandists in Cologne, if you say that's where this came from, used the Whore of Rome image? That's ours, not theirs."

  After she had thought for a couple of minutes, Andrea began to wonder about that herself.

  "Mark," Andrea said the next morning. "I think there's something we need to talk about. About the Special Commission. There's something that came up when I was talking to Clara that made me think that, maybe, the road to getting seventeenth-century Europeans to get to the point of religious live-and-let-live is several thousand miles longer than any of us ever dreamed."

  "Maybe," Mark said after he had heard her out. "Maybe. But you're forgetting something."

  "What?"

  "She is working with us on the Commission. And so is the abbot. Captain Wiegand is really pretty decent. No matter how much of this conditioning they got as kids."

  July seemed to go by in a blur. Sitting in Würzburg, Steve Salatto got the latest mailbag from Fulda and wished that he had better communications. In Grantville, Ed Piazza pointed out to Arnold Bellamy that the folks in the field were pretty exposed and that he was planning to continue letting them function on a fairly long leash. No, he said. He really did not think that Wes went overboard. Under the circumstances. Maybe a little ballistic, but not overboard.

  In Fulda, the news arrived that the CPE delegations were off to Paris and London to conduct negotiations. Everyone figured that getting ready for that must be why they hadn't been getting much in the way of instructions from the Department of International Affairs lately. The Special Commission held a bunch more sessions.

  And ever since the affair of the placards, Wes kept hovering around Clara in a very overprotective manner, fretting every time the Special Commission went out of town until it was back safely. The rest of them thought it was funny, but he didn't even seem to realize that he was doing it.

  Mark Early reported that they would finish up Fulda proper by the end of the month and start on the imperial knights the beginning of August. One at a time, he groaned. The imperial knights of Buchen Quarter were so jealous of their individual prerogatives that they hadn't been able to agree on a common time and place to hold even an introductory meeting so he could explain what the Special Commission's assignment was.

  "Like hell they'll get away with that," Wes exploded.

  The imperial knights of the Buchen Quarter were obviously not happy to be meeting in Fulda. Well, in a mown hay field outside Fulda. However, the combined visitation of the military administrator's regiment and the Fulda militia to each of their territories, individually, had been enough to persuade them of the prudence of agreeing.

  Actually, Derek Utt thought, looking around the field, his soldiers weren't looking too bad these days. They had decent uniforms, finally. He wouldn't have chosen sickly orange himself—that was the best way he could describe the color—being more used to camouflage. But nobody expected them to be fighting in the field, so Frank Jackson hadn't sent them greeny-brown combat uniforms from Erfurt or Magdeburg. He hadn't sent them blue dress uniforms styled more or less after those used during the American Civil War, either—these being a product of what Melissa Mailey, in one of her more acerbic moments, called "reenactors' nostalgia" combined with the relative cheapness of cloth dyed with Erfurt woad. Dennis Stull, the civilian head of procurement, had just sent Derek a bank draft and a recommendation to do his best.

  His best, when delegated to Harlan Stull's fiscal frugality, had turned out to be sickly orange. Good quality English fabric, Harlan said, but a bad dye lot. Or at least some Frankfurt merchant's bad guess as to whether or not the color would be popular. They'd paid the wives to make the uniforms up, which kept the money in the family as much as possible, so to speak.

  They were even developing some esprit de corps. They were calling themselves the Fulda Barracks Regiment, these days. One of the sutlers had found them a set of regimental colors. Derek suspected that the banner had started life as some rich lady's party dress, but it had white and orange satin, so they were happy. And a logo. He couldn't make out what the logo was supposed to be—it looked to him like a lopsided blob—but it had one, and they had chipped in to pay for the flag themselves. Their weapons weren't as fancy as the ones carried by the imperial knights, but then his guys weren't planning on riding around in tournaments. They just planned on riding around looking mean. So far, he had been able to get horses for about half of them to ride at a time and was dual-training them as dragoons. Out in the boondocks like this, Derek had decided, flexibility came in ahead of doctrine any day. He didn't care what the army's organizational table called them. He just had a job to do. Horses were a convenience, frequently very handy in a pinch, even if your label said "infantry."

  Of course, the horses had to be taken care of, but he was paying some of the older kids from Barracktown to do that.

  Which reminded him that Andrea was still nagging about a school out there.

  Plus, the regiment wanted an anthem.

  He had learned that the Swedish custom was to sing Psalm 46—that was "Ein feste Burg"—and then start Psalm 67, starting to advance before the singing finished. That would not work for the Fulda Barracks Regiment. Too many of the men had been on the receiving end of those advances, so to speak. He'd have to think about an anthem. The first requirement was that it had to be something that neither the Catholics nor the Lutherans could claim. The second requirement was that it had to be something he was willing to hear them sing every day. And an anthem ought to be uplifting. Martial, militant, but not some dirty marching song.

  Derek's eyes jerked back to the center of the field when Wes Jenkins yelled again.

  One of the knights was waving around a copy of that obscene pamphlet with Clara Bachmeierin's name in it. Refusing to receive the Whore of Babylon as an envoy from the Special Commission.

  Wes went on yelling. For a Methodist, he had picked up a colorful
vocabulary.

  The guy with the pamphlet was backing down.

  "I don't see what you're screaming about," another one of them—Karl von Schlitz—was saying to Wes. "You had them all torn down before one person in ten saw them. And it cost enough to get van Beekx to . . ." His voice trailed off. "Add in the Whore of Rome, too."

  Wes had stopped yelling. He was smiling. "Just how, Herr von Schlitz," he asked, "do you happen to know how much it cost to do that?"

  Derek moved his men in to form a double line, closer to the knights. Wiegand brought the city militia to replace them around the edges of the field.

  This contributed a lot to the continuation of rational discussion. By the end of the afternoon, all of the imperial knights of the Fulda region were willing to swear upon their Bibles that Clara Bachmeierin was a desirable member of the Special Commission.

  A couple of them even expressed the view that the Special Commission was desirable.

  Not von Schlitz. Over some protest by his colleagues, he was "voluntarily" remaining in Fulda for meaningful discussions with the NUS administration about alleged treasonous contacts with the archbishop of Cologne.

  Fulda, August 1633

  August was a pretty good month. The NUS administration got news of the first flight of the Las Vegas Belle. Wes dipped into his own pockets and held a party for the whole town of Fulda. Barbequed mutton. As he said, his pay had mostly just been accumulating, since there really wasn't a lot in Fulda that a person could spend it on.

  Harlan Stull wasn't sure how many of the guests really believed in airplanes, but the government wasn't paying for it, so it wasn't his problem.

  Then the news of the second Battle of White Mountain arrived. The abbot asked Roy Copenhaver if he was pardoned for having been hanging out with Wallenstein. If he was, he suggested, it would be really nice to have some of that income-producing property back, because otherwise the clergy of Stift Fulda were going to have a pretty hungry winter. Most of the population hadn't really gotten into the swing of voluntary church contributions.

  "Herr Piazza," he said, "says that if I am to save souls, I must use carrots rather than sticks."

  "Sounds like Ed."

  "So." The abbot smiled. He was missing more than a few teeth. "I need a supply of carrots. Please."

  Roy didn't give him any property back, but the administration did agree to turn over the wine from two formerly monastic vineyards for him to sell. Mostly because Harlan didn't want to get into wine marketing, which seemed to involve international cartels and a lot of other really complicated stuff, but Schweinsberg seemed a lot happier after he had sold it.

  And Johnny Furbee married his German girlfriend. She was from Barracktown, though, so it didn't gain them any brownie points with the citizens of Fulda.

  Fulda, September 1633

  What with the news of the Dutch defeat at Dunkirk, September was a downer. People started to ask questions like, "Are they ever going to remember to rotate us out of here?" About all that could be said for September was that the Special Commission wound up the hearings and hired a wagon to take the accumulated paper to Grantville. Joel Matowski turned up, too late to do the Special Commission any good, really, but by having him there, Derek Utt would be able to send his other up-timers, in rotation, for some R&R in Grantville.

  Since the wagonload of paper was going anyway, Wes sent along Karl von Schlitz under guard. Mostly to counter the rumors that he had been torturing the man. Let the Nice Nellies see for themselves. Anyway, Derek and Wiegand hadn't managed to get much out of him. Mangold was Catholic, so it was easy enough to see why he might have linked himself up with the monks who had gone into exile in Cologne. But von Schlitz was Lutheran. It didn't seem to add up.

  Well, it hadn't, until Andrea's drab little lawyer pointed out that a lot of Lutherans hated Calvinists even more than they did Catholics and von Schlitz was one of them. Combine that with the landgrave of Hesse's efforts to make the knights his vassals before the NUS showed up, and figure that the NUS was allied with the king of Sweden who was allied with the Hessians, who were Calvinists . . .

  It made sense, in a warped sort of way. But now Ed Piazza could worry about it. And maybe Francisco Nasi could get more out of the guy.

  Wes wrote a memo to Ed Piazza on the topic of needed legal reforms, with a courtesy copy to Steve Salatto. In the course of it, he mentioned that the administration in Fulda had made several arrests in connection with an outbreak of scurrilous pamphlets, commented that he had refused to authorize the use of judicial torture in the case, and added that, by the way, the pamphlets had been produced on a very ingenious down-time designed and manufactured duplicating machine marketed by a Herr Vignelli from Bozen. He sent this memo off in the same mail bag as his memo on the topic of needed improvements in the postal system, which was appended to his memo on rural transportation which accompanied his urgent memo in regard to cost overruns in the land titles department.

  Fulda, October, 1633

  As Harlan Stull said to Fred Pence, being in Fulda was sort of like being the little ball out on the far end of a stick that was just barely plugged in to some kid's Tinker Toy construction. What with the abysmal radio reception, if it hadn't had a post office on the mail route from Frankfurt to Eisenach, it could have been on the Moon. They didn't learn about Wismar until two weeks after it had happened. They didn't learn that the CPE had turned into the United States of Europe with Mike Stearns as prime minister for a couple of weeks after that.

  One thing they learned from a private courier who rode the route from Erfurt to Frankfurt regularly, two weeks before the letter from Grantville showed up, was that the guard on von Schlitz hadn't been heavy enough. A batch of riders, presumably from his personal guards and presumably led by his two oldest sons, had run down the wagon on a pretty deserted stretch of road, shot the two guards and the teamster, and taken him off it. He had disappeared. Gone to ground somewhere. He had kin all over the place.

  The Fulda Barracks Regiment put up two memorial plaques. It had not occurred to the men to commemorate their fallen, but Derek had suggested it.

  Nobody except their relatives told them anything about what was going on in Magdeburg. They had to read it in the newspaper. That was even how Wes found out that the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel had signed on to some grand railroad project. In the future tense, of course, but at some point people would be coming through to survey a railway route running through Hersfeld and then through Butzbach, down to Frankfurt am Main and then through to Mainz.

  "Has Hesse-Darmstadt signed on?" Clara asked. "Butzbach belongs to an uncle of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, not to Kassel. They'll have to go through quite a bit of Hesse-Homburg before they even get to Butzbach. That belongs to another uncle of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt."

  Wes didn't know. The paper hadn't said anything.

  "The line is supposed to run twenty miles north and then twenty miles west of here, more or less," Harlan Stull grunted. "It shouldn't affect us at all."

  "Once they actually build the thing," Roy Copenhaver pointed out, "it will open up new markets. Even for farmers this far away."

  "Yeah, but that will be years. Why didn't they bring it down this way, and then to Frankfurt along the Kinzig River valley?"

  "To do that, they would have to go through Schlitz and the Reichsritter wouldn't cooperate. He's Lutheran, so Oxenstierna didn't want to piss him off."

  "I remember that stuff. Schlitz beer. One thing about up-time that no one will miss. Horse's piss."

  In Grantville, during the first week in October, Ed Piazza, while digging through the latest stack of usually worthwhile memoranda churned out by Wes Jenkins, found the three paragraphs that specifically addressed the production of scurrilous propaganda pamphlets by means of inexpensive down-time manufactured duplicating machines, yanked the page to the top, and radioed the essential data to Francisco Nasi in Magdeburg.

  Fulda, November 1633

  "So," Wes Jenkins anno
unced, "it is now official. We are the United States of Europe—the USE—rather than the CPE. Mike Stearns is prime minister of the new nation—it's going to have a British-style parliamentary system rather than being modeled on the up-time USA. Ed Piazza's the president of the NUS now, but it's only a state—province, rather—in the new country."

  It took the rest of the staff meeting to digest this information.

  "Hey, Orville," Wes said on the way out, "who the hell is Brillo?"

  "You know, the cartoons. The stories. Contrary down-time ram. Some of them were published in the Grantville Times. Why?"

  "Steve Salatto wants to know how he connects to the peasant revolt."

  Fred Pence frowned. "What peasant revolt? I'm out in the precincts every week and I haven't heard anything about a peasant revolt."

  "It hasn't happened yet," Orville said. "It may happen in Würzburg and Bamberg."

  "I'll tell Steve that I never heard of the stupid ram." Wes paused. "Why are they having a peasant revolt?"

  "I dunno."

  Roy Copenhaver wandered into the "Hearts and Minds" office. "Orville?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Who's actually running these estates that the NUS confiscated from the Abbey of Fulda?"

  "They aren't like plantations with overseers and things. Mostly, after we abolished the stuff connected with serfdom, we've just let the farmers get on with it. I guess the village councils are running them."

  "Who's collecting the rents and taxes and stuff?"

  "We're collecting the taxes, using the district administrators, the Amtmaenner. As for the rents and dues, the real estate stuff, ask Harlan or Andrea. That's their department. All I can tell you is that we haven't had any major complaints from the granges on my watch."

  "Andrea, who's doing the actual collection of revenues from the estates the government holds?"