"Where are we?" Maydene Utt asked. Maydene, the "large one" of the three uptime auditors provided to the Franconian administration by Arnold Bellamy, always had a tendency to take charge of things.
"Somewhere northeast of a town called Gerolzhofen. That was Gerolzhofen, about a mile and a half back. The town that we had to go around. At least, according to Johnnie F.'s map, it should have been. Locked up tighter than a drum behind its walls. `See us on your way back, after we've verified your credentials.'"
Willa Fodor, the second uptime member of the audit team, brushed the snowflakes off her eyelashes. Willa was navigating. The down-timer sergeant of the guards who had been sent out with them was very efficient in a lot of ways, but he had never learned to read an uptime map. Worse, he was from somewhere in Brunswick, so had no more idea about where he might be in rural Franconia than anyone else in the group.
They had had a professional guide until three days ago, but he had come down with what looked to Maydene like walking pneumonia and she had insisted on leaving him in a place called Volkach, where the group had reserved rooms at the inn for two weeks. They had seen a whole bunch of villages since Volkach. They stopped at the bigger ones, where the Amtmaenner or district officers were headquartered. Most of the places had been willing to provide a boy to lead them to the next town or village on their list. They had collected oaths of allegiance in Schwebheim and Grettstadt, Donnersdorf and Sulzheim, with no problems. But, for some reason, no one in Sulzheim had been willing to guide them to Gerolzhofen. And Gerolzhofen had been locked down. Nobody outside the walls. No people. No pigs. No chickens. Definitely no welcome for the NUS administrators.
"Where are we going?" Estelle McIntire, the third auditor, thought that was the more important question, given the way the flakes were starting to come down.
"Someplace called Dingolshausen. That's the last stop on this route. Michelau is beyond it, but the people from Michelau and Neuhof came up to Donnersdorf and did their oath-taking there. Bless their beautiful hides. Then we double back not quite to Gerolzhofen and head south to someplace called Neuses am Sand and then someplace called Prichsenstadt. And from Prichsenstadt, we go back to Gerolzhofen and see if they'll let us in. Charming place, according to Meyfarth. They burned more than two hundred fifty `witches' about fifteen years ago. We've got to go back by way of Luelsfeld, again, though. Too many people had gone to market in Kitzingen the day we went through there. Then we go back to Volkach and from there we cross to Astheim and go home to Würzburg. The guys gave us an easy run, comparatively speaking. Chivalry and all that, I suppose."
"We'll let the army deal with Gerolzhofen." Maydene's voice was decisive. "The kind of behavior they are showing is Scott Blackwell's problem, not ours."
Willa rubbed her eyes again. "If Johnnie F.'s map is right, the left fork here has to be the one to Dingolshausen. We're lucky that it's cold enough that the snowflakes aren't melting and making the ink run." She shook them off the map.
"It's just delightful that something is going right today," Maydene said. "I am duly grateful."
Willa kept on. "The right fork has to go to Neuses am Sand, so the worst thing that can happen is that we take the oaths out of order. We can fib about that, in a pinch. It's a loose-leaf notebook. Let's move somewhere. This snow is starting to come down really hard. We need to get inside."
Maydene felt like the strap of her rifle was about to cut through the muscles of her right shoulder. Wrapping her reins around the saddle pommel, she reached up to transfer it over to the left. A sudden gust of wind blew a clear spot amidst the snowflakes, giving her about forty feet more vision than any of them had had for nearly an hour. The rifle came into her hand and she shot. In an instant, the three women were in the center of a circle formed by the guard company. Every hill along the roadside seemed to erupt men out of the snow.
Maydene's shot was hurried. She missed her target, but hit the man next to him in the shoulder. He spun around, striking one of his mates with his own gun and tangling up another.
Watching, Gerhardt Jost was impressed. He wouldn't have thought such a severe-looking middle-aged woman could react that quickly to an ambush. In fact, she'd reacted so well that the bishop's mercenaries were startled. And she was already jacking another bullet into the chamber.
That meant the bishop's men had lost the advantage of surprise. Already, the uptimers' guards were starting to fire. So was one of other American women. The third had fallen off her horse, when the beast started from the gunfire, but Jost didn't think she was badly injured.
None of the guards were shooting very accurately, true. But neither were the bishop's mercenaries. It was enough for them to simply be firing at all.
An ambush had just become a small pitched battle.
"Now?" asked Rudolph Vulpius quietly. The old man seemed to be practically quivering with eagerness.
"Not quite," answered Gerhardt. "Let the responsibility for the bloodshed be clear."
He paused, while another loud and very ragged not-quite-volley was exchanged. And, once again, was impressed. The big American woman was still on her horse, and took down her target with her second shot. No accident, that one. The mercenary was smashed into the snow with a bullet square in his chest, that punched right through his breastplate.
"And we don't want to seem that conveniently positioned," he added.
Old Vulpius grunted, but didn't argue the point. Jost waited for perhaps another ten seconds, watching the battle taking place below the ridge. After two of the uptimers' guards had been shot down, he decided everything was well enough established."
"Shoot!" he bellowed.
The villagers had been waiting, every bit as impatiently as their council head. An instant later, dozens of shots struck the bishop's men, cutting through them like a scythe. At that range, even with mostly old muskets, the villagers were quite accurate. They didn't have the skill of Jaegers, but they were no strangers to firearms.
It helped—a great deal—that Jost's cold-blooded delay had allowed all of the bishop's men to come out of hiding and expose themselves.
That first big volley fired, of course, the villagers were out of action for a time. Their weapons couldn't be reloaded quickly.
Jost was not concerned. The volley had hammered the mercenaries so badly that they were now completely confused. But the uptimers' guards were firing more accurately. And the big American woman, still stubbornly perched on her horse, took down another man. Jost took a moment to admire the horse.
The outcome was no longer in doubt at all.
One of the mercenaries tried to flee. Jost brought up his rifle and felled him. Then, smiling thinly, jacked another round into the chamber. He adored his American rifle, that had come to him through circuitous means.
Two more tried to flee. Jost killed them long before they could reach shelter.
By then, the villagers had reloaded. With more discipline that he'd expected, they waited for the command.
"Shoot!" he bellowed again.
A few seconds later, it was all over. A wounded mercenary staggered toward the safety of the woods, but Jost put a stop to that.
He rose to a crouch. "Best I vanish now," he murmured to Vulpius. "I certainly don't want to explain exactly how I came in possession of my rifle."
The old man nodded. Big as he was, Jost vanished into the trees like a wraith.
"No," the old man said. "They aren't bandits."
"Then what are they?" Maydene asked with exasperation. Their company had two dead guards, four injured guards, Estelle with a splint on her leg (she had fallen off her horse, but kept hold of her gun), two horses that had to be put down, and six horses that would have to be left behind. The villagers—this was Frankenwinheim, a little spot off the main road—said that they would be happy to nurse the horses back to health. Maydene wondered if they would also "forget" to bring them back to Würzburg until after spring planting, but that wasn't her problem.
"Hatzfeld's men, I think. The bishop. His brother is a general for the Austrians, you know. They don't like it that their move to get a lot of Franconia on grants from Ferdinand II has been blocked. This bunch came in through the woods. Moved into Dingolshausen about a week ago. Don't bother going the rest of the way. There's nobody there to take an oath. So we moved everybody out of the village here, up into temporary shelter in the hills. The people in Gerolzhofen wouldn't let us in. The last couple of years have been so bad that we couldn't afford to pay for the right to take sanctuary inside the walls. This year's harvest is decent enough, but we haven't sold it yet, so we haven't paid. Stinking, greedy, townsmen. We've been watching the road. If it hadn't been for the snow, this wouldn't have happened. We couldn't see well enough to know that you were coming. My apologies, gracious lady."
"No apologies necessary. What's your name?"
"Rudolph Vulpius. I'm the head of our village council." He indicated an old woman sitting on the other side of the room. "This is my wife, Kaethe."
Maydene nodded to her. "How many?" she asked.
"How many what?"
"Hatzfeld's men, I mean."
The old man looked over at a younger one.
"Two dozen, at least. That's how many bodies we have in the granary. Possibly up to a hundred. We have trackers out."
"Your casualties, here in Frankenwinheim?"
The old man cackled. "None to speak of. It helps a lot to shoot the enemy in the back."
Willa did not agree that two babies dead of exposure counted as no casualties. The villagers appeared to take it in stride. Babies died every winter, Hatzfeld's men or not. Innocent babies went to the Lord Jesus in heaven; their lot henceforth was better than that of the families they left behind on earth. Each mother had given God another bud in her nosegay of children. Each mother had another baby angel to pray for her soul. They were quite confident of this, in spite of the fact that for a century, Protestant clergymen had been telling them that they did not need baby angels to pray for their souls. There were just some things about which Mother Knew Best.
"Since we're here anyway," Maydene asked, "should we take your oaths? It's not picnic weather, but we have beef jerky in the saddlebags."
The old man looked at his wife Kaethe. The totally toothless old woman, who looked like she could as well be his mother as his wife, opened a hidden compartment under the manger of the stall that opened into the cottage. She dragged out a heavy chest and opened it. She pulled out a ram's-head banner.
"Yes," the old man said. "You will take our oaths under the banner. Not just the oaths of the villagers who pay their rents to your government in Würzburg. The oaths of all of us in Frankenwinheim, no matter who our lord may be."
Maydene was not in a mood to argue the point. Whoever the old man's lord might have been, he'd been really delinquent in the "protect and shield" department.
"Okay," she said. "First of all, I hereby absolve everybody in this village from any oath he's ever taken to anybody who didn't send a troop of guards in to root Hatzfeld's men out of Dingolshausen. Second, let's get started. You first."
They took oaths. They ate jerky. Somebody threw another log into the fireplace. The old folks started telling stories about what Grandpa did in the Bundschuh. Somebody rolled in a keg of beer. It turned into a long night in Frankenwinheim.
"That pretty well sums it up," Scott said. "And, though I know you don't want me to do it, Steve, I'm going to have to quarter some troops in Gerolzhofen. Some of the mercenaries that Mike and Gustavus are sending down to us. I've been stepping lightly, but that town is just too loyal to the bishop of Würzburg. Just because he's a bishop, no matter who the bishop may be at the moment. It's a lot smaller than Bamberg, but it sure isn't any more of a bastion of liberal enlightenment."
"Where? I don't want them quartered on private citizens." Steve was definite.
"Put them in the Zehnthof." That was Meyfarth. "Nobody, not even the most loyal Catholic, enjoys paying the tithes, so they won't be all that protective about the tithe storage barn. There's room for a bunch of soldiers there and the officers can keep better control over them than if they are scattered out in different quarters. It's sort of off to one side and next to the walls. The inner walls. Quarter the officers in the residence that Bishop Echter built for his bailiffs. That's right next to it."
"Actually," Scott said, "I'm sort of glad that we sent the gals on that run. The Gerolzhofen city council apparently thought that it could defy three women. Sort of exposed them to the point where I can deal with them."
"We have had," Meyfarth said, "excellent press coverage of the incident."
"The `gals' did exceed their authority." Steve Salatto felt obliged to point that out. After Frankenwinheim, Maydene, Willa, and Estelle had cut quite a swath through their assigned section of Franconia. Accompanied by scores of villagers. Waving a ram's head banner. They had taken an extra week to get back to Volkach. They were, as Maydene pointed out after they got back to Würzburg, all three of them, members of the Grantville League of Women Voters. She claimed that they therefore had a perfect right to use the symbol.
"Ah," Meyfarth said. "For my part, I think it went well."
Scott asked, "What about the sheep? Are we going to have farmers marching out under ram's-head banners come spring? And, if so, what do we do about it?"
Johnnie F. said, "You're going to have them marching, I'm pretty sure. Not just here, but in Bamberg and maybe Fulda, too. Stewart Hawker and Orville Beattie agree with me on that." Stewart and Orville were headquartered in Würzburg, but Stewart spent most of his time in Bamberg; Orville was mostly in Fulda.
"People are already on the move," Johnnie F. continued. "Some of the villages are squeezing people out—where the majority are subjects of some lord, folks who weren't eligible to swear to us, the way the law is now. I don't know if the landlords are doing the pushing, or if the other villagers are doing the pushing because they're afraid of the landlords, but we're seeing people on the roads. Heading north into Thuringia, a lot of them, though this isn't the best time of the year to be crossing the Thuringian Forest, now that the snow is accumulating in earnest."
"So they are pushing out the ones who swore allegiance to the Constitution. Are the oath-takers pushing out the ones who didn't?" Saunders Wendell asked.
"We're sort of trying to persuade them not to," Johnnie F. answered. "At least, not if other people's subjects are willing to live peacefully among our citizens, with the banner up. No use in creating grudges where none have to be. No use classifying people as enemies when maybe they're not."
"We might have a clearer idea of where the lines are going to fall out if they did," Scott Blackwell remarked.
"They didn't not take our oath because they love their landlords," Johnnie F. pointed out. "They didn't take it because they've already sworn a Huldigungseid to some other guy and we for sure didn't have any authority to tick off lords who are, or might be, allies of Gustavus Adolphus by ripping off their peasants. We just ripped off the peasants of the lords who for sure are his enemies. Well, except for the gals."
"What are my obligations if they do march?" That was Scott again. He was, after all, the military administrator.
Nobody else answered right away. Finally, Meyfarth said, "You can put the revolt down, as lords have always done before. It would contradict many of Herr Stearns' words, but no one would be surprised, Herr Blackwell, if you gathered troops and did so. If that is the course upon which Herr Salatto and this council decide, that will be your obligation. And, as you have observed, Gustavus Adolphus is sending you a couple of regiments."
Scott nodded.
"You could let it run, if that is the course upon which Herr Salatto and this council decide. That will unquestionably bring attacks on the houses and barns of landlords and overseers, the burning of castles, killings, with enough atrocity and ferocity that the margraves of Ansbach and Bayreuth, who are allies of Gustavus Adolphus, will come to fear that it will spill over into their lands. Until enough has happened that they can demand that he put it down. Until he might have to agree to their demands, which would drive a wedge between him and Herr Stearns."
"Or?" Johnnie F. asked. "There's an `or' in your voice."
"Or, between now and then, you, all of you, here and in Bamberg and in Fulda, can try to harness it and direct it. Control it, as a cavalryman controls a war horse ten times his weight. Get it used to wearing reins. Try to ride a ram."
Finally, Steve asked, "New business?"
Meyfarth pushed a sheet of paper across the table. "My resignation."
They all looked at him, utterly shocked.
"I have done what I can for you. I will not be going back to Grantville or Thuringia. The University of Erfurt will have no lack of takers for its prestigious tenured professorships. Because of the death of Duke Johann Casimir, I am free of obligations to any lord."
"So?" Saunders Wendell was deeply suspicious.
"Herr Wendell, for much of my life, I have been employed as an administrator or in diplomatic matters. But I am a pastor. That was my first oath. I assure you that I have prayed extensively in regard to this decision. I have also consulted with many others—with Dean Gerhard in Jena, with Professor Osiander from Tübingen. Indeed, with your uptime colleague, Herr Lambert. I am going to Bamberg, where I am going to establish a Lutheran congregation in a Catholic city. Although much of the patriciate there was Protestant up into the 1620's, the bishop's campaign and the witch trials broke all organization among the Lutherans and took the property of the Lutheran churches and wealthy Lutherans such as Councilman Junius, whose daughter came into Grantville for refuge. Now, there are only a few who are openly Protestant, those who went into exile and have come back. Many who converted in order to stay are ashamed. We must begin again."
The entire table buzzed with objections.
Meyfarth waited them out; then shook his head. "Herr Ellis was right, you know."
Johnnie F. asked, "How?"
"When he said that what happened to you and Herr Thornton in Bamberg was because your special commissioners there did not take their assignment seriously enough. They paid it only lip service, and did a little around their regular jobs, when they had time. So the Bamberg authorities, such as Councilman Färber, did not believe them when they said, `We mean it.' They thought that it could be evaded."
Johnnie F. nodded slowly.
"I know that many of you do not like Herr Ellis. You find him to be a harsh, prejudiced, abrasive man. You do not find him to be a colleague with whom you can work easily or well. But sometimes, harsh, prejudiced, unpleasant men are also right. It is my best judgment that in this matter, his opinion was correct. As I said already, I have prayed, a great deal, concerning this matter. So I am going to Bamberg. Without a prince and without a patron, with no consistory to pay me and no building in which any flock that I gather can meet. With no tithes to support me. With only my hope that you will continue to mean it when you say that there will be religious toleration in Franconia. And though I feel more like a lamb led to the slaughter than a belligerent ram, I shall nonetheless do this."
Willard Thornton stood at the unmarked crossroads. He was glad that his bicycle was in Bamberg; it would have been hard to push the thing over the hills in this snow. He wondered which of the two forks would lead him back to his bicycle.
A thin man, huddled into a black cloak, was coming up the road behind him, walking alone. Willard waited. Perhaps he knew which road went to Bamberg.
"Ah, Herr Thornton."
"I'm, ah, afraid you have the advantage of me."
"My name is Meyfarth. I have been working with the NUS administration in Würzburg. I heard a great deal about you, last fall."
"Oh." Willard was still vaguely embarrassed about last fall. "Um, do you happen to know which of these forks leads to Bamberg?"
"It is this one. I am going to Bamberg, myself. We can walk along together. Two men are safer than one alone."
They moved forward.
Some distance behind them, a half dozen game wardens coming from the direction of Coburg noted several other men stepping out of the trees onto the road leading from Würzburg. It was all right, though, upon a closer look. They were Jaeger, too; and they wore the ram's head on their sleeves.
"In Aprils Luft," one of them said.
"Entfalten sich die Flaggen," the others completed the sentence.
The uptimers were manifestly insane to have let either of the men ahead of them go out walking the roads of Franconia alone. Each of them should be guarded by a full company of armed soldiers, at the very least. The Jaeger walked on to Bamberg, keeping just out of sight behind the hills and trees, intent on ensuring that the two innocent, good-hearted, oblivious, but inspirational damned fools who had been placed under their protection by the Ram would live to see the banners unfurl in April.