The ram rebellioneric Flint with Virginia DeMarce

Chapter 5: "Prophesy to the breath" Bamberg, early November, 1633There was a ladder leaning against the side wall of Kronacher's print shop. Noelle Murphy tilted her head against the sun, which was, if thin and watery, at least out for a change. Hanna, Else Kronacher's far-from-young maid, was up on the ladder, scrubbing the morning mixture of mud and manure off the wall. The diamond-pane windows were partially open. Through them, the unmelodic sound of Frau Else screaming at her sons came out to join the other noises in the alley.The screeching was followed by a clatter; then by a crash. Either Melchior, who was seventeen, or Otto, just turned fifteen, had apparently been grabbing type from a bin and throwing it at his brother. Or, possibly, they had been throwing it at one another. That wasn't at all unlikely. The crash was probably one or the other of them upsetting a bin. Or shoving his brother, who fell and upset a bin. In either case, lead type would be scattered all over the floor of the working part of the shop the way uptime kids tended to strew Legos.Noelle walked around the corner and entered by the front door, wrinkling her nose at the odor of the boiled linseed oil that constituted the base for printer's ink. "Good morning, Martha. Chaos reigns, I take it."Martha Kronacher pressed the heels of her hands to her temples. "Oh, the boys are fussing again that no other printer will apprentice them because of Mutti's fight with the guild. That no other printer will ever be willing to apprentice them. That even if Mutti succeeds in her fight with the guild and keeps running the shop, they won't have had their proper apprenticeship and journeyman years and therefore the guild won't let them take it over when they are old enough.""Oh, yecchh! Are they all the way back to casting you in the role of the sacrificial lamb—moaning that they just can't understand why Frau Else wasn't willing for you to marry the guild's candidate because at least that would have kept it in the family more or less?""Melchior's position is that it isn't as if I wanted to marry anyone else in particular. Otto's position is that it isn't as if anybody else is ever likely to want to marry me.""Don't listen. They're just being brothers." Noelle plopped her tote bag down on the sales counter."Both of them have decided that Mutti wasn't really doing it for them, but because she's selfish and just didn't want to give the management over to a son-in-law. That if she'd been willing—""If she'd been willing, there's not a single guarantee that your husband would have helped either of them to open a shop of his own when the time came. There's also no prospect that either of them could have married into a shop by way of a widow or only daughter. They're daydreaming." Noelle picked up a guide rule and slammed it down. "Honestly, though, if things are that bad between your brothers and your mom, why doesn't she just send them off to help the Ram?"Frau Else, her ample figure covered by an apron and ink stains on her hands, pushed open the curtain between the shop and the sales room. "Because I can't get any one else to work for me as apprentices or journeymen, that's why! But having my sons at home is insane. Everybody in the world knows that it is insane."Noelle's eyebrows went up. "What's insane?" A flicker went through her mind of Gretchen Richter's—Gretchen Higgins'—frequent proclamations that this or that Grantville custom was wahnsinnig, absolut wahnsinnig."To try to deal with your own children at this age. Nobles foster them to the courts of higher-ranking nobles. Then they hire tutors to take them away for a grand tour for two or three years. Merchants and craftsmen apprentice the boys and send the girls to the households of friends. Bureaucrats send them away to live with relatives in other towns and attend a good Latin school. Laborers and peasants put them out into service by the time they are fourteen or fifteen. No parent who has the slightest amount of Herr Thomas Paine's famous `common sense' keeps them at home during the stage of youth. They are too unruly. Where do you think the term `unruly apprentices' comes from?"Frau Else waved her hands in the air. "At the very least, any other master would beat them for the way they are behaving this morning. Even better, Otto and Melchior would be apprenticed to different masters and therefore would not be available to fight with each other. But can I do that? No. No other master will take them. In any case, I can't do without them. If I send them to the Ram, no one else will work for me. Martha and I don't have the strength to handle the presses by ourselves, and someone must be available for the sales room. Someone has to take orders. Someone has to keep the books."Noelle had heard all this before. And knew that "someone" was Martha. Good, reliable, Martha. When it came to Otto and Melchior, Frau Else was writing her own version of the Book of Lamentations. She shook her head. "Speaking of unruly apprentices, I saw Hanna on the stepladder in the alley. The printers' apprentices are still throwing filth at the shop, I presume?""Only in the alley, now. The front to the street is well enough patrolled since the power changed in the city council. There are no more cobblestones. No more open threats. Just noises in the night. Shit in the morning. The guild masters piously say to anyone from the Ram who confronts them that they do their best to control the boys, but what can one expect? With much more of the same." Frau Else picked up an old rag and wiped off her hands.Noelle pushed aside the curtain and went into the back of the shop. "Melchior, shame. Poor Hanna is not young and yet you let her stand on a ladder while you are wasting time here fighting with your brother. Get out there, right now, and clean the wall if you expect to have food at noon. Otto, I heard you. Turn that bin right side up and sort the type. Don't waste any time. Now, now, now!""Didn't I say it?" Frau Else inquired of the ceiling. "Anyone but a mother. Anyone but a mother or father and boys will do what they are told. Anyone else. Anyone at all." When Noelle came back into the sales room, she repeated herself."I do have a reason for being here," Noelle said finally.Frau Else snapped her mouth shut."Duplicating machines from Vignelli in Tirol. They started coming on the market in March. He is now producing them in fairly large numbers. I have ordered a dozen. They will be shipped from Bolzano, Bozen you call it, this week; they should arrive here in January. One, you may keep in your shop. It will be useful. The remainder are to go to the Ram for quick reproduction of pamphlets and broadsides in places where the movement doesn't have print shops accessible. And in places where quick mobility is desirable.""Who is paying for this?" Frau Else was not so revolutionary as to ignore her bottom line. "Not I."Noelle frowned at her. "They are prepaid. I will give the paperwork to Martha."Frau Else nodded."About the boys . . ." Noelle waved her hand at the curtain. "Once things settle down a bit, why don't you send them to Grantville to learn the new printing technology? It's not covered by the guild regulations." Yet, she thought. There was no real reason to assume that the guilds wouldn't be scrambling to catch up. There was also no real reason to bring that up at this very moment."The whole reason for what I have done is to keep this business for my sons."Noelle ran a hand through her sandy blonde hair. The basic truth was that Frau Else didn't really want to overthrow the system. She just wanted to be part of it. "Could you—maybe—just think outside the box for a minute?"That required quite a bit of explanation.Ending with a repeat of Frau Else's protest that she couldn't send her sons away because no trained journeyman printer would work for a woman who was not a master. And since she was not a master, she could not accept apprentices even if there were parents who were willing to send their sons to her. Not that any reasonable parent would be willing to waste money paying a master when the boy would not be eligible to enter the guild at the end of not. Not to say . . .Blast it! Luckily that was inside Noelle's head and not coming out of her mouth."Ah. Well, maybe we could kill two birds with one stone. Something to keep Melchior and Otto occupied. Someone to work for you in the shop.""There's no way."The world does not end at the borders of Bamberg. Noelle hadn't said that, either. Though she had come close."I'll see about having them organize a Committee of Correspondence in Bamberg. Maybe, given their age, a kind of `junior chapter' with a lot of training involved. They'll need mentors. Something like Boy Scout leaders, I guess."Martha looked skeptical. "Where would these mentors come from?""That's the other end of my idea. I'll see if they"—she left "they" undefined quite deliberately—"can send a couple guys down from Magdeburg. CoC members who are printers and will be willing to work for Frau Else. Create a liaison with Helmut. Organize a junior chapter at the same time."Frau Else crossed her arms over her ample chest. "I will not turn my shop over to any other master. Not to one from Magdeburg any more than to a guild master from Bamberg.""Journeymen. Working for you. There won't be any masters from Magdeburg who are interested in a project like this, anyhow." Noelle laughed. "It's the nature of revolutions to be rather short on wise old elders. Mike Stearns is seriously frustrated at the shortage of Red Sybolt types."That required more explanation also.By the end of the conversation, Noelle wasn't too sure about just how far this fledgling Franconian revolution was going to go. Her mind skipped to the passage in Ezekiel where God told the hapless prophet to "prophesy to the breath." In her limited experience, it just wasn't exactly a snap to put flesh on dry bones. Much less raise the dead.A second image rose up. She saw herself fanning the flames of a wood fire in an old-fashioned cooking range to make them burn more hotly. Blowing upon them. Someone would have to breathe more life into this revolt before anyone could prophesy to the breath.Frau Else marched back through the curtain with a firm, "I can't just stand around talking all day. There's work to be done."For one morning, Noelle thought, she had probably done as much as she could.Martha rubbed her temples again. "I won't marry one of them, either.""What on earth?""If you bring journeymen from Magdeburg. I won't marry one of them, either. I don't intend to be anyone's sacrificial lamb." She glared at Noelle. "Not for my brothers. Not for anyone else, either.""Look, honey." Noelle put an arm around Martha's shoulder. Martha was a little older, twenty-five to Noelle's "going to be twenty-three next month." Equal stubbornness was the main foundation of their rapidly growing friendship. "People are just teasing when they call you the `ewe lamb' and say that since your mom is the Ewe, you're destined to marry Helmut. Whoever he may be in real life. Nobody really expects you to marry him. Or one of these guys, whoever they turn out to be.""Some of them are serious." Martha circled her shoulders. She had spent most of the morning cleaning display cases. "I've got to be realistic. Mutti has turned into a revolutionary. That's fine, I suppose. We need a revolution. About some things, at least."Noelle laughed. Martha was far less of a flaming radical than her mother. Whose radicalism also had very sharp limits. "Realistic about what?""Well, people do tend to marry inside their own trade. There's some marrying across guild lines, but especially in the highly skilled trades—glass making, printing, lens grinding, and the like—families are a lot more likely to arrange marriages into the same trade, even if it means looking outside of your own town. We—the family, I mean—aren't really printers any more in the sense that we're part of the guild. We're revolutionaries. So it's not that odd that people are thinking that she'll find a revolutionary for me to marry. That someone like Helmut would make a suitable match.""So what do you have against the idea?""He's . . . Well, I don't care whether he's been to the university or not, he's just crude," Martha proclaimed. "He can speak Latin, but he's just as crude in Latin as he is in German. Not all the time, but a lot of it. When he's not being a public person. He's been teaching out in that village in the Steigerwald so long that he's practically become a peasant himself. That's . . . I don't want a husband like that. I want one who is just as cultured at home as he is when he's speaking in the city council chamber.""Cultured?""Music," Martha said. "You know. Poetry. Literature. I know that Helmut does lesson plans, and he's smart. Shrewd. He did the annotated version of Common Sense that we published."She elaborated, from her point of view. Helmut was not only crude, but loud. If Martha wanted loud, all she needed to do was stay home with her mother and brothers, who were loud enough to drive a person mad. Helmut had a voice that boomed. Which was good for giving speeches to large numbers of people in open fields, but would become terribly tiring if it were inside a small house.Inadvertently, by listing all the reasons she didn't in the least want to marry Helmut, she gave Noelle more information concerning the Ram than any other uptimer had. Everything, practically, but his name and the exact location of his headquarters. Walking back up the alley, Noelle checked to see that it was Melchior rather than Hanna on the ladder. She wondered if she was legally or morally obliged to share what she had just learned with Vince Marcantonio and Steve Salatto and their various official subordinates. By the time she had reached the episcopal palace which was serving as administrative headquarters, she concluded that she wasn't. What they didn't know, they wouldn't feel obliged to do something—anything—about. After some reflection she decided that she didn't think she would even tell Johnnie F.The Ram movement needed a little breathing room, was her sense of things. That had certainly been the gist of the private messages she'd gotten from Mike Stearns, when he'd been the President of the NUS. Now that he'd moved up to Magdeburg and become the prime minister of the new United States of Europe, she no longer had any direct contact with him. But the two messages she'd gotten since from the new President of whatever-the-NUS-would-wind-up-calling-itself, Ed Piazza, made it clear that nothing had changed.Well, some subtleties, perhaps. Stearns had been more prone to relying on the Committees of Correspondence than Piazza seemed to be. But that hardly indicated any new formalization of affairs, as far as she was concerned. Ed Piazza simply substituted working through the Genevan fellow Leopold Cavriani instead. It had been Cavriani who had obtained, no doubt through his usual tortuous means, the duplicating machines.It was obvious to Noelle that Cavriani often worked closely with the CoCs, in addition to being a revolutionary of some kind in his own right. So, she was still working very much in what, in a now-gone uptime world, would have been called "gray operations."Steve Salatto wouldn't approve of what she was doing, of course. He'd be especially irate if he found out she was doing it behind his back. But his position made him oblivious to a lot of things, anyway. The real problem was Johnnie F., who wasn't oblivious to much of anything.On the other hand . . .Johnnie F. was also a past master at the art of looking the other way, when it suited him. Noelle was pretty sure he'd do it again here, if he found out. Grantville, Late November, 1633At first, the LDS church in Grantville had more or less decided that Willard Thornton ought to stay in town for the rest of the winter. It wasn't the best traveling weather. That suited his wife Emma just fine. She would even be glad—delighted, ecstatic, and enthusiastic, she told her friends—to listen to him hum "Dry Bones" just as often as it crossed his mind. Just as long as he was home and safe.Then the letter came from Bamberg. Frau Stadtraetin Färber reported that her husband had been disabled by a stroke. She believed that it was apoplexy, brought on by the events of September. She had saved Herr Thornton's bicycle, with the many copies of the Book of Mormon in the saddlebags. She had taken the liberty of giving some of them to her friends, since she knew that Herr Thornton had been giving them away.The Frau Stadtraetin wrote further that she wished that the missionary would return to Bamberg. She and her friends would benefit from further explanation of many passages in the book. If she might be so bold, she advised that, if possible, he should bring his wife, since a woman could go many places that a man could not—at le

st, that a man could not go without arousing suspicion. She made an offer, and a joke. She would gladly be a Lydia to their Paul, providing them with hospitality in her home.Howard Carstairs read the letter to the whole congregation. Because of his army service in Germany, he had become sort of Johnny-on-the-Spot for things like this. Reading the letter aloud, he realized that Willard's reports had left the umlaut off her name, and it was not Farber. It was Färber. Dyer. Symbolic.No one said anything. His father and Willard's father looked at one another. Those two, Levi Carstairs and Harold Thornton, were the senior men in the church. Logically, they should have been making the decisions. More and more, though, it seemed like they looked at one another and then looked at Howard.They looked at Howard. Monroe Wilson looked at Howard. Amos Sterling looked at Howard. As did Alden Blodger and Leland Nisbet. Ted B. Warren was looking at him. Myles Halvorsen was looking at him. All the other men were out of town.Howard said, "We should pray about this overnight." Everyone seemed to find that acceptable. He prayed; then he slept.In the morning, he knew what they should do. That seemed to be happening more and more, too. Henceforth, the LDS missionary standard would not be pairs of young men, but pairs of mature married couples. Even if it was more expensive. The other men agreed; clearly, that was what they should do. It was obvious, now that Howard had mentioned it. The down-timers respected maturity; they would not pay much attention to boys not old enough to have finished their journeyman years.Over warm broth at her kitchen table, Emma said, "Willard can start out now. I need to finish the semester, I really do. I'll give Victor Saluzzo my resignation Monday, though. He can find someone else for senior lit by the time second semester starts. I'll join Willard after New Year's. I think that I should stay with the kids for Christmas. The kids need to stay here for school. I won't have time to home-school them in Bamberg, if I'm being a missionary. Our two, plus the two German boys who are boarding with us." She looked at Howard expectantly."Arthur and Bev will take your two. Joel and Gigi will take the boys."Howard knew that, too. He just, well, somehow, knew things these days. Not things about the business, or whether Liz wanted him to pick up pork chops for dinner. For those, he still had to calculate an estimate or pick up the phone. Things he needed to know.Chapter 6: "I shall nonetheless do this" Franconia, December, 1633"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."