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Chapter 15


Somewhere outside of Eichstätt, SoTF

Late June 1635


Everybody who knew anything at all about Dame Fortuna knew that she was a fickle goddess.

There was a member of the Amberg CoC…shall we call him Hans? Hans is a safe, anonymous kind of name…it doesn’t have to be any particular Hans…it couldn’t possibly be Hans Rubenbauer…who was chosen by Achaz Schwandorfer to be a part of the unauthorized party sent out to “do something” about the witch-hunting bishop in Ingolstadt. If the anonymous Hans happened to be Catholic…and had an academically inclined brother…shall we call him Johann?…Johann is a safe, anonymous kind of name, even if everyone called him by his middle name, which was Thomas…who was a student at the university…one of the “restless” students who had gotten in on the prank with the trumpets…

When the Amberg CoC got to Ingolstadt, Johann told Hans what had happened; Erdmann Leitsinger turned the group right around and headed back up the Nürnberg road in hot pursuit of those who had so rudely deprived them of their target.

They overshot the turn-off on their first try, realized it when nobody else, a few miles farther along, had seen a certain ox cart, reversed course, and tried again. This time, they spotted the turn-off.

***

The Würzburg CoC men were waiting right where they said they would wait. They were…Paolo appraised them…experienced fighters. Many of them had probably been involved in the Ram Rebellion. Mentally, he compared them to the occasional CoC units he had seen around Amberg the last couple of years. Significantly better trained. Better armed in a major way, by an order of magnitude.

Their leader would have liked to take the bishop out of the crate and make a night run for it. More cautious voices in his party spoke about road conditions, the tendency of horses to do things such as break their legs, and prudence being the better part of valor.

Paolo’s Jaeger unhitched the ox and started to make camp. The Würzburgers followed suit—making camp, that was. They didn’t have an ox.

The ox lifted its head and bellowed. When the bellow died away—it had temporarily quieted the ordinary noises of a company of men shaking out blankets, starting a fire, cussing at holes in their boots where there had been no holes the day before—the sudden silence allowed them to hear the noise of an approaching party. On foot; there was none of the harness jangle made by riders.

The Würzburgers reached for their weapons.

The party came around the bend at the foot of the hill.

Paolo looked down. Some of them looked…dreadfully familiar. Like that bunch of young men who loitered around with Jozef Rickel in his spare time.

Young men who were possibly…probably…all too likely to be…

Why did Dame Fortuna always choose to go flirt with someone else when a man needed her the most?

The Würzburgers seemed inclined to shoot first and ask questions later. He couldn’t really blame them.

He looked around.

They were near the top of a hill.

The hill wasn’t terribly steep and flattened out gradually into a meadow at the bottom.

The unhitched cart was in the road (why push it to the side of a rarely used road when they would only have to push it back in the morning, the Jaeger had calculated).

Paolo pulled the chocks from behind the wheels and gave it a shove.

The oncoming party scrambled out of the way; most of them fast enough; a few of them not quite fast enough. But Dame Fortuna had been with them; the dragging tongue and hitch had slowed the cart’s downhill progress notably.

“Tell your men to hold their fire,” he directed.

The Würzburg captain was about to respond, “Who are you to give me orders?” Then, for some undefined reason, he decided that it might be better not to.

Paolo nodded at the two Jaeger. “Go down there and sort those idiots out.”

Then he looked at the Würzburg captain. “You don’t really want to start a war between two provincial CoCs. Not even unintentionally. You would win, but I suspect that your superior officers would be no happier than…” He pointed downhill with his thumb. “…theirs.”

***

The next morning, in the middle of breaking camp, Paolo looked at the Würzburg CoC detachment. “Anyone here know how to drive an ox cart?”

“We’re pulling him out and throwing him over the extra horse. We’ll make a lot better time that way.”

“You will take the ox, the cart, and the crate as well as the bishop. If you leave them here to be found, it will certainly ruin the whole plan. If I take them back to the Nürnberg road, it may well ruin the whole plan—for reasons that are beyond your need to know.”

“We can use your driver.”

“No, you can’t. Somewhere on the main road, there is a group of Ingolstadt students waiting with a pile of small crates and a different ox cart. I have to collect my wares, pay them for their trouble, and turn back into a sales representative placidly returning home from a commercial venture. Preferably with no suspicious delays that might cause anyone in the Ingolstadt garrison to wonder if I have taken a side trip. I need my driver to drive that cart. Which I have rented, in the name of one of those students, for long enough to get to Amberg with the cargo—and send it back to Ingolstadt with a different load.”

Silence ensued.

“As I was saying, gentlemen, anyone here know how to drive an ox cart?”


Amberg, Upper Palatinate

July 1635


“I did take an oath not to carry arms,” Paolo said at the after action review that the up-time liaison insisted upon. He harbored some apprehensions about possibly being remanded to the SoTF as a parole breaker. “I never swore that I wouldn’t hit anybody ever again. Honestly, Herr von Dalberg, the CoC fellows from Amberg shouldn’t have been anywhere near the rendezvous spot. They aren’t SoTF forces. The CoCs aren’t even, really, USE forces, so I didn’t violate my oath.”

“I know.”

Paolo felt a spark of hope. “And they all survived.”

“Somewhat the worse for wear.”

“It’s not as if I knew who they were.” He might have suspected, but that was not the same as knowing for certain. “They weren’t supposed to be there.” Even if he had only found that out later. “Anyway, most of them managed to get entirely out of the way of the ox cart when I pushed it down the hill.” Fact. “It wasn’t a steep hill.” Also fact.

“Hopefully they have ‘learned, marked, and inwardly digested’ a significant truth. Namely, that the adage about ‘measure twice; cut once’ applies to more things than the trade to which a man is apprenticed,” Duke Ernst said. Like Theodor Keitel, head of the CoCs in the province, had he only known it, the administrator of the Upper Palatinate had, at one point in his childhood, memorized Martin Luther’s Shorter Catechism. Learned it by heart, as the saying went. Was prone to grasp at its various catch phrases in moments of needing something to say.

“A Hussite war wagon is definitely a military weapon. An effective one,” the Jaeger captain pointed out.

“The ox cart didn’t have blades attached to the axles. It is an ordinary freight cart. And I wasn’t carrying it, Captain Lux, so I did not break my oath.” Paolo smiled.

The only other person in the room who truly appreciated this fine distinction was von Dalberg. He was, after all, a lawyer. Paolo’s lawyer.

“Who owns the ox and cart?” Böcler asked. “Will he be expecting compensation? Or did you arrange to have them returned from Würzburg? If so, when are they expected back? Have you submitted your list of reimbursable expenses?” He was, after all, a bureaucrat.

The after action review got down to the real issues.

***

All the headlines had some variant of:


Eichstätt Witch-Bishop Brought to Justice by Würzburg Committee of Correspondence


“I wonder how they managed that,” Jacob Ranke mused. “As far as anyone knew, Westerstetten was tucked up tight in Ingolstadt.”

“Maybe he had to stick his head out long enough to confirm some kids or ordain some priests.” Sebastian Kellermeister yawned. “I’m about to head home for bed. He was a contemptible dip-shit, but he was a bishop, after all. Most of his diocese fell into the SoTF.”

“‘Was’ being the operative word.” Stentzel Grube’s face reflected considerable satisfaction with the outcome.

Ranke looked into his mug. It was empty. “I might as well go home, myself. I still wonder how they managed it.”



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