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Chapter 1


Amberg, Upper Palatinate

August 1634


“The archbishop thinks that Duke Albrecht is too calm.” Paolo Fucilla waved the knife with which he had been peeling a still rather green apple. A ray of the setting sun slid through a thin spot in the tree that shaded the old barn and highlighted the silver threads that usually weren’t so visible in his black hair.

Carlo Rugatti scratched, first his nose and then his privates. His own hair hadn’t done so well. Whenever he looked at his reflection, whether in water or metal, or in the incredibly clear glass mirrors so numerous in Grantville, as good as seeing one’s portrait immortalized in oils by the greatest of painters, he saw his uncle. “Damned bedbugs. There must have been ten thousand in that mattress last night. Stinking, backwards, country innkeepers.” He scratched his nose again. “You mean?”

“Duke Albrecht doesn’t know where his sons are. At least, that’s still the official line in Prague. Whenever a reporter holding a clipboard pops up, he says he doesn’t know where his sons are. Wallenstein says he doesn’t know where Duke Albrecht’s sons are. Same thing from Munich, too. Duke Maximilian says he doesn’t know where Duke Albrecht’s sons are—except he adds that almost certainly some dastardly minion of the emperor, or of Stearns, has done them in.”

“So?”

“So why isn’t Albrecht rushing around to find another wife and beget some more sons? His wife is dead. He’s young enough. Why is he sitting on his rump in Prague and…”

“Don’t say it.”

“So I won’t say it.”

“The man’s only been a widower for six weeks.”

“Even so, he should be putting out feelers. If, that is, he doesn’t know where his sons are. But he isn’t putting out feelers. Ergo, Duke Albrecht knows where his sons are and has at least some reason to think that they’re alive. So Paris von Lodron wants to know the same thing, and why. Preferably before Claudia de’ Medici finds out first and sticks her elegant finger into the pie. She could probably think of a dozen reasons why those boys, wherever they are now, would be a lot better off in Innsbruck or Bolzano.

“Speaking of pots…” Paolo took the lid off the little copper cauldron. “Get out your bowl.”

“I don’t care what you say. I can’t stand that stuff.” Carlo frowned at the bubbling contents and shook his head. “It’s worse than the barley that the damned Scots make into porridge. Twenty years ago, in the Netherlands, we were on short rations. The quartermaster imported it and tried to make us eat it instead of decent bread. It practically caused a mutiny.”

“Wait. If you boil it in milk instead of water and put a little honey on top, you’ll never even recognize that it’s rice. Takes longer than boiling it in water, but it’s a lot better.”

Carlo nodded toward the house at the edge of the village. “I say it’s worse than oat porridge. Worse than polenta. You paid her for the milk. I saw you.”

“We’re respectable now. Even our aliases are respectable now. After the debacle at the Wartburg, we saw the light. After what we went through there, we left the mercenary trade, found paying civilian jobs that didn’t require nasty things like apprenticeships and actual, measurable, competence, and made good. We are factors representing Arno Vignelli of Bolzano. Marketers. Peddlers of inexpensive duplicating machines and other useful office supplies. No need to bring up that the archbishop of Salzburg is also paying us. We are not foragers. We pay for what we eat.”

“Respectable factors sleep and eat at inns every night, not just sometimes. They don’t sleep in barns and cook their own food over a fire, not even sometimes.”

Paolo let out a short laugh. “At least the hay won’t have bedbugs. Other bugs, maybe, and prickly stems, but not bedbugs.”

“Respectable factors can afford inns that don’t have bedbugs.”

“We’re as ‘respectable’ as the duplicating machines are ‘cheap.’ For every ten thousand people in the Germanies, nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine of them can’t afford one. For every thousand villages in the Germanies, nine hundred ninety-nine would rather spend their money on something else.”

“So we haven’t quite made the transition to ‘salesman,’ as Cadoni would call us rather than factors.”

Paolo looked blank.

“You know. Lodron’s adjutant, or whatever an adjutant is called when he works for a cleric rather than a colonel. Same job, different title. I hate those motivational speeches. I love the idea of per diem, though. He pays us the same, whether we spend it or not. If we want to skimp ourselves and put the money in a bank, how is that his problem?”

“As long as we look respectable to the point of stodgy when we get to talking to the customer. Tomorrow night, it’s an inn, a bath, neat trims for the mustaches and beards, a haircut…”

“Sure, sure.” Carlo stood up and scratched his back against one of the thick posts that supported the floor of the hayloft where they would be sleeping later on.

The next noon, in Amberg, they dined at a table in a respectable inn. After a visit to the public baths and a barber.

It wasn’t a tavern (the sign that impudently pirated the heraldic symbol of both the province and city by proclaiming it to be The Golden Lion said so). It was an inn with an eating room that was open to the public. It served beer, but it didn’t have a bar. It wasn’t a tavern.

It appeared that the floor was regularly swept out with sawdust, since a slight odor of freshly sawn wood competed with those coming from the kitchen annex behind the building.

Carlo twisted around on the bench. Some things changed; other things did not. A bench made of a smoothed plank affixed to a table also made of smoothed planks in Amberg in 1634 was extraordinarily similar to a bench affixed to a table made of smoothed planks by Anabaptists in the Netherlands in the previous century (he had sat at quite a few of them there) or a bench affixed to a “picnic table” made of smoothed planks in the “Fairgrounds” of the up-time town of Grantville that had been built three-hundred-fifty years from now in a world that he would never see.

There appeared to be eternal verities in human history, one of which was that it was much harder for casual thieves to steal a bench that was permanently fastened to a heavy table large enough to seat eight hungry men.

Hähnchensuppe mit Karotten und Spätzle,” the waitress said. Her clothing, the modest tan dress and clean white apron, was, in keeping with the inn’s sign, not new but well-cared for. It proclaimed her to be a respectable woman who would not tolerate casual fanny-patting from the patrons.

Paolo raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“There is no ‘and.’ That’s the menu for today. In the interest of truth, the chicken was an old hen who had stopped laying; not a young cockerel. Also, there are onions in it, as well as carrots and dumplings, because a few of the ones in storage were starting to go bad, so we pulled off the bad layers and used the good parts. The little red lumps are something new called bell peppers.”

Carlo considered her. At some point in the past decade, a female who must, at one time, have been the old host’s pretty daughter-in-law had metamorphosed into the current host’s plump and bustling wife. No waitress dependent upon the goodwill of her master would dare to speak so brusquely or forthrightly.

Paolo sighed. “Two bowls of soup, then.”

“Some of our customers have found that the peppers induce flatulence.” The waitress kept a deadpan expression on her face.

“They’re nothing new; they come from Spain; I’ve eaten them before.”

“It’s your funeral; I hope you don’t have an important meeting this afternoon.” She disappeared into the kitchen, turned back, and announced, “We do our brewing in-house. If you want beer, that’s what you get.”

One of the young men at the longer table next to them laughed out loud. “Newcomers to our fair city? I have a feeling that it’s your first encounter with Mechthilde the Ineffable. Call her Frau if you address a request to her. You’ll get better service; she seized upon the honorific with enthusiasm when the ignorant up-timers started to use it. The fair city of Amberg now has cobblers and harness menders who insist upon Herr.”

Paolo bowed to him as far as one reasonably could when seated. Carlo gave a half-hearted wave.

“May I tell you something? Anything?” The man—really, scarcely more than a boy; he looked to be not much past his twentieth year—laughed again, his red curls bouncing.

Paolo raised an eyebrow.

“Food, shelter, sports, church services, quality of the local schools? Feuds in the city council? Success in reviving the mining industry? If it happens in our fair city, I’ve written an article about it. Sebastian Kellermeister, star—not to mention only—reporter for the Amberg Global News at your service. In return, of course, I would like to know something. Are you passing through? Are you envoys? Have you plans to open a business? Anything for another paragraph.”

Paolo laughed. “We are factors for Vignelli Business Machines in Bolzano, Tyrol, selling office products. Or hoping to. I wasn’t aware that Amberg had a newspaper yet.”

Kellermeister drew back, mock-affronted, his bright blue eyes twinkling. “Why sir, we have three. Which, I admit, is more than one would expect from a town this size, but because it’s the provincial capital, there’s a market. That doesn’t count the Forge, which, as you might guess from the name, will tell you far more than most people will ever need to know about what’s going on in the iron industry, but its subscribers appear to find the content fascinating, given the determination of the Swedes and up-timers to break the Hammereinung, the cartel, and get production back to where it used to be much faster than I think is possible.

“The Patriot isn’t quite a newspaper, either. It is, I think, funded by the Bavarians, even though the Swedes are in occupation now. It might as well be called the Patriarch, because the main message of that weekly broadside is that Papa knows best and the duty of subjects is to remain loyal to their rightful lord and attend mass regularly, supplemented by reprinting some bits and pieces from other newspapers and newsletters that arrive in the mail from other towns. Then there are two stringers for papers in Nürnberg, Georg Betz and Hans Seidel. Both of them sell articles to more than one paper. Neither of them is with us here today.”

Paolo nodded. “We were in Grantville for a while. Such men are called ‘free-lancers’ by the up-timers.”

“Then there are the three real papers. Jacob Ranke,” Kellermeister gestured to his right, “does the political column for the Loyalty. That’s pretty much subsidized by the Crown Loyalists, as the name would lead you to think, but he’s on the news side rather than the editorial side. Not that he wouldn’t appreciate a promotion.”

The scrawny young man with a large Adam’s apple who was seated next to Kellermeister nodded.

“I wouldn’t spill my heart out to him, though, if I were you. Much better to spill it out to me. Then there’s Stentzel Grube from the Current Tidings on the bench over there.” He waved at a square-faced, snub-nosed, blond on the other side of the table. “And several of the outlying towns have weekly papers now, or try to. Sulzbach’s is doing reasonably well, I think.”

Frau Mechthilde returned, plopping down two large beige ceramic bowls and a brown platter with a small loaf of rye bread. “You have your own knives, I hope. Do you need to borrow spoons?”

Paolo reached down to his belt and unhooked one of the various implements attached to it. The useful device contained not only a blunt-ended bread knife but also a spoon, a pronged fork with two tines, and several other small tools, designed by the ingenuity of Swiss mercenaries, he had heard, although it was said that even the ancient Roman legions had something similar. He waved it at her. Carlo was already eating.

Kellermeister kept talking while Paolo and Carlo ate their soup.

Carlo as usual, ate faster. Then he started talking about Vignelli duplicating machines, a magnificent new low-cost alternative to traditional printing.

“Amberg has several well established printing shops,” Ranke said. “At least one of them has been in business for over forty years. I can’t imagine that they will appreciate competition from this innovation.”

Carlo gave him a lecture on the joys of the free market and the absence of guild restrictions when it came to new products. A short one, necessarily, given that Frau Mechthilde was giving them the look that signified that they should all pay their tabs, get up from the benches, and go away in order to make places for new paying customers.

Paolo gave them all copies of their business cards.

Produced, as Carlo pointed out, on stiff paper by a Vignelli duplicating machine and cut neatly into sections by a Vignelli gridded lever-style paper cutter. No, he did not happen to know how those had obtained the nickname of guillotines.

No, alas, they did not have a sample to display at the moment. Their equipment, unfortunately, was on a freight wagon that had broken an axle. They, themselves, had come ahead, but, “soon, most certainly,” he assured the reporters.



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