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Chapter 13


You couldn’t get from Amberg to Ingolstadt. Well, you could, but not by anything like a straight line. The direct route involved crossing as many as possible of the forested hills of the Jura. The route might be recommended for birds, such as crows. Or for humans flying in one of the new dirigibles or airplanes. Crossing the Jura might be feasible for a Jaeger on foot; even he would find it slow going. It was not recommended for lesser humans on the ground, much less for draft animals pulling carts or wagons.

Either usable option involved two sides of a square. In a time of peace (ah, wonderful, blissful, time of peace), a traveler could get on a barge, float south down the Vils and Naab to Regensburg as Carlo did on his sales trips, and then, still on a barge, be towed west up the Danube. In other times, times like these, dreary times when the prospect of Bavarian soldiers with rifles on the right bank seemed unappealing to a commercial traveler, a man went west from Amberg to Nürnberg and then south from Nürnberg to Ingolstadt, overland, on a road. One that crossed much less of the Jura. A lower part of the Jura, along a little river valley.

Which meant that it only made sense to stop and demonstrate one’s wares in Nürnberg. It would, in fact, be quite suspicious if a factor didn’t.

Fortunately, the road was in fairly decent shape. The revival of the iron industry had required that. Paolo wondered briefly if an ox experienced sentiments such as gratitude for road improvements.

They plodded along. There was considerable traffic in both directions. Yokes creaked, harness emitted the unique sound of leather being stretched. Horses and oxen alike deposited urine and manure in the road bed. There were occasional villagers working in the fields he could see—at this season, most likely, because something had ruined the seeds planted in the fall and they were desperately hoping to get the fields ready in time to sow a summer crop.

He hoped that he’d left good enough instructions for young Jozef Rickel. Frau Mechthilde’s younger half-sister’s oldest stepson was minding the shop while he and Carlo were both out of town. The boy’s father was a blacksmith; the kid was mechanically minded. Actually helpful when it came to repairs, happily tinkering away on the machines, clicking little parts first one way and then the other, until they worked right again.

The hand-cranked “wringer” that Jozef had invented, after Lambert Prohorsky complained about all the cleaning rags he had to wash by hand, on the basis of nothing more than a sketchy description of one that Carlo had seen in Grantville combined with a modified copy of the gears of a Vignelli paper shredder, worked surprisingly well, even though it had taken many failed attempts before he got the two rollers to rotate at the same speed; Jozef’s father had made a good thing of his new sideline business and thumbed his nose at guild complaints to the council that blacksmiths were not supposed to go into partnership with a couple of failed cabinetmaker journeymen who had never been able to afford to qualify as masters.

The “wringer” did not require plastic, no matter what the up-timers in Grantville had told Carlo years ago. Wooden rollers worked just fine. Wooden rollers, just like the rolling pins that every baker used to flatten dough. Laundresses all over the Upper Palatinate were singing the praises of Rickelwringer. In combination with the corrugated washboards… So labor-saving; so easy on the back. So…comparatively speaking…cheap. Far cheaper than down-time copies of uptime washing machines, and requiring no electricity at all.

***

“Dalberg’s an absolute coward.” Achaz Schwandorfer, chairman of the Amberg CoC, moved a little closer to the embers in the hearth. The group met in a blacksmith shop outside Amberg’s walls, in the fast-growing industrial sector, not coincidentally because Achaz was a journeyman there. The group abstained from using the “von” particle in front of their leader’s surname as a matter of principle.

“Dalberg’s caving in to pressure from the conservatives, if you ask me.” Erdmann Leitsinger, one of the more combative members, banged a hammer down on the anvil for emphasis. He was almost ready to finish his apprenticeship at the tannery and move on to his journeying years. He was more than ready to get out of this town. He had seen more upholstered cushions than he had ever wanted to. Give him the task of some nice harness leather, or…

“Quit that. You’ll wake up old Rickel and his wife.” The master blacksmith turned manufacturer of Rickelwringer might be half-deaf from a lifetime of heavy hammering, but his second wife was younger.

“Other CoC units are doing something. Marching against reactionary nobles in Mecklenburg. Putting down anti-Semites in Frankfurt am Main. Even managing to catch a rather sub-par witch hunter in the Province of Westphalia.”

“Which gets them headlines in the newspapers.” Lutz Korn had a talent for pointing out the obvious.

“What are the CoCs—that’s us, by the way, Achaz—doing here in the Oberpfalz? Diddly squat, that’s what, and, if that’s relevant, getting no headlines at all.” Leitsinger started to bang the hammer down again, but thought better of it. “Why are we depending on top-down leadership? Aren’t we supposed to be all about initiative from the bottom up? The working class seizing power? Dalberg’s been in Magdeburg again, probably sucking up to the elite Fourth of July Party leaders from the other provinces.”

“The FoJP and the CoCs aren’t meant to be the same thing. Dalberg’s more a FoJP man.”

“Okay, guys. Let’s get down to business. Let’s do something. Show Gustav Adolf’s administrator that we need to be taken seriously.” Thomas Hopfenbeck was a practical man.

“We can’t go defend the Jewish settlements from rampaging anti-Semites. A week ago, I was thinking we could do that, but then Ernst Wettin sent in the militia, stealing the credit for the Crown Loyalists and the administration. Did you see the Loyalty yesterday?”

“The anti-Semites haven’t done any rampaging. Not around here.”

“Lutz, shut up! They might have, if it hadn’t been for the militia. Maybe we can find some of their propaganda pamphlets and burn them. Lena says…” Lena was Erdmann’s sister. She was a convinced and persuaded member, but prudently refused to attend outside-the-walls meetings after dark.

“What about freedom of speech?” Hans Rubenbauer scratched his head.

“That’s our speech; not their speech. Lena says…”

“Hans, you and a few guys take a look around and see if you can collect some of those pamphlets.”

Ja, but there won’t be enough to make a big bonfire. Not like the big one of heretical books that the Bavarians did out in the field five years ago. That one was fun. We got the whole day off school.”

“There are duplicating machines. Buy a few reams of paper and run off some more. Enough to make a decent display when we light them up.”

“Lutz, that’s the stupidest idea I ever heard—even from you. We’d get caught, for sure.”

“It’s not stupid! Jozef’s one of us.” Lutz pointed at a gangly teenager with stencil ink on his fingertips. “And he’s managing the Vignelli shop while those two Italians are both out of town on sales trips because they drink at the Golden Lion and Rickel’s wife is Frau Mechthilde’s sister. Or aunt. No, she can’t be her aunt; she’s not old enough. Some kind of relative. We could get him to make them, after hours.”

“Look, guys…”

“Lutz, shut up!”

Lutz shut up, but not happily.

A slightly younger teenager, almost hidden where he was standing behind Jozef Rickel, tapped his shoulder. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he whispered to his cousin.

“Hush. Wait till we’re out of here.”

“What about witch hunters?” Hopfenbeck was asking.

“There hasn’t been a witch trial anywhere in the Oberpfalz since before I was born.”

“Lutz, you’re only seventeen!”

“There still haven’t been any.” Lutz tended to be single-minded.

“There were a bunch of them over in Eichstätt. That’s right across the border in Franconia.” Erdmann was, like Achaz, a few years older. Nearly ten years older than Jozef Rickel. Staring the imminent arrival of adulthood with all its tedious obligations in the face, and not liking the prospect.

Achaz Schwandorfer resolved to look into witch trials.

Jozef and his cousin climbed up into the loft.

“If Mutti knew I’d been here…”

Lambert Prohorsky, Frau Mechthilde’s oldest, was, like almost every adolescent offspring of a respectable Amberger, under strict orders to have nothing to do with the CoCs.

It wasn’t that Frau Mechthilde opposed their ideological position. She rather more agreed with it than not, when she thought about such things at all. It was just that the last three generations of life in the Oberpfalz had ingrained in most of its inhabitants a deeply held belief that anything you did might, when the ruler changed, or when the same ruler changed his mind, come back to haunt you. So the safest option was to keep your head down and do nothing at all. Let your betters fight these things out.

Lambert couldn’t sleep. He rolled off his pallet, looking down into the blacksmith shop through a crack between the worn floorboards of the loft. There was a moon. He rubbed one finger around and around over the irregular loops and whorls of the grain that had risen up long ago when the then-unseasoned wood of this old gray-weathered plank had dried out.

Paolo and Carlo had been around for months now. Never mean; good tippers when they asked him for anything that meant a bit of extra work around the inn. He’d miss the tips when they moved to their new house.

It didn’t seem right, what Lutz wanted Jozef to do. But Jozef would likely do it, if he thought it would impress Schwandorfer.

He was still awake when the sun rose. More precisely, when the long dawn made it possible to see where you were going. It was getting close to the longest day of the year. His parents took full advantage of daylight. He scrambled down the worn-slick wooden half-rungs of the ladder and out of the shop, making a frantic dash to be at the gate the instant it opened, in hopes of making it back to the Golden Lion before Mutti noticed that he’d spent the night out.


Ingolstadt, Upper Palatinate

Late June 1635


Getting into Ingolstadt from the north was no more of a problem than Paolo had predicted it would be for a commercial agent who had his paperwork in order. The garrison troops kept a close watch on the Danube Valley road that led into Bavaria and would ultimately take a person to Vienna. Georg von Dewitz saw no reason to stretch his resources by doing the same in the direction of the USE, the whole USE, and nothing but the USE, as one of the up-timers had joked. He had enough to do keeping an eye on the behavior of the Italian mercenaries that General Banér had foisted off on him, making sure that their treatment of the civilians didn’t get egregiously out of hand, to waste time guarding against unlikely impending threats from a reliable ally of the Swedes.

Ingolstadt had church towers. Not that other cities didn’t, but Ingolstadt had what amounted to an excessive surplus of church towers. Paolo looked around, trying to orient himself according to the description that Jacob Balde had provided. The university buildings—a warren of old structures—would be…that way, on his right…over next to the Liebfrauenkirche, Our Lady. That was the tallest tower, by a margin. The Jesuit Collegium—yes, there was the tower for Holy Trinity Church at the edge of the complex—was even further to the west, right up against the old city walls. The Collegium, construction completed not much more than fifty years earlier, with its neat, rectangular, whitewashed buildings around neat, rectangular, courtyards with neat, rectangular, beds of herbs and vegetables, edged by straight, graveled, walkways with square corners, represented the only concession to modern city planning inside the walls.

That would be the Dominican cloister a little to his left. If he could spot the convent of the Franciscan Sisters… The Neues Schloss with the garrison headquarters was in the southeast corner, as far away from the Collegium as it could be located inside the cramped old walls, which was a good thing, as far as Paolo was concerned. A man could run the distance in ten minutes—in a straight line. Ingolstadt was an old town; the residents had been rebuilding and remodeling for eight hundred years. Streets came to dead ends; alleys terminated in courtyards; cobbled paths curved around and went back the way they had come from, and passages were suddenly blocked by a flat stucco wall containing a door that opened into someone’s kitchen annex. A man might actually run the distance in twenty minutes, if he knew the best route to get there and no delivery wagons blocked a couple of the streets.

There usually were delivery wagons blocking the streets, unless it was the middle of the night.

The display space he had rented was close to the center of town, on one of the streets radiating from the Hardertor, not far from St. Moritz and the main market square. A man with goods to sell would naturally want to be in the center of trade.

“This way,” one of the men provided by the Jaeger captain said. He was one of Duke Ernst’s River Rats, a commercial boatman who had been in and out of every town on this stretch of the Danube many times over the past two decades.

The other man, who was driving the cart, pulled the reins to the left and clucked.

The ox made no objection.

Officially, the garrison headquarters were in the Neues Schloss. According to Jurgen Lux, von Dewitz and his officers had quartered themselves on the wealthier merchants (the factor for the Fuggers excepted, since nobody with even minimal common sense wanted to irritate the Fuggers) and the common soldiers on the common people.

Which was customary, but didn’t make for rapid communication down the chain of command in case of emergencies.

Not that Paolo wanted to become the cause any kind of military emergency.

He would really much rather not.

Paolo kept looking as he walked beside the cart, trying to keep his boots out of the worst of the sludge left over from yesterday’s steady rain, passing between the gable-roofed, stuccoed, houses with shops on the ground floor and residential spaces above, until the driver pulled the cart up. Ingolstadt wasn’t a Fachwerk town like many of the ones he had seen in Germany. There was probably wood inside the buildings, but not on the exteriors. Stucco walls and tile roofs; the dukes of Bavaria hadn’t wanted their major fortress on the northern border to burn down.

The store was a decent little spot, only a few doors away from the Gasthaus where he had reserved a room. The shoemaker who leased it was currently in bankruptcy proceedings and glad to get a bit of cash back from the property, even if only for a couple of weeks. There was an apothecary next door; a bakery across the street. Those should attract a reasonable number of gawkers.

The display attracted legitimate customers. Paolo took orders, issued receipts; the cart driver trotted back and forth to the post office. A supply officer from the garrison itself wandered in, since the Jaeger captain had sent notice they’d be in town. Some restless (if impecunious) students appeared and wandered around looking at the displays—universities did not adhere to anything like a semester schedule. Paolo chatted with them cheerfully if there were no potential buyers in sight.

The young men were well-versed in such matters as how to get in here, out of there, through this alley, around that hazard. Years of pranks had furnished them with thorough knowledge, passed from generation to generation of students as a valued legacy, of those places where people who were supposed to be there would take note of people who weren’t. And vice versa.

And they knew exactly where Westerstetten’s apartments were. Better, they knew how to get in and out of the building when a visitor wasn’t being escorted by a helpful footman.

The bursar for the Jesuit Collegium came by.

Then a diocesan official. The bishop might be in exile in Ingolstadt and no longer secular lord of the Pflegeämpter that fell into the SoTF, but he still had purely ecclesiastical administrative duties. How would such a machine work for documents that needed to go, for example, to twenty-five particular parishes, but not to every parish priest in the diocese? It was hardly worth having type set for so few copies, but producing that many multiple copies by hand of a document that might be ten pages long was time-consuming. Paolo was happy to talk shop.

The bishop was interested, but he did not visit shops or show rooms; Signor Fucilla was to come to him and bring the machine.

“The crate is too heavy for me to carry by myself; I will have to bring along my assistants to handle it.”

That was acceptable to the bishop.

“In two days’ time.”

“That is acceptable,” Paolo answered. “However, you do realize, don’t you, that I am scheduled to leave Ingolstadt the morning after that. If the bishop should not be able to make up his mind immediately, it won’t be possible for me to provide a second demonstration.”

Well, if he hadn’t previously had an exact date scheduled for his departure, he did now.


Amberg, Upper Palatinate

Late June 1635


The next CoC meeting was not without internal conflict.

“I don’t know how von Dalberg heard about it,” Jozef yelled. “I don’t have the least idea, but he caught us. Came storming into the shop, yelling about getting the Italians in trouble with the city council and Ernst Wettin. I didn’t even know that he could get that mad, he’s usually so disciplined about everything he does. Made us haul everything over to his rooms. He has one of those paper shredders that you have to crank and crank and crank. Put it all through and says we’re going to have to replace the paper that we used. The two of us, at our own expense.”

“Did you tell him about the guys who are headed over to Eichstätt?” Erdmann asked.

“No. Of course not.”

Achaz raised his eyebrows at the other partner in crime.

“How dumb do I look?” Lutz asked. He had been the other half of “us” for the pamphlet project.

“Dumb enough to do that,” Erdmann said.

“Lutz,” Achaz asked a little more patiently, “who did you tell?”

“Ach, Mutti. She always wants to know where I’m going. Mothers are like that.”

“Who did she tell?”

“Cousin Lisel, probably. They gossip all the time.”

“Who, likely, did Cousin Lisel tell?”

“Dunno.”

Erdmann jumped into the discussion again. “Think! I know it’s a stretch, but think!”

“Cousin Lisel is married to the brother of Mette’s husband.”

“Who’s Mette?”

“Frau Mechthilde, at the inn. The Golden Lion.”

“That’s where all the newspaper reporters hang out. Why didn’t you just tell a newspaper reporter and let him publish it?

“I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.”

“Lutz!”

None of them considered that Lambert might have told his mom. None of them even remembered that he’d come to the earlier meeting with Jozef. Except Jozef, of course, who wasn’t about to bring it up.

Since he wasn’t at this meeting, Lambert didn’t even have to feel bad about letting Lutz take the blame without speaking up like an honest boy should.

Besides, Lutz had told his mother.

Who had told Lisel.

Who had told Mette.

But Lambert’s confession of transgression and warning words had come first.

Which was just as well for Lambert, since he hadn’t made it inside the walls and back to the inn that morning before his mother arose for the day. Frau Mechthilde was more inclined to forgive if there was some sign of repentance. Concealment of offenses, on the other hand…




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