Ring of Fire III (54 page)

De Melon’s voice was calm, but insistent.

“Agreed.”

De Melon looked surprised.

Bernhard shrugged his shoulders. “What’s the point of trying to hold on to the lands I have gained if I don’t leave children? Wilhelm’s a commoner now. He has three healthy sons and Eleonore is pregnant again, but he has declared that even though she has chosen to keep her birth title, their children will take his rank and be commoners also. Little Wettins. The up-time encyclopedia says that Albrecht’s marriage in the other world remained childless; he went ahead and married Dorothea in spite of that. Ernst will inherit much of Saxe-Altenburg’s property when he marries little Elisabeth Sofie. If they go overboard and have eighteen offspring in this world, as they did in the other, I can only say that they will
deserve
to have to find a way support that many children themselves.”

“What about a sweetener?” de Melon suggested. “Throw in the agreement of both parties that if the two of you leave no surviving children, aside from what reverts to Tyrol and will thus be an integral part of a USE state anyway, the County of Burgundy as a single entity will become a USE province.”

Bernhard raised that eyebrow.

De Melon spread his hands wide. “Hey, it was just a suggestion.”

“It’s a damned good one,” Kanoffski said. “Carrots with your sticks, Bernhard. We’ll all be dead by the time it might happen. Offer Gustavus some carrots.”

Magdeburg, late March 1635

“
Modus vivendi
,” Mike Stearns marveled. “Four months ago, who’d’a thunk it?”

Wilhelm Wettin just shook his head. “Not I.”

“It’s a genuine offer,” Sattler said. “I sat in on almost all of the discussions, as did de Melon. Including their reiteration of the point about carrots.”

Frank Jackson snorted. “Right now, Gustavus is simply slavering at the thought of carrot stew.”

“Is there any point,” Hermann of Hesse-Rotenburg asked, “in mentioning to the emperor just how
remote
the possibility is that the County of Burgundy would ever revert to the USE? Claudia de Medici has an established reputation for fecundity. Bernhard’s parents produced eleven sons.”

Sattler shook his head. “Not, I think, when the emperor’s succession is entirely dependent upon one rather small girl, with no prospect for more heirs.”

“So.” Mike looked at Wettin. “Your brother, your call. You’re the incoming prime minister. Rebecca insists that I say this. If you absolutely can’t live with this proposal that Bernhard has made, for whatever punctilious points of honor that seem to be so important down-time, tell me now.”

Wettin put his hand flat on the table. “Follow it up.”

“All right, then. Sattler, you and de Melon go back to get this finalized. Stop by Bolzen and get the Tyrol proposal finalized, too. TEA has put the Monster at your disposal. Not as an act of charity, I regret to say. I hope the budget office is really into heavy short-term investment for the prospect of long-term solid gains.”

Bolzen, March 1635

“If We do not even try for more,” the regent said, “then We certainly will not receive it. We have not observed that the USE is in the practice of distributing bonuses or free gifts. Moreover, if one perceives the matter properly, it could almost be said that We deserve this.”

Even Dr. Bienner looked skeptical.

The regent persisted. She was nothing if not tenacious.

“There is no precedent for this in the organization of the USE provinces,” Sattler protested.

“Make one.”

“There is no provision for this in the USE constitution.”

“Amend it.”

“I am far from certain that Prime Minister Stearns will, under any circumstances, consent to the admission of a state which has a
hereditary
governor’s office, settled on your children and the heirs of their bodies, independently of whether or not titles of nobility should at some future date be abolished.”

“Who runs the USE? The prime minister or the emperor?”

Sattler didn’t feel like pushing the point just then. He was fully aware that in the view of Gustavus Adolphus, his desk was the one that held the sign that proclaimed “The buck stops here.” He was equally aware that Stearns was not fully with that program.

He was tired of starting to think in up-time terms and phrases.

Overall, he would find it a relief when Wettin took office in June.

* * *

“The threat of a plague epidemic has weakened the governments of many of the smaller entities along Swabia’s border with Bavaria. We fear that Duke Maximilian might come creeping in. We have already extended Tyrol’s protection to Irsee, to Ottobeuren, to Füssen, to Mindelheim, to Roggenburg. We would have been happy to do the same for the prince-bishopric of Augsburg, but Margrave Georg Friedrich of Baden forestalled Us by doing the same first.”

Claudia paused, a dissatisfied expression on her face. She hadn’t thought that the old man was still capable of carrying out a preemptive strike.

“Having thus sheltered them from foreign dangers, We feel it is only reasonable that they be incorporated into the new ‘state’ of Tyrol rather than into the Province of Swabia that was proposed in June 1634 at the Congress of Copenhagen.”

Philipp Sattler, on behalf of the USE, somehow did not see the matter the same way. He particularly did not see it the same way when she offered to extend Tyrol’s “benevolent protection” to his home town of Kempten.

Sometimes, even Claudia de Medici did not get everything she wanted.

“God be thanked,” Matt Trelli said to Marcie in the privacy of their rooms. “I didn’t go to all those little abbeys and manors and things to snitch them up for Tyrol. She told me that I was going to organize the local authorities to be in a better position to cope if plague passed the quarantine lines. I don’t want to go down in history as a lackey of the imperialist forces. The damned woman’s a shark.”

Eventually, however, Sattler completed the commission with which he had left Magdeburg. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Tyrol and Burgundy, both. He had even managed to sneak a few protective provisions into the document establishing a new Tyrolese regency council for Claudia’s sons.

“So far, so good,” he said to de Melon as he packed his briefcase for the return to Magdeburg. “But if you ask me, she’ll be back. This won’t be the end of it. Not tomorrow and not next year, but that woman could play the starring role in some story, perhaps one of these ‘movies,’ that Herr Piazza was telling me about. “The Tomato That Ate Cleveland,” I believe was the title. I am not certain why Herr Piazza refers to the regent of Tyrol as a tomato.”

Epilogue

Some Months Later

Rebecca and Amalie Elisabeth contemplated the newest map of the area that would have become a nice neat USE Province of Swabia if real life had not intervened.

“It looks like knotted fringe,” Amalie said. “Down at the bottom of the map, all the way from the Rhine to the Bavarian border, like a table runner hanging over the edge.”

Rebecca shook her head. “No. I think it’s more like up-time macramé. I saw some in Donna Bates’ house—the woman whose daughter has married Prince Vladimir—back the first year or so after the Ring of Fire, when I was living in Grantville. The maker starts with a lot of strings fastened to a dowel or rod. She brings them down and knots them, over and over, to make a pretty design.”

She shook her head again. “Poor Michael.”

Upward Mobility

Charles E. Gannon

June 1634

“We are almost at the border of Grantville, Herr Miro.”

Estuban Miro tried to nod an acknowledgement, but the motion was lost amidst the greater swayings and jouncings imparted by the wagon’s passage across yet another set of muddy ruts. Miro had heard of the wonderful roads in and around Grantville, of their many improvements, but this was not one of those major thoroughfares. Political unrest in Franconia had peaked in the past few months, prompting the regional teamsters to give it a wide berth. Ultimately, that had meant a final approach on this narrow, twisting pike that pushed into Grantville out of Hersfeld, well to the west.

Despite the presumed safety of the route, the driver had been slightly more alert the last few miles. Just south of the light forest that hemmed in this modest lane, the road from troubled Suhl wound its way north into Grantville. Indeed, according to the driver, even along this pike, recent reports of—

There were sudden, sharp noises in the brush. Cracking branches and the unmistakable rustling of rapid, even violent motion. Miro’s hand went to his dagger, a move which prompted the driver to scrabble for the rude ox prod
cum
cudgel that he kept at his side.

As Miro tracked the approaching noise, he noticed a small glade just beyond the treeline to the east. This was an excellent ambush point for bandits, particularly since the slight dogleg in this stretch of the road hid it from both its east and west continuations.

The low brush seemed to burst outward at them; Miro drew his dagger, went into a crouch—and froze. A small, wooly ram—a merino?—leaped out into the roadway. Right behind it—generating a much larger explosion of sundered underbrush—was an equally immature ram of much less prepossessing appearance. The horns of both animals were small and ineffectual, but evidently spring had awakened their nascent rutting aggression. Or at least it had so affected the pursuer, who made up for his lack of comeliness with an inversely proportionate allotment of spunk. Charging stoutly, he routed the other ruminant eastward. Then, with what seemed a singularly defiant—and self-satisfied—glance at the wagon and its occupants, the unbecoming ramlet trotted further westward along the road.

Another commotion in the underbrush augured further drama: a boy—perhaps nine years old—broke free of the clutching foliage in a thrashing tumble of leaves and limbs. He jumped up and swore vehemently: “
Heugabel!
” Ignoring the wagon and its occupants, his searching gaze found the young ram’s receding rump. The boy’s mouth opened wide; invective streamed out: “
Ess-oh-Essen, du verdammten scheisskopf! Komm’ doch hier! Schnell!
” And, the sound of his further exhortations dwindling along with his spare form, the boy—and his wooly charge—were lost to sight.

The wagoneer shook his head. “Here, around Grantville, ist all-vays trubble. Even der rams are
rebellisch
...‘rebelyus,’ I tink ist die Englisch wort.” He shook his head again. “All-vays trubble.”

Miro shrugged and carefully resheathed his dagger. Trouble, he supposed, was in the eye of the beholder. Miro had begun his journey to Grantville by debarking upon the shadiest wharves of Genoa, then heading north to begin his transalpine journey via Chiavenna. That newly open city had been tense: still patrolled by various Hapsburg detachments, this gateway to the Valtelline had lately become a hotbed of suspicion and intrigue.

Of course, Italy in general was tense. The anti-Spanish restiveness in Naples was increasing steadily. Rome had been simmering higher as Philip of Spain became increasingly impatient with Urban VIII’s “irresolute stance” toward heretical faiths. And with Galileo’s much-anticipated trial approaching...Estuban Miro had simply been glad to leave Italy when he did. As a
marrano
—a “hidden Jew” of Iberian origin—any region in which both Spanish truculence and religious intolerance were on the rise was a region he preferred avoiding.

His transalpine journey had been slow (as he had been warned), but not particularly arduous: the light, intermittent snows of spring had been far less trouble than the run-off from the post-winter melt. The passes weren’t the only messy parts of Switzerland, though: tariffs, tolls, and other administrative pilferings mired every border between the cantonments. Once beyond the alps in Konstanz, his travel choices had been either an armed caravan through still-embattled and bandit-ridden Swabia, or a barge up the Rhine and over on the Main to Frankfurt. And thence by wagon, and occasional cart, to—well, to this very spot on the road.

The trees diminished on either side of the lane as it neared a more substantial east-west road. The driver pointed to the northeast, where the land seemed to jump up with an eerie suddenness: the famed rampart that was an artifact of the Ring of Fire. “Grantville,” he announced. And with a shake of his head, he predictably amended, “Trubble.”

Miro smiled. For the driver, the growing cluster of strange buildings and strange customs would certainly define “trouble.” But for Estuban Miro, it simply meant “new and different.”

And that, in turn, meant “opportunity.”

July 1634

Don Francisco Nasi rose and proferred his right hand as Miro entered. The reputed spymaster’s shake was not perfunctory, but it was brief.

Sitting in unison with his host, Estuban noted that this office, like every other he had seen in Grantville, was spartan by Mediterranean standards. Indeed, it was austere by any standards of the world outside the borders of this strange town, even considering that this small room was merely Nasi’s occasional “satellite office”: his duties were now in Magdeburg.

Don Francisco evidently eschewed small talk: “I’m sorry we could not meet earlier. My work for the Congress of Copenhagen was quite time consuming. Tell me, how are you enjoying Grantville, so far?”

“It is full of wonders, mysteries, and puzzlements. I had heard the tales, of course, even seen some of the books. But it does not prepare one for...all of this.”

Nasi almost smiled. “Yes, it can be a bit overwhelming. Perhaps that is why you have not yet called upon my brothers or cousins? After all, it is not every day that a relative from the Mediterranean arrives in Grantville.”