Eric Flint - Ring Of Fireakj{6995B4A7-96B4-481F-9265-E1838444EE6D}en-us

Ring of Fire

Eric Flint

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright 2004 by Eric Flint

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-7175-X

Cover art by Dru Blair

First hardcover printing, January 2004

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ring of fire / edited by Eric Flint.

p. cm.
"A Baen books original"--verso t.p.
ISBN 0-7434-7175-X
1. Fantasy fiction, American. 2. Historical fiction, American. 3.
Germany--History--1618-1648--Fiction. 4. Thirty Years' War,
1618-1648--Fiction. 5. Americans--Germany--Fiction. 6. West
Virginia--Fiction. 7. Time travel--Fiction. I. Flint, Eric.

PS648.F3R55 2004
813'.0876608--dc22
2003021801

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America

Also in this series:

1632 by Eric Flint
1633 by Eric Flint & David Weber
1634: The Galileo Affair by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis
(forthcoming April 2004)

BAEN BOOKS by Eric Flint

Joe's World series:

The Philosophical Strangler
Forward the Mage (with Richard Roach)
Mother of Demons

The Shadow of the Lion
(with Mercedes Lackey & Dave Freer)

This Rough Magic
(with Mercedes Lackey & Dave Freer)

Rats, Bats & Vats (with Dave Freer)
Pyramid Scheme (with Dave Freer)
The Course of Empire (with K.D. Wentworth)
Crown of Slaves (with David Weber)
The Warmasters (with David Weber and David Drake)

The Belisarius series, with David Drake:

An Oblique Approach
In the Heart of Darkness
Destiny's Shield
Fortune's Stroke
The Tide of Victory

The General series, with David Drake:

The Tyrant

Preface

Eric Flint

The stories in Ring of Fire are all based in the alternate history setting I created in my novel 1632, which was further developed in the sequel I wrote with David Weber, 1633.

Producing "spin-off" anthologies as part of a popular series has a long and venerable history in science fiction, of course. But, in at least two respects, this anthology is different from most such—and the two differences are related.

The first difference is obvious: It is very unusual to produce a shared-universe anthology when a "series" consists, so far, of only two novels. Doing so would seem premature, since the setting really isn't all that firmed up yet.

But that was exactly why I wanted to do it so early in the game—which leads me to the second difference:

In most shared-universe anthologies, as a rule, the stories are tangential to the main line of the story as developed in the creating author's own novels. They might be excellent stories, in their own right, but they rarely have much if any direct impact on the logic of developments in the series itself. The reason is simple. Authors are generally reluctant to have other authors shape their own setting, and the contributing authors to an anthology respect that and design their stories to be somewhat "off to the side." The stories are in the setting, but they do not really affect the setting very much.

That is not true of Ring of Fire. The stories in this anthology all feed directly into the development of the series as a whole. They are not simply part of it, they actively shape it.

Indeed, several of them have already done so. Many of these stories were written before Dave Weber and I wrote 1633, and we deliberately incorporated them into the plot of that novel. For example:

The characters of Tom Stone and his children, who appear in 1633 and will be major characters in the upcoming novel 1634: The Galileo Affair, are first introduced into the series by Mercedes Lackey in her story in this anthology, "To Dye For." (1634: The Galileo Affair is co-authored by me and Andrew Dennis, and will be published in April of 2004. Andrew is another of the authors in this anthology.)

The interaction between the Earl of Strafford and Dr. Harvey, which occurs in 1633, presupposes a prior visit to the time-transplanted town of Grantville. The story of that visit is told here, in S.L. Viehl's "A Matter of Consultation."

Dave Weber's story "In the Navy" provides the background for the creation of the new American navy, which was such a prominent part of 1633.

The character of Gerd, who appears in 1633 as one of Captain Harry Lefferts' men, is first introduced into the 1632 universe in Greg Donahue's "Skeletons."

* * *

A number of the other stories here lay the basis for future developments in the series. That is most clearly evident with my own story, the short novel The Wallenstein Gambit. The events depicted in that story will be central to most of the future volumes in the series. The story is not "on the side." It is right smack in the middle of the series as it continues to unfold.

Furthermore, the basis for The Wallenstein Gambit was, to a considerable degree, laid in this anthology by three other stories: Dave Freer's "A Lineman For the Country," Jody Dorsett's "The Three Rs," and (most directly) by K.D. Wentworth's "Here Comes Santa Claus."

Andrew Dennis' "Between the Armies" lays much of the basis for our forthcoming novel 1634: The Galileo Affair. (As does 1633, of course—the character of Sharon Nichols who figures prominently in 1633 is a major character in The Galileo Affair.) Some of the characters developed by Deann Allen and Mike Turner in their story "American Past Time" will also appear in The Galileo Affair.

Virginia DeMarce's "Biting Time" lays the basis for a novel which she and I are working on, which will both continue the story she began as well as link it to the story line I develop in The Wallenstein Gambit.

To one degree or another, that is true of every story in this anthology. Many of the characters you first encounter here will reappear in later volumes of the series—and sometimes as major characters in their own right.

* * *

I wanted to produce this kind of anthology early in the series because I wanted, as much as possible, to capture something which is usually missing in alternate history series:

History is complicated. It is not the story of a few people, it is the story of an immense number of people—each of them full individuals in their own right, each of them having their own greater or lesser impact on developments.

In the nature of things, fictional series—like biographies—tend to give the illusion that history marches more-or-less in lockstep with the actions of the main characters of the story. That's almost inevitable, given the very nature of narrative. But it is an illusion, and I wanted to avoid it as much as possible in the unfolding 1632 series.

Yes, Mike Stearns and Rebecca Abrabanel and Jeff Higgins and Gretchen Richter and the other major characters I created in 1632 will continue to be major characters in the series. But they are not Greek gods and goddesses. They are simply people—and what happens to them will, in the end, be deeply affected by the actions of a Jewish jeweler in Prague trying desperately to prevent one of the worst pogroms in history, a small town Catholic priest undergoing a crisis of conscience, and a woman in late middle age who simply decides to found a school.

And . . . enough. Welcome to the Ring of Fire.

In the Navy

David Weber

"I'm telling you, Mike, we can do this!"

Mike Stearns inhaled deeply, counted to ten—no, better make it twenty—and reminded himself that the President of the United States couldn't go around throttling overenthusiastic teenagers. He told himself that rather firmly, then reopened his eyes.

"Eddie," he asked as patiently as possible, "do you have any idea how many people walk through this office every week—every day, for that matter—with projects that absolutely, positively just have to be done Right This Minute?"

"But this is different, Mike!" The wiry, red-haired young man on the other side of Mike's desk waved his hands. "This is important!"

"That's exactly my point, Eddie. They're all important. But important or not, we only have so many up-timers with the sorts of skills to make them work. And this—" Mike thumped a solid, muscular palm on the lovingly executed sketch plan Eddie had laid on his desk between two tall piles of books "—would require skills I doubt any of us have to begin with. Besides, can you even imagine how someone like Quentin Underwood would react if I handed whole miles of railroad track over to you for a 'crackpot scheme' like this?"

"It's not a 'crackpot scheme'!" Eddie said hotly. "This is exactly how the Confederates built their original ironclads, with rolled railroad rails for armor back during the Civil War."

"No, it's not," Mike replied patiently. "It's how you think they built them, and that's—"

"It is how they built them!" Eddie interrupted. "My research is solid, Mike!"

"If you'll let me finish?" Mike's voice was noticeably cooler, and Eddie blushed with the fiery color only a natural redhead could produce.

"Sorry," he muttered, and Mike was hard pressed not to chuckle at his expression. Eddie Cantrell, especially in the grip of one of his effervescent enthusiasms, was prone to forget that the Mike Stearns he'd known all his life had become President of the only United States that existed in this Year of Our Lord Sixteen Hundred and Thirty-Two. Which was fair enough, Mike supposed. There'd been enough times over the last year or so that he'd thought he was living in a fever dream instead of reality.

"As I was saying," he continued after a moment, "I don't have any doubt at all that this plan of yours," he thumped the sketch on his desk again, "represents one hell of a lot of research and hard thinking. But the truth is that you don't have any better idea than I do of what sorts of hardware it would take to build the thing. Or, for that matter, who do you think is going to do the stability calculations? Or figure out its displacement? Or design a steam plant to move a boat this size and weight? Or even have a single clue how to take command of it when it was built?" He shook his head. "Even if we had the resources to devote to something like this, we don't have anyone here in Grantville who has any idea how to build it. And I've got too many other projects that people do have a clue about to justify diverting our limited—very limited, Eddie—resources to building some kind of Civil War navy."

Eddie looked away, staring out the office window for several seconds. Then he looked back at Mike, and his expression was more serious than any Mike recalled ever having seen from him before.

"All right," the young man said. "I understand what you're saying. And I guess I do get carried away sometimes. But there was a reason they built these things back home, Mike, and Gustav Adolf is going to need them a hell of a lot worse than Sherman or Grant ever did."

Mike started a quick reply, then stopped. Just as Eddie had trouble remembering Mike as anything more impressive than the leader of the United Mine Workers local, Mike had trouble thinking of Eddie as anything but one of the local kids. Not quite as geekish as his friend Jeff had been before the Ring of Fire deposited their hometown in seventeenth-century Germany, but still something of an oddball in rural West Virginia. A computer nerd and a wargamer who was passionately devoted to both pastimes.

Yeah, Mike thought. A geek. But a wargaming geek. He may be short on experience in the real world, but he's spent one hell of a lot more time than I have studying wars and armies and . . . navies.

"All right, Eddie," he sighed. "I'm sure I'm going to regret this, but why is 'Captain General Gars' going to need ironclads so badly?"

"Because he doesn't have railroads," Eddie replied. "That's why rivers and canals are so important to his logistics, Mike. You know that."

Mike nodded slowly. Eddie was certainly right about that, although the youngster hadn't been present for the meetings at which he and Gustavus Adolphus had discussed that very point.

"Without railroads," Eddie continued, "the only way to move really large quantities of supplies is by water. That's why successful seventeenth-century military campaigns usually stuck so close to the lines of navigable rivers. I know we're talking about building steamboats and steam-powered tugs for that very reason, and that should help a lot. But the bad guys are just as well aware of how important rivers are as Gustav Adolf is. When they figure out how much more efficiently he's going to be able to use them with our help, they're going to start trying really hard to stop him. And the best way for them to do that is to attack his shipping on the water, or else build forts or redoubts armed with artillery to try and close off the critical rivers." The teenager shrugged. "Either way, seems to me that something like an ironclad would be the best way to . . . convince them to stay as far away from the river bank as they can get."

The kid had a point, Mike realized. In fact, he might have an even better one than he realized. The major cities of most of Gustavus Adolphus' so-called "vassals" and "allies" also happened to lie on navigable rivers, and altogether too many of those vassals were among the slimiest, most treacherous batch of so-called noblemen in history. Which meant that in a pinch, an armored vessel, heavily armed and immune to said cities' defensive artillery might prove a powerful incentive when it came to honoring their obligations to the Confederated Principalities of Europe and their Emperor.

None of which changed a single thing where the incredible difficulties of Eddie's proposal were concerned.

Eddie started to say something else, then closed his mouth with an almost audible click as he realized Mike was gazing frowningly down at the sketch.

The vessel it depicted would never be called graceful. It was an uncompromising, slab-sided, boxy thing which sat low in the water, and its gun ports and a thick, squat funnel were its only visible external features.

"You're right about how important river traffic is going to be," Mike admitted as he ran one blunt fingertip across the drawing. "But this thing would be an incredible resource hog."

"I know that," Eddie acknowledged. "That's why I'm only suggesting building three of them. God knows we could use as many as we could get, but I knew going in that there was no way you were going to give up enough rails to armor more than that."

"No way in the world," Mike agreed with a grin which held very little humor. "Quentin would scream bloody murder if I gave you enough rails for one of these things, much less three! And he wouldn't be alone, either. It's going to take years and years for us to develop an iron industry that can produce steel that good. But that part I could handle . . . if I thought we'd be able to build the damned things in the end."

"Look," Eddie said, "I admit that a lot of that plan is based on the best guesstimates I could come up with from my reference books. At the same time, some of those books are pretty darned good, Mike. I spent a lot of time researching this period when Jeff and Larry decided we just had to do a Civil War ironclads game." He chuckled. "I always was the navy specialist when it came to game design.

"But that's not important. What matters is that it's a starting point. If you can find someone else, someone better qualified to take my notes and my reference books and turn them into something we can build, I'll be delighted to turn them over. You're right. I don't have the least idea how to figure displacements or allow for stability requirements, and I know the designers screwed up the displacement calculations big time for a lot of the real ironclads built during the Civil War. There was one class of monitor that would've sunk outright if they'd ever tried to mount their turrets! So maybe my enthusiasm did run away with me. But it's more important that this gets done and that it work than that it gets done my way."

Mike tipped back in his chair and considered the face across his desk. It was the same face it had always been, and yet, it wasn't. It hadn't changed as much as Jeff Higgins' face had, perhaps, but like every face in Grantville, it had thinned down over the course of the last winter and its sometimes short and always monotonous rations. Eddie had always been wiry; now he'd lost every ounce of excess weight, yet his frame was well muscled from hard physical labor. More to the point, perhaps, that face was no longer as young, as . . . innocent as it had been, and Mike felt a pang of deep, intense pain for the loss of Eddie's last years of childhood.

But a lot of people had lost a lot of things, he reminded himself, and it looked as if Eddie was doing a better job of growing into the reality he faced than Mike had realized when he came bursting into the office. His pride in the concept he'd come up with was obvious, yet it was equally obvious that his offer to turn it over to someone else who might be better qualified to make it work was genuine. Unfortunately, there was no one in Grantville who was better qualified. The skills a project like this would call for weren't the sort that were in much demand in a West Virginia coal mining town. To make it work, they would have needed someone with some real expertise in mechanical engineering and heavy fabrication, not to mention running complicated industrial projects. Better yet, someone with some genuine experience with boats and ships. Best of all, someone with some idea about how a real navy worked.

Someone like—

Mike's thoughts broke off in a sudden mental hiccup, and he sat abruptly upright.

"What?" Eddie asked, and Mike shook his head the way he'd shaken off the effect of a particularly good left jab during his days in the ring.

"I'm still not convinced that any of this is doable," he said slowly, contemplating Eddie through half-slitted eyes. "But if—if, I say—it is, then it's possible that there's someone right here in town who'd be perfect—" He broke off and grimaced. "Let me rephrase that. It's possible that there's someone right here in town who could actually make it work."

"There is?" Eddie looked puzzled. "Who?"

"The only person who has any experience at all with this kind of building project," Mike replied, and grinned sourly as Eddie's eyes widened in dawning disbelief.

"That's right," the President of the United States said in a tone which matched his grin's sourness perfectly. "I think we need to consult with my sister's esteemed father-in-law."

* * *

"Let me get this straight." John Chandler Simpson sat on the other side of a slightly battered-looking table in an Appalachian kitchen and regarded Mike through narrow eyes. "You're offering me a job."

"I guess you could put it that way," Mike replied in a voice he tried to keep entirely free of any emotion. His years of experience as a union negotiator helped, but it was still difficult. He'd seldom felt as much antipathy for another human being as Simpson evoked, apparently effortlessly, from him.

He sat back in his own chair, letting his eyes rest on the framed prints which brightened Jessica Wendell's friendly kitchen. He could think of very few settings which would have seemed less appropriate for a meeting with the one-time president and CEO of the Simpson Industrial Group, but at least Jessica's willingness to surrender her kitchen as an impromptu conference room had let him keep this meeting out of the public eye.

Not that the present confidentiality would help much when Mike's cabinet found out what they were discussing. He shuddered at the thought of how Melissa Mailey, for example, would react when she discovered that her President had been negotiating anything at all with their archenemy.

"I must confess," Simpson said after a moment in a poisonously dry tone, "that I find a certain degree of irony in this."

"I doubt you find it any more ironic than I do," Mike told him levelly.

"Maybe not, but after the way you turned me into some sort of Antichrist in the elections, I have to admire the sheer gall it must have taken for you to suggest anything of the sort."

"Gall doesn't come into it," Mike shot back, then shrugged his broad, powerful shoulders. "Look, Simpson, I don't like you very much. And God knows you've made it plain enough that you like me even less. But the simple fact is that there's no one else in Grantville who'd even know where to begin with a project like this one."

"Well, that's certainly a refreshing admission." Simpson's lips twitched in what, in another man, might have been called a ghost of a smile, but there was very little humor in his eyes. "I suppose I should be flattered that you're willing to grant my expertise in any field."

Mike felt his temper try to flare. He was, by nature, a passionate man, and learning the self-discipline required to control those passions—and his temper—had not come easily to him. But it was a lesson he'd mastered long ago, and although Simpson made it more difficult than most, he wasn't about to forget it now.

"We can sit here pissing in each other's soup all afternoon, if you like," he said instead, throwing the crudity deliberately into the midst of the conversation. "Or we can deal with the reason I came over. Which would you prefer?"

Something flickered in Simpson's eyes. For a moment, Mike thought it was the other man's temper. Then he realized it had been something else. A moment of . . . recognition, perhaps. Or possibly simply an awareness that Mike had no intention of rising to his jibes and giving him the satisfaction of losing his temper.

"Tell me exactly what you have in mind," the ex-CEO said after only the briefest pause.

"It's simple enough." Mike leaned forward in his chair, planting his forearms on the table. "Eddie Cantrell came to see me with the initial proposal. He brought along a stack of reference books, and it turns out that he's got an entire stash of other books we never guessed he had. I should've made a point of going over there and going through the Four Musketeers' library myself. Everybody in town's known for years that the four of them were absolutely buggy where military history and war games were concerned."

He shook his head, eyes momentarily unfocused as he considered the treasure trove he and Frank Jackson had discovered in Eddie and Larry Wild's bookshelves.

"Anyway," he continued briskly, "Eddie has decided that we need a U.S. Navy, and he set out single-handedly to do something about it. Which is how he came up with this."

Mike took a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and slid it across the table. Simpson's eyes flicked to it in a casual, almost dismissive glance. Then they snapped back, and he smoothed the sketch's creases as he frowned down at it.

"Cantrell did this?"

"Yeah. He took a course in drafting over at the high school a couple of years ago. Not," Mike added dryly, "that it really prepared him for a career as a maritime engineer."

"I'd say that's a bit of an understatement." Simpson's attention was on the figures listed in the data block in the upper left corner of Eddie's sketch, and he seemed momentarily to have forgotten his obvious dislike for the man across the table from him. He studied the numbers for several seconds, then snorted in something very like amusement.

"This displacement estimate of his has got to be way low," he said. "And even if it weren't, there's no way he's going to get by with a six-foot draft!" He shook his head. "I'd have to do some volume calculations to be certain, but even at his estimated tonnage, this thing is going to draw ten or twelve feet, minimum, and that's too deep for riverine conditions."

Mike chuckled, and Simpson looked quickly up from the sketch.

"I said something funny?" he inquired in a voice which had suddenly remembered its frost.

"No, not really. But you did just demonstrate exactly why I'm sitting here this morning. Do you really think that anyone else in Grantville—or anywhere else in seventeenth-century Europe, for that matter!—could rattle off what you just did?"

"I suppose not," Simpson said after a moment. "Of course, you realize that it's been the better part of twenty years since I did any hands-on hardware work at all."

"Maybe so, but at least you did some once upon a time. And didn't your company have a piece of the Navy's shipbuilding program?"

"Not really. Oh, our electronics division was one of the second-tier contractors on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers' radar systems," Simpson acknowledged. He didn't seem to wonder how it was that Mike had acquired that particular bit of information, and Mike was just as happy he didn't. The breach between John Simpson and his son Tom was a deep and apparently permanent one, and Mike had no intention of admitting that he'd discussed this offer with his brother-in-law at some length before approaching Tom's father.

"But that whole division was really outside our core petro-chemical business," the elder Simpson continued, "and we didn't have anything to do with the hull or the engineering plant. And I damned sure wasn't handling any of the engineering myself! I don't want there to be any misunderstanding on that. Translating this—" he tapped the sketch lightly "—into anything remotely resembling a practical warship would require skills I haven't used since before I ever left the Navy."

"There's been a lot of that going around lately," Mike replied without cracking a smile, and Simpson acknowledged the point with a grunt of sour amusement. He looked down at the sketch for several more moments, lips pursed, then returned his gaze to Mike's face.

"How much authority and support would I have?" he asked.

"As much as I can give you." Mike shrugged. "I'm going to have problems with my own people if I decide to push this one. Quentin Underwood is going to have three kinds of fits the instant he hears about it, and some of the others aren't going to be far behind. Especially not when they find out how many railroad rails we're going to be asking for! But that's not really the worst of it. What's really going to stick in their craws is the impact this kind of diversion of effort will have on all our other projects."

"They'd better get used to it," Simpson said, and his dark eyes sharpened as if to impale Mike. "And so had you."

"What does that mean?" Mike demanded, not quite able to prevent himself from bristling.

"I may not have the library your young Mr. Cantrell does, 'Mr. President,' but I've been something of a student of military history in my time, myself." Simpson's smile was cold. "Do you know what ultimately brought about the downfall of the Swedish Empire?"

"Gustav Adolf was killed," Mike replied.

"Yes, he was. But that wasn't what prevented the Swedes from making their empire stand up. His generals, and especially Torstensson, Baner, and Oxenstierna, had learned their trade well enough to take over from him. What they didn't have was the economy or the manpower to take on the rest of Europe head-on. That was what really devastated Germany during the Thirty Years War. The only way to raise the manpower the Swedes needed, especially when the French turned against them, was to hire what amounted to mercenaries. And then they had to find a way to pay for them."

He shook his head.

"Don't misunderstand me. Gustavus Adolphus and Sweden probably went further than anyone else in the seventeenth century in rationalizing their manpower resources and creating a standing army out of their own population. But the problem was that Sweden simply didn't have the population density to sustain armies of the size it needed. Just as it didn't have the tax base to create the revenues armies that size—whether raised out of its own population or by hiring mercenaries—demanded."

He shrugged.

"So, ultimately, the only real option Sweden saw was to attempt to make war pay for itself by plundering its enemies and extracting the necessary money in 'contributions' from the populations of the territory it occupied. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was only so much blood in the turnip . . . and it wasn't enough. Some historians still argue that the Swedish Empire really collapsed only when Charles XII finally lost to Peter the Great, but the fact is that it was ultimately unsustainable simply because it lacked the financial and population bases to support it, especially against the inevitable coalitions of nations with larger populations and deeper pockets. And whatever else we may have changed by arriving here, we haven't changed Sweden's demographics."

"I'm aware of that."

In the wrong tone, that sentence could have been dismissive, or a challenge, but it didn't come out that way. In fact, Mike was more than a little surprised by Simpson's analysis. Which, he thought, was probably because the man had shown absolutely no ability or inclination to analyze the social and political realities the transplanted Americans faced with the same acuity.

"In that case," Simpson said levelly, "it's time that you faced the implications. The military implications."

Mike started to reply, but Simpson's raised hand stopped him. It wouldn't have, if it had been the arrogant gesture of Management dismissing Labor from consideration. But to Mike's considerable astonishment, it wasn't. It wasn't exactly a gesture of warmth, but it wasn't overtly discourteous or dismissive, either.

"You've made your policies and political platform abundantly clear," Simpson said. "And you've also made it abundantly clear that you intend to put the platform you ran on into effect. I won't pretend I like that, any more that I'll pretend I . . . enjoyed the way you campaigned."

A core of anger glowed in his eyes, but, to his credit, he kept it out of his voice.

"I'll grant you the strength of your own convictions and your sincerity. I don't agree with you, and I hope to hell your social policies don't turn into a complete and total disaster, but that's a fight I've already lost. And I understand your position on the creation of a general . . . industrial infrastructure, for want of a better term. It may surprise you to discover that I actually agree with you, to an extent. There's no way the seventeenth century's ramshackle, top-down excuses for nation states could possibly hope to match the sorts of technological innovations we could introduce, any more than the Soviet Union was able to match the U.S.'s tech and industrial base back home. To match us, they'd have to become like us, and we saw back home what happened to the Soviets when they tried to do that."

Mike gazed at the other man with carefully concealed surprise. He and his cabinet had never made any particular secret of their commitment to spreading innovations as widely as possible, but he and his inner circle had never explicitly made the argument Simpson just had. Partly that was to avoid tipping their hand to any seventeenth-century opponent too stupid to see the sucker punch coming, but another reason was that even some of his own cabinet—like Quentin Underwood—would have had conniption fits if they'd realized just how much of his "secret technological advantages" he was willing to give away to bring it about. And Mike had never expected John Chandler Simpson, of all people, to recognize what he had in mind . . . or to acknowledge that his strategy made any sort of sense.

"Unfortunately," Simpson's chair creaked as he leaned back in it and folded his arms, "what happened to the Soviets happened during a cold war. Whatever our proxies might have been doing around the periphery, we weren't locked in a direct, life-or-death battlefield confrontation with them. But that's precisely the position Gustav is in right now, and if Sweden goes down, so do we."

"I'm aware of that, too," Mike said. "That's why we organized an army under Frank Jackson in the first place." He grimaced. "Not that sending up-timers out to get shot at is the most efficient imaginable use of their knowledge and skills!"

"Exactly," Simpson said. If possible, the industrialist liked Frank Jackson even less than he liked Mike Stearns, but once again, that seemed to be beside the point to him, and he leaned forward once more, stabbing the tabletop with an emphatic finger. "As a matter of fact, it's the worst possible use of their knowledge and skills. And sending them into the field, even with the advantages we can give them in terms of modern weapons, is inevitably going to lead to casualties. And every casualty we suffer is going to cost us irreplaceable 'knowledge capital.' "

"Are you suggesting that we refuse to risk any of our people and expect Gustav Adolf to foot the entire bill while we just sit around?" Mike demanded. He couldn't quite believe he was having this discussion in the first place, or, in the second, that it seemed Simpson had a brain, after all. The other man certainly hadn't given any sign of it during the constitutional debate or his campaign for the presidency!

"Of course we can't do that, either," Simpson replied. "But in the end, it's really going to come down to how effective an army Gustav can raise and maintain in the field."

"Wait a minute. Wasn't your entire original argument that he doesn't have the money or the population to support a big enough army whatever he does?"

"Yes, it was. But I didn't say anything about army size just now. What I said was that it came down to the effectiveness of his army. There's a difference between sheer size and combat power. In a way, you've already acknowledged that by using Jackson and his troops to give Gustav a qualitative edge at places like the Wartburg and the Alte Veste. But doing it that way wastes our most precious resource. What we have to do is to make that qualitative edge integral to Gustav's own forces. He's got to get his manpower requirements down, and the only way for him to do that is for us to take up the slack by providing him with superior weapons and the training and techniques to use them properly, so that his men make up in individual effectiveness what they lose in numbers."

Simpson paused and snorted suddenly with genuine humor, and one of Mike's eyebrows rose questioningly.

"I was just thinking about the presumptuousness involved in 'teaching' one of the greatest captains of history his trade," the industrialist explained. "But that's exactly what it comes down to, in the end. We've got to give him the tools and show him how to use them in a way which will ease the pressure on his population. Give him smaller armies, with the sort of waterborne logistical support your young Mr. Cantrell is advocating, and the superior weapons to let him defeat larger forces, and he'll have a genuine chance of surviving and holding this empire of his together. But the only way we can do that is to divert however much of our own resources and capabilities it takes to support those smaller armies. What it boils down to, is that we'll have to help him downsize—" his eyes glittered with undisguised amusement as Mike stiffened in automatic resistance to the most hated verb in managerese "—and that will mean an inevitable slowdown in how quickly we'll be able to build up other aspects of our infrastructure."

Mike started to reply quickly, then stopped himself. Nothing Simpson had just said came as an actual surprise to him. God knew he and his innermost circle had spent enough time grappling with the same problems and the same limiting factors themselves! But no one else, not even—or perhaps, especially—Frank Jackson, had laid out the points Simpson had just made in such implacably logical order.

And he was right, Mike realized. It was a bitter admission, and only the tiniest edge of its bitterness came from the fact that John Simpson had elicited it. He turned his eyes back to Jessica Wendell's prints, and his lips tightened as he stared at them sightlessly.

He didn't want Simpson to be right. He didn't want to divert still more precious resources, and skill, and knowledge to the military. What Europe needed was medicines, a textile industry, steam or internal combustion-powered farm equipment. It needed steamships, railroads, oil wells, and telegraphs. It needed widespread electricity, light bulbs, refrigeration, sanitation, sewage plants, and a food canning industry. There were so many things it needed—so many whose mere existence would undermine the aristocracy-dominated excuse for a civilization which was about to turn all of Northern Germany into one huge abattoir.

But to introduce those things, the up-timers and their seventeenth-century countrymen somehow had to survive long enough. And surviving had its own cold, uncaring imperatives. Imperatives, he told himself with what he knew was an edge of pettiness, perfectly suited to John Simpson Chandler.

"You're right," he admitted, and heard the reluctance in his own voice as he did so. "We've already been discussing possible weapon upgrades with Gustav and Oxenstierna—more 'building down' to something we can produce in quantity instead of trying to use our own weapons as some sort of magic wand."

"I'm relieved to hear it," Simpson said. "But it's going to be just as important to show them how to get the most out of whatever we can provide for them."

"I'm sure it is. Unfortunately, aside from a few youthful enthusiasts like Eddie and his buddies, we're awfully short on people who understand how to do that."

"I'm not surprised." Simpson drummed on the tabletop for a few moments, and Mike surprised an expression on his face which might almost been one of hesitation. If it was, it vanished quickly, and Simpson looked directly back at him.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I really am quite well grounded in military history. It's one of the few hobby interests Tom and I share." An undisguised flash of raw pain flooded through his eyes at the mention of his son's name, but his voice never flinched. "What we really need here is one of those historical reenactors—somebody who spent his vacations marching around in a Union Army uniform with a Springfield rifle-musket on his shoulder. But I assume we don't have any of those?"

Mike smiled crookedly. "Sure we do—probably a dozen of them, at least. The first battle of the Civil War was fought at Philippi, not more than an hour's drive from here."

Simpson brightened visibly.

"I should have thought of that, but I suppose I simply assumed that the local population was too small to support many of them. I hope you're making them available to Gustav and his army? Someone with hands-on experience like that with nineteenth-century weapons, tactics, and formation drill would be worth me, Jackson, and Cantrell all rolled into one."

"I know," Mike agreed, but his tone was considerably less enthusiastic than Simpson's, and he grimaced irritably when the industrialist cocked his head in question.

"Our problem is that most of them have skills we need just as badly somewhere else. Down at the power plant, for example, or over at the mine. Dwight Rogers is a perfect example of the problem. He's been a reenactor for at least ten or fifteen years, but he's also the only man in town with actual up-time oil field experience, and that makes him critical to Quentin's oil project."

"I see." Simpson studied Mike's expression for several seconds, then shrugged. "I see," he repeated, "and I understand the problem. But I think you're going to have to consider this the first example of sacrificing infrastructure to survival. We need those men—need not just their actual skills, but also their ability to sell seventeenth-century professional soldiers on the concept that we can show them how to do their jobs better than they can now. In fact, you ought to have people like that in Magdeburg already, working with the Swedes there as military advisers."

"Um." Mike stared out a window while he chewed that unpalatable argument. It seemed to be Simpson's day for making him consider things he didn't want to think about, he reflected. And, once again, Simpson was right.

Damn it to hell.

"Okay," he sighed finally. "You're probably— No, scratch that, you are right. But I've still got to consider how many birds I can kill with each stone." He pondered some more, rubbing the tip of an index finger in slow, thoughtful circles on the tabletop, then nodded to himself.

"All right," he said, focusing on Simpson once more. "I don't know if I can make this permanent yet—we'll have to look at the competing demands on his time—but Jere Haygood's a reenactor, and a good one. He was also the senior partner of the one civil engineering firm we had here in Grantville before the Ring of Fire. Which means, of course, that there are at least seven things we need him to be doing simultaneously . . . including training other engineers. At the moment, though, he's heading one of the teams working with Gustav's engineers on improving the Stecknitz canal, which means he's already on the river. But if we go ahead with this project, you're going to need someone like him to help you lay out your shipyard, at the very least, right?"

"It would certainly be an enormous help," Simpson agreed.

"In that case, I'll send him a radio message and tell him to meet you in Magdeburg. You can discuss the engineering aspects of this whole idea with him, and there are enough other projects going on in and around Magdeburg that Pete McDougal probably really needs access to one of our better engineers on an ongoing basis, anyway. And we can see about having him assigned as our official liaison to Gustav Adolf's engineering corps. God knows we're going to need someone assigned permanently to that slot in a teaching role, if nothing else, and that should also get his foot in the door with the Swedish officer corps in general."

Simpson pursed his lips, obviously considering the notion carefully, then nodded.

"That sounds like an excellent idea," he said, and his tone was approving, if not precisely warm. "And it certainly does kill multiple birds with a single rock. Of course, he's still going to be so busy with other jobs that they'll undoubtedly interfere badly with his ability to function purely as a military adviser. On the other hand, once we actually begin providing Gustav's troops with better weapons, we'll just have to find someone else to assist him. Someone you'll be able to spare from other responsibilities then even if you can't spare him now.

"In the meantime, I would certainly be willing to make what I know myself available. And I wasn't always an engineer during my naval service. Unlike Mr. Underwood, my own early experience was in the combat arms."

"That might . . . be very useful," Mike said slowly, with what he hoped was well hidden caution. He had a sudden vision of Simpson ingratiating himself with the most conservative and inherently dangerous elements of Gustav Adolf's army. Or, even worse, the CPE's more reluctant German princes.

Yet even as the thought crossed his mind, he told himself that it was foolish. Conservative—maybe even reactionary—Simpson undoubtedly was, but the most reactionary twenty-first-century American imaginable was hopelessly and radically liberal compared to someone like John George of Saxony.

Which didn't mean that Simpson wouldn't do his absolute level best to build his own little empire if he had even half a chance. In fact, it would be asinine to expect anything else out of him. Whatever Mike might think of him on a personal basis, no one was successful at the persistently high level of industrial performance Simpson had demonstrated without being extremely capable himself. And that capability, especially in a situation like the one the up-timers faced, would inevitably attract power like a magnet if Mike allowed him to exercise it.

If.

Ultimately, he reflected, that was what it came down to. If Mike allowed his worst political enemy to demonstrate that there was an area in which he was truly and provably competent, it could have incalculable consequences for the future. But Mike was still in the position of a man with no choice but to run even faster to prevent himself from falling.

Besides, if I let a man like Simpson beat me just because there's one area in which he's competent, then I'll deserve whatever the hell happens to me!

"We'll have to think about that," he continued after a moment. "About the best way to make use of your experience and knowledge, I mean. But in the meantime, what about Eddie's design?"

"I think it has . . . potential," Simpson replied, accepting the return to the topic which had originally brought Mike there. "It's going to need a lot of work to make it practical, but assuming that the Allocations Committee is willing to commit the resources and we can come up with the manpower and the funding, I think we can probably build them. Of course, once we do, we'll have to come up with crews for them, as well."

"I know." Mike gazed at the other man for a few more seconds, then inhaled unobtrusively.

"If I sign off on it, the Allocations Committee will, too," he said confidently. "I don't say it will be easy, but I'll bring them around in the end. But if I do, would you be willing to take charge of it?"

"Not without conditions," Simpson said after a moment.

"What sort of conditions?" Mike felt himself slipping into the natural stance of a negotiator, and a small smile flickered around Simpson's mouth, as if he felt the same thing.

"If I build them, then I command them," he said flatly. "It's not going to be easy, however much support you can give me. I'd have to build a shipyard before I could start building ships in it, and part of the job would have to include training the local work force I'd need. The same holds true for building crews to man them, as well. It's going to take time and careful organization to make any of this work, and I'm not really in the habit of involving myself in projects that fail. I refuse to oversee the expenditure of so much of our resources just to let someone else screw up and misuse the final product when I'm done."

He showed his teeth in a brief, fierce grin.

"So I suppose that, in the end, it comes down to how much you trust me, 'Mr. President.' Do you need my expertise badly enough to piss off 'General Jackson' and risk putting me in command of your navy?"

Mike met that flash of a grin with an unsmiling, level look of his own, and several seconds of silence hovered in the Wendell kitchen. Then the President of the United States smiled ever so slightly himself.

"Actually, I think 'Admiral Simpson' has a certain ring to it," he said.

* * *

"I can't believe this," Eddie Cantrell muttered under his breath. "Simpson? " He shook his head.

"Don't even go there, Eddie," Mike growled softly, and Eddie flushed as he realized that he hadn't spoken quite as much under his breath as he thought he had.

"I had enough trouble with Frank and Quentin—not to mention Melissa!" Mike continued. "You wanted your damned ironclads, and you're probably going to get them, so I wouldn't go looking any gift horses in the teeth, if I were you."

Eddie grimaced at the reference to "gift horses" and glowered for a moment at the flesh-and-blood horse whose reins he held. In his considered opinion, horses were a very poor substitute for motorcycles, and his posterior wasn't looking forward to the journey to Magdeburg.

"Sorry," he said, after a moment. "And I meant it when I said I'd be willing to turn everything over to someone else if they knew how to get the job done. But I gotta tell you, Mike—I'm not too crazy about putting Simpson in command of anything, much less the Navy."

"If we're going to do this at all, then he's the best man for the job," Mike said, just a bit more positively than he actually felt. "On the other hand, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I'm just as happy he'll have you along for this little trip."

Eddie cocked his head at Mike, then nodded slowly.

"Gotcha," he said. "I'll keep the bastard honest."

"That wasn't exactly what I meant," Mike said somewhat repressively, already wishing he hadn't said anything about it at all. "Look, Eddie, you don't like Simpson. Well, I don't like him very much, either. But don't ever make the mistake of thinking the man is stupid or incompetent in his own area. Or that we don't need him just as badly as we need Nat Davis or Greg Ferrara. You're going along to help him find the right spot for his shipyard. You are not going along as some sort of Gestapo agent. Is that understood?"

"Understood," Eddie replied contritely, and Mike shrugged.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to bite your head off. But this is important, and we don't need anyone creating still more problems to overcome. At the same time, if you happen to notice anything you feel ought to be called to our attention, I expect you to do it."

"Understood," Eddie repeated in a somewhat different tone, and Mike nodded. He started to say something else, then broke off as Simpson came trotting around the corner on his own horse.

It irritated Mike that Simpson had already known how to ride when they arrived in Thuringia. Worse, the man rode Western-style, so Mike couldn't even put it down to an effete, socially pretentious thing like polo.

The beautifully tailored three-piece business suits which had accompanied Simpson to Grantville for his son's wedding had long since disappeared. The older man wore boots, denims, a flannel shirt, and a light nylon windbreaker against the late-spring chill of Northern Germany, and Mike was still a little surprised by how much the change in clothing changed the man's image. The John Chandler Simpson trotting briskly along the street looked very little like the supercilious city slicker who'd come to Grantville so long ago. This man was tall and broad shouldered—as tall as his son, even if he didn't have Tom's sheer mass of muscle. Then again, no one in the seventeenth-century was as massively built as Tom was. Which meant that "not as massive" certainly wasn't the same thing as "ninety-eight-pound weakling," and little though Mike might have cared to admit it, there'd always been far more muscle and far less fat on Simpson's powerful frame than many another senior up-time executive might have claimed. The recently past winter had wiped away most of the fat which had been there, too.

"Gentlemen," Simpson acknowledged them in brusque, no-nonsense tones as he reined in his mount beside them.

"Mr. Simpson," Mike replied. Eddie only nodded, but he clambered up into his own saddle. Not, Mike observed, with any particular grace. Eddie had learned to ride since the Ring of Fire, but only in the sense that he no longer fell off the horse whenever it stopped. At that, he was doing better than his friend Jeff, but it was all Mike could do to keep himself from breaking out into laughter at Eddie's expression as he contemplated the long ride to Magdeburg.

At least the youngster would be spared the indescribable motion of a coach trip over seventeenth-century roads, and that was nothing to sneeze at. The main road to Magdeburg was slated for improvement as an urgent priority, but it was going to be a while before it could be accomplished.

"Don't forget to check in with the radio shack when you get there," Mike admonished, and Simpson nodded. Grantville's limited number of radio hams were busy training more operators and planning the construction of simple crystal sets to eke out and support the handful of modern radios which had accompanied them back to Thuringia. It was going to be a while before there were enough of them for more than purely limited use, but installing one of them at the new imperial capital had been a high priority.

"I guess that's about it, then," Mike continued. "We'll be waiting to hear from you."

Simpson gave him another not-quite-curt nod, touched his heels to his horse, and started off without another word. Eddie looked at Mike one more time, then shrugged and headed off—far less gracefully—in Simpson's wake.

* * *

By the time they reached Magdeburg, a few days later, Eddie had developed a new, even stronger, first-hand appreciation of the advantages of water transport in the seventeenth century. He would vastly have preferred to make the shorter trip overland to Halle and then travel down the river to Magdeburg, but there'd been a few unpleasant incidents along the river. Everyone agreed that they thought it was only isolated bands of brigands—probably mercenaries who were currently unemployed because Gustav Adolf had destroyed the armies to which they had once been attached—who'd turned to a little freelance river piracy to survive the winter. That was the official story, anyway. Personally, Eddie was none too certain that it wasn't a bit more organized than that. There were certainly enough German nobles who hated and feared the up-timer Americans' impact, starting with John George of Saxony, himself. It wouldn't surprise Eddie a bit to discover that one or more of them had been turning a blind eye to attacks on said Americans' barge traffic.

The situation was improving, in large part because Gustav had begun operating patrols of Finnish and Lapp cavalry—whose fearsome reputations were well deserved—along the more dangerous sections of the river. But for the moment, President Stearns and his cabinet had preferred to send their two-man shipbuilding force to Magdeburg by a more arduous but less adventurous route.

And "arduous" it had certainly been. Every muscle Eddie had seemed to ache with its own individual protest, but that background chorus was nothing to the throbbing ache in his thighs and buttocks. The inns at which they had spent their nights had been an experience of eye-opening unpleasantness in their own right, and he was uncomfortably certain that he had acquired all too many multi-legged insectoid boarders.

But at least they were finally here . . . not that "here" was all that impressive. Magdeburg had been a largish city by here-and-now standards before Count Tilly's troops had massacred the population and burned the place to the ground in the worst single atrocity yet of the ongoing Thirty Years War. The nightmare event had rallied opposition to Tilly and the Imperialists from all over Protestant Germany and provided Gustav Adolf's army with one of the most chilling war cries of the entire war: "Magdeburg quarter"—the promise to be just as merciful to Tilly's men as they had been to the citizens of Magdeburg.

But Magdeburg's history, as well as its central location and its access to the Elbe River, had made it the inevitable choice as the capital of Gustav's new Confederated Principalities of Europe. The heaps of charred rubble surrounding the cathedral—one of the few structures in the entire city which had been spared the torch—had largely disappeared now, and reconstruction was well underway. The sheer devastation of the old city had given Gustav's architects the opportunity to design a proper capital, with a coordinated street plan of long, straight avenues and spacious squares, and the skeleton of the new city to be was plainly evident. But so was the sprawl of temporary quarters, thrown up in haste and without any apparent plan or order, for the work force laboring upon the new buildings and streets. And it seemed evident to Eddie as he gazed out over the site that the area outside the old city walls, where the foundations of the new factories and warehouses were going in, had not profited from the same degree of city planning.

"Quite a mess, isn't it?" Simpson remarked.

Eddie looked at him. The lengthy, arduous trip had forced him to alter his opinion of Simpson . . . some. They hadn't exactly whiled away the journey in deep, philosophical discussion. In fact, they hadn't spoken to one another any more than they had to. But despite himself, Eddie had been impressed by how little Simpson had complained. Of course, Eddie thought resentfully, Simpson's posterior probably didn't ache quite as much as his own did. At the same time, however, Simpson was at least thirty years older than he was, and even though there had to be plenty of room for aches and pains in those extra decades, Simpson showed absolutely no sign of them.

Yet what had truly surprised Eddie was the calm, almost matter of fact way Simpson had accepted the primitive nature of both their transportation and their accommodations along the way. He'd expected the ex-CEO to demand the very best, and to throw temper tantrums if he didn't get it. But it hadn't worked out that way.

Simpson had displayed an amazing talent for hard, shrewd bargaining over the cost of their rooms every night—almost as if the money were coming out of his own pocket, rather than out of the funds the U.S. government had provided for the trip. And it had been obvious that he wasn't prepared to be fobbed off with anything less than the best the inns had been able to provide. Yet that "best" had fallen dismally short of anything he would have tolerated for a heartbeat "back home," and he hadn't said a word. In fact, he'd accepted the limitations of their accommodations far more patiently than Eddie had, and he'd actually tipped the staffs when they left.

Eddie wasn't quite sure what to make of that, but it had at least cracked the armor of his preconceptions where Simpson was concerned. Not that he was prepared to surrender his distrust just yet. Simpson was still the arrogant bastard who'd tried to waltz into Grantville and take over the entire town. And he was still the slimeball politician who'd thrown in with the bigoted rednecks who'd opposed extending the vote to anyone who hadn't been born up-time. Which meant, by definition, that he was The Enemy.

None of which affected the fact that his observations summed up Eddie's own impression of Magdeburg quite handily.

"Calling this a mess is an insult to any other mess," he said, after a moment, and Simpson surprised him yet again with a dry chuckle.

"Oh, I've seen worse. Not very often, mind you, but I've seen worse. And given what they had to start with, I'm actually surprised they've done this well with it so quickly."

Eddie glanced at him speculatively. He'd been more prepared for Simpson to make some cutting remark about primitive construction techniques and lousy seventeenth-century architects. Instead, the older man's tone was merely thoughtful. Indeed, it might actually have been approving, mind-boggling though that possibility seemed to Eddie.

"Well," Simpson continued after a moment, "I suppose we should check in with the local authorities and get off a radio message that we've arrived. This way, I think, Mr. Cantrell."

He urged his mount into motion, and Eddie found himself—once again—following the rear end of John Chandler Simpson's horse.

* * *

The streets of Magdeburg, such as they were, were a hive of activity. In fact, they were so busy that Eddie quickly decided to swallow his pride, dismount, and lead his horse. The journey from Grantville had been long enough for even his horsemanship to improve appreciably, but he knew his limits, and the first time one of the clattering, wooden-wheeled carts came rumbling unexpectedly out of a cross street, he knew he'd reached them. He managed to survive his horse's rearing protest at the sudden, frightening intrusion, but it was a very near thing, and he scrambled out of the saddle with far more haste than grace.

Simpson, on the other hand, simply sat there in the saddle, gazing at him with one quirked eyebrow. His horse, needless to say, scarcely even tossed its head. Eddie would have loved to put its calmness down to its innately placid disposition, but he knew it had far more to do with the hand upon the reins and the rider in the saddle.

Simpson waited until he was certain Eddie had the reins firmly in hand, then clucked gently to his mount and led the way through the bustling confusion of workmen, carts, freight wagons, occasional squads of Swedish soldiers, and street vendors. Eddie followed, glowering at the older man's ramrod-straight spine and feeling like a total doofus.

Stretches of the burned city's original cobblestones were interspersed with and crossed by muddy tracks—usually more puddle than mud, actually—and Eddie was grateful that he'd worn boots instead of sneakers. Nikes weren't exactly the footwear of choice when it came to wading through ankle-deep holes full of water and gooey mud.

Eddie hadn't seen so many people in one place, outside Grantville itself, since arriving in the seventeenth century. And the activity around him very nearly approached the frantic industry with which Grantville had expanded its housing to face the demands of the winter just past. The smell of smoke, the clatter of tools, the bellows of foremen, and the incredible smells of too many people crowded into too little space.

The smell bothered Eddie even more because it was so different from what he'd become accustomed to. He'd discovered, to his surprise, that seventeenth-century German notions of public sanitation were far better than he'd expected from his limited knowledge of history. Melissa Mailey had explained to him that was because he assumed that British history was synonymous with "history." It was in fact true that, as a rule, public sanitation in seventeenth-century Britain was just as bad as Eddie assumed—Edinburgh was especially notorious all over Europe for its filth, with London not too far behind. But most German towns had a long-established system of cleaning up public refuse, including human waste, with a class of people employed exclusively for that purpose. It was a system which Americans despised, since it involved relegating the caste of waste-haulers to pariah social status, almost like the caste system in Hindu India. Still, it normally served to keep the worst aspects of public refuse to a reasonable level.

The problem was that Magdeburg was, for all practical purposes, a brand new city. And one which, he suspected, had already been sufficiently "infected" with American social and political notions for the standard system of public sanitation to be functioning haphazardly at best. Not for the first time since the Ring of Fire, Eddie was discovering that social change, in the betwixt-and-between period, often had as many drawbacks as it did advantages.

So, he was more than merely grateful when Simpson finally drew up outside the hastily thrown together walls of a building two blocks from Magdeburg's temporary town hall.

Half a dozen Swedish musketeers stood guard outside the American "embassy's" entrance, accompanied by a single American in deer hunter's cammies and armed with a semi-auto Browning shotgun. The difference between the sleek, up-time weapon and the clumsy Swedish matchlocks was almost as marked as the difference between the Swedes' cold-eyed alertness and the American's obvious casualness.

Simpson dismounted slowly and handed his reins to the groom who came trotting around a corner of the hastily assembled structure to take them. The same groom collected Eddie's horse, as well, and Eddie was delighted to let him have it. Indeed, he hoped he'd never see the sharp-spined nag again.

But Simpson paid very little attention to the groom. He'd paused long enough to remove his saddlebags before he let the man take his horse, yet his attitude was very different from one he'd demonstrated when he and Eddie had stopped at one of the inns along the way. Then, he'd taken considerable pains to be certain that his mount would be properly cared for; this time his attention was fully focused on the sentries in front of the building.

No, Eddie realized. Not on all the sentries—only on Matt Lowry, the American.

Simpson's frown was not a pleasant thing to see. He looked, Eddie thought, like a man who'd gotten a sudden whiff of a three-day-dead skunk, and his own resentment rose in automatic reflex. Obviously, the rich bigshot from Pittsburgh could hardly contain his contempt for the hillbilly in front of him. Probably because Matt hadn't kowtowed properly in the face of Simpson's innate superiority!

Eddie waited for Simpson to say something, but the older man only pressed his lips firmly together and nodded to the trooper who was obviously the senior member of the Swedish guards. Then he slung his saddlebags over his shoulder and strode into the building.

* * *

"You're here to do what?" Pete McDougal asked.

Before the Ring of Fire, Pete had headed up the safety committee for the same United Mine Workers local union of which Mike Stearns had been president. Now he was Mike Stearns' personal representative in Magdeburg, at least until the rebuilding capital was ready for a larger American presence. Whether he was there as an ambassador to the CPE or to serve the interests of "Captain General Gars" was an interesting point, but McDougal had the natural diplomacy required to discharge both functions at once.

At the moment, however, that diplomacy appeared to be in abeyance.

"I thought my written authorization was clear enough," Simpson replied coolly.

"Well, I guess it is," McDougal admitted. He looked at Simpson with obvious dislike, but his tone was reasonably courteous. "It just sort of took me by surprise. Nobody warned me you were coming."

"Somehow, I'm not surprised," Simpson said dryly. "Should I assume that that also means that Mr. Haygood has not yet arrived, either?"

"No, you shouldn't. As a matter-of-fact, Jere got here yesterday evening, but there was obviously some kind of screwup. He got the message to head on over, but no one told him exactly why he was supposed to do it." McDougal shrugged. "One of the problems with radio messages when you don't get to talk directly to the person who sent them to you."

"That sort of confusion is something we'd better get over," Simpson observed. "But at least he's here. And I trust that you'll be able to render us the assistance President Stearns assured me we'd receive despite the confusion?"

"I'll try," McDougal said. "But if Mike had warned me you were coming, I would've told him we're way too shorthanded already. I don't know who I've got available to assign as a local guide. Jere doesn't know Magdeburg any better than you do."

"What about Matt Lowry?" Eddie asked. He knew he should have kept his mouth shut, but the look Simpson had given Lowry had really rubbed him the wrong way. The notion of getting Matt assigned as Simpson's guide as a way to rub the old-so-superior bastard's nose in his dependence upon the hillbillies who surrounded him appealed strongly to the teenager.

"Can't spare him," McDougal replied promptly. "Frank—I mean, General Jackson," he corrected himself, glancing at Simpson from the corner of his eye "—made it standing orders that we have to have at least one up-timer on guard here all the time. And Matt's picked up more Swedish than almost anyone else I've got."

"That's a wise precaution on General Jackson's part," Simpson said, and Eddie saw the surprise on McDougal's face. But then Simpson continued in a coldly dispassionate voice. "I can understand why his ability to pick up the local language would make this Mr. Lowry particularly valuable. It's a pity, however, that the language appears to be the only thing he's picked up from the Swedes."

"Meaning what?" McDougal demanded, his expression tightening with anger as Simpson's tone registered.

"Meaning that the Swedish troopers outside your front door are at least five times as alert as he is," Simpson said flatly. "It's pathetic. He's got twice the firepower of everyone else out there, and if it weren't for the Swedes looking out for him, anyone who wanted to would walk right past him. Or worse."

"Now just a minute!" McDougal said hotly. "Matt's been assigned here for over three months, and nobody's ever come close to getting past him! And unlike certain people," he very carefully did not glare pointedly at Simpson, "he was with the Army at the Alte Veste and the Wartburg. Did damned well there, too."

"He probably did," Simpson conceded, apparently completely oblivious to McDougal's dig at his own absence from both those battles. "And I don't believe I expressed any doubts about his courage or his willingness to fight. But there's a difference between guts and willingness and discipline, and discipline is what keeps a man on something as boring as sentry duty alert, effective . . . and alive. The Swedes have it; he doesn't."

He held McDougal' eyes levelly, and to Eddie's astonishment, it was Pete who looked away.

"Well, anyway, I can't spare him," McDougal muttered. Then he shook himself. "I'll have to see if I can find you a local. How good is your German?"

"Passable," Simpson replied, "but Mr. Cantrell's is better than mine." The calmly delivered compliment—if that was what it was—took Eddie by surprise, but McDougal only nodded.

"In that case, I think I can probably find someone. It may take a while, though. Do you have someplace to stay while you're here?"

"No."

"I imagine I can find you a room, then. We're still working on the living quarters of our 'embassy' here. I'm sure we'll get the whole thing finished up . . . eventually. But in the meantime, there's a sort of a boarding house for up-timers and some of the more senior Swedish and Scottish officers. It's more like a barracks, really, but it's only a couple of blocks east of here. We can put you up there."

"That will be fine, given the state of the local construction efforts," Simpson told him. "I suppose Mr. Cantrell and I should head on over and get ourselves settled in while you find us our guide. Will you go ahead and radio Grantville to confirm our arrival?"

"I'll take care of it," McDougal said.

"Thank you. In that case, I'll be looking forward to meeting Mr. Haygood and our guide." He nodded to McDougal, then glanced at Eddie.

"Come along, Mr. Cantrell," he said.

* * *

As a citizen of the seventeenth-century United States, Eddie had become far more accustomed to walking than he'd ever been as a twenty-first-century American. Which turned out to be a good thing as he tagged along behind an obviously indefatigable Simpson, Jere Haygood, and their local guide, Dietrich Schwanhausser.

Haygood was a weathered-looking man in his mid-forties, with light brown-colored hair and hazel eyes. He wore work clothes and high-topped, laced boots which had undoubtedly been comfortably worn long before the Ring of Fire, and an old Army Single-Action Colt revolver rode in a black ballistic nylon holster at his belt. He was built on the lean and rangy model, and he moved with a quick, boundless energy that made Eddie tired just watching him. Simpson, of course, simply took it all in stride.

Eddie didn't know Haygood well—they'd never actually met before the Ring of Fire—but it had been obvious from the beginning that the engineer wasn't a Simpson admirer. He'd been civil enough, but that had been about all anyone could have said for his attitude.

Schwanhausser, on the other hand, had been another matter entirely. He hadn't lived in Magdeburg before its destruction, but most of his relatives had, and he'd lost them all. Apparently, that was part of what had drawn him to the reemerging city as it arose like a dusty, smoky, chaotic phoenix from its own ashes. The fact that he spoke more than passable Swedish and was already acquiring at least a smattering of English had made him extremely valuable to the new capital's local authorities, but McDougal had lured him away from them. Exactly how he'd done so remained something of a mystery to Eddie, but the two computers McDougal had been assigned from Grantville's precious supply of desktops seemed to have had something to do with it.

Whatever the reason for it, Schwanhausser had become one of McDougal's primary liaisons with the city government, and his familiarity with the endless construction projects which typified Magdeburg had proven most useful. The fact that he and Simpson got along like a house on fire (not, Eddie admitted to himself, perhaps the best chosen metaphor, here in the ashes of Magdeburg) didn't seem to be hurting things, either.

Eddie felt more like a half-forgotten appendage than ever as he followed the other three about. Simpson's German was considerably better than his comments to McDougal had suggested. It wasn't as colloquial as the German Eddie had been soaking up through his pores ever since he'd arrived here, and there were times when it sounded more than a little stiff, even odd, to a seventeenth-century ear . . . or to a twenty-first-century ear which had learned the language in the seventeenth, but it was quite adequate for his needs.

So was Haygood's. The engineer had started out following Simpson around with a somewhat martyred expression. Obviously, his most earnest desire had been to be somewhere else, doing something useful. But as the tour of possible shipyard sites continued, Haygood had become increasingly animated. Apparently, the engineer in him was sufficiently fascinated by the task at hand to at least temporarily overcome his antipathy for Simpson. By the time late morning had turned into midafternoon, he was waxing positively enthusiastic over the possibilities.

Eddie was more than a little surprised by that. And, if he was going to be honest, he was also a little disappointed. Not that he wanted the ironclad project to do anything but succeed, of course. It just . . . irritated him to see a good Stearns loyalist hobnobbing with John Chandler Simpson so energetically.

But if Haygood's reaction irritated Eddie, the way Schwanhausser seemed to respond to the industrialist bothered him on a much more profound level. It was as if there were some almost organic relationship between the two of them. One Eddie could sense but not really understand. Something which had automatically located them in relationship to one another in some sort of hierarchy or continuum Eddie hadn't even realized existed.

He decided he didn't like whatever it was. Part of that probably stemmed from his ingrained distrust of anything Simpson did and, especially, his suspicion of Simpson's empire-building tendencies, which made him uncomfortable with the easy authority the older man seemed to possess in Schwanhausser's eyes. But even more than that, he suspected, it was because he'd already seen quite a few seventeenth-century Germans who seemed to find the role of bootlicker a natural fit.

That was the one thing Eddie most hated when he encountered it. He supposed it would have been foolish to expect every German in the seventeenth century to be another Gretchen Richter, or even her brother Hans. And by and large, the majority of the German citizens of the United States had done a remarkable job of adapting to the incredibly radical—by seventeenth-century standards—ideology and political freedoms the up-timers had brought with them. In fact, the way some of them—like Gretchen—had seized the twenty-first-century concepts and run with them sometimes frightened even Eddie just a bit.

But not all of them had adapted. Some of them had good (by their standards) and obvious reasons for disliking the bottom-to-top changes the up-time Americans had inflicted upon them. Those were the people who'd held positions of power and authority under the old order and found the notion of being held accountable by the subjects over whom they had previously ruled but who had now become their fellow citizens most distasteful. Yet some of those same former subjects seemed almost equally lost and unhappy. Perhaps it was because they feared the changes were only temporary—that the United States' enemies would succeed in destroying it after all. If that happened, there would undoubtedly be reprisals against those who had supported the new order when the old one returned to power. And in some cases, it was probably as simple as plain old uncertainty. A case of having learned the old rules of the society which was being remade all about them so well that they felt uncomfortable, even frightened by the ambiguities with which the new rules confronted them.

Whatever it was, Eddie didn't like it when he encountered it, and he'd seen a lot more of it since leaving Grantville. Maybe it was only natural for the people in the small towns and villages who so far had had little direct, personal contact with the up-timers to be less certain, more hesitant. He hoped that was all it was—that as the United States continued to expand outward from Grantville, its spreading influence would erode that hesitation and replace it with the same sort of often fractious independence he'd seen in Grantville itself.

But it hadn't yet, and one of the results was that sometimes an up-timer, even someone who still (in the privacy of his own mind) thought of himself as only a kid, found himself being deferred to and kowtowed to as if he were a natural born aristocrat. No doubt some of them enjoyed that, but it made Eddie's skin crawl when it happened to him.

Of course, he thought sourly, watching Schwanhausser and Haygood listening intently to Simpson, someone like Simpson probably ate it up with a spoon.

" . . . need deep water close to the bank," Simpson said as he and the other two stood side-by-side in ankle-deep mud, staring out over an Elbe River that was still high, wide, and murky with the spring floods. The up-timer gestured energetically at the water. "When we send them down the launch ways, they're going to have a tendency to drive downward into the mud if there's not enough depth of water."

"How many feet deep, Herr Simpson?" Schwanhausser asked. Simpson looked momentarily taken aback, but Schwanhausser smiled. "I have been learning your system of measurement," he reassured the American.

"You have?" Simpson looked down at the shorter German.

"Oh, of course!" Schwanhausser chuckled. "Many of our 'honest merchants' are screaming to the very heavens over the thought of adopting a truly universal standard set of measures, but the Emperor has made it quite clear that the entire Confederated Principalities will adopt your system. And it will be such a relief to deal in feet and yards which are the same from one end of the land to the other, instead of dealing with 'paces' which may be one length in Saxony and another in, say, Westphalia!"

"You can say that again!" Haygood snorted. "And what it's going to mean for engineering projects is even more important. For one thing, we're going to make damned sure that when we get around to building our railroads, 'standard gauge' means just that—standard gauge." He grimaced. "None of that business of every outfit building its own private set of rails to whatever gauge suited it."

Simpson glanced at the engineer and nodded.

"I actually hadn't considered that aspect of the rail extension project, Mr. Haygood. Of course, I'm sure that's only one small instance of ways in which true standardized units of measure are going to provide immense benefits. Although—" he turned to Schwanhausser "—I suppose I can see why some of your merchants might not find the prospect particularly delightful, even if that is incredibly shortsighted of them in the long term. But as far as our problem goes here, I can't really give you a definite answer until I know more about the design displacements of the ships themselves. Let's say that I'm probably going to need somewhere around twelve feet minimum depth."

"Um." Schwanhausser plucked gently at his lower lip in thought. "We should be able to find you that much water, Herr Simpson. But to get it, you may have to extend your . . . launching ways further out from the bank."

"Mr. Haygood?" Simpson asked, cocking an eyebrow at the engineer.

"That we can do," Haygood assured him.

"Well, in that case," Schwanhausser said, "I think this area here might meet your requirements. As far as I know, all of this stretch of the river—from there, at the corner of that factory's lot, clear down to that small point in the angle of the bend—is still available. That would give you a frontage on the river of—what? Perhaps two hundred of your yards?"

"More like two hundred and fifty," Simpson mused.

"Actually," Haygood said, casting his engineer's eye over the same distance, "it's probably about two hundred and seventy-five. Closer to three hundred than to two hundred, anyway."

"I will defer to your judgment," Schwanhausser said, then laughed. "I did say I was learning your units of measurement, not that I have already mastered them!"

Simpson chuckled slightly and turned his back to the river while he studied the terrain for several minutes. They were well outside the old walls of Magdeburg. In fact, they were beyond even the area already being developed for the new factories.

"I could really use even more frontage than that, actually," he said.

"We're only building three ships," Eddie pointed out. He tried very hard to avoid sounding like he was nitpicking, but from the expressionless glance Simpson gave him he suspected that he hadn't completely succeeded.

"No, Mr. Cantrell," the older man said after a moment. "If, in fact, I agree to accept the responsibility for building your ironclads, they will most assuredly not be the only ships built here. At the very least, we'll be building additional tugs and barges. More importantly, don't you think it would be a good idea to provide a little something in the way of support for your battleships? In one sense, after all, it doesn't matter how powerful and well armored we make them, does it? If there are only three of them, then they can only be in three places at once, and I can assure you that we'll need to cover more than three places at a time sooner than you may expect."

"Well, yeah," Eddie said. "But right now, all we're authorized to build is the ironclads."

"Actually," Simpson said in a voice whose patient tone surprised Eddie, "we aren't authorized to build anything at this particular moment. All we have is President Stearns'—" he managed to use Mike's title without so much as a hint of sarcasm, Eddie noticed, and wondered if that was because of Haygood's and Schwanhausser's presence "—assurance that if he decides to support the project he'll succeed in obtaining authorization for it."

He smiled very slightly at Eddie's expression.

"Don't get excited, Mr. Cantrell. The President and I may not see eye to eye on a great many issues, but I don't doubt for a moment that if he decides to push the ironclads through, he'll succeed. In fact, I expect him to. And I also expect him to support my proposal to construct a fleet of timberclads to back them up."

"Timberclads?" Eddie could almost feel his ears perk up, and Haygood looked interested, as well.

"Precisely." Simpson nodded. "Timberclads should be survivable against seventeenth-century artillery. After all, they stood up reasonably well against nineteenth-century field artillery at the beginning of the Civil War, didn't they?"

"Yeah," Eddie admitted. "Of course," he added in a more challenging tone, "they retired the timberclads as soon as they could, didn't they?"

"Actually, they continued to use them throughout the war," Simpson disagreed. "Once they'd developed the capability—and had the time—to build better designed, more heavily armored vessels, they did build all of them they could. But the existing timberclads continued to serve in supporting roles until the very end of the war. And our problem, Mr. Cantrell, is that we're going to begin with the ability to build a very limited number of heavily armored units—by seventeenth-century standards, at least—but we're not going to be able to develop the infrastructure to build any more of them for quite some time. 'Building down,' I believe the President calls it, and rightly so. Which means that in order to project force as broadly as we're going to need to project it, we're going to have to accept the units we can actually build to do it with." He shrugged. "Timberclads should just about fill the bill."

"He's got a point, Eddie," Haygood put in. "A pretty good one, in fact. Timberclads may not be as good as 'proper' ironclads, but they'll kick the ass of any seventeenth-century 'warship' they run into. At least on a one-to-one basis."

Eddie turned the thought over in his brain, pondering it from several angles. And then, after a moment, he felt himself beginning to nod.

"You're right," he said. "I guess maybe I did get a bit too fixated on building the Benton or the Tennessee," he admitted in a chastened tone. "It's not like we're going to have to run the batteries at Vicksburg or anything anytime soon, is it?"

"Probably not," Simpson agreed. "Not, at least, in terms of facing concentrations of true heavy artillery. But don't look so downhearted, Mr. Cantrell. Timberclads should serve adequately in many instances, but there will be cases where properly designed, well-armored ships with heavy artillery are required, as well. In fact, the timberclads' actual function will probably be to carry out routine patrols and shipping protection. When it comes to an actual standup fight with a properly emplaced battery or fort, their job will be to back the ironclads up rather than get into the thick of it themselves."

He sounded almost as if he were genuinely trying to cheer Eddie up, although the teenager found the possibility unlikely.

"In the meantime, Dietrich," the older man continued, turning back to their guide, "I believe you're probably right about the basic suitability of the site. I'd like to get a little more of the river bank, if we can, and I'm going to need enough area running back away from the river for the yard facilities themselves and for barracks and a drill field, as well."

"And eventually, at least, we're going to want someplace to put a decent drydock," Haygood put in, as enthusiastically as if the idea of a naval shipyard had been his own brainchild from the beginning, and Simpson nodded without looking away from Schwanhausser.

"That is probably possible, Herr Simpson," the German said thoughtfully. "It may be expensive," he warned.

"I suspect that if Gustav Adolf asks them politely, whoever owns it will be willing to be reasonable," Simpson said dryly, and Schwanhausser chuckled.

"I imagine they might," he agreed.

"Good." Simpson glanced up at the sun, and then down at his watch. It was an expensive electric job which, unlike most of the battery-powered watches in Grantville, continued to tick smoothly along. At first, Eddie had wondered if Simpson were buying additional batteries on the black market, but he'd been forced to give up that cherished suspicion when he realized that it was one of the kinetic-powered ones which used the wearer's motion to recharge its built in capacitor. Which meant, of course, that John Chandler Simpson possessed a modern watch which might run for decades yet.

Not that anyone needed a watch to guess what was on his mind just now, Eddie thought. The sun was settling steadily lower in the west in a funeral pyre of red and gold cloud.

"I suppose we should be getting back to our quarters," Simpson remarked, then grimaced. "I don't imagine the street lights are going to be very bright around here after dark."

"No," Schwanhausser agreed, and glanced back and forth between the three up-timers. "In fact," he continued after a moment in a diffident tone, "the truth is that it isn't always safe for Americans to move about after dark."

"It isn't?" Simpson asked, and the German shook his head. The up-timer glanced at Haygood, but from the engineer's expression he didn't know any more about the local situation than Simpson and Eddie did, and the ex-industrialist looked back at Schwanhausser. "Is that simply because the local criminal element finds the lack of lighting . . . congenial to its efforts?" he asked. "Or is there some specific reason why Americans in particular should be on their guard?"

"It—" Schwanhausser began, then paused.

"Much of it probably is no more than desperation, darkness, and opportunity, Herr Simpson," he continued after a moment. "Even with all of the construction jobs here in the city, some remain who have no means of support. Some of those who lack work do, however, have families. We have enough criminals even without those circumstances, of course, but it has been much worse than usual this past winter. Armies, battles, and devastation do not contribute to social tranquility, after all.

"On the other hand, that situation seems to be improving now that spring is here and the pace of construction has picked up still further. But I fear that there is another danger, one I have not yet been able to convince Herr McDougal to take sufficiently seriously."

"Which is?" Simpson asked.

"Richelieu," Schwanhausser half-snarled, and his head swiveled as if he were peering about for assassins. "Do not, whatever you do, underestimate that Frenchman, Herr Simpson! You and the other Americans are the greatest threat he faces, and he knows it well. Did he not attempt to murder your very children because he knew it?"

Simpson nodded slowly, and Eddie felt a chill which owed very little to the approach of night run down his spine.

"Well, then," Schwanhausser said, returning Simpson's nod. "Be warned. There are rumors of assassins and prices on American heads. No doubt such rumors would abound, whatever the truth behind them, of course. That is Herr McDougal's opinion, at least, and there is probably some reason in it. Yet I do not think that they are only rumors this time."

* * *

"That it," Bill Franklin announced, tipping back in his chair in front of the radio.

"Thank you," Simpson said. He was standing behind Franklin, unable to see his expression, but Eddie saw the radio operator roll his eyes. None of McDougal's staff liked the industrialist one bit. Of course, all of them were Stearns loyalists, and most of them had been solid union members before the Ring of Fire, which created two perfectly good reasons for their attitude right there. Simpson couldn't have been unaware of it, but he certainly didn't act as if he were, and Eddie wondered whether that was out of a sense of towering superiority which refused to acknowledge the slings and arrows of his social inferiors. That was what he'd written it down as at first, but he was beginning to question his initial assumptions. He didn't much care for that, because he liked things nice and clear, and he preferred for the people about him to remain if not predictable, at least consistent. The thought that there might be rather more to John Chandler Simpson than he'd assumed was particularly unpalatable, especially given the unmitigated jerk Simpson had shown himself to be during the immediate aftermath of their arrival in Thuringia.

Eddie wasn't entirely certain why he found the idea so distasteful. Well, he knew part of the reason—he didn't like Simpson, and he hated the very thought of finding something about the man to respect. The ingrained suspicion and hostility which were part of Eddie's self-identification as one of Mike Stearns' men undoubtedly played their parts, as well, he admitted frankly, yet he suspected that there was more to it even than that.

Maybe what it really came down to was that he'd never before encountered the combination in a single person of truly superior abilities with the capacity to make truly enormous mistakes. Intellectually, Eddie knew it was entirely possible for something like that to happen, but he'd never personally experienced it, and it was an affront to his teenager's sense of absolute right and absolute wrong. Worse, it made him wonder if he might be equally capable of screwing the pooch. Not a pleasant possibility at all, that!

"Will the commo link be manned all night?" Simpson asked after a moment.

"Well, yeah," Franklin replied. "'Course there's not much chance Mike—I mean, the President—is gonna be seeing this before sometime tomorrow morning." His voice was somewhat elaborately patient, although no one could quite have called it overtly discourteous.

"I didn't expect that he would," Simpson said calmly. "I was asking for future information, Mr. Franklin. If this project goes forward, I'll need twenty-four-hour communications capability, and I was simply wondering if it already existed."

"Oh." Franklin had the grace to blush slightly, but he didn't go overboard about it. "Yeah," he said in a much closer to normal tone, "we've got round-the-clock coverage. It's not like being able to pick up your cell phone, but we can usually get the message through without too much delay."

"Excellent," Simpson said, and nodded to him. "Come along, Mr. Cantrell," he said then, and stepped out of the radio room and headed back up the short hall towards McDougal's office.

He was finally showing at least some signs of fatigue, Eddie noticed, although they were still minor enough most people wouldn't have noticed at all. Nothing more than a slight limp on the right side—something even Eddie wouldn't have noted if he hadn't been following Simpson, Haygood, and Schwanhausser around all day.

"What do you think about the possibilities?" he asked as he followed the older man down the hall. He hadn't seen the four-page, handwritten draft of the message Franklin had just transmitted back to Grantville for Simpson.

"I think . . . I think it's possible, Mr. Cantrell," Simpson replied after only the briefest pause, then stopped just outside McDougal's office and turned to face Eddie.

"I don't say that I think it will be easy, you understand," he continued. "But assuming that the President is as successful as usual in prying the necessary resources out of the Allocations Committee, and assuming that Gustav Adolf supports this as enthusiastically as I certainly expect him to and that Mr. Haygood's services are made available to us, initially at least, then I believe it should be entirely possible to set up our navy yard here in Magdeburg. Shipping all of the materials we'll need from Grantville will be a royal pain in the ass, of course, but I don't see how we could realistically expect to be able to build and launch them very much up-river from here. And the river itself is going to require quite a bit of improvement before we can move them freely, even operating from here instead of Halle."

"But you think the idea itself is really practical?" Eddie asked.

"Yes, Mr. Cantrell, I do," Simpson told him with a slight smile which, for some reason, made Eddie feel unexpectedly good. "Mind you, I can see quite a few aspects of your initial proposal which are going to require some . . . refinement, shall we say? But overall, I believe that it's not only a practical idea, but a good one."

"Does that mean you're gonna take the job?" Eddie demanded with an edge of lingering suspicion.

"Let's just say," Simpson said, "that my participation in the project is something of a prerequisite if it's going to succeed." He smiled again, ever so thinly, as Eddie stiffened. "Of course it is, Mr. Cantrell," he chided. "Or were you under the misapprehension that there was anyone else in Grantville who'd have even a clue as to how to make this work?"

It was truly remarkable, Eddie reflected as the ex-industrialist resumed his progress towards McDougal's office, how easily Simpson could go from making him feel obscurely pleased to absolutely infuriated with only two simple sentences.

Nor was Simpson finished infuriating people for the evening, either, the teenager discovered a few moments later.

McDougal looked up with something less than total enthusiasm as Simpson led Eddie back into his office.

"Is there something else I can do for you?" he asked.

"Actually, there is," Simpson told him, seating himself in one of the chairs facing McDougal's desk. Eddie started to sit in the other chair, then stopped. Sitting beside Simpson might seem to be ranging himself with the outsider against McDougal, so he chose to stand, leaning against the wall, instead.

"Oh?" McDougal sat back in his chair, his expression wary as Simpson's tone registered.

"I wanted to ask you about something Mr. Schwanhausser mentioned to me earlier this evening," Simpson said. "He advised us to be cautious about our movements."

"Not that again!" McDougal sighed, then shook his head wearily. "Was Dietrich bending your ear about Richelieu again?" he asked.

"As a matter of fact, he was."

"Well, he's just a little bit loony on the topic," McDougal said. He shrugged. "I guess it's not too surprising, really. He did lose most of his family when Tilly burned Magdeburg. A lot of the locals got pretty paranoid after that happened. Now they see murderers and assassins hiding in every alley, and of course the only person who could be sending them is Richelieu."

"So you don't think there's anything to his fears?"

"That Richelieu is sending assassins to Magdeburg? No, I don't think there's anything to that. And if he were sending them here at all, he'd be sending them after Gustav Adolf, not us. Which doesn't mean that there isn't enough 'street crime' here in Magdeburg to make it smart to stay alert."

"Have any of our people—up-timers, I mean—been attacked?"

"Jim Ennis got knifed about a week ago. Hurt pretty bad, in fact, though it looks like he's going to recover fully," McDougal said. Simpson looked at him sharply, and McDougal shrugged again. "Lucky for him, one of the Swedish patrols was passing through and heard him scream. He managed to run for it after the one stab, and the thief gave up and disappeared back down the alley when he saw the patrol. The bastard got Jim's wallet and his pocket watch first, though. Big windup railroad model, too, not battery-powered."

"So you think it was a robbery? A mugging?"

"What else could it have been? The guy demanded Jim's wallet and his 'jewels,' then stuck a knife in him. Sounds like a robbery to me." McDougal sounded a bit impatient, and Simpson snorted.

"Doesn't it seem just a bit odd to you that he stabbed this Ennis after getting what he'd come for?" McDougal looked blank, and Simpson shook his head. "I assume from what you just said that your Mr. Ennis gave the 'robber' what he'd demanded instead of trying to resist?"

"Damn straight he did," McDougal replied. "Jim's about fifty years old, and the first thing he knew about it was when he stepped around the corner and the bastard showed him the knife! What the hell would you have done in his position?"

"Quite possibly exactly the same thing," Simpson said. "But my point is that he did what this 'thief' of yours told him to. He handed over what the man wanted and didn't resist. And the 'robber' still chose to stab him. You said the Swedish patrol heard him 'scream,' not 'shout for help,' so I'm assuming that he hadn't even tried to summon assistance before he was stabbed."

"This isn't the twenty-first century," McDougal pointed out. "There isn't exactly a cop on every street corner, and there are some real hardcases and badasses hanging around here. Some of them would cut your throat for a nickel."

"I don't doubt it. For that matter, there were plenty of places back home where people would have cut your throat just as cheerfully for even less. But usually, Mr. McDougal—usually, I say—even around here thieves don't go around murdering people just for the hell of it. I'm perfectly well aware that there are exceptions to the rule. But it's still just a bit unusual, I'd think, for someone who's been able to get everything he demanded with only the threat of violence to go ahead and murder the person who gave it to him."

"Like I say, it's a rough neighborhood," McDougal replied. "People get knifed all the time, sometimes for no reason at all."

"Actually, people very seldom get knifed 'for no reason at all,' " Simpson disagreed. "There's always some reason for it."

"Maybe so, but there must have been dozens of locals who've gotten robbed, beaten up, or stabbed in the last two or three months, compared to a single up-timer."

"On the other hand," Simpson pointed out, "there aren't simply dozens of locals for each up-timer in Magdeburg, Mr. McDougal. There are thousands of them. Statistically, Americans—excuse me, up-timers—represent an extremely small sample of the total population. So if this was no more than a random street crime, the odds against the thief picking one of the literal handful of up-timers in Magdeburg must have been quite high, don't you think?"

"Look," McDougal said, "why don't you come right out and say whatever it is you're driving at, Simpson. What? You think I'm just been sitting here on my ass ignoring some sort of master plot against all Americans everywhere? Is that it? You're accusing me of not doing my job?"

"I didn't say that," Simpson replied. "In fact, all I intended to do was to suggest to you that Dieter might have a point. Of course it's possible that Mr. Ennis was simply the victim of an armed robber with a particularly vicious temper. But it's also possible that the entire object was to make an assassination look like a robbery. That was all I came in here to suggest. On the other hand, now that you ask, and after hearing your reaction to my questions and my suggestion that you might want to be just a little open-minded on the question, I have to say that, yes, it does sound to me like you've been sitting on your ass—or maybe your brain—where this particular possibility is concerned."

"Listen, you—" McDougal began furiously, but Simpson only shook his head and stood.

"I didn't come in here to argue with you, McDougal. I came in here to try to get you to think. Obviously, whatever your other virtues—and I'm sure they're legion—may be, thinking isn't one of them. You do remember, as Dieter himself reminded me just this afternoon, that it was Richelieu who ordered the attack on the high school? The high school in which your children were students? Why do you think he did that? Richelieu is capable of total ruthlessness, but the man isn't a complete psychotic, you know. He attacked the school because of what it represents, and what it represents is knowledge. The information Gustav Adolf needs and that Richelieu fears even more than he does the Spanish Habsburgs. Well, he didn't get the high school, and he didn't manage to kill all of your teachers and all of your children in one fell swoop, but that's not the only place knowledge is locked up, is it? It's also walking around inside the brain of every single up-timer. And do you seriously think that Richelieu isn't perfectly capable of and willing to attempt to eliminate as many of those brains as he can?"

McDougal stared at him, jaw clenched, and Simpson snorted.

"Apparently you do. Well, I hope the people responsible for keeping your President alive are a bit more willing to think the unthinkable than you appear to be. I may not be one of his greatest admirers, but if I were Richelieu, the only person I'd want dead right now even more badly than I wanted Gustav Adolf that way would be Mike Stearns. You might want to pass that assessment along to him."

Simpson's voice was desert-dry, and McDougal's jaw unlocked enough to drop ever so slightly. Simpson observed the phenomenon and produced another snort, then glanced at Eddie.

"Come along, Mr. Cantrell. I'd like to find some supper before we turn in for the evening."

* * *

Dinner was quite probably the best meal Eddie had eaten since leaving Grantville. In fact, it was in the running for the best meal he'd had since the Ring of Fire, period. The "restaurant" was little more than a very large tent—or, at least, a tarp stretched across two-and-a-fraction walls of what would someday be a proper restaurant but which was currently still under construction. At least the kitchens seemed to be complete, and The Crown and Eagle Bar and Grill was obviously the establishment of choice for both the Americans—Haygood was already there when they arrived—and many of the Swedish officers stationed in Magdeburg.

The name was a nice touch, Eddie thought, and he rather suspected that The Crown and Eagle was a franchise of the owners of the Thuringen Gardens back in Grantville. It wouldn't be surprising, since everyone knew Gustav Adolf was planning to make Magdeburg his new imperial capital in Germany. The city was already a "boom town," and the boom was just getting underway. There was certainly something very up-time about the choice of names, and he recognized two of the bouncers from the Gardens. The food was just as good, too, and he tucked into the steak Simpson had decided to treat both of them to.

There were times when Eddie missed the twenty-first century with excruciating poignancy, and memories of food had a tendency to bring them on. No pre-Ring of Fire American had been even remotely prepared for the change in diet imposed by their transition to the seventeenth century. It wasn't just the esoteric or "modern" foods they missed, either. It was the fact that the entire food distribution system, and the food production system, as well, was so damned limited compared to the one they'd grown up with. Steak, for example. It was generally available, but it cost an arm and a leg. Or corn-on-the-cob. They were lucky as hell that they'd had seed corn available when they were kicked back in time, but there hadn't been enough of it. Almost every kernel they'd been able to produce in the shortened growing season they'd enjoyed after arriving in Thuringia had gone right back into seeds, rather than onto people's tables. And tomatoes. Or avocados. God, Eddie had never imagined that he would have been willing to contemplate homicide for a couple of scoops of guacamole!

But at least The Crown and Eagle's cooks knew how to do justice to one of their extraordinarily expensive T-bones . . . unlike the cooks in the inns in which he and Simpson had stayed or dined on their journey to Magdeburg. Most of them had figured that the only way to cook beef was to boil it into a consistency which would have made decent cavalry boots. This steak, on the other hand, was done to medium-rare perfection (over an open-fire grill, of course!) and served up with nicely sauteed mushrooms, and a salad of very early bibb lettuce (courtesy of the up-timers) with a vinaigrette dressing.

There was even, wonder of wonders, a baked potato. Potatoes had already been introduced in large parts of Germany before the Ring of Fire—to Eddie's surprise, since he knew that Frederick the Great had had to force them onto Prussia in the next century—but they were still something of a rarity. Of course, once he reflected upon the matter, it made sense that The Crown and Eagle would serve them, given that so much of the establishment's popularity stemmed from its "American cuisine."

Eddie luxuriated in all of them with shameless hedonism. In fact, it was quite some time before he was able to tear himself sufficiently away from gastronomic considerations to pay much attention to whatever else was going on about him.

" . . . so the point, you see," Simpson was saying to a pock-faced Scotsman who was obviously one of Gustav Adolf's officers, "is to eventually completely eliminate the pike from the battlefield."

"Och, mon, you're daft!" the Scotsman declared. "There's never a day musketeers could stop a hard charge of well-trained pikes without pikes of their own." He shook his head and thumped his beer tankard on the rough-planked table. "The King's already increased his proportion of shot to pikes to two-to-one, and that's higher than any of these stinking Imperialists. But any more than that, and we've nothing to stop t'other side's pikes with, and there's an end to it. It might be that if all our 'new weapons' could fire as fast as yours can there might be something in it, but they're not going to be able to, are they now?"

"I'm not sure exactly what sort of firearms are being considered, actually," Simpson admitted, and looked down the table at Haygood. "Mr. Haygood? Do you?"

"No, not really," the engineer replied after washing down a mouthful with a healthy swig of beer. "I understand that they're still debating the advantages of flintlocks and caplocks. I know which one I'd prefer, but the manufacturing end isn't my kind of engineering, and I've been kind of busy with other projects, I'm afraid. So far, I don't think anyone's even suggested the possibility of a breechloader."

"Given the difficulties in manufacturing proper cartridges—and, for that matter, fulminating powder and primer caps—I'd assume that you're going to be looking at muzzle-loaders of some sort, at best," Simpson agreed, and turned back to the Scotsman.

"I'm guessing that they'll probably be flintlocks, but the designs should include cylindrical iron ramrods and conical touchholes. In that case, your rate of fire is going to be considerably higher than it is right now, but you're right that it's never going to match that of up-time weapons. I'm sure that plans are already afoot to provide you with rifles, which will let you open fire effectively at greater ranges, so you'll generally have longer to shoot at an attacking enemy, but that certainly isn't enough by itself to guarantee that you can stop a determined charge.

"But you're missing at least part of the point, Captain. If you eliminate the pikes, then you can take the pikemen and issue all of them rifles—muskets, if you prefer—as well. And if your entire army is equipped with rifles and bayonets . . ." He paused. "Ah, they did mention bayonets to you, didn't they?" he asked.

"You mean that wee silly knife they're talking about hanging on the end of a musket?" The Scotsman shrugged. "Och, and won't that be useful against some bastard with a twelve-foot pike!"

"That 'wee silly knife' will be a lot more useful than you think, especially if your troops are trained with them," Haygood interjected. The Scotsman looked skeptical, and Haygood showed his teeth in a thin smile. "What happens when somebody gets inside your reach with a shorter, handier weapon?" he challenged. "Say, someone with a knife who blocks your sword to one side while he rams it into your belly?"

The Scotsman blinked, and it was Haygood's turn to shrug.

"Trust me, properly used, a bayoneted rifle is very effective in close combat. As it happens, I'm one of the very few up-timers who's had actual experience with the kind of weapons and tactics Mr. Simpson's talking about." He did not, Eddie noticed, explain that his "actual experience" was that of a hobbyist, and the Scotsman frowned.

"Mr. Haygood is correct," Simpson said. "For all practical purposes, bayonets will turn every single man in your entire army into a pikeman, if he's needed. And in the meantime, if all of your infantry are musket-armed and trained and disciplined to employ those muskets in mass fire that's properly timed, not very many pike formations are going to be able to close with them."

The Scotsman looked more thoughtful, but it was clear that acceptance still ran a distant second—or third—to skepticism, and Simpson cocked his head.

"Suppose that I gave your musketeers weapons that could open aimed fire at a range of, say, three hundred paces and expect to hit man-sized targets at that distance. And that I got their rate of fire up to four shots a minute, at the same time," he suggested after a moment. "And suppose that your army had nine thousand men in it, and that I organized them into three firing lines, each three thousand men long. And then suppose that I organized your musketeers into ninety-six-man companies, each composed of three thirty-two-man 'platoons,' and trained them to fire by half-platoons."

The Scotsman was staring at Simpson, his eyes almost crossed as he tried to follow what the American was saying.

"All right, now," Simpson continued. "If you've got three thousand men in each line, then that means that each line consists of thirty-one companies, or ninety-three platoons, or a total between all three lines of sixty-three companies and . . . two-hundred and seventy-nine platoons, right?"

The sandbagged-looking Scotsman nodded, obviously prepared to let the up-timer do the mathematical heavy lifting, and Simpson shrugged.

"Well, the math is actually pretty simple. If your musketeers can fire four times every minute, then the total reload cycle for each man in your formation is approximately fifteen seconds. So if half of each platoon in your first line fires, and then two and a half seconds later the second half of each platoon in the first line fires, and then two and a half seconds after that half of each platoon in your second line fires, and so on, your nine thousand men are going to the sending the next best thing to fifteen hundred rounds down-range every two and a half seconds. That's almost thirty-six thousand rounds per minute."

The Scotsman's eyes weren't crossed now—indeed, they were almost bulging, and Simpson shrugged again.

"But the total numbers don't begin to tell the entire tale, do they?" he inquired mildly. "Remember, fifteen hundred of them are going to be arriving every two and a half seconds. Effectively, there will be a continuous, unbroken wall of bullets pouring into any pike block foolish enough to try to close with your formation, which I should think would have at least a tiny bit of an effect on its morale. Obviously you've seen a battlefield or two of your own. How well do you think a formation of pikes would do when it came to holding its ranks and carrying through with an effective charge under those circumstances?"

"Carrying through?" The Scotsman shook his head as if he'd just been punched. "Mother of God, mon! If you're telling the truth about the range of these 'rifles' of yours, then it would take a good three minutes—at least!—under fire for the pikes to close, and that would mean—"

"That would mean that they were trying to charge through over one hundred thousand rounds of continuous fire," Simpson said, once again doing the math for him obligingly. "So if there were nine thousand pikemen, and if one third of the shots your men fired actually hit, you'd kill each of them about four times."

The American smiled thinly, and raised one hand, palm uppermost.

"Of course, that's under perfect conditions. It assumes that the terrain lets you see the target and begin engaging it at extended range, and that your rate of fire isn't affected by something like rain, barrel fouling, or something like that. And once the firing begins, smoke alone is going to cause individual accuracy to drop off pretty severely. But I think you see my point?"

"Aye, you might be saying that," the Scotsman said, and looked at Haygood, as if seeking additional confirmation of Simpson's claims.

"Mr. Simpson's description isn't exactly the one I would have used," the engineer said. "It sounds more like what the Brits did to the French during the Napoleonic wars than the sort of tactics I'm trained in. Of course, most of the differences are because the ones he's talking about would make the kind of tactics you're accustomed to downright suicidal. Which is why we developed better ones which were even more effective. Mr. Simpson's example was hypothetical, but in the up-time American Civil War, a battle was fought—would have been fought—with weapons very similar to the ones he's describing, about a hundred and thirty years from now at a place called Chickamauga, and in just two days, the two sides suffered over thirty-seven thousand casualties. And at the Battle of Antietam, in the same war, the two sides suffered twenty-two thousand casualties in a single day."

It was obvious to Eddie that no one had ever explained it to the Scotsman the way Simpson and Haygood just had—certainly not with the numbers the two of them had produced—and the officer stared at the Americans for two or three more seconds before he drained his tankard. Then he waved it at one of the barmaids for a refill and turned back to Simpson.

"And what other evil little surprises would you be suggesting?" he asked, leaning his forearms on the table and gazing at the American intently.

* * *

It was well past midnight before Simpson, Haygood and Eddie left The Crown and Eagle. Many of the Swedish officers who'd helped fill the restaurant had been thoroughly standoffish when they first arrived—no doubt because Simpson's reputation as an anti-German and anti-Swedish bigot had preceded him. Despite that, however, most of them had been listening when he began his discussion with the pock-faced Scotsman. And whatever his other faults might have been, it seemed that John Simpson had a definite gift for getting at the heart—or, at least, the nuts and bolts—of an explanation.

Even Eddie, with his wargamer's fascination with military history, wouldn't have thought of breaking down the numbers the way Simpson had. He would have just waved his hands and insisted that the weight of fire would have been sufficient to break the enemy's charge. Which would have overlooked the fact that the members of his audience, whatever theoretical faith they might have in Americans' technical ingenuity, were basing their understanding of what he was saying on their actual experience with matchlocks. No wonder they'd had such serious reservations about the possibilities!

But once Simpson had gotten the actual numbers across to them—and once the notion that Haygood really knew what he was talking about had percolated through their brains—virtually every officer in the restaurant had started easing closer and closer to the table the three Americans shared. And as they'd closed in, they'd begun to ask other questions, as well. Lots of other questions.

Simpson had done his best to answer those questions, and somehow Eddie hadn't been as surprised as he once would have been when Simpson frankly admitted, from time to time, that he didn't know an answer. When that happened, Haygood usually did, although there were times when even he had to admit he was stumped. Two or three times, Simpson actually turned to Eddie, drawing the younger man into the conversation when he rightly suspected that the question was the sort a war game enthusiast might know how to answer. But there was a difference between the explanations Eddie gave and those Simpson provided. Indeed, there was a difference between the answers that came from Simpson and those which came from Haygood, as well, and as Eddie listened to the older man, he knew what that difference was . . . and why it convinced Gustav Adolf's officers to listen so intently to the ex-Navy officer.

Experience. John Simpson had never served in the howling chaos of a seventeenth-century battlefield, yet there was something about his voice and manner, an assurance that he knew what he was talking about from personal, first-hand experience when he explained things to the hard-bitten officers of the Swedish Army. Not, perhaps, the same experience as their own, but experience nonetheless.

They kept him talking for hours before they let him go. And when they finally did let him take his leave, it was with nods of mutual respect unlike anything Simpson had ever seen in Grantville itself, before or after the Ring of Fire.

It would have taken a superman not to have been pleased and flattered by such a reception, and whatever else he might have been, John Simpson Chandler was not a superman. The after-supper discussion had to have been the most enjoyable single evening he'd spent since arriving as a less than eager guest for his son's wedding, and it showed. He was never going to be an expressive man, Eddie realized, yet there was a new liveliness in his voice and eyes as the two of them finally gathered up a Haygood who'd apparently had a beer or two too many and headed towards their quarters in the boardinghouse where McDougal had rented rooms for them.

It was blacker than the pits of Hell outside the restaurant. Eddie remembered how Mr. Ferrara had once complained, before the Ring of Fire, about light pollution and how it interfered with observations on their astronomy field trips even in rural West Virginia, but he hadn't really understood at the time. Not the way he did now.

Not even the endless months of the winter just past could have prepared him for the darkness which enveloped the one vast construction site which was Magdeburg. Dark as those winter nights had seemed at the time, Grantville at least still had electricity. Light bulbs were one of the items which had fallen under strict rationing controls as yet one more utterly irreplaceable twenty-first-century resource which had been taken completely for granted before the Ring of Fire. Because of that rationing, Grantville's homes and businesses and public places had seemed woefully dimly lit to up-timer eyes.

Compared to Magdeburg at midnight, however, Grantville at its dimmest had been lit up like downtown Las Vegas on a Saturday night. The inky blackness of the muddy streets and alleys between the half-completed walls of the buildings was broken only by occasional—very occasional—torches or lanterns. In many ways, the widely scattered pinpricks of light only made the darkness even denser by comparison, and Eddie buttoned his denim jacket against a chill night breeze as he followed Simpson out of the restaurant. Simpson, on the other hand, actually unzipped his light windbreaker, as if he welcomed the briskness.

It would have been easy to become hopelessly lost amid all of the heaps of brick, timbers, and other building materials, but they didn't have all that far to go. Besides, dark and confusing as most of the city might be, Pete McDougal had insisted that the United States' official headquarters had to be well-lighted—by Magdeburg standards, at least—at all times. That provided a visual beacon they could orient themselves upon, and they moved out briskly (or, at least, as briskly as Haygood's . . . cheerfulness allowed) through the muddy darkness.

Haygood was kind enough to provide them with an enthusiastic, if not particularly tuneful serenade, but Simpson wasn't in a very talkative mood. No doubt he'd used up a month or two of conversation after supper, Eddie reflected just a bit sourly. Eddie didn't feel much more like talking himself, though. He was too busy with his own ruminations, still trying to figure out how he felt about the surprising, apparently contradictory layers of Simpson's personality. And so the two of them trudged along silently through the deserted streets and alleys.

Except that they weren't quite "deserted" after all.

Eddie was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn't notice when Simpson abruptly halted. His first inkling that anything out of the ordinary was happening came when he literally ran into the older man's back. It was a much more substantial back than Eddie would have anticipated, and the wiry teenager bounced backward a step and a half from the impact.

"What the hell—?" he began angrily, but before he could complete the question, several things happened at once.

He and Simpson had just entered the faint spill of light from a lantern burning outside an alley mouth. It was the most feeble of illuminations, but clearly it was enough for the three men who'd been waiting in the alley to identify them. Eddie knew it was, although it took him two or three precious seconds to realize the fact.

"There!" someone hissed in German. "That's them—get them!"

Eddie was still gaping, trying to get a handle on what was happening, when he saw the gleam of naked steel and three burly figures coming straight for him. Confusion barely had time to begin giving way to fear and the beginning of panic as he realized Dieter Schwanhausser had been right to warn them. Whether or not the men in the alley worked directly for Richelieu didn't really matter. What mattered was that all three of them were obviously intent upon shoving a foot or so of knife blade through one Eddie Cantrell.

He opened his mouth to shout for help, even as he stumbled backward another step. But that was as far as he got before a hammer blow of sound smashed his ears like a baseball bat.

The muzzle flash lit up the night like a lightning bolt. Eddie had never before seen a handgun fired in near darkness at very close range, and the brilliant eruption of light stabbed at his eyeballs like a knife. But if it came as a surprise to Eddie, it was far more of a surprise to their assailants.

Eddie heard the beginning of a scream of agony, then cringed as the baseball bat whacked him across the ears again and another stroboscopic blast of light assaulted his optic nerves. But that same flash of light seemed to carve John Simpson out of the darkness, and Eddie saw the nine-millimeter automatic which had materialized magically from somewhere under his unzipped windbreaker.

The city slicker from Pittsburgh had dropped into a half-crouched shooter's stance, with the handgun held two-handed, and the abortive scream of pain was chopped abruptly off as Simpson's second shot hit the lead attacker dead center, just above the collarbone.

One of the other assailants shouted an incredulous curse and lunged desperately forward, but Simpson didn't even shift position. Haygood was just beginning to claw at the revolver holstered at his hip when Simpson fired again—twice, in a quick one-two sequence that punched a pair of bullets into the triangle formed by the would-be killer's forehead and the base of his throat.

That one went down without even a scream, his throat and the back of his neck exploding in a grisly spray, Eddie noticed almost numbly, and the third man hesitated. It was only the briefest of pauses, and Eddie always wondered afterward exactly what the man had thought he was doing. He might even have entertained some notion of throwing down his knife and surrendering, but if that was what he had in mind, he didn't get around to it in time to do him any good.

Simpson's point of aim shifted, and Eddie had a fraction of a second to wonder how the man could possibly see what he was doing after the blinding brilliance of the muzzle flashes. Maybe he was actually closing his eyes—or one of them, at least—as he fired. Eddie didn't have a clue about that, but it didn't really matter, either. The nine-millimeter pistol barked twice more in that same, deadly rhythm. One shot hit the third attacker perhaps an inch above the heart; the second took him squarely above the right eye and slammed him back to slither bonelessly down the alley wall behind him just as Haygood's revolver finally cleared its holster.

Eddie Cantrell stood there, frozen in stunned disbelief. The entire attack couldn't have consumed more than five seconds. Probably less. But in those few heartbeats of time, three men had tried to kill him . . . and the stuffed shirt from Pittsburgh had killed all three of them, instead.

* * *

"Good morning, Mr. Cantrell."

"Uh, good morning," Eddie half-mumbled as Simpson greeted him the following day. The older man sat at the small, rickety table in the tiny "sitting room" of their shared quarters, carefully cleaning a Browning High-Power automatic.

It was the first really good look Eddie had gotten at it, and from the way the bluing was worn away, it was obvious to him that the handgun had seen a lot of use. It was equally obvious that it had been lovingly maintained during its lengthy lifespan, and Eddie wondered how Simpson had managed to conceal it so effectively that Eddie had never even suspected he had it.

"Are you ready for breakfast?" Simpson asked.

"Breakfast?" Eddie repeated, then swallowed heavily, remembering.

"Well, lunch, actually, I suppose," Simpson said thoughtfully, his face expressionless, although there might have been the faintest flicker of amusement in his eyes. If so, Eddie scarcely noticed as his mind replayed the previous night's events.

The sound of the shots, especially so close to the United States' "embassy," had brought two different Swedish patrols at a dead run. Not only that, but the sentries outside the embassy itself had responded almost as quickly, and, unlike the Swedes, they'd brought powerful up-time hand-portable lights with them.

Eddie rather wished they hadn't. He'd seen carnage and bloodshed enough for someone two or three times his age since arriving in Thuringia. He'd been there when Frank Jackson smashed his first Imperial army of mercenaries outside Badenburg and he and Jeff Higgins, Larry Wild, and Jimmy Andersen had faced down a second army of rapists and murderers who'd been their so-called "allies" with nothing but twelve-gauge shotguns and outrage. He'd been there at the Wartburg, too—and at the Alte Veste. Despite his brash, often bubbling exterior, there were nights when nightmares spawned by the memories of those sights and sounds kept him awake, tossing and turning.

But whatever he'd seen, he was scarcely hardened against it, and the sight of what Simpson's shots had done to their targets on the way through had almost cost him his excellent supper.

McDougal himself had appeared on the scene in less than ten minutes, still buttoning his shirt while he stared down at the three twisted, blood-leaking bodies and the wicked looking knives lying beside them in the mud.

"So, Mr. McDougal," Simpson had grated, the harsh anger in his voice the only indication he seemed prepared to allow of his own adrenaline and fear, "do you still think Mr. Schwanhausser is overreacting to the possible threat from Richelieu?"

McDougal had flinched visibly from the bitter, biting irony of the question, but he'd only stared down at the bodies for a few more seconds, then shaken his head.

"No," he'd said then, not that he'd had much choice about it. "No, Mr. Simpson. I don't suppose he is."

There'd been quite a bit more after that, of course, before anyone got to bed, and it had been still longer before Eddie managed to drop off to sleep. Which was why he was so late rolling out.

"Uh, yeah," he said, shaking himself out of his thoughts. "I guess I am sorta hungry, at that."

He sounded a bit surprised, even to himself, and Simpson snorted. There was amusement in that snort, but not the harsh, dismissive sort of humor Eddie might once have expected. Indeed, in its own way, it was almost gentle.

"Well, give me a few minutes to finish up here, and I'll treat you to lunch at The Crown and Eagle," the older man said while his hands briskly broke down his cleaning rod and packed it and the other cleaning supplies away, then reassembled the Browning quickly and expertly. Eddie watched him, noting the smoothness of the practiced movements, and dismissed any lingering suspicion that Simpson had borrowed the handgun from someone for the trip.

"You had that all along, didn't you?" he asked after a moment.

"Yes, I did," Simpson agreed, not looking up as he finished reassembling the pistol and slid a freshly loaded magazine into the grip. "The Browning is an excellent weapon," he observed, "although the nine-millimeter round is a little short on stopping power, compared to something like the .45. On the other hand, with a hundred and forty-seven-grain hollowpoint and about four-point-six grains of HS-6, it will do the job quite adequately."

"I . . . see." Eddie cleared his throat. "How long have you been carrying it?" he asked.

"For considerably longer than you've been alive," Simpson replied, and looked up at last with a slight smile. "There are times, Mr. Cantrell, when one should be a little cautious about leaping to conclusions, don't you think?"

"Yeah," Eddie said slowly, "there are." He paused, meeting Simpson's eyes levelly, then added, "I guess everybody should bear that in mind, shouldn't they?"

"I imagine they should," Simpson agreed after a moment, and something passed between them as the older man met the youngster's gaze equally levelly. Eddie wasn't certain what that "something" was, but he knew both of them had felt it.

Then the moment passed, and Simpson stood. He tucked the Browning away into the worn holster at the small of his back which Eddie had never noticed before, then nodded towards the door.

Eddie nodded back, and the two of them headed off towards The Crown and Eagle. Quite a few people looked at them—and especially Simpson—oddly as they passed, but the older man paid the curious no attention.

"By the way, Mr. Cantrell," he said casually as they approached the restaurant, "while you were sleeping in this morning, I went over to check with Mr. Franklin to see if President Stearns had responded to my message from yesterday."

"Oh?" Eddie glanced at him. Something about Simpson's tone sounded warning signals. "Had he?"

"Yes, he had," Simpson replied. "In fact, he informed me that he's accepted my recommendations and that he and his cabinet have authorized me to call upon Mr. McDougal for assistance in formally acquiring title to the land for our navy yard."

"Our navy yard?" Eddie repeated, and Simpson nodded.

"Yes. We're going to have to return to Grantville, of course. I'll need to spend some time with you and your original plan if we're going to work out a practical design for the ironclads. And we need to discuss with the President how many timberclads we'll need to add to the mix. And, for that matter, exactly what sort of priorities for resources—other than the railroad rails, of course—and manpower the Navy is going to require. And how we're going to organize that manpower and set up training programs."

"Why do you keep saying 'we'?" Eddie asked. Simpson cocked an eyebrow at him, and the youngster shrugged irritably. "I know you're going to tear my design completely apart and put it together all over again," he said. "I accepted that when I first proposed it to Mike—I mean, the President. So, okay, it wasn't a perfect design. I never claimed it was."

"No, it wasn't," Simpson agreed in a coolly judicious tone. "On the other hand, I'm sure we'll have time to work the bugs out of it. After all, it's going to take weeks—probably at least a couple of months—of organizational work before we can get back to Magdeburg and really start setting things up here."

"Dammit, there you go again with that 'we' stuff! Just because Mike sent me along on this first trip doesn't mean I want to spend my time sitting around in this mudhole while they build the city around us!"

"That's unfortunate," Simpson observed. "On the other hand, I'm sure there are a great many people who find themselves compelled to do things they didn't want to."

Eddie stopped dead in the street and turned to face the older man squarely.

"Just go ahead and tell me what you're so pleased about!" he snapped irritably.

"That's 'Tell me what you're so pleased about, sir,' " Simpson told him, and Eddie's eyes began to widen in sudden, dreadful surmise.

"I'm afraid so, Lieutenant Cantrell," Simpson informed him. "Still, I suppose it's only appropriate that the individual responsible for inspiring his country to build a navy in the first place should find himself drafted for duty as its very first commissioned officer. Well, second, actually, I suppose," he amended judiciously.

"B-b-but I—I mean, I never— You can't be serious!" Eddie blurted out.

"Oh, but I can, Lieutenant," Simpson said coolly, and showed his teeth in the edge of a smile. "Don't worry," he advised, taking Eddie by the elbow and getting him moving once more, "you'll adjust quickly enough, Lieutenant. Oh, and by the way, I imagine you'll adjust even more quickly if you remember to call me 'Admiral' or 'sir' from now on."

To Dye For

Mercedes Lackey

Tom Stone was lying flat on his back in the long grass in front of the geodesic dome, staring up at the sky when Mike Stearns and Doc Nichols showed up for the grass—as in, smokable grass—he'd promised them.

They arrived with a horse and cart, and one of the German boys driving; Tom had heard them coming for quite a while, but in his current state of flat-lined depression, it hadn't seemed important enough to get up just to greet them on his feet.

"Hey, Stoner!" Stearns called, when the hoofbeats and the creaking of the cart were getting pretty close. "Are you dead?"

Tom sighed gustily. "No," he admitted. "Catastrophically crushed, yes. Defeated, depressed, and debilitated. Out-of-time, out-of-luck, down-and-out. Bewitched, bothered, bereft and bewildered. But not dead."

He levered himself up out of the grass with an effort, for depression made his middle-aged body seem all the heavier, and clambered to his feet, while Stearns and the Doc watched him curiously. "Have you been sampling the product?" Stearns asked, finally.

He sighed again. "Would that I had, but not even a monster doobie, not even a full-filled bong of my patented West Virginia Wildwood Weed is going to make me forget my sorrows. I'd run off to join the Foreign Legion, but it hasn't been invented yet."

He took refuge from heartbreak in flippancy. What else could a man do, when he found the love of his life and lost her to something so stupid as money?

Doc Nichols looked completely blank, but a sudden expression of understanding crept across Mike's face. "Magdalena?" he asked.

Tom groaned; it was heartfelt. "Magdalena. Or rather, Herr Karl Jurgen Edelmann, whose considered opinion it is that I am no proper husband for his daughter."

"Ach, vell," said the German boy still on the seat of the wagon, "You aren't."

Tom gave him the hairy eyeball; bad enough that his feelings were exposed for all to see, but this commentary from the peanut gallery was adding insult to a mortal wound. "I resemble that remark, Klaus," he retorted bitterly.

"Vell, you aren't, Stoner," the boy persisted. "Vat haf you for to keep a guildmaster's daughter vith?"

"I am monarch of all I survey," Tom said sourly, opening his arms wide to include the geodesic dome he and the boys called home, laboriously built circa 1973 out of hand-hammered car hoods and scavenged windows by the founding members of Lothlorien Commune. The gesture swept in the two tiny camping trailers that had been added about 1976, the barn and now-derelict shotgun house that had been the original buildings on this property, and the greenhouse that Tom had made out of more salvaged windows.

"Und Magdalena vould haf better prospects elsevere," Klaus countered, stolidly. "You haf no income, Stoner. Effen der Veed, you gifs to der Doc."

Since Tom had heard all that already from the mouth of his beloved Magdalena's father, he wasn't in a mood to hear it again. "I am not," he growled, "going to make a profit off of other people's pain."

Klaus only shrugged, though Doc Nichols looked sympathetic. "Dat earns you a place in Heaffen, maybe," the boy said with oxlike practicality. "But on Earth, no income."

It was an argument Tom had no hope of winning, and he didn't try. Instead, he turned back to Stearns, changing the subject to one less painful. "The stuff I was going to sell before the Ring hit us was already bagged, and I've added everything I could harvest without hurting the next crop, Mike," he said, feeling his shoulders sagging with defeat. "Come on, give me a hand with it."

Stearns and Doc left Klaus with the wagon and followed Tom to the processing "plant" in the barn. Tom was Grantville's token holdover hippy, the last holdout of a commune that had been founded in 1965 by college dropouts long on idealism and short on practical skills—which basically described virtually every commune founded around that time.

"Maybe we can brainstorm something for you, Stoner," Mike said, as they followed the mown path between the dome and the barn—Tom didn't believe in wasting time and ruining perfectly good meadow grass—which provided habitat for an abundance of tiny songbirds—with a mower if he didn't have to. Stearns didn't sound hopeful, though, and Tom couldn't blame him. After all, he was something of the town loser. . . .

"Forgive my asking, but since I'm not from around here, just what are you good at?" the Doc asked

"Other than the obvious?" He had to shrug. "Not much. I was a pharmacy major at Purdue in the late seventies, in no small part so that I could learn how to make mind-opening drugs for my own consumption. There were a lot of us like that back then. I kind of went on to graduate school for lack of anything else, then I lost interest in school and eventually ended up here."

Given that he hadn't been motivated to get a graduate degree, it hadn't taken a lot of persuasion to get him to drop out a year short of his masters degree to move out here, to what his friends and fellow freaks had decided to call Lothlorien Commune—although the fact that his old lady Lisa had been the one who urged the move also had a lot to do with it.

"So you followed the old Timothy Leary mantra, 'turn on, tune in, drop out'?" the Doc hazarded.

"Something like that. Some friends of my friends started this place—I think one of them inherited it from a relative. He left about 1984, and I haven't heard from him since, so I guess he's either dead, in prison or doesn't give a damn. I kept up the property tax payments, so maybe the brain cells that held the fact that he's the owner went offline." He swung open the barn door and they moved into the hay-scented gloom. At the further end was another of his scavenged-window greenhouses, but this one was his drying shed. "Now, of course, it's moot."

At first, in those early days, all had been well, surrounded as they were in a haze of high-grade weed and windowpane acid. But as with virtually every commune founded in the sixties and early seventies, by the time he got there, part of the last wave of the hippie generation, Lothlorien was showing early signs of disintegrating.

Part of it was having to deal with the reality of hardscrabble dirt-farming. All of them were city- or suburban-bred, and grand designs of completely organic farming quickly fell by the wayside under onslaughts of every bizarre bug known to the entomologist. From that slippery slope, it was a straight-down slide, and plans for a completely vegetarian lifestyle became necessity when all they could afford were rice and beans, and the only money coming in was from well-intentioned "businesses" that somehow never lasted very long. The leather-worker left after an argument with the hard-line vegetarians. The pottery was good enough, but no one around here would buy it. Macrame belts and pot-hangers didn't quite match that coal-mining couture. . . .

A total of three SCAdians bought the yurts. Beaded jewelry and embroidered shirts required a lot of time, and a boutique willing to take them. But most of all, businesses needed business-minded people to run them, and no one could stay motivated long enough to make a business work.

"You probably didn't need to bring the cart," he told them, showing them the pile of nicely-compacted kilo "bricks," hot-sealed in vacuum-formed plastic wrap, with pardonable pride in workmanship. His plants practically had resin oozing out of every leaf-pore, and they packed down beautifully. "Doc, don't unwrap these until you're ready to use one. They're exactly like flavoring herbs; air is your enemy."

"Right," Nichols said, hefting a brick and regarding it with reluctant admiration. "I suppose we're talking trial-and-error on dosage, here?"

"It's pretty hard to OD on grass," Tom pointed out. "Especially when you're using it medicinally. By the way, strongly flavored baked goods are the vehicle-of-choice for an oral vector, though I used to get good reviews on my spaghetti sauce."

Part of the reason for the collapse of Lothlorien was rebellion on the part of the women—who very soon found that a "natural lifestyle" meant unassisted child-rearing, childbirth aided only by Tom's hasty self-taught knowledge of midwifery, and nonstop housekeeping necessitated by the fact that there were no handy modern conveniences like—say—electricity. The chicks came and went, but in that final wave, Lisa bailed first, leaving Tom to solo-parent their son, Faramir.

Faramir. I must have been so stoned. How could that name ever have seemed like a good idea?

By the early '90s, all the women were gone, taking the girl-chicks, but leaving the other two boys born to the group with Tom "because he was such a good role-model." Elrond might have been his, but Gwaihir wasn't, and no one had any doubt of that, not with the kid's hair redder than a stop-sign. The only reason Tom was on the birth certificate as father-of-record was because the boy's mother was so stoned during and after the birth that she couldn't remember anyone else's last name.

By the time Gwaihir was born, Tom was no longer just the guru of drug-assisted meditation and provider of the sacred sacraments. Necessity and the fact that he was the only one with any medical training had made him the de facto doctor for the group, as well as midwife. More of a root-doctor than a sawbones, though he'd set broken bones in plenty, so long as the injury was pretty straightforward.

But with all of the old ladies gone, the rest of the guys lost interest in keeping things together. One by one, they drifted off, too, leaving Tom alone with three kids to raise. The three mothers never did come back even to check on their boys; he never knew why.

On the other hand—without a bunch of dopers lounging around, he had a lot fewer mouths to feed, and by then he wasn't bad at subsistence farming. The vegetable garden, the chickens, and the yearly pigs took care of most of their food needs. Wind-generators, one of the last things the commune had built together, brought much-needed electricity, and once Tom himself had gotten the greenhouse built, he was able to grow veggies all year long without having to fight bugs. He'd had a surprisingly green thumb, all things considered.

And of course—though by the time he and the kids were living here alone it was to bring in much needed money for the kids' needs, rather than to supply the group with smoking materials—that wasn't all he grew in there. A trusted friend had made a little pilgrimage to Holland once the greenhouse was operational, bringing back precious seeds, and Tom had been breeding the best of the best back every year. By the time it was just the four of them, he had some finest-kind weed flourishing amongst the zucchini.

"Want to see the greenhouse?" he asked, more out of politeness than anything else. Somewhat to his surprise, they did.

He was irrationally proud of the place, which had started life as the windows from every building that was about to be wrecked that he could scrounge, with a frame of similarly salvaged timber. That was before old barn-wood became such a hot item with decorators, and every time a tilting barn came down, he'd been there with the communal pickup and flatbed. Most of the farmers had been glad to let him haul it off.

"Damn," Nichols said, looking at the place from the inside for the first time. "How the hell did you manage to keep this under wraps?"

Made of barn-boards up to waist-high, with a relatively low eight-foot ceiling, he'd put windows with screens at the bottom where he could open them in hot weather, and solid windows for the roof. Now he'd segregated the pot plants at the rear, with the veggies and herbs up front—though in the days when the law might come a-calling, he'd mingled pot and beans, using the vines of the latter to screen the former.

He shrugged. "Stayed under the radar," he said. "Didn't get greedy. We didn't need a lot of cash to get along, so I didn't deal in more than that."

The boys had kept their dear little mouths shut, when he explained the economics of the situation in terms of toys, treats, and new clothing. An additional bribe—the promise of never telling anyone what their real names were, and signing them into the Grantville school system as "Frank," "Ronald," and "Gerry," made sure they wouldn't tell, wouldn't bring samples out to their friends, and wouldn't allow the friends in the greenhouse, ever. After all, as Tom knew only too well, peer-pressure among the male of the species is a dreadful thing, and a name can become a deadly weapon. "Gwaihir" was too funny for words, "Elrond" had any number of nasty permutations, and as for "Faramir"—well. Any idiot could quickly figure out just what sort of nickname would come out of "Faramir" in the mouths of a pack of boys.

No, Tom never grew too much and never sold it in or near Grantville. One of the former members of Lothlorien came and collected the crop four times a year, paying in cash, taking it—well, Tom didn't know where he took it, but it definitely went far, far away. It wasn't a lot of cash, but it was enough to keep them in shoes and T-shirts, Tonka trucks and the occasional Twinkie.

So yes, he managed to stay far below the radar, so far as the law was concerned. From time to time, he ventured out into legitimate mercantile ventures, but aside from the sale of eggs, they never amounted to much, and some were outright disasters.

Then came the Ring of Fire, and everything changed.

At first, he and the boys had just been concerned about surviving the experience. But—that was months ago. Survival was no longer the issue—thriving was.

It had not escaped him that suddenly he was the only person in all of the New United States that was producing a pain-killer instead of consuming it. He'd never given up on the ethics that had brought him out here in the first place, and as soon as things settled down some, he brought himself and a sample of his crop straight to James Nichols, figuring that an ex-'Nam vet out of the 'hood was going to be a tad bit more open-minded about what had been going on in the greenhouse than the Law, and might be willing to intervene on his part.

As it happened, by then, the practicalities of the situation had not been lost on anyone who was in charge of Grantville, and though there had been some official growling and posturing on the part of the Law, it was all bluff and face-saving, and everyone knew it. Besides, it wasn't as if he was selling it.

"What I want to know is how you're keeping the kids out of the stuff," Mike asked, with one eyebrow raised. "Now that the secret's out, I can't believe you aren't getting midnight raids on your crop."

"Peer pressure," Tom said promptly. "I had my boys spread the word that the Doc here was going to prescribe it for the ladies who are having—um—" He blushed. "Monthly problems?"

"Not a bad idea. From what I've read, it's actually got fewer associated problems for that application than anything else around," Nichols admitted.

"Anyway, I let it be known via the kids that the crop is severely limited in quantity, and if there was so much as a single leaf missing, the culprit would be found and I would personally spread his name to all the women and let them take matters into their own hands." He'd been rather proud of that solution—having had to pacify the commune women himself when a crop came up short in similar circumstances.

"Damn!" Stearns laughed. "That's harsh!"

He shrugged. "I can't stop them from getting seeds and growing their own in the woods, but that's not my problem, that's Grantville's problem and you'll have to figure out how the town wants to handle recreational smoking yourself."

"Well, let's pack up and get out of here," Nichols decreed. "Good operation, Stoner."

Tom wasn't unhappy with the exchange, because it was an exchange. He had gotten something from Grantville for his contribution to the public good. Free electricity from the power-plant, some help with fixing things up around the place, including more insulation against winters that were undoubtedly going to be a lot harsher here than they'd been in West Virginia. The free electricity had allowed him to put the wood-walled extension he'd just added to the greenhouse under the powerful lights he'd bought specifically to grow enhanced pot, but never used, because his own power reserves weren't up to it. That made the Wildwood Weed a lot more potent, true medicinal quality, which made both the Doc and the dentist very happy when they tested and found it powerful.

"You got any more plans for the greenhouse?" Doc asked, as they loaded up with bricks to take them out to the cart.

"More medicinal herbs next, I thought—it makes a lot more sense to use it for things that no one else can grow or preserve, not without lights or protection from the harsh weather." He got a raised eyebrow from Stearns.

"Opium-poppies?" Doc asked carefully.

He shook his head. "I was talking to some of Rebecca's relatives. It's cheaper to buy the raw opium through them and crank out something approaching the morphine you're used to using, Doc. Something that you can inject without lumps clogging the veins of your patients, anyway, something with a consistent strength. What I had in mind was things like foxglove, hyssop, coltsfoot—I've got seeds in the freezer for a lot of stuff out of Culpepper's that I never got around to growing and using. Doctor Abrabanel will probably recognize a lot of them."

"I think we might have to put you on the town payroll," Mike offered.

But Tom shook his head. "You've got some regular pharmacists in town. One of them probably still has all his old compounding manuals, and between him, the chemistry teacher, Rebecca's dad, and the lab at the High, you've got more expertise and equipment than I have. This—" he waved his hand at the piled-up bricks in the back of the cart. "This is a public service. It costs me a little time. Grantville's giving me juice and help with the greenhouse when I need it, and the kids and I are getting medical and dental and that's enough. I'm no good at fighting, never was, so I'm useless for community defense. You've got to have analgesia and anesthetic, whisky isn't good enough, and since I'm not toting a gun, I owe it to the rest of you to do this as my share."

Mike Stearns laughed, and the Doc snorted. "You really are a holdover hippie, aren't you?"

"No income," Klaus said, gloomily.

* * *

The kids came home from school to find him moping around, puttering in the greenhouse with some defrosted foxglove seeds. Frank unbent enough to give his old man an awkward hug. He looked just like his father had at the same age—skinny, puppy-dog eyes—well, except for the hair. Instead of Tom's mane, his boy had a buzz-cut, something that he couldn't understand. . . .

"We heard about it, Pop," he said, without specifying it. "Wish we could do something to help. Magdalena's pretty cool, I think she'd make a great stepmom."

"Stepmom, heck," Gerry said, a wistful expression on his round, freckled face. "She can cook."

Tom's throat ached, and his chest felt squeezed with misery. What kind of cruel fate was it for him to find his soulmate four hundred years in the past, only to have her wrenched away from him? And the worst irony of all of this was that up until the moment that Tom had evidenced interest, Magdalena had been the "unwanted" spinster-daughter of her family—a victim of her times. Betrothed three times, all three of her husbands-to-be had met with nasty demises, and after that, a combination of a lack of suitors that met her father's rigorous standards and the reputation for being a romantic jinx kept her on the shelf.

Stupid, that was—she was clever, sweet-natured, attractive, and exceedingly well educated—the fact that she was over thirty shouldn't have mattered. They'd met quite by accident; she'd come along with her father when a group of guildmasters from Jena arrived as a trade delegation and Faramir had volunteered his old man to act as a guide for a small group that included her.

He'd never believed in love at first sight, and this wasn't it. It was, however, the attraction of kindred souls. Love came later. Not much later, but later.

And the irony was that if he'd just listened to her and let her handle her father, they'd be scheduling a wedding right now. She liked the commune, liked the boys, wasn't afraid of hard work, rather admired his public-spirited attitude—irony of ironies, because of his wardrobe, her father had thought he was rich. If he'd just let her handle it. . . .

"I dunno why you got as far as you did with her old man," Ron said callously, helping himself to a tomato—teenage boys took a lot of filling. "I mean, we're trailer-trash compared to the Edelmann family."

"Believe it or not, it was my T-shirts," he sighed. "Dyes like that, only the rich can afford—"

* * *

And that was when it hit him, and why it had taken so long, he couldn't imagine—except, maybe, that the Adventure of the Tie Dyed Festival Shirts had been something so traumatic that he had repressed the memory.

"Pop—" Frank said warningly. "If you're thinking what I think you're thinking—remember what happened the last time!"

"Yeah," Ron chimed in. "People want their shirts colored, not themselves!"

Which was what had happened, after a sudden heavy rain shower . . . rainbow-colored customers, dripping dye all over their pants, their cars, their friends. Not good. Not good at all. Lothlorien had folded the tent and snuck out the back way, leaving behind a lot of angry people looking for someone to strangle with tie-dyed rope.

The dyes got stored, the remaining shirts distributed among the rest of the commune, and no one, no one talked about it anymore.

"Yeah, but there's two things different this time—the big one being that I'm not stoned. Come on, give me a hand, let's see if the dyes are still any good!"

If they weren't—well, he still had some ideas, and he could not believe that no one else in Grantville had realized the profit-making potential lying around unused and dusty in the grocery, the hardware-store, and the pharmacy, all of whom had their own little racks of commercial dyes that no one had even looked at. This might work. This just might work!

"Mordants," he explained, as they headed for the barn, the loft of which formed the main storage facility for all the assorted flotsam and jetsam, useless for all practical purposes but too good to throw out. "That's what we need. Mordants."

"Sounds like an RPG villain," said Frank, holding open the barn door.

"Mordants are the things that chemically bind dye to fiber," he explained. "That was where I went wrong. I forgot about mordants." Then, shamefacedly, and because he had a policy of always being honest with his kids, "Actually, I was too stoned to remember about mordants."

That was when the unexpected happened, the thing that made every bit of the pain he'd gone through in the last several years worthwhile. Frank grabbed his elbow and stopped him.

"Pop," he said, looking straight into his father's eyes (when had he gotten so tall?), his own honest brown ones the image of Tom's own, "Pop, you have not once, in the past fifteen years, been stoned. Don't think we haven't noticed. Once in a while, about half as often as most guys' dads drink a six-pack, you've been a little buzzed. Never when we needed you. Maybe the rest of the town thinks you're a doper, but we know better. Always have. You've been a damn fine dad, as good as the best, and better than most. No shit."

He was very, very glad for the whole honesty-policy then, because he honestly broke down and cried, and they cried, and everyone hugged. Then the kids got embarrassed and covered it by punching each other, he had to break it up, and they all went up into the loft to check on those dyes.

"The main problem is that I know what a mordant is and what it does," he continued, as he passed boxes of giant wooden beads back to Gerry, "But I don't actually know what any of them are."

"How hard can that be to figure out, Pop?" Gerry retorted. "After all, you made LSD in the sixties!" He screwed up his freckled face in a caricature of bliss. "Oh wow—like, taste the colors, man!"

Tom straightened, indignant. "I will have you know that LSD was a sacrament, not a—a—"

"Whatever." Gerry shrugged, and took the box out of his hands. "The point is, how hard can it be?"

* * *

"Alum?" the town pharmacist looked at him with a puzzled and peculiar expression. "Yeah, I have alum. Why?"

"I want it. All of it," Tom replied, trying to look casual. "I've got a project. And I'll swap you a dozen eggs for every pound."

He'd already sent the boys around to corral every packet of dye and every bottle of food coloring in town. He'd decided, given the slim state of the family funds, he had to confide his plan to a few select movers-and-shakers. It was going to cost him later, in ten percent of the profit, but it was worth it.

A couple of days of research later—some of it in some pretty odd places, like historical novels—and he had his answer. The easiest mordant to get hold of and the safest to use was alum; alum had the added advantage that he could get more of it in the here-and-now once the last of the Grantville supply was used up.

A little dickering later, and he had his alum. And one more thing, his secret weapon—Magdalena.

His local fiber expert. She knew what he didn't—about fibers and dyeing, textiles and fabric, what would be profitable and what wouldn't. She suggested that he produce embroidery thread, not dyed fabric as he had originally planned. The town's relatively small stock of such things—Grantville hadn't had a hobby store—was long since exhausted by hundreds of color-starved handcrafters. Old clothing was being picked apart for the colored threads, for heaven's sake! If he could produce brilliantly colored, color-fast embroidery thread—he'd soon be as rich as her father had first thought he was.

That was what Magdalena said, anyway, and this time, he was going to let her run the show. Along with everything else in the loft had been skein after skein of fine cotton thread, bought surplus and mill-end, undyed cream and white and beige, meant to be used in a knitting machine that no one had ever been able to figure out. The machine itself was rusted into an unusable whole, but the cartons of thread had been right up there next to the boxes of dye. Later, Magdalena said, they would use fine-spun wool or linen, but this was going to be more than enough to prove to Herr Edelmann that Thomas Stone was going to be able to support a guildmaster's daughter, and any future offspring, in the style to which she was accustomed.

Two hours later, dye-pots a-bubbling, the games began.

The pigments were too precious to waste any, and dye-lots were not precisely an issue in the seventeenth century. The barn became a drying shed, with the bolts of cord from the macrame-business serving as clothesline, strung back and forth between the walls at just above head-height. When the bubbling pot held only dregs that wouldn't even produce a pastel, Tom went on to the next color, so that a literal spectrum spread itself across the twine. By the time he went to bed, exhausted, the barn was full—the barn floor looked like Jackson Pollock had come for an extended stay—and the tests he'd run on every new batch had proved that the dyes were as colorfast as anything contemporary, and more so than most.

He fell into bed, and for the first time in a week, really slept.

* * *

Edelmann didn't speak English; he left that up to his underlings, so Tom had recruited the sour and cynical Klaus. Somehow—he didn't ask how—Magdalena had persuaded her father to drive them all out to the commune in the Edelmann's own carriage. She and her father sat on the bench across from them; Magdalena with her eyes cast down and a deceptively demure expression on her face, her father wearing a frown. From time to time, he uttered something for Klaus to translate.

"He says dat he does not need to see dis farm to know it iss not sufficient to change hiss mind," Klaus would dutifully repeat in English. "He has done this as a favor to Magdalena, to make her be seeing dat dis iss impossible." Or, "Herr Stearns hass spoke vell uff you, but vords vill not support a vife."

After each such disparaging comment, Magdalena would murmur something to her father that Klaus did not trouble to translate. Klaus' glum expression would have dampened the spirits of a manic on the upswing, but Tom was armored in his secret, and kept smiling, something that clearly puzzled Herr Edelmann.

Edelmann's expression of disapproval changed only once in the walk from the yard to the barn, and that was when he dismounted from the carriage and was confronted with the dome. It clearly took him aback—but he recovered quickly. "A man vould go mad, liffing in such a place," he muttered, according to Klaus's dutiful translation.

Finally, they reached the barn, where all three boys waited, wearing their best—or at least, their brightest—outfits. Here Tom paused to make his own little speech.

"Guildmaster," he said, speaking slowly, giving Klaus plenty of time to make a thorough translation, "I can understand completely why you felt that I was not worthy of your beautiful and gracious daughter, whom God has endowed with so many gifts."

Behind Edelmann's back, Gerry made a gagging face. Tom ignored him.

"But there is one thing that you may not understand yet about Americans," he continued. "And that is that we all live by the proverb, 'Where there is a will, there is a way.' I vowed that I would find a way to prove to you that I am worthy of her. I swore that I would make myself worthy of her. I pledged that before I asked you a second time for her hand, I would have the means, not only to support her, but to impress you with my ability to rise to exceed anything you could demand of me in order to win her. And here, Guildmaster, are the first fruits of my labors—"

Frank and Ronald flung open the barn doors. He'd run an extension cord out there, and set up a couple of flood-lights, which now played on the display that he and the boys had set up for maximum effect.

The drying cords had been restrung, so that instead of lacing back and forth the length of the barn, they went back and forth between the walls from floor to ceiling. And draped over the cords, skein after skein after skein of the dyed cotton thread, forming an entirely new wall of color. He'd used up all of the cotton, though he'd only made a dent in the amount of dye he had stockpiled.

Edelmann stared. Klaus stared. Magdalena looked up at last, and smiled into Tom's eyes, and his heart turned over in his chest. There was a long silence.

Then Edelmann stepped forward and reached for one of the skeins to examine it closely. Slowly he began to ask questions. Was the color impervious to wetting? How quickly would it fade? Was this all of the thread, or did he have more? Was this all of the dye? Tom fielded the technical questions with ease, having been coached by Magdalena in what her father would probably ask. Questions about marketing the thread, he left to her to answer, which she did. Her father didn't seem to notice.

Evidently he was so used to being managed that it didn't impinge on his conscious mind anymore.

Finally, silence again. And when Guildmaster Edelmann turned back to face them, he was wearing an entirely different expression than the one he'd arrived here with.

"Also," he said. "Ja, gut. Und wann moechten Ihr beiden heiraten?"

Tom didn't need Klaus's translation for that. Magdalena's shining blue eyes were enough.

Preliminary negotiations over, Tom handed his betrothed back into the carriage, following her father, and waved at them until the vehicle was out of sight.

Boxes of thread adorned the top of the carriage; samples to go back to Jena with her father. He pretended he knew what he was doing, all the time basically repeating what Magdalena had coached him to tell her father, while she sat modestly out of earshot in the carriage, pretending that she hadn't any idea what was going on between the men.

Magdalena was going to take care of negotiating the sale of this first batch, and Tom was perfectly content to leave that part of it up to her. He knew he didn't have a head for business, and she clearly did.

"Well, Pop, what are you going to do for an encore?" Ronald asked, when the carriage was gone.

"Another batch with wool instead of cotton—or maybe linen," he said, vaguely, still basking in the roseate glow of knowing that Magdalena was his, his!

"Yeah, but the dye we've got isn't going to last forever," Ronald persisted. "Probably not even a year, so what are you going to do for an encore?"

"What'dye think? He'll come up with something!" Frank countered, punching Ronald's arm. "After all, he made LSD by the gallon in the sixties! How hard can it be to come up with dye?"

"Dammit, I didn't make it by the gallon, it was a sacra—" he began, but all that reading up on dyes and mordants was still in the forefront of his mind, and Ronald's question suddenly made his brain lurch down another path.

Coal-tar dyes . . . Victorian coal-tar dyes . . . ummm. Reds, purples, good god, mauve! Damn! What a great way to get Porter to put a smoke-scrubber on the power-plant stack, a profit out of selling me the acid and the tars! Eco-sound and profitable! Oh, man that's not all—coal-tar salve, microscopy stains—Doc will canonize me—by god, I'm going to convert Grantville to Green yet!

He heard himself start to chuckle with glee, and the boys stopped their roughhousing to stare at him.

"You're right!" he said cheerfully, lengthening his steps into a stride as he headed for the dome, already planning his next course of research. "I made LSD in the sixties! How much harder can it be?"

A Lineman For the Country

Dave Freer

The Thuringen Gardens was, as usual, dense with people. After collecting his first priority at the bar, Dougal Lawrie looked about for his second priority: something to sit on that wasn't a saddle. The only empty spot he could see was at a small corner table with a solitary American at it. Dougal could tell that the man was an American by the teeth and the horn-rimmed spectacles. Well—what you could see of the teeth. He had a moustache that would have looked fine on the hind end of Shetland pony.

Dougal's blue eyes took in the scene. It was a case of stand or sit over there. He decided that the rotund morose-looking fellow was either a fighter or, more likely, a windbag. Well, the former didn't worry him, and he'd always found that he could shut up a bore.

He walked over to the small table. "I'll be sitting here then," he said. No point in delaying a fight if there was going to be one. He was tired. It had been a long ride from Halle to Grantville. He'd been on the road for two days. Then he'd had to stand around while Colonel Mackay read the messages, and hoped to heaven he wouldn't be sent off again tonight. Anyway, with beer at that price he wouldn't be staying long. Grantville was a boom town and bar prices reflected it.

The solid occupant nodded. "Can't stop you."

Dougal had none of Lennox or Mackay's awe for these Americans. Some of them were doughty fighters, to be sure. Their firearms and devices were near miraculous. But he, Dougal Lawrie, was a Supplicant, like the rest of the Clann, even if he had somewhat lapsed in his church-going these days. Too much respect bordered on worship. The covenant made it clear: Worship was due to God and no one else. And after all these years in foreign wars: respect was something you earned. If this American got too talkative he'd give him short shrift. Anyway he had things to think on, and he was looking forward to just relaxing. Being a dispatch carrier in troubled times and places meant most of your attention was focused on the countryside. There was no chance to let your guard down. He'd done that once. Damned near been killed for his stupidity.

After a few minutes of silence the American said: "Well, aren't you going to tell me how wonderful our guns are?" The American's accent was particularly impenetrable, but Dougal was good with languages.

Dougal took a pull at his beer. "Nae. They canna ride dispatches." That should shut him up. He wanted to drink in peace and not sing praises to the wonder of sniper rifles. He'd heard enough of it in the barracks. The average trooper didn't understand that it took more than guns to win wars. It took the movement of men and materiel. And that rested with men and horses.

The slow smile spreading over the face of the American told him he'd guessed entirely wrong. "Well, maybe you Scots aren't all damned fools."

This was fighting talk, even if it was said with a hint of a smile. Dougal tensed. "We're no' stupid. We leave being fools to the susunnoch." These Americans spoke English of a sort but they did not have the Gaelic. The American wouldn't even understand the insult.

The American took off his glasses. Placed them carefully in a pocket. "Watch your mouth, sonny. You Scots are more Saxon than I am."

Dougal's eyes narrowed. "Mo chainnt?" Seeing the American was obviously trying to decide whether "my language?" was an insult or not, he continued. "You don't have the Gaelic do you? Canan uasal mor nan Gaidheal."

The American snorted. "No. I don't speak your damned language. I'm no good with foreign languages." But he'd subsided somewhat. "Ma just used to call someone a Sassanach when she was mad at them. I asked what it meant once. I guess it stuck because she used it pretty darn often."

"So your mother was a Scot? What Clann?"

The American shook his head. "Ma was Irish. Came to the U.S. during the troubles. She had no time for the Scottish." He tugged at his horse-tail moustache. "Well. She didn't have much time for anyone."

"Irish, eh? I served with a couple o' the Wild Geese. None of them could drink."

The American took out his glasses again. Polished them and put them on. Drained his glass in one long moustache-foaming draft. "Really? 'Zat so? We'll have another round then, will we?"

Dougal drained his. "Aye. So long as you don't talk all the time. I have nae had a time when I could take a drink in peace for three weeks. And belike yon Mackay will have me off to Halle in the morning again."

The American was already waving his tankard at the barmaid. When she came over Dougal realized this was another old feud.

To work in the Thuringen Gardens you had to have a pretty fair grasp of English. Even the German customers tended to mix in a fair amount of English. It was a source of pride. Showed you were an old hand around here. Lawrie was willing to bet button-nose Hildegarde spoke English without effort.

"Was willst Du, Du verdammtes rundes Schwein?" Her comment was a source of some amusement with the miners at the next table. It was apparent that the American understood not one word.

"Two beers," he said grumpily, holding up two fingers and pointing at the empty stein.

She looked at him with perfect incomprehension. "Wie Bitte? Was?"

Dougal looked at his empty tankard. It was obvious that this game could go on until a man died of thirst.

"Mach das zwei Krüge. Und wenn Du sie schnell bringst, erzähle ich deinem Freund nicht dass Du diesem Amerikaner Augen machst." One of the reasons Dougal Lawrie did so much dispatch riding was that languages came easily to him. It made simple things like haggling for stabling or asking directions easier, and the receiving of oral replies a lot safer.

The barmaid had the grace to look embarrassed for a second. But she was a pert one, trouble looking for a place to happen, Lawrie reckoned. She was quick to recover. She made a showy little moue. "But you already know, mine darling," she said in thickly accented, but pretty good English. This got a shout of laughter and a whistle from the table next door, and let her sashay off smiling, without the tankards.

The American looked at the empty tankards. Sighed. "I never get service. These Germans give me the gyp. We'll have to go to the bar."

"She's bringing us a couple o' pitchers. Beer's cheaper like that. Which is good o' me, seeing as how you're paying."

The American sat back. Shook his head. "Okay. Hey, I can't talk their damned language. So what did she say to me? And what did you say to her?"

Dougal decided that a few beers was worth a bit of tact. "She asked what you wanted." No point in mentioning the rotund pig part.

"And you said?"

"I told her to bring us two pitchers. And if she made it fast I wouldn't tell her boyfriend she'd been makin' eyes at you."

The American snorted. But there was a smile behind that moustache. "And you'd have to figure out who that was tonight." The pitchers arrived. He looked up, startled. "My God. You get service, Scot." He fumbled out his wallet and paid.

Lawrie contented himself with making a mental note of the barmaid. A bit on the skinny side for his taste, but worth remembering.

Lawrie poured his beer, watching the fine head form. "If ye cannot speak German, why don't you do your drinking across at the Club 250?"

"The beer is lousy," said the American. By the way it was said, there was more. He looked at Lawrie speculatively. He shrugged. "I got thrown out and told not to come back."

Lawrie took a long pull of his beer. Grinned. "Just about have tae get kicked out o' that rat-hole if ye want to be part o' human race."

The American tugged his moustache. "Yeah. But I thought a couple of them were friends of mine. And I organized their phone, dammit. I jumped 'em over the waiting list. I must have sixty of these New Americans yattering at me for phones. I haven't got the instruments even where they're inside the existing line network. Anyway. Name's Tanner. Len Tanner, Scotsman. What's yours?"

"While you're buying the beer, ye can call me Dougal."

By half past eleven, on a week night, Dougal could have found a fair number of seats at the Thuringen Gardens. But few tables with as many empty pitchers. It had been Len's idea to keep count. There were a fair number.

Len stared earnestly at him over his glasses and wagged a finger. " 'S not guns or newspapers or pol'tics that win wars, no matc . . . matter what Stearns says. 'S communications. The telephone . . . the net. God I loved the net."

Dougal knew what the telephone was. Even though Len had made this speech, at more length, six or seven times that evening, the net part was still a mystery. But it had been Len's social life. He had fixed telephone systems by day and spent his nights with this net. Beer was a poor substitute. But Dougal had ridden through firefights and across country with messages too often not to agree about communications. He nodded. "This telephone now, and the radio . . . they could save a lot o' horses." He had a feeling that he'd said that earlier too.

"Ha!" Len snorted so explosively his moustache stirred in the breeze. "I tol' them. But they din' listen. I sh . . . said: Where we going to get replacement telephones from, huh? Like gasoline . . . 'sential supply. Said they couldn't take 'em away. That we'd jus' have to fix. Y'can't fix 'lectronic and plastic crap. Jus' throw it away and get a new unit."

* * *

Quentin Underwood was tired and irritable. Grantville needed that coal mine. He gave it his best for sixteen hours a day on a lot of days, and the committee took up more time. They could at least let him have a few hours sleep. But the trouble was that some of the equipment they'd brought through the Ring of Fire was beginning to reach breakdown point.

The German "new Americans" were good miners, all right. But specialized technical staff was still primarily "old American," or "up-timers" as people were starting to call them. And in some cases they were few on the ground.

Sure, they were training up new kids, but some things took a long time. So at 11:30 p.m., when they had a goddamned problem, they still called the mine manager. This time they'd had to send a runner up from the blast-face, because the phone system in the mine was down again—and the shift boss couldn't find the telephone tech.

Underwood ground his teeth. He'd love to fire her. Of all the people on the mine payroll, Ellie Anderson would be at the top of his personal downsize now list. And thanks to the Ring of Fire it wasn't even an option. She was literally irreplaceable. And she knew it. They'd tried new American trainees with her. The men had left saying they wouldn't put up with being spoken to like that. Quentin couldn't blame them.

He drove down the empty street towards the Thuringen Gardens. Tanner hadn't been in his trailer, but he'd been in the beer hall earlier. Quentin just hoped he wasn't too drunk to be of any use. Well, even stone cold sober, Tanner wasn't a patch on Ellie "the terror" on the mine's exchange. Tanner had worked for the local phone company. The town switchboard was electronic. Safety regs had meant that the mine's switchboard was an old electro-mechanical setup, bought from Bristol when they'd upgraded to electronic systems.

Ellie had come with it. And God help them if ever she went. So the mine management shut up and put up. She'd order what she pleased—and they'd have to find it. Mind you, she was really amazing with the damn thing. She'd stand there, in among the clicking switching stacks and turn slowly like a terrier sniffing for rats. Then she'd lunge off, heading straight for the problem. She claimed she could hear when something was wrong.

The Thuringen Gardens was nearly empty, but yes, Len Tanner was still there. Sitting at a table full of pitchers with a lean, weathered looking fellow. One of Mackay's troopers at a guess. By the looks of the two of them those pitchers were empty. Underwood pinched his lips. Tanner, especially when drunk, had a reputation for being trouble.

"Evening, Len."

The only telephone technician who had been in the office on the day of the Ring of Fire blinked owlishly up at him. "We're going up in the world, Dougal ol' buddy. The mine manager come for a drink with us."

Well. He sounded affable anyway. "We've got a problem up at the mine, Len. Part of the exchange isn't working. And nobody can find Ellie."

Len snorted. "So suddenly I'm wanted, huh? Well get your sorry ass out of here, sir. I fall unner Bill Porter these days. You go ask him."

Quentin Underwood hadn't gotten to be a mine manager without learning to be effective. "Get on your feet, Tanner. I've got men underground whose safety relies on that system. You'll either come up with me now or I'll get the sheriff to cart you up there. And you can sleep it off in the cells."

It didn't look like it was going to work. Tanner started taking his glasses off. "Firsht you'll have to get to the sheriff, Underwood."

Then the trooper at the table put a hand on Tanner's shoulder, and said with a conspiratorial grin to his fellow drunk. "We'll be helping the man, eh Len, if he buys us a pitcher or two, next time. Anyways, I'm so fu' I canna take another drop."

It was quicker and easier than fighting about it. "Yep. I'll buy you a couple of beers—your call, but I need your help now. This is screwing up the blasting schedule. They're making do with runners, but that's bad for safety."

The trooper smiled. "Weel, now. I'd say a dozen was the going rate, but seeing as there are men in need we'll make it a half dozen. A special price for him, eh, Len? It's a bargain we have then, mister?"

Quentin noticed that Len had pushed his glasses back onto his nose. The man was grinning behind that moustache. He was also beginning to push his chair back. The mine manager knew how to drive a hard bargain. He also knew this wasn't the time for it. He nodded. "Half a dozen."

Len lumbered to his feet. "Ma always said Scots could do a goddamn deal with the Devil. Come on, buddy. Le's go fix his problems." The tech swayed to his feet. And so did the Scot. They looked like a real life version of Abbott and Costello—if you had given Abbott about a foot of moustache.

It wasn't worth arguing about. So what if he had a Scots trooper coming along for the ride? The man seemed adroit at turning conflict to his own profit. Maybe it would be useful farther down the line. "Come on. I've got the mine truck outside."

* * *

It was the first time Dougal had been in one of these American vehicles. He sat back against the seat. A man could get used to this. And it was fast. Damn sight faster than a horse. The lights . . . well they were a good and a bad thing. You could see the road, but you couldn't see into the darkness surrounding it. He'd done too many night-rides not to know how useful it was to be able to see off into the surrounding darkness. Still, at this speed you'd have to have some lights. It was as well to have them good, he supposed.

They came to a halt at the mine compound. The gate guard let them in and Dougal found himself being shepherded into a big windowless room full of stacks of machinery.

Len Tanner looked at it, with his hands on hips, swaying slightly. Sighed. "Go back to bed, Underwood. I'll try to dig this lot out of my memory. Damned dinosaur."

The mine manager cracked a yawn. "Do your best." He turned to the shift-boss. "Hein. If he needs to go into the mine, will you detail someone to guide him? Keep him away from the blast zones."

The beefy German nodded respectfully. "Ja, Mister Underwood. I see to it."

Then the two of them left. Dougal looked around at the setup. Machinery at this level he would never understand. He spotted a chair and moved over to it. "Weel, I'll get out o' your way. Unless I can do something?"

Tanner was already staring up at the charts on the wall. "Nah. Siddown. God, a T-bar system. I thought I'd finished with this old stuff forever."

Dougal sat down. My, but this chair was finely padded. This foam-rubber stuff was a long way up on horsehair. He leaned back. Instinctively, he reached for the mug on the table. It was full and still faintly warm. You didn't stay alive, riding dispatches across hostile terrain, by not noticing things, even small things. "Len."

The technician looked up, irritably. "Yeah?"

"Mebbe you should look at this." He tapped the cup. "Yon mine manager said the technician was usually here of an evening, but that she must have decided not to come in tonight." He touched the cup. " 'Tis still warm, just. Would anyone else be in here, drinking a warm drink?"

Tanner felt the cup. Stuck a finger in the brew. Tasted. "Coffee! She's still got real coffee! You're right, Doogs. No way she'd have left this." He snorted. "So much for the goddamned mine management keeping their finger on the pulse of things. Let's go find out if her truck's still here."

As he spoke someone knocked at the door. It was a miner, by the overalls and head-lamped helmet. "Mr. Elsberg sent me, ja. Klaus Kleinschmitt. I am der Health and Safety officer."

"Take us to where Ellie parks her work truck."

"Pleez?"

Dougal translated.

"Oh. Ja. Come."

They walked across the compound . . . to an empty bay.

Len looked at it. "Oh, shit!" He turned to the Health and Safety officer. "You'd better get a search team. She's down there somewhere. Does she go out alone?"

"Pleez?"

So Dougal translated again.

"Ja. It is against the rules. But Fraulein Anderson . . . she breaks the rules. She does what she likes, ja. And when we try to stop her, she swears terrible, and still does it. I go to Mr. Underwood, he just throws his hands up in the air." He sighed, and picked up his walkie-talkie. "I report this. The teams will be called out. But there have been no reports of any rockfalls or problems. You want to go anywhere else?"

Len pointed. "Back to the switch-room. I might be able to work out where the break is. She might be wherever that is."

Dougal was amazed at the turn of speed that the American put into his return to the switch-room. Drunkenness too seemed to have been pushed aside. They arrived a good minute before Klaus, who was attempting to talk on the walkie-talkie and follow them. When they got into the room Len grabbed the cup of coffee and drained it. "Hope that helps me think."

He then proceeded to prove, to the watching Klaus as well as the Scot, that he could both think and work hard when he had to. He was moving at a pace that had his moustache windswept. Dougal learned that Weepstone bridge and ferret meant different things to these Americans. Minutes later, Len was peering through his glasses at the map of the risers and cross-cuts.

"The break is hereabouts." He pointed. "On the old first cut. Good chance she'll be somewhere near there. Can you take us there? We might as well fix the damn thing anyway."

"Pleez?"

So Dougal translated.

"Ja. You vill come and collect the helmets and overalls? And spick slowly, pleez. I cannot understand you so good. I read the lips, and I don't see the lips."

Len tugged his moustache. "Yeah. Well, I'll take my translator. Just need to grab some tools, huh?"

Ten minutes later they, and four other miners, were climbing out of the vehicle into an alcove—in which the mine's telephone systems' maintenance vehicle stood parked.

Len Tanner blew out through his moustache. "Ladder's gone. Come on."

They went up a riser to the original cross-cut. Len, despite his bulk, was leading the way. Dougal didn't enjoy the feeling of tons of earth piled above him. It felt as if the roof was pressing down on him. They hadn't gone far when they heard a yell. At a dogtrot they ran towards it.

She was a mess. Blood on her face amid the dust. She'd been crawling.

Tanner ran to her. "Are you all right?"

The woman had startling red hair and rather glazed eyes. And a totally uninjured mouth. "Fuck me. Yeah, I'm having a real great time. What took you bastards so long?"

"You didn't check in, Fräulein," said Klaus, severely. "We didn't know you were down here until Herr Tanner told us."

She waved a hand vaguely. "Oh, piss on your rules. I was in a hurry. If I have to wait for you bastards, I'd never get anything done."

"You must obey—

Dougal had had enough battlefield experience to know what he was seeing. He squeezed Kleinschmitt's arm and said quietly. "She's been hit on the head, man. Leave it now."

Already two of the team had the stretcher ready. She pushed them aside. "Gimme a couple of shoulders. I've screwed this ankle." She hauled herself up on their arms. "Aw, shit!" She winced. "Not you, Tanner. You go fix it. It's the cable-tray maybe a hundred yards on. A fucking great piece of the ceiling fell into the tray. It, half the tray and the ladder came down with me when I got up there."

So Dougal Lawrie found himself unable to leave the pressing darkness just yet. He, Tanner, and one of the miners went on to fix the fault.

Looking at the splintered stone next to the fallen ladder, Len whistled. "If that whole thing had landed on Ellie, she'd a' been dead," he said quietly.

Dougal found himself a troubled man. If one piece of the roof could come down, could not others? The thought seemed to make the blackness blacker. Give him a moonless night of dodging moss-troopers on the open moor, rather. It didn't seem to affect Tanner. The man looked too round for the ladder—amazingly light that ladder was to carry a man that heavy—but he seemed comfortable up there.

"Bugger." Irritation from the ladder top.

"What's wrong, man?" Dougal hoped he didn't sound breathless. He felt it. Damn fool situations too much beer got you into. That was why he normally stuck with just one or two.

"I musta been drunk when I packed up. Haven't got my wire cutters, f'rchrissake."

Dougal reached into his gaiter and pulled out his sgian dhu. "This knife will cut near anything. Ye can even shave wi' it. I would nae give it to you to cut wire, but I need to get out of this place."

"Herr Tanner," said the miner. "Here is the plier of the . . . liddy Anderson. It must have falled."

Len Tanner reached a hand down. "Yeah. Better than the knife. Pass it up."

Dougal saw that the light ladder could actually take the weight of two men.

A minute or two later Tanner came down, dusting his hands. "No point in testing it. No one in the switch-room. Ellie will be in the hospital by now. Let's get outta here."

Dougal was glad to oblige.

But, some fifteen minutes later, when they got back up to the switch-room they discovered he was wrong. Ellie had a bandage round her head, but she was very present. Her foot was up on the desk and she had a militant look in her eye.

Looking at her in the light, Dougal thought she was a fine figure of a woman. She'd cut and stook peats all day, he reckoned.

"I can hear you got it fixed," she said, cocking her head at the relay-stacks.

Len shrugged. "Yeah. Simple job. Why don't you get them to take you home, Ellie?"

"And leave you and your boyfriend with my exchange?" she sneered.

Tanner was principally interested in telecommunications. "Ha. What the hell would I want with this old dinosaur?"

The other part of her statement penetrated to Dougal. "Ye daft besom! We just gave up a guid nights drinkin' tae pull your tail oot o' the mess ye made. I'm minded tae put ye o'er my knee an' gi ye guid hidin'. Have ye no brains or no manners?" He was quite angered and that tended to make his English a lot thicker than usual. Just about impenetrably thick, actually.

"I think I just got cussed out by a master," said Ellie, looking impressed. "What'd he say, Tanner?"

The telephone technician tugged his moustache. "Damned if I know," he said. "Ol' Doogs here can sound off in about six different languages," he said proudly.

Dougal was quick on the uptake. He realized that the way to deal with this particular woman was to be rude right back to her. He'd met a few troopers like that, but never before a lassie. No wonder the mine manager had sounded so uncomfortable about her.

The subject of his thoughts jerked a sardonic thumb at him. "Thought you didn't approve of all these foreigners. That we Americans should keep to ourselves."

Len Tanner looked uncomfortable. "Yeah, well. Dougal is a Scot. And I got used to it."

She snorted. "Realized you made a goddamn redneck fool of yourself, you mean."

Tanner's moustache began to bristle. "Ha. So where is your 'new American' assistant, Ellie Anderson? You can't handle the Krauts either."

Ellie laughed. "More like they can't handle me. I've been through three trainees. I don't mind Krauts, as long as they jump when I say frog. They bitch about my language to the boss."

"Ain't they figured out that your bark is worse than your bite yet?"

She raised an eyebrow. "That's what you think, walrus-face. And you watch your mouth about my switching gear."

He snorted. "You want me to be polite about stuff that came out of the ark? I work with state of the art electronic equipment . . ."

Now, by the flames in her cheeks, he'd really gone too far. "Tanner, you're so goddamn stupid! Your electronic rig is so superior. This is 'an old dinosaur.' Well, let me tell you this, walrus-face. Within three years that piece of plastic and electronics of yours is going to be nothing but fucking scrap. Something goes wrong there . . . you toss out the whole circuit-board and plug in another. Only you can't make transistors and circuit-boards. And you sure as hell can't buy 'em. But Ollie or Nat Davis's shop can make the mechanical switches here, if they have to. This ol' lady is gonna be the switchboard for the town. Hell, for the whole new United States. We've got ten times the capacity we need for this mine, or even this rinky-dink town. This is where it is gonna be at. So you better goddamn learn," she snarled.

"So your switching gear might outlast my switchboard. So what?" Len held up the telephone. "See this? Do you know what I do every goddamn day? Cannibalize broken phones, crap I'd have thrown away before, and try and make one working instrument outa two pieces of scrap. An instrument has an average life span in normal use of maybe five years. Ain't that many new phones around. In three years the network will be half the size. And in ten you might have three telephones working. But your 'ol' lady is gonna be the switchboard for the town,' " he mimicked savagely. "Big deal. Big fat hairy deal, Ellie."

Ellie stared at him. In silence. "You know, walrus-face, that's the first time I've heard you speak any sense."

"Stop calling me walrus-face!" he snapped.

Ellie snorted. "I'll call you any goddamned thing I please. But it's time I showed you something I've been working on. I figured out that they were going to run out of instruments PDQ. I guess I ain't the most diplomatic person around because when I tried to tell Underwood, he said it wasn't an immediate priority. Fucking jerk."

"Yeah. I tried to tell Bill Porter. He wasn't listening either. People take phones for granted. They don't even think of an existence without 'em."

She pointed at a metal cupboard. "Open that."

Inside stood what Dougal decided could be a fiendish new torture device for the Inquisition.

Ellie pointed proudly to the contraption. "We've got to reverse engineer. Downgrade. They've had to go back to blasting in the mine instead of using the continuous miners, right. Well, we can't make electret sets. So I've been workin' on this."

Dougal didn't understand it, but it certainly impressed Len. "Holy smoke! Edison would have been proud of you! Does it work?"

"Yeah, well . . . The carbon granule part was tricky at first, but I got it licked once I got Ollie Reardon to make me some decent diaphragms. I'm having a bit of trouble with the antisidetone network. But it works."

Len Tanner took a deep breath. "Okay. So I guess I made a fool of myself again, huh."

He didn't sound unhappy about it. He rubbed his hands together. "Heh. We're going to see an increase in subscribers again. Work our way up. Lines all over the new United States . . . Who knows? One of these days we may even have the net itself again. I kinda thought everything I knew about was heading for being history. Makes you feel so damned useless."

Ellie Anderson scowled. "It's not so simple. If I could get the fucks to listen to me. But when everything breaks down they'll want to listen. Maybe three years from now."

Len shrugged. "We can't talk to the bosses. It's not my line and it sure isn't yours. But I'm gonna put in some time up here. Refresh myself on this stuff. The instrument fixing is going to take a back seat for a while." He smiled evilly.

Dougal shook his head. "Weel. My head is starting to hurt. An' you understand this stuff, Len. I understand my way home tae my billet."

* * *

The next day Dougal awoke—as was his lifetime's habit—at first light, with something of a headache, and an idea eating away like a maggot at his mind. Three separate facts he'd picked up last night were connecting in his head.

Firstly, up at the mine was a device which was capable of carrying many more of these telephones than it did now. Secondly, the woman technician had made a telephone itself. It was large and clumsy compared to the phones the Americans had brought with them. But compared to a letter, a messenger and a horse, it was a grand thing indeed. The Americans might not see it as such, but in Jena or Saalfeld—any city in Germany—there'd be a stream of wealthy merchants and notables who would pay very, very well indeed, for such a device. And they'd be happy to take it right now, never mind waiting the three years that Old Americans would accept.

Never mind Jena, for that matter. Just among the new American families there'd soon be a demand if they knew that they could have such a thing. Of course New Americans would want the wonderful light phones that the Old Americans had. It might be a lot easier in one of the nearby towns.

It was however the third point that really was gnawing at him though: Neither Tanner nor the woman at the mine—Anderson—was any good at dealing with Germans. If you came down to it: neither of them was any good at dealing with people. As Mackay's dispatch rider, he understood how vital communications were. But neither of those two could have explained this. And neither of them had the business sense of a rabbit. And neither could deal with authority.

Dougal put his hands behind his head and let his breath hiss between his teeth. He spoke, to varying degrees of fluency, five languages. He could explain things. He'd had to—especially to men in positions of authority. And he did have the canniness to bargain and deal. This, if he could pull it together, had the smell of the deal of a lifetime.

He stood up. First Mackay. If the colonel had left his warm bed next to that pretty and deadly wife of his, he'd be in Staff HQ.

* * *

He was, along with Lennox. Dougal Lawrie saluted. "Sir. Would you be having me return to Halle today?"

Mackay shook his head. "It's already too late to do anything about it, unfortunately."

Lennox twirled his mustachios. Dougal reckoned he had the length on Tanner, if not the breadth. "Nae purpose, t'whole thing. T'would o' done some guid if we'd had word two weeks ago. But th' barges are already on th' way to Naumberg. Now th' guns'll have tae go by road instead. Through Saalfeld, Kronach, and so on."

Mackay shrugged. "His Majesty did understand the communication problem. The message will have to go back, but there's no urgency. It's a pity we didn't have word earlier though."

Dougal Lawrie cleared his throat. "About that, sir. If I could have a word, sir?"

Lennox eyed him suspiciously. "This is nae' one o' your money-makin' schemes again is it, Lawrie?"

Mackay sat back in his chair, his infectious grin spreading. "He saved us a fortune in horseflesh last time, Lennox. Let's hear it, trooper."

Dougal knew that in some ways this would be his hardest pitch. "Well, sir, if we had yon phone"—he pointed to the instrument on the desk—"spread oot across Germany, we'd have done away with this problem."

Mackay smiled. "And trooper Lawrie could spend his time in the beer garden instead of in the saddle. Can't be done, Lawrie. I've talked to Mike Stearns about it. It's something they'd like to do. One day. But they've other priorities."

Dougal took a deep breath. "Colonel. If I could organize such a thing—without taking away frae their priorities, in a private way like—you'd have no objection? You know how many battles have been lost because of poor communications, sir. This could change that. And it would keep me out o' the saddle, sir."

He saw the wariness in Mackay's face. "And if it works, sir, ye'd be able to talk to Julie when you were away."

Mackay laughed and Dougal knew he'd won. "You're my most reliable dispatch rider, Lawrie. You're trouble in a troop, but a good man for detached duties. So if I can help it, you personally are going to be sitting in the saddle, telephone or no. There are places it won't go to and there are not enough of these radio devices to go round."

"Aye, sir. But this would nae need me tae leave your service. There's nowt in my oath that says I cannot have a business interest on the side, as it were."

Lennox snorted. "Y' already have, ye black-hearted moss-trooper."

Lawrie ignored Lennox. Concentrated on Mackay, hoping that the young man would not think too deeply on the affair with the gypsies and their current remounts. "Sir. I've the people who can do the job. They can no' deal with the Germans. They have no' the language nor the local knowledge. If I factor for them, the money will come from the Germans and the skills from these two. And we'll have telephones. They'll aid us in the war. The enemy cannot use them even if they capture the instruments, because the calls will all be routed through Grantville. It's a bargain, sir. A bargain in which Grantville wins, the other towns win, and King Gustav Adolf wins most of all. And ye've still got your dispatch rider. I just have a wee business on the side."

Lennox snorted. "Aye. And we can provide y'r time and horses too, eh, Lawrie?"

Mackay chuckled. "No doubt. But if he doesn't do this, he'll do something else. And we might get something useful out of this."

Dougal saluted smartly. "Thank you, sir. You'll no' regret it. If we can make it work, sir, ye'll talk to Mr. Stearns about a military appropriation?"

This venture was greeted with a shout of laughter from both men. "I knew that you'd be up to some scheme, Lawrie. Get along with you, but see you keep Lennox posted with your movements in case we need you."

Well, it wasn't a flat refusal, anyway. And he had permission to proceed. Dougal was smiling as he walked away.

* * *

He found Len Tanner frowning at pieces of telephone. "My head hurts," Dougal said by way of a greeting.

"Humph." Tanner said, looking up briefly. "So does mine." His voice was carefully neutral.

Dougal realized that what he was dealing with here was a man who was used to people being friendly . . . only when they wanted something. This was going to be trickier than he thought.

"Yon lassie up at the mine said something last night I wanted to ask you about. I've an idea o' a business venture I've a wish to go into. But I dinnae ken this phone business. I need some advice or she could sell me short."

Len Tanner laughed. "Ellie? She couldn't sell a drink to an alcoholic. She's got a nasty tongue and a hell of a temper. But she's rock solid honest, even if she'll snap your nose off for nothing."

Dougal grinned. "Ye sound as if you fancy her." And then, at the thoughtful look on the man's face, he realized he'd been more accurate in jest than he'd been when in earnest.

Len shrugged. "Her bad-mouthing doesn't worry me."

"Well. She is a fine figure of a woman," said Dougal respectfully. There are some lines a wise man doesn't cross. One of those is a fellow man's taste in women.

Len blinked through his glasses. "Yeah. I kinda thought . . . when we were cut off like this. Being the only two telephone techs and having something in common we might get together. Y'know. An' anyway. I've never had any luck with women. But I thought . . ."

Len fingered his moustache. "She said 'I got no fucking interest in a redneck walrus.' Y'know . . . it took me twenty years to grow this darn thing," he said resentfully, patting his moustache. "Anyway. Tell me about this idea of yours."

Dougal pursed his lips. "Weel. It's things you said last night, you and yon lassie. You got me thinking about not having to sit in the saddle all day. About that switch-room being able to cope with ten times the number of phones. And what you were saying o' phones all over the new United States."

"Yeah. Well, the exchange isn't all that big, but it has a hell of a lot more capacity than they're using. But it won't happen for five, maybe ten years. Things have got to get settled and organized first, Doogs. They keep telling us that they've got other priorities. When you put that into my kind of language, that means they've got ten other places to put the money. Me, I think that's goddamn stupid, but they didn' ask me."

Dougal nodded. "Aye. It is stupid. Ye ken, things will get organized a lot faster if we have rapid communications."

Len nodded. "Yeah. Not much we can do about it though. People ain't inclined to listen to me. I've tried to tell Bill Porter. I kept getting this 'we'll get here but we have other priorities right now.' So. We'll just have to wait."

Dougal smiled. "What if we don't wait? What if we just do it ourselves?"

Tanner laughed sourly. "Are you crazy? Nah. I guess you just don't know, Doogs. It's real big bucks you're talking about. Forget it. And forget borrowing it. The Abrabanels pretty well control venture banking and that means big projects get chosen by the town. Mike Stearns ain't a bad guy, but he's set on a whole list of other stuff."

Privately, Dougal suspected that Stearns could be brought around to it by someone who was a better talker than either Anderson or Len Tanner. But that would not fit in with this Scot's plans. "If you're not interested in such a system getting started now . . ."

Tanner snorted. "Of course I'm interested. It just can't be done."

The salmon was chasing the fly. Now to set the hook. Dougal held out his hands. "Well, if you canno' do it, perhaps I'd better talk to some o' the students at the high school. They're full of ideas. Also Mister Underwood. I can raise money from the German towns, even if I cannot raise it from the Abrabanels. As soon as I have a working line, I'll have investors queueing. All I need is one telephone to Jena or Saalfeld. I'll have them falling over themselves to buy shares. Well, it has been nice talking. Perhaps we can employ you one day. I'd rather have had you as one o' the owners, but . . ."

Tanner stood up and pounded on the table with a force that jumbled his miscellany of components. "Students! What the hell do they know about practical telephony? You need us! You need a wireman and Ellie's instruments. And forget it. We're not being your employees!"

"Aye? So you're in, then?"

* * *

Half an hour later they were sitting in Ellie Anderson's office, next to the clicking switch-stacks. Len Tanner was being more eloquent than he'd ever been in his life.

" . . . look, Ellie. We can either sit around and wait for it to happen and stay takin' orders. Or we can just do it. We end up with a phone system designed by telephone technicians and not goddamn bean counters."

Ellie looked suspiciously at Dougal. "So what's your share of this deal, you Scots cadaver? What do you bring in to it?"

"Something you cannot. Ich spreche Deutsch. And what's more, the notables o' the towns around here know me. They'll assume this is Mackay's business, which means King Gustav Adolf business, no' ours." He smiled beatifically. "Otherwise, if ye tried to do it wi' out me, ye'd have every petty official demanding a bribe or a tax. They'll no' try that on with what they assume is Royal business. Besides, I can deal with people."

Tanner nodded. "He's got a point, Ellie. Neither of us can speak to people. We ain't much good with Germans."

Ellie winced as she moved her foot on the chair in front of her. "Yeah. But what are Underwood and Bill Porter gonna say about this?"

Len gritted his teeth. "We're going to make 'em offers they can't refuse."

She snorted. Shook her improbable red hair. "I don't like the sounds of this. What are we gonna do? Take a cut in pay?"

"Nope," said Len Tanner sourly. "We're going to take on apprentices. New Americans. And we're going to pretend to like it."

Ellie put her hands to her head.

"And I'll do the negotiation for ye," said Dougal, in the very tone that he'd once used to trick Gypsy horse traders. "If it all works we'll be needing them. And I'll convince yon Underwood and is it . . . Porter?" Len Tanner nodded. "Aye, Porter, that ye'll no succeed and if they agree to the terms, they'll get the trainees they want. They'll think they're getting the better of you. By the time they ken it is the other way around it'll be too late."

Ellie smiled evilly. "Underwood would agree to hiring us three-quarters of the capacity of this board if he thought his dreams of firing me could one day be real."

Dougal smiled just as evilly in return. "And ye ken, if you train yon laddies or lassies well, why, we'll be able to hire them away frae Underwood. Then he'll have to bargain for our company's services."

Ellie Anderson shook her head and laughed. "Cadaver, I can tell that you'll end up owning the company. So my terms are that you call it Anderson, Tanner and whatever your name is, so people will at least remember we existed." Her eyes were suddenly bird-bright. "Your name doesn't begin with a T, does it?"

Dougal shook his head. "Lawrie. Dougal Lawrie."

Ellie sighed. "Oh, well. I guess I won't be one of the directors of AT&T, after all. There goes another ambition."

* * *

They sat in Len's chaotic trailer, surrounded by half a ream's worth of scrawled paper and the four computers that had been his life, once. Len was painfully aware that the place was a mess. Well, it had been a couple of years since anyone but him had been in here. And since the death of the net, he'd spent little enough time here himself.

"We'd need about twenty miles of three-hundred-pound-per-mile wire. Copper is still quite cheap, thank God. Poles every fifty meters. Insulators. Then we'll need some labor to put up the poles, and the wire. Say a team of five. We're talking months of work."

Len tapped the figures into the spreadsheet. His face got longer as they added new items. Eventually he said gloomily: "It doesn't work, guys. We're about a third over budget. And there'll be stuff we haven't even thought about yet."

Dougal tapped the rough map they'd been working out distances on. "Is it needful that we follow the road? And well, can we not get the farmers to put up the poles?"

Len considered it. He'd been a wireman. "They'd probably fall down in three months. And if we go across country we'd have to clear the trees. "

"Three months is all we need," said Ellie. "Look, our aim is one line to Saalfeld. Get tolls coming in and get investors. There's no way we're gonna have enough money to set up a telephone network." She grimaced. "Especially if every instrument we make is gonna take me a month."

Len knew she could do better than that. "We'd get around that. I reckon Ollie could do most of the parts for one in a day. If he did it production-line style, we'd get a lot more. Those phones sure aren't gonna be cheap. It'll work, though. But the poles, and the time and the labor—we can't get away from that."

The Scot looked speculative. "Do we have to put up poles?"

"Unless we can insulate the wire, yes. And then basically we'd have to bury it. Which would cost a whole hell of a lot more. It's got to be up in the air."

"We couldn't just attach it to the trees?" asked Dougal.

Len shook his head. "Trees move. And they grow at different speeds. And . . ."

"Y'know . . . he's right," interrupted Ellie. "We could do that! We're talking about three months, Tanner. We can start replacing, putting up proper poles—even during that time."

Len tugged at moustache. "It won't look professional."

Ellie snorted. "Jeeze, Tanner! We're trying to get it up and running. The Germans won't know it's not professional, and the Americans—well, why should we care?"

Len sat back. Nodded. "Yeah. I guess we could do that. And I guess we can improvise so long on the insulators. They don't have to be glass as we were planning on. I figure a piece of tire should do the job. There's stuff down at the junkyard that is beyond retreading. But even cutting all the corners, me demanding leave . . . we're still going to be way short. Ellie and me aren't much by the way of savers, Doogs."

Dougal took a deep breath. "Ah, weel." He stood up and started undoing his shirt. "As well hung for a sheep . . . This idea had better work." He pulled out a money belt. "A tribute o' my faith. A mercenary trooper does nae earn much, but I've done a small amount o' horse trading."

He spilled some silver, copper and even one golden coin onto the desk. "My savin's over the last ten years or so. Will we do now?"

Len Tanner looked at the coins. At the weather-beaten Scot. The man wasn't young. He looked at Ellie, and she at him. Back at the pile of coins. The Scot's entire life-savings might add up to three hundred dollars. The two Americans looked at the Scot. Dougal Lawrie was plainly uncomfortable. "It's no' much," he muttered. "But it's what I've got."

"It'll be enough," said Ellie in her don't-even-think-of-arguing-with-me voice.

Len nodded. "Yep." He looked at the pile again. "Equal shares."

"It's no' equal to what you're putting in," said the Scot quietly. "Shares based on what we put in."

"We're all putting in equal amounts," said Ellie, harshly. "We're all putting in all we've got. I can find another grand or so."

Len nodded. He could always sell a computer. They were worth a fortune these days. It would be a shock to get more for a machine than he'd paid for it for a change. "Yep. Sounds fair."

The Scot looked embarrassed. "I'm no' dishonest. That's not right."

Len tugged his moustache. "He can take it or leave it, eh, Ellie?"

She nodded.

The Scot reached down and pulled a knife from his gaiter. Slit the stitching on his belt and squeezed out a golden coin. "A ducat. My last resort. If ye're going to do that, I canna hold this back, can I?"

* * *

The caravan was made up of a load-bed and the rear axle from a rusty scrapped truck. Ellie called it Fort Knox. They'd built it up to about six foot with rough timber and roofed it over. It had four low slit windows, just above the metal of the load-bed, and a ladder to a manhole at the top. As far as Len Tanner was concerned it wasn't secure enough. The forest still had loot-hungry deserters and other perils. Wolves and bears, too. At least those wouldn't steal the wire. They might eat the three of them in their narrow bunk beds, though.

The caravan's two oxen were an added aggravation. Len longed for a truck. But then he longed for even the relative comforts of Grantville. The only "comfort" he had was the new prototype AT&L carbon granule telephone, with the Tanner-built antisidetone transformer. It, and its battery, had pride of place in the crowded caravan.

The task had so far taken a week. It was more than just following the marked trees and poles that Dougal had had put up where there were no suitable trees. Every new wire attachment point was numbered. Len would attach the phone, call in, and Ellie would record resistances. If the line went down they'd be able to tell exactly where the break was by the resistance on it. It was tedious, painstaking work. Len was at the stage of wishing for some excitement. Wishing for better German linguistic skills, too. Dougal had been with them until two days ago, but the Scot had had to return to Grantville. The bulk of Mackay's troop were taking part in an exercise in Saalfeld, merely miles away. But Dougal was posted back to Grantville.

Dieter, the assistant Dougal had found him, was so eager it was painful. And he spoke fair to middling German-English. Len found he was coming to like the boy. But he was getting mighty suspicious about this Waldross term the kid kept using when talking to Ellie's trainee, Lilli. Still, he'd even managed to learn a few words of German. It was different when you wanted to. Having a purpose, having a dream, had made the year 1633 in Thuringia a great place to be. It had changed somehow from a curse to a place of opportunity. It had become a United States that had a place for him too, even if it meant learning a foreign language and working his hands raw at repetitive manual labor. Another four days should see them in Saalfeld, their first target city. A lot of business from Grantville was going that way these days.

They'd just settled in for the night when boredom suddenly became a very desirable thing.

The door-bolt was literally ripped out of the wood. And through it came barreling saber-armed men. Len never even managed to get to the shotgun beside him. Instead he was wrestling with a sword-arm. Then bar-fights came to his rescue. He grabbed a tunic and head-butted. He could actually feel the nose break. But someone else had seized him from behind. More hands, strong ones, and profuse German swearing. He kicked savagely and was rewarded by more cursing.

Ten minutes later he and Dieter were tied with their own precious wire as well as rawhide thongs and dragged outside the caravan, to where more men were throwing kindling onto the fire. Len was conscious. Dieter wasn't.

A pair of riders came up through the darkness. Two of the attackers hastened to hold bridles once they dismounted. The others saluted them respectfully. Len wished like hell he understood more German. One of the men who walked into the firelight looked as if he'd just stepped out of a palace rather than the darkness of the Thuringenwald. His clothes and cape were impeccable. His boots gleamed like mirrors in the firelight. He looked down an arrogant aristocratic nose at the scene. The other . . . well, he was one of those invisible people. Everything from his dress to his face radiated ordinary, forget me. They walked over to the prisoners. The elegant one looked at them in such a way that Len Tanner began trying to remember prayers. He snapped something in German at them.

"I can't speak German. Ich nix sprechen zee Deutsch."

The look this earned him from the elegant one didn't bode well. "So. You are one of these American interlopers, ja?"

"Just what are you doing here?" demanded the plainly dressed man in perfect English.

"He is a spy, Weiman. Ja. Or a guard. Here to watch over the route of the guns. I think we will have the truth tortured out of him." It was said in English, while the elegant nobleman watched him under half-lidded eyes.

I'm expected to understand. To shit myself. Like it could get worse. But he knew it could.

"I'm a technician. I don't know anything about your guns. We are putting up the telephone line through to Saalfeld for King Gustav Adolf." As soon as he'd said it, looking at the man's face, Len knew he'd screwed up, badly. This man wasn't a bandit. Or even some local aristocrat. This was someone who both feared and hated the King of Sweden and Captain General of the United States. Whatever he was doing here was obviously aimed at hurting the King.

"You have just ordered your own execution." He leaned forward and grabbed Len's moustache, tugging. "I will singe Gustav Adolf's moustache via you. Captain Von Streml . . ."

The plain man held up hand "Wait, Graf. I wish more information from the prisoner."

Len knew that "Graf" translated roughly into the English "Count." It was apparent the count was not accustomed to being told to wait. But it was also apparent that this man Weiman held the whip hand. The Graf stayed the order.

Weiman turned to look at the two prisoners. "This telephone. I saw them on my visit to Grantville. You can make them?"

Len knew a lifeline when he saw one. "Between the two of us, yeah."

Weiman turned back to the graf. "I think the Emperor might like these men alive."

The Emperor! That had to be Ferdinand II of the Austrian Habsburgs he was talking about, Gustav Adolf's most bitter enemy. And earlier that day he'd thought 1633 was a time of opportunity. Well, if he could talk his way into letting him call Grantville . . .

"We need our gear in the caravan. And look, if the line gets broken the machines back in Grantville will ring an alarm. And if we don't call in every morning Colonel Mackay's men will come and check. You'll have to let us call in."

By the look in the eyes of Weiman, he hadn't succeeded. "We can deal with anyone who comes out. Most of Mackay's troops are not in Grantville. So, no, you will not call in and by great cleverness give some warning. You will now show us this telephone. A small device, Graf, but it allows them to speak across great distances."

Only when he was taken back to the caravan with a couple of flaring brands did Len realized that the AT&L carbon granule telephone was also a casualty of the fight. "It got smashed." The heartbreak in his voice made the count laugh.

"You can stay in here and enjoy it, ja." he said. He snapped something in German and Len found himself flung onto the caravan floor. A few moments later they tossed Dieter on top of him. The young new American groaned. Well, at least he was still alive.

The troops nailed the door in place.

* * *

It was a long, long night. Dieter had regained consciousness quite soon, much to Len's relief. There wasn't much he could have done for the boy, tied up like this. Outside they could hear several of the graf's men making use of the fire and devouring their precious rations. Their beer too. The fireside conversation grew louder. Of course it was all in German. Eventually Len had to ask Dieter. "What are they saying?"

The young man's voice was bleak. "They do not like the new United States, ja? It takes their peasants, their ancient rights. It weakens them. And now the graf, he waits for the big shipment of the new guns for Torstensson. They will ambush them here tomorrow. If they can, they will steal them for the Austrian Emperor. If not they will destroy them."

Len ground his teeth and went on with bending and flexing his bonds. Maybe they'd break. Not that that would do them much good. "And we just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time." He sighed. "Listen Dieter. You are an expert telephone tech. Between the two of us we make telephones. You got that, boy? That's what I told them. That's all that is keeping us alive right now."

Len began easing his way along the broken remains of the telephone. In the ragged light of the brands he'd seen something among the ruins.

The battery.

Finding it in the dark, with his hands tied behind him was another matter. But eventually he located the squareness. And then, managing to sit up, keeping hold of it, against the back wall, to find the insulated cable. Getting it to his mouth was something that would have been best left for circus acrobats.

Len tried not to think about what biting the wire was doing to his teeth. And then he had to maneuver some more. Trying to manage a short behind your back, when your hands were tied was exhausting. And very difficult.

A spark told him he'd managed that short.

"What are you doing?" hissed Dieter.

"Tryin' to call home. I just hope Ellie's on the board, not your bit of talent."

Spark spark spark—spark . . . spark . . . spark—spark spark spark . . .

The battery died sometime after dawn. It had been a long night, and Len had no idea if the line to Grantville was intact. Or if anyone would hear it in between the sound of the switches.

* * *

The wagon train trundled forward toward the graf's ambush. From the slit window of their prison Len and Dieter watched, horrified and helpless. Oxen don't move fast. To Len, these seemed to be moving glacially. Sixteen heavy wagons especially built for transporting Torstensson's new gun barrels. Guns that could spell the difference in the war, neatly under canvas covers. And there didn't even seem to be any outriders. At the moment the up-grade was the image of tranquility. It was going to be murder. And the aftermath, if those guns got to the other side . . . would mean that the artillery advantage that the Swedish forces had enjoyed would be over for a while. Men, money and materiel still weighed on the side of Emperor Ferdinand.

Len couldn't handle the waiting. The guards might come and beat him up but the hell with it. He yelled. So did Dieter, adding his bull-like young voice to Len's.

No one came in. But the sound wasn't carrying to the wagons.

Len saw the smoke-puff at the forest edge before hearing the gunshot. Saw the cuirassiers begin to charge out of the forest. Closed his eyes. He could hear the pop of pistols.

The thin bright sound of trumpets made him open his eyes again. The pop of cuirassiers' pistols was replaced by the heavy, solid massed sound of shotguns. Lots of them. Looking at the wagons now, Len saw that the canvas—if it had ever been canvas—was ripped. Firing in massed volley from behind the rampart of cannon-barrels, the Grantville militia was tearing the Austrian cuirassiers apart. There was a red head in among those on the lead wagon. And riding down the hill from the direction of Saalfeld were the bonnets of Mackay's Scots.

Len grinned at Dieter's bloody face. The young man grinned back. Len hoped Lilli wouldn't mind a couple of missing teeth. The two settled back to watch the Austrian raiders being shredded.

* * *

Len massaged his wrists, his mind in some turmoil. Ellie had not only left her switch-room but had actually kissed him. Well, that was when she and Dougal had kicked in the door to the caravan. Now, she stood and shook her head at the smashed ruins of the AT&L Mark One. Awkwardly, he patted her shoulder. "We can make more."

She shook her head. "Maybe one day. But you came up with the real answer, Len. We've been over-engineering. We thought coming down to a Bell-type instrument was stepping down. Sure, it was a long way down from electret microphones and transistors. But it wasn't far enough. Any one of the machine shops can knock together a Morse-key in a couple of minutes. We need to go back to the telegraph. We can have the telegraph covering towns from here to the Baltic in six months."

Len sighed. "I guess the internet is a way off, huh? But I suppose you could be right."

Dougal nodded. "Aye. That she is. We were talking about it this morning. Look, you Americans expect to talk to people immediately. The rest o' the world—we're glad if we can send a message within three weeks. This telegraph will do a grand job."

"And once we've got the lines, well, then the step to telephones is a much smaller one, Len."

"Yeah. I guess. So did you figure out it was Morse code I was sending?"

She scowled at him. "You made that damned noise in my exchange for nearly ten hours. And I couldn't even tell you shut up. Three shorts, three longs, three shorts. Over and over again. Why didn't you tell us what was going on?"

Len shrugged. "That's all the Morse I know. Besides, my hands were tied behind my back."

Ellie smiled. It was a slightly nasty smile. "Bet you can't say that in a year's time. You'll even dream in Morse."

Len shrugged. "If that's what it takes to make AT&L fly . . . I will." He pointed to the rout below. "So how did you organize this? I mean the militia I can see, Mackay's troopers back from Saalfeld."

Dougal rubbed his butt. "There were horses before telephones, Len. And I've got a mort of an investment tied up in you. I couldnae let that go tae waste now, could I? It's going to cost you, mind. I have nae been in the saddle for months, and I'm damned sore."

Ellie shook her head at the third partner. "Lawrie, you're a fraud. Len, he led the scouting party, rode back to Grantville and then rode cross country to Saalfeld to find Mackay. He's been through about six horses, and been in the saddle just about nonstop since last night."

"Aye, but she was the one who got yon Stearns and his wife tae come up and listen to the tappin', to get it into his head where you were and why we needed tae scout it." Dougal grinned. "It wouldnae have been worth his life not to come up to the mine. Ye ken we've got some good out of this. Mike Stearns saw the value o' the idea no more than five minutes after Becky. We've got backing for the telegraph."

Ellie put an arm over Len's shoulder. "You're something of a hero, Len Tanner. Everyone in town is already talking about this." She pointed across at the hastily set up aid station. "Dieter is telling the militia nurse quite a tale by the looks of it. Story is going to grow, boy. You're going to be a popular fellow. Not bad for a man who didn't have a friend in Grantville three months ago." She looked at him quizzically but with an unusual tenderness. "And all it cost you is a black eye and maybe a couple of ribs. And blistered fingers."

Len blew through his moustache. "The truth is, Ellie, I did it to save my own skin, as much as anything."

Dougal grinned. "What they dinnae ken their hearts won't grieve over."

"And you, Len, are going to keep your mouth shut and let the lying Scots company spokesman do the talking," said Ellie firmly.

Len looked speculatively at Ellie. She'd kept that arm over his shoulder. "You wouldn't like to repeat that kiss, would you?"

Ellie actually blushed. "Not with that damn moustache, Tanner."

Len put a reflexive hand to it. Sighed. "Hey, Doogs . . . ya said that knife of yours was sharp enough to shave with. Lend it to me, will you?"

Between the Armies

Andrew Dennis

1

It was a bright cold January afternoon in Avignon. An unassuming, long-haired, round-faced man in a clerical soutane sat at a desk in a high chamber of the Palais du Pape. He had the window open, for the cool breeze. Outside, the winter sun cast a light like crisp white wine on the Dom des Rochers and glittered on the Loire.

Monsignor Giulio Mazarini, Canon of St. John Lateran, Secretary to the Legate of Avignon—the Legate, Cardinal Barberini, was in Rome to the minor inconvenience of Mazarini's career—had found a quiet spot to look over the latest intelligences. He did not need to—he was between achievements, becalmed. The canonship was a sinecure he had held for some time, and his real work was diplomacy.

He had done, false modesty aside, good work for His Holiness and his Spanish allies—better to say, masters—in the Mantuan matter, even if others had sniffed at the self-aggrandizing behavior of a junior diplomat not thirty years old. Let them. If that battle had not been stopped before it began, the treaty negotiations would have become impossible, and even the botched peace that French mission to the Emperor had secured would have failed.

He had even risen from negotiating with Richelieu with credit: shaken hands with the man and come away with all his fingers. In truth, Mazarini had a high professional and personal estimate of His Eminence. Despite Mazarini's best efforts, the cardinal had taken the Pignerol valley as his price to keep French troops out of Mantua. A lesser man would not have had that much to show from bargaining with Mazarini. He had even found Richelieu pleasant and affable.

Mazarini had been rewarded for his work and now sought to anticipate his patron's next command. Hence his present diversion with the reports from the rest of Europe. Since the Swedish successes of the previous autumn, the main source of political and diplomatic information in Germany, the Society of Jesus and its devotion to regular reporting, had dwindled.

But not dried up. Information still came out. The reverses of the Catholic League made for intriguing reading—Tilly defeated, the Swedes looting Bavaria. Add to that the appearance of this new polity, claiming to be from the future, among the multifarious Germanies. Even Mazarini could hardly find that news dull, whatever its credibility. From the future, indeed. There was certainly no shortage of lunatics in the Germanies—it seemed the Bohemian disease was a contagion.

Then, the latest from Caussin at Paris. The despatch of Servien—Chretien, not the Marquis de Sable by that name whom Mazarini had known in Mantua—to Vienna and Brussels by way of Thuringia, that was all too credible. A moment's thought to order the implications in his mind, and—

He opened the door to his chamber and bellowed down the stairwell. "Heinzerling! Get me a map of the Palatinate—no, maps of the whole Rhine. And get your fat German backside up here!" He shouted in French, the language the two had best in common other than Latin.

Shortly, from the stairwell, came Heinzerling's heavy footsteps. Although little worse than most parish priests, he was below the standards Jesuits expected even of an army chaplain. Either the Society of Jesus had some deeper use for him in mind or had simply ignored his raucous behavior and not dismissed him from the Society.

The latter was more likely. The last five years' frenetic re-Catholicization of the Germanies had seen the barrel scraped for priests.

Even so, nowhere was desperate enough to put Heinzerling in charge of a parish. Heinzerling had had to join the chaplaincy of Tilly's army. He had left that post carrying messages three months before and not been in any hurry to go back. For the time being Mazarini had appropriated him as aide-de-camp.

A disaster as a priest, he was one of life's better sergeants. Mazarini had learned the use of the breed as a cavalry captain in the Valtelline War. That Heinzerling was fluent in a dozen languages was certainly no disadvantage.

"Put that foul thing out and come here," said Mazarini, when Heinzerling shouldered the door aside and rolled in with a bundle of maps under his arm and his ever-present pipe clenched between his teeth, a habit he had picked up from English mercenaries in the Imperial army. "What do you know of Mainz?"

"I was born near there, why?"

"If you wanted to cut the Spanish Road from there, how would you do it?"

Unlike most soldiers, Heinzerling had some grasp of strategy. "Up the Mosel, or there're probably a couple of routes across country. More expensive, but quicker than besieging every damned fort from Koblenz to Trier."

"You think the Swede will do that?" Mazarini stared at the map, trying to squeeze more information out of it by sheer pressure of staring.

"If Wallenstein lets him, ja."

"So the Spanish have to—" Mazarini let it trail off. The implications for the Spanish if they lost their road up the middle of Europe were obvious from a single glance at the map.

"Ja, and they—why are we discussing this?"

"Don't tell me you don't read these reports before I do." Mazarini grinned to take some of the sting from his words. He had a simple arrangement with Heinzerling with regard to his duties to the Society: he could send reports to Satan himself provided he was an efficient aide. Besides, Mazarini had himself only narrowly avoided being talked into the Society which had educated him.

"Well, this Thuringia business, with Richelieu's man, is that it?"

"Exactly. We'll make an intriguer of you yet. Here, roll that out." The map showed the Germanies in more detail than he needed, and he had to hunt about a bit for the points he wanted. Mazarini stabbed his thumb, finally, at Leipzig. "Here, this is where the Swede knocked Tilly back on his heels."

"More, mein' ich. Tilly's not just knocked back, the old teufel is finished. Spent. I was there."

"Fine, whatever. But now the Swede is here." Mazarini drew his thumb south a little and west to the Rhine. "Mainz. Where, as you observe, he's right for an attack on the Spanish Road in the spring."

"Where he's right to get kicked off before a year is out if he does. Tilly's gone, fucked, but Wallenstein's not going to be so easy. The Swede's been running himself ragged for three years all over the Germanies. Before that, Prussia. Wallenstein's going to come roaring up the Donau, unbuttoning his britches as he goes to be ready to fuck the Swede."

"Quite. Now, in all this," Mazarini said, "why is Richelieu sending this other Servien to Thuringia, and not to Mainz? Mainz is the logical place if he wants to subsidize the Swede."

"These newcomers, it seems to me. They are definitely supporting the Swede?"

"Now you're getting it. They've got a regiment of the Swede's horse on hand, which I think counts for more than this nonsense about where they're from."

"You believe he'll take the opportunity?"

"Yes. Or, he will if Louis lets him. He will have the Swede supported on the Rhine, enough to hold off Wallenstein and still get a force up the Mosel. Spain will throw everything they have into saving their precious road. And this time there will be no way to stop it all with a convenient knife in the right set of ribs."

"They could—" Heinzerling paused. "No, you're right. No one the Spaniards can knife to stop the armies marching. It will all get a lot worse, nicht wahr?"

"A lot worse. Especially if Richelieu gets Spain mired in Germany and makes mischief elsewhere." Mazarini scowled at the map, as if willing Gustavus Adolphus away from the Spanish Road. That road had been instituted in days when the English were resolute in their heresy, rather than kissing Spanish diplomatic ass and leaving their shipping alone, inasmuch as a nation of inveterate pirates could bring themselves to do that.

The road was the land route from Spanish-held Genoa to Flanders, a hard road and an expensive one. Poner un pica en Flandes, they said, for anything difficult and expensive to just short of impossible.

"Don't know why Spain doesn't just abandon the Road. They haven't used it in ten years," said Heinzerling.

"That hasn't stopped them fighting for it. You forget, I was in the Valtelline for the last bloodletting. And the Mantuan business, for which that fathead de Nevers and his alleged inheritance was no more than a pretext. We kept that from a worse fight only by the Grace of God." Mazarini made a face. "Worse fight. Hah! Plague and fever and nearly three years of butchery." He trailed off, remembering some of the things he had had to ride past in cavalier finery. He had stuck resolutely to his clerical dress after that.

Heinzerling prodded, seeing his boss about to grow maudlin. "So what do we do?"

"Try to stop my good work being undone by Spaniard hotheads, that's what we do." Mazarini scratched his chin, although he had already thought it through. "We have to get into this before worse happens. Go, start packing, my German friend, you're going to be taking a trip home soon."

Heinzerling left and Mazarini turned his mind's eye to Thuringia and the problem of making contacts in this Grantville. Anywhere else, and the notables would be known to someone. A discreet question or two and the Church's formidable network of gossips would see that the information got to him.

So, instead, to first principles: if you want to know something about a parish, ask the priest. He began to rummage through the reports. The one that named the church in Grantville was among the earliest—the doctrinal lay of the land had been the first priority of the spies, given what it usually told about a local ruler in the Holy Roman Empire.

When Mazarini saw the name that church had borne when the town first appeared, he gaped for a moment. When he saw the spies' comment that it was clearly a heretic establishment as there was no such saint, he positively bellowed with laughter, slapping the desk in his mirth.

Heinzerling put his head back around the door as Mazarini was recovering, some minutes later. "Ein problem?" he asked.

"No, quite the reverse. I think there is more to the story about Thuringia than I was prepared to credit. You remember who we had in here last week? Who you had to 'escort' out of the Palais?"

"That arschloch down from Paris?"

"The very same." Mazarini turned the report around on his desk. "Here, look here."

Heinzerling looked down at the paper, his lips moving a moment. When he looked up, he was grinning. "Ja. Definitely from a far and strange time. Of course there is no such saint, he isn't dead. Yet. More is the pity."

"Oh, it makes too much sense not to be true." Mazarini choked while his belly shook again with laughter. "Saint Vincent de Paul. Oh, he should be, he should be. What do the French say of their priests? The shortest way to hell?"

"Is to be ordained a priest, ja."

"Quite so, and de Paul is trying to teach them their letters and to stay out of the whorehouses. The patience of a saint!"

Heinzerling's grin widened. "Would you mind that I tell him?" He was fighting to control his face, trying to reconcile the expostulating little man he had marched out of the Palais by the scruff of his soutane with the image of a plaster saint. With his name on the front of a church, yet.

Mazarini choked again, and then roared with another burst of laughter. "No," he said when he recovered, "In the name of God and all his Angels and Saints, including Saint Fucking Vincent, no. The wretched mendicant will simply increase his demands to match his new status. No, Heinzerling, you're going to Thuringia. And I want reports on everything, you hear me? Everything."

2

Six months before, two newlyweds had walked out of Saint Vincent's, Grantville, after the novelty of a Methodist wedding service conducted in a Catholic church.

"Just got to change, then I'm ready when you are, Larry." The Reverend Simon Jones came back into the church from waving off the happy couple. "I intend to scandalize my flock by buying a beer for a romish idolater."

That was assuming Jones' congregation hadn't completely accustomed themselves to their pastor keeping company with a Roman priest, or that they were upset by his having borrowed St. Vincent's in order to have room for the guests at the wedding.

Mazzare grinned. "I looked it up. You've got more than a century to get drunk and chase the girls before Wesley comes to put you straight."

"Ah, touché." Only the day before Jones had twitted Mazzare about papal infallibility being anachronistic in 1631.

While Jones was changing in the sacristy, Mazzare cleared the more egregious litter from the church. The sacristy, the priest's green-room beside the sanctuary, concentrated the smells of the church: candles, floorwax, furniture polish and a hint of incense, the distinctive smell of Catholic churches everywhere.

The midsummer sun struck down through the geometric stained glass. Too art deco for a church, not enough for a cocktail bar, Mazzare had once said of it.

Jones raised an eyebrow at the double handful Mazzare dropped into the wastebasket. "Couldn't that have waited for tomorrow?" he asked.

"I've got eight o'clock mass tomorrow morning. Mrs. Flannery, God bless her, comes in half an hour early to dust things. I doubt I could face her if"—Mazzare bent, and reached into the basket—"she found this."

He held up the offending object: one of Grantville's fine collection of now-anachronistic beer bottles.

Mazzare grinned, dropped the bottle back into the basket. "Bad enough I allow Protestants in here, without I allow drunken, littering Protestants in. And she'll say all that without opening her mouth. That woman can glare."

"Ah, now that was probably one of your own papists seeking to discredit the Methodist confession. Another romish plot."

Mazzare laughed. "I do wonder why I bother having anyone clean this place, you know. The amount of time I spend tidying up so I can face the ladies in question—"

"And well done for facing Irene Flannery at all."

"I'm sure she loves you too—I might as well do it myself."

"Have you considered a witch-hunt? They're all the rage these days," Jones said, holding open the door.

Mazzare stopped, frowned. "Now, don't even joke about that. We're right in the height of it here and now."

"Only, what, fifty, sixty years before Salem?" Jones nodded. He'd been doing some reading as well.

"About. One of yours, that."

"Eh?"

"Sorry. Protestant. Although in your case you can say 'before my time.' Come to that, does Methodism have any atrocities to its credit?"

"Other than three-hour sermons?"

"You know what I mean. It's the season for them hereabouts. Magdeburg." Mazzare paused, shuddered, went on. "The Inquisition. Forced conversions. Thuringia's Protestant this week."

"I heard. Still a fair few Catholics, though."

"Yes, but am I one of them?"

"Whoa there, big fella. This sounds serious." Jones felt a sudden start of alarm at the expression on Mazzare's face. He let the door swing shut.

"It is." Mazzare sighed. He leaned on the tall vestment chest with both hands. The summer sun was high. Through the stained glass, it lit the top of the vestments chest in a rainbow dapple almost too bright to look at. Mazzare stared into the glow for a moment.

"Troubles. And then some. Yes." He turned, leaned back against the heavy chest of drawers and folded his arms before he carried on. "No, it's—well, lots of things. You've seen the name out front?"

"Yes, what of— I see. He's still alive, isn't he? And this is only one of many shocks, I take it?"

"Well, it's the easiest one, just a little work with a paintbrush. That, and having to dust off my Latin to say mass in, and oh, how the old guard are loving that."

"I can imagine. Some of that Gregorian stuff is easy on the ear."

"Whatever." Mazzare waved aside the aesthetic merits of the Tridentine mass. "Simon, I didn't sign on for this. Here, the shop manual for this place, you've seen it before."

"Sure." Jones had seen the heavy, leather-bound volume Mazzare had picked up. It contained the liturgy for every conceivable service, office, benediction and mass that could be performed in a Catholic church. Jones had been particularly taken with the engagingly mediaeval Novena of Saint Blaise.

Mazzare let the book fall back to the table it had been on. "Heresy, every word of it, in this day and age. Just for the language it's in. I've got a catechism, the '92 one, that could get me executed, just for the suggestion that Protestants might be Christians too. That's what I signed on for, vowed to obey. Here and now, though, the orders are different. Damned if I do, damned if I don't."

Jones glared. "You snapped at me for lawyering?" he said. That had been Mazzare's response to Jones' last attempt to jolly him out of his gloom. "Look, Larry, if the pope's not infallible— If there's—well, what I mean to say is that what you've got there"—he jabbed a finger at the missal—"is the best the Catholic Church knew how to be up to, what, '98? The turn of the millennium in your own case. So take it forward. Look, the Inquisition won't get called in to Grantville if anyone around here can help it. They're in for the bum's rush if they turn up anyway. Just keep your corner of the Church of Rome as clean as you can."

"Can I do that?" Mazzare's tone said that he didn't believe it. "What do we do, Simon? Sit on our asses and pretend the word of God isn't being used as toilet paper everywhere more than three miles from this spot? What does that do to our parishioners, when some asshole, pardon my mouth, preaches a damn crusade because we're setting a bad example? Or do we just join in the lunacy?"

There was a silence between them for long moments, broken only by the refined tick of the sacristy clock. Jones said nothing.

"It's a tough one, Simon," said Mazzare into the silence.

Jones offered a face that, had he ever played poker, would have been a winner. Eloquence, polished before his own congregation, deserted him for a moment. What to say? Then it came. He pointed at a spot on the wall, where the only answer to his friend's worries was hanging.

Mazzare understood, laughed ruefully. "But," he said, "as the Irishman said, if you want to get there, you don't want to start from here."

Jones shrugged. "We've time to think. Come on, you old papist, there's a better use for the day."

Together they went out to find the party. The real trick would have been avoiding it.

3

The months passed, and Mazzare and Jones settled into something that was not routine. There were too many changes and shocks for that. But it was at least an accommodation with the life of twenty-first-century clerics transplanted to the seventeenth. They did not speak again of Mazzare's troubles, for the day-to-day hard work of pastoral responsibility for congregations that doubled and redoubled was enough to take the load off either priest's mind, just as five minutes of real stomach cramps will cure any amount of heartache.

It was February of 1632 before the issue arose again. The Reverend Jones answered the telephone late in the evening.

"I've had a letter, Simon." The voice was Mazzare's, abrupt as usual. He spent most of his time exhausted these days.

"Letter, Larry? Who from?" Jones had been half-asleep himself when the phone had rung.

"You remember we were talking about what'd happen when the hierarchy heard about me? I think the other shoe's dropping."

"Oh. What does it say? And who in particular is it from?" Jones sat up straighter in his chair.

"Guy name of Mazarini. He's a papal diplomat at Avignon."

"In France?" It was the best Jones could do. Mazzare was assuming he knew more than he did.

"Not for a while. Avignon's a papal state, this guy works for the head of it."

"Sounds heavy."

"Might be. Why don't you come over, we can have a chat while I think what to do."

Jones begged off until morning, when he made his way to Mazzare's presbytery in the quiet hours of the late winter dawn. Mazzare was already up and waiting.

"Someone I want you to meet, as well," he said, by way of greeting. "Father Augustus Heinzerling."

The priest in question was a short, wide, brawny-looking man, his shoulder-length hair and prize-fighter face clashing with his clerical dress. He nodded to Jones. "Ein Ehre, Herr Jones." He said it "Tschones."

"Pleased to meet you, too," said Jones, glancing across at Mazzare, whose face was impassive. "You come from Avignon?"

It turned out Heinzerling's English was reasonable, if German-accented and scented with cheap tobacco. "I am come presently from Avignon. I have the honor to be from Germany in my origins."

"I guessed," said Jones.

"Father Heinzerling is here in violation of King Gustavus' prohibition on Jesuits, it seems." Mazzare's mouth twisted, wry. "But we have freedom of religion here, so I think we needn't turn him in just yet. He brought Monsignor Mazarini's message for me. Here, before we go any further. I've written out a translation."

Jones took the two sheets of paper, one a heavy, ragged-edged sheet with wax seals and pale brown ink and the other feint-ruled with Mazzare's neat handwriting. Neither version was a long document.

"Doesn't say much, does he?" said Jones when he had finished reading. "Would be honored to make your acquaintance, interested in discussing matters theological. There's more?"

Mazzare grinned, although there was no humor in it. "Tell him, Father Heinzerling."

"The monsignor is a diplomat. He hath seen implications in Grantville"—he gave it the French pronunciation—"and Sweden. He would have correspondence with Grantville in the hope of a present peace."

"You'll raise this with Rebecca?" Jones looked to Mazzare for that.

Mazzare nodded. That was a given. "There's more, though, Simon. Tell him, Father."

Heinzerling nodded. "Richelieu has sent his man Servien to Wien and thence to Grantville. Thereafter to Bruxelles. The monsignor believes his Eminence seeks to do Spain a mischief by provoking more general war in the Germanies."

Jones nodded. "Definitely one for Rebecca. Larry, I think your hopes of tidying up your hierarchical headaches are still faint."

"Maybe," said Mazzare, "on the other hand, Mazarini works for the pope. Something might come of it, after all."

4

"Your Eminence." Mazarini began to kneel, feeling slightly silly doing so for a cardinal younger than himself.

"Come, Giulio, we are in private. My esteemed uncles may have fine ideas about the dignity of cardinals, but I am not so grand. Come, sit by me. Come." Cardinal Antonio Barberini the Younger might disavow his grandeur of station but, like the rest of his family, he had done well out of his uncle's securing of the Vatican.

Mazarini took the chair he was waved to. An easy conversational gambit—"How is the cardinal finding Avignon?"

"Now that I am here? As ever I did. Charming. Rustic. Alas, French. Come, Giulio, you have not sought a private audience to inquire after my health and pleasure, eh? Out with it, Giulio, out with it."

Mazarini smiled. "The cardinal finds me transparent."

Barberini snorted. "Not only this cardinal. I was met at the border by one of Richelieu's intendants." The warmth had gone from Barberini's face.

"Your Eminence?" Mazarini made himself ask the question, although he knew what was coming.

"If you think our esteemed brother in Christ at Paris does not see and hear everything in this town you are not the man who was recommended to me."

Mazarini nodded. "I was waiting for a response."

"From Richelieu? You have it. His Eminence is displeased. Speaking for Rome, so is His Holiness. Speaking for his Holiness, perhaps helping pry apart France and Spain is no bad thing. Speaking for my dear uncle Maffeo, it would be good work but your timing is execrable."

Mazarini slumped in his chair. "Such was not my intention. I had thought France and Spain were about to be at each other's throats again."

Barberini smiled again. "Come, events make fools of us all, sooner or later."

"As they have of Richelieu." Mazarini grinned. "He would have had more for France by doing nothing."

"Or by helping the Swede." Barberini's moustaches twitched as he said that, as if he smelt something vile.

Mazarini nodded. "Although there he—he is helping the Swede?" He frowned.

It was Barberini's turn to grin. "No, I doubt it. I read your appreciation, good work, good work. Come, Richelieu is not so stupid as to think he can sway the Swede now the Swede has the Jew money, no?"

Mazarini sucked at his moustache for a moment. "I am pleased the cardinal finds my work useful. Has His Holiness any further directions as to my actions in Thuringia?"

Barberini pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, deeply. "I cannot speak in detail, you understand? Uncle Maffeo may have raised me to the purple but he still expects me to be his little nephew. I think you should take care. When I left Rome my uncle was considering two million in subsidy to Wallenstein. Just, you understand, to balance the Swede. Olivares' lapdogs were snarling as usual about our lack of enthusiasm for the Habsburg cause. And the French army has yet to stir out of its winter quarters. Much could happen before springtime."

"So I may continue making preparations to open formal discussions later in the year?"

Barberini chuckled. "No, if you would be a peacemaker, you must wait for war. Best to wait for the die to be cast before you work your charms in the Germanies."

Mazarini felt his jawline grow numb with the effort of maintaining his face. He kept his voice slow and careful, his manner that of the patient, polite uomogalanto. "And while the cardinal awaits the development of the implications, how free a rein is Wallenstein to have to rape his way across the Germanies? How many converts for the Lutherans will satisfy the cardinal? How far past the right time to act does the cardinal wish me to wait?"

"As long as it takes!" Barberini slapped the arm of his chair. "As long as it fucking takes! Do you not see what Richelieu wants? Do you not? As soon as the Church moves to stop France, Louis of France becomes another Henry of England. How many do we lose then, Monsignor?" Barberini sighed. "Please, forgive me. I set a poor example, no?"

Mazarini waved the apology aside. "I provoked the cardinal. But, please, Richelieu threatens apostasy?"

"Come, does Richelieu ever threaten? Overtly, I mean? You know the man, Giulio. You know him, how he talks. How he can hardly control Louis at times, as if Caussin doesn't have that fool on a tight leash."

Mazarini raised an eyebrow. "We're counting on Caussin now? That prig?" He also had doubts that the popular opinion of Louis of France as a blithering, purblind, easily led idiot were entirely accurate.

"He is a good and pious man, else Richelieu would not have appointed him the king's confessor." Barberini waved a finger of admonition as he spoke and grinned at his own joke.

"The cardinal may joke, but Caussin is a good and pious and above all loyal man. That is his trouble. Richelieu does take some of his duties seriously, and the king's conscience is one of them."

"Yes," Barberini waved aside the minor matter of a monarch's conscience, "but we digress. We dare not prevail upon France lest they turn Protestant. We dare not prevail upon Spain lest they work a mischief on the church in the guise of their own piety. May god forbid a church run by Olivares and his lot, eh?"

Mazarini held his tongue with the first—insolent—reply that came to him. "We dare not," he said finally, "dare not."

"Basta! Don't be such a fool, Giulio. What we dare not is set the Church against what the two largest Catholic powers want. One of which is Spain, which runs the church in its territories how it damned well pleases."

"And the Catholics in Germany? Is it necessary to kill them to save them for the Church and the House of Habsburg?"

It was Barberini's turn to be silent while Mazarini glared at him.

Mazarini cracked first and sighed, deeply. "So I am called to my obedience. So be it. I will say I could do more—"

"I don't doubt it. Come, if it were only Uncle Maffeo and I perhaps you might be allowed to try, eh? For now, there were too many . . ." Barberini's forced bonhomie trailed off. "No, I mislike it, too. But do nothing, Giulio. To intermeddle and fail before the war begins, eh? You see?"

"So the possibility of embarrassment must take second place to the certainty of bloodletting?"

Barberini frowned. "I share your disappointment. But we are both bound to obedience."

Mazarini hung his head. "I know," he sighed. "I have a man in Thuringia. On his way back, more than likely."

"I know. Your messenger. Do not send him back with any message."

Mazarini looked the cardinal full in the face. "I understand."

* * *

The Rhone flowed slow and even, the litter of Avignon only thinly scattered in it. "Obedience," he said, and spat. The spittle drifted down to vanish, blown by the wind under the arch of the bridge.

The thin winter sun, not yet tinged with the warmth of spring, scattered and danced on the wavelets around the river boats. He mimicked Barberini's pompous tone. "Come, Giulio, you patronizing little bastard." He spat again.

He hawked up one more, this time for the House of Habsburg, and dropped a good one into a boat as it emerged under the Pont St. Benezet. Snickering like a naughty boy, he stepped back from the parapet. Ah, if it was all that simple. Do the thing and escape notice after. The fat fool. And his—back to the parapet for another gob of malice into the river—dignity!

"Monsignor?" The voice was German-accented. "Monsignor Mazarini?"

"Ah, Heinzerling. There I was, convinced my life was being written by Cervantes from his assured place in Hell, and you arrive to be my Sancho Panza."

"Monsignor?" Heinzerling was frowning.

"Did the paltry contribution of Spain to world literature pass you by, Father?"

"No, Monsignor, but—"

Mazarini waved it aside. "How was Grantville?"

Heinzerling grinned. "All the reports had and more. The priest there, Father Mazzare, invites you to visit him, and their dignitaries would welcome discussions provided there is no expectation of conclusion. I have here for you a letter from the priest Mazzare, a note of the words I had with the Jewess I spoke to who is in their council of government, notes of what I saw in the town, everything." He pulled out a small packet of papers, on which the rings of ale mugs were visible.

No doubt there would be fowl-grease and tobacco-scorches where he had composed the notes in taverns on the ride back. Mazarini gestured for the paper. "I shall look forward to reading this. Father Heinzerling, does the priest at Grantville need a curate? Can he afford one?"

"He is alone, yes. He seems rich enough to hire a curate, too. Why?"

"Because you did not meet me here, Father Heinzerling."

"But Deacon Bazin said you'd be—"

"Never mind that little turd. If he asks, I wasn't here. No, you go back to this Grantville, make yourself at home. Get a living of this priest who thinks de Paul is dead, and wait for word. While you're waiting, get letters to me in Rome, where I'm going, eh? You have the address of my usual correspondent there, yes?"

"Yes, but—"

"I cannot go to Grantville. I need a pair of eyes and ears there, and someone who will keep me informed. You're going back of your own free will because you missed me here, yes? I left word—I'll see Bazin later to leave it—that you were to follow me to Rome, but like the thickheaded German oaf you are you went back to this town of wonders in Germany, with that woman you think no one knows you keep, yes?"

"Ja—"

Mazarini waved to shut him up. "You've come out, missed me here and gone and got drunk, all right? That's the excuse you've used every other time you've been at home with the woman, yes?"

Heinzerling grinned. "Your spies are good."

"You have a lot to live up to, eh?"

5

Heinzerling returned to Grantville with what appeared to be a small party of refugees: a woman and three small boys.

"I have no response for you," he said to Mazzare. "The monsignor is recalled to Rome."

"Why?" Mazzare had had hopes of a response that would ease his own tension.

"I cannot say for sure. He did leave word that I might come to Grantville if I wished it, and would come himself when he might."

"What as?" Mazzare frowned. "You, I mean. His spy?"

Heinzerling shrugged. "He would have reports of me, ja. Will you have a curate in whose ears you might speak no secrets?"

Mazzare stared at him, hard. Then, coming to a decision, sighed. "Fine. I need the help. You can stay at least until Monsignor Mazarini arrives."

Heinzerling nodded. "And Hannelore can keep the presbytery. And clean the church."

"Ah," said Mazzare, "let us discuss Hannelore . . ."

* * *

The months passed. Work, again, was the remedy for Mazzare's doubts. Grantville's population swelled. The expanding cordon of rumor and report was like an osmotic membrane, sucking in the frightened and unsettled, the hopeful and the greedy.

Mazzare was far and away the busiest of the pastors in town. His responsibilities to what had already been the largest congregation in town doubled and redoubled; more of the refugees, immigrants and outright carpetbaggers were Catholic—or at least decided to be so on arriving—than any other denomination.

On top of that, he was working as part of Grantville's corps of mechanics and teaching at the high school, evening classes for those who wanted to try their hand at the new trades the Ring of Fire had brought.

"I'm doing the work of a bishop, Simon."

"Put in for the promotion, then," said Jones, muffled inside another recalcitrant engine. "You got a ten-millimeter nut?"

"Sure." Mazzare rummaged in one of the drawers of his rollaway. "Joking apart, if we hadn't been such an ageing town, we'd have been in real trouble."

"Eh?" Jones stood up.

"Well, the Ecumenical Relief Committee. What'd we have done without all the old—"

"Battle-axes?"

"May you be forgiven, my son. Good word, though. Here's the nut."

"I know what you mean. I never thought I'd say this, but having a supply of fierce elderly ladies on hand was a godsend when it came to soup kitchens, if nothing else."

"I'm getting sidetracked again. We're getting to be a fair-sized deanery here and practically a diocese. It's more than six priests can deal with, never mind the two of us. And I'm worried about things getting, you know, tense."

"Tense? I haven't seen any of that sort of thing other than maybe some brawling now and then. As to the workload, I know what you mean. Well, I would, but we don't get half so many Protestant refugees and there's plenty of a whole lot of denominations hereabouts so we're not so stuck for hands."

"Speaking of denominations, how's the theological correspondence?"

"There, that's fixed." Jones stood up again, slipped his wrench back into its place in the roll. "We'll do the rest in the morning, huh? Too late now."

"Yes. The kids are asleep. Y'know, it still feels weird to say that. Coffee?"

"Kill for one. No, about the correspondence, we seem to have exhausted the real fruitcakes, but Al Green got a doozy this morning. Did he tell you?"

Mazzare worked the coffee machine, the newly-arrived Turkish roast temporarily overruling the smell of oil and hot metal. "I haven't seen him since, oh, must be last week sometime."

"Yeah, well, word got around that he's the Reverend Doctor Al Green, and so he's gotten a letter from the Earl of Carlisle's secretary. Apparently the earl's in Paris, helping Ussher with his researches, and does the reverend doctor have anything that might help?"

Mazzare pantomimed jaw-dropping amazement. "That Ussher?"

"The very same. He's glomming antiquarian documents from across Europe."

"Reassure me Al's not going to send him anything." Mazzare felt a genuine pang of alarm. The Reverend Doctor Al Green, while a fine man, was notorious for occasionally needing to take a little more water with it.

"Well, I offered him my copy of Hawking . . ." Jones cracked up.

Mazzare found Jones' humor infectious. "Simon Jones," he chuckled, "may you be forgiven. Mocking a harmless old lunatic so."

"Had a bit of fun at Ussher's expense, too. Anyway, speaking of theological debate, I understand your curate was disputing a point or two at the Thuringen Gardens last night?"

"Oh, I heard about that. A lively controversy, by all accounts. You hear how it turned out?"

"Indeed. God exists, by two falls to a knockout."

"Exactly." Mazzare grinned a fiendish grin. "Although what Gus got in the Gardens was nothing to what Hanni gave him when he got home."

Jones laughed again. "I'll bet. Seriously, how's he shaping up?"

"Not so bad, within his limits, once I cured him of a few bad habits."

"Such as?"

"Drunkenness. Lewd cohabitation. Foul language." Mazzare chortled. "I thought I had him broken of picking fights in bars, too. No, he's all right. Ah, that's brewed. About the only person that objects is Irene Flannery, bless her."

"Oh?"

"Bit of a story. Come on, let's sit on the porch with these." Mazzare poured coffee into two workshop-issue chipped mugs.

The evening was warm with just a hint of the cold night that the clear sky promised after the heat of the summer day. Father Heinzerling was already there, his heels on the porch rail and puffing smoke at the stars. "Hast fettled the engine?" he asked by way of greeting.

"Likely," said Jones, "try 'er in the morning, I reckon."

"How's the jaw?" asked Mazzare.

"Mending." Heinzerling grinned ruefully and lopsidedly, rubbing at his bruised chin, "and a certain Scotsman will be more respectful of Catholic courage, ja?"

"Never mind the jaw, what about the eye?" asked Jones.

"Ah, now," said Mazzare, "while the jaw was got in defense of the faith, the eye was got for disobedience of Hannelore. Sympathy only where it is proper, Simon, and for just punishment he must suffer in silence."

They settled down again, stretching and shifting to get comfortable. Jones broke the silence first. "You know, if Gus' little fracas there was the worst of it, I don't think we need worry too much."

"You know me, Simon, I worry." Mazzare sipped at his coffee. "I don't think there was any malice in last night's nonsense, but I hear some ugly things."

"Oh?"

"Oh, the usual. All the best jobs are going to 'them,' we're not getting a fair shake. I'm hearing it from the Catholic side, of course, but I'll bet the same thing is going around among the rest of town. If it's just the creaking as we settle in here, it's nothing, but—" He gestured with his mug, waving at all the possible problems that waited to crystallize out of the clear air.

"You worry overmuch, Father Mazzare," said Heinzerling, tapping out his pipe on his bootheel. "There are those who will gripe if it would rain florins. With your leave, gentlemen, I shall take to my bed."

They bid him good night.

"So, Larry, what's the story with Hanni and Irene Flannery?" Jones leaned forward. He would cheerfully admit that, if he had a fault, he was an awful gossip.

Mazzare grinned. "Ah, now I first got a notion something was up when I turned up at the church and heard the shrieking."

"Oh, my." Jones was on the verge of cracking up. "I can imagine. You know, Irene Flannery has scared me all my life? I had her as a teacher. And I imagine Hanni didn't hold anything back—"

"No, not a bit. I do declare I learned more 'colorful idiom' in two different languages than I had ever hoped to in a lifetime." Mazzare shook his head and chuckled gently.

"Let me guess—once you intervened, they turned on you?"

Mazzare sighed. "That was the worst of it. That might have given them a point of agreement. Of course, they stopped the minute they saw I was there."

"A Father Ted moment?" Jones had bought videos of the Irish comedy as a present for Mazzare a few years before.

"Pretty much. Suddenly all sweet and meek for the priest. And now Irene says she's too old to keep the church any more, and we don't see her but for mass, and her neighbors say she's getting worse. It used to be just kids and footballs, but—" Mazzare bit his lip.

"She got worse?" Jones frowned.

"No joking matter, Simon. No, I think she'll get over it in time. She's about the only one who hasn't, anyway." Mazzare sighed and shook his head.

"Bit of a shock, suddenly having a married priest."

Mazzare grinned. "Not for most of my parishioners. Perfectly normal, at least to the older folks. The counter-reformation took a while to get out to here, and most of the older Germans can remember having married priests about the place."

"Well, Larry, I can find you—"

Mazzare laughed aloud. "Get thee behind me, Jones. I have seen enough of clerical matrimony to know better than to inflict it on myself at my age."

"What, four years younger than me?"

"Shut up, Simon."

6

It was months before Mazarini could get away from Cardinal Barberini's court to make the long ride to Grantville.

His first sight of the town, spread out in the evening sunshine before him, confirmed its alien origin as no amount of reports could have done. The geometry of the place had nothing to do with defense. No wall to huddle in, no easily defended spot. Just a place where roads met. He stopped to look over the town, comparing the place to the map he had had. He identified the carillon tower of St. Mary's, and smiled a moment at the memory of its former name. Then, his lathered horse glad of the slower pace, he dismounted and walked in.

The town was quiet, almost deserted, but that was to be expected if the American forces were away dealing with the Spanish threat that had been the main news at Paris when he had passed through. When he reached St. Mary's, he found Heinzerling saying an evening benediction.

"How are you keeping?" he asked, when Heinzerling had finished and the gratifyingly large congregation had gone.

"They have a phrase here: 'going native.' I think it fits me."

"About the only thing that still does, by the look of you." Mazarini appraised his former aide. He wore the weight like a prize boar. Called on to wrestle with Satan, Heinzerling could make Satan regret it.

"The living is good here." Heinzerling grinned, and shrugged. "Even a curate does well."

"How does the Society take your new status?"

"Well as can be expected. The Provincial asks I report regularly and fit in. They ask after converts, and I tell them of the increase in numbers here, which satisfies them well enough."

Mazarini raised an eyebrow.

Heinzerling shrugged. "Things are different here. The place is governed in the strangest way. There is more regulation of how one shits than of how one prays. When you get used to it, though—" He shrugged again.

"And so your converts?"

Heinzerling laughed. "This is a good place to live. People come here. Some of them are Catholic. So we have more each day at mass. Converts!" He waved a hand, "Oh, we have a few, sicher. We have a fine social center. Some come for that. The rigor of our doctrine and the holiness of our sacraments? No. The other churches do just as well, and to each his own."

Mazarini had known the genial German was capable of fitting in anywhere—sent among the Turk he would have made friends and found something kind to say of Mahomet—but had not quite expected this. Indeed, had not suspected it from the reports. He changed the subject. "Father Mazzare? He has not written since that first invitation to visit."

"As he was. At the moment, he is at the rectory, mending an engine with one of the Protestant priests."

Mazarini's bewilderment must have shown.

Heinzerling grinned. "There is a lot that has not gone into my reports. Father Mazzare's closest friend is a Protestant priest, and together they raise church funds by mending engines, which they enjoy. I should report this where it might come to the ears of the Holy Office?"

Mazarini could not help but grin. "I must meet Father Mazzare. But first, I need to speak with whoever is in charge of the troops here."

"This would be Dan Frost, mein' ich, he is the police chief here."

"The what?"

"Sort of like a town watch. Only not. I will explain later. You have news for him?"

"Indeed. I think Wallenstein may have sent someone this way. I passed what looked like three or four squadrons of cavalry, Croats by the looks of them, four days ago. I have been coming as fast as I could make post-horses go, so I will be ahead of them by perhaps two days. Can you summon a messenger?"

"I can do better. Here, come to the rectory. How is your English?"

"Poor. Why?"

"Ach, I shall translate." As they spoke, Heinzerling had led them across the grounds of the church to the presbytery. Once inside, and before Mazarini could spend any time gawking at the house, Heinzerling had picked up a peculiarly shaped object attached to another by a twisted cord.

"Telefon," he said.

"Ah, I wanted to see this. How is it done?"

"You press numbers to make another telefon ring. This number makes the one at the police station ring, and, ah," Heinzerling held the instrument closer to his ear. "Marlene? Father Augustus here."

Mazarini watched closely as Heinzerling held the instrument to his ear and mouth. He could just hear a voice from the thing, could better follow Heinzerling's much-improved English as he passed on the report of cavalry and their location.

Heinzerling turned again to Mazarini, now back in French. "Monsignor, it was three to four hundred, yes?"

"Yes, nearer four hundred."

Heinzerling passed that on to the invisible Marlene. "Ja," he said into the phone, "the monsignor was once a captain of horse. He knows what he is talking about. Perhaps two days if they come straight here." Another exchange of pleasantries and Heinzerling put the phone down. "Done," he said. "Dan Frost will know of these Croats soon enough. There are plans in place for any raid."

"Excellent. Now, shall we discuss Grantville while we await Father Mazzare?"

* * *

Mazzare turned out to be all that the reports had said: tall, spare, silver-gray and black in his short-cropped hair and a touch of gold in his brown eyes: patrician was a word that might have been coined for him. Committed to his pastoral duties, continent in his vows and gentlemanly in his manner. By the standards of his own time, apparently, not unusual. By the standards of the time he was in, practically a saint.

Heinzerling, for example, had a woman in tow and three children, none of whom had formed any great bar to his remaining in orders. To Mazarini's surprise, Mazzare had insisted they marry. Over dinner that evening, Mazzare said: "Every other thing about this parish is irregular, so why not our curate?" There was little mirth in Mazzare's laughter.

The other irregularity was the presence at table of the pastors of four Protestant churches of Grantville, whom Mazzare had invited to meet the visiting monsignor. There was the Reverend Chalker, a Pentecostalist, the Reverend Wiley, Free Presbyterian—although not, apparently, a Scotsman, and the Reverend Doctor Green, a Baptist. These were familiar strains of heretic, able to give a—friendly enough—account of their heresies by reference to Protestant sects that Mazarini knew.

The Reverend Jones and his wife were remarkable, not least for Signora Jones being a minister herself. Their "Methodist" sect was a schism of the English heresy that would not be committed for another hundred years.

The meaning of the gesture—Protestant and Catholic clergy at table without even harsh words—was not immediately clear. Mazarini could not help but shake the feeling that it was purely a normal guest-list for such events. He put the thoughts aside and concentrated on enjoying Frau Heinzerling's cooking.

After dinner, Mazarini joined Mazzare in the garden behind the presbytery. The Protestant pastors had gone home, leaving promises of hospitality in the coming days, another wonder.

"I have made errors in my assessment of your situation." Mazarini had discovered early in the day that Mazzare's Italian, his own hesitant, new-learned English and the Latin they had in common were enough to communicate fluently.

"Easy enough to do. There'll be a lot of change in the Church over the next four hundred years, and St. Vin . . . St. Mary's reflects that."

"Not that. By the standards of these times you are a model of obedience to Rome." Mazarini waved a hand. "From what I see so far, I should arrange for Vincent de Paul to come here and see what he should be trying to achieve." He looked up at Mazzare's face, and grinned back at the frown. "I have the dubious honor to know him, but I haven't told him. The man's a nuisance as it is. Seeing his name on the front of a church would have made him more than mortal man could stand."

Mazzare laughed. "Most of the usual patron saints for Catholic churches in the twentieth century are either still alive, not saints yet or not even born." He frowned again. "Or politically sensitive."

"It must be difficult. No, to return to my confession of error, I had believed that His Eminence the Cardinal Richelieu was preparing to seek advantage from your presence. I had thought that he would seek a more general war with Spain."

"He's not?"

"No. It seems that between Grantville and its Jews, His Eminence feels Sweden is strong enough that France is better served by alignment with Spain. Which puts me in a hard place."

"Oh?" Mazzare's face was suddenly still. Unlike Jones, he had been known to play the occasional hand of cards, and was good at it.

"Yes. I am now in poor odor in Rome. With France and Spain now aligning, my efforts to hold a balance between them are no longer so highly thought of. I have been these past few months trying to keep on my political feet."

Mazzare let out the breath he had been holding in a sigh. "That's nothing we hadn't heard, of course. We have a force out to—we have forces out. We suspected something of this kind must have happened. And His Holiness?"

Mazarini nodded. "Can do nothing for fear of the Spaniards. So long as we were providing a, a—"

"Level killing field?" Mazzare's tone was savage.

Mazarini, in return, was gloomy. "Yes, yes, rem acu tetigisti. A phrase of the twentieth century?" He thought for a moment of what Mantua had looked like after three years of bloody stalemate.

"Yes. An English diplomat," Mazzare spat the word, "sent to try and settle fighting in the Balkans."

Mazzare barked a short laugh. "I can excuse him a harsh word or two, if he was sent to do that. Even the Turks have trouble there. No, now France and Spain no longer need their killing field, His Holiness has less need of peacemakers. These three months past I am recalled to Cardinal Barberini's court. It is said to me that I were better to keep quiet for a time, since I have tried to make trouble for France and keep her from Spain's throat, not knowing they were pissing in the same pot." He snarled the last words, his waxed mustachios quivering in indignation. "So," he sighed, "I am come here, at your invitation. Perhaps there is something I can do."

Mazzare placed a hand on his shoulder. "We figured some of it out, you know, when Servien never turned up, or at least never announced himself. We'd heard he'd left Vienna after trying to make trouble for the Abrabanels and was on his way here, but we didn't have anyone on hand who'd recognize him." Mazzare's voice turned bitter. "All this time thinking the religion would cause the trouble."

"I will admit it is worse than I imagined it would be. There is talk of witchcraft"—he held up a hand to stop Mazzare's hot interjection—"Flummery. The talk of witchcraft is a pretext, as it usually is. The real issue is France, Spain, and the Spanish Road. I had thought that Richelieu would take advantage against Spain, but it seems that His Eminence has made an error."

"An error? We're a threat to him. We took his best ally against the Habsburgs and bought them out from under him."

"Which Richelieu should have seen as an opportunity to undo Spain. The fool." Mazarini gave vent to a stream of language in an idiom four centuries older than Mazzare had learned in Chicago yet surprisingly comprehensible. "That could so easily have been repaired," he said when he had run out of splenetic force. "France and Spain guided into deadlock with each other, Sweden allowed just enough to stop Wallenstein. It could have been done. I could have done it. This war could have been ended!" This last a shout, at the heavens, clear and starry and moon-bright, the half moon low in the east obscuring the earth with silver-gray shadows.

"And Rome?"

Mazarini sighed again. "Rome is under Spain's thumb. Now Richelieu is in with Spain, Rome must needs no longer intrigue against France and France will not help Rome against Spain. We must allow France her head, and no doubt they will cease to move against Italy."

"That isn't what I meant." Mazzare's voice was gentle, weary.

"It is not?"

"Where am I in all this?" Mazzare spoke quietly, pleading.

Mazarini placed a hand on his arm. "I am sorry, Padre. I do not know. I truly do not. No one is paying mind to such petty matters as religion. Or peace."

Silence fell. Mazarini made his excuses and retired to the presbytery's guest room.

* * *

Mazzare did not go to bed that night. Had anyone been up and about, they would have seen lights on in the church.

For a little while, at least, sitting in the presiding chair on the sanctuary—itself an anachronism in this century—he could be seen to be at peace. Over his shoulder, the crucifixion scene behind the tabernacle. In his lap, his well-worn rosary.

For some time after, sitting perfectly still, he stared across the sanctuary at the lectern, the missal open on it. Now he sat in a less composed fashion, his face closed and tight as he considered the sight of the book of liturgy.

And when he could bear that no longer, he simply stared, eyes unfocused, into the empty pews, his face candid in its misery as he awaited a dawn that had still not come when he turned off the lights and left the church.

* * *

Mazarini, as was his habit, arose before dawn and descended to find Mazzare, Heinzerling and the redoubtable Frau Hannelore Heinzerling in the kitchen.

Like breakfast tables since the dawn of time, there was little conversation among the adults while the children—three beefy little boys, the eldest about eight—chattered. Frau Heinzerling served up just about everything that it was possible to fry in heroic portions, and coffee and beer in similar quantities. Mazarini declined coffee and beer, but noted that Mazzare was drinking coffee like his life depended on it.

"You like coffee?" Mazarini tried to open some form of conversation once breakfast had gone down and Frau Heinzerling had rounded the boys up for school. St. Mary's, it seemed, was a rich parish to afford schooling for three children.

"Didn't sleep much, last night," was the mumbled reply.

Mazarini noted a peculiar expression on Heinzerling's face. Reproach for his former master, concern for the American priest—it was hard to tell.

Another gambit, then. "Perhaps we might discuss how I am to spend my time in Grantville?" Something was troubling Mazzare, it seemed, and Mazarini thought that perhaps a practical topic would concentrate his wits.

At that, Heinzerling rose from the table. "I will go and open the church for morning mass, ja?" he said, and left.

"Doesn't want to hear anything he'd have to report," said Mazzare. His voice was as tired as his face. "The man's torn."

"You are troubled?"

"Somewhat."

"I will not pry. Perhaps I might presume upon you for introductions to Grantville's notables? If I can do nothing else, I can at least be plying my trade."

"Already tried. I called Rebecca Stearns, but she's gone up to the school for the morning, I was told. Everyone else is out of town at the moment." With a sudden burst of vigor, Mazzare wrenched himself from his chair. "Come on, I'll give you the ten-dollar tour. Need some fresh air, anyway."

* * *

It was a fresh, bright September morning, the pale moon still showing in the west, the sun low in the east. The town of Grantville, seen only briefly the day before, had some intriguing novelty on every street and corner.

The architecture was odd; severely plain in some instances, strangely fanciful in others and here and there, bizarrely, echoing classical Rome. Tastes in ornamentation were radically different from his own.

Mazzare was clearly well known. Those up and about were, in the main, women and the elderly. Most with a greeting or a wave or a nod for the American priest.

Children he saw assembling to be taken to school, and the notion of schooling for all was explained to him. It was more than even the Jesuits attempted.

Then he saw the buses, and was startled almost out of his wits. He had read of the engine-vehicles of Grantville, but the first encounter was a shock. In that shock, he made the mistake of asking Mazzare how the engine worked.

Half an hour later, and dazed by the flood of information and the first genuine enthusiasm the American priest had evinced in his presence, Mazarini was, if no wiser about the operation of the internal combustion engine, at least ignorant in more detail than before.

Their walk had taken them down by the creek that ran through Grantville when the alarms began to sound. It began with a wail, somewhere between a wolf and night wind in a chimney-cowl.

"Trouble," said Mazzare.

"What is that noise?"

"Siren." He said the word in English. "No, not the mythical creature. A machine for making noise." Mazzare turned and lengthened his stride.

"Oh." Mazarini had to walk more quickly to keep up with Mazzare, who stood a full hand-span taller than him. "Where are we going?"

"Downtown. See what's going on."

"We can help?"

"Straight away, no. But we need to know where our action stations are."

* * *

Downtown turned out to be the name for the part of town with the tallest buildings in it, and there was the busy, determined chaos of a wasp's nest going on in it. Mazzare spoke to several people to get the story, and then translated for Mazarini. It was, indeed, a cavalry raiding party, sighted on the edge of town near the school.

Mazarini followed Mazzare to help direct people as they came into the center of town. A man sporting a bronze badge had given the orders. He had been swearing sulphurously about the lack of warning. Apparently someone assumed that cavalry a hundred miles away two days before would not be a threat so soon and simply left a note on the desk of the Chief of Police—who had been too busy to notice it.

"Wallenstein," said Mazarini.

"You think so?" answered Mazzare. "No shortage of other bandits."

"Not with Wallenstein around. Better opportunities for loot and a stipend when pickings are poor."

"Whatever." Mazzare shrugged, began directing the streams of people toward doorways.

Mazarini felt his eyebrows climbing when he saw the people coming to take shelter. "They're all armed!"

Mazzare grinned over his shoulder, breaking off briefly from his work. "Welcome to America!"

The weapons were different, the soldiers nothing like those Mazarini had led in the Valtelline. Nevertheless, the ambush taking shape around the plaza was as old as warfare.

Heinzerling showed up at the head of a column of elderly women, half of them with the peculiar pistols the Americans favored.

And then came a shout. "Father Mazzare! We need your help." It was another man with a badge.

Mazzare strode off, Mazarini on his heels. The man with the badge strode along with him, explaining something in English, talking too fast for Mazarini to follow.

They came to a building that was a whirl of activity, more men—and women, here, too, with badges. There was a thunder of shouting in English and German both. Many of those doing the shouting were shouting into little boxes with sticks on them. Like the telefon, he thought.

Mazzare, oblivious to Mazarini now, had picked up a telephone and was talking into it, urgently but gently. Heinzerling had come along too. "Scheisse," he said, "typisch."

"What?" Mazarini was still confused.

"Frau Flannery. She was at mass this morning. She must have gone home instead of following me here."

"Who?"

In the background, Mazzare. "Irene, it's not safe, yes, I know, but you must . . ."

Heinzerling went on. "Widow. Older than Satan and just as pleasant. Took it badly when Hannelore began cleaning the church. Thought Hanni was not good enough to set foot in a church. Called her a whore. Hanni called her some bad names, too. Father Mazzare couldn't get them to see reason. I told Hanni to forgive and forget, but Frau Flannery stopped talking to anyone but Father Mazzare."

" . . . I know, Irene, but you'll be—yes, but there's no sense . . ."

Mazarini, trying to follow two conversations at once, stopped staring at Mazzare and asked, over his shoulder, "Why?"

Heinzerling's shrug was all but audible. "Who knows? She is a crazy old woman."

" . . . yes, Irene, I know to the minute how long it's been, but I can hardly hear it over the phone, you should come . . ."

"Is he doing what I think—"

"Ja." Pause, for another shrug. "He feels bad that she feels unwanted, mein' ich. But Hannelore was fifty years younger and lives next to the church. She could still have helped, but—"

From Mazzare, resignedly, the Latin words of absolution. He put the phone down, his face gray. "Penance hardly seemed worth it." Louder, to one of the badged men. "She won't come, Dan. Won't be driven out of her home, she says."

"You did all you could, Father."

"I should go—"

The badged man, Dan, cut that off with a wave. "No, Father. Don't. She made her choice. Save those that want it." He strode away, barking orders—unmistakably in command.

Heinzerling, now, with more tenderness than Mazarini had thought the Jesuit had in him. "We should find a position on the plaza, Father."

* * *

The battle itself was short, noisy and one-sided. The three priests took station in an upper room, awaiting the signal. Heinzerling turned out to have an American pistol, a huge brute of a thing by the standards of such, machined of some black metal. Mazzare frowned, but said nothing.

Outside, Mazzare could see down the street to where the Croats were coming from, and saw Dan Frost the constable facing them down. Good, he thought, draw them in. There is a man with courage, to die for his people. Would that constables in other towns were so conscientious.

The constable drew a pistol, leveled it at the front rank of Croats.

The shooting, when it came, was a rattle of rapid fire, the crack and curls of blue smoke from the Americans answering the coughs and reeking clouds of the Croat pistols.

Mazzare kept to the back of the room, where the unarmed sheltered, comforting the frightened. Mazarini stood in the window, ignoring the imprecations to keep his head down—every inch the captain he had once been—and watched the slaughter in the street below for some minutes.

Like him, Heinzerling stood. Side on to the window in the classic duelist's stance, returning fire and grinning the savage, tusky grin of a boar with the drop on the hunters.

The windows shattered in the storm of fire, the tinkle of glass inaudible in the rip of gunfire and the screams of wounded men and dying horses.

When it was clear that the battle was won, the street outside a bloody, shrieking shambles, Mazarini turned to find Mazzare holding a blood-soaked cloth to the back of a woman's head.

"Scalp wounds always bleed badly," offered Mazarini, "but are seldom serious."

"She's concussed. That"—Mazzare stabbed a finger at a heavy, brass-framed icon in the Eastern style—"fell off the wall."

Mazarini picked it up. It was painted on, of all things, black velvet. The saint's face was serene, slightly corpulent, and he was dressed in a white raiment adorned with jewels. The name written under the portrait was an odd one, the appellation even more so. Elvis—Still the King.

"What saint is this?" he asked, able now to converse normally with the guns all but silent.

It took some time to explain the slightly hysterical laughter to his satisfaction.

* * *

Irene Flannery's body was not found for hours. Cut down in her front yard, she had tried to drag herself back to her house to die, but had gotten only as far as a flowerbed. A riot of colorful growth like the rest of her garden, it had concealed her corpse from the first quick parties of searchers.

She was found, eventually, and only on Father Mazzare's insistence was she brought to the church for burial.

The order of service was stilted. The passages of scripture, the prayers and invocations echoed in the empty church. The badged man, the "Dan" who had spoken with Mazzare after he had tried to save the old woman's life, turned up for the requiem mass.

He had taken no communion and left without speaking. The Protestant Jones had also attended and had followed the pitiful cortege to the graveside, his worried silence following Mazzare's grimness like the foam in the wake of a ship running before a storm wind.

Mazzare had spoken the words of the requiem mass in a cold tone, an iron tone that hammered the flowing Latin syllables and drew them out as a glowing, hot wire of condemnation.

His sermon had been harsher still, for all its quietness and plainness of manner.

"The Ring of Fire was an Act of God," he had begun, "and in His Act he has done nothing so capricious as the act that has brought us here today. Irene Flannery, in her lonely old age, felt rejected. Rejected even by the church she made the second home of her thirty years of widowhood."

Not, today, the literary form of the eulogy, deprecated in a catechism that would not be written for three hundred years.

"She was not alone."

There were only seven people and a corpse to hear him. Only the corpse did not flinch.

"We have been brought to a world in which religion is no more than gang colors."

The walk to the cemetery was silent. There had been neither gasoline nor spare horses for a hearse. Irene Flannery, birdlike in life like so many old women, scarcely outweighed her pine box, but the pallbearers' tread was heavy.

"A world in which people kill and die and nations stand or fall by the canting of theologians and the greed of statesmen."

Heinzerling had risen in the small hours to dig a grave in the pouring rain.

"It is not enough to say that religion is not to blame. That it was only a pretext."

Half of those present at the graveside wore vestments. The rain had made short work of all of them, and the wind flapped the sodden cloths in short, harsh volleys of cracks, the only salute Irene Flannery would get.

"Nor is it enough to say that she will be missed by no one. That she left no living relatives behind in America, had no friends here. The same can be said of millions."

Around the grave, four clerics and no mourners bar the pallbearers, three miners whom Mazzare had had to call out to help him and Heinzerling and Mazarini carry the coffin.

"That has never been an excuse for any murder. Who murdered her?"

After the fighting, Mazzare had moved among the dead and dying in the plaza, trying to administer the last rites, blessings, whatever might be wanted.

"The man so lost to his faith that he refused the rites of his own church?"

He had been spat at, cursed, insulted in all the languages the Croats could manage. His countenance, grayed already by the carnage, had paled.

"No. But his guilt is no less for his lack of responsibility."

He had hardly spoken since then, had spoken two words to Mazarini when he finally walked away from the blood-soaked plaza.

"Poor bastards.

"They say that religion is only the pretext."

In the grave, already a hand's depth of water.

"But it is the fault of the religious who let it be so used."

The pallbearers, waiting to lower the stubborn old woman into the red clay, avoided meeting Mazzare's eye as he barked the words of the rite to the uncaring clouds.

"Irene Flannery was murdered by every man of God who turned his back on the things done in the name of his faith. That good men should do nothing. Indeed. We have all done that nothing, sinned in what we have failed to do."

The words spoken, the coffin lowered to its resting place, the cemetery fell silent other than the drumming of the rain on the coffin lid.

"She lived nearly ninety years, to die of the cowardice of men she would have trusted for the cloth they wore. She had a right, contrary as she was, to better. From me, from everyone professing a Christian faith."

Heinzerling picked up the shovel he had left thrust into the mound of earth. He stood, silent a moment, watching Mazzare gaze, empty-eyed into the grave, at the handfuls of earth on the plain, unseasoned pine board of the coffin.

"Should we take the churchmen of this time to task for their failure to see now what will be seen over the next three centuries?"

It was the last of the five graves left after the raid. The others were already starting to settle, a flush of green weeds appearing on the raw earth.

"Perhaps I cannot. I have, myself stood by. Not acted. Who am I to cast the first stone? But if I cannot, God will."

Heinzerling put down the shovel, and, with the others at the graveside, left Mazzare to stand, staring silently into the earth at the coffin of an old woman who had had no living friends.

"Without faith, the thing that gives meaning to religion, we truly have nothing here but a meaningless death."

Rain ran down Mazzare's face. Perhaps he wept. There was no one to see.

* * *

The kitchen was hot and fuggy with pipe-smoke and steam. Irene Flannery, unwaked before she was buried, was being drunk to now in scalding coffee and silence.

They heard the presbytery door open and shut. Long minutes passed. Jones, Mazarini and the Heinzerlings waited in silence.

Mazzare walked in to the kitchen. His face was calm. Water dripped from his hair, his clothes.

Under his arm, a stack of books. "Mazarini," he said.

Mazarini nodded.

"Larry," said Jones, "are you—"

"Never better," said Mazzare, "never better, Simon." There was a small, cold smile on his face, his eyes clear and bright. "Can you carry a message, Legate Monsignor Mazarini?"

"Certainly."

"Here. The Papers of the Second Vatican Council." He slammed a heavy hardback in a gray dust-jacket onto the table. "The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1992 Edition." A thick paperback volume, dog-eared and stained and fringed with yellow notes. Hammered onto the table. "The Bible. In English. An approved Catholic translation." This, more gently, on the table. "You won't recognize the names that go with the approval. Take my word that they're honest ordained bishops. Meantime, Father Heinzerling here will stop editing his own reports."

"Larry—"

"Father Mazzare—"

Only Mazarini was silent.

Mazzare held up a hand for silence. "Simon, Augustus, I've had enough of being quiet but I don't have a big enough voice. Monsignor Mazarini, you rode between the armies once, calling for peace."

Mazarini nodded, understanding what was asked of him. "I will fail, of course," he said. "Some things can only be done once."

Mazzare nodded. "Sometimes," he said, "failure counts."

Biting Time

Virginia DeMarce

1

Jeff Higgins climbed the stepstool and eyed the diminishing number of boxes stashed between the top level of the trailer's kitchen cabinets and the ceiling. It was odd, he thought, the things that brought memories from before the Ring of Fire back to him. He and his father used to tease his mother unmercifully for her tendency to buy foods by the case every time there was a special at the grocery warehouse in Fairmont. In the two months since he had married Gretchen, though, it sure had come in handy.

Grandma Richter was really the problem—the rest of them could and would eat almost anything that Gretchen defined as food. Even Wilhelm was doing pretty well on solids, if you considered canned yams to be a solid food.

Grandma had fewer teeth than Wilhelm. Grandma had no teeth at all.

It wasn't that Grandma didn't eat with enthusiasm—she ate instant oatmeal with cinnamon apples, instant mashed potatoes with gravy, cups full of instant ramen noodles with flavoring (add boiling water). After two months of eating twenty-first-century America's versions of dehydrated and reconstituted goo, in addition to the ever-present pease porridge and boiled cabbage, she was, according to Gretchen, just about back to her normal size (wiry but no longer withered) and strength (Jeff's best estimate was, "tough as an old gourd").

Above and beyond all other forms of sustenance, she had taken to StoveTop brand. By his count, there were only three more cases, with six double boxes per case, which figured out as thirty-six more meals. There's no doubt about it, Jeff thought. Grandma needs to get false teeth. She needs to get them right now, before Dr. Sims runs out of supplies.

* * *

"Grandma, we need to talk about your teeth." Jeff had prudently waited until the household was fifteen minutes into supper to bring the matter up—the first quarter hour of every meal, as soon as the blessing had been completed, was devoted to serious eating. He opened his mouth, pointed, said, "Zaehne," and pointed at her mouth. "You need to go to the dentist—to Dr. Sims—to get teeth, so you can eat regular food, not just soft food."

"What teeth? I lost my last tooth a dozen years ago. They say that you lose a tooth for every child. Wahnsinn. What did I have? Ten pregnancies, all my teeth gone, and not one living child to show for it: four miscarriages, two born too early to live, four that made it to the font but died before they were six years old." Grandma paused. "Not, mind you, that Annalise and Hans and Gretchen aren't as dear to me as if their father had been my own son."

Jeff eyed Gretchen rather warily as this spate of words descended upon him. His German had improved rapidly since being immersed in Gretchen's extended family, but Grandma's Oberpfalz accent resembled spoken Thuringian German only vaguely. After considerable participation by everybody around the table, he managed to determine three things. The first was that Grandma had been the stepmother of Gretchen's father, being too young by several years to be her actual grandmother. The second was that all seventeenth-century Germans defined the function of a dentist as pulling teeth, not repairing, much less creating, them.

The third thing that he determined was that Grandma thought he was making fun of her, which was not a good state of affairs—not good at all.

* * *

By the end of August, everyone in Grantville had learned to be wary of the high school library's collection of German-English dictionaries. The original Langenscheidt by means of which Jeff had proposed to Gretchen had been augmented by a ragtag collection of paperbacks formerly in the possession of private owners and a sizable number of travelers' phrasebooks, not to overlook the invaluable little picture book, See It and Say It in German, which had already been reprinted, the cartoons by way of woodcuts, and widely distributed, along with the companion volume created by substituting new subtitles Sieht das und sprecht das auf Englisch. The problems tended to lie in the way the language had changed during more than three hundred and fifty years.

The dictionary said that the term for dentures was "kuenstliches Gebiss." Cautiously checking further, he discovered that Grandma Richter, however, would hear "Gebiss" as a reference to the bit one attached to a bridle and placed in the mouth of a horse. That wasn't going to improve domestic relations if he said it to her . . .

Bridge? Well, the German word was "Bruecke," but in the seventeenth century, in both languages, the structure went across streams rather than between teeth.

"Kuenstliche Zaehne" would be understandable enough as applying to individual teeth, but would give someone who had never seen false teeth no idea how they might be set together on the plates to make dentures.

See It and Say It in German gave him an idea. See it . . . he thought. Now, who . . . ?

* * *

Henry Dreeson's bachelor Uncle Jim had come back from the army hospital after World War I with a glass eye. Jim had entertained the younger Dreeson relatives (including Henry) at family reunions and all-day-meetings at the church by popping it out and tossing it from hand to hand. He had frightened the more impressionable younger Dreeson relatives (not including Henry) by telling them that the eye could follow them around and report all of their misdeeds to their parents. On the theory that he wouldn't need it on the other side, one way or the other (if the preacher's conviction of a glorious bodily resurrection was right, it would be superfluous; if the argument of Robert Ingersoll and the other freethinkers that there was no afterlife was right, it would be unnecessary), Jim had directed that the eye be removed before his burial and given to his favorite nephew. Henry Dreeson carried it in his pocket as a good luck piece, often tossing it from hand to hand while he was thinking.

The more Jeff considered the matter, the stronger his conviction became that old Jim Dreeson's nephew was not a man who would mind taking out his dentures in public, mayor of Grantville or not. That took care of "who." "What" and "why" were already very clear in his mind, leaving only "when, where, and how" to be tackled. "When" was clearly ASAP, but would have to be pinned down. "Where" would have to be "not at home," because if he unexpectedly brought the mayor home for dinner, Gretchen and Grandma would skin him. As for "how," the most effective approach was bound to be the most direct approach. He set out for City Hall.

2

"Monday will be Labor Day—let's take the whole bunch to the Thuringen Gardens before it gets too chilly to have the kids out at night."

"What is Labor Day?"

"It will cost too much."

"Aw, c'mon, Mrs. Richter," protested Jeff's friend Eddie Cantrell, who, along with Larry Wild and Jimmy Andersen, lived in the trailer complex with Jeff and the Richter family. "All of us guys will chip in. You and Gretchen can feed the kids before we go, so they won't really be hungry—we'll just buy 'em a big bowl of pork rinds that they can snack on while they run around."

Jeff took care of the easy part. "Gretchen, Labor Day is an American holiday that celebrates the dignity of work and workers."

"It will cost much too much. This household should not spend money on such things until Jeff is properly of age and is a master in his trade."

"I am of age, Grandma. I've been of age for over a year. I just had my nineteenth birthday."

"Nineteen is not of age—twenty-five is of age."

"Listen, Mrs. Richter!"

"Eddie, you also are not of age. I cannot imagine what this place can be thinking of, allowing youth to be treated as if they were adults. You should properly still be under guardianship, all four of you."

Gretchen's younger brother Hans weighed in. "If they were subject to guardians, Grandma, you and Annalise, and Gretchen, and the kids, would be sitting over by the power plant in the refugee camp rather than comfortably around our dinner table."

"Hans, sprich mich nicht so frech an."

Gretchen brought it to a close, to Jeff's relief. "Genug, that's enough. Labor Day would appear to be a worthwhile holiday. We shall go. Then no more extra spending until Christmas."

"Er, Gretchen . . . I don't think we've told you about Thanksgiving yet."

"Are we skipping Columbus Day this year?" asked Larry.

"Columbus Day doesn't count. We usually never even got off school."

"Are we doing Halloween?"

"That's Allerheiligen—the eve of All Saints' Day. It's a lot different here."

"We never got off school for Halloween, either. It's not even a federal holiday."

"We ought to have a Halloween party for the kids, at least. Andy Partlow has a pumpkin patch."

"Worueber sprechen Sie, Hans?"

"Amerikanische Feiertagen."

"Look, guys. Let's get through Labor Day first."

Before the Ring of Fire, the principle of taking life one day at a time, or at least one holiday at a time, had, somehow, never seemed so wise.

* * *

"Okay, Eddie, what's the plan?"

"Hans and Annalise say that once you get a couple of pints into Mrs. Richter, she really mellows a lot."

"So?"

"So Mayor Dreeson doesn't bring out the false teeth until she gets to that stage."

"But we need to have him take them out before it gets too dark for her to get a really good look. They haven't wired lights for the outside seating, and the kids make too much noise for us to sit inside."

"We can leave here earlier—get the first pint into her on an empty stomach, before Mayor Dreeson gets off work. Then we eat. Then it's bring on the dentures. Julie's bringing her dad. They're going to come in behind us and sit two tables away. As soon as Gretchen's grandma looks impressed enough, he pounces and goes off with her signature in his appointment book. He's bringing it with him. Just to make it official, he's bringing a stamp to plop down next to her signature. I've noticed that Germans would rather do almost anything than go back on something that's been officially stamped. Of course, it's a play stamp out of one of Julie's old toy boxes and has Tinker Bell on it—that's all we could find, but at least the appointment will be 'gestempelt.' If she does ask what it is, I'll tell her it's a heraldic bumblebee with a lot of symbolic significance."

"Eddie—I dunno. You're getting awfully devious these days."

"She'll just say that they cost too much, anyway," added Jimmy.

Jeff shook his head. "Anything that will keep Gretchen from having to put every bite that Grandma Richter eats for the next twenty-five years through the hand grinder is cheap, guys. I know that it's going to stretch things to the limit, but we'll manage to pay, on installments if we have to."

* * *

It took a certain political adroitness to get oneself elected mayor, even in Grantville. Henry Dreeson came into the Thuringen Gardens bearing a basket with two dozen freshly picked apples from the cherished Winesap tree in his backyard. After he had disposed of his share of the wurst and kraut, he distributed them, after which he made a point of mentioning his age, opening his mouth wide enough to show an unnaturally perfect set of teeth, and ceremoniously biting into one. (This was showing off, of course: ordinarily the course of prudence would have caused him to quarter and core it first. Luckily, the Fixodent held.) Then he paused and bent across the table solicitously.

"Would you like me to slice yours very thinly for you, Mrs. Richter? Thecla could take the slices inside and boil them for a few minutes to soften them down." He busied himself with arranging this, as the odor of fresh apple, with each thin slice, wafted from his pocket knife to Gretchen's grandma's nose. As her mouth watered, he pounced, "You really ought to see Doc Sims about getting a set of teeth, you know."

"How do you 'get' teeth?"

"Doc Sims makes 'em to fit your mouth—here, like this." Mayor Dreeson pulled out his teeth and handed them across the table. "See, uppers here, lowers here. They fit in like this." He took them back, demonstrated the insertion, and handed them across the table again.

Grandma Richter promptly popped them into her mouth.

The adolescent diners winced, flinched, or surreptitiously gagged, as best suited the temperament of each. The younger kids watched with genuine fascination.

Mayor Dreeson leaned across and said, "You won't have a proper fit with these, you know. They're made to fit my mouth and not yours. Here, wiggle those lowers a little." He stuck his finger into her mouth to reposition them a bit as he looked over his shoulder and called, "Hey, Doc."

As Julie giggled helplessly, her father, armed with the Tinker Bell stamp, advanced to clinch the deal. Mayor Dreeson retrieved his teeth and put them back in.

"That's really weird," Eddie said to Julie. "Isn't there a proverb or something about getting married to someone you wouldn't mind sharing a toothbrush with? What does it mean when you run into someone you wouldn't mind sharing your teeth with?"

Thecla emerged from the kitchen with a small bowl of boiled apple slices. Mug in one hand and spoon in the other, Grandma Richter settled down to consume mushy apples and beer. Mayor Dreeson was saying, "Your name's Veronica, is it? Mine's Henry. I used to be a big fan of Veronica Lake in my day."

3

"Really, Annalise. I mean, yeeecchhh. Ugghhh. Phewewww!" In spite of her status as a dentist's daughter and ad hoc dental receptionist, Julie was still thoroughly grossed out by her memory of the Thuringen Gardens episode.

"It worked. She's here." Annalise might have spent the last two years as a camp follower in Tilly's army, but, like Gretchen, she had absorbed the pragmatism that enabled people to survive in the small spot on the German map called the Upper Palatinate. She leaned forward, her chin on her hand, contemplating the rack full of back issues of National Geographic, Rod and Gun, and Parenting that adorned Dr. Sims's reception room. "Can I take a couple of these back for Grandma to look at while they're waiting for the mold to harden?"

"Sure. Can your grandma read English at all yet?"

Annalise grinned. "Better than she could a week ago. Mayor Dreeson climbed up into his attic and came down with a couple dozen Archie and Veronica comic books that his daughter Margie left behind when she married and moved to Ohio. We're making translations of the words for her. She reads them because the cover has her name on it."

"Well, I'm not surprised he had 'em. If anything was there when Mrs. Dreeson died, it's probably still there. I doubt that Mr. Dreeson ever does much cleaning in that old rattletrap of a place. He's always either down at City Hall or at the barber shop—or any place except his house. He keeps the yard and garden up nice, but inside . . ."

Attracted by the pictures of cute children, Annalise opted to supply Grandma with Parenting. "Some things are hard, though. What does it mean to 'enhance your child's self-esteem'?"

"In German? I dunno. I don't even know exactly what it means in English."

The outer door slammed. Julie looked up and shuddered. "But whatever it is, Maxine Pilcher has done it. Those kids of hers are the worst brats in town and here they come now. Two simple checkups, but we'll get tantrums."

Howls of fury echoed throughout the clinic as a thin, harrassed-looking woman forcibly dragged a five-year-old and a seven-year-old through the inner door. Julie added hurriedly, "She's the kindergarten teacher, too, of all things for her to be!"

Almost all the German women who came into Grantville had immediately seized upon the canvas-tote-bag-with-two-handles as a wondrous advance of modern civilization compared to the shallow-basket-precariously-perched-on-one-hip- and-likely-to-tip. Since this was an item that multiplied in American closets at a rate second only to wire coat hangers, the local housewives had been more than happy to supply the perceived need. Annalise dropped a couple of issues of Parenting into hers (which commemorated the eleventh annual conference of community-based Black Lung clinics) and backed down the hall toward Room B where Grandma was sitting.

Joshua and Megan Pilcher shrieked, sometimes in unison and sometimes alternately. Maxine Pilcher wanted to know why her dental coverage wasn't still in effect. Julie outlined the difficulty of submitting bills to an insurance company in Cleveland when the dental clinic was in Thuringia and displaced four centuries in time. Mrs. Pilcher protested that she had paid her premium for six months in advance just in June. If the company wasn't going to pay, she wanted a refund. With commendable restraint, Julie wished her luck in getting it.

Megan and Joshua continued to wail, but Julie foresaw from bitter experience that although their mouths might be open now, the minute she got either one of them into the examining chair, the lips and teeth would be clamped shut.

The door of Room B opened. Veronica Richter advanced into Dr. Sims's waiting room.

* * *

"That was awesome, Mrs. Richter." Julie's voice resonated with sincerity. Megan and Joshua, under the close supervision of an ogre who lived in the supply cabinet in Room A and two trolls whose preferred mode of transportation from the bridge over the river into Dr. Sims's office was the water pick, had submitted to having their teeth cleaned with really surprising docility.

"She is a fool." There could be no doubt that "she" was Maxine Pilcher. "Gretchen is busy, immer, always. Jeff and the other boys are busy, always. Hans is busy, always. Annalise must go to school, always, always, always. All of Gretchen's orphans go to school. Even little Johann has started school. All the parents work; they must. So what do I have? I have all the tiny ones in the trailer court who are not old enough for school. I have Wilhelm, but also I have Frans and Peter. I have Sofia, I have Hedwig, I have Carolina. Six children I have, all day, every day. Do I have noise? Yes. Such is the way of nature. Do I have that much noise? No."

"Ummm." Julie wasn't quite sure how to ask this. "Do you really think that there's an ogre in the supply cabinet in Room A?"

Grandma Richter snorted. "Of course not. I am not an ignorant woman. I am not a stupid, superstitious peasant from some remote village. I am a townswoman, the widow of a printer. My husband was a Stadtburger, a Druecker. But some things I know, and one of them is that if a child believes that there is an ogre in my cabinet, he will not open it and get sick by eating the soap. If he believes that there is a troll under a bridge that has no railing, he will not run onto the bridge and fall off the side. If he believes that there is a snake-monster in the carp pond, he will not wade too deep and drown. The world has dangers for small children, many dangers. By the time they are old enough to realize for themselves that there are no ogres or trolls or monsters, they are old enough not to eat soap or fall in the water."

Somehow, this seemed to make perfect sense to Julie (who had, of course, heard the stories about the alleged disciplinary powers of Jim Dreeson's glass eye all her life). She filed the news away in the mental storage compartment known as, "stuff I may need to try some day."

"Now," continued Grandma Richter, "How much does this 'set of teeth' cost? Too much, probably, but I have signed a contract. Jeff talked about installments. I do not want installments if they charge interest. I will be no party to the practice of usury."

For just such occasions, Dr. Abrabanel had written, and supplied to all of Grantville's professional offices and businesses, a nice prepared statement, in German, which explained in detail that the charges for installment payments were not to be regarded as interest on the money involved, but as compensation for any inconvenience caused by the delay.

Julie read it out loud.

Grandma Richter didn't buy it for a minute.

"I wish," she insisted, "to pay when I get my teeth. Also, I do not wish to be dependent upon Jeff. I brought a proper dowry into my marriage. I have a life estate in my late husband's property. Now that the king of Sweden has pushed out the Austrians, I have written to a lawyer to find out if anything is left. But I have no money now."

"Well," said Julie. "You're babysitting six kids already, just to be neighborly. Could you manage a few more? When both parents are working, they're happy to find reliable child care. They pay you; you pay Dad; everyone's happy."

* * *

On September 17, 1631, Grandma got her teeth. Although Grantville did not yet know that Gustav II Adolf had defeated Tilly at the Battle of Breitenfeld on that momentous day, Dr. Sims's decision to stay late at the office the night before in order to finish up the dentures probably had great allegorical significance. Veronica Richter would have considered the day to be one of momentous victory in any case. By combining her earnings from a week of completed sitting for eight additional paying children with a week of advance payments for eleven and the contributions from Jeff, Hans, Eddie, Jimmy, and Larry, she had paid for the teeth—without usury.

She had still to pay the Jungen back, of course—without usury. But that was household. That was what family was for.

* * *

She took on an assistant, but the three trailers, even when everyone else in the household was at school or at work, had room for only twenty paying children: no more. By early November, she had a waiting list as long as the list of those she had accepted.

"Think about it, Ronnie," Henry Dreeson said. "When you babysit kids out at the trailer park, all the parents have to go over there to take them and pick them up. You and Gretchen have a lot of mess to clean up before you can get supper and put your own kids to bed. If you take care of them downtown here, it will be a lot handier—Mom or Dad can just drop them off on the way to work, and there will be space for a lot more. You'll probably double your weekly income in no time. This old building isn't suitable for a store, because there's no street frontage—just a door. That's why it isn't rented. Can't imagine why anyone ever built it that way."

Larry Wild raised his eyebrow at Jimmy Andersen. It not only would never have occurred to him to address Gretchen's grandma as Ronnie—it would never have occurred to him that anyone might address her as Ronnie. Jimmy just shrugged.

The mayor pulled out his key ring. The building was one of those 1920s oddities that occur in towns without strict zoning codes. The street door opened into a corridor no more than three feet wide and a good twenty-five feet long, no stairway, no side doors opening into the neighboring buildings, no windows; just one bare lightbulb and another door at the back. That one, unlocked, opened into a single large room, about thirty feet by fifty feet, with a row of windows facing on the creek. Henry Dreeson stared at the contents with a broad smile. "Gawd, I'm glad I brought you guys down. I'd plumb forgotten that I had all that lumber I bought at George Trimble's auction sitting in here. I bet there's enough to frame a duplex."

At either end of the far side, there were doors opening out onto a landing and wooden steps leading down to a grassy area between the building and the creek. "It's flood plain down there—not buildable," said Dreeson. "Don't usually flood more'n about ten days out of the year, though. You can use it for a playground when it's dry enough.

"You won't have to pay rent if we go partners—no upfront capital involved. Set it up this way: I provide the premises and you provide the labor and do the bookkeeping. Get these fine, strong, young men here"—he slapped Larry on the back—"to clean it up for free. Divide the profits, fifty-fifty."

"No rent?" Grandma Richter pulled a spiral-bound tablet out of her tote bag and started to make calculations.

4

After the next Emergency Committee meeting, the mayor asked, "Becky, could I talk to you. Privately. Just for a few minutes?"

"Oh, of course."

"How does a man court a German lady? How does he do it right, I mean? Not helter-skelter."

"You put your money where your mouth is. No, better, you put your money where your mouth is going to be. You give her presents, proper ones, suitable to your rank, income and status; suitable to her rank, income, and status. For you? You need something valuable."

"I don't have anything valuable. I'm the mayor, but I'm the mayor of a dirt poor, scroungy, Appalachian coal town."

"Certainly, you must. Everyone in Grantville has things that are valuable. Look, tomorrow. Look at your house with all that you have learned about the costs of things in Germany while you have been arranging the supplies and provisions for this town. Just look."

* * *

"Would these work? They were never opened after Annie died. She'd bought them right before she had that aneurysm, just before Valentine's Day. They should still be fresh."

Rebecca looked at the little bottles he was showing her. Glass, with tightly fitting plastic screwtops, the three little bottles themselves were worth quite a bit. But the contents . . . cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger: there must be two ounces of each. "It is a gift worthy of being given by a prosperous merchant; truly it is."

"Maybe I could write a note to go with them in English. Paying my respects, and asking her to accept them in time for the holiday baking. If you could translate a copy of it into German? Ronnie doesn't read English very well yet, and I'd sort of rather not have her call on one of those boys to read it out loud. If she doesn't accept—well, I could always, say, I guess, that it was meant for all of them if they'd invite a hungry old bachelor to Thanksgiving dinner and treat him to some Christmas cookies."

* * *

Jeff had walked out to the road with the mayor, to engage in one of those interminable, "Well, I guess I should be going about now" conversations without which rural and small town America could not function. Grandma opened the little packet that Henry had pressed into her hand as the two men went out the door and gasped. "Maria Margaretha!"

Throughout Gretchen's life, the appearance of her full baptismal name had heralded events of portentous significance: she hadn't seen or heard it since she signed "Maria Margaretha Richterin" on the marriage register for Father Mazzare. She looked at what Grandma was holding and her eyes grew wide. "There's a note."

* * *

"We must discuss it with the whole household," Grandma was insisting. "It is a matter that will concern us all."

"No Grandma." Gretchen was also insisting, even more stubbornly. "We're Americans now. I decided for myself. You decide for yourself if you will accept Mr. Dreeson's offer to court you. Then, if it happens—then we can talk about how it will concern us all."

Dreeson offering to court Grandma Richter? Every one of Ms. Mailey's repeated, urgent, anxious lectures about cultural misunderstandings, repeated like a hammer throughout the summer at every available opportunity, came rushing into Jeff's head. This had to be a monumental mistake. This had to be a cultural misunderstanding of stupendous, humongous, proportions. This could not have been equaled by anything that had happened since the Ring of Fire. Oh, good grief, he thought. And it's too late to do anything about it tonight. He wasn't looking forward to tomorrow.

But first, to find out what had brought it on. He entered the kitchen. All this from three dinky little bottles of spices? Mom hadn't gone in for cooking from scratch, so there hadn't been any in the Higgins trailer, but he had seen them in the stores. Racks full of the things at what? He had no real idea. Two dollars a bottle, maybe? At least, he'd learned when to keep his mouth shut. He'd warn the mayor first thing in the morning. Then what? Of course, ask Becky. In a pinch, always ask Becky.

* * *

Jeff was the first one out the door the next morning. He was waiting when City Hall opened; he was in a chair outside the office before Mr. Dreeson arrived. "I thought I'd better flag this. Er—Gretchen and her Grandma got all excited about those bottles of spices."

His efforts were rewarded with a broad, relieved, smile. "Great, she's willing to consider the idea, then. I was afraid she wouldn't be. It'll be a big change for her, you know. If we can work it all out."

Never before in his life had Jeff Higgins understood the true depth of meaning signified by the simple word, "relax."

5

The license for the day care center was issued in mid-December. As soon as it was in hand, the great clean-up of the premises began. The grand opening was scheduled for January 1, to take advantage of the holiday and draw a bigger crowd.

"Do you ever get the feeling that we've been stung?" grumbled Larry.

"Shaddup and haul those two-by-fours out to the flatbed."

"D'you think he really forgot that he had this lumber here?"

"'Course not—he intended all along to get something extra out of this deal, and that was having his lumber carried down this stupid narrow hallway without having to hire anyone. I knew it the minute that he said 'plumb forgotten.' He only talks with that much local color when he has a reason to act like a good ole boy. He's the tightest man with a dollar anyone ever met. That's why they made him minister of finance."

"Oughta get along real good with Gretchen's granny, then."

"Lennox says that she's thrifty."

"Lennox admires thrifty. What d'you want to bet? If Dreeson hadn't beaten him to it, would he have shown up on our door with some kind of a nosegay?"

"Too late to bet. No way to find out."

* * *

But Larry had his revenge, both for the lumber hauling and for all the evenings for the past six weeks when he had cowered in the farthest corner of the third trailer while Mayor Dreeson entertained the Higgins household with his favorite 1940s videos on the VCR. Somehow, between the last inspection the night before the grand opening and the next morning, the entry door acquired an elaborate full-length exterior-enamel portrait of Veronica Lake with a lock of hair falling down over her eye and a sign on the wall next to the doorframe, in Gothic Fraktur, that proclaimed, "Ronnie's Day Care."

Veronica Richter was not amused. Neither, however, was she willing to pay for a completely unnecessary additional coat of fresh paint.

* * *

Guided by Becky, Dreeson had continued to be a punctilious suitor. For Thanksgiving, there had been a 1950s silk headscarf, all pink and turquoise flowers and paisley, found in its original box; then paintings suitable for decorating the day care center ("wonder why we never threw out these old calendars?"); for Christmas, which Becky had warned him was not a big gift-giving day in Germany, a pair of quilted, insulated, footwarmers with cotton knit tops and also two linen handkerchiefs edged with Irish crochet in variegated thread; for New Year's, two pair of knit knee socks, with all sorts of fancy cables and feathery sorts of stitches, that, O blessings upon us, stayed up without garters. Each offering had been accepted graciously. The courtship was progressing. On Epiphany, January 6, 1632, he presented his chosen wife with a hand mirror. (Heavens! Is the man made of money?) To the full satisfaction of the future spouses, the match was agreed between them.

6

"The woman is totally insane." Maxine Pilcher had not attended the grand opening, but had certainly heard enough about it. "I tell, you, Anita, I could not believe the things she said to Megan and Joshua. I was surprised they didn't have nightmares for weeks."

"They didn't, though, did they?" Anita Barnes asked.

Since Megan had passed through her first grade classroom the year before, the prospect of the arrival of her colleague's second offspring next year was not one of the experiences to which Anita looked forward with happy anticipation. The Pilcher children did not strike her as having fragile egos. Nor, she thought, were any children of Keith Pilcher likely to develop them. She'd gone to high school with Keith. He had not suffered from undue sensitivity.

Maxine pushed on. "How can they possibly allow her anywhere near young children? The city council is completely crazy to have given her a day care license. It must have been all arranged under the table—she's the grandmother of Higgins' wife. He's in tight with Stearns and they're all hand-in-hand with Dreeson."

"It wasn't exactly a secret, Max. It was on the council agenda for two meetings. They put the agenda up on that bulletin board in the City Hall lobby. They publish it in the newspaper. They announce it on the radio. Rebecca Stearns reads it on her TV show. You absolutely have to go out of your way not to know what they're going to be discussing."

"I go to my book discussion group on Mondays."

"Your book discussion group reads Harlequin Romances."

"Don't knock it, Anita. Kelley Bonnaro had three titles that no one else did. She's sold the translation rights to a press in Muenster for enough money to add a room to her house for each title."

"She what?"

"Well, the authors sure aren't here to collect the money, so we figured that the owners might as well. Publishers are absolutely grabbing for them. The only thing was to decide how to share it out. We decided that anyone who had the only copy of a title got to sell it; for the rest, we put as many titles on the table at each meeting as there are women in the club and draw straws for who gets to sell which one."

"You gals are in absolutely no position to call anyone else crazy, no matter what they do. Does the cabinet know about this? Has the committee on foreign currency exchange approved this?"

"None of their business." Maxine returned to the topic at hand. "We've decided to do something about Mrs. Richter, though. Next week, we'll sacrifice our discussion group meeting. We're going to the city council meeting instead. Someone has to speak out about this."

"You and who else?"

"Well, Darlene. Jenny. The rest of them didn't really want to come."

"You and your sisters, in other words? What did Keith say about . . . this?" Anita managed not to say, "about this latest nitwit fit and start of yours."

"Well, I haven't told him. He has so much on his mind, you know. I think I ought to spare him my own troubles if I can possibly bear them alone." Maxine looked virtuous.

Anita thought, You dwork! The only thing besides hunting that Keith ever had on his mind was his hair, and that's gotten pretty thin on top.

* * *

The entire Monday Evening Book Discussion Club was sitting around the table in the conference room, looking rather defensive. "Maxine," said Melissa Mailey. "Would you please just explain. You don't have to justify it. Just explain it."

"We've got a right. When they came around to collect for the National Library, or whatever the fancy name is now, they just laughed at our books and said we could keep them—a bunch of intellectual snobs, that's what all of you are out here at the high school."

"What on earth gave you the idea for selling the publication rights to them?" Melissa looked around the room and fixed her eye on a club member who had once been in her classes. "Kelley." Having undergone conditioning, Kelley scrambled.

"Ms. Mailey, it was when that guy from Amsterdam came to talk to Dr. Abrabanel. You know Susie Castalanni here. She has a complete set of first edition Betty Neels—real collectibles, valuable—all the ones about English nurses who marry Dutch doctors, more than forty titles, I think. Susie's awfully proud of it. She invited him to come see it. He was real happy to find out that in three hundred fifty years the Dutch and the English would still have their countries and their languages and their churches and live in peace and have good hospitals and not be harried by the Spanish Inquisition like the remnants of the Waldensians. Susie hasn't found out what a Waldensian was yet, but whatever happened to them, it wasn't good."

Kelley was forced to pause for breath. Maxine interrupted. "They're real respectable classics, too—not like some of the newer ones. No sex at all until the nurse and doctor get married and not very much after they do. Lots of descriptions of houses and furniture and landscapes. Shopping trips for new clothes. Pictures of ancestors on the wall. Being nice to your stepchildren. He thought that the Calvinist preachers would OK them just fine."

Kelley regained the initiative. "When he went back to Holland, a publisher up there sent a guy down to copy her whole set. They're going to publish them in English for export to London and translate them into Dutch. So we thought, if Susie can sell those, why can't we sell the rest of them? And we did. To the highest bidder. That's all there is to it."

"We reported it on our taxes, too," added Susie. Then, looking at the expressions of her fellow club members, she added in a more doubtful tone of voice. "Well, at least I did. You can look it up."

* * *

Nobody blamed Anita Barnes, of course, for dropping the news to everybody she met that Maxine was going to make a fuss about the day care center at the next city council meeting. She hadn't campaigned about it or said anything that a person could call criticism of another teacher. There sure was a big crowd, though—as city council meetings went. All the chairs around the sides of the room were full, with SRO in the back.

"Face it, there's no one in this town over forty whose grandma didn't say something of the sort to them. We all turned out all right." Karen Reading finished her thirty seconds at the microphone. Darryl McCarthy turned to the man next to him and whispered, "Hell, there's probably no one in this town over twenty whose grandma didn't say something of the sort to them."

"Will the audience please maintain silence. Everyone will be given a chance to speak in turn. If you want to speak, and didn't take a number at the door when you came in, please see one of the ushers now." Quentin Underwood was acting as chairman pro tem, since Henry Dreeson, as a partner in the business, had recused himself.

It surely was not to be interpreted as a comment on the dialogue that Mayor Dreeson pulled his glass eye good-luck piece out of his pocket and absentmindedly started to toss it from hand to hand. He did that all the time.

Nat Davis expressed the opinion that kids these days were too full of themselves anyway and didn't need their self-esteem enhanced. The German apprentices he had taken on paid more attention to him than the ones from West Virginia families. Ollie Reardon seconded him. The Baptist minister got up and read part way through a pamphlet on the importance of discipline, but ran out of time.

Maxine had spoken first. When she realized how many people were there, she had sent Darlene and Jenny back to trade in the low numbers they had picked up by coming-early-to-make-sure-they-were-on-time for higher ones, so they would have a chance to comment on the comments.

"We don't want our children exposed to it. It's not modern. It's not progressive. Disciplining children that way is cultural regression." Jenny glanced at the three-by-five card in her hand. "Er—I was supposed to say next that it's un-American, but I guess that I really can't, though, because Karen Reading was telling the truth: my grandma was always frightening us with ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. You should have heard what she could make out of an acorn hitting the shingles or a squirrel in the chimney." Maxine's glare at her sister indicated that Jenny's contribution had not been up to the standard of debate she had hoped for.

"I guess maybe Maxine has reason to complain about what Mrs. Richter said at Dr. Sims's office," began the manager of the Dollar Store (who didn't sound very sure, even about this qualification, because Maxine Pilcher had brought her children into his territory on many occasions). "But that doesn't have anything to do with the center. If you don't want to send your kids there, you don't have to. Send them somewhere else. Find someone who's running a day care center that you like." He sat down.

"Actually, I mean, you know, well, when you come right down to it. It's not such a bad thing to have kids do what you tell them to." If Jenny had gotten a glare, Darlene got the kind of look that signified the beginning of a major family bone of contention—the kind with reruns at every holiday dinner for the next fifteen years. Darlene, of course, did not have an education degree: she had gotten married right out of high school and gone to work for the Grantville veterinarian. Veterinary assistants develop considerable respect for the value of discipline, even though they don't always articulate its theoretical basis very well.

By a unanimous vote, the city council reaffirmed the day care license that had been issued to Mrs. Veronica Richter.

7

Jeff had discovered that there was a big chasm that gaped between the stage when a match had been agreed upon by the parties involved and the stage when it was a done deal. There were a lot of conversations. Negotiating the marriage of a widow and widower of such prominence in the town bore more resemblance to a corporate merger than a proposal, even when both of the parties concerned were heartily in favor of the project. Necessarily, there would be feelers and tenders; offers and counteroffers; exploration of the options. Eddie, of all unexpected people, was invaluable—he was learning esoteric diplomatic arts from Becky and her father almost faster than they could teach him.

* * *

"It's hard for a man to maintain a proper housekeeping without a wife to manage things—there's a lot of scrubbing and stuff that ought to be done first. We could get a maid. My income runs to that."

"We will need a cook, also. To cook, with the business, I do not have the time. My own income, now, runs to paying the cook."

"It might be that I should help with the cook. It sort of contributes to a man's position to have a wife. Because I'm mayor, people have asked me to have dinners when we have out-of-town visitors, but I've put them off."

"It's only proper for you to host dinners, considering your office."

"I'd need to get a new suit if we gave dinners."

"Leonhard Kalbacher is a tailor of respectable quality. He opened a shop about three doors down from the museum a couple of months ago. A nice black worsted, with velvet facings?"

"Velvet facings? Er—Ronnie!"

"Velvet facings are very fine. America used them, too. I saw them on Professor Ferrara's suit the day the faculty came from the university at Jena to visit our Hochschule."

"Hell, that wasn't a suit. That was the academic gown Greg had to buy when he got his M.S. degree."

"It was a very fine robe, indeed. Dignified."

"Velvet facings?"

* * *

"It still doesn't seem just right to me for a boy as young as Jeff to be the head of a household. Probably, sometimes, I don't give him quite the deference that his position deserves."

"He's American, Ronnie. He isn't expecting your deference—not the way a German might."

"Well. Remind him that if we ever do get my late husband's property back, I only have a life interest. After that, it will go to Gretchen and Hans and Annalise, so there will be no harm to his children's inheritance. What will your family say?"

"I don't have any really close relatives left here—just a couple of my late wife's nephews and their families. Technically, they don't have anything coming from my side of the family, but I thought—if you don't mind—I'd just divide Annie's personal things between them, half of the trinkets for Lila and half for June. They weren't worth a lot back home, you understand, just some costume jewelry and such. But if we make it, if Grantville makes it, they'll all turn into 'valuable, irreplaceable antiques' in another twenty-five years. Which the boys know—they've seen as many tourist traps as I have. It's probably more than they'll have been expecting. And if we don't make it . . ."

"Ja, wohl. You ought to make sure that they understand that it will not hurt their prospects in the long run. It's always best to be on good terms with your kin."

"Yep. No matter what else comes and goes, family stays with you."

* * *

A few days later, Henry Dreeson had reason to reflect more deeply on his comment that family stays with you. "Hoo, boy, did it ever!" Or if it went away, it came roaring back in spades. It appeared that he had traded a deceased wife and one married daughter with a husband and two children in Ohio for . . . what? Well, Ronnie appeared to think that it would be his first duty as an adoptive step-step-grandfather to provide moral support, wise advice, useful contacts, and at least some financial backing for launching Eddie, Larry, and Jimmy into their careers. It did not strike him that Ronnie was the type to let a man shirk on his duty. And that's not all, he thought with a quirky grin. No, that's not all.

* * *

"It's a big old Victorian house. You'll have a lot more room than you do now, and fewer people."

"Certainly, but with the new baby coming, we should make more room for Jeff and Gretchen."

"You could bring Hans and Annalise along."

"It would certainly save time for Hans if he were living downtown, now that he's working for the newspaper. It would also improve Annalise's prospects, I think. Those boys are not doing her manners any good at all—she's becoming very outspoken, almost frech—fresh."

"Do you have any idea what Gretchen would say if we suggested this? I've sort of felt Jeff out about it. It seems okay with him."

"Gretchen is their sister. But under our old law, I would be their guardian. She was under age when their parents were killed. I would not fight her, though. Still, with a second baby . . . and they will be with us, right here in town. Without the war, they would both have gone by this age, Hans to an apprenticeship and Annalise into some form of service."

"So let's count on having them."

"I think that we should probably take the two oldest of the other children, also. It's a lot closer to the elementary school here. They can help me at the center when they get out of school in the afternoon."

"You will be closer to the center, too—not the long walk home after dark on winter evenings."

"Have you ever thought that we might expand to another location? There's plenty of need, and a good place would be over by the power plant. Appollonia Hirsch could be manager. She's learning fast."

"Well, I have an old garage on a lot over that way. If we tore it down . . ."

"I may have already done a few figures here, just thinking about possibilities."

* * *

There was a formal betrothal, of course: everything was to be done in the most proper order, suitable to the age and standing of the parties. It took place in late March, presided over by Father Mazzare and the Calvinist minister whom Henry Dreeson shared with Mike and Rita, who both solemnly accepted the words of promise de futuro (after cautiously looking up the significance of the rite in advance and finding to their surprise that both Mazzare's completely up-to-date ritual and an 1894 Manual of the Presbyterian Church in the USA once bought at an auction provided for such a contingency). For the preparation of the marriage contract, Jeff and Dr. Abrabanel represented the bride; Mike Stearns and Quentin Underwood represented the groom. All parties emerged with greatly heightened respect for the negotiating abilities of the others.

All of the parties : even Grandma, who for the first time referred to Jeff as "Herr Higgins" after his triumphant, if mischievous, insertion of a clause according to which, when Hans married, he and his wife should receive the right to occupy an apartment to be constructed on the third floor of the second day care center building for five years at a fixed, very modest, rent, with option to renew. Hans was not old enough to marry yet, of course; Grandma was certain of that. But he was also now of age by the American laws, so it was best to be prepared.

* * *

The day care center had held a grand opening. Henry Dreeson's house received what the entire Higgins/Richter household came to think of as the Grand Inspection.

o Soap

o Rags

o Whitewash

o Furniture polish

o Floor wax

o Laundry

"Oh, all those curtains and draperies; oh, that smell of tobacco smoke; Henry, what is this?

"We cannot possibly marry until September. Everyone in Grantville is so busy, always, immer, immer. It will take a while to organize a cleaning crew to bring it up to the standard that will be properly, yes properly, expected of a Herr Buergermeister and a Frau Buergermeisterin."

"Nobody's ever objected to my house the way it is so far."

"Did your first wife keep it like this? I ask you?"

"Well, ummn, no."

"So. I am a townswoman, not an ignorant peasant. I know what is due to your position. I may never have expected to be a Frau Buergermeisterin, but I certainly know what is expected of one."

8

Every morning for several weeks, when she came down to open the center, she had spent a few moments glaring at Veronica Lake on the door. Then, for several more weeks, every morning, she had carefully ignored the door. On Monday of the eleventh week, the day after the signing of the marriage contract, she backed across the street to look at it more carefully, and came to a decision. While keeping most of the picture intact, thus saving on the expense of hiring an artist, a modest amount of overpainting could transform Veronica Lake into Saint Veronica and she would have her very own respectable patron saint for her business. A headdress, with a bit of the linen falling forward to cover that hair. A halo. Drapery fluttering across the neckline and arms; drapery down the bottom of the skirt. There was bound to be someone among the Germans in town who could do it. Almost the first thing any apprentice artist learned to paint was drapery. It should be done. There would henceforth be a pious matron of Jerusalem on her door.

She could reuse the sign. Whichever of those three young rascals put it up (and she had her suspicions), he had made it from nice cured wood with shaped edges, far too good to waste. "Ronnie's Day Care" was not suitable for Saint Veronica, but with a little sanding, she could turn it over and use the other side.

She paid extra to have the door taken off the hinges and carried to the back room of the store next door to be repainted. She was prepared to say that it needed to be repaired, if necessary, but always, immer, immer, everyone was so busy here in Grantville. Nobody asked.

Carefully, very carefully, she drew the letters. A printer's widow, that she was. A calligrapher she was not!

It was the first thing that she'd said when Jeff brought them there, she thought. She'd said that the building couldn't be a school—that there weren't enough noble children in all of Germany to fill it. She'd known at once that it couldn't be any ramshackle village school for peasant children, nor even such a one as they had in town. It had to be a great Akademie, a Gymnasium, for those who could pay and those lucky few who had scholarships. It was too late for Gretchen and Hans. They were too old. But her little Annalise, she would graduate there. Her granddaughter would be a member of the learned professions, like Ms. Mailey. Anna Elisabetha Richterin, Lehrerin. Maybe even Professorin. She would introduce her grandmother to her colleagues, "Meine Grossmutter, Veronica Schusterin verw. Richter, verh. Dreeson." Pride was a deadly sin, yes, so they said, but Veronica would have pride in her, no matter how many eons she must repent it in Purgatory. And she would have pride in all the children who followed her.

Carefully, very carefully, she placed the stencils for the letters on the wood.

"St. Veronica's Preparatory Academy."

She had made her letters a little too small. There was still a space at the bottom. Should she do them over?

She decided to give it more thought, and put the stencils for them back in the folder until such time as they would be needed.

The new sign did not escape notice. The first morning it was up, the center scarcely open for the day, it brought Maxine Pilcher through both doors and into the center itself.

"Preparatory Academy, Mrs. Richter? Preparatory Academy! Don't you think that's maybe a little pretentious?"

Grandma's answer was blank incomprehension of the last word.

"I mean it's too fancy. You're just being a show-off, calling a day care center a preparatory academy. What do you think you are doing?"

"Herr Higgins found it for me—the name. It is right."

"Listen to me."

"No. You listen. You can let the children in your class not learn. You know that whether they learn or not, they will still go to Mrs. Barnes in the first grade and then they will learn what you did not teach them. Or the year after. Or the year after that, perhaps. For American children, there will always be another year, it seems. You are all rich, so rich. My children have no such promise that they will have another chance."

"Mrs. Richter, the best modern theories of early childhood learning indicate—"

"Akademies we have in Germany. Or the Gymnasium, if you call it that, but it is the whole school and not where the young people play sports. Only through an Akademie can a boy of ordinary family advance, to become a member of the learned professions, to became an official in the chancery of a ruler. There are few scholarships, so few can advance. Most of the places are only for the children of the nobles, or the great families—the Geschlechter—the bankers and the wholesale merchants in the Imperial cities. And all of them boys, boys, boys, boys, boys. Immer die Jungen. Immer die Knaben."

"Well, naturally, I don't have any objections to coeducation."

"I learned well in the town school. Could I go to an Akademie when I was ten? No. Could I become ein Beamter? No. Ein Gelehrter? No. I loved my schooling; I loved my reading. My parents wasted the money on my brother, wasted it. Hopeless, he was; spoiled, lazy too. All of his opportunities he frittered away. He came to no good end!"

"Mrs. Richter, just what do you think that you are doing?"

"I am making a Preparatory Academy. I am preparing children for Akademies, and to do it I must use my ways, not yours. Boy children. Girl children. Poor children, of peasants and artisans. All of them! I shall take them when they are so little, the tiny ones. I shall teach them. They shall have no choice but to learn, to be ready when they are ten. The Akademies shall drown in children. It will be like the play-yard down by the creek that no one can build upon because the powerful water comes down from the mountains and would push all the buildings off their foundations. I shall flood them. They will take my children when the time comes, all of my children. Or they will be washed away."

9

"Well, no, Henry. I wouldn't mind being married by your and Mike's Calvinist preacher. I was baptized a Calvinist, after all."

"You were what? Ronnie, you had a saint painted on the door of the day care center."

"I was born the year before the old Calvinist prince died. Then his son inherited. He was Lutheran, like his mother—so I grew up a Lutheran, like the king of Sweden. Lutheran is how I learned the catechism. Lutheran is how I was confirmed and married to Stephan."

"Umm-hmm."

"But then he died, and the heir was Calvinist. But it took quite some time to decide and there were many fights between the Calvinist regent and the Lutheran Adel—the nobles. Finally, the ruler won. That wasn't so long ago. Maybe twenty years, or not quite that."

"I see."

"But when we were taken away from the king of Bohemia after the Battle of the White Mountain, the Emperor gave us to Bavaria, so we all became Catholics a few years later. Gretchen and Hans remember a little bit about being Calvinist, but Annalise isn't old enough."

"So Calvinist is okay for the wedding."

"Yes. I was Lutheran longer than anything else, but Calvinist is fine. The American freedom of religion is much simpler, really. Sometimes it was quite hard to remember what answers a new pastor wanted to hear, from one year to the next."

10

It was bad, that Croat raid, but she lost no more of her children. Not even—Gott sei Dank!—Gretchen's foolish young Jeff, wounded though he may have been as a consequence of his stupid bravery. Dashing right out to get yourself shot at does not lead to having many descendants, no, not at all. But he was defending the children, so perhaps it was not so stupid after all.

As for her, she had seen nothing of it. After all, what could one old woman do to fight in a raid? With her little tiny ones, who had been dropped off early by working parents, already safe inside, protected by the stores in front and by the intercession of Saint Veronica, she had simply locked up and placed tables as barricades. The day care center had proceeded with its accustomed daily schedule throughout the gunfire.

The wedding took place, as planned, in September—on Labor Day. The feast included a basket of Henry's Winesaps, uncooked.

But already, the day before, the bride had come to another decision. She knew what to do with the extra space on the sign she had left unpainted. Carefully, very carefully, she drew a few more letters.

She thought they fit nicely, next to the bullet-ridden door where Saint Veronica proudly bore her battle scars.

"School Number 1."

Power to the People

Loren K. Jones

It was a typical Sunday at the Grantville Power Station. Claude Yardley, the senior operator on "C" Crew, was leaning back in his chair as always, watching the power plant's main board. Everything was as it should be, right down to that annoying little flutter in #2 Boiler's pressure. It had been there for years, and no one had ever found the cause. By now it was just one of those little idiosyncrasies of the plant that everyone ignored.

"Hey Nissa, how about bringing me a refill? Please?" he called to the back of the figure at the coffee urn.

"Does I looks like yo nigga?" Nissa Pritchard sassed back without turning around. She was slightly older than Claude, and had risen through the ranks to become the senior instrument tech in the plant through pure cussedness. The fact that she was a black woman had hindered her over the years, and it was something that she never let the men around her forget.

"No, from this angle you look like my Aunt Diane. Don't throw that!" he quickly added as Nissa turned and raised the can of creamer that she was holding.

"I've met your Aunt Diane, Claude," she growled at him, eyes burning. Diane Yardley was a large woman, especially from the rear. "Are you calling me a fat-ass?"

Claude raised his hands defensively. "Never! Wouldn't dream of it."

"Better not. Union rules say that I can have your ass busted for harassing me about my weight. Besides, I lost five pounds this month." Nissa was bringing a thermos carafe with her as she returned to her desk. Claude held his cup off to the side, well clear of his panel and his lap. Nissa's sense of humor tended toward the physical. She poured the cup full enough that he had to carefully sip before he could move it much.

"Thank you very much, Madame Nissa."

"I ain't no madame, either. You better jus' watch yo' mouth, White Boy. Those size twelves of yours won't both fit." Nissa smiled to show that she was joking, though there had been times in the past that she hadn't. It had been the union's rules, not the EEOC or state snoops, that had seen to her rightful rise through the ranks.

"You're mean. No fun at all. Not like the old days." Claude pretended to pout, which only made Nissa laugh.

"The old days out by #1 Stack? We're both too old for that crap any more. Damn the luck." Nissa grinned and winked at Claude. Their brief affair had ended almost as soon as it started fifteen years before. They had both been married, but the temptations of nightshift and the solitude of the area had been more than they wanted to resist. Now, years later, they could laugh about it. In private.

Claude sighed. "Time to take readings. You know, I wish that they would get rid of this stupid paperwork. The computer logs everything instantly."

"If they got rid of the paperwork, they could justify getting rid of us." Nissa sighed. "I installed these monitoring systems. Thought that they would be a great help. Fah! Help to the company in justifying minimum raises. Crap."

"Crap indeed, Nissa. Crap—" Thunder slammed through the control room, and white light showed around the rim of the door, interrupting Claude's complaint.

"Holy shit! Loss of load! Loss of load!" Claude shouted, grabbing for his controls. The old-fashioned gauges on the wall mirrored the computer's reading. They had been cruising along at fifty-eight percent power, then suddenly nothing. Automatic systems reacted before Claude could, cutting the flow of steam to the main turbine in the blink of an eye. Even so, the turbine was already turning at far above its rated RPM.

"Initiate steam braking! Slow the turbine down!" Nissa shouted as she ran her fingers over her board. "All of the main breakers are tripped. I'm getting ground-faults on all transmission lines. Phase-to-phase in the south. Shit, what was that?"

"I don't know, Nis. Everything else seems okay, it's just the outgoing lines that are down. Call in help, Nis. Call Bill. I think he's in his office. I'm calling Northeast Grid Control. See if they know what happened." Claude was picking up his phone as he spoke, then tapping the hook. "My line's dead. How's yours?"

"External lines are dead. Not even a dial tone. Bill isn't answering his phone."

Claude grabbed his radio next. All of the men and women on the crew carried a five-watt hand-held radio. "We have an emergency. We have an emergency. All personnel report."

Nissa was sitting beside him, shaking her head. "I can't hear you, Claude. You aren't broadcasting." A sudden chill swept over her, and her eyes grew large with fear. "Oh, shit, Claude. EMP? Was there an attack? Oh shit oh shit oh shit," she began chanting, almost hyperventilating.

"Nissa! Shut up! It wasn't an attack! Look at your computer! Look at your watch! They're still working." Claude held up his wrist. "EMP would have taken these out too. Whatever it was, it wasn't nuclear."

"But what . . ." Nissa grabbed for the old intercom microphone and gingerly pressed the switch. "Testing. Testing. Can anyone hear me?"

"Yah, Nissa, I hear you," Rodman Shackleton's voice replied. "What the hell was that? What happened?"

"We don't know, Rod. Is anyone else with you?"

"Yep. Norris, Carney, Vaughn, Jeff and Latham," he instantly replied, drawing sighs of relief from the two in the control room.

"Where's here? Maintenance?" Claude asked over Nissa's shoulder, pressing his hand down on hers to key the mike.

"Ten-four."

"Are you bastards playing poker without me again?" Nissa asked angrily.

There was a pause before Rodman answered. "Would we do that?" He sounded genuinely hurt, but the laughter in the background ruined it for him.

"Get up to control immediately. Grab anyone that you see on the way. Something happened and we can't contact anyone outside of the plant. Anyone who can hear this, come to control." Nissa let go of the mike and looked up at Claude. "What now?"

Claude looked at the plant layout on his board and shook his head. "Everything is shut down. We have to recover the plant first, then see about recovering the rest of the grid."

Pounding feet moments later announced the arrival of two of the other instrument techs on the crew. Leona McCabe and Darlene Braun had been in the instrument shop repairing a pressure gauge when the intercom had come to life. Both had listened and then run, taking the stairs two at a time to reach control. "Nis, what happened?" Darlene immediately demanded.

"Don't know yet. Find a perch and wait for the rest." Nissa pointed to the counter along the back of the room and the two women immediately complied. Gina Goodman entered right on their heels and joined them, glancing nervously at the big board. She was another of "C" Crew's four operators, and had been eating lunch when the call came. Five others followed her in and immediately began asking questions. "Wait for the rest," Nissa commanded, and they quieted.

More running feet announced the arrival of the men from the maintenance shop. Once everyone was present, Claude spoke. "All right. Here's what we know. We're out of communication with the rest of the area. Phones and radios don't work. Internet is gone as well.

"The main generator is down and is going to stay down. We're running on the emergency diesel for now. All of the outgoing lines show ground-faults, and a few phase-to-phase shorts. We have to get the field crews going and start isolating the problem, but we can't contact them. I want four volunteers to go get help. Operators and instrument techs only. I want the mechanics and electricians working the plant."

Selena Alcom and Paul Stancil immediately stepped forward, as did Dane Stevenson and Leona McCabe. Claude nodded. "Selena, go to Bill's office and see if he's still here. If he isn't, come right back." He nodded as she immediately went to find the plant manager.

"Leona, drive into town and see what gives with the phones. They have their own generator, so us being down shouldn't affect them. Someone should be there, even today." Leona nodded and turned to leave, but hesitated at the door.

"Claude, what if there isn't a town there?"

"There is! Don't talk that way or you'll scare someone. Like me." Claude's wide eyes made her almost grin, then nod before leaving.

"Dane, go to the police station. They should have some idea what is going on. Stay there until you find out what's happening. If no one knows, come back in three hours."

Dane nodded and left, ambling in his unhurried fashion even in what amounted to a major emergency. He only had one speed, unless there was beer involved.

Claude watched him go, shaking his head. "Paul, go to the service depot. See if there's anyone there and get them out looking for the downed lines. Since we don't have radio contact, tell them to come here and report. And tell them to go out in groups of three. They can't call in help, so they need to be able to handle whatever they find. Tell them to isolate any downed lines. Cut 'em high. We need to get the grid back up. Once everyone has reported, we'll bring the generator back up. Until then, everyone stays."

That pronouncement drew immediate protests from everyone. "I'm sorry!" Claude shouted. "I'm sorry. I want to go home and check on Beth and the kids too, but we have a responsibility to everyone. We have to get the power back on. For our families as well as everyone else."

Claude's shout had the desired effect, and the men and women began nodding. Paul turned and left as Claude began speaking again. "Everyone else start checking out the plant. Get the main turbine on the jacking gear." He paused and looked at his readouts. "It's down to less than fifty RPM already. Get the jacking gear going as soon as possible. We have to keep that baby turning so she doesn't warp." The four mechanics of the crew immediately went to do their job.

"The diesel generator is running, and I want someone watching it. We are well and truly screwed if that thing stops. Take it turn and turn about. Operator, mechanic and electrician when we can."

"C" Crew immediately began their task, assuming the calm demeanor of experienced professionals as the minutes slowly ticked by.

* * *

Help arrived shortly after that in the form of off-shift personnel. When you work at the power plant and the lights go out, family members expect you to do something about it. And when you can't call in, you come in.

The first to arrive was Thomas McAndrew, an electrician from "D" Crew. He entered the control room in a foul mood. "What's going on? Jen is throwing a fit about not being able to chat with her mother online because the power's out."

"We don't know. Suit up, we need the help. The entire grid is down, and we can't contact anyone." Claude's terse report, spoken without turning, silenced Tom.

"Where do you need me?"

"Diesel. That's where the other electricians are." Tom nodded and left immediately.

Nissa stood and walked to the door. "I'm going down to the guard shack. I just realized that we haven't heard from Howard since whatever it was happened."

"No, Nissa, wait . . . Oh, damn it all anyway." Nissa hadn't even slowed down when he tried to call her back. Not surprising. Howard was an old man, old enough to be her father, and one of the few men that Nissa didn't tease. Howard had once used his nightstick on a man who was harassing her. The two of them had lied about it to keep him out of trouble, but the harasser's broken arm and cracked skull couldn't have been caused by the fall that they both swore that they had seen.

* * *

Nissa arrived at the guard shack in moments. Both gates were open, against company policy, but the shack was empty. Looking around, she spotted the one place that Howard was likely to be if he wasn't in the shack. The bathroom.

Walking over to the door, she knocked loudly. "Hey, you old fart! What happened, did you fall in?" Silence answered her. Knocking again, she pushed the door open a crack. "Howard? You in here?" Still no answer. Finally, she entered the men's room.

Howard was there. His pants were still around his ankles, but he had managed to pull his underwear up. He was crumpled in a heap on the floor, and there was blood around his head. "Howard!" Nissa shouted, going to her knees beside him. "Howard, are you okay?"

Nissa gently turned his head, but the first contact with his flesh made her scramble back. He was cold. No. No, no, no! He can't be dead! her mind screamed. Touching him again, she checked for a pulse. None. Scrambling to her feet, Nissa ran out of the men's room just as a pickup pulled up to the open gate.

"Help! Howard's down! We need to get an ambulance right away!"

The man in the truck stared at her for a moment before driving toward her. Nissa recognized Ross Flemming, a Mechanic from "A" Crew. He slammed on his brakes and jumped out of his truck, leaving the engine running. "Where is he?"

Nissa turned and ran back into the men's room with Ross. Ross knelt by Howard's side and felt for a pulse. "No pulse. His skin is cool. I'm sorry Nissa. We have to call an ambulance, but I don't think . . ."

"No! He has to be okay! He has to be!" Nissa shouted. Nissa grabbed Ross by the collar and dragged him to his feet. "Go get an ambulance! The phones are down. Go now! Go, for god's sake, go!" Nissa was crying and pushing Ross toward his truck as she spoke.

"Okay, Nissa, okay, I'm going. I'm going!" Ross climbed into his truck and drove away as fast as he dared. He was sure that it was futile, but he liked old Howard, too.

Others were trickling into the plant now as well, but Nissa didn't notice. She was sitting on the floor of the men's room, stroking Howard's curly hair.

* * *

Bill Porter's arrival in the control room ten minutes later was welcome, and he immediately called a meeting of the senior personnel. "Where do we stand?" he asked, looking around the conference room.

Claude stood as he answered. "We're self sufficient, but we don't know what happened to the grid, and we can't find out. There's no communication from outside of the immediate area."

Bill nodded. "Okay, I'm instituting Emergency Protocol One. Everyone needs to be here. We can't call, so I want one person to take the list and go get everyone. Most of the people who live in the local area are already here, but not everyone. I also want someone to go to the school and find the police chief. He needs to be informed about Howard." Bill paused and hung his head. Nissa had refused to leave Howard's side until the ambulance arrived.

"What about our families?" Gannon Emerson, "B" Crew's senior operator asked. "I don't want to leave Mary and the kids alone . . ."

Others immediately joined in, demanding that they be allowed to go home to their families. "Okay, okay, enough already. Whoever goes out will hit every house. Tell the families that they can come here."

"I want to go . . ."

"No! We need an operational staff. We'll get your families here as soon as possible," Bill interrupted once again. "We have a responsibility to the community . . ."

"We have a responsibility to our families first, Bill," Gannon continued.

"Then do them a favor and get their lights back on," Bill snarled. "We all need electricity. How many of you can cook right now?" His question silenced them. "How much of your food is going to spoil in the fridge and freezer if you don't have power? Think about it. I want any of you who used to work the lines to get out and grab a truck. We have to clear the faults and get the power back on. But I want "C" and "A" crews here. The rest of you grab your cars and get to the depot. Grab a service truck, drive to the end of a line, fix the problem, and come back here. Go home for your families if you want." Bill paused. "And someone stop in and tell Jill to come out here too."

The men and women who were from "B" and "D" crews immediately went to their cars. No matter what Bill said, families first. Even his.

* * *

It was completely dark before any of the field service crews returned. Men and women climbed wearily out of the trucks, stretching their aching backs and in some cases limping. Each crew reported on the lines that they had checked. And each report was eerily alike.

"The lines were cut, slick as a whistle. Just ended. So did the road, about where the lines would have been."

Once all of the crews had reported and all of the faults were clear, Bill ordered the main generator brought back on line. Two hours later, after carefully warming the turbine and bringing it up to speed, power came back to Grantville.

Gannon found Bill once the generator was on line. "Bill, I ran into some people who said that there was some trouble out south of town. A fire and then some fighting. Apparently Dan was shot."

"Dan? Dan Frost? The police chief was shot? Who's in charge? What happened?" Bill immediately asked, but Gannon was shaking his head.

"Don't know much more than that. The people that I talked to didn't either."

Bill looked around him at the plant that was his responsibility. "Tomorrow. It'll have to wait until tomorrow." Looking around, he took a deep breath to calm himself. "Maybe by tomorrow we'll have our answers."

* * *

Morning brought more questions than answers. The story of the fight south of town had made its way to the plant with a speed that only urgent gossip can attain. The woman that Stearns and the men of the United Mine Workers of America had rescued told them that they were in Middle Ages Germany. Thuringia. A mutter of "Where the hell is Thuringia?" had swept through the plant. Worse was what they couldn't find out.

Where was the rest of the world that they knew?

Where was the United States?

And worst of all, where were their families?

Claude and Nissa sat in almost stony silence as they listened to what the various members of the plant crew had learned. They were lost, and alone. Both of them had lived out on Route 250. Beyond the cut. Bill Porter's family was also gone, left behind in Barracksville.

It was decided to turn some of the plant's unoccupied offices into bunkrooms until something could be done about the situation. The three were taken off of the watch rotation and unobtrusively watched. Each was encouraged to talk, to let the healing begin. Each saw a priest, but Claude was not a religious man and found little comfort in "God's Will."

Nighttime darkness and pilfered sleeping pills saw them to bed with the hopes that morning would bring better news.

Claude was missing the next morning. Nissa was the first to notice his absence when he failed to meet her for breakfast, and raised the alarm. A quick search of the plant showed that he had not gone alone. Ross Flemming's .300 Savage was gone as well.

* * *

Claude had stared at the ceiling for half the night before making up his mind to go. Rising quietly, he had dressed in the hall and headed for his car. He was just pulling up to the gate when his eye caught the silhouette of a rifle in the back window of a truck. A smile crossed his face when he realized whose truck it was. Ross is going to be so pissed, he thought to himself as he opened the door. A brief search under the seat yielded a box of ammo, as expected. Some people were just too predictable for their own good.

Claude had a destination in mind. He had been rolling the idea around in his head since the Ring of Fire, and the rumors that they had been hearing had convinced him to go. It was only twelve miles from the plant to home. Or at least where home had been. Driving up the road, he felt a tightness in his chest begin to ease. He was finally going home.

The end of Route 250 was abrupt and chilling. He had heard the stories of the line crews, but they hadn't prepared him for the reality. The road ended at the edge of a three foot tall cliff. The ground had crumbled a bit, but the edge of the pavement was cut in an almost glass-smooth line. The land beyond the cut was strange in the moonlight.

There should be hills there , he thought, and the stream. But there wasn't. Still, his sense of direction led him on, and his feet knew the distance. Forest that hadn't existed in West Virginia impeded him, slowing his progress. Bushes that he couldn't identify tangled his legs.

The sun was peeking over the horizon in the wrong place according to his senses, but it matched what they had been told was east. He slowed now, walking carefully and looking ahead at each clearing. He was depressed and homesick, but he wasn't suicidal. Not yet, at least.

His legs told him that he was near home. Just ahead was a shallow valley where there should have been a hill. Staying in the trees, he made his way to where his heart said home was.

An old oak had grown in his front yard. It had been there since before the area had been developed, and he had cherished the gnarled old tree like one of the family. But there was no tree here. A small meadow with a trickling creek ran through where his heart said his house should have been.

He drew a long, shuddering breath, never looking away from the empty space where his home should have been. Deep in his heart he had held out hope that he would find it. That Beth and the kids would somehow be there. Now he believed, and that belief was tearing him apart.

The sound of movement in the bushes caused him to snap his head up some time later. Searching the area with his eyes, he fumbled with the rifle in his hands. Thank god that Ross kept it loaded. He hadn't even thought to check. Clicking the safety off, he wrapped the shoulder strap around his hand as he brought the stock up to his shoulder.

The sound wasn't repeated, and he carefully eased back to the tree line, continuously scanning the area. The story of the German soldiers came to his mind, and sweat beaded his forehead. Taking one last look around, he began the trek back to the plant. Then it hit him. Where was the plant from here?

* * *

Nissa was almost frantic as the day wore on. Claude was no wimp, but he was no Rambo either. Nearly fifty, with a beer belly and bad eyes, Claude wasn't exactly a prime specimen of American manhood, but he was the best friend that she had. All through her marriage it had been Claude to whom she had taken her troubles. He had been the sounding board for her sorrows, and had shared her joys.

Her marriage to Jim Pritchard had been all but over. Nineteen years with no children had left them more like friends sharing a house than lovers. It had only been her deep faith that had kept them out of divorce court. She wondered if him not even being born yet would suffice for "Till death do us part." Now, at age fifty, she was facing the loss of someone who meant more to her than her husband.

Nissa was facing off against half of the men in the plant with her fists planted on her hips and a snarl twisting her lips. "What do you mean? Won't any of you pussies go out and look for him?" she shouted, sweeping the men with a gaze that said just how little she thought of them.

"Now, Nissa, we understand how you feel, but . . ." Bill Porter began, but she shouted him down.

"Horseshit! That's horseshit, Bill. Claude is out there alone someplace, and you bunch of pussies won't even go look for him!"

"Where!" Latham Beckworth shouted back. "Where are we supposed to look, Nissa? No one knows where he went, and it's too risky to just go charging around beating the bushes. Claude is a grown man, and he's armed. Give the man some space. Maybe he just wanted to be alone for a while."

Nissa glared at Latham in silent fury. Still, even she had to admit that he was right. Claude was no child. Stamping away in frustration, she climbed to the highest point in the plant and began scanning the area with a pair of binoculars.

* * *

The day was wearing on toward noon as Claude made his way through the forest. He was thoroughly lost, alone, and hungry. Thirst had, fortunately, not been a problem. There were a number of small creeks crossing the area, and he had drunk his fill at each one. Unfortunately, he had no idea which plants he could eat, and he was not going to shoot a squirrel with a .300. There wouldn't be anything left but bits of hair and bone if he did.

Sounds filled the forest, but they weren't sounds that he knew. He found himself jumping at the calls of birds, and all but shouting at the chattering squirrels above him. Sounds that he had no way of identifying assailed him from every direction. Then a sound that he could identify caught his attention.

A roaring sound silenced the animals and made him turn to his right. That sound had no place in seventeenth-century Germany, but he knew it by heart. It was the sound of the steam pressure relief on the boilers being tested, and it was the sweetest sound that he knew.

The sound was repeated every half hour. It didn't last long, but it gave him a direction to go. His path was still far from straight, but within a few hours he sighted the edge of the land that had come with Grantville. He could see the plume of smoke from the plant in the distance, and gratefully turned toward it. It was still a long walk to his car, but he was back.

* * *

Nissa saw him coming and all but ran down the stairs to reach the gate. She was there in moments, and her worry and fear had turned into anger by the time that he arrived. "Claude Yardley, you son of a bitch! What the hell do you think you're doing!" she shouted as soon as he pulled in and parked.

Claude waved his left hand over his head, but didn't shout back. He was too tired and relieved to shout. Walking toward the office, he was met by half the crew. Especially Nissa and Ross.

Ross was the first to reach him. "You bastard! You'd better not've scratched my rifle."

Nissa was right on his heels. "Claude, what the hell did you think that you were doing? Where did you go?" Her shout was muffled because she was burying her face in his shoulder. When she pulled her face back, there were tears running down her cheeks. "How could you leave me like that?" she whispered.

Claude was taken back by her last question. "I went home. Or at least I tried. I walked half the night away, following my nose to where home should have been. I thought . . . I don't know what I thought. I had to see it for myself, Nis. I had to see that the house really wasn't there."

"Selfish bastard," she said in an almost normal tone. "You could have told someone rather than have me worry myself to death."

"Sorry, Nis."

* * *

It was days later that their answers were to come. Everyone who could be spared was at the high school for the town meeting. Sitting there, listening to the discussion, Claude stared at the podium with bleak eyes. Nissa was at his side, nearly as numb as he was. They were stuck in Germany, more than three centuries from their families. Nissa clutched Claude's hand as Greg Ferrara said those fateful words: "We're here to stay." A choked sob drew her attention back to Claude.

"I loved her, Nis. I really did."

"And I loved Jim. What now, Claude?"

Claude just shook his head. "I don't know. I don't even know if I care."

Nissa squeezed his hand and laid her head on his shoulder. "You care, Claude. We all care."

Claude nodded and stood to walk out of the gym. The commotion behind him didn't even make him turn his head as the mayor once again took the podium. Nissa stayed at his side, still clutching his hand.

They had come in Nissa's jeep, and Claude naturally took the passenger seat for the ride back. His eyes were haunted as they drove back out to the plant. All that he could think of was how alone he was.

The plant was running, but just barely. Looking up as they neared the plant, he saw the figures of three men walking along the highest catwalks. One of the first precautions that they had instituted was to have the workers arm themselves. The fear of someone going "postal" was overridden by the fear of the unknown. Claude and Nissa were off-shift, but with nowhere else to go they went to the control room. Sympathetic eyes met them as they entered, but no one spoke. There were no words. Of the seventeen people at the plant that day, only Bill, Claude and Nissa had been left alone by the Ring of Fire.

The two stayed, helping where they could, but as night came they felt their uselessness. By unspoken agreement they walked out and headed for the office.

Cots had been set up in the plant offices, and the two old friends stopped in the hallway outside the room that had been designated the "Women's Dorm." "Good night, Nis. I hope that you can sleep, 'cause there's no way that I can."

"You will. You can sleep standing up, Claude. But if you can't, look in on me. I'll probably be counting spots on the ceiling again tonight."

* * *

Bill Porter called a meeting just after supper the next day. The off-duty personnel were all gathered in the plant's lunchroom. "All right, people, listen up. After the town meeting yesterday it was decided that we would begin planning and building a smaller plant. One that will supply our needs, but isn't so large that it will eat us alive. This is Andy Frystak and Scott Hilton." He nodded to the two men sitting behind him. "They are both steam engine buffs. Our basic plan is to build a steam engine and generator that is capable of supplying ten to fifteen megawatts. That may not sound like much compared to our two hundred megawatts, but it's more than enough to handle the area and any reasonable amount of growth."

A man at the back stood and raised his hand. Bill nodded for him to speak. "How are we going to do that? We don't have the facilities to wind a generator that big?"

Bill nodded. "Not at the moment, but that doesn't mean that we can't build them. Look, people, I figure that we have eighteen to twenty-four months before this plant becomes a monument to the future. And I'm not talking about one generator. I want two, maybe three, to give us some backup. Remember, we're all that we have. Even the diesel isn't going to do us much good once it's out of fuel. And that's another thing. Fuel. As of last night fuel, gas and diesel, became a vital resource. No driving into town. No driving home. Sorry, but the new U.S. Army has first call on the gas."

After the meeting Claude and Nissa walked out of the office side by side, but not touching. "A ten to fifteen meg plant. That's barely enough to . . ."

"It's enough for Grantville," Nissa interrupted. "Even with growth, our load is going down, not up. No new appliances. Fewer lights. Hell, Claude, where are we going to get light bulbs? Someone is going to have to build a plant to build them. By the time that we need more than fifteen meg . . ."

"We'll be dead and buried," Claude said morosely.

* * *

Claude and Nissa were both being kept under close supervision, as was Bill. Claude's little escapade had brought everyone's attention to the stark realities of their situation; the three of them were alone, with no home to go to.

Claude immersed himself in his job. The plant had been his home away from home for years, and he knew it better than just about anyone else. Now he haunted the catwalks and workshops. He did everything that he could to avoid returning to the office that was his bedroom. It was only when he could no longer keep his eyes open that he would leave, but he often came back just hours later. Sleep was a reluctant lover who kicked him out of bed as soon as she could.

Nissa was in better shape. Always self-sufficient, she became almost cold. Her emotions ran to the extremes, with bouts of rage alternating with bouts of crying. But in between she was all but a mannequin walking around the plant. It was only around Claude that she began to show some signs of life.

Claude and Nissa had been partnered in the control room for six years, and it was there that they began to recover their spirits. Other workers occasionally heard the sound of crying from behind the closed doors. Less often, they heard laughter.

* * *

It was after the first big battle that Nissa and Claude began to really take notice of the world outside the plant. The new U.S. government had built a refugee center next to the plant to take advantage of the waste heat from the boilers. After the battle, the prisoners that were brought to the refugee center were, for the most part, pathetic. Nissa stood on the middle level of the #2 Boiler catwalks and watched them as they sat in the sun. Few of them really looked like soldiers. Most of them looked like farmers, and all of them looked thoroughly miserable. The bright lights at night left them confused and dazed. The loud voices that came from high in the air left most of them terrified. And the armed men who surrounded them simply stared, never answering even the most innocent question.

The refugee center had been equipped with several makeshift water heaters that had been built using spare heat exchangers and pumps from the plant. Low-pressure steam was piped over and run through the heat exchanger shells while water from the plant's fire main was passed through the coils. Hot water, a most uncommon luxury, was available for everyone. Even the soldiers.

Claude returned from the refugee center chuckling. Nissa looked at him with a question in her eyes, and he burst out laughing as he explained. "They just made all of the soldiers take a shower. Talk about a bunch of miserable mo fo's. I swear, most of them would rather've been shot!"

Nissa grinned, more from seeing the life come back to Claude's eyes than from his story. "I wish that I could've seen that."

"I'll bet! Couple of hundred naked men to ogle. Wouldn't have been right though. It was bad enough that the army guys were watching 'em. Worse than prison. One of the Scots was there and said that most of the prisoners were convinced that they were being condemned and wailing about the Inquisition. It seems that their own people are likely to turn against them and denounce them if they appear too clean. Be the first time that I've ever heard of someone being shot for not stinking."

Nissa's eyes clouded for a moment. "They wouldn't be shot. They'd be tortured and then burned at the stake."

Claude calmed down immediately. "Oh. Didn't know that. Still, from what I've heard, burning would be too good for some of them. Did you hear about the family that hid their girls under a shithouse to save them from the 'friendly' troops?"

Nissa nodded. "There's a long history of that, Claude. I've been talking to Ms. Mailey, the history teacher. Seems that the losing side's baggage becomes the property of the winning side. Including any women and children that are there. What she describes sounds a lot like slavery to me. White men taking white girls as sex slaves and drudges. Makes me sick to think about it."

"Well, those boys down there ain't taking nobody for nothing, I can tell you that. Even the toughest are a bit timid in the face of a twelve-gauge shotgun."

Now Nissa did grin. "Especially bare butt naked."

Claude nodded. "I need to get something to eat. Coming?"

Nissa nodded and joined him on the short walk. "I'm getting sick of this place," she murmured.

Claude nodded but that was all the answer that he could manage. They made their way to the plant break room and grabbed a couple of sodas. The machines were running low, and they were all too aware that when they were empty, they would never be refilled.

"I've been thinking about home, Nis. A lot." He paused to look around. "This isn't a home. This is . . . work. I . . . I need someplace to call home."

"Claude, please don't. You're tearing yourself apart, and me, too."

"Sorry, Nis. I'm really sorry. I'm really depressed." He paused to sigh deeply. "I'm really lonely."

"You're really going to get smacked in the nose if you keep that up," Nissa said softly. "I'm depressed enough without your help."

"So what do we do?"

"We? What's this we shit, White Man?" Nissa grinned as she spoke, uttering the punch line of a joke that was almost as worn out as she was.

Claude gave her a lopsided grin. "Us. I've been thinking about us lately, Nis. About how we used to be. You know, Bill has turned his office into an apartment of sorts. He already had a fridge and coffee maker, and his office has a private bathroom. He has to shower in the locker room, but that's not a big problem. I was thinking about doing something like that."

"Oh? And just where do you plan to do this?" Nissa asked, curious in spite of herself. Claude rarely talked about plans that he hadn't thoroughly thought out.

"Well, I want a place with a private john. I hate having to walk down the hall to piss in the middle of the night."

"Where, Claude?" Nissa said softly.

"A nice, big place. Not as big as a real apartment, but with enough room for a king size bed." Claude grinned and winked at Nissa as he mentioned the bed.

"Where?" she growled.

Now Claude was grinning. "Well, it has to be close. Don't want to walk to work in the snow, you know."

"Yardley!"

"Upstairs."

Nissa just looked at him for a moment. "Ya ain't getting Bill out of his office, Claude."

"Nope, sure ain't."

Nissa's eyes narrowed with real anger. "Talk or die, Yardley."

Now Claude laughed. "Remember when this was going to be the central plant of a huge power corporation?"

"Before my time, but go on," she answered softly, intrigued.

"Well, there are other offices upstairs besides Bill's."

Now Nissa's eyes grew from slits to round orbs. "You're insane."

"Yep. Ain't it great! The CEO's office is just sitting there, ready for us to move in."

Nissa eyed him carefully. "Us, Claude?"

"Us, Nissa. I'm not talking anything permanent, unless that's what you want." There was a twinkle in Claude's eyes as he continued. "What d' ya say? Wanna shack up?"

Nissa's laughing assent was punctuated by her punching his chest.

A Matter of Consultation

S.L. Viehl

"Now I know how Hansel and Gretel felt." The spring breeze had Sharon Nichols buttoning her jacket as she eyed the forest. Her paramedic training hadn't covered hikes through the woods. "How did they find their way out? With a trail of bread crumbs?"

"They torched the witch and ran." Anne Jefferson also scanned the tree line. A registered nurse, she'd grown up in the backwoods of West Virginia, and unlike her friend felt almost at home. "Not an option today."

Ragged stumps lined either side of the forest path, but the woodcutters had barely made a dent in the dense groves of oak and birch. According to rumor, none of the locals went into Thuringenwald unless they desperately needed firewood, venison, or the witch.

Their patients didn't need chopped wood or deer meat.

"One thing." Sharon glanced sideways at the nurse. "Becky said if she lives in a gingerbread house, she's got dibs on the chocolate. All the chocolate."

Anne grinned. Some of their needs were serious, while others—like Rebecca Stearns's pregnancy cravings—were just plain painful. "Fair enough, but if she's got anything that even remotely resembles coffee, it's mine."

The forest canopy made the air lacy with sunlight and shadow, as disparate as the well-endowed, dark-skinned Sharon and the pale, redheaded Anne. Oddly, the sight of a black woman and a white woman together didn't seem to shock the natives as much as what they wore. Their clothes, like both women and a huge chunk of the town of Grantville, West Virginia, had traveled back in time to land in the middle of seventeenth-century Germany.

Time would eventually catch up. In three hundred and seventy years.

The carpet of twigs, dead leaves and moss grew thicker, and made crunching sounds beneath Sharon's sneakers. "You really sure this witch can help us?"

"Mathilde said Tibelda was the only decent healer the prostitutes in Jena had, before the burghers drove her out." Anne didn't think much of those upstanding citizens, not after hearing what they'd done to many of the refugee women from Palatinate. "Her knowledge of the area alone could save us a lot of time and foraging."

"I hope so." Sharon ducked to avoid a low-hanging branch. "Why does she live all the way out here by herself?"

"Remember how twitchy these people are." Anne paused to adjust the straps on her backpack. "A cow drops dead, the local healer gets blamed, then someone starts piling up wood and asking who wants extra crispy or original recipe."

"Better keep that in mind, nurse." Sharon tilted her head and squinted. "I think I see something up there."

The cottage that appeared around the next bend wasn't made of candy, but the mud-brick walls and thatched roof looked solid enough. A large patch of ground on one side had been cleared to make way for a thriving garden. As they drew closer, Anne smelled freshly cut rosemary, and spotted some familiar white and pink flowers in the garden's front row.

"See those?" She pointed out the blooms. "That's yarrow. It's an excellent astringent and coagulant, and even works as bug repellent. This is definitely the place."

"Why do we need her?" Sharon asked as she went to knock on the front door. "You know more about plants than anybody."

Anne thought of her grandmother, who wouldn't be born for three centuries. "We need her. This is her turf, not mine."

The door opened an inch, and a suspicious eye peered out. "Was willst du?"

"Guten morgen, Frau Tibelda." Being more fluent in German, Anne handled the introductions. "Mein name ist Anne Jefferson, könnten sie mir bitte helfen?"

The door opened to reveal a gaunt, elderly woman wearing a plain peasant's dress. A faded cloth covered her hair with the ends knotted under her prominent chin. She gave both women the once-over, uttered something scathing, then shut the door.

Sharon frowned. "What was that?"

"She said she doesn't perform abortions." Now Anne hammered on the door. "Bitte, Frau Tibelda, ich bin Englisch Krankenpflegerin!"

"You dress like harlots," Tibelda said through the door, in heavily accented but understandable English.

"We're not. Please, open the door."

The gap and the eye appeared again. "What do you want?"

"Some help." Anne brought out their bribe—dried parsley, one of the last bottles in stock at the Grantville A & P. "This is for you."

Tibelda emerged and took the bottle. "It should be dried on the stem, not crumbled." She opened it and sniffed. "Too old." She thrust it back in the nurse's hand. "Go away."

"Wait!" Sharon caught the door before it slammed shut. "Mathilde said you took good care of the women in Jena. There are other people who need your help, and they can't take no for an answer."

Either Mathilde's name or the compliment appeared to mollify the old woman, for the door swung inward.

Sharon and Anne walked in. Crude furnishings within the cottage provided Spartan comfort, while bunches of flowers and herbs hung suspended from the network of boughs supporting the roof thatch. Another door at the back of the cottage stood open, revealing a well-stocked pantry. The air smelled fragrant and delicious, thanks to something bubbling in a pot hung over the hearth. A thin pallet occupied one corner, while a simple cross nailed to one wall provided the only decoration.

"Just like Granny's." Anne's eyes grew misty. "Right down to the simmering stew pot."

Sharon gave her friend's arm a squeeze. When Grantville had been wrenched from the year 2000 and thrown back through the Ring of Fire to 1632, Anne had been shopping in town. She'd lost her entire family, including her beloved grandmother, who'd lived only twenty miles away.

Tibelda went to stir the pot. "Where are the people who need me?"

The two women exchanged a look before Anne began with, "You may have heard about Grantville—"

"The place of endless wonders, and witchcraft." She snorted. "I've heard."

Anne wondered if the old woman resented the competition. "People who have lost their homes and families to the war have taken sanctuary with us. Most of our refugees arrive wounded."

"War destroys everything." Tibelda didn't sound impressed.

"We've used our own supplies up 'til now to help these people, but we're running low now," Sharon said. "Especially on medicine."

Tibelda sampled what was in the pot. "So you need my herbs."

"We need your knowledge," Anne corrected her. "I know a lot about herbal medicines, but nothing about what grows here or can be had from traders. You do. We'd like you to come back to Grantville and teach us."

Tibelda removed a handful of leaves from a pocket in her girdle, and tossed them in the pot. "You could be witch-hunters, sent to test me."

"Show time," Sharon murmured.

"Frau Tibelda, watch this." Anne removed a syringe and a small vial from her pack. While she prepared the injection, the paramedic rolled up her sleeve and tied off her upper arm.

The sight of the needle seemed to mesmerize the old woman. "What are you doing?"

"Proving we aren't witch-hunters." Anne slid the slanted needle tip into Sharon's vein and depressed the plunger. "Would they do something like this?"

The old woman came closer, so engrossed she spoke in rapid German. "So small—like a bee sting. Why does she not drink from the bottle instead? Why put it in her arm? How do you distill it to make it so clear?"

"She wants to talk shop, right?" At Anne's nod, Sharon grinned. "We've got her."

"Alte Hexe!" Someone pounded on the front door. "Aufmachen! Du wirst mir helfen!"

Sharon rose, still holding her arm. "What's that mean?"

"Someone else wants help, and they're not asking nicely." Anne swept everything off the table and into her pack. "Do you have a back door?"

"No, hide, in here. Quickly!" Tibelda shoved Sharon in the pantry. Before she could do the same with Anne, the door flew open and three men strode in. From their rough, sweat-stained clothes, bleached hair, and ruddy skin, the nurse guessed they were farmers.

Very upset farmers.

The largest began gesturing wildly while speaking in German too rapid for Anne to follow. When Tibelda shook her head, he shouted "Ist Drud!" and came after her.

"Hey." The nurse shoved him back, and he stared at her with almost comical disbelief. "Hau ab, you jerk."

"Do not do this. They need our help."

"What for? They look healthy enough."

"A man in their village is dying." The old woman didn't blink as the other two men brandished crude but very lethal looking scythes. "And they won't take no for an answer."

* * *

The jolting ride to the village in the back of the farmers' cart didn't seem to bother Tibelda, who sat in calm silence. Anne alternated between glaring at her bound wrists and wondering how long it would take her friend to get help.

Thank God Sharon had the good sense to stay out of sight. "Why didn't they tie you up?" she asked the old woman.

"I did not punch any of them in the face."

"True." She sighed and rubbed her bruised knuckles. She'd never hit anyone before in her life, but she'd never been shanghaied by men with razor-sharp weed wackers, either. "Do they usually kidnap you when someone gets sick?"

"Drud's wife sent them. She knew I would not come to the village willingly."

"Really." Anne eyed the scythes propped on the shoulders of the men guarding them. "I take it she doesn't like you much."

"No." Tibelda's mouth twisted. "She doesn't."

By the time they arrived at the village, Anne's hands and backside were numb. "Finally. Can someone untie me now?" Everyone seemed to be ignoring her, and she turned around.

Two well-dressed men emerged from one of the farmhouses. The older of the two men sported a snow-white goatee, expensive black robes and a skullcap on his balding head. The younger man's traveling clothes were not as fine, but he had an appealing smile and shrewd dark eyes.

"Who are those guys?"

"They brought Drud here," Tibelda said. "One of them is a physick."

"A doctor? Then what the heck do they need us for?"

Her companion sniffed. "They say he does nothing for Drud."

"Terrific." She tried to rub the back of her neck and nearly dislocated her shoulder. "So he's either a lousy doctor, or a lazy one."

Tibelda shrugged. "Most of them don't bathe or cure people."

"I see the prodigal farmers have returned, and with such interesting companions." The elder man spoke German with a distinct accent—or sneer, Anne couldn't decide which. Whatever it was, it sounded British.

"I speak English," she told him. "Who are you?"

He showed some mild surprise, then inclined his head a degree or two. "William Harvey, physician in ordinary to His Majesty, King Charles of England."

Anne barely noticed the farmer untying her wrists. He can't be that William Harvey. Can he? "Are you the Dr. Harvey who was—who wrote that blood circulates through the body?"

"Yes." He frowned. "You have read my books?"

"Not exactly." Anne skipped the explanations as she grabbed her backpack and climbed off the cart. "I'm Anne Jefferson."

"Lady Jefferson." The younger man stepped forward and offered a more courtly bow. "I am Adam Olearius, scholar and ambassador for the Duke of Holstein."

"Anne is fine." Probably another loser from Jena, Anne thought, and addressed Harvey again. "Doctor, what are you doing in the middle of Germany?"

"Until recently I accompanied the king's cousin, His Grace James Stewart, the Duke of Lennox, on his tour of the Continent." Harvey invested each word with weighty significance. "His Grace sent me from Belgium to Holstein, to meet with the duke and Ambassador Olearius before he begins his tour of Persia. Why is that woman glowering at me?"

"This is Frau Tibelda. She's, uh—"

"I can speak for myself." The herbalist marched past Harvey. "But not to him." She entered the house, the three farmers trailing her.

"She's a little cranky." Anne shrugged. "Being abducted at scythe-point does that to people."

"My condolences." He plucked a bit of straw from his sleeve. "I understand she is a healer of some sort."

"Yes." She'd dealt with enough snotty doctors in her own time to recognize professional contempt. "She's the local expert on herbal remedies."

The skin around his nose drew up. "You brought an herbalist to treat this man?"

"It wasn't my idea." She gestured toward the farmhouse. "Go talk to the three stooges."

Olearius cleared his throat. "We have heard rumors of extraordinary folk come to the south of here." He eyed Anne's backpack with barely concealed curiosity. "Would you be citizens of this new United States of America?"

"Tibelda isn't—yet—but I am." She gave Harvey a deliberate smile. "I'm also a registered nurse."

The older man's white brows rose. "Nurses of this region are required to be registered? Like Jews? How novel."

A distraught wail from inside the home made Anne move. "Excuse me. I should go check on the reason I was kidnapped."

The two dignitaries escorted her into the farmhouse, which like Tibelda's cottage consisted of one room. Unlike the old woman's home, it was much larger, with stone walls and a packed-dirt floor strewn with clean straw.

Someone had been making cider, and the smell of apples was strong. Larry, Curly and Mo sat at one large center table, muttering as they passed around a jug of something that probably wasn't cider. Baskets filled with grain and root vegetables sat stacked against the walls, while cooking pots and utensils crowded shelves near a large hearth. The blazing fire added heat to the warm glow of candles and oil lamps.

Anne's mouth hitched. Farming sure pays better than witchcraft.

Tibelda crouched by the hearth, sorting through bunches of herbs from her satchel. On the other side of the room, a peasant woman knelt and prayed at the foot of a wood frame bed.

Anne went to the bed and pulled the heavy coverlet back. "This the patient?" Without waiting for an answer, she put her backpack beside the enormous man sprawled on the straw-filled mattress and took out her stethoscope.

Harvey joined her. "Are you a giddy midwife, to administer to him with such unseemly haste?"

"Not now, doctor." Anne glanced at the peasant woman. "Wie heißen Sie?"

"Uli." The woman sniffled. "I speak English."

Harvey blocked her view with his bulk. "I've already personally examined this man."

"Good for you." Anne leaned over to look around him. "Uli, how long has he been like this?"

"Since this morning, when those men brought him home." She bowed her head over her clasped hands. "Drud is never sick. Never."

From her place by the hearth, Tibelda made a scoffing sound. "He is probably drunk."

The peasant woman stiffened. "He never drinks!"

"Ladies, please, no bickering." Anne depressed Drud's tongue to check his throat. Airway's clear, no obstructions or inflammation.

She didn't realize she'd spoke out loud until Harvey asked, "What has his throat to do with anything?" When she didn't reply, he tapped her shoulder. "I asked you a question."

Oh, sure, explain standard traumatological procedure to a man who thinks leeches are a cure-all.

"Let's chat later, shall we?" She rolled a black cuff around Drud's upper arm. "BP's two-ten over one-twenty. Pulse's irregular, two-fifteen." She moved the diaphragm of her stethoscope from his arm to his chest. "Tachy, fluid in his lungs." She reached automatically for drugs she didn't have, then exhaled her frustration. "I need some digoxin or lidocaine, he's going to stroke out on me."

Adam Olearius came to stand beside her. "Can they be obtained locally? I can ride back to Jena."

"No, not from Jena." She slung her 'scope around her neck and straightened. "I can't risk moving him. We need to get a doctor out here."

The farmer Anne had dubbed as Curly stalked over, looked down at Drud, then shouted at Tibelda in German. Her response was equally blunt.

Adam's dark brows drew together. "Perhaps I should ask Drud's neighbors to accompany me."

"Ambassador, don't encourage this nonsense." Harvey turned to Anne. "As for you, young woman, I am a doctor."

Now he'll want to bleed him or something. "Right." She took out a styrette and jabbed Drud's finger, then squeezed a drop of blood onto a chemstrip.

"Pricking the finger is not enough," Harvey told her, his expression smug. "Shall I demonstrate the proper method of opening a vein for you?"

See? "Thanks, but we'll skip that for now." After the strip showed normal, she put a hand on Drud's brow. "Blood sugar's okay, but he's burning up."

The great anatomist stalked off in a huff, but Adam bent closer to study the chemstrip. "That scrap of paper indicates he has the fever?"

"No, this does." She pressed a digital thermometer to Drud's ear canal, then read the display. "Temp's a hundred and three. Could be viral pneumonia, with cardiac comp." Anne jerked the linens off the bed, startling Curly. "Uli, open all the windows and bank that fire. You"—she dropped the linens in Curly's beefy arms and gave him a push toward the table—"move. Adam, I need the cleanest water you can find, and Tibelda, start boiling some more."

Uli took care of the windows, while Curly went back to drinking with Larry and Mo. Adam returned with a bucket drawn from the village well, and Tibelda brought it with some well-worn, folded linen to Anne. In a low voice, she said, "I have tincture of meadwort, to drive the fever out."

Anne knew meadwort contained salicylic acid, but Drud needed a cardiac glycoside, not an aspirin. Still, if she could get his temperature down, it would take some stress off his laboring heart. "That would help."

"You are wasting your time, young woman," the English physician said from his chair by the hearth. "Your theatrics are certainly entertaining, but useless."

"You being an authority on that, I suppose?" As Anne began bathing Drud's fever-flushed body, she looked for signs of injury or disease, but found none. She hadn't packed more than the basic medkit before leaving town, so there was little more she could do. She eyed the man beside her. "Ambassador—"

"Adam, please."

"Adam, I need someone who can speak English to go to Grantville and get me a doctor and some supplies. Right now. And guess what?" She patted his lean cheek. "You're elected."

"The man will be dead before sunset." Harvey sounded like a judge pronouncing sentence.

Drud's wife dropped the pot she carried. Water went everywhere. "No!"

"Calm down, Uli, we're going to get a second opinion." The nurse took out a notepad and scribbled down a brief explanation along with a list. Then she gave Olearius directions, ending with, "When you get there, ask for Dr. James Nichols and give him this note. Tell him to throw all of it into the fastest truck Mike's got and hightail it back here, okay?"

"You have a lovely hand, but what is . . . a de-fibrill-ator, an IV rig, sa-line, EKG,"—Adam struggled over the words—"portable battery pack?"

"I don't have time to explain, but it's what I need. Oh, wait." She took the list back and added another item. "Ask James to scrounge in the ER, see if there's any digoxin left."

Harvey snorted. "For God's sake, man, you can't be seriously considering this—she's just a woman. She may have some amusing toys, but she knows nothing about proper methods of treatment." He said as much in German to the farmers.

Larry, Curly, and Mo eyed the nurse with identical expressions of angry doubt.

Anne decided the level of testosterone in the room needed immediate reduction. "Doctor, I have an M.S.N. degree from Johns Hopkins, and seven years experience working in a two-thousand bed hospital. Before I landed in the middle of this godforsaken place and time, I was studying for my P.A. in critical care obstetrics. I come from a long line of women healers, too—my mother is a midwife and my grandmother, like Tibelda, is an herbalist. My great-grandmother took care of Rebel soldiers during the Civil War." From Harvey's bewildered expression, she realized he didn't comprehend half of what she'd said. "Look. If he's dying, it doesn't really matter what I do, right?"

Adam murmured something indistinct to Harvey, who waved a languid hand. "Oh, very well, Adam, if you wish to be sent on a fool's errand, go."

Before the ambassador left, Tibelda blocked his path. "Is something amiss, madam?"

The old woman glanced over her shoulder at Anne and Harvey. "If you can find a priest there, bring him back, too."

* * *

After Olearius left, Anne had Tibelda administer the meadwort as she continued bathing Drud, and gradually his temperature dropped. Uli had resumed her fervent prayers, while William Harvey observed from the hearth, silent but bristling with indignation.

Larry, Curly and Mo disappeared briefly, only to return and take up their vigil at the table, passing around two more jugs and an enormous joint of some kind of meat.

At last Anne felt safe enough to leave her patient under Tibelda's watchful eye. She took the notebook she was using as a chart and went to Harvey. "Doctor, Uli said you brought Drud home. Where did you find him? Was he conscious? Did he complain of any chest pain or nausea?"

"Oh, you wish to consult me now?" His upper lip curled. "I, who never attended Jonathan Hopkins's school?"

"I apologize, I didn't mean to insult you." She'd have to play Stupid Helpless Female for awhile, to appease him and get the information she needed. "Please, help me out here."

He steepled his fingers and considered that for a moment. "We came upon his cart, which had gone off the road," he told her. "The man was sitting beside it, short of breath, but in no other apparent discomfort. He remained lucid enough to direct us here, but his subsequent utterings were quite unintelligible."

"The fever must have made him delirious." Anne bit her lip. Drud's wife continued to insist he'd been in perfect health until today. "This doesn't make sense."

"I have no wish to disparage your efforts, young woman—misguided though they are—but I examined him quite thoroughly." Harvey nodded toward the bed. "The man will be dead before nightfall."

"No!" Uli reached out and seized the herbalist's hand with both of hers. "Tibelda, you can save my husband! A stimulating tonic—you can make that for him, that will work!"

Anne knew many aggressive drugs that came directly from plants—like the heart stimulant atropine, derived from belladonna, AKA deadly nightshade. "What's in this tonic?"

"Come here, Miss Jefferson." Harvey led the nurse to Drud, and placed her hand over the man's heart. "Do you feel how rapidly it beats?"

Anne gathered what was left of her patience. "I know his heart rate is too fast."

"I am an expert on the function of this organ. Not only is it beating too quickly, but the rhythm itself is irregular." He tapped Drud's sternum. "This indicates that the heart is either diseased or damaged, and doomed to fail."

His diagnosis was surprisingly accurate, she thought as she removed her hand. "So you're convinced the patient is in a terminal decline."

"I am certain of it, my dear. I have treated many patients with these exact symptoms, and all of them died." His tone went from pitying to adamant. "This woman's ridiculous potions cannot repair a damaged heart."

Uli wailed again, and Curly staggered over to pull her from the floor and guide her to the table.

"I'm not so sure about that, Doctor." Despite the great man's intuition, and lack of supplies, Anne couldn't give up on Drud. You're a nurse. Treat the symptoms, and let James Nichols worry about the disease. "Tibelda, tell me what ingredients you use to make your tonic."

"Sage, dandelion roots, and humility flower." As she named them, the old woman produced each from her satchel.

Anne took the flower and studied the dried stalk. "Was this white and bell-shaped, and did it grow in a shady place?" Tibelda nodded. "Thought so. Granny called it Dead People's Blossom."

"That is lily of the valley!" Harvey sputtered the words. "It's deadly!"

"Dr. Harvey, this plant has been used medicinally to treat cardiac disorders for centuries, even before now." Anne crushed the end of one stem, and held it to her nose. The fragrance assured her it had been dried properly. "A correct dosage will increase the efficiency of Drud's heart muscles without increasing his need for oxygen." Which was a reasonable substitute for her longed-for digoxin.

"An incorrect dosage will kill him!"

Anne remembered to count to ten. "Tibelda, has anyone ever died after taking your stimulating tonic?"

"No."

"Then would you be so kind as to make some up for us?" Before Harvey could protest, she lifted her hand. "Please, unless you have a better idea, let's give this a shot."

"That woman's presence is an insult to me and my profession. I will not be a party to this farce a moment longer." Harvey swept out of the house.

With him gone, Tibelda's shoulders rounded, and she seemed to shrink. "The English physick grows angry. Angry men are dangerous." She glanced at the three villagers gathered around Uli at the table. "Very dangerous."

"Don't worry, the cavalry is on the way." She handed the dried stalk back to the herbalist. "Show me how you steep it."

The simple process took less than a half hour, and Anne watched as Tibelda administered her brew to Drud. By then Larry, Curly, and Mo had silently left the house, while Uli paced back and forth by the bed, until it became apparent there was to be no miraculous change in her husband's condition.

"His breathing does not ease." Uli clasped her husband's limp hand between hers. "You must make a stronger tonic."

"It takes time, Uli," Anne said. "Give it a chance."

"You can see it was not enough." Drud's wife turned on the herbalist, and grabbed her hands. "You can't let him die. You know what they will do if you fail."

"Yes." Tibelda eased out of Uli's desperate grip. "I will try again."

Anne had faith in the herbalist, but caught the flicker of fear on her face. "What happens if we fail?"

Tibelda wouldn't meet her gaze. "Something bad."

Anne checked her watch. Sharon was on foot, and Adam might get lost on the way to Grantville. Neither of them might return for several hours. If Drud's condition deteriorated any further, he might not last thirty minutes. She didn't have time to worry about the something bad. "I'll give him another bed bath while you make it up."

The old woman left the house for a moment, then returned with some flowers and leaves and went to the pot of water boiling over the fire.

The nurse glanced over her shoulder. "What's that?"

"Fairy's glove, to ease his chest." Tibelda crushed some leaves before immersing them in hot water. "How is the fever?"

Anne took Drud's temperature. "Climbing again."

Tibelda cooled the second tonic by pouring it from one pot to another, then brought it to Anne. They had to dribble it between Drud's parched lips, a little at a time, but had gotten two-thirds of it in him when the door flung open.

"I have returned," Harvey announced.

"I'll notify the press." As Drud coughed, Anne took the cup away. She didn't see the English physician go to the table and examine Uli's ingredients.

"What have you done?" He stalked over and grabbed Anne's arm, giving her a hard shake. "This moronic hag means to kill him! Give me that!"

With difficulty, Anne held the tonic out of his reach. "Hands off. Let us do . . ." she trailed off as the three stooges and a sizable number of villagers entered the farmhouse. "What's going on?"

Tibelda seemed frozen.

Harvey turned to the people and pointed an accusatory finger at the two women. "They have poisoned this man!" He strode back to the table, grabbed a handful of leaves, and shook them. "Here is what they have used to hasten his end!"

Uli pushed her way through to the front, then stared in horror, first at Tibelda, then Harvey.

The crowd made a collective, ugly sound, then several voices cried out "Witches!" and "Murder!"

Drud's wife flung herself on top of her husband, while Tibelda backed up until her thin shoulders hit the wall.

Anne stepped between the mob and the herbalist. "We are not witches and we are not poisoning this man. Tell them that, Dr. Harvey."

"I have proof of the poison right here." The physician put on his judge face. "You may not be witches, but women like you kill more patients in a month than I can save in a year."

"Yeah? And how many do you bleed to death, doc?" Anne held the cup out toward the villagers. In German, she repeated, "I'm a trained nurse. This is not poison."

Curly lifted a ham-sized fist and shook it at her. "Save your assurances for God, witch!"

"You need proof?" There was only one way to handle their disbelief—the same way she had Tibelda's. "Fine. Cheers." Anne lifted the cup to her lips and drank the rest of the tonic.

* * *

"Maybe you should drive, Sharon," Father Mazzare said as he held onto the pickup truck's roll bar with a white-knuckled hand.

The paramedic patted Hans Richter's strong arm. "Slow down, Hans, you're scaring the priest."

"Jeff says I am good driver," Hans said proudly. Jeff Higgins, the American boy who had saved Hans, his sisters, and his nephew during "the Battle o' the Crapper," had since become both brother-in-law and personal hero to the young printer. He glanced at Sharon. "You wanted to get back fast, you said, ja?"

"Fast, ja. With concussions, nein."

Hans chuckled and eased his foot off the accelerator. For the beautiful dark angel who'd awakened him to his new life, he'd do just about anything. "Okay, I slow down."

Father Mazzare muttered a short, fervent prayer of thanks.

"Almost there?" Gretchen yelled through the window from the back of the truck.

Sharon checked through the window, saw the lights of the village and gave her a thumbs up. She watched as the German girl adjusted the belt around her curvy hips. "Did your sister have to bring a gun?"

Hans's grin faded. "The Committees of Correspondence recommend it, but Gretchen would carry her pistol no matter what is said. Anne and the old woman were kidnapped. She is also concerned about this English doctor Adam brought out of Jena."

Sharon knew a concerned Gretchen was no one to mess with. "Just see to it she doesn't create more patients for Balthazar." She glanced back to see how the Balthazar Abrabanel was faring, but Rebecca's father seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. With her father tied up in surgery, he'd not only insisted on returning with her but riding in the back of the truck as well, probably to keep Adam Olearius company.

The ambassador, on the other hand, had not recovered from his brief whirlwind tour of Grantville, and hung on with his expression still dazed.

A little payback for how we felt, being dropped here. Say hi to the twenty-first century, pal.

When they stopped just outside the village, Sharon saw a crowd of people clustered outside the farmhouse Adam indicated as Uli and Drud's. She helped Abrabanel down from the truck bed, then went to retrieve the medical cases.

Gretchen led the group in. No one paid any attention to them, which puzzled her until she saw Anne being dragged out of the house between two farmers. Her light brown eyes narrowed as she saw the terrified old woman already bound to one of the two crude wooden stakes erected in the center of a heaping pile of firewood. "Was machst du da für scheiße?"

No one wanted to look at her, and several women muttered to each other in low voices.

"We burn the witches," one of the men called out at last.

Sharon, busy carrying medical supplies from the truck, also came to an abrupt halt. "Jesus." She put down her bags and headed for Tibelda. "I abandon you for a couple of hours, Jefferson, and look what happens—you have a barbecue without me."

"Next time," Anne said, sounding breathless but relieved, "I'm hiding in the closet."

One grim-faced farmer moved to stop Sharon, but Hans got between them and unconsciously imitated his beloved brother-in-law. "Don't even think about it."

"We have no quarrel with you." The man flung a hand toward the farmhouse. "They tried to poison Drud, and for that they will burn. It is justice." He went after Sharon again.

Hans pushed the farmer back, and used another of Jeff's favorite phrases. "Over my fucking dead body."

Gretchen turned her lethal gaze on the man. "You kidnapped these women and forced them to help you. Now you intend to burn them for trying. This is your idea of justice?"

"They have been of little help, I assure you," a snide voice said.

The Teutonic goddess swiveled and watched the older man approach. "You would be the English doctor."

"I am William Harvey," he said. "As I've told these good people, I don't believe these women are witches. Mentally deprived, perhaps, and criminally negligent, surely, but—"

"But you would have watched them burn." Gretchen studied him for a moment. "What does that make you?"

Twin red spots appeared on the great man's cheekbones. "You do not know whom you are addressing, madam."

"I know exactly what you are," she said flatly. "Do you know who I am?"

Apparently the villagers did, for her expression made everyone shuffle back. One of the peasants bumped into Harvey, who tripped over the hem of his robes. As he tried to regain his footing, the physician doubled over and howled.

"Oh, for crying out loud." Sharon finished untying Tibelda before she ran over to Harvey, whose face was contorted with pain. "What did you do? Stub your toe?"

"My gout." He pulled back the tattered hem and displayed a badly swollen foot. "I must soak it in cold water at once, or I will be lame for weeks."

Hans helped Sharon support Harvey as he called two of the sturdiest village men to take him. Still cowed by Gretchen's presence, the crowd dispersed as the men led Harvey to a neighboring home.

"I think we can go in now," Hans's sister said. "Hans, stand guard."

Inside, Sharon saw Anne sit down by the fire, while Father Mazzare joined Uli at Drud's bedside and Gretchen spoke to a much calmer Tibelda.

Adam went to the hearth to speak to Anne. As soon as he touched her hand, his head snapped up. "Lady Sharon, come here, quickly."

Sharon caught the urgency in his voice and hurried over. Anne sat very still, and was dead white. "Honey, what is it?"

"We had a bit of a crowd control problem." She spoke slowly, as if getting out each word took tremendous effort. "I had to take some of Tibelda's tonic, to prove it was harmless." She swallowed. "Surprise, it's not."

Sharon checked her pulse, which was practically nonexistent. "Overdose?"

"Not sure." Anne's voice dropped to a whisper. "My heart rate's dropped, and I've got one hell of a migraine. I've been so dizzy and nauseated that I can't stand up straight. Where's your Dad?"

"He was operating, so we drafted Dr. Abrabanel." Sharon waved Balthazar over. "Got another patient for you."

Anne related the circumstances while the elder Abrabanel performed a brief exam. He left her to pick up the leaves Harvey had thrown on the floor, and examined them for a moment before he returned.

"I fear this was not caused by lily of the valley, Anne." He displayed a dark green leaf tinged with purple. "This, I believe, is the source of your illness."

At the sight of the plant, she stirred. "Is that what I think it is?"

"Digitalis purpurae." Balthazar gave her a sympathetic smile. "A very dangerous substance for a healthy woman to digest."

"Foxglove—Jesus Christ, no wonder I can't move. She called it fairy's glove, and I thought it was a diuretic." Anne closed her eyes. "Maybe Harvey is right."

"Tibelda." Sharon's voice snapped across the room. "Come here. Now."

The old woman reluctantly left the priest and came to the hearth. "She was not supposed to drink the tonic herself."

"Will it kill her?" Sharon demanded.

"I don't know." Tibelda lifted her chin. "I do not give it to people who are well."

"What concentration did you use, and how many leaves?" Balthazar listened as the old woman gave him her measurements, then nodded. "That would be sufficient for someone of Drud's size. Anne, as long as you do not take another dose, the effects will wear off. However, you must rest and someone should stay with you. Sharon, I will need you here with me."

"Allow me the honor, sir." To Anne, Adam said, "The villagers have made rooms available for Dr. Harvey and me, and I insist you take mine for as long as you need it."

"Insist all you want." She swayed as he helped her from the chair. "Just hold on to me or I'm going to fall flat on my face."

Hans stood by Sharon to watch them go. "They look good together, ja?"

"Sure they do," she said. "Not everyone falls in love at first sight, like Jeff and your sister, though."

He gave her an odd look. "Are you so certain of that?"

* * *

"This is silly, Ambassador. Put me down, I can walk."

He shouldered the door to his room open. "I thought we agreed you would call me Adam."

"Put me down, Adam."

"Dr. Abrabanel insists you rest, Lady Anne." Olearius carried her the last few yards to his bed. "You do not wish to make more work for him, do you?"

"No wonder you're a diplomat." As he eased her down, she struggled to sit up. "No, let me. I'll lose consciousness if I'm prone."

"Prone to what?" He sat down on the edge of the mattress. "Independence? Stubbornness? Determination?"

"All of the above." Anne edged backward until her shoulders rested against mound of pillows he piled behind her. "I meant if I lie down, I'll fall asleep."

"Sleep then, my lady." He smoothed some rumpled hair away from her cheek. "I will watch over you until you awake."

"I don't need a baby-sitter either." She caught his hand, and focused on the fine scars crisscrossing his palms and fingers. "Where did these come from?"

"Sharpening quills, scraping vellum, grinding inks." He made a seesaw gesture. "A scholar's work is oftimes hazardous."

"Tell me about it. I nearly poisoned myself in the name of nursing today." She licked her lips. "Lord, I'd kill for a cup of coffee right now."

"No need to plot a murder." Adam disappeared for a moment, then brought back a steaming cup.

The rich, familiar smell made Anne blink. "I'm hallucinating." She took the cup, inhaled, then took a cautious sip. "I'm not hallucinating. Oh, my God. This is real coffee." She sipped again, and moaned. "Adam, I'm in love with you."

Amusement made his eyes gleam. "On so short an acquaintance?"

"Forget that. This is honest-to-God coffee here." She took a third sip, then forced herself to hand the cup back to him. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I can't drink it, not on top of Tibelda's tonic. I'll throw up."

"Perhaps later, when you are feeling better." He set the coffee aside. "You have a fondness for the brew, then?"

"I was a confirmed addict, until we ran out about a month ago. Where in the world did you get it?"

"Dr. Harvey introduced me to the drink in Holstein." Adam reached behind her to adjust a pillow. "Apparently he carries a prodigious supply of the beans, wherever he goes."

She wondered what Harvey would take in trade for his prodigious supply. Maybe Mike Stearns wouldn't miss one or two of the town's pickup trucks. "What did you think of Grantville?"

"I saw so many wondrous things, my head fair spins." He tapped his temple. "It is a marvelous place, but you are all so very far from home."

"This is our home now." Anne looked out through the small window at Uli's farmhouse. Tibelda reminded her so much of Granny, and over the past months Sharon had been like a sister to her. Even the lofty Dr. Harvey had brought something back to her life—pride in her work and her heritage.

The coffee didn't hurt, either.

"I am glad you feel that way." Adam watched her eyelids droop. "Does your husband share the same sentiments?"

"No husband." Anne yawned, then lifted her left hand and languidly wiggled her ringless fingers. "No time . . . for . . . one. . . ."

As she fell asleep, Adam caught her hand and gently lowered it to rest at her side. "Ah, but Lady Anne, you are in a different time now."

* * *

Despite his aggravated gout, Harvey refused to be kept from the patient, and limped in several hours later. Since Drud's heart rate had improved, and his fever remained low-grade, Balthazar called everyone to the table. Father Mazzare tactfully invited Uli for a walk and guided the peasant woman out of the house.

"Sharon has stabilized the patient, and will monitor him so that we may concentrate on diagnosing his condition," The physician scanned the faces around him. "Dr. Harvey, you have far superior knowledge of anatomy, while Frau Tibelda understands the nature of botanical medicines. I myself have studied a wide variety of healing practices used in many different lands and have learned much from my new colleagues in Grantville. If we consult together—"

"With her?" Harvey rose to his feet, gasped, then dropped back in his chair. "It is our duty to drive women practitioners out of our profession, man, not collaborate with them!"

"If it wasn't for Frau Tibelda, Drud would be dead," Anne said from the doorway. She still looked shaky, but the color had returned to her face, and her voice was much stronger. "I didn't keep him alive until you got here. The medicine she made did."

When Harvey glanced at Balthazar, he nodded.

"Very well." The English physician regarded the herbalist with thinly veiled dislike. "We will consult on the matter . . . together."

Anne thought of morning ward rounds as they went together to examine Drud. Balthazar listened as she described the patient's progression, and showed him the makeshift chart she'd kept on his vitals. Sharon had performed an EKG earlier, and explained the results to Tibelda and Harvey.

"An incredible device." Harvey examined the paper strip. "It also supports my diagnosis. As you can see"—he pointed to several clusters—"the lines that are shorter, here, here, and here. This can only be attributed to dysfunction."

"The lines are the same, at the same spaces," Tibelda said. "Would they not grow more shallow as his lungs seize?"

Balthazar examined the tape, then consulted the vitals on Drud's chart. "You are both right. The lines do indicate a dysfunction, but one that is regular. This condition may have originated much earlier in his life, and been of some duration."

"Wait." Anne recalled something the English physician had said. "Dr. Harvey, you told me you'd seen a lot of people with this condition die. How old were they?"

"Most of them were children or adolescents." Harvey's shrewd eyes moved to the patient. "Now that I think of it, I've never actually treated a middle-aged person with this type of dysfunction."

Anne took a quick breath. "A congenital heart defect, like abnormal walls, or valves, or vessels. That's it. He's had this from birth, Dr. Abrabanel."

"Corrective surgery or implanted devices sustain patients in your time, Anne, but as for the present"—Balthazar shook his head—"such a defect means retarded growth and development, and an early grave. Even if Drud somehow survived childhood despite this, as an adult his health would have rapidly deteriorated."

"Perhaps not." Tibelda looked thoughtful. "Anne, what manner of defect would make Drud this way?"

"It could be aortic valve stenosis—having two flaps in a valve in his heart, instead of three. Over the years, the flaps tend to become calcified, and that causes regurgitation of blood into the ventricle. In other words, his heart doesn't pump enough blood out." She rubbed the back of her neck. "But Balthazar is right, it doesn't fit. An untreated defect would become very serious in adulthood. Drud's symptoms appeared out of nowhere."

The old woman turned to Drud's wife, who had silently returned with Father Mazzare. "Tell them, Uli."

"I don't know what do you mean, old woman."

"No one cares about that"—Tibelda shook her head—"but I took the fairy's glove from your own garden."

Suddenly Uli became very interested in examining the floor. "I grow it because it is pretty."

"Tell them!"

The command made Uli explode. "I grew the plant and made your tonic and gave it to Drud! I put it in his cider! Every day!" The farmer's wife clenched her fists, then she seemed to crumple. "He forgot to take the cask I put it in when he went to Jena two days ago. When they brought him back, they wouldn't leave. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't tell them."

"Well, why the hell not?" Sharon demanded. "Do you have any idea how much time it would have saved us?"

"Do you think I wish to be branded a witch? Like her?" Uli gestured wildly at Tibelda. "Live, like her? Hiding in the forest? I have Drud, and friends here! I would be despised, driven from my village!"

Anne felt the dregs of her migraine flaring up again. "But you had no problem with using her to clean up your mess."

"What else was I to do, when he came?" Uli pointed toward Harvey. "He would not go, he would not leave Drud alone. He would have had them burn me."

"This man might have died . . . simply because of my presence?" Harvey looked stricken.

Sharon touched his hand. "You didn't know."

With visible reluctance he turned to Tibelda. "I owe you an apology, madam."

"Do not strangle yourself on the words, physick." The old woman waved her hand. "I have no need of them."

Father Mazzare went to Uli, and took her hands in his. "I believe she needs more from you, my child."

The peasant woman cringed. "She hates me."

"No," Tibelda said, in an unfamiliar, gentle voice. "I have never hated you. I have always protected you, child."

Uli slowly walked over to kneel before the herbalist. "I've pretended for too long, but I was so afraid. You know that, don't you?" She buried her face in Tibelda's skirt and sobbed. "Forgive me, Mother."

As the Grantvillians stared, the old woman rested one hand on her daughter's head, and carefully stroked her hair.

* * *

Two days later, Drud had recovered enough to be moved, and the entire group relocated themselves and their patient to Grantville for further treatment at the hospital. By then Tibelda and Uli had reconciled, and were in agreement with James Nichols' decision not to perform heart surgery.

"Your daughter's herbal treatments have been successful for the past twenty years," Nichols told Tibelda. "I see no reason to discontinue the medical regime, unless you do?"

Pleased at being treated as an equal, the herbalist shook her head. "It is as you say, physick. Now, what is this about working in a lavatory?"

"Jeff Adams is setting up a laboratory where he can work with you on developing new medicines," Nichols said, and smiled as he took the old woman's arm. "Let me show you around."

Anne Jefferson was already working on Uli, and nearly had her convinced to move to Grantville, and begin interning as a nurse in Anne's fledgling training program. "You already know a lot about cardiac care," she pointed out. "And Drud is interested in joining our construction crew."

"I would like to stay close to my mother," Uli admitted. "And if we live here, we need not worry about being burned as witches if anything goes wrong."

She laughed. "No, you'll probably be drafted to help fix it."

Anne left work that evening to find the ambassador waiting patiently outside the hospital's main entrance. "Adam, what are you doing out here?"

"I wanted to bid you farewell before I leave." He sketched an elegant bow. "Would you allow me to escort you home?"

"Okay." She took his proffered arm and tried not to feel depressed. The man was an ambassador, after all, and travel went with the job. "So, are you excited about the trip?"

"The duke has requested I forego the second half of my journey after I complete my mission in Persia. He is quite interested in pursuing new trade with you Americans." He guided her around a puddle on the street. "I should be returning to Germany in a few months."

"I see." She felt better, for some reason. "Will you be stopping by Grantville on your way back?"

"Perhaps." Adam sounded amused. "Is there a specific reason that I should?"

"Maybe." She felt her face grow hot as she recalled what she'd said to him over Harvey's coffee. She'd only been joking at the time, but now . . . "I think it would be a good idea. Seeing as your duke is interested in trading with us and all."

Adam, ever the diplomat, only smiled.

* * *

Before he left Grantville, William Harvey took a brief tour with Anne Jefferson that concluded at the high school principal's office with an introduction to Ed Piazza.

"I'm sorry I have to run, but my shift at the hospital starts in twenty minutes." She hesitated, then held out her hand. "After everything that's happened, you probably won't believe this, but . . . it was an genuine honor to meet you, sir."

"You are a very uncompromising woman, Miss Jefferson. You've insulted me, overruled me, and completely undermined my position against women practicing medicine." Harvey brushed a dry kiss over her knuckles. "The honor, I believe, is mine."

As the bemused nurse left, the principal exchanged a glance with Harvey. "Hell of a woman, isn't she?"

"Utterly terrifying. I shall not feel safe or competent again until there are at least two hundred miles between us. Now, for the last of my tasks." He placed four books on Ed's desk. "Dr. Abrabanel said I could inquire as to whether copies of these medical texts could be made for me here."

The principal, who had become Grantville's unofficial director of information and resources, put aside a schedule of projects for the school's machine shop and examined the books on modern diagnostic and surgical methods. "Sure, we can do that."

"Thank you." Harvey also produced a scrap of paper. "I must hasten my return to England, so when your monks have completed making the copies, would you send them by courier to this address in London?"

"Um, we don't use monks anymore, sir." Ed managed to keep a straight face as he picked up the books. "Come with me and I'll show you."

After escorting Harvey to the head librarian's office, Ed demonstrated how the school's copy machine worked. "We have to conserve its use these days, but doing the books are no problem. Especially after your generous gift of coffee, and telling us where to find the Turkish traders to buy more."

"I have never seen grown men weep like that." The English physician shook his head. "Over a beverage, no less. It was most disconcerting."

Ed thought of the precious half-pound of beans locked in his office safe, and grinned. "We get very sentimental sometimes." To the librarian, he said, "Would you copy whatever Dr. Harvey needs?"

The principal excused himself to return to his office, and the librarian got started on the books. Disturbed by the unfamiliar sounds from the incredible but eerie machine, Harvey left the room to examine the shelves outside. The sheer number of books collected by these Americans still stunned Harvey. And the quality—every volume was meticulously bound, worthy of a monarch's library—yet left out in plain sight, where anyone could take them.

"God in Heaven. They should hire monks, if only to stand watch over this place," he muttered as he removed one book and caressed the smooth binding. He opened it carefully, flipped through the pages, then a passage caught his eye. Harvey groped blindly for a chair, sat down, and began to read.

Ten minutes later, he approached the woman at the copier. "Dear lady, would it be a terrible inconvenience for you to copy a few pages from this book as well?"

The librarian checked the spine. "Trevelyan's History?"

"I think the king would be charmed to see what future scholars have written about him, don't you?" Harvey pointed to the corners he had folded over. "Just these pages I've marked, if you would."

"No problem." She added the book to the stack and went back to work.

* * *

A new influx of refugees fleeing Tilly's battle lines kept the town's physicians on double shifts, so Rebecca Stearns volunteered to retrieve her father's medical books from the high school library.

"I need to walk, Anne says. James, too," she told her father when Balthazar Abrabanel protested. She caressed the protruding curve of her lower belly. "It is good for the baby."

It was also good for her, she thought on the way, as the queasiness from her first months of pregnancy still returned on occasion. A daily cup of Tibelda's chamomile and mint tea helped, but not as much as the fresh air and exercise. Besides, as she constantly reminded her big, tough husband Mike, she was pregnant, not made of porcelain.

Thinking of Michael made her dark eyes grow dreamy as Rebecca walked into the high school library. Just that morning the former union leader, now Grantville's main domestic crisis manager, had spread his large hand over her stomach. He'd given her a slow smile as he'd felt their child kick. You'd better not be made of porcelain, sweetheart, or this kid is going to make some cracks.

"Morning, Mrs. Stearns," the librarian greeted her as she walked in the office. "What can I do for you?"

"I'm here to pick up my father's medical books." She spotted them on a shelf beside the copier, but didn't recognize the history book on top. "I don't think this one is his."

"Oh, that belongs to the library. That English doctor who was here last week had me copy a couple of pages for him." The librarian took it and placed it on the to-be-shelved cart. "I heard he nearly killed someone, but he seemed like a nice old man."

"Dr. Harvey is a very nice man. He merely gave the wrong advice." Rebecca retrieved the book and flipped it open to a dog-eared section. "You copied these pages, here?" At her nod, Rebecca skimmed the text, then closed her eyes for a moment. "Do you know why he wanted them?"

The woman thought for a moment. "I can't remember, exactly. He said something about a king. Why?"

"That nice old man is not only the most celebrated anatomist in England, he also happens to be personal physician to King Charles." Rebecca showed the first marked page to the librarian. "The same King Charles who will lose his head in 1649, as it says here."

"Oh, geez." The librarian clapped a hand over her mouth. "He'll tell him, won't he?"

"As loyal as Dr. Harvey is to the crown, yes, I am sure he will." Rebecca closed the book. "And I fear this time, the advice he gives will have far more lethal consequences."

Family Faith

Anette M. Pedersen

Johannes Grünwald shivered in the cold gray dawn and tried to stifle a cough. The down-hanging branches of the big conifer sheltered him somewhat from the cold, but a thin layer of ice was visible on the small puddles of water in the wagon-track, and despite the layers of rags wrapped around him he was chilled to the bones. He had grown up here on Grünwald-an-der-Saale, his father's small estate, and knew the area like the back of his own hand. There were several warmer places nearby, but before seeking a better shelter he had to talk with his old playmate Frank Erbst.

Frank was the son of the old reeve, and for the first sixteen years of their lives the two boys had been each other's best friends. Then Johannes had left to stay with his mother's family in France, where his remarkable talent for painting and drawing could be trained better than on the small estate at the edge of the Thuringen Forest. Frank now ran the estate for Johannes' older brother Marcus, who preferred the life of a Protestant professor of theology at the university in Jena.

Johannes had not visited the estate since becoming a Jesuit priest seven years ago, but the old reeve had always walked to the piers at the river landing first thing in the morning, and Frank would undoubtedly do the same. From beneath the conifer Johannes could see and hear who came along the track between the river and the estate, without being seen himself, so he muffled the sound of the cough and tried to burrow deeper into the dry needles. He had walked all night, as he had walked most nights of the late summer and autumn. Despite the cold he soon slept.

* * *

As the sun rose above the forest on the other side of the river, it quickly melted the thin layer of frost on the ground. The tall trees were nearly naked in the early November morning, but the yellow leaves of the brambles glowed in the sun, and along the track small water-drops sparkled on the knee-high seed-heads of the grasses. The old dog shook the droplets from his graying head and sniffed into the wind before slowly approaching the big conifer.

At the first bark from the dog, Frank Erbst left the track and hurried toward the tree while lifting the gun from his shoulder. Old Wolf's barking was mixed with yips and sounded joyous rather than angry, but with all kinds of people displaced by the war it was better to be careful.

Beneath the sheltering branches of the big tree Wolf was wagging his tail till he nearly fell over, while trying to lick Johannes' face. At Frank's command the old dog went to him and sat down with the tail still wagging. Johannes crept out from his shelter and stood before his old friend with a tentative smile on his face.

"Johannes," said Frank, hardly believing his eyes.

"Well, yes. I don't intend to stay, but do you know what has happened to Martin and his family?"

Frank's responding hug squeezed Johannes' ribs and started a new coughing fit. When the fit passed Johannes was wrapped in Frank's coat and the two men sat down on a log, passing a small bottle of brandy between them.

"Of course you must stay, Johannes, this is your home."

Johannes looked at the red-haired bear of a man beside him. "No, not anymore. Had Lucas still been alive it might have been possible. After Papa's death, Lucas' devotion to any religion would always come a distant second to his place as head of the family. Marcus, however, is a devoted orthodox Protestant, and being a professor in Jena means much more to him than the position he inherited."

"You might be right," said Frank, frowning towards the river flowing north to Jena. "Marcus has grown more stiff-necked than ever since his wife died. But Marcus also hasn't been here since Lucas' funeral. He would never know."

"Perhaps, but there is another problem," said Johannes with a slight smile. "People around here know who and what I am, and I made some very bad enemies after Magdeburg. Besides, neither Protestant nor Catholic soldiers are likely to show much mercy towards a excommunicate Jesuit. Or to those who shelter him. And before you protest my old friend, remember your family."

"Oh, we are fairly safe these days," said Frank. "Largely thanks to old Wolf there."

"Of course, I remember Wolf," said Johannes, reaching out to put his hand on the head of the dog. "But is he really that fierce? He was bred as a hunting dog, and I trained him so myself on my last visit."

Frank grinned in answer. "When Lucas and his heir died, and Marcus hired me to run the estate, I started a few projects of my own. One of them was breeding and selling hunting dogs to both Protestant and Catholic nobility. Grünwald-an-der-Saale is now very well known to both armies for its excellent hunting dogs, and only out-and-out bandits don't fear the wrath of the officers enough to leave us alone. Old Wolf has probably done more to keep the estate safe with the puppies he has sired than the fiercest guard-dogs ever could. But joking aside, Johannes. If you are really in danger, you could go to Jena. Marcus'll protect you if you ask."

"Probably. I'm just not certain I really want to live that badly. I would, however, like to stay in one of the cabins till this cough I'm plagued with has passed. And I really want to hear everything you know about Martin."

* * *

By noon, Johannes was installed in a cabin overlooking the river valley, with old Wolf for company. The cabin was little more than four walls and a sod-roof dug partly into the hillside. Inside, a fireplace would keep out the cold and a heap of boughs covered with old blankets formed a sleeping place. Otherwise, the only furniture were two rough benches and a rickety table placed in front of the shuttered window-opening.

Frank ordered Johannes to sit on the bench nearest the fire, and started brewing a tisane and heating an old pot filled with stew.

"Was not your wife curious about the stew?" asked Johannes.

"Elisa? No. Our oldest daughter may present us with a grandchild any day, and none of the women can think of anything else." Frank's broad grin showed his pride as well as his worry.

"Your first grandchild?"

"Yes. Elisa was a farmer's daughter. She gave me five children in as many years. The three daughters are all married, but they haven't been in much of a hurry to make us grandparents."

"Are you happy here? Running the estate for Marcus?"

"Yes. Marcus has always had a very rigid mind. He is, however, neither unkind nor unfair. And besides, employing the son of his father's reeve to run the estate for him fits his creed of people doing God's will by filling the place they have been born to." Frank smiled wryly. "I get that particular sermon every time I go to Jena. We mainly talk by letters, though. The few times a year I visit, I can live with a sermon or two."

"You've always been far more easygoing than me," said Johannes. "I never understood the pride that kept Lucas and Marcus from playing with you and the other children on the estate. As heir and the oldest Lucas may have felt it beneath his dignity to join our games and pranks, but even before Marcus went to study in Jena, his dogmatism always irritated me. Had it not been for his love for his wife, Catherina, I would have doubted he even knew the meaning of the word compromise. You do know Catherina was a Catholic?"

Frank shook his head, "No, but I know his son Martin is." He gave Johannes a mug filled with the fragrant tisane. "I'm leaving the herbs here with you. It is mainly thyme, but with some of the southern herbs you gave me at Martin's wedding. You can make a second portion from the same herbs. Drink it hot, but no more than three times a day."

Johannes obediently drank and said, "Once you hoped to study medicine."

"Going to a university to become a doctor was always an impossible dream for the son of a reeve. For a while I hoped an apothecary might be willing to take me on as an apprentice, but we could never spare the money for the fee. Still, I've learned a lot from reading on my own, and the seeds and recipes you've sent me over the years have been most useful."

"And now your herbs may help me regain my health. Bread upon the water."

"Bread upon the water indeed," answered Frank. "Now eat the stew before we start on the news. Elisa doesn't expect me before dark, and I want to hear about your life before I tell you what I know."

Once the plates were empty, Johannes sat fiddling with his spoon. "I don't want to talk about my own life. I suppose you've heard what happened at Magdeburg last May."

"Yes," said Frank quietly. "Louisa, Martin's wife, told me you were there."

"Then they made it to Jena?" Johannes looked up quickly. "And Martin lives?"

"Yes, but there are complications. Please go on."

"I don't know how much you know about this, but when Marcus went to study at the university in Jena, he became the special protégé of the strongly orthodox Lutheran Professor Johann Gerhard. Despite this he married Catherina, a devout Catholic, and allowed her to raise their only son Martinus in her faith. For all his aloof behavior, I suppose Marcus must have loved his little dab of a wife very much. He certainly became more cold and dogmatic than ever, when she died of the same fever that had killed Lucas and his family." Johannes stopped his tale while Frank rinsed out the mugs and filled them from a jug of wine.

"Young Martin grew to his father's size, but with Catherina's cheerful and gentle temper. He stayed to study in Jena, and in all matters, except religion, he was his father's dutiful son. Turbringen—and the other universities specializing in students from the nobility—offers a full range of military training for its students. Jena University, boasting of its theological scholars, has never tried to do so. Still, after the death of Lucas, Martin managed to acquire at least the most basic of the skills of war necessary to a nobleman. During his weapon-training Martin met and made friends with Helmuth Eberhart. It must have been a case of opposites attract. As far as I can see, the two men have nothing in common except both being minor Thuringian nobility and heirs to small estates. Did you ever meet Helmuth?"

"Yes, I saw him at the wedding and a few times later. We never spoke."

"I met him only at his and Martin's double wedding, but everything I've heard about him supports my opinion of him as a short-tempered, hot-headed enthusiast, who never gives the smallest thought to the consequences before leaping into action. A bigger contrast to the gentle and studious Martin I can barely imagine." Johannes shook his head and went on.

"The brides were two sisters from Nancy in France. Their mother had been Mama's closest friend there, and after Papa's death she had come with her two daughters to keep Mama company for a while. Martin's bride, Louisa, seemed a very calm and serious young girl, while her one year younger sister Anna impressed me as the most frivolous little flutter-head I'd ever met. Anna was also an unusually pretty young girl, and her flirting combined with Helmuth's temper alternatively scandalized and amused the entire town for months before the wedding. Louisa was far less pretty than her sister and probably the most practical-minded female I had ever met. I suppose you saw them, while they stayed with Mama?"

"Yes, and I completely agree with you."

"Well, according to Martin both marriages were quite happy, while the two couples lived in Jena. And had it not been for Marcus they might still all have been safely there. Do you know why they left?"

"Not in any detail."

Johannes sat for a while drinking from the wine before taking up the tale again. "The way the changing political alliances of this war has been supposed to change people's religion as well has created a lot of problems for the parish priests. Some have just gone on as they always have, regardless of the decrees of the princes. Others have found it necessary to flee, and now wander around looking for a new place. Still others just change as the wind blows. This can work in the countryside, but would never do in a town. I could come to Protestant Jena, even during the war, by invitation from the university, to 'assist' Marcus' mentor Professor Gerhard in his research on theological questions. That I timed those visits with family affairs was no problem, but Martin and Louisa, who lived in Jena, had to pretend to be Protestants. And that meant having their children baptized by a Protestant priest. And to promise in church to raise them in the Protestant faith. Is Loewthall still priest for the estate?"

"Yes. And people may choose if they want the old or the new rituals." Frank smiled. "Do you want to talk to him? He is a man of many faiths."

"No. I have nothing to say to a man of any faith." Johannes drank again and held out the mug for more wine before saying more. "A year after the weddings—well, eight months for Anna, but I'm told it was a small baby—both sisters had borne a son. Martin had intended to work around the baptism problem by arranging for the ceremony to take place at the estate, using Mama's wishes as an excuse. When Marcus overruled his son and arranged a ceremony in Jena, even asking Johann Gerhard to witness and permit the child his name, Martin for the first time in his life rebelled against his father. The baptism took place, but afterwards Martin and Helmuth both left Jena with their families. Taking service as officers at Tilly's army must have been Helmuth's idea. Martin's faith in the Catholic church has always been strong, but I had told him some of the things I'd seen since the war began. He could not possibly have thought such a life would suit him. At least I hope so. Perhaps I should have told him more."

Frank kept silent, while Johannes sat a long time staring at the flames in the fireplace. When a log shifted, it seemed to startle him and he went on in a rush. "I expect you know that Martin lost a leg at Magdeburg. Louisa came to me for help, but by then I'd been confined to quarters with a guard outside my door, and there was little I could do to help her. Conditions at the field-hospitals were—as always—horrible, but she had stayed with Martin to nurse him, leaving little Johann with Anna in the camp outside the town. Martin had survived the amputation and overcome the following wound fever, but the horrors surrounding him made her fear for his sanity. We decided that the best thing to do, would be trying to get Martin back to Jena. The boats and river-barges carrying goods along the Saale river went no farther than Halle, so it would be dangerous, but it was the least strenuous way for Martin to travel. And besides, a wagon and an escort all the way would cost more money than either of us had."

Johannes drank again. "Louisa wanted to leave Johann with Anna. None of us really liked this, but Louisa felt that keeping track of an energetic four year old, while caring for Martin and handling all the travel arrangements, would be too much for her. Anna, on the other hand, had long since found some camp-followers to help look after her own son. Not that she didn't care for him, but to Anna her husband and her own pleasures came first."

Johannes stopped his rush of words, and said slowly, "In a way I envy people like Anna—and Helmuth too. Once I condemned such lack of reflection, the frivolity and seeming absence of the finer emotions. But Anna really loves life. Her sense of humor may have lacked refinement, but it enabled her to see the horror around her, and still look at life with joy. As officers, Helmuth and Martin usually had a farmhouse or at least bigger tents placed apart from the camp with the soldiers they commanded. But as they were young and without political connections, their troops were among the worst in the army. I went to visit her and Louisa several times during the siege at Magdeburg. We talked about faith. About God's purpose."

Johannes stopped again. Then he shook his head and went on. "Still, no soldier would dare harm the child of an officer. And besides, little Johann's sunny temper can melt all but the hardest men. He surely melted the heart of his Uncle 'Annes the few times we met." Johannes smiled. "Is Johann in Jena too?"

Frank shook his head.

"What happened?" Johannes' voice sank to a whisper.

"In early September, I had a letter from Marcus telling me to come to Jena," said Frank. "Louisa and Martin had made it there, but Martin was in a bad shape from fever, and nobody could find little Johann. Louisa had left Johann with Anna, as she told you she would, and Marcus had sent a messenger to Helmuth in Tilly's army, now camped near Leipzig. Helmuth was to bring Johann to Leipzig, and from there a friend of Professor Gerhard would arrange an escort to Jena. But the messenger brought back only a short letter. Helmuth had been killed in a skirmish near Magdeburg, and Anna had died from a fever shortly afterward. The group of soldiers Martin and Helmuth had commanded was no longer a part of the main army, and what had happened to the two boys nobody knew."

Frank drank the rest of his wine. "Tracing that group of soldiers, and especially those camp-followers Anna had hired, seemed to be the only chance for finding the boys. Marcus now wanted me to use my Catholic contacts to do so, and before leaving the estate I sent off the first letters to people who might be able to help. We have now traced the soldiers and the camp-followers to a place called Grantville. We don't know for certain that the boys are there. Or even if they survived the fever that killed Anna. The main problem with finding out is Marcus, but that's a long story and I better get back to Elisa." Frank put a hand on the shoulder of his friend. "Drink the rest of the wine and get some sleep, Johannes, you need it. I'll be back tomorrow."

After Frank left, Johannes remained sitting at the table drinking the wine and gazing at the fire until only embers remained. When he curled up between the blankets, and old Wolf went to lie beside the bed, he patted the blankets and said, "Come here old man, I can use the extra heat."

After a few moments he continued, "I like it here. I should never have left this place. Perhaps I can become a hermit. Would you like to be a hermit's dog?"

Old Wolf sighed and closed his eyes, and soon two sets of snoring filled the cabin.

* * *

The next morning, Johannes woke to the sound of somebody chopping wood. His head felt as if it was being used as the chopping block, and the sour taste in his mouth made him stumble through the open door and head for the small trickle of water running from a shale outcrop.

"Good morning." Frank's cheerfulness seemed out of place in the gray November morning. "I've brought you breakfast."

"Don't be obscene."

Frank laughed, "You always were a slug-a-bed, Johannes. However did you manage to get up in time for mass at daybreak? No. Don't answer me. Congratulate me instead, I am now the grandfather to a big bouncing red-haired baby boy."

"Congratulation indeed, Frank." Johannes smiled and went to give Frank a hug. "But should you not be with your family today? Play with the boy? Or at least stand and admire him?"

Frank's grin grew a little sourly. "No chance for that today. Every woman from miles around is gathered around the baby and his mother. Chattering like magpies, too. I'll go down later."

Inside the cabin Frank built up the fire and made the tisane, while Johannes opened the shutters and let in the light.

"I brought along an extra gun for you," said Frank. "It's an old one, but you might need it."

"No!" Johannes jerked around. "I'll never touch a gun again."

Frank looked surprised at his friend. "I don't mean for hunting. You are in no shape to do so. But there are all kinds of people moving around the forest these days. You might need it for protection."

"No! No more deaths." Johannes pulled the fingers of his shaking hands through his hair.

"Be sensible Johannes," Frank looked worried now. "No more deaths might well mean no more deaths but yours."

"Then so be it," Johannes' voice grew firm. "At least I won't have to look at my own corpse."

"As you will, but come sit down. Are you sure you don't want any food?"

"Quite sure, but you promised to tell me what you knew about little Johann. I've been trying to remember a town or place named Grantville but with no success. Is it in France?"

"No, it's between here and Jena."

Johannes frowned. "Frank, that's ridiculous. It might have been seven years since I was here last, but I spend several months in Jena five years ago. Nobody mentioned starting a new village or estate."

"It's true though," said Frank. "It seems a group of foreigners settled there sometime last spring. I haven't been there myself, but I spoke to some of them in Jena last month. They call themselves Americans. Clever people, too."

"And what do they have to do with Marcus and Johann?" Johannes asked.

"I managed to trace the group of Catholic soldiers Martin and Helmuth had commanded to Badenburg not far from Jena," Frank said. "There they had been part of an army defeated and nearly wiped out by Protestant troops reenforced with soldiers from Grantville. The Grantville soldiers—the Americans—had several kinds of new weapons, and it was them, rather than the Protestant troops, that saved Badenburg. No one at the time had ever heard of Grantville, but the Badenburg leaders were desperate. Besides, the changing political and religious alliances have forced many people to move for one reason or another. You must have met some, Johannes."

"Sure. A Hungarian Protestant took care of me when I caught fever on my way here. He was a Calvinist and on his way to Holland, where he hoped to find employment. But please go on."

"While I was in Jena a couple of months ago, another Catholic army threatened the town, and the Americans again offered to help. Not surprisingly the offer was accepted in the end, but when the town leaders first asked the university for the opinion of the professors the replies ranged from eager cries of "new knowledge" to vehement "vile sorcery." And, as you can probably guess, your brother Marcus was strongly in the second group."

Johannes nodded. "But surely even Marcus cannot have become so rigid as to let that stop him from finding Johann?"

Frank grinned a little, "No, but things got worse for your brother. The Americans completely beat the army threatening Jena, and with seemingly few losses. They left a few of their soldiers in Jena to help the City Watch maintain order. Just a few men, nothing like an occupying army. And the only payment they asked for was trade and an exchange of knowledge and skills. Seemingly a most innocent request, but after a few weeks it had the entire faculty of theology in a state of absolute fury. That the Americans were republicans was bad enough, since God had surely created kings to rule and peasants to serve. But the new ideas and chances for knowledge had completely won over all the brightest students, and that was absolutely intolerable."

Frank was now grinning broadly. "One night even Marcus lost his temper—and dignity—and threw an inkwell at one of Professor Gerhard's favorite students. The student, Peder Winstrup, was defending the contact with the Americans with the argument that any knowledge about the world would lead to a better understanding of God. After all the Bible said that God's mercy spanned the world, so if one knew exactly how big the world was, one would know more about God."

Frank laughed out loud at the memory and Johannes joined more quietly.

Then Frank grew serious again and said, "It was only a few days later we finally found out that the captive soldiers from the battle at Badenburg had gone to Grantville, not Badenburg. Unfortunately your brother's dislike for the Americans had by then hardened to considering them anathema. He not only forbade me to go to Grantville, he also ordered me back to the estate. Not even a last chance to find his missing grandson could make Marcus consort with such Devil's spawn."

"And Martin?"

"Martin has not recovered completely from the fever he contacted on his journey to Jena, and he is slowly getting weaker and weaker. He tried to reason with his father, until Marcus refused to go near him."

"Stiff-necked idiot." Johannes frowned. "But surely Louisa would not just accept that."

"No," said Frank, "and neither did I. Before returning to the estate I first contacted Helmuth's parents. They are in favor of the Americans, and would gladly go to Grantville. Unfortunately neither of the Eberharts have seen any of the two boys since they were babies, and in the end we decided that Louisa and Helmuth's father should go to Grantville together. Louisa didn't like leaving Martin, but finding Johann is quite likely the only thing that can make Martin live, too. And if the boys are not in Grantville, there are no more leads to try. My last task before leaving Jena was making contact with one of the American soldiers. The man could not help with information about the boys, but he promised that Louisa and Herr Eberhart would be quite welcome to search in Grantville. He also promised to introduce Louisa to a woman named Gretchen, who knows both those camp-followers from Badenburg who stayed in Grantville and those who left."

After Frank had stopped talking both men sat silent for a while.

Finally Frank broke the silence. "If the boys are still alive, I believe we'll find them in Grantville, but I must admit I don't understand your brother's definition of faith. Or of family. Perhaps you can explain it to me, Johannes."

Johannes shook his head, "I never understood Marcus either. I once thought I understood faith, but it turned out I didn't. As for family? Well, I care about Martin and his family, but you are so much closer to me than anybody else. We haven't spent very much time together since I first went to France, but it seems to me that no brother—and certainly none of mine—could have been more pleased to see me."

"There is nobody I would have been more happy to see, Johannes, but remember that you are quite a lot younger than your brothers, while you and I were born only two days apart and spent nearly every moment of the day together from the day we could walk."

"Yes, and quite a lot of nights too. Do you remember how I used to climb down the wall from my bedroom window?" Johannes asked.

"Yes, and I never understood how you could do it. The only time I tried something similar I fell and broke an arm."

"Well, that particular skill may have saved my life this summer. I don't want to talk about Magdeburg, but, as you probably know from Louisa, I was arrested for heresy and blasphemy, and placed under guard. Father Vincent tried to convince the rest that I was sick, and would regain my senses if sent to the peace of a monastery. Father Francisco—as always—opposed him and wanted me burned as a heretic for my insults to the church—and to him. I was far from the first priest to suffer a crisis, and while most just sink quietly into black melancholia, it is becoming a problem. So for a while I was merely locked away, and—aside from those coming to interrogate, argue or just shout at me—I was left alone.

"Father Vincent was the one who gave me most of the recipes I've sent to you. He is from northern Italy and—I suspect—more than a little influenced by the humanism once popular there. He often works with the hospitalers, and sort of took me under his wing when I was first sent to draw pictures of the war. Father Francisco, on the other hand, is a Spaniard and strongly connected with the inquisition. The two of them almost never agree on anything, but though Father Francisco usually wins, it doesn't seem to slow Father Vincent the slightest."

Johannes paused before going on, "I managed to escape from Magdeburg before they got around to torture me, though. In June, as always after a major battle, fever spread around the area. I took advantage of the fewer guards, and escaped one night, simply by climbing out the window and down the rough stone wall. Just the way I used to do as a child to join you catching crawfish in the ponds and all the other things we used to do. Do you remember the kobold trap in the ravine, that caught Frau Messel?"

"Yes, and also the beating I got afterwards," said Frank wryly. "But how did you get here from Magdeburg?"

"I walked." All traces of humor had disappeared from Johannes' face. "Once out of Magdeburg I walked south towards Jena. The area is filled with abandoned farmhouses, some just standing empty, and I could usually find edible plants growing round the house. Others were burned and plundered. Often, much too often, with the corpses of the previous owners inside." Johannes tried to smile. "It wasn't the corpses, as such, that bothered me. Only, sometimes the corpses showed beyond any doubt exactly how those poor people had died. I couldn't take that. At first I just dug their graves, and prayed for their souls with a sincerity I had never felt as a priest. But after a very bad house, the nightmares started haunting me until I feared going to sleep. I caught a fever and that wracking cough you are trying to cure, while standing outside a farmhouse in a thunderstorm, fearing what might be inside would break my sanity.

"I knew I had to find someone to talk to, but Father Francisco would surely have sent out soldiers to search for me. I could not approach a church of any faith, and trying to find Martin and Louisa would endanger them. Marcus? You are probably right that Marcus both could and would protect me, but we have never been able to talk of anything but the most commonplace without quarrelling. Meeting that Hungarian traveler saved me in more ways than one. Still, if I never see another corpse from now until Judgement Day, it'll still be too soon."

Again both men sat silent, until Johannes spoke again, now in a lighter voice. "Once past Jena, I dared not let anyone see me, so I walked at night when the moon was up, and hid during the day. It took me until now to get here."

"And the future?"

"I don't know." Johannes drank the last of the tisane and looked down into his empty mug. "I cannot stay here, where people know I used to be a Jesuit, but there is nowhere I want to go, and nothing I want to do."

Frank smiled and pushed two bundles across the table to Johannes. "I can do nothing to give you back the faith in God you seem to have lost, but perhaps this will change your mind about wanting nothing. I must go now, but if nothing else, eat the food in the big bundle. I'll come back tomorrow."

After Frank left, Johannes sat staring at the two bundles, before reaching out to open the biggest. Never taking his eyes from the oblong roll of the smaller bundle, he broke off pieces of bread and ate them slowly. Closing the food-bundle again he hung it from a peg, and with unsteady hands he reached to open the second bundle. Sheets of fine white paper lay on the rough table along with big feathers and ink.

At the sound of a broken sob, old Wolf came, and looked up at the shaking man as if to ask a question.

"Look, Wolf," whispered Johannes. "For this I traded my home and family. My faith and everything I was or could have been. Marcus might have been the only devoted Protestant in the family, but even Mama worried, when her brother entered me in a Jesuit school. She only reluctantly accepted that it offered the best teachers. Me? I was so absorbed by learning how to draw and paint, that I never even questioned going to her family in France. I'd barely noticed the religious teachings until I found myself a priest. Even my quarrels with Marcus seemed unreal. I suppose I defended the Catholic faith so strongly, more because my brother irritated me than because I felt very strongly about the theological differences. Only my drawings were real. Only while painting did I really live."

* * *

Carefully Johannes cut a feather, and made the first lines on a sheet. Jagged lines as if of flames followed each other across the sheets until darkness forced him to stop.

* * *

Johannes build up the fire and closed the shutters against the darkness outside. Then he sat down at the table and looked at the sheets of paper now filled with drawings and words.

* * *

In my dreams Magdeburg is still burning, and so it still is in my drawings. As a boy I dreamed of painting the glories of Heaven in glowing colors in the churches. When told my talent was better suited for copperplates and broadsheets, I accepted this, still certain that my talent was a gift from God, and that I was using it for His purpose.

But at Magdeburg there could have been no God's purpose. No Glory. Nothing right! Denouncing my fellow priests and superiors as hypocrites, and accusing them of doing Satan's work in God's name had me branded as a heretic. But they had claimed those people had died and burned for the glory of God and the true faith. This could not possibly be!

I no longer know what I am, or what I believe. The faith that once made me certain, that I knew what God wanted from me, is as burned as those people in Magdeburg. As dead as those children I saw in its gutters.

* * *

The old dog put his head on the knee of the crying man, and when getting a hug in return, tried to lick away the tears. Rising, Johannes rolled together the sheets, wrapped them in rags and hid them in a hollow between the wall and the roof.

* * *

The next morning there was no sign of Frank Erbst around the cabin. Old Wolf was restless and kept sniffing into the wind blowing from the valley, so Johannes took him to the ledge from which they could see the estate. The dog whined, and Johannes put his hand upon its head.

Normally few people came to the small estate, but today many were moving around. Mainly on the estate and along the roads, but also into the Thuringen Forest. There were horses and wagons, people looking like soldiers but with no banners to identify them.

The old dog whined again and looked up at Johannes.

"There are no fires, Wolf." Johannes spoke as much to calm himself as for the dog. "And people seem to move about in an orderly fashion. I don't think they are bandits, so Frank and his family are probably safe. But how about you and me? The existence of the cabin is no secret, and the trail here isn't hidden. Sooner or later those soldiers will get here."

Johannes sighed, "I suppose we can try hiding in the forest until they have left, but I'm still frail, and who knows how long they'll stay. Perhaps we should just stay at the cabin. Disciplined soldiers, Protestant or Catholic, might not know who or what I used to be, and might leave a harmless old man and his dog alone. With the drawings hidden there is nothing to show I'm more than just an old refugee with no possessions of any value. Of course, if they are one of those rowing bands of riffraff plundering the countryside in between serving in one or the other of the armies, we'll probably both be dead before nightfall, and I probably by torture. But they do look well organized. What do you think, Wolf?"

The old dog looked up at the man, and whined again.

"That's not very helpful."

The man and the dog went back to the cabin.

* * *

Taking the old pot from the fireplace, Johannes went to the small spring and placed the pot beneath the trickle of water, before sitting down and wait for it to fill. The stone he was sitting on was cold, but the sun had broken through the low clouds. It warmed his face and made the autumn colored shrubs glow.

Like fire.

The bright blue sky above the rocks and the forest made Johannes long for the colors and paints he had left behind when first sent to draw The Glorious Victories of God's Holy Army over the Heretic and Damned Protestants. Painting the sufferings of Protestants and Catholics alike had been no problem, though letters had to be added to show who were what. But Glory! Or Holiness! Those had become increasingly difficult to see.

Like fire. The colors of fire.

"No. Like harvest. God's harvest."

The sound of his own voice woke Johannes from his reverie, and he looked around in confusion. The pot was full, and he took it back to the cabin. Wolf had placed himself at the top of the narrow trail from the cabin to the valley. His ears were raised and he stood sniffing into the wind, but when Johannes called he came with no protest.

Inside, Johannes stirred the fire and placed the old pot on its hook above the fireplace, before sitting down to dry his feet and stare at the flames.

"The fires! The fires at Magdeburg. They were caused by people, not by God. God's colors are those of the harvest." At the sound of Johannes' whisper Wolf looked up, but Johannes fell silent again, and the old dog laid his head on his paws.

* * *

Drops of boiling water hitting the fire startled Johannes back to the present. He crushed some of the dried herbs into a mug and poured on the boiling water. Then, stirring the tisane with a twig, he again sat staring into the fire.

Painting God by painting His creation.

The words of Johannes' old teacher suddenly sounded in his mind. Father Baptiste's hands had been shaking so badly he could no longer hold a brush, but he had taught his pupils to see the beauty of the smallest leaf. Taught them to paint what they saw. To paint Truth. He had shared his pupils' joy, when their results had been good. And their sorrows, when eyes and minds wanted more than the hands could give.

In the brash ignorance of his youth the young Johannes had asked if Father Baptiste did not miss painting his own pictures. After all he had once painted an altarpiece for a royal chapel. Father Baptiste's gentle answer, that his pride in his pupils brought him more joy than the empty hubris of his own accomplishments ever had, sounded like nonsense to the young Johannes. It still didn't make sense, but thoughts about painting and creating now tumbled through Johannes' mind. If the soldiers killed him today, what would he be leaving to show he had ever lived? Had he nothing to teach to others?

Taking the big cloth-wrapped bundle from its peg Johannes put the dark rye bread, apples and a piece of honeycomb on the table. At a sound from outside he went to the door, but there was no one in sight, and Wolf remained calm.

Leaving the door open, Johannes sat down and started to eat. Old Wolf moved closer to the fire and split his attention evenly between the food and the open door. Johannes scraped honey from the comb into the tisane, before throwing the rest to old Wolf. Then he drank the tisane and poured more hot water into the mug. He packed away the rest of the bread, and went to stand in the open door. Old Wolf joined him, but just sat down looking alert.

* * *

Suddenly Wolf growled and stared towards the trail to the valley with his hackles up. Johannes went outside and listened. When hearing the sound of men and horses on the track to the cabin, he sat down on a rough bench by the cabin wall, his eyes meekly on the ground. A short command made the old dog lie down by his side, still bristling and looking towards the sounds.

The soldiers would come now; they were only minutes away. Perhaps what would happen would give him back some idea of God's will. Of what God wanted from him. As living or as dead.

* * *

The purpose of life is living.

The memory of Anna's simple words made Johannes' head jerk up.

Anna dancing with her son on her arm amid the ruins and cruelty of the war.

Father Vincent's pain and Father Francisco's triumph.

Teaching and Creating.

Fire and Harvest.

"No! Not like this." Johannes hurried into the cabin, grabbed the drawings from their hiding place and spread them across the table. If even one of the soldiers looked at them and remembered, then they would not be wasted. Even if burned immediately afterwards.

And those words he had spoken in Magdeburg. About doing Satan's work in the name of God. They might be the only thing resembling a sermon from his heart that he had ever spoken. But he would be speaking them again to whoever now came to the cabin. Speaking them as he died.

Johannes hurried outside, taking a deep breath to speak to whoever waited there.

His jaw dropped at Frank Erbst's cheerful—if slightly out-of-breath—greeting.

"Good morning, Johannes. Come meet Harry Nielson and Magnus Fries. They are some of the Americans I told you about."

* * *

When Johannes came to himself again, he looked up at Frank's worried face.

"Thank God, Johannes. I thought you'd died." Frank held his small bottle of brandy to Johannes' mouth.

"I'm fine. I'm fine. I just didn't expect you. I expected somebody else." Johannes took the bottle and drank deeply.

"The Devil himself, from the look of your face." The oldest of the two American soldiers smiled down at Johannes. "More people are coming to Grantville—our town—every day, so we need more food to see everybody through the winter. We gather food from abandoned farms, and trade with those who have anything to trade. Your friend, Frank Erbst, wants us to take you with us, when we go back. We have room for anybody. Do you want to come?"

"Yes." Johannes stumbled to his feet. "Yes, I'll come. I just want to get some papers in the cabin."

* * *

The first thing Johannes noticed about Grantville was the activity. He had seen more people on streets in market towns, but never a place with so many things going on at once. Many he did not see the purpose for, but whatever these people were doing, they seemed very enthusiastic about it. The Americans he had traveled with had called Grantville a "boomtown." Odd word. But somehow very fitting.

"We sent a message ahead about you," said Magnus Fries. "Father Mazzare is expecting you. He is our Catholic priest."

Johannes shook his head. "I told you, I am no longer a member of the Catholic church."

"That doesn't matter, you can stay with him until you find a place of your own. And besides, he wants to see you."

"Oh."

* * *

Father Mazzare met Johannes and Magnus at the door of his church, and when Johannes looked into the smiling eyes of the priest, he immediately felt less worried.

"Father," Johannes blurted out. "Do you understand God's purpose?"

"No. And I personally doubt anybody truly can. But sometimes His Mercy is unmistakable. Please come in." Still smiling, Father Mazzare stepped aside.

* * *

Inside the church a small boy left his mother to run down the aisle, shouting "Uncle 'Annes, Uncle 'Annes!"

When the Chips are Down

Jonathan Cresswell and Scott Washburn

The tool bit reached the shoulder of the shaft and the steel chip it was peeling off suddenly widened. A screeching noise hammered at Larry Wild's ears. Frantically, he hit the panic button on the lathe, remembering a split-second too late that—

Bang! The tip of the cutting tool shattered as the lathe slammed to a halt. Larry stared glumly at the ruined tool bit. Nat Davis was heading his way and Larry could hear the lecture already. From the expression on his face, the owner of the machine shop was pissed, pissed, pissed.

"—many times do I have to tell you, Larry? Carbide's fragile, dammit, you can't slam it around like you can high-speed. You stop a cemented carbide tool in the middle of a heavy cut and you'll bust it nine times out of ten! You're supposed to stop the feed before you hit the shoulder and ease it in by hand."

Angrily, the middle-aged man pointed to a small wheel on the side of the lathe. "That's what that's for."

Larry looked at the machine shop's proprietor sheepishly. "Sorry, Mister Davis."

Davis looked as though he was going to explode; but after he took a few very deep breaths, the red color slowly faded from his face. "Larry, you can't treat a piece of precision machinery like one of your damn video games! This is the third time you've done this. Take it easy, for Pete's sake. Learn how to do it right before you start trying to do it as fast as possible. Look at this! The tool's busted—and there's no way to repair it. Not cemented carbide—and that's the last thing we can afford to be wasting. There's no way to replace carbide in the here and now. Not for years, anyway."

"I'm sorry," Larry repeated dully.

Davis snorted. "Sorry doesn't cut it around here . . . Look, kid, it's almost quitting time. Why don't you go home before you wreck anything else?"

Oh, and I guess you were born knowing how to do this? thought Larry; but he just muttered, "I didn't do it on purpose."

Relenting, Davis clapped Larry on the shoulder. "I know, I know. But go on home anyway. We can try it again tomorrow."

"Okay. Good night, Mister Davis."

" 'Night, Larry."

As he headed toward the shop's exit, Larry brushed the metal shavings off himself. He started to remove the safety glasses but decided to wait until he'd left the shop itself. The last thing he needed was another lecture from Nat Davis.

A few more steps took him out of the shop and into the December twilight. It got dark early these days. Cold, too. He pulled his bicycle out of the rack and started pedaling toward town. He felt a little silly riding his old bike, but with the gas restrictions, he couldn't use his dirt bike anymore. One more irritation. It seemed like life had become just a collection of irritations now. Since Grantville had been deposited in seventeenth-century Germany, things had gotten worse and worse.

Oh, it had been exciting enough at first. The realization that they had actually traveled through time and space had fascinated Larry. And then there were the battles and Jeff's wedding to Gretchen Richter and the influx of refugees and all the other new things. But now that winter was here, there were no more battles; just a daily grind with everyone trying to survive.

And everyone trying to do their part.

Larry hadn't been sure what his part should be. Before the Ring of Fire, he'd had some hopes of going to college. That was now on indefinite hold—instead, he'd become a motorcycle scout for the Grantville army. But the campaigning season was over, and he needed something else to justify the food he was eating. He needed a job.

But he was starting to suspect that "machinist" was not something that suited him.

Today's mishap was one of a series. Nat Davis had been remarkably patient with him, but Larry wasn't sure how much longer that would last. And, for all its intricacy, Larry found the work pretty boring anyway.

Larry cycled slowly into the center of town. The trailer where he lived lay on the far side, about a four-mile ride. Normally, he would have made it in about twenty minutes, but today he was slowed by crowds of people on the streets. He coasted to a stop and looked around. Dozens of people balanced on ladders, stringing lights and hanging wreaths. Hundreds of others, many of them German refugees, stood and watched.

Christmas decorations, he thought in surprise. Christmas is only a week away. That's not enough warning—guess they forgot you have to start advertising it in August.

Larry shook his head. He hadn't even thought about Christmas. It had always been a big event in his family, although with little money, presents were few and simple. But they still managed to make it a holiday. They would decorate the trailer and the little pine tree that grew outside. They would walk around the neighborhood and sing carols. His mother would make that great stuffing of hers to go with the turkey. And her pumpkin pie . . . he could almost taste it.

Almost before he realized it, he was wiping away tears. There wouldn't be any Christmas with his family this year—or ever again. His mom and dad and sister were centuries away—forever out of his reach. "I miss you guys," he whispered. He had cried once before when it had sunk in that he would never see them again. But then he had been busy with lots to do and forced it from his mind. Now the loss came back to him—worse than ever.

His private mourning was jarred by a cry of amazement and pleasure from the watching crowd. Someone had plugged in a big batch of the lights and now hundreds of them sparkled along a row of houses. The Germans pointed and gasped and the smaller children shrieked in delight. He was surprised that anyone was taking the time to do this now, with so much work to do. They'd almost completely ignored Thanksgiving in the desperate scramble to find food and housing for so many refugees before the weather turned bad. But now things had slowed down . . .

"Hi Larry!"

He jumped in surprise and jerked around. Bonnie Weaver, a girl from his high school class, smiled at him from a few feet away. He liked her and they'd dated a few times, but with his after-school job at the machine shop, he hadn't even talked to her in weeks. Had she seen him crying . . . ?

Sorry doesn't cut it around here . "H-hi, Bonnie. Where are you going?"

"Choir practice," she said brightly. "We're getting ready for the big Christmas celebration."

"What big celebration?"

"Where have you been? Everyone's been talking about it for weeks! I think it was Rebecca Abrabanel's idea, believe it or not, but everyone's getting involved."

"I . . . I guess I've been busy."

"The choir has been translating some of the carols into German and we've been practicing them. Want to come along?"

"I can't carry a tune in a sack," muttered Larry.

"Well, you ought to get involved in something, Larry. Gotta go! See you later!" Bonnie skipped off down the street.

Larry stared after her for a few seconds and then pushed his bicycle into motion and slowly wove his way through the crowd. Christmas! He couldn't remember ever having less interest in Christmas than he had right now.

He worked his way through town and headed for his home. It was completely dark now, but roads had little traffic anymore, so he didn't worry that the light on his bike hadn't worked for years. Last week's snowfall had been plowed, but he still worked up a sweat in his parka. A few minutes later he turned into the driveway that led to the trailers he called home. Lights shone in all the windows; most everyone would be home by now.

He propped his bike against one of the trash cans and walked up the steps to the left-hand trailer. This was the "bachelor's quarters" for the extended family that now lived in all three trailers. Larry, Jimmy Andersen, Eddie Cantrell and Hans Richter all shared it. Jeff and Gretchen and the baby and little Johann had the one in the middle, and Gramma and the other girls had the far one. It was a bit crowded—okay, a lot crowded; but still, better than coming home to an empty house. And the women surely cooked better than any of the boys . . .

To his surprise, the only person inside was Jimmy, hunched over the computer and working the joystick madly. He didn't even look up. He wore two lumberjack shirts and fingerless gloves; the trailers were heated by natural gas now—Jimmy's standing joke about that had worn pretty thin—and they got chilly at night. That was fine for the Germans in their sleep-heap, but there was no way Larry would even think about that as a solution.

Larry shucked off his parka and tossed it in a corner. "Where's everyone else?"

"Hans had an appointment at the clinic," said Jimmy, still not looking up. "Not sure where Eddie is. Dinner's in an hour."

Larry grunted. Hans had been badly wounded a few months earlier in the fight that had brought Gretchen and her family to these trailers. He had only gotten out of the hospital a few weeks before, and crowded their own trailer even more, although at least he didn't move around a lot. Larry walked over to stand behind Jimmy and look over his shoulder.

"Playing OrcSmasher again? Aren't you sick of that?"

"Of course I'm sick of it! I'm sick of all these crummy games! But the nearest game store is three hundred and fifty years away, and my time machine is broken."

"I hear you—watch out for that Skraknar behind you."

"Crap!" exclaimed Jimmy as he lost half his hit points. "Stop distracting me!"

"I'm not, you're just a weenie."

"Oh yeah? Hell!"

"Game over, bro'."

"Yeah, yeah," said Jimmy in disgust. He pushed his chair away from the computer, scowling. Then he pointed. "Have you noticed the way the screen flickers lately?"

"I guess so. It's been doing that for a while."

"It's not going to last much longer. I'm not sure I'll be able to fix it. What'll we do when it craps out on us?"

"Find another one, I guess."

"Where?"

"From some computer that's broken but still has a good monitor! How the hell should I know?"

"This really stinks, y'know," grumbled Jimmy. "Old games, out-of-date equipment, and pretty soon we won't even have that anymore. How the hell do the locals stand it?"

"Don't know what they're missing, I guess," shrugged Larry. He turned and went over to a shelf and plucked out a video tape. He turned back to the television and stopped in his tracks.

"Where's the VCR?" he demanded.

"Oh, Gretchen borrowed it earlier. She wanted to show some cartoons to the kids."

"Why didn't she just use the one in their trailer?"

"Don't you remember? Johann dumped his oatmeal down the tape slot last week."

"Oh, right. Think you can fix it?" asked Larry. Jimmy was pretty good with electronic gizmos. His afternoon job was in the school's computer lab.

"Dunno. It's gummed up pretty good. I'll have to strip it down completely and see."

"What's on the school station?" Larry turned on the television set and after a moment grimaced. "Not The Seven Samurai again! What's with those guys? They've got other tapes than that!"

"Hey, Reverend Jones is in charge of the afternoon programming. What do you expect? Anyway, the samurai are pretty cool."

"Not cool enough after a dozen times." Larry turned off the set, sighed and flopped down on the sofa. What a pain. Old computer games, no VCR. Reruns. Christmas. "What's for dinner?"

"What do you think? Venison, bread and boiled turnips."

"Ick. I'm getting tired of that."

"A long way 'til spring. Better get used to it."

Larry sat there grumbling to himself. After a while he noticed his stomach grumbling, too—but not for boiled turnip. There had to be something better . . .

Why the hell not? At least there's one thing I can enjoy.

Larry got up and went to his bedroom. He opened up a dresser drawer and rummaged around in the rear of it, pushing aside his stash of girly magazines to reach for . . . for . . .

"Where are they?"

He pulled the drawer all the way out. Gone! He slammed it shut and stormed back into the living room.

"Who ate my cheese curls!?!" he roared. Jimmy jumped in his chair.

"What cheese curls?" he asked with a totally unconvincing veneer of innocence.

"The ones in my drawer! I was saving half a bag! Where are they?"

"They were stale anyway," mumbled Jimmy.

"I like 'em stale! And they were mine!"

"Chill out, man," said Jimmy. "It's nothing to get wound up over." But Larry was wound up—as wound up as the shrieking lathe that he'd mishandled. I make an honest mistake and get reamed for it—and he steals my stuff and tells me to chill?

"There aren't any more at the stores, they're all gone! They were the last ones! The last ones in the whole goddam world! And you stole them, you son of a bitch!" Suddenly all the frustration and anger of the day boiled up in Larry—and unfortunately for Jimmy, he was the only possible target for it. Larry stepped forward and punched an astonished Jimmy square in the face, spilling him out of his chair. He lunged after him, but the toppled chair was in the way and then Jimmy recovered enough to fend him off with a few frantic kicks.

"Are you crazy?" he shouted, scrambling to his feet with blood gushing from his nose. Larry waded into him; in a moment both boys were throwing punches like windmills and cursing like sailors. They tripped over the chair and rolled around on the floor, still punching and kicking. They collided with some furniture and there was a loud crash and tinkle—oh, perfect, thought Larry as a fist rang off his skull, that's the TV gone.

Suddenly, something bristly slapped Larry's head and he heard a shrill German voice close at hand. "Dummkopf! Dummkopf! Halt!" He rolled away from Jimmy and there was Gramma whacking at him with a broom. Larry rolled further away, cringing, and she turned and whacked at Jimmy for a while. "Halt! Halt!"

"Okay! Okay!" shouted Jimmy. "I've stopped! Now you stop!"

Gramma stopped her whacking and glared at the two boys. She spouted off a string of German that they couldn't follow. Then she tossed the broom at Larry and pointed to the broken drinking glass where it had fallen. "Swine! Pigs! Clean up!" She turned and stalked out of the room, slamming the connecting door to the next trailer behind her.

The boys lay there and glared at each other. Larry spat out a straw.

"You are nuts, you know that?" said Jimmy, wiping his bloody nose on his sleeve and frowning at it.

"Yeah, I probably am," grumbled Larry. He got up and grabbed the broom. Jimmy flinched reflexively, but Larry merely began sweeping the glass into a pan with as much dignity as he could muster for the chore, secretly relieved that the crash had only been the glass and not the TV after all. Then the trailer's door swung open and clipped his elbow, re-spilling half the fragments. Eddie Cantrell leaned around the panel.

"What's all the dummkopf-halting about?"

"I ate his cheesh hurls," said Jimmy thickly, holding his head back and forcing a plug of tissue up one nostril.

Eddie whistled. "And you lived to talk about it? Lucky boy! Larry has killed men for less than that!"

"Well, he nearly hilled be."

Larry finished his sweeping, dumped the glass in the trash can and flopped back on the sofa. He patted at one cheekbone; there was no blood on his fingertips, so it just felt as though it had been split. "Give me a break. I've had a bad day."

"What was so bad about it?" asked Eddie.

"Oh, Mister Davis yelled at me when I screwed up . . . and Bonnie Weaver was . . . and this big Christmas celebration . . . and . . . and he ate all my cheese curls."

"Oh, well, no wonder you're being such a jerk," said Eddie. "Who wouldn't be in your place?" Larry glared at him.

"So what do you guys want to do tonight?" continued Eddie.

"How abou' some Dunheons & Drahons?" suggested Jimmy to the ceiling. "We habn't played tha' for a long time. . . . Ah, sproo this." He pried out the tissue and wiggled his nose gingerly with two fingers.

"Not much fun with just three people. You think we could get Jeff interested?"

"Are you kidding?" snorted Larry. "The only thing Jeff wants to do anymore is make love to Gretchen. He's got no time or energy left for kid stuff." The bitterness in his voice made the others look at him in surprise.

"Hmm, maybe we could get Hans interested when he comes back."

"I tried," said Eddie. "He can't understand the point of the whole thing. He does like the miniatures though. He tried painting a few before the paints all dried up. He's pretty good. . . ."

"Hell, I don't feel like playing anyway," said Larry. "I don't know what I want to do. We can't even watch TV."

"Yeah, I really miss that," admitted Eddie. "No football, even. I wonder who's going to win the Super Bowl this year?"

"I wonder who won this year's World Series . . ." Jimmy blinked. "That year's. Oh, hell, you know."

"I wonder if Voyager is ever going to make it home?"

"I sure wish we could get home. I . . . I miss my folks."

"Yeah."

The three boys sat in silent gloom, thinking of all the things they had left behind. Of all the people they would never see again. They were just seventeen.

"I sure could go for a Big Mac," said Eddie, suddenly.

"Oh, don't start on that!"

"And those incredible fries . . ."

"Stop it, Eddie, I'm warning you . . ."

" . . . and a triple-thick shake . . ."

"Stop!" shouted Larry and Jimmy in unison.

"Okay, okay."

"I'd just settle for some stale cheese curls," grumbled Larry. "But I can't have those either."

"Maybe we could make some," said Jimmy after a moment.

"What? How?"

"I don't know. They gotta make them somehow. What are they made of?"

"Cheese. And curls."

"They're mostly corn, I think. You still got the bag with the ingredients listed on it?"

"It's in the recycling bin. I'll go get it." Jimmy hastened out the door without even putting on his coat. The town was not actually recycling very much at present, but every bit of metal or plastic or paper was to be saved. They might or might not find uses for those things, but it was a sure bet that they could not get any more.

After a few minutes Jimmy returned, shivering, with a flattened-out snack food bag. He brought it over to the light and they squinted at the tiny print.

"Corn meal, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, cheese flavoring and salt. No preservatives added," read off Eddie.

Jimmy looked uneasy at that. "How old were they?"

"Years," Larry said deadpan. "What's that other list of stuff below it?"

"The 'cheese flavoring.' "

"Ick. Looks awfully complicated."

"Yeah," agreed Larry. "And how do they make these things out of corn meal? It doesn't look like corn to me. They're all puffed up."

"I think they get shot out of some machine and then deep fried or something."

"It says 'baked' on the front of the bag."

"Okay, baked then. But we don't have the machine to make the things in the first place."

"Hell, so much for that idea." The boys all flopped back in their seats.

"What about something else?" asked Jimmy after a while. "Corn chips or something?"

"We don't know how to make those either. There must be some sort of fancy processing involved to make corn come out like that."

"What about potato chips?" said Larry. "They've got to be pretty simple. Just slice up potatoes real thin and fry 'em."

"That might work. I've seen recipes for homemade potato chips," said Eddie.

"Probably still a lot of work," said Jimmy. "Hardly worth it just to make some chips for the three of us."

"Well, we could make them for the whole family," said Larry. "None of the Germans have probably ever tasted a potato chip. We . . . we could do it as a Christmas present."

"Cool! That's a great idea!" Jimmy and Eddie started talking about what they would need and how they could get it, but an idea started growing in Larry's brain. He remembered the people putting up the lights in town. He remembered Bonnie Weaver . . .

"Say guys . . ."

"Yeah?"

"What about making a lot of potato chips? I mean a whole lot of potato chips?"

"What for? They'd just get stale," said Eddie. "Better to make smaller batches every now and then."

"No," said Larry, firmly. "We are going to make a lot of potato chips. Enough for the whole town! And we're going to make them in time for Christmas!"

* * *

The first requirement was potatoes—although as Larry found, the first problem was rationing. "Sorry, son. They've all been collected to make a seed crop. Mister Hudson's orders." He wasted an evening going from store to store; and it seemed the only variety left now in stores was in the way that their owners told you no. All right, what about local producers? Potatoes were pretty common, right? He wasn't looking for pickled artichokes, after all. But no one he asked seemed to know anything.

He thought about asking his teachers during the next day. But if this was to be a surprise—the sort of surprise that impressed a girl like, say, Bonnie—then he could hardly stick up his hand and ask a teacher about making potato chips. . . . At the end of classes he borrowed a book from the school library, Applied Agronomy: The Potato. It was possibly the dullest thing he had ever voluntarily taken home to read.

"The potato has a series of ploidy levels . . ." What the hell is that? Jeez, I miss the Internet! No search engines in books.

Noises from the next trailer made it clear that both Jeff and Gretchen were home; Larry tried to block them out and concentrate on his reading. The information he could puzzle out looked promising; potatoes had terrific yields per acre. Twelve tons? That's a lot of chips! Forget just snack foods, we could feed a huge number of people!

But the rest of it . . . "In Lemhi Russet potatoes, gene escape by pollen is unlikely, unless sexually compatible relatives are in the immediate proximity." Well, that's definitely a yes. Larry winced at a particularly enthusiastic bellow in German. Extended family living, they call it. Yep, I'm getting extended already—that was a five on the Richter scale. Where's Gramma when you need her?

Now there was an idea. Gramma might be a terror with a broom, but she ought to know whether there were any potatoes being grown in the region. She lived in the third trailer, so Larry would have to duck out into the early evening chill and that seemed like an even better idea just at the moment. He folded the book shut on his finger and slipped outside, scurried to the last trailer in the row, and knocked at its door.

Gramma peered around the panel. "Was?"

"Guten abend," ventured Larry. "Ah . . . Do you know about any potatoes near here? Farms? Gardens?"

"Was?" repeated Gramma blankly. She didn't invite him to step inside.

"Do. You. Know . . ." Larry said carefully. "About. Potatoes." He opened the textbook, and pointed to the picture of a potato.

Gramma's eyes widened in recognition. Hey, we're getting somewhere! She slammed the door; he waited, shivering, for a few seconds. Then she opened it again much wider in order to swing the broom fully through the doorway.

"Hey!" yelled Larry. He dropped the book to cover his head from the blows. "What—"

"Swine! Pig! Ist skandal!" She added a string of German syllables. "Raus! Scram!"

Larry stumbled down the steps and grabbed the textbook. The door slammed loudly, a universal language. He dusted snow off the book—and straw off himself—then stamped back to his own trailer to get his parka and bike. That's it. I've had it.

Time to go to the top on this; in fact, it was the last straw.

* * *

The corridors of the high school milled with people who, like Larry, had some kind of petition for their leaders. Several languages filled the air. He used his status as a combat veteran to get through, and his shoulder when necessary. The meeting that had attracted the crowd was just finishing up; after a few minutes of jostling, the doorman—another underemployed motorbike scout—nodded slightly. Larry slipped past him into the meeting room.

Willie Ray Hudson, the farm czar, was shrugging into a Peterbilt jacket older than Larry; he looked as worn and creased as the leather. "Mister Hudson?" asked Larry. "Ah, can I talk to you a moment? I think it's important."

Hudson cocked his head and stared at him. "You been fightin', son?"

"Just a disagreement." Larry cleared his throat. "Mister Hudson, a few of my friends and I want to make something special for the Christmas feast, and we thought that potato chips would be good. But I don't know if anyone around here grows potatoes . . . and some people get kinda, um, strange when I ask them about it. And this book I was reading about potatoes said that they could feed . . . uh . . ."

"A whole lot of people?" finished Hudson. "Bet they quoted twelve tons an acre, didn't they? Well, son, that's with fertilizer, irrigation, and spraying Lorox twice a week. Here, we'd be lucky to get two, three tons an acre. This is farming, not agribusiness."

"Oh," said Larry, somewhat taken back. He hadn't exactly thought that farmers were dumb—but they didn't go to college either, did they? He could feel himself blushing.

"But there's no point anyway," Hudson continued. "Sure, it'd still be a good yield, but we can't get 'em to grow the damn things. The locals think 'taters are animal fodder—or worse." He turned, although not far enough that Larry could slip away. "Hey, Melissa!"

The slender woman sorting folders at the table's head looked up. "Yes?"

"How'd that Prussian guy get his peasants to grow potatoes?" Sounds like a joke, Larry thought.

Melissa Mailey sniffed. "Frederick the Great? He cut off their noses if they refused to. Inspired leadership." She resumed her work.

Typical seventeenth-century punchline, though. Or was he eighteenth . . . never mind. "Maybe we could persuade them instead?" offered Larry.

"We're trying to stop people from killin' each other over which Bible they thump," said Hudson wearily. "Vegetable tastes aren't exactly top priority."

"Well, I don't need a lot of potatoes. A couple of bushels at most. And maybe if they eat something that tastes better than boiled turnip, they'll change their minds . . ." But Hudson was shaking his head.

"Nobody here I know of has any potato seed, Larry. We need to keep the potatoes we have to plant 'em as cuttings, so we can grow more potato plants. Otherwise, the only potatoes around are somewhere in the Andes, and we aren't goin' there anytime soon. Hearts and minds is all very well, but when . . ."

Melissa stopped next to them as though the phrase had physically hooked her. She had a parka slung over her arm and a scarf already wrapped around her neck. "Willie Ray, you're going to freeze like that," she said sharply.

"Aw, it's not cold," said the farmer, looking down.

"There might be influenza this winter. Don't wear yourself down when you don't have to." She looked at Larry. "Men. Have you been fighting, young man?"

Damn you, Jimmy . "Just a scuffle, ma'am. I was asking Mister Hudson about potatoes. My friends and I want to make potato chips for the Christmas feast."

"Sounds great! What's the problem?"

"No potatoes," said Larry. "I asked Gretchen's grandmother, but she just yelled at me."

She frowned. "Well, what was she yelling?"

"It was all German. Teufels-wurzel, I remember that . . ."

Melissa turned and waved vigorously. "Becky! Hey! I need some translating."

Larry bowed instinctively as Rebecca Abrabanel joined them. She just did that to him somehow. "Larry here's running into some language problems," Melissa added. "Larry, you know Rebecca, right? Everybody does."

"Hi," he managed. I just wanted to ask about potatoes . . .

"You have been fighting, I see. What is the language?" The National Security Advisor had donned a woolen shawl; now she slipped it free again with a graceful tilt of her neck.

"German, what else? Teufel . . . something. Larry?"

"Uh . . . Teufels-wurzel, I think."

"Devil's root," said Rebecca. She glanced to Willie Ray, then back to Larry. "You are discussing agriculture? Devil's Root is a common term for what you'd call potato. It is used by apothecaries, and even eaten in England and Holland, but I do not recall that it grows here."

"C'mon, Larry," urged Melissa. "Think. What else did she say?"

"Ah . . . Verke . . . her, ter . . . then Knave or something like that."

Rebecca lifted an eyebrow. "Verkehrter knabe would be 'perverted boy.' Just what sort of conversation were you having, Larry?"

Larry knew the school floor couldn't open beneath him and swallow him; he just wished that it could. "I asked Gretchen's grandmother about potatoes. That's all! And she went Jeet Kune Do on me!"

"Went . . . ?"

"Hit me with her broom. A lot."

"Ah." Rebecca nodded. "You are . . . off the hook, as Michael says. Potatoes are very exotic here. They are believed to be Aphrodisiakum—an aphrodisiac, a sexual stimulant, like rhinoceros horn—but that is superstition. My father says that rhinoceros horn is much more effective."

Larry opened his mouth, thought, and closed it again.

Hudson grinned sympathetically. "You should have heard what they called me when I tried to suggest planting 'em in gardens."

"This is rather interesting," mused Rebecca. "Missgebildete Schmutzknolle? Ugly dirt-tuber object? That's a common one as well. Do you recall it?"

"It was hard to hear, uh . . . with the broom and all."

"Jeez, you must have gotten her riled up," muttered Hudson. "Look, son, I appreciate your stopping by, but there's a rationing system for a reason. I'm not breaking it just for some snack foods. Go shoot yourself a deer."

Rebecca looked back to Hudson. "I am distracting you, I'm sorry. Good night, gentlemen."

As Hudson and Larry made replies, Melissa jumped into the gap. "Now just hang on, Willie Ray. Potatoes could be a useful crop, right?"

"Well, yes, but—"

"And if people eat tasty snacks made from potatoes, they'll like potatoes, right?"

"Melissa," said Hudson with heavy patience, "you're not runnin' rings around me on this one, okay? We got to have some priorities. Snack foods just aren't in there."

"Mister Hudson . . ." Larry gestured at his own face. "I got this from fighting over a bag of cheese curls. She's right—people really like junk food."

Hudson's face tightened stubbornly. "It's a seed crop. You don't eat that."

"If we don't get people to plant the seed potatoes by this spring, won't they just rot anyway?" said Melissa. "It took Frederick the Great years to make them do it. Better the carrot than the stick—even better carrot sticks, of course . . ." Melissa still hadn't quite made the mental adjustment from calories make people fat to calories allow people to survive. "But junk food's powerful stuff—it conquered the world in our time, and they won't have any built-up immunity to it. Now, we can't spare sugar for anything nonessential—"

"Now that's right," put in Hudson. "Salt we can get, but I can't grow sugarcane in central Europe without a greenhouse." He shook his head ruefully. "Got me agreeing with you already, don't you?"

"No sugar?" blurted Larry. Sure, it was being rationed, but—none?

"There's only a few plantations nowadays," explained Melissa. "Refined sugar's still about as expensive as cocaine was in our time. Pretty much the same kind of people running things, too—the world's first drug lords. But just wait until we get some sugar beets growing here!" She bit off the rant. "Sorry. Long day. Anyway, salt we do have. If you can make the chips, and get people to change their minds about potatoes by tickling their taste buds instead of cutting off their noses, it's worth doing. Come on, Willie Ray! He only needs a bushel or two."

"All right," muttered the farm czar. "I'll give you a slip for one bushel. But it isn't gonna work."

Melissa looked at the door; figures could been seen milling behind the reinforced glass pane. She reached up to lay her hand solemnly on Larry's head, then grinned. "Gotta go. Larry, you are now officially in charge of . . . Project Quayle. May you do better at it than he did."

A few minutes later a pleased but puzzled Larry slowly pushed his way through the crowd, clutching the precious authorization slip. Quail? Why would she name a potato chip project after a bird?

* * *

It took all three of them to carry a bushel of potatoes back home from town; then Larry discovered they'd forgotten to give the storeowner the ration slip, and had to ride back with it, then meet the others in town again. Two different stores had no cooking oil at all. Night had fallen before they started peeling, and the moon was up before they managed to get an even slice.

And it was one-fifteen in the morning when Larry stumbled, choking, out of the trailer, Jimmy and Eddie treading on his heels with Hans slung between them. The half-moon barely threw enough light to show the clouds of smoke billowing from the open trailer door. Larry wiped his eyes, coughed rackingly until nothing seemed to be shaking loose anymore, and turned back to the others.

"Okay," he wheezed, "so that's what they meant about smoke point."

"I guess that oil's no good," said Eddie. They'd had to settle for olive oil at the store; the high-temperature oils had all been requisitioned for emergency diesel fuel. Eddie's hopes for "Italian flavor" chips had clearly been a little optimistic.

"Jimmy, go back and open all the doors and windows," said Larry. "Hans, you okay?"

"Okay, okay," said Hans. He sat on the ground with his legs stretched out, still blinking in surprise, while Eddie braced him upright. They'd bundled him outside wrapped in the blanket he was sleeping in—Larry was relieved to see he wasn't coughing hard. That wouldn't be good for someone with a wound still healing.

"Why me?" grumbled Jimmy, but he pulled his shirt over his face and darted inside.

"Fire? Is fire out?" asked Hans anxiously. "The other trailers—"

"It wasn't a fire," said Larry. "I don't know why Jimmy wasted that extinguisher—crap, those things are priceless now! The oil just started to smoke. A lot. The stove's turned off, and the oil's cooling down now. It's okay, Hans. We'll go back inside in a minute." The windows were rattling open one by one.

"Okay," Hans repeated. He wrapped the blanket closer and settled down to wait. At least he had a blanket; Larry was freezing already after the boiling confines of the trailer's kitchenette. In a minute or two, though, they could go back in, close up, and crank the heat.

Jimmy trotted down the steps, coughing pointedly. "All done, Darth Tater. Got any holes to dig—bales to tote?"

"Kicking of butt are you seeking, young Jedi," singsonged Larry. "I think there's another extinguisher in the shed; go get it."

"What, so we can eat smoke again instead of chips?"

Larry bunched his fists. "Jimmy, do you remember the last time we had an argumen—" He stopped in midword as a smoke detector started keening. "Shit!"

"Didn't you turn it off?" said Eddie.

"I took out the damn battery myself!" Larry followed the sound with his eyes. The second trailer.

"Jimmy," he said carefully, "did you open all the doors?"

"Sure, like you said."

"The connecting door?"

"But you said all—"

"You moron!" howled Eddie. He stood up abruptly; Hans wobbled, but braced himself on the ground with one palm. "They're gonna be out here any second! Jeff's gonna kick—"

"Jeff's off doing a courier run," snapped Larry. "Gretchen's gonna kick our butts." He walked grimly towards the noise and the second set of steps, framing an apology in his mind. Behind him, Eddie and Jimmy railed at one another, voices rising like baseball players grabbing the bat before a game; but he was starting to feel concerned.

Something's wrong. There's no lights going on in there. They can't sleep through that! God, there can't be enough smoke to—

It hit him as he set one foot on the steps. Night. Smoke in the house. A wailing noise. Jeff's away. Loud voices outside. The memory of a stone-faced Gretchen, standing with folded arms as she waited for the mercenaries to come, flashed into his head. Oh, shit!

"Hans!" he shouted—just as Gretchen slammed out of the darkened door with a blanket wrapped over one shoulder and a pistol gripped in both hands.

Larry recoiled a pace, skidding in the snowpath. There wasn't enough light scattering from his own trailer to show him or the figures behind him very clearly—but there was damn well enough moonlight to shoot by. She'll see Hans on the ground, surrounded by figures—targets, just like me! He was already raising both hands palm-out. "Gretchen!" he shouted, his voice breaking as it hadn't for two years. "It's me, Larry! Gretchen, it's okay!"

She was down on one knee on the front stoop; her arms foreshortened as she swung the pistol onto Larry below. The faint light that caught her face showed as much expression on it as a steel lathe spindle might have. This close, the nine-millimeter slugs would blow clean through his chest, splintering bone like balsa wood. Gretchen was a crack shot, too; once Jeff had shown her how to use the pistol, she'd taken to it with a passion.

Hans called out in English behind him. "Gretchen, is okay! Me, friends, all okay!"

Larry was frozen from his guts outward, much colder than the air accounted for. Instinct screamed at him to turn and run, but that would be the worst thing he could do—and even more importantly, he wouldn't let himself die like a coward in front of his friends. That had kept him from running on a battlefield before; now it kept him alive. Gretchen blinked hard once, twice, and suddenly became just an angry human being. She lifted the pistol's muzzle, and Larry took a long and shaky breath.

"It's okay," he husked, and swallowed. "Just a cooking mistake." Shit, what a stupid way to get killed.

Feet thumped to the ground on the third trailer's opposite side. Larry glimpsed motion between the foundation blocks. The kids? They went out a back window? Oh, God, that's why she went out the front. While she's being killed by the men who set her house on fire, they might get away. It's a German fire drill. He rubbed at his face. I'll never complain about my childhood again, ever.

"Was?" snarled Gretchen. "Cookink?" Her brother called out something in German. Presumably he'd shouted first in English because that was less of a threat. Her eyes scanned along the treeline while she sorted out what he'd said; then she safed the weapon and got to her feet. Larry turned away sharply. Part of him wanted very much to stare at places the blanket didn't cover—but the rest was still thinking about survival, not reproduction.

At least the threat of gunshot wounds had stopped Jimmy and Eddie's arguing, although the smoke alarm continued to wail. Hans looked startled, but unharmed. The trailer door banged shut, and Larry turned back again as Gretchen yelled out the opposite window at the kids. He crouched to look through the blocks; they'd popped up in the snow-dusted underbrush just short of the trees, their faces pale blobs lifted to her voice. They'd been low-crawling, and he'd wager that they hadn't looked back once until she called. That's one damn scary fire drill.

A thud came faintly from the trailer, then another. The electronic wail stopped abruptly. Gretchen opened the door and flung a handful of plastic shards onto the plowed driveway. She'd wrapped the blanket properly this time; Larry rose from his crouch and stepped forward. Blame Jimmy? No. Jimmy could be a jerk sometimes, but he was still Larry's friend.

"I'm really, really sorry. It was an accident. I—" He twisted aside as the kids pounded up the steps and glued themselves to Gretchen like limpets. One of them was carrying Gretchen's baby, who seemed to have slept through the whole adventure. Now that the emergency was over, two of them were crying, and guilt gnawed at Larry as he looked at them. You must have been scared half to death. Arson's part of warfare for you.

He'd seen far worse in battles, but for all its crowding and irritations, this was his home—and they were his family now. "I'm sorry," he repeated softly. "It shouldn't be like that here."

Eddie and Jimmy took up the chant behind him. "Sorry, sorry . . ."

"Sorry doesn't cut it around here!" shouted Gretchen. "Look at zem!"

Larry nodded, although his mind muttered Does everyone in town say that when I screw up? "There's no fire. No fire. Just some oil that got too hot and made a lot of smoke. We'll clean up anything we have to."

"Uh, maybe the kids would like some Italian chips?"

"Shut up, Jimmy."

Gretchen sniffed. "You all say sorry to Jeff, ven he gets back in mornink! Maybe he just hit you with hand, not hit you with motorbike!" She ushered the kids inside with her left hand. She still held the pistol in her right; the edge of her palm was bleeding from a small cut. Larry was very glad that the smoke alarm's housing had taken the worst of her anger. "Cooking always makes fires. If kitchen burns, houze burns—you must watch, always! You are all stupid!" She slammed the door behind her.

"I guess we are," said Larry to the door. He turned and sat down hard on the steps; his legs were a little shaky. What a Goddamned stupid way to get killed that would have been, all right. He rested his head in his hands. "Okay. Eddie, you help Hans back inside and close the windows. I'm gonna sit here until I decide not to rolf; then we figure out how to get some real oil before Jeff gets back, because about the only thing that's gonna stop him from killing all of us slowly and painfully is a handful of fresh potato chips."

"What do you mean all of us?" said Jimmy. "It was your idea—"

Larry glanced to the end trailer as its door opened. Gramma stood in the opening, holding her broom at high port. At least she hadn't tried to go out through the windows . . . Between the wisps of smoke still eddying around and the light silhouetting her, she looked like a bad remake of The Terminator. "Yeah, you're right, Jimmy," he said slowly. "Go help Gramma sweep up the smoke alarm bits, and maybe you can stay in her trailer overnight."

"Sounds good to me," grumbled Jimmy. "You guys are bad news to be around." He trotted down the trailers. "Hi, Gramma! Give me the broom."

Larry settled his head again and closed his eyes. Whiskery thuds and yelps and guttural curses sounded to his left; he found it kind of soothing while he thought. No stores open this time of night. Grantville wasn't quite the sleepy town it had once been; merchants locked up their stores now, and the gas station—where the diesel substitute oils were kept—was actually guarded. Larry wasn't going to run a risk of getting shot again for the damn potato chips.

Jimmy slammed their trailer door in a delayed echo of Gramma slamming hers. Larry looked up and realized he was shivering with cold. Time to go in and admit it; I haven't got a clue. Sorry, guys, we'll draw straws to see who Jeff gets to beat up in the morning. . . .

"Sorry doesn't cut it around here," Larry said aloud, and snorted. Nat Davis would laugh his head off at this scene . . . His jaw sagged open. Hang on. We use lube oil to cut gears. And the lathes need oil. What if Mister Davis grabbed some of that stuff in case he needed it later?

Larry didn't have keys to the shop. But there was that window at the side alley, the one that Mister Davis always cursed because it wouldn't shut properly . . . and that he never had time to fix. It wouldn't be stealing—we'd just borrow it for a while. It's not like we'll use it up.

He jumped down from the steps and hurried to his trailer. The doorknob wouldn't turn; he rattled it with increasing force. "Hey!"

"Go away," said Eddie's muffled voice. "No one's home. We've cashed in our chips."

"If you—" shouted Larry; then he lowered his voice. "If you guys want something better to do than a D & D game, I need a couple of Level Four Fighter-Thieves for a quest."

The door edged open. "Huh?" said Eddie.

It took them three hours—plus the fifteen minutes it had taken Jimmy to find his ninja mask in the litter of his room; he'd refused to go without it—two frostbitten fingers, a set of flashlight batteries, one skinned knee, and a fuming half-hour putting all the drill bits back into the storage bin that Eddie had knocked over before they switched on the lights; but when they finally staggered home with six one-quart containers of canola oil, Larry knew that it had been worth it.

Then the real work started. Batch Two.

"I didn't know you could get blisters from peeling things," complained Jimmy.

"Shut up. Keep peeling, it's almost dawn."

"Never mind!" yelled Eddie from the living room. The kitchenette wasn't big enough for three to work in—not with a pot of hot oil on the stove. "I've already got enough sliced for a batch. Is the oil doing okay?"

Larry stirred the big pot doubtfully. "Looks pretty hot. All right then, load!"

The cooking rig was an old oversized egg basket, with additional levels of mesh provided by screening pulled out of the bathroom window and wired in place. As Jimmy had pointed out, mosquitoes were a distant problem compared to Jeff. They arranged the slices within; Larry thought he saw a wisp of smoke and hastily backed down the burner, although the connecting door was duct-taped around its seal now. "Let's try two minutes of cooking."

The resulting chips could have been used themselves for lubricant. "Okay, too long. Load! Half a minute."

Jimmy crinkled up his face at the first bite. "Pthaw!" He flicked the half-chip at the window; it stuck. "Ugh. That can't be good."

"One minute, then." Larry was sweating, and it wasn't entirely from the burners. "Load!" A minute later the basket came out of the oil. The things inside actually, sort of, looked like potato chips . . .

Another anxious minute while they drained and cooled. Jimmy snagged one, blew on it and popped it into his mouth. It crunched in a very satisfactory manner.

"Not bad! Bland, though."

"Crap, we forgot the salt!" Larry dug a shaker from a cupboard and unscrewed it. "I think there's enough here for now. Get them salted fast, before they cool off. Load!"

They didn't stop for breakfast; semi-failed batches kept all of them nourished. By the time it was fully light and Jeff's motorbike rumbled into the driveway, there were several bowls stockpiled.

Larry turned off the burner. "Show time, troops."

"He's gone inside their trailer," reported Eddie, holding the Venetian blind open with two fingers; he was a scout, after all. "Maybe he'll want to wash up, eat breakfast first . . . Uh oh. Guess not." He released the blind and strolled casually toward the bathroom.

"Oh no you don't," said Larry. "That's not why we took the screen out. All for one, one for all."

"Gretchen did it for her folks," muttered Eddie; but he slumped onto the sofa with the others. "Is the door open?"

Jeff slammed the panel inward, catching its expected rebound from the computer desk with his arm.

"Is now." Larry leaned forward. "Hi, Jeff! Sorry about the trouble. We're . . ." He trailed off. Courier duty? Looks like mud wrestling instead. Jeff was slathered in road gruel from boots to cap; he'd taken off his goggles, leaving a raccoon mask of clean skin around his eyes. He'd also taken off his gloves, Larry noted, as Jeff cracked the knuckles of first one hand, then the other. The room got more crowded as he advanced into it.

Hans was back in the third bedroom. They'd asked him to speak to Gretchen, but he'd explained that the phrase death wish had originated in German. . . .

"You. Stupid. Shitheads. What were you doing? You scared the crap out of my entire family. You scared my kids."

Jimmy opened his mouth, but said nothing. Thank God for that, Larry thought. They were Jeff's kids now, no matter whose genes they had. "Jeff, we're all really sorry about that. It was our fault—my fault. We were cooking . . ."

"Sorry doesn't cut it around here!" bellowed Jeff. "Would've served you right if she had shot you, you stupid jerk! You know what they've been through?"

"Yes," said Larry evenly. "I was there at that battle. We all were."

Jeff checked momentarily at the mention of Gretchen's rescue. "Yeah, you were. So you should know better! Waking her up like that—smoking up two trailers—we need a new smoke alarm, and they're goddamned expensive now—"

"Pretty much ruined a broom, too," muttered Jimmy.

"You're right," agreed Larry as Jeff stooped, closed a hand in Larry's shirt, and lifted him to his feet. "Absolutely right. Here, have a potato chip." He edged a bowl between them.

"What? There's no chips since—" Jeff looked down. "Where'd you get these?"

"We made 'em last night," said Eddie proudly. "We're gonna make enough for everyone."

"Probably taste like crap." He scooped up a handful. "Hmnoh. Y'know why Gretchen didn't whale you, Larry? In German families, the husband does all that stuff . . . Hmnoh. Not bad. Y'see, I know Gretchen can take care of herself, but I still gotta do the right thing. Hmnoh. Six hours riding with nothing to eat . . . C'mon outside a minute."

Larry sighed and put the bowl down. "No, bring that," said Jeff. He dragged Larry onto the stoop and down the steps, taking fistfuls of chips with his off-hand, until they both stood on flat ground; then he let go, his breath smoking in the freezing air. "Here, gimme those."

Larry complied. Jeff grinned and took the bowl—

—with his right hand. Larry didn't even see the left hook coming. He was just suddenly there on the cold, hard ground, his head ringing. Some pretty-looking red clouds filled the morning sky. Is that a hawk circling, or a vulture? Jeff looked awfully big, standing up there. . . .

"Hmnoh. That settles that," said Jeff. He turned. "Hey, kids! Gretchen! You gotta try these!"

* * *

Larry leaned against the row of lockers and let the chattering crowd flow past him. Conversations just didn't sound the same after cell phones had stopped working—they all had at least two sides. His eyelids drooped. God, I'm tired. Two more classes, some more fun at the machine shop, then home and more chip-making . . .

"Larry!" He jerked upright. "Oh, your face looks awful! Were you fighting again?"

"Uh, sort of, Bonnie. So, how are you doing?"

"Never mind that!" She twisted out of the crowd's current. "Is it true? You're making potato chips for the feast?"

"Well, it was supposed to be secret, but I guess I can tell you." A few feet behind her, Eddie bounced on his toes to be seen over the crowd, dragging one hand's edge repeatedly across his neck. What's with him? "The prototypes have been a success, my minions served me well—and we're gonna change German agriculture, one chip at a time."

"Great!" Bonnie squealed. "I'll tell all my friends so they can be first in line! Oh, this is gonna be great!" She dove into the crowd.

"Didn't you see me?" snapped Eddie a moment later. "You told her anyway, didn't you?"

"Well, why not? You're just ticked 'cause you don't have anyone to impress yourself."

Eddie pressed his palms to his forehead. "I've been trying to get you for— Never mind. We're screwed. Why'd you have to go and—"

"What?"

"Don't you listen to what they tell you here? Do the math, Larry. It took us two hours to make a few bowls of chips—and Jeff and Gretchen ate all of them already! There's gonna be four thousand people at the feast. We can't make nearly enough in four days! Are you gonna tell ninety-five percent of 'em that 'there's no chips left, try again next year'?"

He felt a sinking feeling. "We'll get faster at it."

"Not that much. None of the Germans are gonna help, either. Maybe some of our people would . . ."

Larry frowned. "They're all our people now, Eddie."

"Sorry," said Eddie, looking as though he meant it. "But they're all gonna be hungry people, too." He looked over his shoulder. "Damn! I'm late. Look, just stop telling everyone, okay?"

"Okay." But it wasn't okay; and Larry brooded on that for the rest of classes, for his shift at the machine shop, and for the slow ride home. He wiped out twice; the roads had melted during the day and were already refreezing at dusk, making them treacherous. After the second fall he just lay there a while until a truck rumbled up and someone asked him something loudly in German. He staggered to his feet. "I'm not hurt, just tired. Thanks. Danke."

"Naw, he's sayin' to get out of the way!" yelled the driver of the truck. One of the figures in the open back stooped and straightened; a shovelful of sand fanned over Larry's feet.

Well, that figured.

Lights glowed in all three trailers when he wobbled into the driveway. At least we won't wake anyone up. Eddie's right, but we've gotta keep trying. He trudged up the steps. Why is there a brick in the doorway? He looked to his right; the other two doors were also chocked open. He shrugged and pushed open the door.

A row of hulking garbage bags barricaded the living room. Are they throwing out my stuff? Jeff said it was settled! But the bag that toppled against his leg hardly seemed to weigh anything. It rustled when he touched it. Chips?

Then he saw the kids sitting beside a composting bin, peelers flying like cavalry sabers—Johann and the girls, plus another boy he recognized from down the street. They hardly glanced up as the door clunked against the brick behind him. Hans' voice sounded from the kitchenette. "Driese!"

"I'm out!" called Eddie from the next room. Johann jumped up with an armful of peeled potatoes, scurrying around the corner. Larry followed him in a daze. Eddie sat cross-legged on the floor; Johann dumped the potatoes beside him. "Thanks, Johann. Hi, Larry!" He held up an orange plastic food-slicer. "Found this baby in the shed—whoever lived in this trailer before us already thought like we do, and they didn't throw out anything." He skimmed a potato into a blizzard of slices. "I'm just not as fast as Gramma with a knife. Look at her go!"

Larry leaned past Eddie to look through the open connecting door. Gramma stood at a counter that had been covered with a plank; her dark iron cooking knife hammered out a volley on the wood, and a potato dissolved under it. She caught Larry's eye, grimaced, spat out "Teufelwurzten chippen! Ist skandal!" and looked down again.

"Einse!" barked Hans. Larry turned and stumbled four steps to the kitchenette. Gretchen had just lifted a cooking rack from one of three pots at full flame; she held it over a fourth—unheated—pot to drain, blew a strand of hair out of her eyes, and looked witheringly at him. "Stupid men," she growled. "Not to use kitchen right." She shook the drained chips out onto a towel, then dropped the rack onto the counter. The half-familiar neighbor behind her—Traudi?—dealt fresh chips into it.

"Triese!" cried Hans, wedged into a corner of the kitchenette and holding three wristwatches. The open window beside him wafted in cold air—ah, that's what the brick's for. Why didn't we think of that? Gretchen lowered the freshly loaded rack into a pot and drew another out. "Jeff likes po-ta-to chips much," she said. "Und Jeff is husband, und you Jeff's kamerade, zo I make chips. But not stupid way! Jeff talkink about man Henry Forhd . . ."

Melissa will kill Jeff if she finds out, thought Larry dazedly. Death by liberal feminist. "Ah, where is Jeff?"

"In our kitchen, mit Grossmutter und Jimmy, und Dolores und children from next . . . road. Need strong arms, to lift chippenmaaschen so many from kettle."

All right, maybe not . . .

"Billy Wallins from Reynolds Crescent is in the last trailer with his wife and kids," put in Eddie. He massaged his slicing hand while he paused. "They brought all their cooking pots—"

"Edvard! Schnell!"

"Yes'm." Eddie bent to his task.

"Driese!"

"I'm out! Johann!"

As he watched in amazement, another trash bag filled with chips was added to the pile. This timeline's United States is gonna be unstoppable, thought Larry.

* * *

By the next day they had used the last potato. A rough guess told them they had enough chips for about a quarter of the people who were going to be wanting them. A quick trip and a generous sample of their work, and an enthusiastic endorsement by Gretchen convinced Willie Ray Hudson to write out another slip for three more bushels. He even authorized the gas for a pickup truck to deliver them to the trailer. Nothing succeeds like success, I guess, thought Larry, shaking his head.

Two days to go and fortunately there was no school. They cut back on the frantic production pace a little so there was some time to sleep. Still, they were hard at it on Christmas Eve.

"Hey, guys, it's snowing!" said Jimmy, looking out the window during a break.

"Hard?" asked Larry.

"Coming down like gangbusters right now."

"Damn, if we get a lot of snow it will screw up the celebration!"

"And no weather forecasts so we don't know what's coming," said Eddie. "What a pain not knowing what the weather's going to do tomorrow." Several of the Germans looked at him like he was insane.

About two in the morning, the last potato was peeled, sliced and cooked. Almost every cubic foot of all three trailers was packed with bags of chips. They couldn't leave them outside for fear the raccoons would get into them.

"How are we gonna get them all to the school tomorrow?" asked Jimmy.

"We'll figure that out in the morning," yawned Larry. "Assuming we can get to the school at all with this snow. Right now, I'm going to bed. Great job everyone!"

* * *

Christmas morning dawned clear and bright. Larry guessed that there was about three inches of fresh snow on the ground. Not too bad, but it was going to make it harder to get their chips over to the school. He was still worrying about the logistics when the roar of a diesel engine outside caught his attention. He squeezed past the mound of bags in the living room and opened the trailer door. Outside was one of the town's two dump trucks. This one had a plow fitted to the front of it. He thought it might be the one that had almost run him over the other day. The driver was swinging down from the cab.

"Hey! I understand you've got a special delivery for the school?"

"Sure do!" cried Larry. "And Merry Christmas!"

* * *

The high school was the only building in town big enough to handle the crowds—barely. Naturally enough, the food would all be served in the cafeteria, although people would have to find other places to actually eat it. As Larry gently tossed bags of chips down from the back of the truck, he could see that he and his fellow-chippers had not been the only ones laboring through the night to get the feast ready. Hundreds of other people were already bustling about, making sure there would be enough for everyone. He and the other chipmeisters were assigned spots in the serving lines and they piled up their bags behind them so they could keep the serving bowls filled. By about ten o'clock, most of the preparations seemed to be complete. Larry could see a huge crowd forming outside, as nearly the entire population of Grantville—new and old—converged on the school.

But before the feast there was something far more important to do.

An announcement over the school's loudspeakers sent everyone heading for the football field. It was cold outside, but not really bad: bright sun, no wind, and snow beginning to melt here and there. Crews had already swept the snow off the bleachers, leaving dry seats. Larry and Jimmy and Eddie and Hans and Jeff and Gretchen and Gramma and all the kids grabbed a section for themselves and huddled together near the forty-yard line. At midfield a podium had been set up on a platform, framed by an arbor of evergreen branches. Folding chairs lined the field in front of the podium, but most folks were heading up into the bleachers where their feet could stay out of the snow. Another, higher platform stood behind the podium; the choir had assembled there. He could just make out Bonnie Weaver.

Mike Stearns appeared, ushering the movers and shakers from the town and the community toward the metal seats. Larry grinned when he saw a few of them glance towards the bleachers enviously. Sometimes rank's privileges were uncomfortable ones . . .

Rebecca Abrabanel came over to Mike, spoke with him and pointed. Larry followed Becky's gesture and saw a small group clustered by the south goalpost. He recognized Becky's father and Mr. and Mrs. Roth and a few others. He puzzled for a moment; then nodded. Jews at a Christmas celebration. No wonder they're hesitating!

But Mike Stearns walked briskly over to them and took Mrs. Roth by the arm and led her and the others over to the folding chairs. Larry had seen military formations maneuvering on the field before, and there was a certain military precision in what happened next. The group were seated, but somehow there were no unoccupied sections big enough for all of them. They had to split up—just enough to create a mingling, a merging. No ghettoes here in Grantville! Not even temporary ones!

Finally, everyone had found a seat. The stands were filled with people and the blending of brightly colored synthetic fabrics with dull wools and leathers made a patchwork pattern in the morning light.

The people of Grantville were assembled. All of them.

The crowd fell silent as three small groups of people entered the field. Father Mazzare, wearing colorful robes, strode in from one sideline. Reverend Jones, in more sedate clothing, approached from the other. And a third group was coming in from the north goal. The first two groups had people carrying books and small crosses. The third had someone carrying a small menorah. There was a stir in the assembled crowd and Larry realized he was witnessing something that must have taken a lot of planning.

All three groups met in the center of the field and bowed to each other; and four thousand people looked on in utter silence.

A man from the third group came forward and hesitantly approached the microphone; Larry didn't recognize him. He must have been one of the German refugees. No, refugee no longer—one of the new citizens of the town. He glanced back at Father Mazzare and Reverend Jones; the two men smiled and gestured for him to go ahead. The man began to speak, and after a momentary flinch when his voice boomed out from a dozen loudspeakers, he went on. Larry could not understand the words, but he recognized that it was Hebrew he was hearing; and the effect on the Jews seated in front of him was plain. Rebecca clutched at her father and the Roths seemed to be crying, too.

The man finished and stepped back. Father Mazzare took the microphone and Larry was a bit surprised when he could not understand him either. He was speaking in Latin. He spoke for perhaps five minutes and at least a few of the people in the crowd seemed to be reacting to it.

Then it was Reverend Jones' turn. When he stepped up to the microphone, he held out his hand and Rebecca Abrabanel came forward to stand beside him.

"My friends, welcome," he said. "And a very Merry Christmas." Rebecca leaned forward and repeated it in German.

"This is always a very special time of year," continued Jones. "But this year's Christmas is perhaps the most special since the very first, so many years ago. This is the first Christmas since the Ring of Fire." He paused while Rebecca translated.

"Many of us have wondered what the Ring of Fire was. How did it happen? Why did it pick us? Why did it bring us here? How did so great a power leave us alive and unharmed? I cannot answer those question, my friends, I can only tell you what I believe in my heart.

"I believe that we have witnessed the Hand of God in this thing. He has brought us here for a purpose. It is not for Man to question God's Purpose, but there are some things we can try to understand. His hand has brought us here. All of us. American and German, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant. We have all been brought here, to this time and this place to serve His Purpose.

"What that purpose will ultimately be, we can only imagine. But we have begun a great task here. We are building a place where people can be free; truly free. A place where people, no matter their origins, can live and raise their families and serve God as they see fit. A place free of the fear and superstitions of the dark past. A place where people can worship God as they please."

A place where they won't be spooked by potatoes, thought Larry.

As the reverend's words sank into the English-speaking listeners, and as Rebecca translated it for the Germans, the impact spread through the crowd. Larry felt it, too, even though he did not at first have the words to describe it; and then he realized he did.

A place for me.

"We must become a single people," continued Jones. "Rich in our diversity, but unconquerable in our unity. As we have begun, so let us continue. I ask Almighty God for his blessings. May He guide us to a bright new future. Amen."

Four thousand people echoed with one voice; but it seemed to Larry that the six adult voices on both sides of him were particularly strong. Or perhaps it was just that he'd heard them a little more clearly than any of the others. . . .

He shook his head ruefully. C'mon, it's just Christmas feelgood crap, isn't it? He knew where his family still was, and it wasn't here—or now. Still, two different timelines, both of them real; maybe there's room for two different families. . . .

Jones stepped back from the microphone and the choir began to sing. It was a sweet, sweet sound. All the traditional carols were sung, first in English and then again in a German translation. Or in the case of "Silent Night," in the English translation and then the original German. Soon everyone was joining in.

Larry told himself he was singing along with Bonnie, down in the choir; but by the fourth carol, he'd admitted it; he was singing with his folks. His family. Not a perfect one for sure, not even one he'd have chosen if he could—but then you never get to choose, do you?

During breaks in the singing, the clerics did more formal services. Father Mazzare held mass; Larry had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing at the thought that if they had substituted their potato chips for the Communion wafers, they might see a mass conversion. Gramma leaned forward to glare at him from two seats away. Damn, she's a telepath!

By the time it was all done, it was nearly noon and most of the people were getting pretty chilly despite the warm sun. A call blared over the speakers for all the food serving people to man their stations.

"That's us folks!" Larry called to the family. They made their way down off the bleachers and headed for the cafeteria.

* * *

The chips were a great success.

It took several hours to serve everyone, but each and every person who wanted them got a large handful of potato chips to go along with the turkey and ham and venison and stuffing and turnips that were being handed out. They kept telling people "no seconds" until everyone was served, but Larry noticed that a few faces in the line seemed awfully familiar. In the end it didn't matter, there were plenty for all and even some left over for the dance.

"Well, congratulations, Larry," said Melissa when she came up. "Project Quayle has accomplished its mission. Willie Ray is being mobbed by German farmers asking about potatoes."

"That's great!" said Larry. "But all we were really trying to do was have some chips for Christmas."

"You did that, too, Larry. Everyone's really enjoying them. Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas, Miss Mailey."

After the meal, music and dancing filled the gymnasium. They could only fit a fraction of the people in at a time, but they had cranked the heat up to the point that people gladly went outside after staying a while. They also lured people out by having the gift exchange outside. Larry wasn't sure whose idea the exchange was, but it seemed like a good one. It was just a big pile of stuff. Clothes and blankets and old toys and nicknacks. Anyone who had something to give added it to the pile. Anyone in need could take from it. The exchange went on all day.

Once the last of the chips had been distributed, Larry slipped away; he'd been tracking Bonnie as best he could in the crowd, and after a few minutes of squeezing past enthusiastic—and unskilled—dancers, he managed to cross her path.

"Oh Larry, isn't this a great day?" she asked when she saw him.

"One of the best. The choir sounded wonderful."

"Thank you! And your chips were fantastic!"

"A lot of people chipped in to make them. . . ."

"Ugh," said Bonnie; then she grinned. "Want to dance?"

"Sure."

It was a very nice day—scarcely even dimmed by Nat Davis' comment about wanting to do a lubricant inventory at the shop—but eventually it drew to an end. People started drifting off toward their homes as the early night came on. Larry had lost track of the rest of the family but he was in sort of a daze anyway. Bonnie had kissed him goodnight.

He hitched a ride home on one of the buses that was shuttling people back to town. He was surprised to see that only the lights in his own trailer were on.

He was even more surprised when he saw that the only one there was Jimmy. He had disappeared early on, and Larry had been wondering where he had gotten to. Most surprising of all, Jimmy was back in the kitchen, slicing up another few potatoes he'd found somewhere. A funny odor wafted through the trailer. . . .

"Hey, Jimmy! Aren't you sick of making potato chips? What are you working on now?"

Jimmy didn't even look up. "Sour cream and onion flavor," he said.

American Past Time

Deann Allen and Mike Turner

Billy stood on the mound and sweated in the glare of the afternoon sun. His game was on and he knew it, but he couldn't help feeling a little nervous. It wasn't from checking the stands to count the major league scouts with their laptops and cell phones—not anymore. He had just never pitched in front of so many people.

It was the Fourth of July, the first big baseball game since the Ring of Fire, and it seemed like half the town had turned out to watch, refugees included. He hadn't expected that. The Americans heading toward the high school had attracted notice, and now the refugees formed their own crowd along the fence surrounding the athletic field.

Or maybe it wasn't so surprising. The Germans had been working like bees, putting up new shelters and other projects in the town, and working the nearby farms to make sure the crops survived. They needed the holiday as much as the Americans. And they seemed to grasp the game of baseball.

That was no surprise, either. It really was a simple game: you throw the ball; you hit the ball; you catch the ball. Simple. It didn't even surprise him that everyone was pretty well-behaved, despite that things were getting rather drunk out. What did surprise him was that every single refugee was completely and vocally behind the UMWA!

* * *

Conrad had never seen anything like this baseball. The numbers being posted on the large board outside the fence had something to do with the players' actions, but he did not quite understand what they meant. It didn't seem to matter, though. The little ones especially were having a grand time, cheering whenever anything happened on the field, shouting encouragements to the miners that Conrad doubted most of them understood. He was surprised at the grin plastered on his own face. The UMWA team needed all the encouragement it could get, facing the young man throwing for the school team.

The young man—boy? he was certainly no older than Conrad—was tall and thin, but threw the white leather ball with the force of an arquebus, and far more accurately. It was deceptive, for he moved with a casual and easy grace until he released the ball, which seemed to explode from his hand in a blur that ended in a loud thwok! into his teammate's glove that Conrad could hear even over the noise of the crowd.

He wondered what it would be like, trying to hit that ball. It was fast. Oh, it was fast! But not so fast he couldn't see it, couldn't track it with his eyes as it flew across the field. He looked at the man now trying to hit it—trying and failing. He digs his toes into the dirt, shifts his weight as he swings the club. It's not all in his arms.

Thwok! The ball was past the man before he'd even begun to swing. He stood straight and stepped outside the lines drawn on the ground with white powder. He bumped his club against the ground, seeming to mutter to himself. Then he spat in the dirt, stepped back inside the lines, and readied himself.

The young man leaned forward and looked intently toward the . . . plate. He nodded at something and stood upright. A moment's pause, then he kicked out a long step while pushing off with the rear foot, snapping his hips around as his hand arched over his head, his wrist snapping to loose the ball just as his body reached its full extension.

The miner swung, and Conrad knew he would miss. That throw was slower than the others. It looked the same, but it was slower! The loud thwok! came again and the older man crouched to the rear of the group around the plate stood and shouted something.

Players from both teams swarmed onto the field, shaking hands and patting backs. The people who had been watching from the tall, scaffold benches also moved out on the field, smiling and talking loudly. The game was over, and everyone seemed to be still having fun.

Conrad certainly was. I could have hit that ball. I know I could!

* * *

Billy wiped the sweat from his sunburned neck, heaved the last sack of vegetables onto the bed of the pickup, and waved to the scrawny German in its cab. The truck lurched forward with a loud grind of the gears that made Billy mentally deduct a good fifty bucks from its Blue Book list price, then it roared off toward the rutted dirt road by the farm Billy and his crew had spent most of the day harvesting.

"You folks done here?" Mr. Hudson's voice came from behind Billy, and he nearly jumped. The old farmer stood across the dirt track, looking pleased.

"Yes, sir, I think we are."

Mr. Hudson nodded. "We'll have the crops in in plenty of time. I didn't think we'd do nearly this well. Gather your crew up for me, would you, please?"

Billy dutifully gave out a whoop and circled his arm over his head, and the mixed group of Americans and refugees who had been working the field began to gather around. A couple of the older refugees and not a few of the Grantvillers looked about wiped out.

"Nice work, folks," Mr. Hudson said. "Most of the other crews are finishing up, too, so go ahead and take the rest of the afternoon off. I'd say you've earned it."

A tired cheer went through the group. The man in charge of the crew read haltingly from his cheat sheet of German phrases to fill in the local workers, and another quiet cheer went up. After days on end of the breakneck pace of the harvest, both the townsmen, who were unaccustomed to the work, and the refugees, many of whom were still recovering from borderline starvation or old injuries, welcomed the unexpected break.

Billy grabbed up his backpack with the remains of his lunch and other such necessities as his folks insisted he take with him when out "on crew," and headed along the windbreak of trees lining the field toward the forested hills beyond. This patch of woods was pure Grantville for quite a ways, and Billy was glad of it. There were a lot of things he missed from before the Ring of Fire—real baseball most of all—but at least his personal favorite swimming hole wasn't one of them.

If anything, the displacement had improved the place. Before, the hole in the creek bed with its sheltering boulder would have been half-dry this late in the summer, but now a new and larger stream fed into the creek. It might cause some excess flooding, come spring, but it kept the water flowing nicely.

Billy stepped around the fallen hickory tree that edged the pond and looked at the sun-drenched boulder that held back the clear stream water, forming the surprisingly deep little pool. The sun twinkled invitingly off the water as he hung his pack on a root sticking out of the tree base like a coat hanger. Grinning in anticipation, he bent to untie his shoes.

The icy chill of the water was welcome after all that hot work, but it didn't encourage him to stay too long. After a short bask on the sunny rock to dry himself, Billy got dressed and set out for home. He hopped over a narrow place just downstream, and trudged up the opposite hillside to cut a corner off the path to his house on this, the now-south side of town. As he descended the far slope, he heard voices ahead. It sounded like kids playing.

He came out of the woods into a hay field on the edge of town, and found the kids. They were refugees, and they were playing ball on the stubble of the freshly mowed hay. Billy grinned in amazement. Nearly two dozen Germans, most about his age, were playing by-God baseball! Or at least making a good go at it.

They were playing gloveless, with a sturdy club making a reasonable bat and a largish ball made of what Billy guessed was brown leather. Flat stones marked the bases. The pitcher was throwing overhand with great enthusiasm, but seemed to be having trouble finding the plate. No one was umpiring, at any rate, each batter getting three swings or hitting the ball. There was much argument and confusion, the boys jabbering loudly in German and having a lot of fun. It looked just like the sandlot games Billy had played when he was ten.

He joined a group of boys alongside the field, recognizing several of them from the work crews. They were smiling and shouting what sounded like advice to the players. A few girls were in the group, paired off with boys or watching over some younger kids who were playing under the trees along the field's roadside edge.

One of the boys smiled at him as he joined the group, and stuck out his hand. "Hallo. Ich heisse Conrad."

Billy took his hand and shook it firmly, feeling slightly foolish, and said "Billy."

The German boy grinned at him, and motioned to two of his companions who promptly joined them. Conrad introduced them with broad gestures and a clear "Karl" and "Wilhelm," along with a gabble of fast-paced German that Billy could not quite catch, despite the fact that every kid in Grantville was struggling to master the language. Billy would hear a familiar word and miss ten more while he tried to place the first. The gestures came across much easier.

The Germans conferred together for a moment, then Conrad shouted something out onto the field. Several of the players shouted back. Conrad turned to Billy and said, "Please," and motioned toward the field. All eyes turned to him and the action stopped. Billy felt oddly exposed as the boy pitching motioned him forward, and Wilhelm trotted out to join him. Billy put his backpack on the ground, and ambled onto the field. He wasn't exactly sure what they wanted, but he was beginning to suspect. Wilhelm conferred for a moment with the younger boy who had been pitching, who then nodded eagerly and handed the ball to Billy.

It was leather, like boot leather, and very soft—stuffed with rags, maybe. A few threads dangled from the unevenly stitched seams. It was slightly larger than a softball.

It's a good thing it's so soft. They'd tear their hands up with a regulation ball. Billy had seen kids play bare-handed occasionally when he was little, and he knew the only way to catch a hard ball that way was on the bounce, and not always the first. This one they could probably catch straight off the bat—assuming anyone could get something that size over the plate in the first place. But it's what they had. So . . .

Billy nodded. The two boys smiled, jabbered happily, and went to stand with Conrad. Karl picked up the bat, and stepped up to the makeshift home plate.

Billy approached the mound with the ersatz baseball in hand, and felt his slightly smug pitcher's look coming onto his face. The smugness was fully justified. Few high school juniors grabbed the interest of even one major league scout, much less several. For him, Yankee Stadium had been both a dream and a definite possibility.

Now he had a hay field, and a ball the size of a grapefruit—with the consistency of one gone past prime. What the hell, the thing's brown. They won't be able to see it worth a damn, anyway. He stopped at the low clear place the Germans had been pitching from, and carefully kicked some stray dirt into a pile in the center of the area. Stepping onto the mound, he turned to face the batter.

Karl grinned at him with the loglike bat hitched over his shoulder. One of the younger boys stood a few feet behind him, ready to field the pitch. Billy pointed to him and made motion to back up. After the youngster had retreated several feet, Billy signaled that he was fine, and started his pitching motion.

He opened with an easy side-arm throw, sort of a fastball but not too fast, to see how the ball handled. The ball went far to the side of the plate. Fortunately, the outside, and the catcher fielded it on the bounce and sent it back.

Billy nodded to himself. "Okay. I can throw this ball. Nothing fancy. Just a clean throw." Kicking off easily, he unleashed another side-arm fastball. Right down the pipe and a little high, but Karl swung mightily at it, eyes shut and shoulders straining, and managed by sheerest accident to catch the bottommost corner of the ball. Which sent the ball back over the catcher's head and into a nearby clump of bushes.

That was the highlight of the next few batters. Karl took two more swings but never got close to the ball again. The next batter, a younger boy Billy had never seen before, tried to hit the ball while diving backward out of the way. At least he kept his eyes open. Billy decided to slow down on the smaller kids a little, but the next still proved no match.

Then the teams traded places, but Conrad motioned Billy to stay on the mound. It seemed fair enough to him. One of the older boys from the work crews led off and Billy increased the speed a little. The boy took a swing late and Billy decided to try a curve. The big soft melon ball broke only about six inches, but the German youth still had no luck hitting it. Nor did the younger boy who followed him.

The bright core of fun at playing started to fade. These guys are no challenge. They're pathetic. My arm will turn to spaghetti before one of them hits me. He looked around the outfield. The dozen or so kids in it were standing talking in pairs, or sitting on the ground playing with straws or with their chins on their fists. Looking next to the batter's box, Billy saw Conrad step up to the plate. He perked up a bit. Conrad was as big as he was and probably older. With shoulders. Hmm . . . Maybe.

Billy tried another curve. Harder. This one broke better and Conrad swung at it hard but awkwardly. Flatfooted. Billy noticed he never took his eye off the ball, but the curve flummoxed him and the ball sailed past.

Billy motioned his catcher back a few more feet on the next pitch. Conrad had set up a little closer to the plate, but Billy had a feel for the ball now. He let loose an overhand fastball a little inside, and watched Conrad jerk the bat inward and down, grazing the top of the ball and bouncing it to the catcher.

Billy threw the next pitch almost exactly the same except half speed. Conrad, now set up a little more off the plate, over-swung and missed entirely.

After one more desultory inning, most of the kids had had enough and the game more or less broke up.

"Well, that was fun," Billy muttered under his breath as he watched the German kids moving away in small clusters. He guessed baseball was not much of an attraction anymore. Well, no one but a hardcore fan liked a pitchers' duel. Especially with only one pitcher. And I'm the only hard-core fan or player left. Yippee. He slumped over to where he'd left his pack. Conrad waved to him from a cluster of the bigger kids, who did not look like they were leaving just yet. The big German kid approached him with a strained look on his face.

"How?" he began in uncertain English. "You . . . ?" and completed the question with a throwing motion. Billy sighed and nodded, holding out his hand for the ball. Maybe if I show them some stuff, and they have the gumption to practice it, they won't be so totally hopeless.

He beckoned them all into a semicircle, and began to demonstrate baseball pitching mechanics in mime. He showed both his usual overhand delivery, and the sidearm throw he used sometimes when he was tired or the other team had him figured out. They watched him intently, pointing to something he'd done and arguing with each other, or trying to catch his attention and mimicking his movements to see if they were doing it right.

He pulled his baseball out of his pack and handed it around, showing its hardness and how he gripped the seams, then switched to their cloth-stuffed ball, and mimed out his approval of its density from a fielding standpoint. He showed them his glove, removing it from its usual place nestled snugly in his pack. They oohed and ahhed as if he'd pulled a rabbit out of a hat.

Then a couple of them started arguing over something, which got the rest jabbering again, most eagerly nodding, a couple still looking a bit puzzled. Then they all moved out to take positions and try out what they'd learned from Billy's impromptu baseball clinic. He put his ball and glove back in his pack, slung it over his shoulder, and got out of their way.

Conrad stopped him before he left, though, gesturing toward the plate. What now? Batting lessons? But the German boy wanted something else. He made it clear when he crouched behind the catcher, then looked back at Billy and pointed to the ground where he stood. Billy couldn't help but chuckle. Now they want me to be the bad guy!

Standing back there, trying to judge balls and strikes, it didn't take him long to realize that batting lessons were also needed. But what the hell, it was sort of like playing baseball. And it was better than going home.

* * *

"And then they had me umpire!" Billy said.

His mother laughed and handed him another biscuit. "I bet it wasn't easy explaining strike zones to them."

"No, it wasn't. I could only think of about one word in ten that I needed. I really—"

"Then you should have paid more attention to your language lessons in school," his father said, frowning.

Billy gritted his teeth. "That's what I was going to say."

"You need to get your head around reality, Billy. Playing baseball is no excuse for not being here to do your chores."

"What chores? Polishing cars that no one'll buy because they nationalized all the gasoline? I did my chores for the day! I worked my butt off on that farm and earned some time off! You got a problem with that, take it up with Mr. Hudson! What were you doing all day?" He knew that was a mistake as soon as he said it. He looked at his plate and started shoveling food into his mouth.

"What was I doing? I was trying to find some way to make a living, to keep food on this table and a roof over your ungrateful head, that's what I was doing! I have two trucks from the army that need suspension work, and I needed you here to help with them, not gallivanting off in some hay field, pissing away time that could be spent helping this family!"

"Then you should have damned-well said something about it!" To hell with supper; he'd go hungry before he put up with another second of this. Dammit, Dad, you used to be proud of me! He shoved back from the table to leave.

"Billy, sit down and finish your supper," his mother said. "After working the farm all day, you should know we can't afford to waste food. And don't swear." She turned to his father as he sat back down. "Keith, that is enough. He did his work for the day. He earned his afternoon off. If you didn't tell him you had things for him to do, that's your fault, not his."

"He should know there are always things to do," his father grumbled, but stuffed a large bite in his mouth, and chewed it angrily.

"Be that as it may, he was doing other things we've been told need to be done. Working on his language skill, for one. Do you think he can be teaching those boys, and playing with them, and not pick up more German? For another thing, he's finding common ground with them, which may be even more important here and now than working on those trucks. The more things we can find—or create!—in common with the people around us, the less the army will have to defend us against, and the more people it will have to do it with. So don't think of it as wasting his time. Think of it as . . . improving foreign relations."

His father swallowed his latest over-large bite. "I still need him here!" He jabbed his fork at his plate for emphasis.

"Well then, I suggest you put him on the payroll and pay him for the work he does for you, since that will be time taken from other useful things he could be doing. You can make up a work schedule, and go over it with him in the mornings before he leaves."

Billy smothered a snicker at the look on his father's face—if he hadn't just swallowed, he might have choked. He looked like he might, anyway.

Billy's mother smiled much too sweetly. "That will, of course, also serve several purposes. It will teach you to talk to Billy, and schedule things, instead of just assuming he can read your mind, and taking his help for granted." She turned that smile on Billy. "And it will teach you the discipline and responsibility that comes with having a real job."

Billy looked at her, looked at his father, thought of having him as an actual employer, and quickly swallowed the bite he was chewing before he choked on it.

* * *

The work on the trucks took up three evenings, and even with the mechanics from the mine workers to help, it was just as heavy and dirty as the work in the fields, if not more so. They wound up dog-robbing heavier leaf-springs from old farm equipment to support the armor hanging on the trucks. The shocks were a hopeless cause—no matter what they put on, the extra weight and nearly nonexistent roads would soon trash them. The army would be in for rough rides in the near future. But the contract was done, and Billy's evenings would be free until his father found another.

Billy and his mother watched as his father dutifully entered Billy's pay into the account books, then they went to the bank to transfer the money into Billy's savings account. His father goggled a bit at the amount already in there from Billy's work on the harvest crews. Billy suppressed a smirk until he noticed his mother wasn't suppressing hers, at all.

They left the bank with his father shaking his head. His mother looked across the street, smiled to herself, and said lightly, "Excuse me. I'll meet you back home." She started across the street. "Miss Abrabanel? Could I have a moment of your time, please?"

Billy looked at his father; his father looked back. They both shrugged, two men together, baffled by the ways of women.

After dinner, Billy called some of his teammates and arranged for them to meet at the hay field after the work crews knocked off. With gloves, balls, and bats.

* * *

The next day, Billy, Vern, Steve, and a couple other team members gave a clinic on the fine art of baseball, passed out gloves, and coached two separate games on opposite ends of the hay field. The refugees were joined by several of their Grantville peers. Strangely, Billy's mother and Miss Abrabanel showed up and watched for a while, talking and occasionally gesturing at the players. They didn't stay long, and Billy soon forgot about them. The games went on until it got too dark to see the ball, and the youths found themselves walking home in the near-inky blackness of night.

Even with his father having a claim on his time, and the abysmal lack of talent among the Germans, the remainder of the summer passed much easier for Billy. Something like baseball was better than nothing at all.

* * *

"Pass the sausage, would you, Billy?"

"Sure, Dad." He handed the platter across the table. "Oh. I was talking with Mister Kinney, today. He's worried about Joey, what's going to happen to him, and I was thinking . . . well, Todd's working out okay, isn't he?"

"Yeah, he's a good worker. Why?"

"I thought that since Todd's doing well, maybe there might be a job that Joey could do? He's going to need to be able to support himself, too. I mean, he's nowhere near as smart as Todd, and he probably couldn't help with actually making the nails, but maybe he could dump them in the barrels, or bring bar stock, or help Todd keep the shop cleaned up? There's a lot of stuff to do that doesn't take any real skill."

His father sighed. "What do you want me to do, hire every Special Ed kid in the area?"

"You've hired one, already," his mother commented. "Why not another?"

"Martha, I am not a charity! Georg had a lot of doubts about hiring a 'simpleton' like Todd. He'll give me hell about even thinking of hiring someone he'd class as the village idiot! I may supply the building, but he's the one who actually runs the business."

"Surely a used car salesman can sell him on the idea. . . ."

"If you'll recall, one thing I like about this new business is that I don't have to feed people lines of bullshit anymore, so do tell me why I should feed a line to my partner. And I sold new cars, too!"

"Nobody says it has to be a line, Dad. Just see if there's anything he can do. Todd really likes Joey, and when Joey's around, I've never seen Todd lose focus like he does around other people. It's like he's looking out for someone who's worse off than he is. So it might even make Todd a better worker."

"And if you or someone else can't find a job for Joey," his mother said, "the churches are going to have to set up a charity for him. Or the government will have to start a welfare program. His parents aren't going to be around forever. Which would be better, for him to be a productive citizen, or a charity case?"

"All right, all right, quit ganging up on me! I'll talk to Joey's parents and see what he can do. If he's got the ability to hold a job, I'll bring it up with Georg." He snorted, then muttered angrily, "Hell, I'll even put it in terms of charity. Christian charity. It's about time all this religious hoo-hah was good for something besides an excuse for killing people."

"Thanks, Dad."

"Don't thank me, yet; I haven't done anything."

Billy shrugged. "You said you'd look into it. That's all I asked."

"I . . . um . . . hmm . . . You're welcome." He cleared his throat, then turned back to his plate with a puzzled frown.

Huh. Weird reaction. Billy wondered about it for a second, then shrugged it off. He reached for the bowl of porridge, and served himself some of the ubiquitous glop, when he saw his mother glance at him with a pleased, and rather proud, smile. Wondering what in the world had brought that on, he started eating, bending over his bowl with a puzzled frown on his face.

* * *

WHACK! Conrad hammered the ball with a swing of the white ash bat worthy of a Teutonic war god. Billy's head tracked up and over his shoulder. Quickly. The ball wobbled as it arced high into the air. The crowd of children roared in astonished approval as, despite its great altitude, it cleared the tree line to the north for a home run.

Vern's head was shaking in disbelief, and Billy grimaced at the grinning teenager rounding the base paths at a lope. The locals seemed to be learning baseball all right. Too darn fast. That was the second solid hit Conrad had had off him today, and the longest hit Billy could remember seeing off anybody, anywhere. What's he been doing, sneaking lessons with the army from Mr. Simpson? Wilhelm was still off in the trees looking for the ball when Conrad crossed home plate.

As the storkish Saxon was mobbed by his elated teammates, Wilhelm finally emerged from the forested slope. Billy held up his glove to signal Willi to throw the ball in, but the outfielder held onto it and trudged up to Billy in the diamond's center. He drew near, and silently held out the baseball. One seam was split down an entire side, and its yarn insides trailed out like some soldier's innards after a hard battle. From the pale look on Wilhelm's face, it might have been a soldier.

Vern ambled up to the plate, took one glance at the split ball, and said, "I have another in my game bag."

"This was my last one that isn't autographed," Billy said. "How many are left?"

"Some, I'd guess, around town."

Billy frowned and said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Vern put a hand on his shoulder. "Hey, we're aiming for eighteen-hundreds tech, right? The game got started back then, so we just roll the equipment back to match." He grinned. "Walter Johnson started on dead balls, and you pitch like him, so you'll match, too!"

Yeah, right. Go back to dead ball days, go back to sandlot games. Glorified Little League, that's all it'll be. Ever. He stifled a sigh and nodded, forcing a smile for Vern's sake, knowing his friend would be hurt if Billy didn't at least pretend he'd been cheered up.

* * *

The day had started bad enough. "I will not accept any 'the dog ate my homework' excuses!" Miz Mailey had said at the beginning of the year. How about a "the cat shredded my report then used it for a litterbox" excuse? He'd even brought the two pages that weren't fouled to prove it.

Then the day got worse. The bus passed huge smears of blood all over the road, and what he could swear was a pile of bodies just off the shoulder. Someone on the other side of the bus had seen a dead horse. What the hell was going on?

He found out soon after arriving at school, and suddenly the shredded report wasn't very important anymore.

* * *

The line moved up. Billy heard the younger students pounding up the stairs. No one called them down for running in the halls today. Desks and cabinets screeched across the floor—metal to barricade the stairs. Metal to block bullets. The line moved up. Another senior took a baseball bat from Mr. Trout. A club to fend off swords. Wood to block bullets. The line moved up. Smooth wood pressed into his hands. Snakes started crawling in his stomach.

"Herr Trout!" Conrad's voice came over his shoulder. "I take the bat; he takes the balls." The lanky German eeled past Mr. Trout into the athletic equipment locker, reappearing the next moment with the bucket of baseballs. He plucked the bat from Billy's hand, and hung the bucket over his arm. The snakes quit crawling.

"Conrad, are you nuts?" Mr. Trout said. "They'll be wearing armor and helmets!"

"Open-faced helmets, sir," Billy replied. "No, he's right. Randy Johnson keeps a bucket of balls beside his bed for home security and never had a break-in. Nobody wants a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball in the teeth."

Mr. Trout nodded shortly. "All right, if you think it'll do you more good. Just don't hit anybody standing in front—" He stopped with his mouth open, then closed it. "Never mind. You don't hit anything you don't aim at." He turned to hand out the last two bats, and the boys headed for the gym.

Conrad looked at Billy. "This is true? You hit only where you aim?"

Billy smirked slightly. "Yeah, pretty much."

"Ah. So the time you almost took off my nose was deliberate?"

Looking at Conrad standing there with a bat in his hand, Billy took the better part of valor. "That . . . was one of the not-quite times."

Conrad cocked an eyebrow. "Try not to have any not-quite times today."

This time the snakes didn't crawl; they simply bit. Billy jerked his head in a nod. "Yeah."

* * *

Half a dozen students ran the north bleachers out from the wall with a rumble like distant thunder. Or the pounding hooves of approaching cavalry. The gym doors shut behind them with a hollow boom, then came the rattle-clatter of Jeff Higgins setting the top and bottom catches, and running a chain through the handles to padlock them shut.

Mr. Trout chivvied kids up to the top levels of the bleachers, looking like he was herding cats for a second as Gena bounded off the end of the middle level and into a corner behind a different set of bleachers. She returned shortly with the long, heavy handle from one of the janitor's big push brooms. Mr. Trout motioned her upward when she took a lower level. She turned a narrow-eyed look at him and spun the broom handle so it hummed.

"Brown belt, sir. Remember?"

"Okay, front row of the top, but top! Please?"

She nodded and backed up three more rows. That left Billy standing between her and the bigger boys armed with bats.

Shouts sounded outside in the foyer, followed by gunfire from another part of the building. Mr. Trout hurried the students upward. Jeff stepped back toward the center of the room and jacked a round into his shotgun's breech.

Then the distant shooting stopped. The shouts moved closer. The noise just outside increased. Glass smashed. The doors shook as something started bumping into them. More shouting. The bumping stopped. The smashing sounds didn't. Then . . .

Boom! The doors shuddered as something slammed into them. Some of the kids started yelling. Vern, Conrad, and others stood on the lower rows of seats, bats in hand, between them and danger. Ka-boom!

Billy clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering, crouched down, and started sorting through the balls in the bucket, shoving the hardest ones into his pockets and shirt. If . . . when they get through, I can't be stooping down to get these. He just wished he'd thought to go to the bathroom before all this started. He really needed to pee!

Ka-boom! The doors bent inward. More kids started yelling, shoving their way toward the top of the bleachers. Mr. Trout went to stand with Jeff and readied his pistol. Ka-boom! Gena twirled the broom handle, swallowed hard, and stepped down to stand behind Vern and Conrad. Billy gripped a ball and made sure his others were in easy reach.

Ka-boom! Ka-boom-crack! Boom-crack! Crack-slam! The doors splintered and burst. The shouts rose to a triumphant shriek as the Croats poured into the gym.

The racking boom of Jeff's shotgun filled the gym with sound and emptied the front line of Croats with torn and dying bodies. He stepped back to reload and Mr. Trout started firing.

Billy threw at one man on the edge of the crowd—the rest were too close to Jeff and Mr. Trout for a clear throw—but his foot slipped on the slick wood and the ball went wide, bouncing off the wall and rolling into a corner. He swore and grabbed another. This time it flew straight, but bounced off the chest armor of the man it hit. He grabbed a third ball and looked up just in time to see a saber come down on Mr. Trout's head. The next one went into his neck and he fell, blood flying.

Jeff took down that man and many others in a roaring storm of gunfire that ended all too quickly. He turned the shotgun into a club against the Croats' sabers, bashing one in the face as another came at his back. That one caught a major-league-grade fastball square in the head that knocked him flat.

But there was nothing Billy could do about the new group that came howling in through the broken doors, nor the Croat on the other side who sent his saber smashing into Jeff's shoulder and drew back for the killing blow.

Then there was nothing for Billy to do at all but watch in sick fascination as the new group began taking the Croats apart, starting with the one standing over Jeff. The giant in the lead of the new force split the man's head like a cantaloupe, and stood there shouting to his men who quickly drove the Croats into the back corner of the gym, while some made a protective line in front of the students on the bleachers.

And then the slaughter began. It didn't end even when the last two dozen or so Croats threw down their weapons and held up their hands. They just went down to savage cries that sounded like "Hack 'em all!" When the last Croat lay dead on the blood-smeared floor, then it ended. Only then.

And Billy quietly walked over to the end of the bleachers, knelt down looking at some part of the floor that wasn't covered with blood, and was not so quietly sick all over it.

* * *

"What happened?!" Steve stared in wide-eyed horror at their bloody clothes.

"Hey, bro, settle down," Vern said. "It ain't ours. Jeff Higgins got cut really bad, and we had to do first aid on him." He looked down at himself, then closed his shaking hand into a fist. "Damn, I'm glad I took that EMT course!"

"Certainly I would never have known to do most of that," Conrad said wonderingly. "You are sure he will not be crippled from it?"

"Nah, the docs will stitch him up and he'll be fine."

"But Mr. Trout . . ." Billy said hollowly. "God damn those bastards!"

"Mr. Trout?" Steve looked back and forth between them.

Vern nodded heavily. "They killed him."

"They damn-near cut his head off, is what you mean!" Billy said, wiping sudden tears from his eyes.

Steve swallowed hard, then squeezed his eyes shut. "Dammit, I should have been in there with you. I could've done something!"

"No, you didn't want to be there, Steve," Vern said. "Believe me, you didn't!"

"And you wouldn't have been able to do anything," Billy said. "They came in a rush, went right at Jeff and Mr. Trout. You'd have been standing up there with the rest of us, holding nothing better than a bat. I had baseballs, and I couldn't really hit the ones in the middle, and those were the ones that . . . did the damage.

"Then it didn't matter who could've done what, because those other men came in. What's-his-name . . . Captain Gars' men. They shoved the Croats back against the wall and cut them to pieces."

"Yeah," Vern said. "Screaming something like 'hack them to paté,' and that's just what they did." He started to shake, and whispered, "Even after they tried to surrender . . ."

Billy reached up and put his hand on Vern's shoulder. "And that's why you didn't want to be there, Steve. I saw that and lost my breakfast."

Vern took a deep breath and straightened. "Well, I know what I'm going to do—start paying more attention to those militia training sessions. There's no way in hell I'll ever stand there again with nothing but a bat in my hands when some pack of bastards is trying to kill us all."

"A gun is well and fine," Conrad said. "But a saber will not run out of bullets. I intend to speak to Colonel MacKay about lessons on that, as well."

Billy reached into his pocket and pulled out a ball. He turned it in his hand, looking at it. "I think I'll join you," he said quietly.

"Are you crazy?" Steve exclaimed. "You said you never wanted to be in the Army, just like me!"

"Yeah, that was before I realized that a baseball is a really piss-poor weapon to be holding when someone's shooting at you, or coming at you with a big friggin' sword. If you really want to be able to do something next time, Steve, you'll go to those training sessions, too, 'cause that's the only way I can think of to do anything but die."

"Your parents are gonna have a cow, y'know," Vern said.

"Let 'em. Me, you, Gena, Conrad, and a couple of others were the only kids in there who weren't screaming their heads off and trying to hide in the woodwork. If my folks can't see that it's better for the many to defend the few, than the other way around, that's their problem. I'm eighteen, now. I can join the militia or the Army on my own say-so. Don't know that I'll ever sign up, for real, but I do want to know how to use something besides this. . . ." He bounced the ball in his hand. "When the shit hits the fan, again."

* * *

Billy rolled his head, trying to relieve some of the tension in his neck and shoulders. His elbow felt like someone had tried to dislocate it. Someone had. Himself. The last two pitches—a curve and a slider—had been murder this late in the game, but they'd psyched Conrad out, coming from opposite directions to cross the plate cleanly in the strike zone.

Billy grinned wanly as Karl waggled two fingers wildly around for the sign. He did not have much left and the call was perfect. His high kick obscured the plate for a moment as he reared back to let go what was to all appearances a screaming fastball that looked to sail up high in the strike zone.

Conrad swung hard, only to nearly stumble as the ball fell almost vertically into Karl's mitt. The gangly German stared, perplexed, as Mr. Simpson called strike three. A perfect fade-away.

Billy blew a sigh of relief. Conrad had gotten two hits off him this game—a single to center field, and a triple when the ball took an utterly crazy bounce into the far right-field corner. With him gone, Billy's biggest worry was gone, as well. In the bottom of the ninth, with one out, one man on second base, and his team up by only one run, he'd had to go all out to keep the German from driving in another run and tying the game. Or worse, getting a home run, as he had a disturbing tendency to do.

A big German started toward the plate, a man Billy had never seen before. Conrad stopped on his way back to the dugout and spoke to him quietly. Billy used the time to move his arm around, working out some of the soreness. The audience did a somewhat ragged wave. For which side, he couldn't tell. The once-wooded dell where they now played did weird things to cheers, but the school field bleachers wouldn't hold everyone who'd wanted to see the game—people had come from other towns. So an area that had been cleared for building materials and firewood had been chosen, and boards set across the stumps for seating. The slope let everyone see the field, and had room for even more people than had showed up.

The batter stepped up to the plate. Billy rolled his shoulders one more time and stepped up to the pitching board. One more out and he'd be done. Three pitches. He could do three pitches. The man on second didn't look like he was going to try anything. Billy looked for the sign.

Heat. Good. I could throw that in my sleep. Karl wasn't as experienced a catcher as Vern—who now sat in the Army dugout—but he was shaping up fast. Good call. Get the guy thinking about the ball's speed, instead of its location and direction. Billy wound up and let fly with a fastball right up the center.

Then shoved his glove in front of his face as the ball came screaming off the bat straight at his head.

Or so it seemed. He missed catching it by a foot, and quickly turned to watch it sail into the middle of the center outfield seating, causing a mad scramble among the audience.

The guy on second gave a whoop and headed for home. The batter loped around the bases with the world's most surprised grin on his face.

Billy stood on the mound with his head back and his eyes closed. The only thoughts in his mind were things that would get his mouth washed out with soap by his mother, if he ever said them in her hearing.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. "Ach, bad luck," Karl said. "That's all it was. You threw a good game."

Billy let his breath out in a sharp hiss, but still couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't foul. What was the use? He was the only real pitcher in existence, and with the piss-poor—hell, practically nonexistent!—competition around here, he was losing his edge to the point where any schmuck could hit him. Screw it. Baseball is dead. I'm just going through the motions out of habit.

Someone came up on his other side. Conrad. Who stood there with a crooked grin on his face. "You were careless, Billy. You were ready for me, but you thought no one else could hit you, and so you were not ready for my student!"

Student. Great. Bad enough my talent's rotting on the vine, now he's training other people how to embarrass me by proving it. "Aw, blow me," he said, and turned toward his dugout. Karl followed. So did Conrad.

Mr. Simpson came ambling over from home with a kind of wistful grin on his face. As he drew abreast of the younger men he laid a hand on Billy's shoulder, resting its mate on Conrad's. "Gentlemen, that was a good game. Come on down to the Gardens, I'm buying the first round."

"Thanks, sir, but I don't really—" Billy began, as the others accepted eagerly.

"Don't tell me you're going to mope about it! So you lost a game. Big deal!" Mr. Simpson snorted softly. "If we were keeping stats, your earned run average would be . . . one-point-oh-oh-what? So come on and have a free beer."

Billy shrugged and nodded. "Okay. Thanks."

"Great! I'll meet you all there!" He patted their shoulders and went off to talk to Captain Heinrich.

Billy packed up his gear and headed up the footpath leading out of the dell. As he reached the top, the lowering sun shined straight into his eyes, and he stopped and turned away for a moment to let the dazzle subside. There was still quite a crowd down there, milling around and talking. From here, the board seats didn't look as ratty—he could barely see the stumps—and nearby trees threw shadows across the field. If he squinted his eyes, he could almost imagine it was a real stadium.

He shook his head and started the walk home, wondering what he'd do for the rest of his life. Nailmaking was okay, but, geez, it was boring!

* * *

Billy sat in the chair Karl pulled out, and nodded thanks to the waitress as she handed him the promised free beer. He still didn't really want to be here, but Karl had been waiting for him outside his house, and had practically dragged him to the Gardens. It didn't help that Conrad was sitting at the same table, laughing and accepting congratulations for his team.

"Great, everyone's here!" Mr. Simpson said loudly. Some of the noise died down. He lifted his mug. "To the Army!" Everyone cheered and drank the toast. Everyone but Billy, who drank because it was expected, but couldn't muster more than a weak smile he was sure looked fake.

"To Viktor!" Conrad called, and led the cheers that followed.

The German batter stood up from another table and waved the noise down. "Nein! Not for me. I was only doing what Conrad taught me. Give him the credit, for it is his, and well-earned!"

When that round of cheers died down, Coach Benton stood up. "And to Billy, who is not only the best pitcher in the United States, but has added another two miles an hour to his fastball!"

Billy's head whipped up so fast he almost cricked his neck. "What?!"

Coach leaned over the table. "Ha! Didn't know I'd clocked you, did you?" he said with a huge grin. "I even bet you thought you were losing your edge for lack of competition, didn't you?"

"I . . . ah . . . yeah."

"Because Conrad and now Viktor can hit you? Because you're so blasted arrogant that you think you must be getting worse instead of them getting better?" There didn't seem to be any way to answer that, but the narrow-eyed look and quiet snort Conrad gave him told Billy the truth was plain as day on his face.

"Billy, if Nolan Ryan never had batters who could challenge him—and beat him, now and then—he'd have been nothing but a circus freak. If baseball is going to be popular, we'll need German superstars, too. And here's Conrad, the very first!" The crowd cheered again.

"Two teams don't make a league!" Billy growled. "Nobody else is playing, so it isn't very popular, is it?"

Coach stood up and looked at him. "I guess you haven't heard, then." He turned and looked over his shoulder. "Hey, Tom!" he called to Mr. Simpson. "Billy here says two teams don't make a league!"

"Well, I admit Badenburg isn't ready, yet, but Jena wants a game with Army next month. Every one of them was at the game, today, checking out what they'll have to face."

Do four teams make a league . . . ? Yeah, they do. Damn. Baseball isn't dead! Billy stared at his beer, knowing the voice inside himself whining that he didn't want to be one star among many was just a lingering remnant of brat. I'd have had to share the spotlight with lots of others, if none of this had ever happened. Shared it and been proud of it.

The beer pitcher appeared in his view as someone refilled his mug. Conrad set the pitcher down and lifted his own mug, smiling. "I get the bat, you get the ball," he said quietly. "And perhaps someday, between us, we'll find or create the one who gets the glove."

Billy looked at him, saw the sincerity and enthusiasm shining in his eyes, the love of the game that Billy had known so well for so long, and had almost given up on. The new flag of the United States hung on the wall behind Conrad. The same stripes, but fewer stars. It really did look better with more than just the one star off in a corner by itself. One state doesn't make a new U.S. One person doesn't make a team. Or a sport.

He remembered that last look back at the field where they'd played. The crowd still milling around, the low hum of their voices reflecting from the dell's bowl to wash over him. The way the board seats fell away in a seemingly smooth sweep. The long, pillarlike shadows from the trees that lay across the infield. And if you look at it just . . . so . . .

He grinned, lifted his mug, touched it to Conrad's, and drank to future superstars. How about that? Maybe Yankee Stadium isn't impossible after all.

Skeletons

Greg Donahue

Dave woke up when the front door slammed. He sat up off the couch and pushed his glasses back in place. A book fell off his chest and onto the floor. Scooby sat up and barked once before running into the kitchen.

Dave muttered as he picked up the book and placed it on the coffee table. He looked at his watch. Gerd was probably getting home from his shift. "Hey buddy, how was work?" Dave shouted towards the door.

"It vass gut," Gerd hollered back from the kitchen. He appeared at the doorway with two beers. He handed one to Dave before taking a seat in the La-Z-Boy opposite the couch. "Aber, I am worried. I mean, but I am worried."

"Talk to me, Goose," Dave replied before taking a drink. Gerd first saw Top Gun two nights ago, and it had enchanted him. He was heartbroken to learn that apparently no one in Grantville possessed an aircraft.

"You know they let all men from Jena come here?" Gerd asked, calming down a bit after sipping his beer. Scooby, Dave's Great Dane, sat completely still, hoping Gerd would share the beer.

Dave was still getting used to his boarder's version of English. He had met Gerd a couple of months ago while helping recruit labor for his tree-trimming crews. Gerd was one of the few who spoke any English at the time, and Dave grew to like him. He offered to let Gerd stay with him after about two weeks of working together. Gerd had happily accepted, anxious to leave the growing refugee camp.

"I'm sorry, what?" Dave asked slowly.

Gerd had a look of concentration on his face before continuing. "The man all taken from battle at Jena. They come here and join Army, or work with us. I heard today at work."

"Oh, right," Dave replied. "We could certainly use them. So why are you worried?"

"These man are trouble. Gretchen kicked some out after Badenburg. How you know if they start trouble this time? Who kicks them out?"

"I'm sure some will start trouble. We gave you and the others a chance, and it worked out great. It's how we do things," Dave said, trying to keep his wording simple.

"Right, but these men . . . we must be careful," Gerd finished by setting his empty bottle on the coffee table. Dave knew Gerd liked a lot about Grantville, but the German was never shy about his feelings of the beer Dave and the other Americans had brought with them. Gerd had made no small ceremony of the day Dave ran out of beer. Dave was shocked with how quickly Gerd and his co-workers had started brewing their own.

"Look, America was formed in no small part by groups of unwanted people. In fact," Dave stood up and took his empty bottle into the kitchen, "several of . . ."

"I know, I know. I hear this from you before," Gerd followed him and put his bottle in the recycle bin. "What we have for dinner?"

Dave, relieved that Gerd moved onto another subject, smiled. "We're about out of the usual." He scratched his chin, then pointed at Gerd. "We will feast like men! Wait here!"

Dave left Gerd standing in the kitchen, waiting and looking slightly confused. Scooby, either picking up on the conversation, or just happy to be in the kitchen, started pawing at his bowl.

Dave returned with a shotgun in one hand, and a scoped rifle in the other. He tossed the shotgun to Gerd. Gerd fumbled and almost dropped it. He held the shotgun gingerly, as if Dave had handed him the fire of the gods. Scooby, seeing the weapons and knowing meat was coming, grabbed his bowl in his mouth and sat at the sliding glass door, pawing at it.

"We will stalk our prey like cats, strike like eagles and feast like pigs!" Dave shouted, thumping the rifle to his chest. He laughed at the look on Gerd's face. Dave handed him a box of shells. "Guess you'd better have a lesson first." Dave walked out the sliding glass door and into the woods behind the house.

Gerd followed, carefully holding the weapon as if expecting it to start firing off dozens of rounds at the slightest touch. "No more vegetables for dinner, thank God."

* * *

"So you ended up shooting your dinner?" Mathias asked, tugging on a branch as Gerd sawed away.

"Yes. I think Dave was looking for deer or something. A boar charged, and I dropped it with one blast from the shotgun," Gerd replied, with the last word in English. The limb broke free and fell to the ground. "A very impressive weapon; it stopped the boar cold. We had it cleaned and cooking within an hour."

"Nice! Mr. and Mrs. Sizemore haven't needed to go hunting yet. They had plenty of food stored away. I sure hope they eventually let me try, especially with one of his firearms," Mathias replied as Gerd helped him drag the branch over to the pile of detritus. "I think, however, that Mr. Sizemore would rather I save ammunition and use the bow he has. The damned thing looks like some torture device. Pulleys and wires everywhere, rails for holding the arrow, and other parts I can't recognize. It is extremely quiet and easy to use, though. An intriguing weapon." Mathias was staying with an older couple that took him in as a son.

"You'd love the shotgun. Smooth and very powerful. Not that I needed to, but I had it reloaded and ready to fire before the boar hit the ground. It's a wonder any of us survived the battle," Gerd said, remembering the leg wound he received that frightful day. "I wonder how bad the Americans chewed up the men marching on Jena."

"The way I hear it, not too bad, actually." One of Mathias' hosts, Mrs. Sizemore, was also an excellent source of rumor, gossip and news. Gerd found that Mathias wasn't shy in sharing any of it with his coworkers. "There is some girl who is supposed to be an incredible shot with a rifle. She apparently took out most of the officer types before anyone knew what was going on. They folded before really going nose-to-nose with the Americans."

"Lucky for them." Gerd started sawing on another limb. "When are the prisoners coming here?"

"They're already here, but not as prisoners," Mathias replied.

"How do you always know these things?" Gerd asked, a little exasperated.

"I suffer through hours of conversation with Mrs. Sizemore to get a few details. Mr. Sizemore says he let me stay with them just to 'run interference on the wife' as he put it."

Gerd laughed, understanding the meaning if not the translated idiom.

* * *

Hermann sipped his beer slowly, keeping his eyes on the crowd. Pieter and Jan were also eyeing the crowd. Most of the men from Jena were packed into Thuringen Gardens for their first night off after being inducted into the American Army.

"What an unusual place," Pieter said softly.

"What an unusual week," Hermann added. A few days prior, he had barely escaped death. Most of the other men on horseback, especially those with plumage on their heads, were swatted down by an unseen and unheard weapon. Hermann had immediately sensed the trend, dove off his horse and hid among the men. In short order, they had all surrendered under the best of terms. At the time, he actually looked forward to fighting with the obviously wealthy and powerful Americans. His first impression was fast changing. "Naïve bastards."

"Sir?" Pieter asked, cocking his head to the side.

"The Americans, naïve," Hermann repeated. "They could take any city, crush any army, and here they are, letting us sit on our asses and drink beer while they worry about refugee camps."

"Weak," Jan commented. He was always short on words, and those he did speak were often in agreement with Hermann. Hermann favored his efficient brutality over his "intellectual" dialogue.

"That's right my nearly mute friend, weak," Hermann said, pointing to his beer, "so get us some more." Hermann cuffed Jan and sent him on his way.

"I have to say, this could be a most profitable diversion, sir," Pieter said, once Jan had left.

"What diversion is that, Pieter?" Hermann replied.

Pieter smiled. "Our temporary stop in Grantville, sir. There are some things here that would be in extremely high demand in other parts of . . . well, anywhere, really."

"How do you propose we liberate the naïve Americans of some of their underutilized valuables? More importantly, how do we get out of here without having them looking for us with their damned vehicles?"

"As I said, sir, a profitable diversion."

* * *

"What's the matter?" Mathias asked. Gerd had talked his coworker into joining him at Thuringen Gardens for some drinks before heading home for the day. Apparently, most of the new arrivals from Jena also had the same idea.

"Why did you stop? Do you see one of those underdressed American women?" Mathias looked out in the crowd.

"Oh shit," Gerd muttered.

"I don't see her! Who are you looking at?" Mathias started jumping a little to look over the crowd.

"Stop, you fool!" Gerd growled, grabbing Mathias and dragging him to the side. "I see Hermann."

"Who the hell is Hermann?" Mathias protested, yanking his arm free from Gerd's grip.

Gerd took a moment to breathe deep before continuing. "Of course, you wouldn't know him. I suffered under him all of the winter and spring, before joining up with you guys."

"What, do you owe him money or something?"

"No," Gerd replied. He looked back over to the table where Hermann was sitting. His right-hand man Pieter was where he always was, next to Hermann. Hermann's two other favored thugs, Jan and Christopher, were nowhere to be seen. "He is one of the most vile men I have ever known. A bastard's bastard. What the hell is he doing here?"

"I imagine he was brought back after the battle at Jena," Mathias replied, giving Gerd a concerned look. "We've both known our share of bastards. What's the problem?"

"Let's get out of here. They are trouble, and I don't want him to see me." Gerd turned around and took off at a fast walk without waiting for Mathias.

* * *

Dave awoke to the sound of Scooby barking. He realized his watch alarm was beeping. It usually served to wake Scooby up, and Scooby in turn would wake up Dave. He rubbed his eyes and put his watch on.

"Stupid damned Ring of Fire," he muttered as he skulked into the kitchen. Everyone had been working hard ever since the Ring of Fire, and his tree-trimming crews were no exception. He hadn't had a day off since, but set his alarm early this morning to get one last good breakfast in before the cereal ran out.

Dave pulled open the cupboard and pulled out the last box of cereal. He got the milk out of the fridge. It wasn't the pasteurized, homogenized two-percent milk he was used to, but it was white, wet and helped the cereal go down.

"Come on, schlafkopf!" he hollered. "This is our last day of Lucky Charms for the rest of our lives!" They had agreed to make it a special occasion as the last of the cereal was consumed.

Dave got out two bowls and two spoons. He filled both with cereal and threw the empty box away. "I don't want to start without you, hurry up!" Since Gerd was moving slow, Dave figured he had time to get some coffee going. Coffee was running out too, so he decided to add it to their last "twentieth-century breakfast" for the foreseeable future.

"God damn it, wake up!" Dave yelled. He had already downed a cup of coffee with no peep from Gerd. "The best part of waking up, my ass," he muttered while walking to the living room. He turned on the stereo and set the volume to an uncomfortable level. A Rolling Stone's song started, causing the walls to buzz.

Gerd stumbled out of his room a minute later, punched several buttons on the stereo before finally hitting the power, and flopped into a chair at the kitchen table.

"What the hell's wrong with you? Stay up late with a lady friend?" Dave asked, pushing a coffee mug towards Gerd.

"Nein. I sleep bad." Gerd picked up the cup and held it both hands. "Remember our conversation about new men from Jena?"

"Mmhmm."

Gerd got quiet and looked away quickly. Dave was about to say something before he continued. "Well, I . . . met some guys at Thuringen Gardens. They keep me up all night."

"Ah, some drinking buddies!" Dave said with a smile. "We could use some more drinking buddies. Invite them over."

Gerd almost dropped his coffee mug. "I . . . I didn't catch their names. Probably won't see them again."

"Hmm, okay," Dave said, setting his mug down and grabbing a spoon. "This is the last of the Lucky Charms, man, enjoy it while you can!"

Gerd finally managed a smile. He picked up his spoon and started on his bowl.

* * *

"This will do nicely!" Pieter said, with a savage grin. He racked the slide on the shotgun.

The three of them were sitting around a small fire on the edge of the refugee camp. Most of the inhabitants had quickly learned to keep their distance from the three men. It was evening, and they had spent the day familiarizing themselves with the tools of the American Army.

"I don't understand what that Simpson man meant when he called this the 'Elmer Fudd Special,' " Hermann said, holding up the large double-barreled shotgun issued to him. Tom Simpson spoke fair German, but during the weapons issuing process, he didn't elaborate on the strange term. Hermann, thinking it was probably the name of the inventor, and wanting to keep a low profile, hadn't asked. "However, it will indeed do nicely."

"Nice," Jan growled, sticking his large finger in the barrel of the weapon issued to him.

"Unfortunately, they are keeping a tight hand on the ammunition," Pieter added. They were not issued ammunition, and were instead given spent shells to practice operating the weapons.

"Only for these shotguns. We have all the powder we need for our pistols." Hermann gestured, with the shotgun, to their wheel locks. The wheel locks were normally a hot commodity, and Hermann had felt fortunate to have just one, prior to Jena. In one violent moment, he and his comrades learned how obsolete the pistols had become. As such, the Americans had no use for them, and Hermann had taken several from other fallen mercenaries.

"Not too tight," Jan said, smacking his fist into his other hand.

"What was that, you lout?" Hermann said impatiently. Hermann made it a point to always act annoyed at everything Jan said or did.

"I think he meant we could get ammunition easily, for the new guns that is," Pieter replied for Jan.

Jan nodded.

"Do you care to tell us how?" Hermann poked Jan with the end of his shotgun.

"There," Jan said, pointing to some of the American houses visible from their fire.

Hermann was about to tear into Jan about how all the Americans have ammunition because they all have weapons, but stopped himself. If Jan thought he could get ammunition from an American home, Hermann was inclined to let him try. Jan had a way of getting things done. If not, Hermann knew he had one less person to split any loot with.

Hermann sat back a moment in thought. He looked at Pieter and considered the plan Pieter brought up at the beer garden. Pieter returned the look, nodded and winked. Hermann smiled, glad that at least one of his smart men was still around. Christopher, unfortunately, did not survive the battle at Jena. Pieter's original plan, slightly modified to allow time for Jan to get ammunition from an American home, would work nicely.

* * *

"No, NO!" screamed the old man.

Gerd hesitated, earning a backhand from Hermann.

"You gutless cur, he's obviously hiding something!" Hermann snarled.

Jan pulled back on the old man's arms tighter and smiled. "Do it."

Gerd tried to postpone the inevitable by reheating the knife over the candle.

"For God's sake, young pup," growled Hermann. He grabbed the hand Gerd was holding the knife with. "The longer you wait, the longer this old bastard suffers."

Hermann guided, by force, Gerd's knife-wielding hand towards the man's stomach. He slowly pressed the knife in. The hot tip sent an acrid smell of burnt hair, skin and blood into the air. Hermann released his grip.

"Pull it out and heat it again," Hermann said, sounding bored.

Gerd pulled the knife out, and stuck it back over the candle, blood sizzling. He felt like he was going to throw up at any moment.

"Please," the old man whispered.

"What?" Jan said, driving his knee into the man's back.

"Please," came another weak whisper.

"Speak up." Hermann grabbed the man's thinning hair and lifted his limp head.

"Please, no more."

"Gerd, give him a reminder." After a moment's hesitation, Hermann turned to face Gerd. "I don't want to tell you twice."

Gerd stuck the knife slowly in the man's stomach.

"Where is it, you bastard?" Hermann yelled at the old man. "Where's your stash? Give it up! Give it up! Give it up . . ."

* * *

" . . . get up! Man, get up! I'll sic Scooby on you!"

Gerd woke up with a flinch. Dave stopped shaking him.

"What the hell's been going on lately?" Dave asked, opening the blinds in the room. "You've been oversleeping and looking like hell."

Gerd sat up and rubbed his eyes. "Was ist . . . what time is it?"

"You're not late, but only because I bothered to check on you," Dave answered. "Still don't have a lot of time. We're going to start clearing some trees to the north. Looks like they might run a line up to Jena."

Gerd got out of bed without comment and lumbered to the bathroom.

"Good morning to you, too." Dave went to the kitchen, concerned, and started preparing breakfast.

* * *

"Remember, don't make a sound, and avoid anyone. No need to make them look for murderers," Hermann whispered. He handed a matchbook and sack to Jan.

"Nice." Jan took the sack and matchbook with a smile.

"When you find enough shells, pick a shed, not a house, to light. We don't need to give them a reason to look for a murderer or an arsonist, make them think it was an accident," Pieter added.

Jan stood up and walked quickly to the first house. Hermann and Pieter stayed behind cover, with an axe handle, to quietly take care of any witnesses. Hermann had picked midmorning rather than night to make their move, as the houses would likely be unoccupied. He also wanted daylight to navigate quickly out of town.

Jan disappeared around the back of the house. After a few long moments, he walked quietly out the front door. He had the sack in his hand, with something in it, and smiled.

"He's really good at this, you know," Pieter whispered.

Hermann nodded. "He only needs the occasional flogging to keep him on his toes."

Jan continued to the next house and took much longer. Hermann was about to send Pieter to go and get him, when he finally appeared at the front door. He shook his head and pointed to the bag. It didn't look any fuller.

Jan hurried to the back of the third house they had cased. After a few moments, he quickly walked back the way he came, shaking his head, indicating with his free hand that someone was sleeping inside.

Hermann waved Jan over to a house farther down the street. Jan nodded and proceeded towards it at a fast walk. Hermann and Pieter crept through the edge of the woods, keeping pace.

"He needs to slow down, he's too obvious," Pieter hissed.

"He'll be done soon enough, get ready to move." Hermann hustled over to their gear, as Pieter followed.

Jan was in and out of the last house before they had gathered all the gear. He had a huge smile on his face and the sack had several more boxes in it. He disappeared behind the house for a minute before returning. A small wisp of smoke was coming from the backyard.

"Hurry," Jan said as he approached.

Hermann grabbed the sack as they hustled into the woods. It held five boxes of shotgun shells. One of them was labeled "20 Gauge" and the rest "12 Gauge." When they were issued their weapons, they were told that the weapons were made for 12-gauge shells. Hermann would have normally backhanded Jan for something like that, but he was too happy to have four boxes of usable ammunition.

"Perfect. Let's get out of here, we have a package to pick up," Hermann whispered. They headed northwest.

* * *

"This is not rocket science!" Dave hollered.

Gerd sighed and lowered the .22 rifle. Of the ten soup cans on the ground fifty yards away, only one had any holes in it, and only two holes at that. Fifteen spent .22 cartridges were on the ground next to him. "Ja ja, I know, and Germans make rocket science. You say that before!"

"Tell you what, forget about the .22. You do fine with the shotgun anyways." Dave had spent the afternoon after work trying to teach Gerd marksmanship with a rifle, so Gerd could help hunt as well. He was fast deciding it was a wasted afternoon. Gerd had done well enough by killing a boar with a shotgun slug a few days ago.

"Mathias say the Sizemores have a bow. I can use that, and not use ammo. I can ask him tomorrow."

Dave made an overdramatic display of slapping his forehead. "I haven't used that thing in years!" He turned and ran into the garage, leaving Gerd outside, unloading the remaining .22 cartridges. After rummaging in the garage for a few minutes, he seemed to find what he was looking for.

"Got it!" Dave ran out with a crossbow. "Oh, crap, I'd better get the foam target for it, so we don't ruin all the bolts." After a few more minutes of rummaging, Dave came out and quickly had the crossbow ready and the target set up.

He handed Gerd the crossbow. "I hope you have a strong back, it's set pretty tight. It doesn't use sights like the rifle, but a bead and . . . damn dude!"

Gerd yanked the string back and locked it with little apparent effort. He slid a bolt into place and sighted on the target. Gerd fired and the bolt hit a few inches high, but horizontally centered. "Much better."

"Definitely," Dave added. "Again."

Gerd repeated the process and put the next one directly in the middle.

"You'd better stop before you Robin Hood my bolt and ruin it," Dave laughed.

"Can you tighten it? These little wheels make easy to pull back," Gerd said, pointing to the cams.

"Uh . . . sure. I think I have some Allen wrenches handy. However, I think the bolt might punch through a deer if we do that, and I don't want to lose any. Let's leave the setting where it is, gorilla boy." Dave took the crossbow back from Gerd.

"Mathias is coming over tonight. He is bringing some ladies from the camp, and some more real beer!" Gerd said as they walked back to the house. Mathias and the Sizemores lived fairly close to the camps. He was always meeting women there and trying to get them to meet his friends.

"What was wrong with my beer? I still don't understand why you're so happy it's gone."

Gerd smiled and didn't answer.

* * *

Hermann, Pieter and Jan had been moving for over an hour without being seen by anyone. They had heard some strange sirens on some vehicles heading back in the direction of the houses Jan had robbed, but nothing else. Hermann saw one of the vehicles, a red one. One of the many markings on it had the word "Fire" in English, raising Hermann's hopes that the American police were not involved. Jan, despite his typical brutality, was a remarkably hands-free thief. It was possible no one would know they were robbed for hours, even days.

* * *

"Ja. Ich verstehe," Gerd said into the phone.

"Did Mathias get stood up?" Dave asked, while Gerd was on the phone. He must have detected the obvious disappointment in Gerd's voice.

Gerd nodded. "Sorry."

"Damn!" Dave put the box of Twister back in the closet. "The beer and Twister combo would have worked, too, I know it!"

"Ja . . . Ja . . . tschüs," Gerd said into the phone, and hung up.

"So what happened?" Dave asked.

Gerd suppressed a smile. Dave was learning German, but much slower than Gerd was learning English. He could still safely rant in German without Dave picking up on too much.

"He say there was a fire several houses down, in someone's shed, this morning. He was helping rebuild it. Also, someone rob two houses, maybe more. They were checking all the houses."

"Well, let's head to T-Gardens. Maybe we'll meet some ladies there." Dave stood up and grabbed his jacket.

"I, uh . . ." Gerd hesitated. He didn't want to risk running into Hermann and his thugs there. "If these house robbed by someone, maybe we should stay?"

"It was probably just kids, stole some cigarettes and lit the barn up by accident. I'm not worried about it, Scooby has it covered." Scooby, hearing his name, ran to the kitchen full of hopes.

"All right, but . . ." Gerd sighed. He really didn't want to have anything to do with Hermann. "Bring your pistol. In case they not kids, I don't want to get robbed on the way. Also one less thing to steal."

Dave shrugged. "Well, I don't mix beer and guns, but I'm on a mission to find women tonight. I don't want beer goggles interfering with that anyway."

Gerd smiled. He inwardly hoped that Dave would meet Hermann tonight. More to the point, he hoped Dave's .357 would meet Hermann. "All right, let's go."

"What are you worried about, anyway? You pull that crossbow back like it's a slingshot! You could throw some young punk across the street."

* * *

Dave decided Gerd was right. They should have stayed home. He was sharing a table with Gerd, three lovely ladies, and Johann, one of the Germans newly inducted into the Army after Jena. It was all probably a perfect evening with friends new and old, except the only other person who spoke English was Gerd. He was too busy flirting and having fun to translate for Dave.

Dave's hopes flared a little when he spotted Tom Simpson. Granted, Tom didn't have any women with him, but he spoke both English and German and was a fun guy. Dave waved him over.

"Hey there L-T!" Dave shook Tom's hand. "Congratulations on a successful military campaign. Care to reap the rewards of peace by helping me chat it up with some of these ladies?"

Tom shook his head. "I'd love to, but I'm here on official business."

"That's a damned shame. What's going on?"

"A few of the new arrivals from Jena failed to muster this morning. They probably deserted, but in case they're screwing around here, we need to grab them. They have some weapons with them. Some of our weapons, that is." Tom was scanning nearby people.

"No shit, huh? There was a fire this morning and some break-ins, you think it might be them?"

"Could be," replied Tom. He turned to the other people at the table and asked them, in German, if they knew or saw anything. Dave was pleased he picked up most of Tom's German. He knew he was a little slow in learning the language. The ladies shook their heads, while Gerd paused before shaking his head. He looked a little ashen.

Johann stood up, in respect for his new superior, before replying with a nein.

"All right," Tom said, turning back to Dave. "The bastards probably just took off with a couple of shotguns. We didn't give any ammo to them yet, though. They're likely halfway to Leipzig by now. Damn it!" Tom gnawed on his lower lip hard enough that it looked painful to Dave. "Well, we're going to keep searching around here. Keep your eyes open. They won't be in any uniforms or camouflage, but will have our shotguns. None of them speak a lick of English, to my knowledge."

"All right, hope it works out." Dave shook his hand again.

"Catch you later, thanks." Tom stormed off through the crowd.

Dave and Johann sat back down. Johann started talking with one of the women again. Dave looked across the table, and noticed a face missing.

"Hey, where did Gerd go?" Dave exclaimed. Johann knew little English, but understood the meaning and shrugged. The other ladies did the same. "That's odd. I hope he comes back with some pretzels."

Dave wasn't too worried, Gerd was having fun talking to one of the girls, and would surely be back to pick up where he left off. Dave decided to try again with one of the other ladies.

"So, uh . . . Wie heisst du? Whoops, my bad. Wie heissen Sie?"

* * *

Dave got concerned about Gerd after about an hour and a half. He called back to the house, with no answer. He spent another fifteen minutes walking around the area looking for him, with no luck. Dave decided to head home before the sun set.

* * *

When he opened the front door, Scooby was there to meet him.

"Gerd!" Dave hollered. "Where the hell are you?"

He went through all the rooms and around the outside of the house looking for Gerd, with no luck. He finally plopped on the couch and turned on the TV. The marquee said that Memphis Belle would start in an hour. Dave hoped Gerd would show up by then. As much as his German friend loved Top Gun, he should like tonight's movie. Of course, Dave recalled, it pitted Germans and Americans against each other.

The thought abruptly vanished when loud whining came from the kitchen. Dave stood up and walked towards it.

"I fed you this afternoon, butthead," Dave grumbled. When he got in the kitchen, Scooby was sitting and pawing at the back door, whining and wagging his tail. His bowl was in his mouth. "Ohhh SHIT!"

* * *

Hermann heard Jan's quiet whistle. He and Pieter shuffled across the road to Jan's position. The sun had been down for about a half hour, and they were beyond the lights of Grantville. They had followed one of the American highways out, keeping a slow pace, out of sight in the adjacent woods. They finally had to cross it to keep heading northwest. There was no indication the Americans were looking for them, but they kept quiet anyway.

"How much farther do you think?" Hermann whispered.

"Not sure. This is still American land that was put here from the Ring of Fire," Pieter replied. "If what they told us is right, we'll be in German land shortly. The effect ends three miles from the center of town."

"The outhouse we want is about two leagues west of Jena."

"We're on track, sir. We will most likely get there before dawn."

"We may need daylight to find our little treasure." Hermann starting walking, smacking Jan into motion as he passed by.

Pieter and Jan fell in behind him.

"This works out well. We only have to split it three ways, not five. Gerd and Christopher aren't joining us," Hermann snorted. "Poor Christopher is dead and Gerd ran off like a girl months ago."

"He was weak. Good riddance." Pieter spat.

"No," Jan stated flatly.

Hermann turned to look at Jan. He stared for several moments before finally backhanding Jan. "Do I always have to prompt you? Will you ever just spit it out without encouragement?"

Jan rubbed his chin and smiled. "I saw him."

Hermann stopped and pointed his shotgun in Jan's face. "For God's sake, man. I think you like it when I hit you. No more games, talk!"

Jan lost the smile. "When we were in the Gardens. He was there. I don't think he saw me."

"Or the rest of us?" Pieter asked.

Jan shrugged.

"Damn!" Hermann hollered. "He might have already grabbed it!"

"I doubt it, sir. He's too soft, and probably has nightmares about that old man. If it is indeed gone, we can always sneak back into town and beat it out of him."

Hermann nodded. "I think I'll send Jan by himself. He'd attract less attention. We'll worry about that if we can't find the sack. We still need to get away from town."

* * *

"No, it's not a missing persons issue. He took off. He took my shotgun, too, and who knows what else!" Dave shouted into the phone.

"So this is a robbery? He lives with you . . ."

"Look, who else is on duty?" Dave got frustrated.

"Fred Jordan."

"Put him on." Dave rubbed his temples. Hopefully Fred would see it as a more urgent situation.

"Fred here, what's up?"

"Fred! My boarder, Gerd, has taken off with my shotgun."

"When did you last see him?" Fred asked.

"We were at Thuringen Gardens. I turned to talk to Tom and he took off. I came home an hour or so later, and he wasn't here, and neither was the shotgun."

"Okay. Any idea where he might have gone?" Fred continued, the sound of scribbling audible in the background.

"Not really. I don't think he really had much to drink, either." Dave was glad he didn't have any. He wanted a clear head.

"Does he have any beef with Tom? Did you or Tom say anything that might have pissed him off or something?"

Dave paused for a moment before answering. "No, I don't think he had any problem with Tom. I'm thinking," Dave sighed. "Tom mentioned some missing men from Jena. New guys brought into the Army. He thought they might have deserted."

"All right. I heard that from Tom as well. They sent out a few guys on bikes, but didn't see anything. His boys in Jena have been told to be on the lookout, in case the deserters went that way. You think he joined them?"

"I really have no idea," Dave sighed, knowing the frustration in his voice was too obvious.

"Hey, we'll figure this out, try to relax a little. Tom was going to send some of the new recruits on a combined field exercise and search party. I don't think they're going to find much on foot, though. This counts as enough of an emergency to use the truck. I'll be at your place at dawn. Be ready to roll when I get there." Fred hung up the phone before Dave could say anything else.

Dave went to the closet in his room and yanked the door open. He pulled his M-1 Garand out of the back and headed for the kitchen. He field stripped it and began cleaning.

* * *

Hermann squinted in the near darkness. The moon was out, but not full.

"I think we just head west from here," Pieter whispered. The area looked familiar. A faintly visible road wound its way east and west.

"We'll wait here until morning. We won't be able to find the loot without light, and I'd rather sleep now so we can grab it, leave, and get as far away from Grantville as possible."

* * *

Gerd's legs burned like fire. He didn't know how much of a head start Hermann and the rest had, but he was determined not to miss them on account of not running fast enough.

He had scouted the route once before. It was shortly after Gretchen had set most of the detained soldiers free. He was given the benefit of the doubt at the time for being new to that group of mercenaries. Luckily, no one seemed to know about the horrors he was complicit in committing with the likes of Hermann. Before being picked for Dave's tree-trimming crew, he took a day to find the sack of gold and other trinkets that he helped steal from the old man west of Jena. Jan had hidden the sack in an outhouse, so that Hermann and others wouldn't be forced to "share" with other mercenaries, or have it outright stolen. Gerd had located the sack, and then left it in place, buried in the same sort of filth that desired it. Gerd still had no idea where the old man got all the loot from. It didn't matter if the old man had ten times as much, Gerd thought, it wasn't worth taking a soul. Taking a soul and damning another, he thought.

Gerd ignored the burning in his legs and kept running.

* * *

Dave was restless the whole night, and didn't sleep. He had cleaned the Garand four times, and the pistol twice. He heard a car pull up in front of his house as he started to work on the pistol again.

"I don't know when I'm coming back, Scoobs. This is your lucky day." Dave pulled out a large chunk of cooked boar from the freezer and tossed it on the floor. The sun had just peeked over the horizon and Dave heard a honk from outside. He came out of the door with his Garand in hand, and got in the police four by four. Fred put the truck in gear and floored the gas.

"Which way are we headed?" Dave asked.

"For now, we'll just take the highway out. I don't think we need to head to Jena, given that Tom's already got a small garrison up there," Fred replied. "I hope we just find him walking down one of the highways, though he's been gone long enough to be in German lands by now. We'll hit some of their roads, too, and see what we see. The woods are too dense to really drive into, and there's too much area to cover. If he's not walking alongside a road, this is a lost cause."

"The way I hear it, Tilly's army is north of here. If the deserters don't join back up with them, they'll probably head roughly north, over familiar ground. I can't even guess what Gerd has in mind." Dave slapped a clip into the rifle and pulled his hand free as the bolt slammed shut.

"Damn, man, you going to open up on him with that antique? I hope I never piss you off!"

"Probably won't." Dave smiled. "However, he is armed, and so are the deserters. I'm not sure if he's rushing to join up with them or what. He might even have a grudge against them."

"How much would it bother you if he shot those deserters if, say, they killed his wife or daughter? The way I hear it, many of the guys in these mercenary armies are as much victims as perps," Fred offered. "I'm not sure what Dan or the others would do with him if that's the case. A jury of our peers would let him go."

"Don't talk around it, I heard about that Gretchen thing." Dave smiled. "Frontier justice had a bit of a rebirth after the Ring of Fire."

* * *

Hermann saw Jan waving them forward. He and Pieter hustled up to Jan's position. The small cluster of houses was much as they left them months ago, except the houses had long since stopped burning, leaving charred skeletal remains. The rising sun cast long shadows across the ravaged crossroads. The only untouched structure was a lone outhouse.

"Funny the men didn't burn that," Pieter commented.

"Some things are indeed sacred, especially to a soldier," Hermann replied.

The three of them made quick work of tearing the outhouse away from the underlying pit. Jan set his shotgun on the ground and stared inside the hole, with his hands over his eyes.

"Still too dark." Jan stood up and let out a deep breath.

"See if you can't find a large stick or board to fish it out with." Hermann pointed to both Jan and Pieter.

Pieter returned quickly with a hoe retrieved from one of the collapsed barns. "This should work."

Jan took the hoe from Pieter and started poking around in the pit. When he had hidden the bag, he'd tied a rope to it to help later pull it out. He dug around for several minutes before Hermann interrupted.

"Is it in there or not?" he asked.

Jan stood up and shrugged. "Still too dark to tell."

Hermann let out a sigh. "I'd like to know if we have to send you back to Grantville to beat some answers out of our friend Gerd. Would you rather dig in filth all day looking for a sack that isn't there, or be beating the piss out of Gerd by noon?"

Jan smiled. "Beating Gerd."

"That's right. So tell me, will Gerd have the sack, or is it still swimming here in this shit?"

Jan didn't answer. He got back on his belly and continued looking for the sack.

"Got it," Jan said with little emotion, five minutes later. He stood up and pulled the hoe out. A rope was looped around the end.

"Excellent!" Hermann almost grabbed the rope with his bare hands, before remembering where it had been sitting for many months.

Jan took his shirt off and wrapped it around his hands. He grabbed the excrement-soaked rope and pulled out the sack. The sack was equally soaked. Still working with his wrapped hands, he managed to untie the sack. Inside was another, much less soaked sack. Jan threw his shirt down and grabbed the second sack. He pulled it free and set it on the ground with an audible clink.

"Ah hah!" Hermann clapped his hands and laughed.

"Don't worry, my friend, we'll be able to buy you another shirt!" Pieter squealed, patting Jan on the back.

The sound of the bolt flying through the air might have registered in Hermann's mind, but it was moving too fast and too quiet for any of them to even realize what it was before it hit.

Jan staggered back while clutching his lower stomach. The bolt had punched clean through, instantly staining both sides of his undershirt with his own blood.

* * *

Gerd set the crossbow on the ground and picked up the shotgun. Instinctively, he had wanted to shoot Hermann first. Logic dictated that Jan, being the most dangerous in a fight, took the first hit.

He sat perfectly still. During their brief hunting trip, Dave told Gerd that camouflage coveralls made a man virtually invisible. The less he moved, the better the concealment. Gerd, having survived the battle at Badenburg, was already a true believer in the American camouflage.

Hermann and Pieter ran for one of the burnt outbuildings while Jan fell to the ground. Pieter fired an unaimed shot into the woods on Gerd's left, sending hundreds of small pellets ripping through the leaves.

Gerd smiled. During his brief shotgun lesson with Dave, Gerd was told to use birdshot only when hunting birds. He had ended up killing their dinner with a slug. Hermann the pig, Gerd thought, will get a slug as well.

Hermann and Pieter dove behind a section of collapsed roof as Gerd lined up his shot. He heard rapid talking followed by a moan from Jan. His fallen form raised an arm and pointed directly at Gerd. Gerd was about to shoot Jan again when Pieter leaned around the piece of roof and fired right where Jan pointed.

Gerd yelped as a couple of sharp stings bit into his shoulder. He clenched his jaw and lined up his shotgun with the piece of roof Pieter and Hermann were using for cover. He fired three rapid shots before pressing himself behind a tree. His shooting was rewarded with a startled grunt of pain from behind the roof.

Two rapid booms accompanied a shower of pellets, but the tree Gerd was behind provided plenty of protection. He slid three more slug shells into his shotgun before breaking cover and charging Hermann and Pieter's position. He had seen Hermann's doubled-barreled shotgun, and knew he would still be reloading. As he approached, he saw Pieter lean back around the roof, shotgun first, with his face partially covered in blood and splinters. Gerd fired from the hip. The shot went high, but forced Pieter to duck back behind the roof.

Gerd racked the slide on the shotgun, and ran to the opposite side of the roof. He turned the corner to find Hermann facing him, his double-barreled shotgun open as he fumbled to put more shells in. Gerd fired from ten feet away. The slug blasted dead center through Hermann's chest, and he collapsed to the ground in a mangled heap.

Pieter scrambled to turn and face Gerd, his backside covered in Hermann's blood. Gerd racked the slide. Pieter dropped his shotgun and threw his hands up. He had managed to make it to his knees. His face was covered in splinters and was bleeding in several places.

"Mercy, my friend," Pieter said quietly.

"You . . . you . . . bastard!" Gerd spat. Some part of him was wishing he had something better to say. His finger crept into the trigger.

"I never made you do . . ." Pieter's reply was cut short by a boom.

For the shortest of instants, Gerd thought he had fired. There was a numbing slap on his left thigh and Pieter went down hard, face first. Gerd struggled to maintain his footing as his thigh began to burn and seize up. As Pieter fell, Gerd saw Jan behind him, smiling and holding a smoking wheel lock. Gerd quickly put the shotgun to his shoulder and fired. The slug caught Jan in the chin and scattered his smile, along with the rest of his head, across the remains of the outhouse.

Gerd crumpled to the ground, his thigh oozing blood. A gurgling bloody cough came from Pieter's fallen form.

"Killed by the maniac Jan," Gerd snorted. He unzipped the coveralls and pulled them past his waist. He removed his belt and did his best to staunch the bleeding.

"Both of us," Pieter hissed through spit and blood. He let out a string of hacking coughs, forming a foamy pool of blood on the ground.

"I think not. You may have saved my life, just by being in the way." Gerd grunted as he tightened the belt over a rolled-up strip of cloth on the wound.

"Pigs."

"You and your two dead friends, sure!" Gerd laughed. He picked his shotgun back up and laid it across his lap.

"No, pigs!" Pieter gurgled. He used his head to nod in the direction Gerd came from.

Gerd looked over his shoulder and saw several wild pigs trotting from the woods. Using both his hands and one good leg, he spun around to face them. Pieter hacked out rough laughter.

"What are you laughing for? I've still got some fight in me. You don't." Gerd wasted no time, using his three-"legged" crawl, in distancing himself from Pieter. He topped off the ammo in the shotgun, and held it at the ready. He had two shells left in his pocket.

The animals approached Hermann's corpse first. They sniffed it briefly before taking a few tentative bites. Pieter's hacking cough and desperate attempts to move got their attention, and they approached him.

Gerd thought he might enjoy watching the pigs eat the bastards that had damned him. Hearing Pieter's screams changed his mind, quickly. He fired one round into Pieter's side, instantly silencing him. The shot sent the pigs running.

Gerd allowed himself to relax for a moment. He didn't feel his soul was any more or less damned, but he sensed profound satisfaction and closure, knowing all others involved were dead.

The pigs quickly regrouped. Gerd shuffled over towards the outhouse pit. He knew Jan's discarded shotgun would have more shells in it, even if they were likely birdshot. He propped his shotgun on his good knee, forcing himself to keep an eye on the pigs as they split their work between Hermann and Pieter.

Jan had one more wheel lock pistol hanging from his belt. Gerd took it. He struggled to his feet, and took a few tentative steps. He leg throbbed with deep, dull pain. He limped away slowly, looking over his shoulder. Several of the pigs started to follow him. He fired the wheel lock at one, missing. The pigs scattered. They quickly gathered again at the fallen bodies, apparently deciding Gerd wasn't worth the effort. He slung the shotgun over his shoulder, and concentrated on walking.

* * *

"What do we have here?" Fred brought the truck to a slow stop.

The small crossroads they approached contained the remains of a few burnt houses. There were several carcasses strewn about. They looked like men, given only that they had bloody clothing more or less on them. There were several pigs gnawing on the bodies. Some ran back into the woods at the sight of the truck

"If Gerd doesn't magically float down on a cloud and into the truck in five minutes, I say we get the hell out of here!" Dave clicked the safety off his Garand.

"You don't have to tell me, mister," Fred pulled his .45 from his holster.

The two got out of the truck and slowly approached the pigs. One turned to face them and Dave fired, dropping the squat animal where it stood. The remaining ones scattered.

"Any of them Gerd?" Fred asked quietly.

"I don't think so. These guys are all dressed like Germans. Gerd was fond of jeans." Dave started approaching one that appeared to be missing a head. As he did, his foot snagged on something. He looked down to see a crossbow bolt stuck in the ground. An aluminum one. "He was here."

"Check this out!" Fred said excitedly. He was tapping a sack with his foot. Several of the contents had spilled out. They all shined brilliantly. "If Gerd was here, why did he kill them and leave this stuff?" Dave didn't answer.

Dave and Fred gathered the shotguns left on the ground and put them in the four by four. Dave put the sack in the truck as well. It smelled like it had been marinating in the outhouse for some time.

"Jeff is going to get a kick out of this," Dave giggled, pointing at the sack.

"Out of that?" Fred waved his hand in front of his nose. He bungied the sack down tight.

"Yeah, that. Amazing what wonderful treasures can be found in German outhouses."

Fred let out a tired laugh and motioned Dave inside the truck.

"We've retrieved most of the weapons, and found the deserters. I don't think we're going to find Gerd unless he wants to be found. Sorry, Dave, but we've got to head back into town and let Tom know. I can't justify burning any more gas over this whole ordeal," Fred said.

Dave nodded without comment.

* * *

Gerd had been convinced for the last hour that his next step would send him falling to the ground, and that he wouldn't be getting back up. It had been slow but steady going all morning, but as the afternoon wore on, he was beginning to have doubts about his leg. It was with great relief that he found the edge of the American road. Somehow, leaving behind the brutal world of mercenaries, torture and nonstop war had a physical effect he could feel. Over the months, the perfectly cut dirt wall had been smoothed out to a dirt slope connecting the German landscape with the American one. He eased his way down the slope, grunting with each step.

He wasn't sure how soon it would be before an American vehicle would travel by and see him. Not soon enough. The bleeding from his wound had stopped, but his leg was still swelling and seemed to get more tender with each step. As he had done for the past hour, he overrode the pain with willpower, and hobbled on.

Ten minutes later, biology overrode willpower, and Gerd found himself hurling towards the ground. He caught himself in the tumble, and managed to prevent any further injury. He tentatively worked his injured leg. It didn't budge, and he was instead rewarded with intense pain.

Gerd took off his shirt and bundled it under his head before zipping up Dave's hunting coveralls. He considered leaving the top unzipped and pulled down, knowing his white chest would catch a driver's attention much easier than the camouflage coveralls, but the afternoon sun was making its way to the horizon and was taking the temperature with it.

The events of the day, and being finally off his feet, quickly caught up with him. Gerd recalled something he read from Dave's small collection of textbooks from, as Dave called it, his "aborted college days" from the late twentieth century. He knew his body was on a collapse from an adrenaline surge, and he realized he'd had nothing to eat since the previous night. Gute Nacht, Gerd, was the last full thought he remembered before losing himself in the gentle shuffle of leaves and trees lining the American road.

* * *

"No, NO!" screamed Dave.

Gerd hesitated, earning a backhand from Hermann.

"You gutless cur, he's obviously hiding something!" screamed Hermann.

Jan pulled back on Dave's arms tighter and smiled. "Do it."

Gerd tried to postpone the inevitable by reheating the knife over the candle.

"For God's sake, young pup," growled Hermann. He grabbed the hand Gerd was holding the knife with. "The longer you wait, the longer Dave suffers." Hermann guided, by force, Gerd's knife-wielding hand towards Dave's stomach.

Gerd jerked the knife away from Dave's stomach and shoved it into Hermann's chest. "What in the hell are you sick bastards thinking?" Gerd screamed. He rammed the shotgun that suddenly appeared in his hands against Jan's face and pulled the trigger. Gerd was slightly surprised, as Jan's head exploded exactly as he knew it would.

"Mercy, my friend," Pieter oinked through his snout, as Gerd swung the shotgun towards him. Hermann's corpse turned into a pig and started nibbling on Pieter. "Mercy," Pieter said again, before being consumed.

"Let it go, Gerd. Let it go and come with me," Dave said. He turned and started walking out of the house and towards Grantville. "Let it all go, Gerd. Have a beer, watch a movie with me and Scoobs, and just leave all this behind."

Gerd struggled to follow Dave to Grantville, but found he couldn't walk fast enough, much less run. His leg wouldn't cooperate. Dave walked farther, looking over his shoulder and beckoning to Gerd.

Jan's headless form sat up and somehow started speaking, very loudly. "FRED DAMN NEAR RAN OVER YOU, YOU'RE ONE LUCKY SON OF A BITCH!"

* * *

Gerd sat up in a flinch. He was in the back seat of a police four by four, and Dave was in the front passenger seat and was still talking.

"If we hadn't driven by, you might have been lying there a bit longer. By the looks of your leg, you couldn't afford a bit longer. How in the hell did you make it this far on that leg anyhow?" Dave's voice betrayed an enormous amount of concern.

Gerd rubbed his eyes hard. Sleep was still drawing him in, and he tried to fight it off. "What happened?" He felt his voice come out in a croak.

The man driving the truck spoke up. "We might ask you the same thing, Gerd." Gerd remembered his name as Fred, one of Grantville's deputies. "We had three dead men back there, or what the pigs left of them. You didn't make off with their weapons, or that sack full of goodies. In fact, given where we found you, I'd say you were trying to hobble your way back to town. What gives?"

Gerd sat up slowly, shifting his weight to his right side as his left leg quickly reminded him of the lead ball still inside. "They were murderers. Thieves, rapists and murderers."

"Not to mention burglars and arsonists." Fred grumbled. "I take it they did their murdering before the Ring of Fire. You knew them from Tilly's army?"

Gerd nodded.

"Dare I ask how you became aware of their crimes?" Fred shifted his gaze from the road to the rear view mirror, looking right at Gerd.

Gerd shook his head.

"Punished outside Grantville for crimes committed outside Grantville. Hell, crimes committed before Grantville even existed," Dave said. Gerd caught Dave giving Fred a knowing look.

Fred's mouth bunched up in a suppressed smile and he shook his head. "As much as I criticized it before the Ring of Fire, I'm starting to miss the American criminal justice system."

* * *

Reverend Jones opened the door to find a large, dirty sack sitting at the stairs. A young man was walking away and towards a police truck.

"Hey, there! What's this about?" Reverend Jones asked.

The young man got into the truck before answering.

"Don't ask. It ain't a perfect world. Just put it to good use, Reverend." The truck pulled away.

It ain't a perfect world, the minister thought. That would be a good intro into my next sermon.

He leaned over to pick up the sack, and was caught off guard by the odor.

* * *

"Thanks Ms. Nichols," Dave said. "Don't be too gentle on him, though."

"He's a cutie; I can't make any promises!" Sharon replied, before turning to Gerd. "What happened to you, anyway?"

"I . . . uh . . . plead the fifth," Gerd stammered.

"Hey Gerd!" Dave hollered from the truck.

"Yes?" Gerd replied.

"If you have any other dark secrets in your past, can you get them sorted out before you come home? I'd just as soon not risk getting in the way!" The truck pulled away before Gerd could respond.

"Dark secrets, huh?" Sharon asked, dubious, as she led Gerd into the first aid tent.

"I plead the fourth? I thought it was the fifth! The sixth then?"

A Witch to Live

Walt Boyes

A. M. D. G.

He looked at the letters he'd just written at the top of the page. "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam," he breathed. "To the greater glory of God." He calmed himself as he had been taught in his novitiate, and began to write.

"Father Friedrich von Spee, of the Society of Jesus, to His Excellency, Mutius Vitelleschi, Father General of the Society," he wrote.

* * *

Branches slapped her face, roots grabbed at her feet. Veronica ran, exhausted and terrified. The forest was dark and there was no moon. She could hear the baying of the dogs behind her. Were they getting closer? She couldn't tell. She ran on. Her breath was tearing in her lungs. The pounding of her heart felt like hammer blows throughout her body. Behind her, the baying grew louder.

Suddenly she broke into a clearing. She had been braced to push branches out of her way and their sudden absence sent her sprawling. She spat the dirt and leaves from her mouth and scrabbled to her feet, swaying. She turned and faced back the way she'd run. Her face shaped a rictus of terror. She slowly backed up as the first dogs broke through the brush into the clearing.

She put up her arms to try to defend herself against the fangs of the dogs and kept backing up. She started as her back came up against something. It was the stump of a tree. She whirled around it, trying to keep it between her and the dogs. The stump was thin, only about a foot in diameter, and broken off just above her head. It was too small to hide behind, and too short to climb. The dogs snapped and snarled around her.

Voices and then horses and men carrying torches burst from the forest. A troop of cavalry surrounded the clearing and a couple of troopers took their crops and beat the dogs off the woman. The packmaster collected the dogs to one side of the clearing as two of the riders dismounted.

"Well, Father Eberhardt, what have we here?" The taller of the two spoke. He was tall, run to fat, and wearing a back and breast that could have used a polish. His pot helmet was still lashed to his saddle horn. "The witch, as I live and breathe!" In the torchlight, she could see the grin on his face, and her heart stuttered in her chest.

"Veronica Junius; the witch indeed," Father Eberhardt replied, pulling out his prayerbook. "Get her tied up and we can take her back."

"What for? We've got a nice stake she's hugging there. Let's burn her right here and get it over with."

"Captain, please," the priest bridled like a banty rooster. "There are forms we must follow. She has been found guilty of witchcraft, yes. But only in an ecclesiastical court. She must be relaxed to the civil arm, tried again and then you can burn her. Tomorrow. In Würzburg."

"What? And give that damned Jesuit, Von Spee, a chance to try to get her off? You heard what he wrote in his devil-inspired book, didn't you? She's a witch! She needs to burn! You know what she knows! We will take her to Suhl!"

Eberhardt spluttered as the soldier's fist grabbed his soutane and lifted him partway off his feet.

"Do you want to try me, priest? I want her dead, and His Excellency wants her dead. I have my instructions from the bishop. We will take her to Suhl, and burn her there. She has no friends in Suhl." The priest nodded and the captain released him and turned away.

"Get ready to move out!" he commanded. "We've a long way to go!"

The priest and the captain mounted. Two burly troopers muscled the woman onto the priest's horse behind him, and tied her to the saddle. The packmaster busied himself rounding up the dogs.

The troops dressed lines, and the captain motioned them forward.

* * *

Father Spee was still writing. "It is with a chastened heart that I accept your rebuke, Father General. I will amend myself so that in the future I will keep better control over such writings as Cautio Criminalis so that they are not printed against my wishes. But, with respect, Excellency, I must tell you that nothing in the work is false. I have attended the confessions of over two hundred witches up to now, and I have never heard one confess except after torture and the rack."

Von Spee put his pen down. He stood in his bedroom. It was spare, small and had a simple crucifix on the white, stuccoed wall as its only decoration. There was a bed against one wall, several shelves of books and papers, and the desk at which he had been writing. He stretched his neck, thought about sitting down and completing his letter, and then decided against it. He went to the bookshelf and took down a thin, well-thumbed volume. He looked at the title, Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius Loyola. How many times in his forty years of life had he read the book, done the exercises? He could not count.

"Eternal Lord of all things," he read, "I make my oblation with Thy favor and help, in presence of Thy infinite Goodness and in presence of Thy glorious Mother and of all the Saints of the heavenly Court; that I want and desire, and it is my deliberate determination, if only it be Thy greater service and praise, to imitate Thee in bearing all injuries and all abuse and all poverty of spirit, and actual poverty, too, if Thy most Holy Majesty wants to choose and receive me to such life and state."

Friedrich von Spee closed the book, put it back on the shelf, and taking his breviary, went down to the chapel to pray and to reflect.

The chapel was dark, with only a few candles and the Presence lamp lit. Through the tall, narrow, stained-glass windows, the late afternoon sun made colored pools on the floor. Von Spee breathed deeply as he entered. He loved the smell of the chapel. The scent of years of melting beeswax and incense was to him the odor of sanctity. He moved quietly down the main aisle, paused before the altar to genuflect, and knelt at the altar steps. As he knelt, he began to relax his mind, as he had been taught, and prepared to pray. He was grateful for all of the years of the discipline of the Society and the Spiritual Exercises. His mind quieted, and he grew still.

Von Spee remained kneeling motionless before the altar for several hours. He really did not notice the passage of time. In his mind, he saw again the images of the trials of the witches he'd seen. He saw the brave, the timid, the intelligent and the foolish all reduced to terror by application of the proper instruments of persuasion. He heard again the confessions to the judges. He saw the victims, for that is what he knew them to be, as they went to their deaths. He heard again many of them cursing God as they died.

"Lord Jesus," he prayed silently, "give me the strength to continue. Give me the courage to witness, and to comfort these poor innocents."

As he prayed, a sense of calm, of peace descended on him. Finally, he felt a sense of release. He stirred, stood, genuflected, and walked briskly down the aisle. He signed himself as he pushed open the heavy chapel door. There was the sound of activity coming from the gates. Curious, he moved to the top of the stairs.

The courtyard gate opened to admit a party on horseback. It was dark, and the group was preceded by linkboys with torches. As they moved into the courtyard, the light from a torch illuminated the face of one of the riders.

"Johann!" Von Spee rushed down the stairs into the courtyard. "My friend, I have not seen you in too long! What brings you to Würzburg?"

"It is you I have come to see, Friedrich." The man swung down from his saddle, and gripped von Spee's forearms in greeting.

"Come in, come in, then. We are just sitting down to supper, have you eaten?"

"Not yet. I was hoping to beg a meal and a bed from you this evening."

"No begging needed. We can talk during our meal."

Von Spee motioned to a young man in the robe of a novice.

"Albert, this is His Excellency Johann Philip von Schönborn, from Mainz. Father von Schönborn is secretary to the prince-bishop. He is an old student of mine from when I taught at the seminary in Trier. Have his horses and his party seen to, please. I will show him to his room."

The novice motioned to the guardsmen and the servants to follow him. Attendants took the horses off to the small stable on the first floor of the residence. The guards closed the courtyard gate after the linkboys were paid and sent off.

Von Spee turned and ascended the stairs, von Schönborn behind him.

Supper was light, as was common in a Jesuit residence. There was a plate of meat and some vegetables, some bread and a light wine, followed by fruit and cheese. Although born to noble families, neither priest missed the extravagant meals of court life. Both were spare and thin, Father von Spee to the point of gauntness.

"I have been using some of your hymns in the services at Mainz, Friedrich," Johann said around a slice of apple. "You have a way with words and the people seem to enjoy singing them. When will you print them in a songbook?"

"Probably never. They are simply scribblings, of no real account." Friedrich carved a piece of cheese, and stared at it. "And besides, I've just gotten into trouble for a book that was printed." He popped the piece of cheese into his mouth.

"Ah, yes! The Cautio Criminalis."

"Yes, that."

"You know, Friedrich, pardon me for saying this, but you are not looking well. How old are you now, forty?"

"Yes, yes, I am forty."

"Yet your hair is already gray, like an old man! And you keep yourself fit, too. So what is the problem, my friend?"

"It is the witchcraft trials, Johann. I do not know how much more of this I can stand."

"What do you mean?"

"It is regret that has turned my hair all gray," Friedrich said, looking at his hands, "regret that I have had to accompany so many witches to the place of execution and among them I found not one who was not innocent."

Johann stared at his older friend. "Not a single guilty one?"

"No."

"I have read your tract. Do you really believe that it is the torture that gets them all to confess? And that they are confessing false things to keep from being tortured again?"

"That is what I believe. It is not possible that so many people of stature, such as the nephew of the bishop of Bamberg, and the chancellor and several burgomasters there, could all be witches!"

"Do you not believe in witches, then?" Johann asked, his winecup poised.

"Of course I do! The Bible says they exist, and the Church says they exist, and I firmly believe they do exist. It is just that . . ." Friedrich's voice tailed off. He looked past Johann to a point in space.

"That what?" Johann prompted.

"I do not see how hanging someone from the ceiling with weights on their feet and bouncing them at the end of the rope can possibly be used to tell if they are lying or not!"

"Yes, I don't like the strappado either. Or the screws. Or the rack. But what else is there to do?"

"Look, Johann, you were good at logic when I taught it to you," Friedrich leaned forward intensely. "Is it logical to assume that someone who is being tortured will eventually tell the truth if they are tortured enough, or is it more logical to assume that they will say anything, anything at all, simply to stop the pain?"

Johann looked away. The silence grew intense. Finally he spoke.

"Have you heard about this new city that has appeared in Thuringia? It appeared like magic, they say, and is filled with warlocks and witches."

"You can't catch me out like that." Friedrich laughed, finishing his wine. "I have been writing to a friend of mine who is at the University in Jena."

"You have Protestant friends?" Johann said, eyebrow raised.

"Of course. How else to know the enemy?" Friedrich replied, smiling. "The city is called Grantville, which is English, and the people call themselves Americans and claim to have come from a time in the future when the New World is highly populated. Professor von Muenster, in Jena, has even been there, and says that though the things they have, and their works, are marvelous, they are artisans of great power, not warlocks."

"How did they come to be in Thuringia?" Johann replied.

"None of them knows. It is considered by them to be a miracle. Von Muenster writes that they have a very clear set of laws, and they are a republic, like the Dutch."

"What do they think of witches, then?" Johann asked.

"They don't believe in them," Friedrich said starkly. "They don't believe in them at all."

He paused, sitting still for a moment, then he turned to his friend.

"Johann, what if they are right? What if there are no witches? What if all the people we've burned are innocents? I have seen more than two hundred people burned! How can I face Almighty God with that on my soul, if there are no witches?"

"Ach, Friedrich," Johann said. He paused, then he breathed deeply.

"Now I must tell you the reason for my visit," he said slowly.

Von Spee looked at him, horror slowly dawning in his eyes.

"Eberhardt, the bishop's inquisitor in Bamberg has chased down the daughter of that man, Junius, who was the burgomaster of Bamberg before he was burned. He is taking her to Suhl, and will be trying her again there. He aims to burn her in Suhl because she has too many friends in Bamberg. My master the prince-bishop was informed of this by one of his intelligencers. He has sent me to ask you to go there and make sure that the trial is conducted properly."

Von Spee rubbed his face with one hand, and pushed back his hair.

"Why me? I am not in good odor with either the bishop of Bamberg or my own father general at the moment. You know his true mind, what does the prince-bishop expect me to do at Suhl?"

Johann looked at him, light from the table candle glittering reflected in his eyes.

"He too has read your tract. He is concerned as we all are, that innocent people may be suffering the vilest torture. And even though the Protestants also hunt witches, he is concerned that these trials are giving the Holy Office a terrible reputation. The Church, he says, should not compel its children to obey out of fear of torture."

He met von Spee's eyes. "He is a good man, Friedrich. He needs you to go, and report to him."

Von Spee straightened in his chair. He looked off into space for a few moments, and then sighed deeply.

"Very well, I shall go to Suhl. But I am going for myself, not for the prince-bishop, or the Society of Jesus. I am going for Friedrich von Spee, nothing more. And if she is innocent, I will not let her burn."

Johann nodded. "I think," he said slowly, "that my master will be pleased."

Von Spee blew out his breath. He rose.

"I must see to some things, if I am to leave in the morning, Johann."

"I believe that I and my guards will ride with you. We will have access to extra horses, and we will keep you safe," Johann said. "In the morning, then."

"In the morning, Johann."

* * *

Friedrich von Spee sat at the outside table at the Inn of the White Swan in Suhl, watching. He and von Schönborn had arrived earlier that morning. Von Schönborn was at the episcopal palace, delivering papers and seeing to the guardsmen. Friedrich had taken a walk through Suhl. They had arrived before Eberhardt, for which he was grateful.

An enormous American officer leaned over the left fender of a big metal vehicle and wiped his wet rag on the glass. The big metal wagon was standing in front of the inn where they were staying. Von Spee stared at it, thinking that it reminded him very much of the woodcuts he had seen of a Bohemian war wagon. There was another officer, not so large, using a brush and a bucket filled with soapy water on the wheels and the sides of the wagon.

The huge soldier had taken the armor off so he could wash the curved glass window in the front of the wagon and get the mud and smoke and guck off it.

"Hey Tom," the other soldier called, "Want a beer?"

"Sure, Heinrich, I'm just about finished here. We've got us a nice, clean APC. Just gimme a minute to put this back." Tom lifted the huge metal plate and set it gently down over the window of the war wagon. Heinrich tightened the bolts on the right side of the truck, while Tom did those on the left. "Tom" had an unusual accent but his German was fluent, von Spee noted, while "Heinrich" was clearly a native speaker. The only word von Spee could not understand was "aaypaysee" but it was clear that it was the name of the war wagon.

Finished, the two American soldiers strode to one of the other tables outside the inn and sat down not far from von Spee. Von Spee had his breviary out but was not reading. Fascinated, he just sat and listened. The barmaid brought beer, smiling.

"I'm glad you did that, not me," Heinrich said, blowing the head off his beer and taking a drink. "You are stronger than two oxen! And I hope to the Good God that you don't ever get mad enough at me to forget I'm your commander!"

"Me? Violent?" Tom slurped his own brew. "How could you ever think that? I am wounded, Captain! Wounded!"

"You are a big bullshitter, Tom Simpson. After you picked that one drunken bastard up and tossed him right through the door of this very inn, you can say that to me?" Heinrich declaimed.

"Yeah, well." Simpson drank his beer.

"You know, Heinrich, this garrison duty beats the hell out of marching around, and it sure beats fighting, but it is awful damn boring."

"Ja, Tom, but you know, it isn't going to be boring forever."

"You think they'll come through Suhl?"

"I don't know, but it is a good bet."

"When will they come?"

"Who knows? Don't get all, how do you Americans say it, all stressed out, ja, that's it . . . don't get all stressed out over it, eh? They will come when they come. It is our job to be ready."

"Yeah, well, I guess I ought to go out and see how the breastworks are coming."

"Tom, stop. Listen to me. Our men know what they are doing. You know that. What do you think they will do if you keep going out and looking over their shoulders?"

"I guess they'll think I'm nervous."

Heinrich nodded. "That's right. And you are. But you can't let them see it. So have another beer, and let's finish cleaning up the APC."

"Hauptmann Heinrich! Captain!" One of the sentries at the breastworks was running toward them. "Soldiers! Some soldaten coming are!"

"Who are they?" Heinrich asked.

"Don't know," the runner panted. "They have no banner. It is a small troop, but they have dogs and a woman with them."

"A woman?" Heinrich asked. Von Spee tensed, knowing who the soldiers and the woman must be.

"Ja, Hauptmann! She is riding behind one of the men."

Abruptly, Heinrich stood.

"We will come. Tell them to keep them at the gate. But do not fire on them!"

"Ja, Hauptmann!" The runner tore off back toward the American emplacements.

"Good, now Tom, let us go finish our beer, and then make an appearance."

"I see," said Tom. "It wouldn't do for either our men, or our visitors to believe that we were too anxious. Did I get it right?"

"Right in one." Heinrich smiled.

"Should we take the APC?"

"I don't think so. Let us walk."

"Suits me, Captain," Simpson said.

Von Spee waited until the two officers had gotten a couple of buildings down the street, and then he stood and tucked his breviary into the sash of his cassock, and quietly followed the soldiers.

The commander of the troop of soldiers was arguing with one of Heinrich's guards when Heinrich and Tom arrived at the gate. The American troops stood, and saluted as Heinrich walked up. Von Spee stopped, and stood in a doorway far enough away so he would not be noticed.

"What is going on, Sergeant Massaniello?" Heinrich asked, pleasantly. Simpson stood behind him, a little to one side.

Sergeant Massaniello, the soldier in command of the detachment, reported.

"This gentleman wishes to enter Suhl, sir!" Massaniello spoke in heavily accented German, obviously a courtesy to the strangers.

"And why does he wish to do that, Sergeant?" Heinrich asked, also in German.

"It appears that they have caught themselves a witch, sir, and they want to bring her in and put her on trial."

Tom Simpson began to look very angry. Von Spee sharpened his gaze, and looked closely at the huge American. Simpson started forward. Heinrich held up his hand. Simpson stood still. Heinrich thought, then he moved forward.

"Guten Tag," he said. "Good day."

"I am Captain Wolfgang, Ritter von Brun," the mounted commander replied. "I am the Commander of the Guard of His Eminence, Bishop Friedrich von Hatzfeld, of Würzburg-Bamberg. This is Father Joachin Eberhardt, the bishop's inquisitor."

Heinrich smiled. "I am Captain Heinrich Schmidt, of the Army of the United States. This is Lieutenant Thomas Simpson, and Sergeant Lawrence Massaniello. Welcome to Suhl, mein Herr Ritter. May I ask your purpose in coming here?"

"Father Eberhardt and I would like to use the courtroom here in Suhl, and the town square."

"For what?"

"We have apprehended a notorious witch, already tried before the ecclesiastical court in Bamberg, and we want to relax her to the secular authorities and burn her."

Von Spee noticed that all of the Grantville men were standing now, intent on von Brun. Each of the American soldiers appeared to be carrying an odd type of arquebus, small, and very light. Friedrich saw that all the guns were pointed at the incoming troop.

"Fine then," Heinrich said. "You may safely leave her with us. It appears that you may not have known Suhl has been accepted as one of the United States. It is very recent, so. We will have her sent to Grantville for the trial. You need not accompany her further, if you wish." Von Spee found himself moving forward, slowly, almost without his own volition. He stopped himself and stood still. No one had noticed him standing there.

"What do you mean, you will have to send her to Grantville? The woman is guilty, and she must burn. We will stay with her until this is done."

"Perhaps Father Eberhardt would like to come with her, but there is no need for you to trouble yourself further, Herr Ritter."

"Why are you interfering? All we want to do is to burn this witch! Why is this causing a problem?"

"It is not our policy to permit armed troops of foreign princes on United States soil, Captain. If you wish to enter Suhl, you must do so unarmed."

"This is preposterous! If I wish to enter Suhl I will enter Suhl. I am the Ritter von Brun. I don't have to give up my weapons to any jumped-up peasant in rusty armor!"

"But I am not a jumped-up peasant," Heinrich said, still pleasantly. "I am a sovereign citizen of the United States. Suhl is now part of the United States. And in the United States, Herr Ritter, my blood is as good as yours."

"Then perhaps we should do something about this United States of yours. Stand aside. I will enter Suhl." The Ritter was incensed.

"Your pardon, Herr Ritter, but unless you agree to disarm, you will not." There was steel in Heinrich's voice. Von Spee watched as unobtrusively each of the troopers had moved into positions of high alert. The Bamberger horses stamped and neighed nervously.

"I see six of you, and there are more than a dozen of us," Captain von Brun declared.

"I would think again," Heinrich began.

Friedrich would always remember how suddenly it happened. It was like a hot rock dropped into a cooking pot.

Veronica began to struggle with the priest she was riding behind.

One of the Americans raised his rifle. A Bamberger trooper pulled one of his horse pistols, fired at the American and missed. The American fired back and didn't miss. Von Brun drew his saber, preparing to ride Heinrich down. Even though Von Spee was standing directly behind Heinrich, he felt paralyzed.

A small hole appeared in von Brun's forehead as the back of his head sprayed away on the trooper behind him. Tom Simpson held a squarish silver handgun with smoke coming from the hole in the muzzle. The Ritter von Brun slid out of the saddle. Von Spee vomited. He'd seen death before, but usually in the hospitals where he regularly served as a nurse. Never before had he seen such an explosion of violence.

"Everybody stand still!" Heinrich ordered. "You," he pointed at one of the Americans, "get the woman. You, take the priest. Bring them along. Tom, make sure that these soldiers are disarmed and find housing for them. Oh yes, and see if any of them would like to join the United States Army."

"Jawohl, Captain!" the enormous lieutenant replied.

"And find someplace to bury the Ritter von Brun."

Heinrich snorted, turned and strode back down the street into Suhl toward the inn. He immediately ran into von Spee, still paralyzed, standing over the puddle of his vomit in the street.

"Who are you?" Heinrich demanded.

Von Spee shook himself. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief from the sleeve of his cassock, hawked, spit into the handkerchief, and met Heinrich's eyes.

"I am Father Friedrich von Spee, of the Society of Jesus. I have been sent to Suhl by the prince-bishop of Mainz to witness the trial of a woman from Bamberg. I believe that is the woman, there." He pointed to Veronica. "It is my charge to see to it that no innocents are burned as witches any longer." He held his head proudly, and stared at the American captain and at Father Eberhardt. Eberhardt glared back. Heinrich slowly nodded, thoughtfully.

"Come along, then."

* * *

By the time Simpson and Massaniello had sorted out the bishop's soldiers, and brought Father Eberhardt and the woman to the square in front of the inn, a large crowd had gathered.

Heinrich had brought together the tables from the inn and moved them out into the square. He was sitting, waiting. Von Spee sat beside him. The crowd parted and Johann von Schönborn and his guards marched to the table. Along with him was the burgomaster of Suhl. The burgomaster sat next to von Spee at the table.

The American troops lined up at one side of the table, and the prince-bishop's guard, unarmed but in armor, took the other side. Tom Simpson walked around behind the table and stood at Heinrich's side. Von Schönborn stood just behind von Spee. Eberhardt and Veronica Junius stood before the table facing them.

Heinrich nodded to the burgomaster, who began to speak.

"We have not yet learned to be truly Americans," he said. "But I have been studying the Constitution very hard, ja. And it is part of our new Constitution that nobody can be forced to confess against his or her own will. Since Fraulein Junius has been tortured, we must assume that her confession to the crime of witchcraft was forced. Captain Schmidt has suggested that it would be best if we sent this woman to Grantville where she can be tried again according to our new laws, and I have agreed. So be it done."

Eberhardt began to protest, but it was soon obvious that no one wanted to listen to him.

"Massaniello, take Fraulein Junius and Father Eberhardt to Grantville and turn them over to Dan Frost and Father Mazzare." Heinrich spun around, pointing and giving orders. "Tom, take the bishop of Bamberg's guards back to the checkpoint and send them on their way back to Bamberg, as soon as His Excellency here can have a copy of his judgment ready for them to take with them."

He turned to von Spee and von Schönborn. "And what will you do now, Reverend Sirs?"

Johann smiled, and looked at Friedrich. "I must be back on my way to Mainz immediately, Captain."

Von Spee looked at his hands thoughtfully. "I have a letter to finish," he said, "but I think I will accompany Fraulein Junius to Grantville if I may." He looked at Heinrich for permission.

"Yes," the American captain said, "I think that would be wise."

* * *

"Father, Father! Father Mazzare! Where are you?" The elderly woman, with von Spee behind her, barged into the garage of the rectory. There was another one of the metal vehicles, with a man's legs sticking out from under the front part.

The man started, banged his head on the underside of the vehicle, muttered some words Von Spee didn't understand, then came out from under the vehicle. Von Spee stood in the doorway watching as the man, covered with grease, sat up on a peculiar rolling cart.

"What is it, Mrs. Flannery?" The man—Father Mazzare, apparently—rolled off the odd, low-slung cart and got to his knees, holding his head.

"Oh, Father," Mrs. Flannery gasped, holding her palm to her mouth. "What happened?" She ran to him and helped him up.

"Nothing, really. You startled me when you came in, and I banged my head on the engine mount. I'll be fine in a few minutes. Yeah, fine."

She muttered to herself.

"What? I didn't hear you, Mrs F," Mazzare said.

"I said that it just isn't seemly for a priest of God to be getting all dirty and greasy working on the underparts of cars. That what I said! And that's what I believe, too!" Her glare was trying to melt him into a puddle on the floor.

"Yes, well, so you've said before," Mazzare sighed, and pushed himself to his feet.

"But what brings you looking for me, Mrs. F? I thought you were too angry to be here."

"This gentleman here asked me to come fetch you for Dr. Adams. Sergeant Massaniello has brought in another one."

"Another one?" Mazzare looked nonplussed. "Oh, you mean another poor woman who's been accused of witchcraft. I'll get changed and go. Is she at Dr. Adams' office?"

"Yes. But Father, what are we going to do if one of these days we get a real one? A witch, I mean."

"Mrs. Flannery, I'm surprised at you. There's no such thing as witches."

"Not in our time, maybe. But there must have been witches back in this terrible time. After all, they were burning a lot of them. It seems to me that there just has to be some truth to it."

"I've never heard of any," Mazzare replied, shaking his head. "Please tell Dr. Adams it'll be about an hour. I need to take a shower and shave, and get dressed."

"You'll wear your cassock, Father?" the old woman encouraged.

"Yes, I'll wear my cassock! The poor woman who's been accused will probably have a hard enough time believing I'm a priest without it."

"Well, then I'll go tell Dr. Adams. Good night, Father."

"Good night, Mrs. Flannery."

Mrs. Flannery turned and shepherded von Spee before her. Friedrich said nothing, and turned obediently back into the rectory. As he and the old woman moved down the hallway to the door, he heard the American priest singing, horribly off key.

"I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha! My destiny calls and I go!"

Friedrich von Spee smiled as he puzzled out the words of the song. He had always enjoyed the exploits of the Dubious Knight. He was beginning to feel even a stronger kinship with the addled old hidalgo. Or was it more likely a kinship with Sancho Panza? He hurried to follow the bustling old woman out into the night.

* * *

Massaniello paced the front room of Dr. Adams' combined house and clinic. At the sound of the knock, he strode to the door and opened it.

"Hi, Father, come on in."

Mazzare entered and shook the big coal miner's hand.

"Sit down, Father," Massaniello offered. The priest sat in one of the armchairs in the sitting room. Massaniello sat down, too.

"How is she?" the priest asked.

Massaniello took a deep breath.

"Well, she was running to Grantville when they caught her," he began.

"She wasn't running very fast, I'll bet." A deep voice interrupted from the door of the clinic.

Mazzare turned toward it. Dr. Jeffrey Adams strode through the door into the parlor with his hand outstretched. The messenger Mazzare had seen at the rectory entered the parlor behind him. Chief of Police Dan Frost came in last of all.

"Father Larry, how are you?" Adams greeted him. Frost nodded at the priest.

"I'm fine, but what about our newest immigrant?"

"She's under sedation. She's been hurt, badly. She has really been through the ringer, Larry. I never thought I'd actually see what happens when you put somebody on the rack. Oh," Adams added gesturing toward von Spee, "this is Father Friedrich from Würzburg. He came with Fraulein Junius. My German is still horrible, but I think he is her defense attorney."

* * *

Von Spee shook Mazzare's outstretched hand, his brow furrowing at the strange legal reference. His spoken English was really terrible. He could read it, but had never had the chance to speak it much. He wasn't sure what "attorney" meant, but he had decided to be her defender, so he kept his questions to himself.

"Who is this woman, Father Friedrich?" Mazzare asked.

Von Spee was folding and refolding a piece of paper in his hands, like it was a worry stone. Mazzare spoke slowly, and von Spee had very little problem understanding what Mazzare wanted to know.

"She is Veronica Junius, daughter of Burgomaster Junius from Bamberg," he replied.

"What happened?"

"Well, Burgomaster Junius got accused of witchcraft about four years ago, along with some other high officials in Bamberg. They all confessed and were burned. So the bishop seized Junius' property and she wound up in the gutter. She went to Würzburg to try to start over, but she fell into hardship there."

Massaniello took up the tale. "After the burgomaster determined what the facts were, he sent her back here to Grantville to be officially retried under our laws. Captain Schmidt sent me with her." He looked at the Grantville priest. "We had a chance to talk a little on the ride back from Suhl. Heck, she could be my daughter."

"How did she come to be accused of witchcraft herself?" Dan Frost inquired.

Von Spee replied, "I don't know all of the . . . how you say it, details? Yes, details. Somebody found out who she was, and told Father Eberhardt, the bishop's inquisitor from Bamberg. He came to see her in Würzburg, and accused her of all of the usual things they accuse witches of doing. She says she denied doing any of it, but of course, he wouldn't believe her."

"And . . ." Mazzare cocked his head, wincing a little.

"Just so. They put her on the rack until she confessed. But one of the guards was friendly, and didn't think she was guilty, and looked the other way while she escaped. She appears to have been running to United States territory when they caught her."

Frost spoke. "As soon as she is well enough, we'll have a hearing. This Father Eberhardt from Bamberg is insisting on it. Father Friedrich here is, too. But she isn't in good shape, physically."

"I imagine she isn't in a great mental state, either," Mazzare said, shaking his head.

"Not after what they did to her." Von Spee said, "She tells me that they tried her under torture for three days before she could escape. Of course, each day worse than that before."

Mazzare turned to Adams. "Can she talk to me?"

"I think so. Come with me."

Adams turned and led the way into the clinic, with everyone trooping in behind him. It was a small white room, with two beds and some medical equipment on stainless steel carts.

The woman was in one of the beds. Her face was swollen and it was full of lacerations. Von Spee thought the newer scrapes probably came from the woman's dash through the woods to Grantville.

"Do you understand me well?" Mazzare asked in hesitant and newly learned German.

"Ja. And I can ein wenig English speak," said the young woman.

Mazzare took a deep breath. Von Spee could see that Mazzare was not comfortable with the idea of interrogating someone accused of witchcraft.

"I am Father Mazzare, the Catholic priest in Grantville here. How are you called, and from where do you come?"

The odd constructions of German made Mazzare sound stilted to his own ear, but Von Spee realized that it was easier to understand the English words when Mazzare used German-like grammar.

"I am Veronica Junius, and I come aus Bamberg," she replied.

"Why were those men chasing you?"

There was silence. She looked away.

"Veronica," Mazzare said softly, "were you accused of being a witch?"

She looked at him. The pause lengthened. He held her gaze.

"Ja . . . I mean, yes," she said softly, finally.

"Were you practicing witchcraft?" Mazzare asked.

"Sheiss no!" she retorted, animated for the first time. "I'm not a witch, I'm a whore!"

Behind him, Massaniello broke up. He tried to stifle his snigger, but failed, miserably. Dr. Adams started to chuckle, then Mazzare, and finally Veronica did too. Von Spee looked a little blank, parsing the statement in his mind. His English was poor, yes, but he finally got the joke, and he smiled.

"Well," the American sergeant choked out, "at least, in English, it starts with the same letter!"

As the laughter died, Mazzare gestured for focus, and went on.

"What did you do that got you accused?"

Veronica tossed her nondescript brown hair. "It was not what I did," she replied, "but who my father was, that got me into trouble."

"Mmmm?"

Her story came out in a rush. "Ja, my father was Junius the burgomaster of Bamberg. They . . . they burned him. But he was innocent! He never was a witch! I swear it! And I never was. After they killed him, and the bishop took our house and our business, I went to Würzburg. But I didn't have any money, and the families I knew didn't want to know me anymore."

"So you became a prostitute," Mazzare said quietly.

"Yes." Her language, Mazzare noted, was becoming better and more educated by the minute, like she was taking off a disguise.

"That is all right, my child," Mazzare said. "We sometimes have to do very terrible things in order to survive. God, I am sure understands."

Suddenly, von Spee pushed forward, and handed her the paper he'd been folding and refolding.

"I kept this for you," he said.

"Oh, Father Friedrich," Veronica said, "thank you. I thought it was lost. And then nobody would believe me."

She handed the paper to the Grantville pastor. Mazzare looked at the shaky German handwriting. He looked around the room.

"Father Friedrich, can you read this?" he asked. "It is hard for me to make out."

"Ja, I can read it," von Spee said. "Please excuse my English. I speak much better Latin and Italian." He cleared his throat.

" 'Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head and—God pity him—bethinks him of something.' "

Friedrich somehow kept reading, slowly, and in almost a monotone, punctuated by the sobbing of the woman in the bed. He read on and on, until the end.

" 'Dear child, keep this letter secret so that people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most piteously and the jailers will be beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden. . . . Dear child, pay this man a dollar . . . I have taken several days to write this: my hands are both lame. I am in a sad plight . . . Good night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you more. 24 July, 1628.' "

There was silence, except for Veronica's sobbing.

"You see, Father," she said through her tears, "he was innocent. There is a scribble in the margin, Father Friedrich. Can you read that, too?"

"Ja. 'Dear child, six have confessed against me at once: the chancellor, his son, Neudecker, Zaner, Hoffmeisters Ursel and Hoppfen Els—all false, through compulsion, as they have all told me, and begged my forgiveness in God's name before they were executed. . . . They know nothing but good of me. They were forced to say it, just as I myself was . . .' "

Veronica looked hard at Mazzare.

"They had a chance to steal a fortune," she said. "So they accused rich and powerful men, and tortured them until they confessed, and stole their goods and homes. And their families were put out in the street like me."

"And even then it wasn't enough, Father. They sent Eberhardt to find me. He tracked me down from Bamberg to Würzburg, and arrested me for being a witch. I told him I wasn't a witch but he wouldn't listen.

"But Father, even if it damns me to say this, I must. That Father Eberhardt, I'd put a spell on him, all right, if I could, but I don't know any."

"I see," Mazzare said.

Mazzare brushed his hair back from his face with both hands. He sighed, and said, "Veronica, you're safe here. We don't burn witches in Grantville. We don't believe in torture in Grantville. We don't really even believe in witches in Grantville! We will have a trial, as soon as you are well, and then you will go free."

Von Spee stared at him.

* * *

Mazzare morosely sipped his tea and read his breviary at the kitchen table in the rectory. He'd invited von Spee to spend the night at the church, and the two of them had said an early mass and come back into the kitchen for tea. Neither man spoke much as they waited for Hannelore to fix breakfast.

The screen door banged, and Mazzare looked up. Simon Jones barged into the kitchen, smiling. Mazzare's friend, fellow auto mechanic and the town's Methodist minister began pouring himself a cup of tea.

"The Good Lord knows I hope we can talk the Turks into selling us more coffee beans," he said, by way of greeting. "They are still pretty expensive for coffee every morning."

"The Good Lord is getting more help along those lines from the Abrabanel family, from what I heard," Mazzare replied. Von Spee' eyes widened. Like every Jesuit, he knew his politics, and he knew who the Abrabanels were. It was not widely known that they were supporting the United States. Interesting, he thought, very interesting indeed.

"I hear you were out late last night with a beautiful woman," Jones needled.

"That's not very funny, Simon!" Mazzare said. "You know Vincent de Paul? The guy this church was named for? Well, he is still alive, campaigning over there in France to keep priests out of the whorehouses, did you know that? The Church in this time has much to answer for, I think."

"Whoa, there, my friend," Reverend Simon Jones put up his hands. "Easy. I was only kidding."

Jones noticed von Spee. He smiled at him, and looked questioningly at Mazzare.

Mazzare said, "Father Friedrich, this is Simon Jones. He is a Protestant minister here in Grantville, and my good friend." Wondering, but remembering his own friendship with Professor Muenster in Jena, Friedrich shook Jones's hand. Mazzare was continuing to speak.

"It's this whole darn witchcraft thing. We got another one last night. A young woman named Veronica Junius from Bamberg. It seems her father was burned for witchcraft, so they assumed she was a witch, too, and they were all set to burn her at the stake! For real! Tom Simpson shot the leader just as he was going to put his sword through Heinrich Schmidt's head."

"Yeah, they did it a lot in this century, here and in England. And in America, too . . . remember the Salem witch trials? It wasn't just the Catholics, you know."

"Well, we've got to do something about it, Simon." Mazzare looked straight at his friend. "It's like the Church thinks that every woman is the 'wicked witch of the west' nya-ah-ah! Too bad we can't get them to think about Glinda the Good Witch instead."

"Um, why can't we?" Jones said, slowly, thinking.

"What?"

"Well, you have a tape of The Wizard of Oz, don't you? Why don't we have Becky show it? And we can have a discussion afterward with young Miss Junius and Melissa and maybe Gretchen or one of her friends from Jena."

"Okay," Mazzare said. "That works for inside the United States. Now we have to figure out what to do outside the United States."

Friedrich von Spee was completely confused by the back and forth. He had no idea what the two Americans were talking about. He started to interrupt, but Mazzare suddenly stiffened, and rose half out of his seat.

"Wait a minute," he said.

Mazzare got up and went into his study. He returned with a large volume.

"Catholic Encyclopedia," he said. "I want to look something up. Let's see. 'witchcraft' . . . yes, here it is. I thought I remembered it."

"What did you find, Larry?" Jones stood and peered over his friend's shoulder.

"This. Look here. 'Friedrich von Spee: a poet, opponent of trials for witchcraft . . .' He sounds like a pretty good guy. I think we need to find him."

"Um." The sound came from von Spee.

The two Americans looked at him. He came forward, and as he did so, they noticed he was shaking.

"May I please see that book?" Von Spee's voice quavered, and he took the book from Mazzare.

He looked at the cover, then he turned to the page Mazzare had been reading from, and read haltingly aloud.

"Friedrich von Spee. A poet, opponent of trials for witchcraft, born at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, 25 February, 1591; died at Trier 7 August, 1635." Friedrich swallowed heavily, and kept reading. " . . . During the storming of Trier by the imperial forces in March, 1635, he distinguished himself in the care of the suffering, and died soon afterwards from the results of an infection contracted in a hospital. He was one of the noblest and most attractive figures of the awful era of the Thirty Years' War . . ."

He looked at Mazzare and Jones.

"It . . . it is not every day that a man gets to read the judgement of history upon him," Friedrich said.

The two Americans sat, staring at him.

"I am sorry not to have properly introduced myself last night, Father Mazzare," he continued. "I am Friedrich von Spee."

* * *

Friedrich von Spee crumpled up the letter he had started to write so few days before. He went to the window and stared out of it, at nothing.

"Not my will, but thine, almighty Father," he said to himself, softly.

He returned to his desk, took out a new piece of paper, lifted his pen, and began to write.

"AMDG. Father Friedrich von Spee, of the Society of Jesus, to His Excellency, Mutius Vitelleschi, Father General of the Society," he wrote. "It is with a chastened heart that I accept your rebuke, Father General. I did not intend the Cautio Criminalis to be published. But, with respect, Excellency, I must tell you that nothing in the work is false. I have attended the confessions of over two hundred witches up to now, and I have never heard one confess except after torture and the rack.

"I have just returned from the new town of Grantville, which I am certain you have heard of by now. I am now convinced that all of the witches I have seen burned have been completely innocent.

"I have brought back with me to Würzburg copies of some books that were given to me by Father Mazzare, the priest in Grantville. They have a marvelous machine that flashes a strong light at the pages of a book and produces an exact replica without a printing press. Father Mazzare showed me the workings, and explained them so far as I was able to understand them. It is an entirely mechanical device, and nothing of witchcraft. Father Mazzare himself is a scientist and artisan, I believe. I have put together a package of some of these copies to include with this letter.

"I am asking for your permission to publish the Cautio Criminalis in my own name, and with official imprimatur. I am certain that your permission will be forthcoming once you have read these books.

"Father General, I beg you to permit me to continue as I have begun, for as a priest of God, and a theologian, I can do no other."

The Three R's

Jody Dorsett

Bishop Comenius put down the page of the book he was working on. Swedish was not his best language, and he had to be very precise in what he was doing. He hoped that writing textbooks for the Swedes would pay his way, and the Church desperately needed more money to help the Brethren scattered across Poland and the rest of Northern Europe. Since the publication of his work Janua linguarum reserata several years before he had received many requests for his time. Now that he had recently been elected bishop of the Unitas Fratum he hoped those contacts would help him save the Church.

That effort consumed much of his time; more still was taken up earning a living. He had barely enough time for his personal work, the Didactica magna, a revolutionary concept of universal education. He had no way of knowing when, or if, he would get it published. His fear of the Brethren fading away occupied his every spare thought. These works were the beginning of what he was slowly coming to accept was a long-term vision. The planting of seeds.

His ruminations were disturbed by a knock at the door of his study.

"Bishop?" The young minister quietly asked, interrupting as gently as he could. "There is a man here to see you . . . Jan Billek?"

"Deacon Billek? Here? By all means, send him in Timothy, send him in!"

Jan entered the garret room, his body filling the doorway. He looked much the same as he had the last time they had seen each other, only much grayer. Comenius rushed forward and grabbed the hand of the man. "Praise be, that I get to see you again, Jan Billek!"

"Yes, Bishop, it has been quite awhile."

They both stopped and looked at each other. Remembering the horror after White Mountain and Bloody Prague, the time following Tilly's victory and the capture of the barons. The time when Liechtenstein had declared the Brethren apostate, banished them from Bohemia, and turned the Brethren into penniless, desperate refugees. Burned their Bibles, hymnals, and catechisms, and placed them in the position they were in now—the head of the church an exile in the Netherlands, and the congregations reduced to running or hiding.

"What brings you, Deacon Billek, from far away Poland to here? It was surely an arduous journey."

"I came to speak to you about the future of the Church, my Bishop."

"I've read your reports from Lissel. I hope you have received my observations?"

"Yes, Bishop. I have read your letters, and they give us strength. It has given us hope these last many years, that now you will one day get us the help we need to bring the Church back to its home."

Comenius sat back down in his chair. Not long ago he had taught and fought vigorously for not only the evangelical expansion of the Church, but the need to ally with others. He had felt that there was, or at least should be, a common bond between the Protestant nations and people. It was one of the reasons the synod had selected him. Now, away from the halls of academia that he had trod for so long, he realized that theory and practice were quite different. That realization had made his publishing efforts even more important to him. He had committed himself to finding a savior for his people, and would seek it where he could, but his heart was committed to an effort that would take years.

"I know you hope that, and I petition for aid from all I can, but help is not forthcoming. And you must know from my letters, that I have begun to plant what I hope are the seeds of rebirth for the Church. That when the time is right, it will grow again. You and your fellows' acts of distributing the printed Word to the people, even if they hide them away, is a great help." Comenius paused, then forged ahead. "But anything else might bring about the destruction of the Church. We must wait."

"Sir, perhaps not." Jan went to the window, and looked out of it. "You've heard that Wallenstein's army was routed at the Alte Veste? Wallenstein himself badly wounded—some rumors say mortally."

"Yes, I have heard."

Billek turned from the window and looked at the last bishop of the Church of The Brethren. "Wallenstein's army is smashed, true, but so long as the Habsburgs rule Bohemia, we will find no succor at home. But that victory over the Habsburgs has made me think of these new folk. The 'Americans,' as they seem to be called, whom the rumors say were instrumental in his defeat. Perhaps they might help us. I don't know how much you know about them, or even if you have considered contacting them."

"All we hear are wild rumors, Deacon Billek. That they are 'witches' and other such nonsense. Nothing is really known of them, and I hesitate to contact an unknown."

"I have tried to glean a little about them. One of the first things I found was that the Jesuits are also collecting information. That must be a good sign."

Billek and Comenius exchanged a hard smile at the thought of the Jesuits having consternation over the appearance of the new folk.

"Hmmp . . . Another foe for them, you think?"

"I don't know. But what I have found out is very interesting. Although they are allied with the Swedish Lutherans, they apparently believe in complete religious tolerance. They are highly educated, and have great command of the physical sciences. And they have interesting ideas of freedom for every person. I am reminded of Zizka, and the early Church. None could stand before them."

"I see." Comenius was intrigued. Education and tolerance were some of the seeds he wanted to plant. Perhaps there was something here after all.

"What is that you want me to do, Deacon Billek? I can hardly show up at their court with no prior knowledge, and ask them for aid."

"That's why I'm here, my Bishop. I want to go there. Give me a letter of introduction as your emissary. I will find out enough about them for you to determine if you wish to pursue further talks with them yourself."

Comenius didn't respond at once. He was torn between the sudden flare of hope, and the experience of rejection. He also didn't want to lose Billek. He was one of his rocks in Poland, and he kept the Church alive, even if hidden. But Comenius also knew that everyday Billek spent outside of the Protestant countries he was at risk.

"All right, Deacon Billek, you'll have your letter. But I ask one favor in return."

"What might that be, my Bishop?"

"That you consider receiving your ordination and taking a congregation."

For the first time since he entered the room, Jan smiled.

* * *

The first part of Jan's journey was not as hard as he feared. Comenius' contacts with the Swedish court helped get him first to Sweden, and then to Germany. He was able to accompany a Swedish supply column until he was close enough to the area of Thuringia that he believed held the Americans. The last leg was a different story.

When Jan entered the region that lay close to the country of the Americans, he was appalled at the devastation. It was worse than anything he had seen in Bohemia or Poland. Whole areas in central Germany were almost devoid of people. Struggling groups of refugees abounded, and towns were not pleased to see strangers. The constant reports of bands of brigands forced him to move at night. He had learned to travel at night during his travels back into Bohemia, but he didn't like it. It took longer to travel.

Then, suddenly, everything changed. While the country he was in still showed the ravages of war, the roads began to show cart traffic, and clots of people traveling in apparent relaxation. Jan walked along the road and listened to the people. Some were refugees on the edge of collapse, following the rumors of a safe haven. However, there were many others who were in better shape. These were apparently traveling to the town called Grantville not out of necessity but because they were on some business or other. This was the type of group he wanted.

The group he approached allowed him to join without too much of a glance, since he only carried a small bag and a walking staff. Despite his size, his lack of weapons seemed to gain him acceptance in a group all too familiar with what even the smallest band of armed men could do.

Shortly after noon on the next day, the small band he had attached himself to came to a halt. In front of them was a small tollbooth, and men in strangely colored garb surrounded it. Some held familiar muskets, but others held what were surely weapons but unlike any that Jan had ever seen before. The group was formed into a queue. Jan could see that each was asked a question, and then directed off to another area.

When he reached the front of the queue, he was confronted by a man with blazing red hair, a full beard and mustache. He wore the oddly colored clothing that many of the others wore, but his boots were those of a cavalryman and he carried a brace of pistols on his belt. Jan took him to be one of the officers. He then asked, in the most atrocious German Jan had ever heard "Lord, yer a big 'un. Be yer here fer business, or be yer fleeing?"

"I come from my bishop. But . . . perhaps there is another language that we may speak in, that you may be more comfortable in?"

The answer was clearly longer, and different, than the man had expected, and it took him a moment to parse it out. Then he grinned and replied, in some of the worst English Jan had ever heard: "If yer speak English it would be a vurra good thing. We don't get many past here that speak naught else but German. You say you come from yer bishop. Are ye a Catholic then?"

Jan couldn't help but chuckle a bit. "Hardly, sir, I come from Bishop Comenius, of the Unity of Brethren. I wish to present my papers to your court."

The red-haired man blinked. "Yer wanting to present papers to our court? Hold on a minute, laddy . . . you'll be needin' to speak to someone other than myself."

The red-haired man went to one of the tents that were behind the tollbooth. He opened the flap and went inside. Shortly he emerged with another, a very young man who wore spectacles such as Jan had never seen before, and who carried a sheaf of papers in his hand.

As they walked back towards Jan the young man flipped through the pages and then apparently found what he was looking for. The two came to a stop and the young man spoke, with an accent Jan had never heard before.

"Lieutenant McAuliffe here says you are a representative of Bishop Comenius. The Unity of Brethren. If the information I have is correct, that's what we'd call the Moravian church. Back where we come from. Uh, I guess I should say 'when' we come from."

It was Jan's turn to blink. "Moravian" church? What sort of name is that?

But, whatever it was, it seemed to satisfy the young man. Indeed, he gave Jan a smile that was downright friendly. "Moravians were well spoke of, in our time and place. So, welcome. We usually don't receive such august personages mixed in with a group of refugees. What's your name?"

"I am Deacon Billek, and these are my papers." Jan handed over the letter he had pulled from a pocket in his cloak.

"I'm Marty Thornton," the young man introduced himself. He opened the letter and began to read it. "What exactly is your business here?"

"I wish to present my papers to the court, as I told the first gentleman."

Thornton made a sound somewhere between a snort and a chuckle. "Well, that would be the first problem. We don't have a court. We aren't ruled by an aristocracy here."

So Jan had heard, from some of the refugees, but he'd discounted it as wild rumor. "I . . . I didn't know," he almost stammered. "I am here to make arrangements for my bishop to meet your rulers."

Thornton stared at him. Jan could practically hear his thoughts. Billek clearly wasn't a peasant, yet neither did he dress or act in the manner of the nobility and merchants. "If you are a diplomatic representative, where is your entourage?"

"I don't need one. I am but a deacon of the Church of the Brethren, the Unitas Fratum. Such would be a waste, and it would also be dangerous. There are not many outside of England, Sweden or the United Provinces who are friendly to us."

"Well, we certainly know how that feels," said Thornton with a wry grin. He look back down at the letter. "Well, why not? This certainly seems authentic. Come with me to the tent, and I'll call for someone from Ms. Abrabanel's office to come down and meet you."

* * *

Jan was picked up by several men in a sort of carriage that he had never seen before. Seeing new mechanical marvels was something that he figured he would have to get used to. The knowledge also made hope swell in his heart. These strange folk might be the answer that the Church needed to survive.

The ride into town further encouraged him. The streets were a bustle of activity, and he heard several different languages spoken or shouted as they drove. The road itself amazed him. It was smooth and continuous, and there were no wheel ruts or loose stones. They passed several churches, only one of which seemed to be Catholic, and that interested him even more than the road. He was tempted to ask if what he'd heard about their religious tolerance was true, but the men he was with had not introduced themselves, nor spoken more than a few words.

The carriage came to a halt in front of a brick and glass building. The glass in the front was the smoothest and clearest Jan had ever seen. Through it he could see desks with people sitting at them, some speaking into odd-looking horns. The men escorted him across the floor, past several small offices with glass fronts and then down a corridor to a large office with a very large desk. Behind it sat a beautiful woman with lustrous black hair. Though she was quite young, she seemed to radiate a kind of quiet confidence. Jan knew he was about to speak to one who held the reins of power in this strange place.

"I am Rebecca Abrabanel," she introduced herself, after reading the letter. She smiled a bit wryly and added: "I hold the somewhat peculiar title—office, I should say—of 'National Security Adviser.' I am not actually certain if I am the one who should really be speaking to you, but since no one else knows either, I suppose it will be me. That is generally how my title seems to operate." She glanced back down at the letter. "This says you are Deacon Billek, the personal representative of Bishop Comenius, leader of the Unity of Brethren. It is written in Latin. Do you speak Latin?"

"I speak it and write it, yes. I am also knowledgeable in several other languages."

"I see," replied the Abrabanel woman in excellent Latin. "Would you like something to drink? Something to eat?"

"A little water will suffice."

"Besides opening communications between the bishop and us, what else does your bishop ask?"

"I come to offer my bishop's congratulations on your recent victory over Wallenstein. I also will ask for time to appear at . . . whatever you call a court . . . for him to speak."

"What sort of things might Comenius wish to say?"

"I cannot speak thus for my bishop. But we wish to see if the Brethren can find a friend in your people."

"Deacon Billek, it is my understanding that Comenius acts alone in his representation of the Church. How long have you been a diplomat for him?"

Jan paused. He was no diplomat, and began to fear he would make a hash of this conversation. The Church needed friends, and being too obtuse might put this woman at odds. That was not the way he wished the Church to begin with these folk.

"Lady Abrabanel, this is the first I have done so for my bishop. I have known Bishop Comenius for a long time. He and I understand each other. He is seeking, as we speak, support from the Swedish court for our people. I urged him to speak to you, but he wants more information before he would make such a journey. It is not safe for him, except in a few places. I felt that we could not wait. Liechtenstein has scattered us to the winds, taken our property, and destroyed our Bibles. We need a friend who can help us."

"Deacon, we are a friend to all who are a friend to us, but whether we can help you . . ." She paused, then continued. "We are having a meeting tomorrow morning of the cabinet. We will take up several issues. I can't speak for our government in this, other than to tell you that I would not hold hopes for much assistance beyond that which we offer any who flees depredation. Our own resources are limited and already tightly stretched. Still, you may wait and speak to our cabinet—or you may leave your letter and return and tell Bishop Comenius that we would love for him to visit us."

The room seemed to narrow in on Jan, and his vision became like a tunnel. His hopes fell. He closed his eyes, and took a few breaths. There was still that faint chance that the others on the cabinet might be more receptive, and as long as there was hope, he would continue. "I will stay and address your council, if that may be arranged."

* * *

Jan walked through the crowd of people on the streets of Grantville in almost a stupor, the wonders that surrounded him no longer registering. He knew, in his heart, that these people represented the only hope that his people and his Church had for survival. He prayed for strength and guidance. In his wandering, he found himself in front of a tavern. One of the people from the ministry had told him he could get food there and directions to a place he might sleep.

He entered the tavern. It was quite busy by the front bar, the large room full of smoke and laughter in English and German. He spied a small table in the corner and sat, looking around him. He didn't see the withdrawn manner he had come to know through most of his travels in central Germany. Soon a young woman appeared before him. She didn't have the look of the typical serving wench he was accustomed to in such a place.

"Yes, may I help you?" Jan asked.

The girl giggled. "That's what I'm supposed to ask you. What can I get you?"

"Ah. Some food and mild beer would be fine."

"Our daily special is hamburger steak with beets and turnip greens and a liter of small beer. How about that?"

"Yes, that's fine." Jan wasn't sure exactly what he had ordered. But being surprised was no longer a new thing for him. When she returned with his drink, she dropped a slip of paper off. He picked it up and read it, mildly surprised that it was a tally of his food and drink, and obviously written by the girl. Even the servants could read in this land, it seemed. The thought brought both pleasure and disappointment. Like all of his church, Jan believed that reading and writing were the keys to salvation.

And so he ruminated on the mystery of being so close to salvation, but having it held out of his reach. He sat in front of his food for hours, barely picking at it, and sipping his beer. After he had waved the serving girl off several times, she told him to simply call her if he needed anything.

A brown-haired man in a leather jacket finally interrupted him. It was one of the men who had driven him to meet Rebecca Abrabanel.

"Hey, pal, you look like someone killed your puppy."

"I'm sorry, what do you say?"

"My partner and I have been watching you," the man said, with a nod toward someone sitting at a nearby table. Jan saw that it was the other fellow who had been on the carriage with them. "We figured that anyone who looked that sad, for that long, couldn't be a spy."

"A spy? You make a joke. Why would you think I'm a spy?"

"Well, you weren't exactly the typical refugee or diplomat."

"I see. I suppose I am a little bit of both. And really, not much of a diplomat," Billek replied with some sadness.

"Why don't you let us join you?"

"Certainly. Perhaps I could use some company, and I can learn more about you people."

The man in the leather jacket pulled up a chair and motioned for the other to join him. The man who walked up also had the small spectacles that Jan had seen some wear. He had a face that was lined with smile lines, eyes that were lively and intelligent, and was carrying a glass of beer in his hand.

The man who was sitting grimaced a little as he shifted in his chair and introduced them. "I'm Skip and this is Red."

"Pleased to meet you," said Red. "I gather your meeting didn't go as you would hope?"

"Yes. Lady Abrabanel held out little hope for me. But I still will press on with your cabinet. Maybe God will put the words in my mouth that I need to get your help."

"Red, the deacon here describes himself as sort of a refugee. He don't look like one to me. Especially as big as he is."

"Oh, I don't know, Skip. The Brethren got hammered pretty bad by the Habsburgs. Victims of a hostile aristocracy. Shit, it's bad enough having an aristocracy, let alone one that targets you. That's why most of them wound up in America, back—" He waved the beer glass about. "Then. There. Whatever. 'Moravians,' they were called then. I used to have some Moravian neighbors, in my hometown."

"Ah, hell, here we go . . . Red on the soapbox again." Despite the grimace, Skip seemed more amused than anything else. "Ah, not to change the subject, Deacon Billek, but why don't you tell us about yourself there. I haven't met any of the Brethren before—and neither has Red, neighbors or no."

Jan began with his early studies at the Brethren school. He found it a good way, when he was out in the villages, to slide in a little theology when talking to people. But soon he found himself going into deeper detail than he thought. Red and Skip asked questions that brought him out. He spoke to them of the hope they had had after Emperor Maximillian II had approved the National Protestant Bohemian Confession, which opened all of Bohemia for them to preach and set up congregations. His joy in bringing the teachings, both of Christ and of worldly education to the people. He spoke of the horrors of Bloody Prague and the Brethren's expulsion from Bohemia. Finally, he spoke of his efforts to keep the faith alive. The secret meetings and the hidden printing presses. The raids by the bullyboys of the local nobility or bishop.

Suddenly, he realized that the men he was speaking to weren't smiling anymore, nor had they asked any questions. "What is the matter, have I offended you?"

"Nope, I guess I'm a little embarrassed by the actions of the Church. I'm a Catholic, myself, but I can't stand how they operate in this day and age. It's not part of our customs and traditions." Skip then stood up. "Look, I gotta go, the wife's waiting. You guys stay, if you like. I'll see you in the morning."

After he left, Jan turned to Red.

"Are you a Catholic too? I did not mean to offend."

"No, Jan, I am not a Catholic; I'm not really religious at all. Your stories reminded me of what I did before I came to Grantville. I was a union organizer. I guess I went around and preached a different sort of gospel, and got into the same sorts of trouble you did."

"And what do you do now, here in Grantville?"

"Oh, I was working in the mine. But there are plenty of stronger backs than me now. I work full time for the government; most of the union officers do." Then he started laughing; a deep, heartfelt laugh.

"What is so funny?"

"Oh, me—working for the government!" replied Red. "Look, you got a place yet? I live by myself, and have a spare couch you can sleep on. I'll tell you all about it, if you'd like."

"Thank you, the Brethren often rely on the kindnesses of those we meet. Just as we gladly give it."

* * *

As they walked to the edge of town and up the hill towards Red's home, Jan took the opportunity to ask Red more about how things worked in Grantville. He was fascinated by their conception of "democracy," especially the notion of a written constitution that guaranteed each person's freedom. As they neared the house that Red pointed out was his, they heard a series of shots. Jan hunched and looked around. Shots, to him, meant an army; and that was always bad.

Red laughed again. "Don't worry, Jan, that's my neighbor Bobby Hollering. He's one of our gunsmiths, and he always has something cooking. Would you like to see it?"

Jan nodded, and Red led him down a narrow lane to a house with a small barn close by. It was to the barn that they went. Standing at the door was a heavyset fellow with a musket in his hand. But out of the side of the musket a bar of iron protruded. The man was preparing to fire at a bail of hay at the back of the yard when Red called to him.

"Hey, Bobby. What the hell is that thing, anyway?"

The man named "Bobby" turned toward the pair and put down his weapon. "It's my new improvement that I'm going to present at the meeting tomorrow. They're finally going to let me argue my case. Actually, I stole the design, but it's really cool. Wanna see?"

The man's enthusiasm was palpable. He picked the weapon up, pulled back the hammer and fired. As soon as the shot went off, he brought the weapon down, pulled a lever, slid the iron bar, cocked the hammer, and fired again. He did this seven times.

"See, Red! Seven shots in about a minute," Bobby said through a pall of smoke. "Using an old musket! They gotta take this one. We'll really be able to fight with these . . ."

How long he might have gone on with this enthusiasm, the two would never know. For at that moment, the door to the house opened and a woman stepped out, scowling a bit. "Bobby, put that thing down and come hold your son while I finish supper."

With the same enthusiasm he had just displayed for his weapon, Bobby put down the gun and called back to the house. "Yes, honey! I'll be right there. Are you coming tomorrow, Red?"

"Yeah, Bobby. Me and the deacon here will be there. He's going to speak too."

Bobby looked at Jan as if seeing him for the first time. "Okay, great. I'll see you then."

As the man jogged to the house, Jan asked Red: "Isn't he a little old to be a father?"

Red laughed. "As you'll see tomorrow, he's unstoppable. Let's get to the house."

* * *

The meeting of the cabinet began at midmorning. There were quite a few petitioners there, all of whom wanted the cabinet's permission to do something. Most were small matters: permits to build houses, new enterprises to start, that sort of thing. All were questioned, and if they could justify the need and benefit, and demonstrate that it would not divert too many resources, they were generally approved by a voice vote.

The last two were Bobby Hollering and Jan. Jan was to be last.

The central figure in the cabinet was a man named Mike Stearns. He looked down at Bobby and said: "Okay, Bobby, let's hear it."

"The slide rifle was first invented by Browning. It is easy to make . . ." Bobby went on for quite awhile, impervious to the glazed looks that soon began to cross the faces of some of the members. Finally, when he seemed to pause for breath, Mike interrupted him and informed him that it was soon time for a lunch break.

"We'll get back to you after recess; we'll discuss your proposal over lunch. I'm sure you have a write-up on this thing, so pass it up. Meanwhile, we need to hear from Deacon Billek, a representative of Bishop Comenius of the Church of the Brethren."

Jan had thought all night long what to say. He decided to use an abbreviated version of the tale he had told Red and Skip the day before. It had moved them; maybe it would have the same effect on the cabinet. He was used to speaking in front of people. As he spoke, he could tell he moved a few of the people who would decide the future of his people. When he concluded, he saw Mike whisper to a few. Then he stood.

"Thank you, Deacon Billek, that was a powerful speech you made. Again, like Bobby, you'll have to wait for our decision after we return this afternoon. We'll see any interested party back here at half past one."

With that, Stearns banged his gavel and he and the others rose and filed from the room.

Red walked up to Jan. "So, Jan, if the cabinet decides not to go any further with your request . . . what'll you do?"

"I will go back and tell my bishop what has happened. Then I shall return to Poland and continue my work. Planting the seeds of the future of the Church is a job for the bishop. I only want to see the Church and its people survive as best they can."

"Okay, I certainly understand that. I gotta go talk to that young lady over there." He nodded toward a young blond woman standing toward the rear of the room. "Gretchen just got back from one of her trips, and I need to speak to her. I'll see you when the cabinet session begins again."

Jan couldn't eat. He went back to his seat, and prayed that the coming hours would show him God's will for the salvation of the people. He sat by himself, and the intensity he gave off kept the others away. With a passing of time that surprised him, soon the cabinet returned. He looked around, and found that there were only a few people there. Bobby and some of his friends and associates, and Red, Skip and Gretchen in the back.

Mike Stearns began brusquely. "Bobby, your gun is an ingenious weapon. Yes, we agree that we could convert enough to supply the home guard. But that's it—and at what cost? We have extremely limited resources. Our greatest resource is the skill and knowledge that folks like you possess. We need you to continue your work in training our friends—that means the Swedes, first and foremost—to make the modest improvements that we can afford to do for a lot of soldiers. We have to have a plan that gives us the greatest impact over the whole thing. We appreciate you and your boffins. We would be lost without you.

"Furthermore, what if we lose some of those things? As you say, they are easy to make once you know how. And we don't have the capacity to compete with some of our potential enemies. We aren't ready for an arms race of that kind, yet. One day, we will be able to build that and all the other inventions you and your team have uncovered. But not now. I'm sorry, Bobby . . . I know you are disappointed."

Now, it was Jan's turn.

"Deacon Billek, as you just heard me say to Bobby, we have limited resources. We all feel for the plight of your people. We will welcome any of your people that you send. They will find a good home in our area. And freedom. But we can't offer you any more than comfort when they get here. We have nothing to spare to help them anywhere else. We certainly can't make any sort of offer to free your land."

Jan's head dipped in despair, though he had known the probable outcome. It seemed that God favored the bishop's plan after all. Jan also knew his own purpose, still.

"Thank you for your time, sir. I will tell Bishop Comenius of our speech here. Perhaps some of the Brethren may make it to your land, where you will find us to be a valuable addition to your community."

Jan picked up his cloak, his bag, and his staff, and moved towards the door. As he approached it, Skip, Red, and the woman with them moved towards him. Red held out his hand, and Jan took it.

"Jan, are you really going to go back to Poland?"

"Yes. I will tell the bishop, and the people, of your offer. We have prospered in sanctuary before; perhaps we will do so again. I will go to help those who cannot come, and to keep spreading the ministry as best I can. The only way evil can be stopped is to witness against it. Thank you for your help."

"Ah, Deacon," interjected Skip, "have you ever heard the expression 'the Lord helps those that help themselves'?"

"What do you mean?"

"What he means, Jan," Red interjected, "is that we have a little proposition for you. Why don't we go outside and talk about it?"

* * *

Mike Stearns and Rebecca Abrabanel stood in the window of his office watching the ox cart being loaded on the street below. Red and Jan were piling in sacks and boxes, while Bobby and one of his friends lifted an anvil into the back of the cart.

"Isn't it a little risky, sending them out like this?" Rebecca asked.

"I guess, but it isn't the first time we've sent people into hostile terrain—either us, or the UMWA back where I came from—and it won't be the last. Besides, Billek would have gone anyway."

"What about Red?" Rebecca asked.

"Red didn't come to Grantville expecting to stay this long. He came to get back in touch with his roots, and work with the local. He was taking a break from what he does best. He has no kin here, and certainly didn't expect the Ring of Fire to keep him."

"And what does Red do best, Mike?"

"He makes trouble."

* * *

"Well, that's the last of it," Bobby said, wiping the sweat from his brow. "I hope that you can make use of it, and I'm sure Mike is happier I lose my home shop—it'll keep me focused."

With that, and a flurry of farewells, Red and Jan headed the ox cart out of town. Skip and Bobby watched them until they couldn't see the cart anymore.

"Skip, what are the deacon and Red going to do out there in Bohemia?"

"Oh, they're going to be teaching the three R's, Bobby," Skip said with a rueful chuckle. "Call it 'reading, righting and revolution.' "

Here Comes Santa Claus

K.D. Wentworth

When Julie Mackay initially proposed it, the First Annual Grantville Christmas party seemed a bit of unnecessary fuss to Mike Stearns. Not to mention that it was a misnomer: it would actually be the second Christmas since the Ring of Fire. In December of 1632, Mike had vastly more important things to think about, not the least of which was the future of their infant United States in war-torn Europe.

Besides, all the children in Grantville who had been orphaned, either the American ones by the Ring of Fire or the ensuing battles, or German ones by the chaos of the Thirty Years War, were being well looked after anyway. But Julie, heading toward motherhood herself in the coming new year, was adamant. These were all American children now, she said, and American children should have a proper Christmas, one with Santa and all the appropriate trappings. She meant to show this strange new world of theirs just how it was done.

For just a second as Mike stood there on the street, looking down at her, homesickness glimmered in the former cheerleader's blue eyes. Mike saw all that had been left behind, the many comforts and people this displaced populace would never possess again.

"We should start out as we mean to go on," she said stoutly. "Tradition is important. The fact that we didn't do it the first Christmas we were here doesn't count. We were too busy then just staying alive."

Mike's will crumbled. Perhaps a small celebration of the season would not be amiss. If they were circumspect, it wouldn't deplete their limited resources too badly, and, after all they had been through since the Ring of Fire, spirits could use some lifting. "All right," he said, "if you don't get carried away. It's going to be a long winter, you know. We can't waste food and supplies."

Julie beamed, her enthusiasm contagious. "I'll take care of everything," she said, "the presents, the decorations, the food. We'll have it one week from today, on Christmas Eve. There's just one hitch—we need someone to play Santa." Her eyes measured his six-foot frame. "How about you?"

Mike turned and quite wisely fled.

* * *

Accompanied by two of his handpicked men, General Gottfried von Pappenheim, the trusted top subordinate of the duke of Friedland, Imperial General Albrecht von Wallenstein himself, approached the outrageous new settlement known as "Grantville" on foot. He was a tall man, barrel-chested with a strong profile and prematurely white hair, though he was but four and thirty. On his face, he bore a distinctive birthmark, which looked for all the world like crossed swords. More than one had sworn that birthmark glowed red when he was angry.

Two of his men, handpicked for this mission, Otik Zeleny and Meinhard Durst, strode along at his back, clad in shabby farmers' smocks. Pappenheim knew all three of them looked entirely too well fed to be what they claimed to be, but there was no time to starve themselves and they settled for clothing too large for their frames to achieve the look.

The day here in Thuringia was cold, but fine, the sky arching overhead like a vault of shimmering blue glass in a cathedral. Armed guards with curiously sleek muskets patrolled the borders of the town, but allowed the three to pass without even paying a toll after they were found to be unarmed and asked for sanctuary in low German.

They were posing as poor refugee farmers, as per Wallenstein's specific orders. The general himself had been transported back to his estates in Bohemia in order to receive the best medical care. He had nearly died not long before, at the battle of the Alte Veste, when his jaw had been broken by a bullet from a gun fired from so far away, no one could even detect the shooter.

As they walked slowly down that strange gray road, Pappenheim couldn't keep from bending down to examine it. The unfamiliar substance was hard as rock, yet seemed to have been laid down in malleable form somehow, then smoothed like butter before it solidified. His right-hand man, Durst, the sober veteran of innumerable years of fighting, also bent and ran calloused fingers over its unyielding surface.

Pappenheim shook his head. "The Croats told me, but I didn't really believe them. If it were indeed made of crushed rock, as it appears to be, how did they get it to bond in this fashion? Amazing," he murmured. "I have seen nothing like it anywhere."

Another of those devilish carriages roared past and Pappenheim did not suppress his shudder. The ignorant peasant he was imitating would have shuddered too. The upstarts who populated this town reportedly had countless such vehicles that moved without benefit of horse, not to mention lights not generated by fire and stoves that cooked without flame. The list went on and on.

His orders were to find the one called "Jew Lee Mackay," who was, by all reports, the marksman whose aim had been so devastating to General Wallenstein at the Alte Veste. One of his subordinates had beaten the name out of several refugees who had lingered for a time in this bizarre town, but then, frightened by its outlandish ways, returned to their farms. He still wasn't sure he believed the witless peasants.

"Jew Lee Mackay" was a strange name, made all the more puzzling by the peasants' insistence that "Jew" meant the same as the German word "Jude" in the newcomers' garbled version of English. That the shooter might be a Jude surprised Pappenheim. Most realms who allowed Juden to live within their borders forbade them to possess firearms. Pappenheim had never known a Jude who was proficient with weapons, much less a miraculous marksman.

But, beyond that, it was said this Jude was female, and though the females of this outlandish bunch seemed to put their hands to much that was traditionally male, he had trouble believing any woman could be so skilled in arms or steady of nerve—or that any self-respecting man would yield his place in combat to her.

At any rate, Wallenstein had been adamant: Find this mysterious Jew, Lee Mackay, and complete their mission.

A knot of young boys stood on a corner just ahead, arguing cheerfully in German about something. Pappenheim glanced over his shoulder, but none of the local inhabitants was paying them any undue attention. He headed toward the boys. The folk of this place spoke a bastard form of English so these children must be refugees. Perhaps they could point them toward this particular Jew.

He stopped behind the tallest, who looked thirteen or fourteen, a big yellow-haired lad just beginning to put on flesh after obvious long starvation.

"We are looking for the Juden of this town," Pappenheim said, giving the boy a stern look. "Where is their quarter?"

A shorter redhead with his arm in a sling looked from face to face. "There are no such quarters here," he said. "The townspeople do not consider such things when assigning living space."

"Besides," said the yellow-haired one, "why should you care? You do not look Judisch."

Durst stepped forward and backhanded him so that he fell onto the hard road. "Insolent pup! No one cares what you think!"

"Klaus!" The red-haired boy dropped to his knees.

A trickle of blood ran from the fallen one's lip, but his blue eyes were like stone as he took his friend's proffered hand and lurched back onto his feet. "This is Grantville," he said, and there was a flash of pride in his face. "No one has the right to do that here! No one is better than anyone else. Here, we are all equal." He glanced at his companions and they moved in to stand at his side. "Stearns has said!"

Durst snorted. "You—a common field brat, whelped under some bush by the look of you, equal to me, or anyone else for that matter?"

The boy flushed and he clenched his fists as a metal vehicle pulled up and stopped. A man with closely cropped hair stepped out. He was dressed in some sort of uniform that Pappenheim had never seen before and carried one of those small but deadly looking American pistols in a holster on his hip. "What is going on, Klaus?" the man asked, in badly accented German. "These men making trouble?"

Klaus dabbed at his lip with the back of his hand and Pappenheim could see how badly the boy wanted the speaker's respect. It was not in him to admit how easily he'd been struck down.

"They want directions, Mr. Jordan," he said finally, not meeting the fellow's eyes, "but we have been trying to tell him that here in Grantville we have no special quarter for Juden."

"Oh." The man nodded as though all that made sense. He turned to Pappenheim. "Okay, this is the way it is: no one here cares if you are a Jude or a Catholic or a Protestant. All are welcome. Go down this road until you come to the school. It's a big brown-and-white two-story building. They will you feed there and tell where you can sleep tonight."

Remembering his supposed identity as a poor peasant farmer, Pappenheim dropped his gaze. "Thank you, sir. It is very good of you to give us sanctuary."

The man waved them on, then the humming vehicle lurched back into motion and rumbled down the road.

"He thought we were Juden!" Durst stared after him, both angry and dumbfounded. "Does he not know what Juden look like?"

"Perhaps not," Pappenheim said. "By all reports, these people are very strange."

Klaus and his two friends had withdrawn across the road and now watched as the three men started toward the building that must be the promised school, just visible in the distance.

"What about them?" Zeleny jerked his chin toward the trio.

"Field brats," Pappenheim said. "It won't matter what they do or do not say. No one will care." He felt for the package tucked into his waistband beneath his filthy peasant smock. Soon enough, they would find this Lee Mackay, as ordered.

* * *

After Julie consulted Victor Saluzzo, the man who had replaced Len Trout as principal of the high school after Trout had been killed in the Croat raid a few months earlier, he gave her free access to the Christmas decorations. Armed with the key to the storage room, she dug through box after box, discovering wreaths and strings of lights, along with decorative candy canes as tall as her knee and smiling plastic Santa faces.

"The kids are going to love this!" she told herself, surrounded by boxes of ornaments and plastic tinsel.

She sat back on her heels, thinking. She was fuzzy on the details, but, as far as she knew, Christmas at this point in history had developed few of the traditions that so flavored the celebration in her own century. Maybe she could ask Gretchen Higgins, her closest friend among the locals, how people in this area liked to celebrate, but she was fairly certain the Christmas tree had first been used in Germany. Perhaps that was the one point where her culture and this one overlapped.

So, she told herself, shoving a box aside, the school's tired old artificial tree would not do for this party! She would send her husband Alex out for the tallest, greenest real tree they could find. Closing her eyes, she imagined the majestic evergreen out in the middle of the gym floor. It would smell divi—

"So here you are." A voice broke into her reverie. "An' just what is all this rubbish for?"

"Alex!" She came to her feet and threw her arms around her husband. "Just wait until you hear what I've got planned!"

"Dinna tell me." He smiled beneath his trim ginger mustache. "I have married myself a woman who is a better shot than I'll ever be and my puir heart canna take nae more shocks, at least not until after the bairn is born."

"Oh, that won't be for months," she said. "You'll have lots of shocks to get through before that."

"No doubt," he said, running his fingers through her hair fondly. "Of that, I think we can be sure."

"We're going to have a Christmas party," she said, "for the orphans, and anyone else who wants to come. I hope the whole town will be there." Her face sobered. "This Christmas is going to be hard for us, since it's our first holiday away from our old lives—well, our second, but last year we were too frantically busy to think much about it." She thought of her elderly grandmother, who lived in Virginia along with her aunt and uncle and six noisy cousins, none of whom she'd ever see again, and swallowed hard. "Lots of folks will be missing their families this year. I think we need to celebrate together and be glad for what we still have."

"Well, I'm certainly that glad for what I have!" He pulled her into his arms and nuzzled her neck with great enthusiasm.

The resulting tingle ran all the way down to her toes. "Hey!" she said, but made no move to hold him off. "I can't think when you're doing that."

"I should hope not!" he said indignantly. "Anyway, thinking is highly overrated. Mike Stearns himself told me so, and you know how wise he is."

Julie grinned. "Now," she said, firmly extracting herself from her husband's embrace, "you have to help me plan this Christmas party."

"Well, I know aboot Christmas, of course," he said. "What Christian does not, but a party? Christmas is a time for sober reflection and worshipping in church back in Scotland, and not much else, unless you're a papist."

A furrow appeared between Julie's eyes. She'd forgotten. Her dear sweet Alex was a Calvinist, though mostly lapsed, by his own admission. Calvinists and probably most Protestants had likely frowned upon anything that smacked of pagan origin, like a tree or decorations. They tended to be adamant about anything that smacked of idol-worshipping.

"Okay," she said, "I'll plan it myself. You can do all the fetching and carrying and hanging, not to mention the cutting down of the tree. I'll handle the rest."

His brow furrowed. "Cutting doon of the tree?"

"You'll see." She held up a string of red and green lights and sighed. "I just hope we have peace for Christmas, whatever else we manage. There are still enough stragglers from Wallenstein's and Tilly's armies roaming the countryside out there to make trouble."

"That, wife," Alex said, "unlike fancy parties, I do know aboot." He enfolded her in his arms again. "Whatever else comes, I swear I will keep you and our wee bairn safe."

* * *

Otto Bruckner and Anton Berg, officers in Emperor Ferdinand's army, skulked around the perimeter of the strange town for hours, but in the end found no way to sneak in carrying their casks of gunpowder. People were entering Grantville, yes, quite frequently, and without a toll, but some of them were also being searched. It might be possible to spirit in something as small as a knife or even a pistol, if one were careful, but an ungainly object like a wooden cask was another matter.

"This settlement was not here two years ago," Bruckner told his subordinate, as they finally retreated to bury the two precious casks beneath a lightning-split oak out to the north of town, out of sight of the frequent patrols. "I spent a number of days in the area. This was mainly woodland, and the few surrounding farms were poor. The peasants had nothing worth stealing, other than the occasional daughter."

Berg, newly assigned to his command, snorted. "I doubt any of their filthy piglets would have tempted me."

Bruckner ignored the implied refinement of Berg's taste. Though Berg was his subordinate and younger than himself, he was of a noble family.

Relieved of the weight of the casks, the two made a last check of their clothing. Before setting off to see what they could learn of these devilish "American" upstarts, they had exchanged apparel with several like-sized members of their footguard. The boots were worn to holes in the soles, the nondescript trousers and shirts tattered, the linen unspeakable. Soldiers in the field for months at a time sometimes bettered their situation by robbing corpses, but this area had been at war for many years now and apparently no one better shod or dressed had made themselves useful by dying within recent memory.

Bruckner did not have orders to do anything but scout the area. But since it took days of riding on the fleetest horses available to take a message to Vienna, then return with its answer, he'd decided to act on his own. Bruckner was confident the emperor would be generous to an officer who had taken the initiative to wound this new enemy at its very heart.

Two kegs of gunpowder could be very effective, when positioned properly and detonated. If they could just find a suitable target, they might well strike a quick blow for the empire and use the ensuing confusion to steal some of these remarkable munitions and perhaps even one of these bizarre iron carriages that moved faster than any horse, and, unlike living flesh, never tired.

Such a carriage stood in the middle of the main road into the town as they approached. "Halt!" A pair of men emerged from behind it, their shoulders broad, their muscles heavy with years of work. They were clad in curiously splotched garments and most obviously were not of peasant stock. No peasant ate well enough to put on that kind of muscle and fat.

"What business you have here?" said the foremost, a man with a heavy jaw but no beard or mustache at all so that he had the aspect of a youth, even though he was well advanced in years.

His German was so heavily accented as to be barely intelligible. These troops had been imported from very far away, Bruckner told himself, perhaps even as far as England. He snatched off his battered hat and then held out otherwise empty hands. "We only look for food," he said, keeping his voice faint, as though he were either ill or weak with hunger. "Soldiers burned our homes, killed our families, and took what little we had." He glanced out of the corner of his eye at Berg, who quite plainly had never put hand to plow in his life. "But we are hard workers. Will you take us to your lord so that we may put ourselves into his service?"

They would see through this ruse, he told himself, as cold sweat pooled between his shoulders. Anyone with half a brain would have the wit to see that he and Berg with their well-trimmed beards were of the aristocracy. They would be taken before the local lord all right—then put to death. This was utter foolishness. They never should have come—

"Hold out arms," the second man said. When Bruckner didn't obey at once, the guard seized his shoulders and spun him around. Bruckner had to resist the urge to whirl and strike him with a ready fist. No one laid hands on him in such a disrespectful fashion!

For the emperor, he told himself with gritted teeth. Focus on the rewards that would flood his way when Emperor Ferdinand learned of his initiative and cleverness. Hands patted the length of his body, straying into territory entirely too personal. He stiffened but kept his eyes focused downward on the bizarre gray ground.

"Good," the gruff voice said. "Around turn."

Over to the side, Berg looked as furious as he himself felt, evidently having been searched as well.

"Walk this road down," the man said, still mangling German, "until school in the center, brown and white, two stories. They take care of you there."

Berg straightened his grimy smock. His aristocratic blue eyes were glacial. "That is where we will swear allegiance?"

The shorter guard smiled grimly. "Something like that. We have room as long as you work. Everyone in Grantville works."

"That is all we want," Bruckner said. "Thank you." He took Berg's arm and dragged him in the indicated direction. He smiled and Berg smiled back with his strong crooked teeth as they stalked toward the school.

* * *

Word of the party had spread by the next day, so that offers of help as well as inquiries came flooding in. Julie was hard put to sort them all out. She finally set up a command center at the school, using the consumer science room on the ground floor—the class used to be called "Home Ec" and that was the way Julie still thought of it—to receive donations and organize the tasks.

Gretchen Higgins, married to Jeff Higgins, a local boy, was among the first to drop in. Julie looked up as her friend appeared in the doorway. Gretchen was pregnant too, and due at about the same time, though like Julie, she wasn't really showing yet. The statuesque blonde put down her son, young Wilhelm, who was flourishing in his new home, and he toddled toward Julie on chubby, unsteady legs.

Gretchen smiled broadly. "We are having a party, ja?"

"You bet!" Julie gestured to her. "Come in and give me a hand!"

"I know little of parties," Gretchen said, striding across the room. She was tall and vibrant, her honey-blond hair clean and shining, her light-brown eyes dancing. "But I will do whatever you want."

"Well . . ." Julie nibbled on the end of her pen. "I'm trying to decide what local customs to include."

Gretchen pulled out an orange plastic chair and sat across the table from Julie, her brown eyes now puzzled. "Customs?"

"What people do for Christmas," Julie said. "Presents and decorations, trees, stuff like that."

Gretchen rubbed her forehead, concentrating. "It has been long since we thought about anything but trying to keep alive." She sighed and closed her eyes. "But when I was little, I remember putting out shoes for presents." She opened her eyes and met Julie's. "Is that what you mean?"

"Shoes?" Julie shook her head. That sounded Dutch. "Well, never mind. I'm probably trying too hard. We have plenty of decorations and we'll just make it up as we go along. If we leave out something local, we can put it in next year."

Gretchen nodded, then rose to capture Wilhelm before he toppled a pile of Home Ec books. "So what do I do?" she said over her shoulder.

"Well, we need presents," Julie said. "I had Melissa give me a count of orphans and we're already up to two hundred thirty-three. You could go door to door and see what folks could spare in the way of toys and clothes and anything else that kids would like. Most of the local children arrived with so little. They could use almost anything."

"Okay," Gretchen said and swooped Wilhelm up. "Whatever we find, bring back here?"

"Yes." Julie stood and then leaned down to tickle the boy under his chin. His dazzling blue eyes crinkled and he crowed with laughter. One of these days, she told herself, she would have a baby of her own and it still made her head swim to think about it. "Thanks for helping."

"No problem," Gretchen said, sounding uncannily like her young husband, Jeff. "I'll get a lot, you'll see. We will have a good time!"

Julie had no doubt about that. She'd already seen Gretchen in action often enough to have a good idea what her friend was capable of. "You go, girl!" she said softly as the door closed, then turned her attention to the next on her list of knotty problems:

Where to find turkeys?

And who could she get to play Santa?

* * *

After two days in Grantville, Gottfried Pappenheim had been able to ascertain several facts. First, there were indeed a number of Jews in this outlandish town, as reported, but they were scattered throughout, as the boys had maintained, not sequestered in their own ghetto. No one seemed to make any fuss here about who was Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, or Jew. In fact, no one had even asked them to state their religion since they'd arrived. Several churches already existed within the city limits, although nothing as grand as the cathedrals in other cities, and a Jewish synagogue was currently being constructed.

Second, the marksman whom they sought actually was female, as reported. He found this harder to accept than the existence of these bizarre metal carriages constantly rattling about, but everyone who professed to know anything about the attack at the Alte Veste agreed: Jew Lee Mackay had done the shooting and she was a woman, a young one at that. Several even maintained she was presently with child and had been so even at the Alte Veste.

On the morning of the third day, Pappenheim motioned his two men outside after they had broken their fast in the huge dining hall of the refugee center attached to the school. The sky was gray, ominous with snow, and it was so cold, their exhaled breath hung like low clouds in the air.

He could still taste the breakfast served this morning. The food was extraordinarily good here, if sometimes strange. He rubbed his hands together in the cold, then stared ruefully at his blistered palms. In payment for food and bed, they had labored the last two days with other refugees to build a fortress guarding the northern approaches to the town. The Americans, clearly enough, were taking no chances of being surprised by another Croat cavalry raid.

Their hands were raw, their backs sore, but no one else seemed to mind the hard work so Pappenheim and his two companions had been careful not to utter any complaints themselves.

"I know now where she is," Durst said, blowing on his hands to keep warm.

Pappenheim narrowed his eyes. "The Jew?"

Durst nodded. "One of the cooks told me when I took my plate back to the scullery."

Pappenheim's hand went to the package concealed beneath his grimy farmer's smock. "Where is she then?"

"She is married to the headman of the village, a man named Michael Stearns, and serves herself as 'National Security Advisor.' She also, apparently, has the title of 'Senator,' whatever that means."

Unlike Durst, who was not well educated, Pappenheim recognized the term "Senator." It was a title the ancient Romans had used, although whether it meant the same thing here was impossible to determine. But the other . . . National Security Adviser?

"What exactly does that mean?" Pappenheim stared at Durst. The man looked ridiculous as a peasant, something like substituting a slavering war dog for his mother's pampered spaniel and imagining no one would notice.

The shorter man waved his hands. "I do not know, but the cook said she was the most important Jew in all of Grantville. So that must be the one we're looking for."

"Did she say where we could find this Jew?" Zeleny asked, his hands tucked beneath his armpits for warmth.

"They have a house near the center of the town, the cook told me." His face was rosy with cold. "A very nice house, apparently, since she described it to me rather enthusiastically. But I didn't dare ask her for directions. That would have made her suspicious. But I know what it looks like well enough, I think, to be able to find it if we can go to the town."

"We'll have to slip away," Pappenheim said. He raked fingers back through his white hair, now clean thanks to the marvelous "showers" provided in the refugee center. "The work crew will be going out soon."

"They never count," Zeleny said, "and it's a large work crew. I do not think we will be missed."

With Pappenheim leading the way, they edged around the massive building so that they were out of sight of the peasants gathering to work. In less than an hour, they were threading their way through the wood and brick domiciles that characterized this town.

"Fine work," Zeleny murmured, running his fingers over the magnificently regular red bricks. "I wonder who heads their guild?"

Pappenheim scowled. "Keep your mind on our mission. Who cares about bricks?"

Zeleny, whose father had been a guildsmen in Rothenberg, ducked his head and closed his mouth, but Pappenheim could see the wheels turning in his obstinate head. It was almost as though this place were haunted, or possessed, like the old tales of faeries. According to them, if a man once tasted faery food, he was ruined for the real world. That was what Grantville was like.

It took them some time, but eventually they found the right residence. It fit the description, at least. And it was still early in the morning. Early enough that the residents would probably still be at home.

Pappenheim made sure Wallenstein's package was readily to hand, then marched up the steps, his head held high, and knocked on the door.

After a moment, it opened and a beautiful black-haired woman gazed at him with dark-brown eyes. "Yes?" she asked, in flawless German.

Pappenheim cleared his throat. Could this beauty possibly be the infamous marksman of Alte Veste? "We seek the Jew Lee Mackay, and we were told she lived here."

The woman blinked in surprise. "Julie Mackay?"

"Yes," Pappenheim said stiffly. His nose felt numb with cold.

"Oh, Julie does not live here," the woman said, shivering. "This is the home of Michael Stearns." Somewhere in the house, the thin wail of a baby began. She glanced over her shoulder, then looked at her wrist. "Julie should be at the school before too long, in the room called 'consumer science' on the first floor. Did you want to help with the party?"

Pappenheim blinked. "You are not the Jew Lee Mackay?" She certainly looked like a Jude, he thought.

The baby's crying grew louder. "No," she said with a trace of impatience. "Julie is at the school. You will have to excuse me." And she shut the door in his face.

"The school," Durst said, disgusted, after Pappenheim came down the steps and reported the conversation. "But we were just there!"

"We must go back then," Pappenheim said. He shook his head. "What does 'consumer science' mean? Sometimes I think these Americans are not sane at all."

* * *

Hard labor most certainly did not agree with Bruckner and, after two days, Berg was beside himself at the very thought of spending even one more hour sorting rock and fitting appropriately sized chunks into the walls of the growing fortress.

He glowered as they were herded along with the rest of the peasants out to the perimeter of the town. "I will not demean myself in this way anymore!" he said under his breath to Bruckner.

"They do not watch us so carefully now," Bruckner said quietly. "Have you noticed?"

Berg's lip curled as a small girl with blond plaits waved at them from the steps of a nearby house. "I have noticed that my back hurts!"

"I think we could sneak into the woods and retrieve our casks of gunpowder, if we picked the right moment. Then we could hide them near the wall and come back for them when it is dark tonight."

"Oh." Berg nodded. "I suppose so."

Bruckner scratched his neck. "I hear there is to be a party on Christmas Eve, in the great hall at the school. Everyone is invited, even peasants like ourselves."

"That is ridiculous," Berg said. "They should go to mass on Christmas Eve."

"A number of orphans will be at this party," Bruckner said. "People are being encouraged to bring presents for the poor children who have lost their family."

"Presents!" Berg glanced at him, cheeks ruddy from the cold. "You expect me to bring a present for some sniveling houseless brat?"

"We have very little, you and I. We are poor peasants, remember? Little more than the clothes on our backs and those two casks, but I think we should try to do what we can."

"The casks." Berg's eyebrows rose and understanding dawned in his face. "If we brought them disguised as presents, no one would ask questions."

"I imagine not." Bruckner smiled thinly. "Imagine how surprised the orphans will be."

* * *

Three days before the party, Julie shut herself up in the Home Ec room in despair. Although Jeff Higgins had agreed to oversee the hanging of the decorations and his wife Gretchen was efficiently collecting presents, no one in the entire town of Grantville would agree to play Santa! All the available men were either too shy, too short, too busy, too skinny, too young, too—something! The excuses were endless. She'd play Santa herself, if she thought she could pull it off, but this was important. As nearly as she could tell, local children knew nothing of her time's archetypal jolly old gent. If she settled for some poor excuse, the legend she was trying to establish would be warped forever.

She'd begged the doctor, James Nichols, last night, and he'd laughed in her face. "No," he'd said, his dark face apologetic. "I'd rather stitch up a hundred men than face a roomful of orphans and try to do the ho-ho-ho thing. Surely you can find someone else."

But there wasn't anyone. Michael Stearns had been but the first to turn her down. Her own husband Alex had been the second, pleading his Calvinist ties. "Dammit!" She folded her arms and put her head down on the shiny table. "How hard could playing Santa be?"

Someone knocked on the door.

"Go away!" she called, too close to tears to want to see anyone.

"Ve vant help vith partee," a deep voice called. "This right place, ja?"

Julie brushed the unshed tears out of her eyes. It was just the pregnancy hormones that were making her so emotional, she told herself, and besides, by the accent, these were obviously locals. She couldn't turn them away.

"Ja," she said, rising, then went to the door and unlocked it. "Come right in and—"

The door swung open to reveal three men waiting out in the hallway and the rest of her words died in her throat. Two of the men were unremarkable, just more refugee farmfolk, it seemed, one short and swarthy, the other pale, both clad in dingy peasant smocks.

But the third!

"Hallelujah!" she said, taking the center man's arm and pulling him into the light from the windows. It was as if Santa himself had come knocking on her door. He was tall, well over six feet. Best of all, even though he looked to be in his thirties, he had a head of white hair and a lovely beard. She resisted the urge to reach out and stroke it. "I'm Julie Mackay and you've just saved my life!"

True, that weird birthmark didn't really fit on Santa's face, but you couldn't have everything.

"Ja, Jew Lee," the man said. "Ve come find you."

She walked behind him, admiring the breadth of his shoulders. "You certainly did!"

The white eyebrows knotted together. "Ve haf orders—"

"Mike sent you, didn't he?" She beamed. "This is so wonderful! I must remember to thank him. You'll make a splendid Santa!"

The man fumbled at his smock.

"Yes," she said, "you're right. You really should try on the suit, but not in here." She hurried over to the cardboard box languishing in the corner and pulled out the traditional red flannel suit trimmed in white. "Take it down to the bathroom and see how it fits." She pushed the shirt and trousers into his arms. "We may have to alter it a bit, but I'm betting both pieces fit perfectly—after we add a few pillows."

"Pil-losss?" The man's brow knitted, then he turned to his companions, speaking in rapid German. By now, Julie's own German was rather good, but the language had so many dialects that she couldn't really follow what he was saying. Something about—a message?

"Don't worry," she said. "Mike didn't get around to telling me you were coming, but I know you'll be perfect." Taking his arm, she led him to the door and pointed. "The bathroom is down the hall, to the left. You can't miss it."

Her new Santa blinked down at her, perplexed, and seemed disinclined to leave. "Ve haf orders," he said again.

"Not now, you don't. Whatever Mike told you, I'm overriding him. President or not, Christmas comes first." She glimpsed Victor Saluzzo's worn blue suit jacket as he entered the hallway on the way to his office and waved. "Mr. Saluzzo!"

His head turned.

"I've found my Santa!" She pointed at her man.

Saluzzo's affable face broke into a smile. "Splendid!"

"But" she continued, "he doesn't speak much English and I can't understand his dialect. I need someone to help him try on the outfit."

Saluzzo nodded and headed toward her.

"Nein," her Santa said, trying to wave him back. "I haf for you somesing, Jew Lee Mackay. You must—"

"Later!" Julie said merrily, giving her candidate over into Saluzzo's capable hands. "For now, go down to the men's room and try that on."

The tall man's blue eyes darted to his companions. "But—"

"Go!" She fixed him with a steely glare. "I'm too busy to argue!"

Saluzzo grinned. "Come on," he said. "I don't know about you, but, where we come from, there's no arguing with a pregnant woman once she takes that tone of voice!"

Julie leaned limply against the wall and watched their halting retreat. Her Santa kept looking back at her, something plainly on his mind. There was no telling about what. Well, it was probably nothing.

At any rate, she had her Santa! Now all she had to do was to make sure Jeff Higgins hung the rest of the decorations in the gym and Gretchen located enough presents for the list of orphans.

She charged out the door, her energy renewed. After finally finding a Santa, that should be a cinch.

* * *

In the end, Bruckner was surprised how easy it was to bring his nebulous plan to fruition. Instead of having to ferret out where and when this celebration was, a woman actually came out to the fortress and asked the workers for donations to be given to the orphan children of the town.

"For fatherless urchins?" Berg muttered, his aristocratic face smudged with mud. "They cannot be serious!"

Bruckner put down the rock he had been fitting into the cursed wall and dusted his blistered hands off. "Shut up," he hissed.

"We will both bring something," he said over his shoulder to the lovely peasant with the statuesque frame and shining dark-gold hair. Indeed, by the cleanliness of her person and the way she carried herself, she might easily have been mistaken for a duchess, if not for the hideous garb of this region. "We have very little, but we will do what we can."

He had to sigh, looking at her. She looked quite magnificent. The woman wore tight dark-blue trousers, just like a man, and a long flannel shirt beneath a sleek jacket that looked very warm. Though Berg was openly staring, she seemed totally at home in the bizarre garb.

Berg managed to make a effort to maintain their disguise. "What kind of donation do you require of us?" he asked, a bit sourly.

"Whatever you think a child might like," she said. "Toys would be nice, if you could fashion any, but old clothing to be made over or blankets, anything you could spare." Her light-brown eyes were shrewd, as though she wasn't fooled at all by their impersonation of farmers. Bruckner had the sudden intuition this Valkyrie had experienced things that no young woman of good breeding would encounter.

Then she took him totally by surprise. "Can you find a way to wrap your donation?" she asked.

Bruckner blinked, then glanced aside at Berg. "Wrap?"

"It is the custom of Grantville," she said, "to give presents at this season covered in something, so that their nature is not readily apparent. Then, I am told, the child is allowed to 'unwrap' it. I gather it was usually done with paper, in their—" She hesitated, her gaze faraway. "In their old home."

She shrugged, which only served to emphasize the ampleness of her very healthy figure. "At any rate," she said, "you can use whatever is at hand. If you can't find paper, some sort of cloth, perhaps, or cast-off clothing, but Julie is very determined. She wants everything 'wrapped.' "

"Then we will wrap," Bruckner said. "What time does the festival start?"

"Sundown on Christmas Eve," she said, "in the great hall at the school. What they call a gymnasium, which means something different than it does to us. You are staying right next to it in the refugee center."

"Yes, I know it," Bruckner said. He had wandered into the school several times, and peered into the huge room on the lower floor with its gleaming wooden floor and strange rope baskets dangling from boards nailed to columns. Once, when he looked in, youths were bouncing large orange balls, shouting with great abandon and running about. The activity was clearly popular—a game of some sort, obviously—but he found it perplexing.

"Bring the presents before the party starts," the woman said, then worked her way down the incomplete construction, asking the rest of the workers for their help, just as she had asked them.

* * *

The day of the party had dawned frosty and bright. Outside, a foot of snow already covered the ground, so Julie knew they would have a white Christmas for sure. Alex had guard duty with his cavalrymen that day, but had promised he would be off in time for the gift distribution this evening.

She picked up a cut-paper "snowflake," crafted by refugees. Unfortunately, it resembled an elephant more than an ice crystal.

Not that it really mattered, she told herself firmly, as she hung the "snowflake" on the magnificent tree set up in the center of the gym. She just wanted everyone to be together so they wouldn't focus on all they had lost. Though admittedly not everyone looked at it her way, she felt most had gained as much through the Ring of Fire as they'd been forced to leave behind. She had a sense of really being needed in this world, of coming into her own, despite her youth. Back in America, it would have been years before she could have had this much responsibility.

And then of course there was Alex, her wonderful husband, and the baby. Her hand crept to the new roundness of her abdomen. Next Christmas, they would share the wonders of the season with their child and she was surprised to find how eager she was for his or her arrival, when she'd never even thought she wanted children before this. For now, she would have to settle for making the best Christmas she could for Grantville's current population of children. Fortunately, Gretchen had gone over her quota on the gift gathering, so if a few unexpected guests turned up, it would just be the more, the merrier.

Hank Jones, one of the miners, called her over to admire the UMWA banner they were hanging on the wall. She was just having them move it over a few feet, when her dad stuck his head in the gym and waved. "Need any help, Jules?"

"You bet!" she said.

Her dentist father, Henry G. Sims, looked good, she thought, as though this century agreed with him. And maybe it did. Back in their own time, people took dentists for granted, made jokes about them, many avoiding them like the plague until they had no choice.

Here, the locals were literally lining up for Dr. Sims' services, despite the distressing lack of anesthetics. Next to their physicians, Doctors Nichols and Adams, he was the most sought after professional they had brought into the past. Even her Alex had gone to him and had his teeth worked over before he'd summoned the nerve to propose to her.

"Hang these up along the wall," she said to her father and pointed at an armful of sweet-scented pine boughs.

He picked one up and sniffed. "There's really something to be said for the real thing, isn't there? I can't remember when I smelled anything this wonderful."

She laughed. "You're just saying that so I'll forgive you for not playing Santa!"

"Maybe." He grinned and moved off toward the wall.

She put her hands on her hips. Now, just where was her German Santa Claus, Gottfried, anyway? She'd left instructions for him to arrive early.

Gretchen sailed through the door, holding her son Wilhelm in one arm and using the other to sweep her younger sister and a whole host of children before her. "We come early," she said to Julie, her cheeks red with the outside cold. "They all want to help."

The kitchen volunteers were already loading long cafeteria tables with food and drink and the children's eyes gravitated to the piles of iced Christmas cookies. "All right," Julie said, "but no snacking before the party begins."

Gretchen rattled off a string of insistent German. The wide-eyed children nodded, then headed for the Christmas tree instead, chattering like sparrows. Immediately, a slender little girl pulled off a gleaming gold ornament and dropped it, then stared in tears at the shards on the floor.

Julie sighed and went to fetch a dustpan. While she was on her knees sweeping up, three men appeared in the doorway, one of them Gottfried. His red Santa suit was hung neatly over one arm.

"It's about time," she said, dustpan in hand. The shards slid together with a clink. "Why aren't you dressed? The children are already beginning to arrive."

Gottfried glanced at his companions. "We talk," he said, using German this time. "Now."

"Not now," Julie said as another group appeared in the double doorway, their arms full. "Go put your suit on!"

"No, we talk." His blue eyes were fiercely insistent. "They say you are the shooter—"

"Look," she said, "I don't have time! I have to organize the presents into appropriate age groups, as well as boy and girl things." She pushed him toward the door. "Dress now. Talk later!"

With a forced smile, she turned to newcomers who had evidently brought presents for the children—five live chickens, a handcart full of potatoes, and a kid goat. The benefactors, Franz, Anna, and Ernst, siblings from a local farm just outside the town, seemed quite elderly and all smiled gap-toothed smiles at her.

"How—lovely," she managed. "Just set them down by the tree." She watched them hobble away, wondering just how they were going to wrap any of that.

Over the next two hours, the pile of gifts increased to include handcarved spoons, two rusty keys, an ax handle, a bag of goose feathers, a broken eating knife, several dozen candles, and innumerable bundles of firewood. Julie retreated to the wall where she watched the ongoing parade of dead hares and foxes, dried fish, vegetable seeds, and farm implements with growing amazement. Those few items that were wrapped, as requested, came covered mostly in hay or straw. The goat kept escaping to nibble at the hem of her dress.

The problem was quality, not quantity. Before too long, Julie had to start telling people to store the presents in the Home Ec room.

She shook her head. Toys—she'd told Gretchen to ask for toys, dolls, carved soldiers, balls, that sort of thing, but she'd obviously failed to communicate the concept.

It's all my fault, she thought miserably. I messed up and now the orphans' first real Christmas is going to be ruined! She felt tears coming on in earnest and didn't know what to do. She had to stay and do the best that she could, but the children were going to be so disappointed!

And, on top of everything else, Santa Gottfried had never come back, after she'd dispatched him to get dressed. She was either going to have to look for him herself, or find someone else who would.

"Pliss," a gruff voice said at the door. "Vhere put?" Two scruffy looking wind-burned peasants stood in the doorway, each holding a cask wrapped in a shirt.

Sauerkraut, she guessed. Wonderful. "In the room down the hall!" she said, pointing and trying her best not to snarl. The two ambled away, as she turned to find Santa and wring his neck.

* * *

Bruckner worked to contain his glee. There was a room right across the corridor from the one being used to store presents—unlocked and unoccupied. The perfect place for the casks. Close enough to the gymnasium to do the needed damage, but far enough away that no one would smell the burning fuse until he and Berg made their escape and it was too late to stop them.

"Come on," he said in a whisper, elbowing the door open. "We must hide these in here out of sight and lay the fuse."

Berg nodded, but his attention was clearly back on the strange flameless lights that illuminated the gymnasium, as well as the steaming platters of food being carried in from the dining hall next door. Music was playing, as good as the finest musicians he'd ever heard, but none were in sight. "How do they do it?" he wondered. "Is it witchcraft?"

A dark-headed toddler of about three came running down the corridor and threw her arms around Bruckner's legs, dimpling up at him. "Are you Santa Claus?" she asked in German.

"No!" He shifted his weight to break her hold. "Let—go!" he said in a fierce whisper.

The girl laughed and pressed her cheek against his leg. "I am a good girl, Santa," she said. "I get present!"

"How—nice." Bruckner's skin crawled as he handed his cask off to Berg and then pried the tiny fingers off his trousers. "Now, run along and play."

Her face contorted and then she dissolved into wailing tears. "Did you forget my present?"

"Shhh!" Bruckner glanced around, afraid of drawing too much attention. Fortunately, they were alone and Berg had already taken the second cask into the room, closing the door behind him. "I am sure you will get a lovely present, when this Santa fellow arrives, if you just do not cry!"

A tall young woman came into the corridor, saw the wailing child and angled toward them without hurrying to sweep her up into her arms. "Hush, Berta! Whatever can you be making such a fuss about?" Her light-brown eyes regarded Bruckner over the child's dark curls.

He realized with a start it was the same woman who had been soliciting gifts out by the fortress. "I am sorry," he said stiffly. "This child is mistaken. She thinks I am someone called 'Santa.' "

"Oh, Berta." The woman chuckled, taking the little girl by the hand and turning away. "This is not Santa. Julie told you—Santa wears a beautiful red suit and has a long white beard and merry eyes." She gave Bruckner a not entirely friendly glance over her shoulder. "And he is much nicer. Julie says he loves little girls."

A moment later, they were gone. Bruckner cracked open the door and slipped through. The room was dark, but there was enough light from the windows for him to spot Berg in a corner, already beginning to lay the powder fuse.

"I hate peasants," Berg muttered when Bruckner joined him in the shadows. "They are stupid and carry disease."

Bruckner began opening the second cask, mopping at his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He could hear people pouring through the school doors now, men, women, and children. The noise outside grew louder with every passing moment. Soon everyone would be too preoccupied to notice them at all.

"As soon as they start serving the banquet," he said, "we will strike a spark, and then slip away."

Berg nodded and settled on the floor in front of the casks to wait for the right moment.

* * *

Fortunately, Julie found Gottfried and his two friends in the cafeteria next door, sitting at one of the few tables that hadn't already been moved into the gym, and drinking hot tea. To her relief, he was wearing the red Santa suit, though not the hat. "What are you doing in here?" she burst out at the sight of them. "You're supposed to be next door playing Santa! Where's your hat?"

"I did not come to wear a silly hat," Gottfried said firmly. "I came to talk with you."

"Not now!" Julie hauled at his arm, but he was rock solid, impossible to move. "The children are all here. In a moment, they'll serve the food, and then after that, you're on!"

Gottfried's brows knotted. "On what?"

"Never mind," she said. "We're counting on you!"

"I want to talk about the Alte Veste," he said. "You were there, yes?"

The strange birthmark on his face, she suddenly noticed, seemed more prominent than she'd remembered. It looked almost like two crossed swords. "What?" she said, as his words came together inside her head. "The Alte Veste? What does that have to do with anything?"

"You were the shooter, yes?" His blue eyes were fierce now.

"Who are you?" She edged back out of reach.

"You shot Wallenstein." His tone was more sure now, his manner businesslike. He stood and towered over her, his body looking rock-hard. Her heart raced. How could she have seen Santa Claus in this man? He was more like a pit bull!

"I'll get Mike," she said, trying to keep her voice steady. "He can tell you about the Alte Veste, if that's why you're here." She turned and almost ran away.

Footsteps clattered after her across the floor as they followed.

* * *

In the gym, food was now being served on pink plastic cafeteria trays to the tune of "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Children were squealing with delight as adults led them to their place and sat them down with the biggest portions they'd ever been served in their short lives.

As Julie dashed through the double doors into the gymnasium, she saw three Grantville boys trying to rig up a harness for a gift suckling pig out of school jump ropes, while a pair of wondering little girls in red Christmas frocks were on their knees, staring in rapt fascination at three speckled hens scratching in vain at the polished wooden floor. Mike Stearns was standing with his wife Rebecca and their new baby daughter over on the far side of the room, looking contented.

"Mike!" She waved, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. Gottfried and his friends were only three men and she hadn't seen any obvious weapons. Maybe Mike and some of the other men could get them out of here before they caused trouble. "Mike, I have to talk to you!"

Her father was standing close to the Christmas tree with her Uncle Frank, admiring the lights, and she tried to get their attention too. "Dad! Uncle Frank! Over here!"

The trio entered the room, their eyes searching her out. No! she thought hard at heaven. Please! Not here, not now, just when everyone is so peaceful and happy!

"What is it, Julie?" Mike said, his eyes twinkling. "I already told you I won't play Santa."

"I already have a Santa," she said, the breath wheezing in her chest, "and he's asking me about the Alte Veste!"

"What?" Mike glanced up at the approaching men.

"They know I was the sharpshooter at the Alte Veste," she said as her father and uncle reached her side. "I think—they must be part of Wallenstein's army."

Mike reached under his jacket and she saw the sleek deadly shape of his pistol tucked into a shoulder holster. "It's all right," he said, stepping in front of her. "Nothing is going to happen."

Julie caught at his arm. "I know this is serious, but please don't let them spoil the party."

Gottfried stopped a few paces away, and drew a small box out from his Santa suit. "Jew Lee Mackay," he said, his tone very firm—like that of a man who has put up with as much nonsense as he can tolerate. The other two flanked him like an honor guard.

"Hello, Santa," Mike said evenly. "It's about time you showed up."

"Santa!" A trio of Grantville children, who recognized the suit, squealed and launched themselves across the gym floor. "Where's your bag?" they asked, their voices echoing. "Where're your reindeer?"

Scattered applause rang out and more children sprang up from their places at the long tables. "Santa! Santa!"

Gottfried stared down at them, evidently unnerved.

"What's your business here, Santa?" Mike had his hand on the .357 magnum under his suit, but hadn't drawn it out yet. "Only our friends are invited to this party."

Gottfried straightened and nodded at Mike, then turned to Julie. "I am General Gottfried von Pappenheim," he said. "I have been sent by Imperial General Wallenstein to find the one who shot him at the Alte Veste."

Mike's gun came out. Julie glanced at her uncle and father, who had also drawn guns. The image of Wallenstein's shattered body falling was vivid in her mind.

"The duke of Friedland instructed me—" Pappenheim broke off, his head suddenly swiveling toward the entrance to the gymnasium. His nostrils flared, as though scenting something.

* * *

Bruckner had the door open, ready for their escape. He could hear children in the gymnasium shouting. "Santa! Santa!"

Berg cursed, as a third spark flared and died.

"Idiot!" Already the room stank with burning gunpowder from Berg's fumbling efforts to light the fuse. The smell—if not much smoke, yet—was drifting down the corridor

He took the flint away from Berg and knelt down. The casks were in the corner, now on their sides, with a powder train leading to them.

He gripped the steel and flint carefully and struck a spark. For a moment, the powder hissed but, again, the flame didn't catch. Unfortunately, the long days the casks had been buried had allowed some dampness to penetrate.

Berg grasped his shoulder and pulled him around, pointing out the door. "Look!"

The tall, powerfully built man in the red suit was striding down the corridor, sniffing with his nose. He spotted Bruckner and Berg almost immediately.

He smiled and kept striding toward them. About the coldest smile Bruckner had ever seen. And, behind him, other men were starting to come into the corridor.

Desperately, Bruckner looked down at the cursed fuse. No hope for it. They'd just have to escape.

He and Berg scrambled out of the room and began running down the corridor. With a muffled curse, the white-haired man dashed after them. Glancing over his shoulder, Bruckner could see other men coming after him—and they were holding firearms.

They almost made it out of the building before being tackled from behind and sent sprawling across the hard floor. Berg was cursing, but the blow had knocked the wind out of Bruckner and he was having trouble breathing.

Someone flipped him over on his back and stared down at him with cold blue eyes. The muzzle of a pistol was shoved into his neck. "Who in the hell are you?"

He could only shake his head and try to make his lungs work. Rough hands hauled him to his feet and then held him there when his legs buckled. The blue-eyed man lowered the pistol but kept it in his hand.

To his left, he could hear Berg complaining of the rough treatment and invoking the prestige of his ancient lineage.

Red invaded his field of vision and he tried to make his eyes focus. "There's gunpowder in that room!" someone was shouting in German. "They were going to blow up the school!"

The blue eyes were very hard. "Who sent you?"

He tried to take a deep breath and this time succeeded in drawing a moderate amount of air into his shocked lungs. "We are from Emperor Ferdinand," he said weakly. "We are of high rank and will surely be ransomed, if you preserve our lives."

The man in the red suit came up. "Nonsense. The emperor will disown you immediately. To save himself money, if nothing else. I sense two young officers haring off on their own, trying to curry favor and rise in rank."

He had a birthmark on his face and now it seemed to blaze red, like two crossed burning swords. Bruckner blinked. He had heard of such a famous mark once, somewhere . . .

"So, General Pappenheim," the blue-eyed man said. "It seems we are in your debt."

Pappenheim! Bruckner's knees went weak again. Though he had never had the honor of meeting the famous general, everyone who had fought in this war knew of him. He was something of a legend. What was he doing here with these damned Americans?

Berg had a cut over one eye where he'd struck the floor and his lip had already swollen to twice its size. "I demand to be ransomed!"

A squealing pig came racing down the corridor, followed by a bevy of laughing children.

* * *

The two would-be assassins were turned over to the custody of Fred Jordan and another deputy, who handcuffed them and hauled them away—none too gently. One of them was still shrieking a demand for ransom. The other seemed in shock and said nothing.

Julie, on the other hand, was full of questions. She came over to Pappenheim, who was now back in the gymnasium handing out presents from under the tree after it had become apparent to him the children wouldn't take no for an answer. Over in the corner, toddlers were building a fortress out of potatoes.

"I don't understand," she told him. "Those two meant to kill us, but you stopped them, so that can't be why you're here."

He looked baffled. "I told you." He passed out a doll made out of straw to a beaming two-year-old led up by Gretchen. "Wallenstein sent me."

"I shot Wallenstein," she said numbly. "I hit him twice! I saw him fall!"

Gretchen brought another child forward, a five-year-old with eager eyes. Pappenheim picked up a dried fish wrapped in yarn and handed it over. The child rattled off a string of incomprehensible dialect. Gretchen smiled. "He says he'll name it Fritz. It looks just like his uncle!"

The general shook his head and moved on to piles of vegetable seeds in burlap bags. "Wallenstein was wounded, true, very badly. Now he wants to change sides. The emperor is no longer pleased with him, after the Alte Veste—and then the duke read one of the books we stole from you which says the emperor will have him assassinated."

Another happy child raced off. "So the duke decided to make a secret treaty with you Americans and King Gustav of Sweden."

"But he tried to kill our kids—and I did my best to kill him!" Julie protested. "Came that close, too! He can't just turn around now, say all is forgiven, and become our ally."

Mike Stearns had been standing nearby, listening. "Why not?" he asked. "I'll sup with the devil—if it means breaking Bohemia from Austria and tying that bastard Ferdinand into a knot. I won't think twice. Gustav Adolf won't even blink an eye."

She was trying to think of an answer to that when Pappenheim gently disentangled a little girl who was trying to climb into his lap, reached into his voluminous red Santa pocket and pulled out the same small wooden box she'd seen him carrying earlier.

"I brought this from Wallenstein, at his command," he said earnestly. "For the Jew Lee Mackay who shot him. Though it seems you are not actually a Jude, after all." He handed it to Julie. "There is a condition to the alliance."

"I knew it," her Uncle Frank said. "Leopards don't change their spots. What does the bastard want—half of Thuringia?"

Julie opened the lid. Inside the box, nestled on a bed of blue silk, was the deformed shape of a rifle bullet, the same caliber she had used at the Alte Veste. It was threaded onto a golden chain. Beside it rested the remains of four shattered teeth.

"Oh—my—God," she breathed.

Gretchen peered into the box. Her light-brown eyes crinkled at the corners and her face was suddenly merry. "Ha! He wants magic, General Pappenheim, doesn't he? The magic of new American teeth!"

Pappenheim nodded. "That is his condition for the alliance. Not negotiable. American dentist to come to his estate—or he will come here—so he can chew again."

Julie looked at her dentist father, who was as amazed as she was. "Well, Dad," she said. "I guess the alliance is up to you."

She could see the wheels turning inside his head as he tried to make sense of this upside-down world in which they found themselves, where the most sought after Christmas presents of the day were apparently a suckling pig and a pile of potatoes, dentists were held in higher accord than emperors, and a cavalry general was Santa Claus.

She snuck a second peek at the gruesome teeth. It would take some getting used to.

The Wallenstein Gambit

Eric Flint

Chapter I: The Bohemian Opening
March, 1633

1

"So what's this all about, Mike?" asked Morris Roth, after Mike Stearns closed the door behind him. "And why did you ask me to meet you in Edith's home?"

Grantville's jeweler looked around the small living room curiously. That was the part of Mike's request that Morris had found most puzzling. By the early spring of 1633, Stearns was usually so busy with political affairs that people came to see him in his office downtown.

As soon as he spotted the young man sitting in an armchair in the corner, Morris' curiosity spiked—and, for the first time, a trace of apprehension came into his interest. He didn't know the name of the young man, but he recognized him even though he wasn't in uniform.

He was a German mercenary, captured in the short-lived battle outside Jena the year before, who'd since enrolled in the army of the United States. More to the point, Morris knew that he was part of Captain Harry Lefferts' unit—which, in reality if not in official parlance, amounted to Mike Stearns' combination of special security unit and commandos.

"Patience, patience," said Mike, smiling thinly. "I'd apologize for the somewhat peculiar circumstances, but as you'll see for yourself in a moment we have a special security problem to deal with." He glanced at the man sitting in the armchair. "I think the best way to make everything clear is just to introduce you to someone. Follow me."

Stearns turned and headed for the hallway, Morris trailing behind. Edith Wild's house wasn't a big one, so it only took a few steps before he came to a closed door. "We're keeping him in here, while he recovers from his latest round of surgery. Edith volunteered to serve as his live-in nurse."

Morris restrained his grimace. Edith Wild was capable enough as a nurse, so long as it didn't involve any real medical experience. Like many of Grantville's nurses since the Ring of Fire, she'd had no background in medical work. She'd been employed in a glass factory in Clarksburg.

Her main qualification for her new line of work, so far as Morris could tell, was that she was a very big woman, massive as well as tall, and had much the same temperament as the infamous Nurse Ratchett in a movie he'd once seen, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Not the sadism, true. But the woman was a ferocious bully. She was normally engaged in enforcing Grantville's public health laws, a job which required a firm hand given the huge influx of immigrants who had a seventeenth-century conception of sanitation and prophylaxis.

A "firm hand," Edith Wild certainly had. Morris had, more than once, heard Germans refer to her as "the Tatar." When they weren't calling her something downright obscene.

And who is "he"? Morris wondered. But he said nothing, since Mike was already opening the door and ushering him into the bedroom beyond.

It was a room to fit the house. Small, sparsely furnished, and just as spick-and-span clean as everything else. But Morris Roth gave the room itself no more than a cursory glance. Despite the bandages covering much of the lower face, he recognized the man lying in the bed within two seconds.

That was odd, since he'd never actually met him. But, perhaps not so odd as all that. Like many residents of Grantville, Morris had a poster up in his jewelry store that portrayed the man's likeness. True, in the form of a painting rather than a photograph. But he could now see that it was quite a good likeness.

He groped for words and couldn't find any. They'd have been swear words, and Morris avoided profanity. The poster in his shop was titled: Wanted, Dead or Alive.

The man was studying him with dark eyes. Despite the obvious pain the man was feeling, his expression was one of keen interest.

Abruptly, the man raised a hand and motioned for Morris to approach him.

"Go ahead," said Mike, chuckling harshly. "He doesn't bite, I promise. He couldn't anyway, even if he wanted to. His jaw's wired shut."

Reluctantly, much as he'd move toward a viper, Morris came over to the side of the bed. There was a tablet lying on the covers—one of the now-rare modern legal tablets—along with a ballpoint pen.

The man in the bed took the pen in hand and, shakily, scratched out a message. Then, held it up for Morris to see.

The words were written in English. Morris hadn't known the man in the bed knew the language. He wasn't surprised, really. Whatever other crimes and faults had ever been ascribed to that man, lack of intelligence had never been one of them.

But Morris didn't give any of that much thought. His attention was entirely riveted on the message itself.

CHMIELNICKI
I CAN STOP IT

For a moment, it seemed to Morris Roth as if time stood still. He felt light-headed, as if everything was unreal. Since the Ring of Fire, when Morris came to understand that he was really stranded in the seventeenth century, in the early 1630s, not more than a week had ever gone by without his thoughts turning to the Chmielnicki Massacre of 1648. And wondering if there was something—anything—he could do to prevent it. He'd raised the matter with Mike himself, several times before. Only to be told, not to his surprise, that Mike couldn't think of any way a small town of Americans fighting for its own survival in war-torn Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War could possibly do anything to stop a coming mass pogrom in the Ukraine.

"How?" he croaked.

Again, the man scrawled; and held up the tablet.

COMPLICATED
STEARNS WILL EXPLAIN
BUT I WILL NEED YOUR HELP

Morris looked at Stearns. Mike had come close and seen the message himself. Now, he motioned toward the door. "Like he says, it's complicated. Let's talk about it in the living room, Morris. After the extensive surgery done on him, the man needs his rest."

Morris followed Mike out of the bedroom, not looking back. He said nothing until they reached the living room. Then, almost choking out the words, could only exclaim:

"Wallenstein?"

Mike shrugged, smiling wryly, and gestured at the couch. He perched himself on an ottoman near the armchair where the soldier was sitting. "Have a seat, Morris. We've got a lot to discuss. But I'll grant you, it's more than a bit like having a devil come and offer you salvation."

After Morris was seated, he manage a chuckle himself.

"Make sure you use a long spoon."

Seeing the expression on Mike's face, Morris groaned. "Don't tell me!"

"Yup. I plan to use a whole set of very long-handled tableware, dealing with that man. And, yup, I've got you in mind for the spoon. The ladle, actually."

"He wants money, I assume." Morris scowled. "I have to tell you that I get awfully tired of the assumption that all Jews are rich. If this new venture of ours takes off, I might be. Faceted jewelry is unheard-of in this day and age, and we should get a king's ransom for them. But right now . . . Mike, I don't have a lot of cash lying around. Most of my money is invested in the business."

Mike's smile grew more lopsided still. "Wallenstein's no piker, like the rest of them. He wants a lot more than your money, Morris. He doesn't want the gold from the goose, he wants the goose himself."

Morris raised a questioning eyebrow.

"Figure it out. Your new jewel-cutting business looks to make a fortune, right? So where's that fortune going to pour into? Grantville—or Prague?"

Morris groaned again. "Mike, I'm over fifty years old! So's Judith. We're too old to be relocating to—to— A city that doesn't have modern plumbing," he finished, sounding a bit lame even to himself.

Stearns said nothing, for a moment. Then, harshly and abruptly: "You've asked me four times to think of a way to stop the coming massacres of Jews in the Ukraine. Probably the worst pogrom in Jewish history before the Holocaust, you told me. This is the best I can manage, Morris. I can't do it, but Wallenstein . . . maybe. But it's a hell of a gamble—and, frankly, one which has a lot more parameters than simply the Jewish problem in eastern Europe."

Morris' mind was finally starting to work clearly again. "To put it mildly. Am I right in assuming that Wallenstein came here secretly to propose an alliance? He'll break from the Austrian Habsburgs and take Bohemia out of Ferdinand's empire?"

Mike nodded. "That—and the best medical care in the world. Julie's bullets tore him up pretty good, Morris, and the man's health was none too good to begin with. The truth is, Doctor Nichols—he did most of the actual surgery—doesn't think Wallenstein's likely to live more than a few years."

"A few years . . ." Morris mused. "Do you think—?"

"Who knows, Morris? Immediately, the alliance is a godsend for us, as weird as it looks. I've discussed it with Gustav Adolf and he agrees. If Becky's mission to France can't get us a peace with Richelieu, we're looking to be at war again soon. A revolt in Bohemia—sure as hell with Wallenstein in charge—will at least take the Austrians out of the equation. As for the Ukraine . . ."

He shrugged. "We've got fifteen years, theoretically—assuming the butterfly effect doesn't scramble so-called 'future history' the way it usually does."

"It'll maybe scramble the timing," Morris said grimly, "but I doubt it'll do much to scramble what's coming. The Chmielnicki Massacre was centuries in the making, and the ingredients of it were pretty intractable."

Mike nodded. Morris knew that after the first time he'd raised the subject with Mike, Stearns had done some research on it. He'd been helped, of course, by his Jewish wife and father-in-law. By now, Morris thought, Mike probably knew more than he did about the situation of eastern European Jewry.

"Intractable is putting it mildly. If it were just a matter of religious or ethnic prejudices and hatreds, it'd be bad enough. But there's a vicious class factor at work, too. Polish noblemen are the landlords over Ukrainian peasants—whom they gouge mercilessly—and they use the Jews as their rent collectors and tax farmers. So when the Ukrainian peasants finally revolted under Cossack leadership—will revolt, I should say—it's not too hard to figure out why they immediately targeted the Jews."

Morris sighed. As much as he was naturally on the side of the Jews in the Ukraine, he knew enough about the situation not to think for a minute that there was any simple solution. In fact, he'd once gotten into a ferocious quarrel with one of the Abrabanel scions who, like a number of the young Jews who had gravitated into Grantville, had become something of a Jewish nationalist.

Arm the Ukrainian Jews! the young man had proclaimed.

"For what?" Morris had snarled in response. "So they can become even more ruthless rent collectors? You stupid idiot! Those Ukrainian peasants are people too, you know. You've got to find a solution that they'll accept also."

He stared at the large bookcase against one of the walls, where Edith kept her beloved collection of Agatha Christie novels. For a moment, he had a wild and whimsical wish that the great detective Hercule Poirot would manifest himself in the room and provide them all with a neat and tidy answer.

Neat and tidy . . . in the seventeenth century? Ha! We never managed "neat and tidy" even in our own world.

"All right," he said abruptly. "As long as Judith agrees, I'll do it. I'll try to talk Jason Gotkin into coming with us, too, since he was studying to be a rabbi before the Ring of Fire."

Having made the pronouncement, he was immediately overwhelmed by a feeling of inadequacy. "But—Mike—I don't . . ."

"Relax, Morris," said Mike, smiling. "You won't be on your own. Just for starters, Uriel Abrabanel has agreed to move to Prague also."

Morris felt an instant flood of relief. Rebecca's uncle was probably an even more accomplished spymaster and political intriguer than her father Balthazar. And if he was elderly, at least he didn't have Balthazar's heart problems. So far as anyone knew, anyway.

"Take those young firebrands around Dunash with you, also."

Morris grimaced. Dunash Abrabanel was the young man he'd had the quarrel with. "I'm not sure they'll listen to me, Mike. Much less obey me."

"Then let them stay here and rot," Mike said harshly. "If nothing else, Morris, I want to give those fellows something to do that'll keep them from haring off to the Holy Land in order to found the state of Israel. I do not need a war with the Ottoman Empire on top of everything else."

Morris chuckled. "Mike, not even Dunash is crazy enough to do that. It's just a pipedream they talk about now and then, usually after they've had way too much to drink."

"Maybe so. Then again, maybe not. They're frustrated, Morris, and I can't say I blame them for it. So let's give them something constructive to do. Let them go to Prague and see if they can convince Europe's largest Jewish community to throw its support behind Wallenstein."

Morris was already thinking ahead. "That won't be easy. The Jews in Prague are Ashkenazim and they're Sephardic. Not to mention that Prague's Jewry is orthodox, which they really aren't—well, they are, but they often follow different—and . . . Oh, boy," he ended lamely.

"I didn't say it would be easy, Morris."

"Dunash will insist on arming the Jews."

Mike shrugged. "So? I'm in favor of that anyway. As long as those guns aren't being used to help Polish noblemen gouge their peasants, I'm all for the Jewish population being armed to the teeth."

"Will Wallenstein agree to that? As it stands, Bohemian laws—like the laws of most European countries—forbid Jews from carrying weapons."

Mike jerked at thumb at the bedroom door. "Why ask me? The man's right in there, Morris. Negotiate with him."

After a moment's hesitation, Morris squared his shoulders and marched into the bedroom.

* * *

When he came back out, a few minutes later, he had a bemused expression on his face.

"Well?"

Mutely, Morris showed Mike a sheet of paper from Wallenstein's legal pad. When Mike looked down at it, he saw Wallenstein's shaky scrawl.

AGREED
JEWS MAY BE ARMED
BUT MUST SUPPORT ME
OR I WILL BURN DOWN THE GHETTO

"He's not the nicest guy in the world," Morris observed. He folded up the sheet and tucked it into his short pocket. "On the other hand . . ."

Mike finished the thought for him. "He's ambitious as Satan and, whatever else, one of the most capable men in the world. Plus, he doesn't seem to share most of this century's religious bigotry. That doesn't mean he won't burn down the ghetto. He will, Morris, in a heartbeat. But he won't do it because you're Jews. He'll do it because you failed him."

* * *

Judith agreed more quickly than Morris would have thought. Indeed, his wife began packing the next morning. But the first thing she put in the trunk was the biggest ladle they had in the kitchen.

"We'll need it," she predicted.

2

"It looks a little weird without the statues," mused Len Tanner, adjusting his horn-rim glasses. He leaned over the stone railing of the Charles Bridge and looked first one way, then the other. The bridge was the main span across the Vltava river, and connected the two halves of the city of Prague. It had been built almost two centuries earlier, in the fourteenth century—though not finished until the early fifteenth, moving as slowly as medieval construction usually did—and had been named after the Holy Roman Emperor who commanded its erection. The Karlüv most, to use the proper Czech term, although Tanner said they hadn't given it that name until sometime in the nineteenth century. In this day and age, it was still just called the Stone Bridge.

Watching Tanner, Ellie Anderson almost laughed. Something in the little twitches Len was making with his lips made it clear that he'd have been chewing on his huge mustache, if he still had one.

But, he didn't—and wouldn't, as long as Ellie had anything to say about it. However many of Len Tanner's quirks and foibles she'd grown accustomed to and decided she could live with, that damned walrus mustache was not one of them. She preferred her men clean-shaven and always had, a quirk of her own she suspected came from memories of a great bearded lout of a father. Dim memories. He'd been killed in a car wreck when she was only seven years old, caused by a drunk driver. Him. It was a one-car accident and the only other casualty had been the oak tree at the sharp bend in the road near their house.

Fortunately, the oak tree had survived. Ellie's memories of the oak tree were a lot more extensive, and a lot fonder, than those of her father. Years later, she'd even built a treefort in it. The neighbors had been a little scandalized. Not so much by the implied disrespect for her father—truth be told, nobody in that little eastern Kentucky town had had much use for Dick Anderson—but because it was yet another display of the tomboy habits that had already made her the despair of the town's gentility.

"Gentility" as they saw themselves, anyhow. Ellie had thought then—still did—that the term was ludicrous applied to seven matrons, not one of whom had more than a high school education and only two of whom had ever been anything more than housewives and professional busybodies.

She wondered, for a moment, what had happened to any or all of them. She hadn't been back to her hometown in ten years, since her mother died of cancer and her two brothers had made it clear they'd just as soon not be burdened with her company. Since the feeling was mutual, she'd simply come in for the funeral and left the same evening.

And what do you care, anyway? she asked herself sarcastically. They're a whole universe away, so it's a little late to be thinking about it now.

But she knew the answer. Hers had been a self-sufficient life, and she was not sorry for it. Still, it had often been a lonely one, too.

It wasn't now, because of Len Tanner. Ten times more aggravating, often enough, but . . . not lonely.

"Looks weird," he repeated.

"Oh, for God's sake, Len! Doesn't it strike you as a little eccentric to call a city 'weird' because it doesn't have statues from three and half centuries later, in another universe, that only you remember because—far as I know—you're the only resident of Grantville weird enough to go to Prague on vacation?"

The jibe, not to Ellie's surprise, simply made Tanner look smug.

"Not my fault the rest of 'em are a bunch of hicks. 'Vacation,' ha! For most of 'em, that meant fishing somewhere within fifty miles or—ooh, how daring—a trip to the big city called Pittsburgh." Again, his lips made that wish-there-was-a-mustache-here twitch. "Ha! I remember, back when Mike Stearns went to Los Angeles for three years. Everybody else in Grantville—'cept me—thought he'd gone to Mars or something. The only 'furrin country' most of those boys had ever been to was Vietnam. And that was hardly what you'd call a sight-seeing trip."

It was one of the many odd little things about Len Tanner, Ellie reflected. To her surprise, she'd discovered that he was probably the most widely traveled man she'd ever known. Tourism was one of Len's passions. His main passion, probably, leaving aside that grotesque mustache. For his entire adult life, every vacation he'd gotten—and he'd always been willing to work extra hours to pile up vacation time—Tanner had gone somewhere outside the old United States. Some of them pretty exotic places, like China and—

Ellie chuckled. One of Tanner's little brags was that he was the only American veteran in Grantville who'd made it all the way to Hanoi. True, he was a veteran of the Grenadan conquest, which the Vietnam vets in town didn't consider a "real war." Still, they didn't begrudge him the boast. They even chuckled at it, themselves, partly because most people who got to know him tended to like Len Tanner, and partly because . . .

He was a lonely man, and, what was worse, a man who was uncomfortable in his loneliness. So, for years, his friends and drinking buddies had indulged his little oddities.

Loneliness had been at the heart of his compulsive traveling, Ellie suspected. Tanner had adopted tourism as a hobby, the way other lonely people adopt other things. And if it was a more expensive hobby than most, it had at least made Tanner less parochial-minded than most people of Ellie's acquaintance. He actually had seen the "big wide world," even if his ingrained awkwardness with learning foreign languages always kept him at a certain distance from the people whose countries he'd visited.

Now, Tanner was staring up at the Hradcany. The hill upon which Prague Castle was perched overlooked the entire city. It wasn't much of a hill, really, but it hardly mattered. The Prazský hrad—to use the Czech term for "Prague Castle"—seemed to dominate everything. It was an ancient edifice, begun in the ninth century a.d. by the rulers of the Slavic tribes who had migrated into the area a century or two earlier, and added to in bits and pieces as the centuries passed. But, always, whether the rulers of the area that eventually became known as Bohemia were Slavic princes or German Holy Roman Emperors, the seat of power was in Prague Castle.

"At least that's still pretty much the same," Tanner said. "Except for that stupid, boring façade they added in the eighteenth century. Good riddance—or riddance-never-come, I guess I should say." He exuded an air of satisfaction, studying the hill. "Even when I visited it, though, that gorgeous cathedral was the centerpiece. Now, even more so."

Ellie wouldn't have used the term "gorgeous" to describe St. Vitus Cathedral, herself. As far as she was concerned, the immense Gothic structure that loomed over the entire Hradcany belonged where everything Gothic belonged—in a romance novel, preferably featuring sexy vampires.

Womanfully, though, she restrained herself from calling it "ugly and grotesque." One of Tanner's many little quirks was that he invariably defended—ferociously—each and every architectural or artistic endeavor of the Roman Catholic Church. That was to make up, she'd once accused him, for the fact that he was never found in church more than once a year.

I ain't a "lapsed Catholic"! he'd responded hotly, at the time. Just, y'know, not around as much as maybe I oughta be.

Well, that's one way to put it, Ellie had retorted. Is that why Father Mazzare greets you with "howdy, stranger"?

Remembering that minor fight, she smiled a little. She and Tanner bickered a lot, but, truth be told, he really was a hard man to dislike. Once you got to know him, at least. Most of his vices and character flaws he wore on his sleeve. What lay underneath—assuming you could cut your way through that damn crust—was . . . really pretty nice and warm.

At least, Ellie Anderson thought so. More and more, in fact, as time went on.

* * *

As was her own nature, the surge of sentiment made her brusque.

"C'mon, Len! Let's quit gawking at the sights. We're supposed to be on a secret mission for Morris Roth, remember?"

Tanner gave her a sour look. Then, bestowed a look considerably more sour on the squad of men who were following them. Lounging along behind them, it might be better to say. The four mercenary soldiers in Pappenheim's pay somehow managed to make their way across a bridge as if they were loafing in an alehouse.

"Some 'secret' mission," he grumbled. "With those clowns in our wake. Why don't we just put on signs saying: Attention! Dangerous furriners!"

She took him by the arm and began leading him along the bridge, toward that part of Prague known as the Staré Mesto—which meant nothing fancier than "Old Town"—where the eastern end of the Charles Bridge abutted.

"Jesus! Were you just as suspicious of tourist guides, too, back in your globe-trotting days? You know damn good and well—ought to, anyway, as many briefings as we had to sit through—that nobody in this day and age thinks of anybody as 'furriners.' Well. Not the way you mean it. A 'furriner' is anybody outside of your own little bailiwick. So who cares if they're 'Czech' or 'German' or 'French' or 'English'—or even 'American,' for that matter? That's the business of the princes, not the townfolk."

By the end, she was almost grumbling the words herself. Tanner's quirks, harmless as they might be, were sometimes annoying.

"I never trusted guide books. They don't pay the guys who write 'em to tell the truth, y'know? They pay 'em to sucker in the tourists."

Her only response was to grip his arm tighter and march him a little faster across the bridge. And maybe tighten her lips a little.

Stubbornly, Ellie continued her little lecture. "So nobody—except you—gives a fuck about whether we're here on a 'secret mission' or not." She jerked her head backward a little, indicating the castle behind them. "Not even Don Balthasar de Marradas gives a damn what we're doing here. If he's even noticed us at all."

Len's good humor returned. "How's he supposed to? He's too busy squabbling with the Count of Solms-Baruth over which one of them is really the Emperor's chosen administrator for Prague. Gawd, there are times I love the butterfly effect."

Ellie grinned. Grantville's knowledge of central European history in the seventeenth century was spotty and erratic, as you'd expect from the records and resources of a small town in West Virginia that had neither a college nor a business enterprise with any particular reason to develop a specialized knowledge about central Europe, even in their own time much less three or four centuries earlier. But, there were occasional exceptions to that rule, little glimpses of historical detail—like islands in a sea of obscurity—usually engendered by some individual interest of one or another of Grantville's residents.

And, as it happened, Prague in the middle of the seventeenth century was one of them. That was because, some years before the Ring of Fire, Judith Roth had developed an interest in genealogy. She'd traced her ancestors back to the large Jewish community which had lived in Prague since the tenth century and had enjoyed something of a "golden age" recently because of the tolerant policies of the Austrian Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, who'd reigned from 1576 to 1612.

Judith's interest in genealogy had lapsed, eventually. But she'd never bothered to erase the data she'd accumulated from her home computer's hard drive. Eventually, some months after the Ring of Fire, it had occurred to her to look at it again.

Melissa Mailey—for that matter, the entire executive branch of the U.S. government—had practically jumped for joy. Most of the information, of course, concentrated on Jewish genealogy and history. But, as is invariably true when someone does a broad and sweeping search for data on the internet, there was a lot of other stuff mixed in with it, mostly disconnected and often-useless items of information.

One of those little items—the one that was causing Tanner and Anderson to enjoy a moment's humor as they crossed the Charles Bridge—was that Johann Georg II, Count of Solms-Baruth and one of the Austrian emperor's top administrators, had died in the plague that swept Prague in the spring of 1632.

But that had been in a different universe. In this one, he was very much alive a year later, in the spring of 1633. Apparently, following Gustavus Adolphus' victory at the battle of Breitenfeld in September of 1631, the influence of the newly arrived Americans on events thereafter had been enough to send a multitude of ripples through "established history." Small ones, at the beginning, as was always true of the butterfly effect—so named after the notion that the flapping of a butterfly's wings could eventually cause a hurricane. But big enough, obviously, to allow one Count Johann Georg II to survive the disease that had felled him in another universe.

Good for him, of course—but now, also, good for those who were secretly scheming with Wallenstein to overthrow Austrian rule in Bohemia. Because the Count of Solms-Baruth was a stubborn man, and refused to concede pre-eminence in Bohemia's administrative affairs to the Emperor's favored courtier, Don Balthasar de Marradas. The enmity between Count Johann Georg and Don Balthasar went back to 1626, apparently, when Wallenstein had selected the count over the don as his chief lieutenant in the campaign against the Protestant mercenary Mansfeld.

Neither Tanner nor Ellie knew much of the details, which were as tangled as seventeenth-century aristocratic feuds and vendettas usually were. All that mattered to them was that Solms-Baruth was tacitly on Wallenstein's side, and he was doing his level best to interfere with Marradas' ability to retain firm Austrian control over political developments in Prague and Bohemia. Which, among other things, meant that the two of them could carry out their special project in Prague—even go on side expeditions like the one that was taking them across the Charles Bridge—without any real fear of being stopped and investigated by Austrian soldiery.

In fact, the only soldiery in sight were the four men in the squad following them—who had been given the assignment personally by Wallenstein's general Pappenheim, and had an official-looking document signed by the count to establish their credentials should anyone think to object.

"There are times," Ellie mused, "when the 'Machiavellian' scheming and plotting of these fucking seventeenth-century princes and mercenary captains reminds me of the Keystone Kops more than anything else."

Tanner came to an abrupt halt. "Think so?" He pointed a finger ahead of them, and slightly to the left. "We'll be coming to it soon, on our way to the Josefov. The Old Town Square—'Starry-mesta,' the Czechs call it, or something like that. That's where Emperor Ferdinand—yup, the same shithead who's still sitting on the throne in Vienna—had twenty-seven Protestant leaders executed after the Battle of the White Mountain."

Now he swiveled, and pointed back toward the Hradcany. "The guy who did the executing was—still is—one of the most famous executioners in history. Jan Mydlar's his name. When I was here, I saw his sword hanging in one of the museums in the Castle. They say he could lop a man's head off with one stroke, every time."

The finger lowered slightly. "They stuck the heads on spikes, right there, all along the Charles Bridge. They left them there to rot, for years. Only took the last down maybe a year ago."

He turned and they started walking again. In silence.

As they neared the end of the bridge, Ellie cleared her throat. "Whatever happened to that guy? The executioner, I mean. Jan Whazzisname."

Tanner shrugged. "Not sure. Maybe he's still alive."

Ellie gurgled something inarticulate. Tanner gave her a sly, sidelong glance.

"Hey, sweetheart, cheer up. The funny thing is, according to the story Mydlar was something of a Bohemian patriot himself. They say he wore a black hood that day—in mourning, so the story goes—instead of the flame-red hood he normally wore. So who knows? If he's still around, he might wind up working for us."

"Like I said," Ellie muttered. "The Keystone Kops. Okay, sure, on steroids."

Chapter II: Pawn to King Four
April, 1633

1

By the time the expedition finally set out for Prague, three weeks after his meeting with Mike Stearns and Wallenstein, Morris was feeling a bit more relaxed about the prospect. A bit, not much.

What relaxation did come to him derived primarily from the presence in their party of Uriel Abrabanel. By temperament, Rebecca's uncle was less given to sedentary introspection than his brother. True, Balthazar Abrabanel had spent much of his life working as a spy also. But he was a doctor by trade and a philosopher by inclination—more in the nature of what the term "spymaster" captures.

His brother Uriel had had no such side interests, beyond the financial dealings that were part of being a member of the far-flung Abrabanel clan and integral to his espionage. He'd spent much of his earlier life as a seaman—a "Portuguese" seaman, using the standard subterfuge of secret Jews anywhere the Spanish Inquisition might be found—and, though now in his sixties, he rode a horse as easily as he had once ridden a yardarm.

"Oh, yes," he said cheerfully, "they're a lot of hypocrites, the English. Jews have been officially banned from the island for centuries, but they always let some of us stay around, as long as we—what's that handy American expression?—ah, yes: 'kept a low profile.' Not only did their kings and queens and dukes and earls always want Jewish doctors, but they also found us so handy to spy on the Spanish for them."

Morris tried not to make a face. Even two years after the Ring of Fire, with the attitudes and sensibilities of one born and raised in twentieth-century America, he found it hard to accept the position of Jews in the seventeenth century. What he found harder to accept—and even more disturbing—was the readiness of Jews in his new universe to accommodate to that seventeenth-century reality.

Uriel must have sensed some of his distaste. "Whatever else, Morris, we must survive. And the truth is that, for all their hypocrisy, the English are no real threat to us. Not the Stuarts, nor the Tudor dynasty before them. The real enemy . . ."

His voice trailed off, as Uriel studied the landscape ahead of him. His eyes were slitted, though there was really nothing in that central European countryside to warrant the hostility. By now, having skirted Saxony, they were through the low Erzgebirge mountains and beginning to enter the Bohemian plain.

"The Habsburgs," he said, almost hissing the words. "There is the source—well, the driving engine, anyway—of Europe's bigotry in this day and age. The Austrians as much as the Spanish."

"I would have thought you'd name the Catholic Church. From what I hear, the Austrian Emperor has treated the Jewish community in Prague rather well."

"That's because he needs their money to keep his war coffers full. As soon as the war's over, Ferdinand will treat the Jews in Prague just as savagely as he treated the Utraquists and the Unity of Brethren. Watch and see."

Uriel shrugged. "I am not fond of the Roman Catholic Church, to be sure. But then, I'm no fonder of most Protestant sects either. No pope ever fulminated as violently against the Jews as Martin Luther. Still, religious intolerance we can live with. Being fair, it's not as if there aren't a lot of Jews who are just as intolerant. The real problem is when that intolerance gets shackled to a dynasty driving for continental power. Which, for centuries now in Europe, has meant the Habsburgs first and foremost."

Morris glanced to his left, where a number of horsemen were escorting several large wagons. Uriel followed his gaze, and a slight smile came to his face.

"Ah, yes. The Unity of Brethren. It will certainly be interesting to see how they finally—"

Again, he groped for an American colloquialism. Uriel was very fond of the things.

" 'Shape up,' " Morris provided.

"Indeed so! Such a splendid expression! 'Shape up', indeed."

Morris shook his head ruefully. The political situation he was about to plunge into in Prague was a genuine nightmare. Since the Habsburg armies had conquered Bohemia, after the short-lived period from 1618 to 1621 during which the Bohemians had tried to install a Protestant king against Ferdinand's wishes, the Austrian emperor had ruled the province tyrannically. In particular, he had introduced a level of brutality into religious persecution that had not been seen in Europe since the campaigns of the Spanish Duke of Alva during the first years of the Dutch revolt.

It was said that, upon hearing the news of the Catholic victory at the Battle of the White Mountain, a priest in Vienna had taken the pulpit to urge Emperor Ferdinand II to follow the Biblical precept: Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them into pieces like a potter's vessel.

Ferdinand had needed no urging. He was a bigot by nature, who was a genuine Catholic fanatic, not simply a monarch using the established church to further his political ends. In point of fact, it was also rumored—apparently based on good information—that Pope Urban VIII had several times tried to rein in the Habsburg emperor's religious zeal. But, to no avail. Stalin's notorious wisecrack from a later century—how many divisions has the Pope?—would have been understood perfectly by rulers of the seventeenth century, the Catholic ones perhaps even better than the Protestants. Like Cardinal Richelieu in France, Emperor Ferdinand felt he was simply following Christ's advice to give unto Caesar that which was Caesar's.

And he was Caesar, and Bohemia was his, and he intended to make the most of it. Thus, he had:

—executed dozens of Protestant noblemen who'd led the short-lived revolt;

—banned the Utraquist and Calvinist and Hussite sects of the Protestant creed outright, and made it clear to the Lutherans that they were henceforth on a very short leash;

—abolished elective monarchy and made the Kingdom of Bohemia henceforth hereditary in the Habsburg line;

—had the Letter of Majesty, the Bohemians' much-cherished charter of religious liberty that had been captured in the sack of Prague, sent to him in Vienna, where he personally cut it into pieces;

—with his Edict of Restitution in 1629, seized Protestant churches and church property and given them to the Catholic church;

—seized the estates of "rebels," bringing into his dynasty's possession the property of over six hundred prominent Protestant families, fifty towns, and about half the entire acreage of the province;

—allowed his soldiery—mostly Bavarians in Bohemia and Cossacks in Moravia—to ravage and plunder the peasantry and the small towns, more or less at will, thereby saving himself much of the need to actually pay his mercenaries;

—ruined the economy of Bohemia and Moravia by severely debasing the currency in order to buy up still more estates;

—transformed the once-prosperous peasantry and urban commoners of the region into paupers, and created a handful of great landowners to rule over them (of whom none was greater and richer than Wallenstein, ironically enough in light of current developments);

—and . . .

* * *

Oh, it went on and on. True, Morris would admit—even Uriel would—Emperor Ferdinand II of Austria did not really make the roster of Great Evil Rulers of History. He just wasn't on a par with such as Tamerlane and Hitler and Stalin. But he was certainly a contender for the middleweight title of Rulers You'd Like to See Drop Dead. A narrow-minded, not overly intelligent man, who could invariably be counted on to follow the stupidest and most brutal policy offered to him by his multitude of advisers and courtiers.

Yes, stupid as well as brutal. A stupidity that was evidenced in the fact that the mission Morris was on was designed to break Bohemia away from the Habsburg empire again—permanently, this time, if all went well—and the instrument of that break would be the very man whom Ferdinand himself had raised up from obscure origins because he was the most brutally capable mercenary captain of the day and age.

Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein. Born in the year 1583 into a family of the minor Protestant Bohemian nobility, and orphaned at the age of thirteen. Today he was the greatest landowner in Bohemia—possibly in the entire Austrian empire except for Ferdinand himself—as well as the duke of Friedland, a member of the Estate of Princes of the Empire, recognized as the duke of Mecklenburg by the Habsburgs (if not, of course, by the Swedish king Gustav Adolf who today actually controlled Mecklenburg), and prince of Sagan.

Thinking about Wallenstein—and the big ladle Judith had stuffed into one of their trunks—Morris grunted.

"What do you think of him, Uriel?"

Abrabanel had no difficulty understanding the subject. "Wallenstein? Hard to say." He paused for a moment, marshalling his thoughts.

"On the one hand, he is probably the most completely amoral man in the world. I doubt if there is any crime he would shrink from, if he felt it would advance his purposes."

"No kidding." Morris scowled. "He's the stinking bastard who ordered his Croat cavalry to attack our school last year. Tried to slaughter all of our children!"

Uriel nodded. "Indeed. On the other hand . . . There is a lot to be said for him, as well. It's no accident, you know, that he wound up becoming something of a folk hero in German legend."

He barked a little laugh. "Not an unmixed admiration, of course! Still, what I can tell of reading your books from the future, the Germans came to grudgingly admire the man in the decades and centuries after his death, much as the French never stopped grudgingly admiring Napoleon. The German poet and playwright Schiller even wrote several plays—in the next century, that would be—about him. Odd, really—a Corsican folk hero for the French, and a Bohemian one for the Germans."

The scowl was still on Morris' face. "Big deal," he said, adding somewhat unkindly: "That's just because the Frogs and the Krauts don't have too many genuine heroes to pick from."

Uriel's easy smile came. "Such terrible chauvinism! Of course, that term does come from a French word, so I suppose there's some truth to your wisecrack. Still—"

The smile didn't fade, but the old spy's dark eyes seem to darken still further. "Do not let your animosities get the best of you, Morris. This much is also true of Wallenstein: a peasant on one of his estates is in a better situation than peasants anywhere else in the Austrian empire. Wallenstein is shrewd enough to know when not to gouge, and he even fosters and encourages what you would call scientific farming. He opposed the Edict of Restitution and, by all accounts, is not much given—if at all, beyond the needs of diplomacy—to religious persecution. If he is amoral, he is not im-moral."

"They say he believes in astrology," grumbled Morris.

"Indeed, he is quite superstitious." Uriel's smile broadened, becoming almost sly. "On the other hand, they also say he treats his wife very well."

Morris grunted again. "Um. Well, okay. That's something, I guess."

* * *

They heard the sounds of a horse nearing and twisted in their saddles to look backward. The motions were easy and relaxed, since both men were experienced riders. In Morris' case, from an adult lifetime of being an enthusiast for pack-riding; in Uriel's, from an adult lifetime that had had more in the way of rambunctious excitement—including several desperate flights on horseback across the countryside—than most city-dwelling Jews of the time ever experienced.

The same could not be said for the man approaching them, and neither Morris nor Uriel could restrain themselves from smiling. Jason Gotkin, though in his early twenties, was not at all comfortable on horseback—and showed it. He rode his mount as gingerly, and with the same air of uncertainty, as an apprentice liontamer enters a lion's cage.

Seeing their expressions, Jason flushed a little. When he finally came alongside—it might be better to say, edged his horse alongside with all the sureness of a cadet docking a boat—his words were spoken in something of a hiss.

"Look, I was getting a degree in computer science and was trying to decide between a life spent as a software engineer or a rabbi. I was not planning to become a cowboy."

Uriel's smile widened into a grin. Among the uptime hobbies that Uriel had adopted since the Ring of Fire, reading westerns was one of them. He was particularly fond of Donald Hamilton, Luke Short and Louis L'Amour.

"I should hope not! Leaving aside your pitiful manner on horseback, you can't—what's that expression?—hit the broadside of a barn. With a rifle, much less a revolver."

"Software engineer," Jason hissed again. "Rabbi." He scowled faintly. "The average rabbi does not pack a gun. Not even in New York—and wouldn't, even if it weren't for the Sullivan Act."

Morris' gaze slid away from Jason and drifted back toward the rear of the not-so-little caravan. There, almost at the very end, was the small group of horsemen centered around the figure of young Dunash Abrabanel. None of them rode a horse any better than Jason. But, unlike Jason, all of them were armed to the teeth. They looked like a caricature of highwaymen, in fact, they had so many firearms festooned upon their bodies and saddles.

Morris sighed. "We're nearing Bohemian territory, if we're not already in it. They're going to have to hide the guns, Jason. Whatever Wallenstein's promises, until he carries out his rebellion Imperial law still applies."

"Either that or agree to pretend they aren't Jews," grunted Uriel. The humor that had been on his face was gone, now. This was a sore subject with him, and one on which he and Dunash's little group had already clashed several times. Many times in his life, Uriel had passed himself off as a gentile of one sort or another. Once, he'd even successfully passed himself off as a Spanish hidalgo.

"Stupid!" he said, almost snarling. "They are no more observant—not any longer—than I am. Much less my brother Balthazar. And even in the days when we were, neither of us hesitated to do what was necessary. So why do they insist on flaunting their Jewishness, when it is pointless?"

Morris started to sigh again, but managed to restrain himself. Jason was apprehensive enough as it was, without Morris making his own nervousness about their project apparent.

It was hard. Even in the age from which Morris had come, the urbane and cosmopolitan world of America at the turn of the twenty-first century, there had been divisions between observant and non-observant Jews, leaving aside the disagreements between the various branches of Judaism. In the seventeenth century, those tensions were far more extreme.

Not, perhaps, for the Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe, cloistered as they were—corralled by the gentiles surrounding them, more properly speaking—into their tight ghettos and shtetls. There, rabbinical influence and control was powerful. Even enforced by law, since in most places—Prague being no exception—the gentile authorities gave the rabbinate jurisdiction over the members of the Jewish ghettos. But for the Sephardim, since the expulsion from Iberia, it was far more difficult. The Sephardic Jews had been scattered to the winds, and although many of them had managed to retain their traditions and customs and ritual observances, many others had not. So, the issue of how to handle nonobservant Jews—any number of whom had even officially converted to Christianity—was always difficult. In practice, Amsterdam being one of the major exceptions, most Sephardic rabbis and observant communities had adopted a fairly tolerant and patient attitude.

Morris and Judith Roth were themselves Ashkenazim, but their attitudes had far more in common with the cosmopolitan Sephardim they'd encountered since the Ring of Fire than the Ashkenazim of this day and age. And now, unwittingly, the arrival of a half-dozen modern Jews into the seventeenth century had introduced a new element into the equation: the twentieth-century ideology of Zionism.

"Zionism," at least, using the term loosely. Not even Dunash proposed to launch a campaign to create the state of Israel in the middle of the seventeenth century. His own Abrabanel clan would squash any such notion instantly, since their own survival and well-being depended largely on the tolerance of the Ottoman Empire. Murad IV, the current sultan ruling in Istanbul, bore not the slightest resemblance to Lord Balfour. "Murad the Mad," they called him, and for good reason. Though astonishingly capable for a ruler who was obviously a sociopath, one of his principal amusements was wandering about Istanbul personally executing inhabitants he discovered violating his recently decreed hardcore Islamic regulations.

So, the zeal of Dunash and his young comrades had been turned elsewhere. Toward the great mass of Jews living in eastern Europe, and the alleviation of their plight. They had been more enthusiastic about Wallenstein's scheme than anyone. Even Wallenstein himself, Morris suspected. If a Jewish homeland could not be created in the Levant, who was to say that somewhere in eastern Europe . . .

It was a tangled mess. Morris had supported the state of Israel, was a U.S. army veteran himself, and had no philosophical attachment to pacifism. But he also did not share Dunash's simple faith in the efficacy of violence as a way of solving political problems. In the end, he thought tolerance and a willingness to accept a compromise were far more practical methods than shooting a gun.

Not, admittedly, that shooting a gun isn't sometimes necessary to get the other guy to accept a compromise, he reminded himself.

He put the thought into words. "Look at it this way. Maybe having them along will help the others involved see things the right way."

Uriel looked skeptical. "Pappenheim? And what do you propose for our next trick? Intimidate a wolf with a stick?"

* * *

Pappenheim himself came out to meet them, as they neared the outskirts of Prague. Wallenstein's chief general rode down the line of the little caravan, inspecting them coldly. Looking every bit, Morris thought . . .

Like a wolf on horseback.

There was no other way to describe him. Pappenheim was just plain scary. Melissa Mailey had a copy of C.V. Wedgwood's classic The Thirty Years War, and Morris had read the passage in it describing Pappenheim. In fact, he'd reread the passage in the copy of the book which he now owned himself, produced by a seventeenth-century printing press, just before leaving on this expedition. Morris had an excellent memory, and now, watching Pappenheim trotting down the line, he called it up:

The heaviest loss Wallenstein had suffered at Lützen was that of Pappenheim. Reckless of his men, arrogant and insubordinate, Pappenheim was nevertheless the soldier's hero: tireless, restless, the first in attack, the last in retreat. Stories of his fantastic courage were told round the camp fires and he had a legend before he was dead—the hundred scars that he boasted, the birthmark like crossed swords which glowed red when he was angry. He flashes past against that squalid background, the Rupert of the German war. His loyalty to Wallenstein, his affection and admiration, had been of greater effect in inspiring the troops than Wallenstein probably realized. The general owed his power to his control over the army alone, and the loss of Pappenheim was irreparable.

But Pappenheim hadn't died at the battle of Lützen in this universe, because that battle had never been fought. He was still alive, still as vigorous as ever—and still Wallenstein's right hand man. Come out to meet Wallenstein himself, who was hidden in one of the covered wagons since his trip to Grantville had been kept a secret.

Morris watched as Pappenheim exchanged a few words with Wallenstein, who had pushed aside for a moment the coverings of his wagon. Then, watched as Pappenheim inspected the rest of the caravan, examining the peculiar new allies whom Wallenstein had brought with him.

Pappenheim spent not much time studying the men from the Unity of Brethren. Those, he was familiar with. Though now defeated and scattered, the spiritual descendants of Huss and Jan Zizka were a force to be reckoned with. One which had often, in times past, proven their capacity to break aristocratic forces on the field of battle.

He spent more time studying Dunash Abrabanel and his little band of Jewish would-be liberators. Pappenheim wasn't exactly sneering, but there was enough in the way of arrogant condescension in his face to cause Dunash and his followers to glare at him.

Morris decided he'd better go back there and defuse the situation. With the ease of an experienced horseman, he was soon at Pappenheim's side.

"Is there a problem, General?" he asked, keeping his tone level and mild.

Pappenheim swiveled to gaze at him. Up close, Morris could see the famous birthmark. It didn't really look like crossed swords, he thought. Just like another scar.

"You are the jeweler, yes?" Since it wasn't really a question, Morris didn't reply.

Pappenheim grunted. "There are times I think the Duke of Friedland is mad. Nor do I have his faith in astrologers. Still . . ."

Suddenly, his face broke into a grin. It was a cold sort of grin, without much in the way of humor in it.

"Who is to say? It is a mad world, after all."

2

"Well, will it do?" asked Len, a bit gruffly.

"It will do splendidly," Uriel assured him. He cocked an eye at Morris and Jason. "Yes?"

"Oh, sure," said Morris, looking around the cavernous room that served the—small palace? mansion? it was hard to say—as something of a combination between an entry hall and a gathering place. Not for the first time, he was struck by the conspicuous consumption that was so typical of Europe's nobility of the time.

He reminded himself that there had been plenty of conspicuous consumption by rich people in the universe they came from, also. But at least they didn't—well, not usually—have people living in hovels next door. Not to mention—

He moved over to one of the windows and gazed out at the street beyond, almost glaring. Across the narrow passageway rose the wall of Prague's ghetto, sealing off the Jewish inhabitants from the rest of the city. The Josefov, that ghetto was called. Somewhere around fifteen thousand people teemed in its cramped quarters, the largest ghetto in Europe. It was quite possibly the largest urban concentration of Jews anywhere in the world, in the year 1633, except maybe Istanbul.

Jason came to stand next to him. The young man's gaze seemed filled with more in the way of dread—anxiety, at least—than Morris' anger.

Morris smiled crookedly. It was hard to blame Jason, of course. Morris could glare at the injustice embodied in that ghetto wall till the cows came home. He wasn't the one he was trying to wheedle and cajole and finagle into becoming a new rabbi for its inhabitants. A Reform rabbi-to-be, with precious little in the way of theological training, for a community that was solidly orthodox and had a long tradition of prestigious rabbis to guide them. Rabbi Loew, in fact—the one reputed by legend to have invented the golem—had been Prague's chief rabbi not so long ago. He'd died only a quarter of a century earlier.

"They don't even use the term 'Orthodox,' " Jason muttered. "In this day and age, there's nothing 'unorthodox' to give the term any meaning. In our universe, the term didn't come into existence until after the Reform movement started in the nineteenth century. In the here and now, Jews are Jews. Period."

He gave Morris a look of appeal. "They'll just declare me a heretic, Morris, and cast me out. So what's the point?"

Morris jabbed a stiff finger at the street separating their building from the ghetto. "You're already out of the ghetto, Jason. So how can they 'cast' you out?" He glanced at the two gentiles in the room. "That's why I asked Len and Ellie to find us a place just outside of the Josefov."

Jason gave the two people mentioned a questioning look. "Is there going to be any kind of . . . you, know. Trouble about this?"

Len shrugged. "From who? Don Balthasar de Marradas? Yeah, sure, he's officially in charge here in Prague—so he says, anyway. But most of the soldiers and officials in the city are Wallenstein's people, from what Ellie and I can tell. And the ones who aren't are too pre-occupied dealing with Wallenstein to be worrying about whether a few Jews are living outside the ghetto."

"They wouldn't know the difference anyway," added Ellie. "Not with you guys."

She hooked a thumb in the direction of the Hradcany. "Don't think they won't learn soon enough that some more Americans have arrived. They're not that preoccupied. Whatever else is backward about the seventeenth century, spying sure as hell isn't. By the end of the week—latest—Marradas will have his fucking stoolies watching you, just like they do us."

Morris found Ellie's coarse language refreshing, for some odd reason. He was one of the few people in Grantville who'd always liked Ellie Anderson, and had never found her brash and vulgar personality off-putting. And, in their current circumstances, he thought her go-fuck-yourself attitude toward the world was probably . . .

Dead on the money.

"Dead on the money," he murmured, repeating the thought aloud. "Stop worrying, Jason. Ellie's right. They'll spy on us, but what they'll see is Americans, not Jews."

"What about Dunash and the others?"

Morris shrugged. "What about them? The plan is for them to find quarters in the ghetto anyway, as soon as possible. They'll be officially coming here every day to work in my new jewelry establishment. Even in the here and now, Jews are allowed out of the ghetto on legitimate business."

"Especially when the soldiers stationed in the area to check stuff like that are handpicked by Pappenheim," Ellie added cheerfully. "Nobody fucks with Pappenheim. I mean, nobody. The one and only time a Habsburg official gave Pappenheim a hard time since he arrived here, Pappenheim beat him half to death. The way the story goes, he dumped the fuckhead out of his chair, broke up the chair and used one of the legs to whup on him."

Morris couldn't help smiling. Pappenheim was scary, true enough. But if there was one lesson Morris had drawn from his studies of history, it was that bureaucrats, in the end, killed more people than soldiers. Way more. If Morris had to make a choice between this century's equivalents of General Heinz Guderian and Adolf Eichmann, he'd pick Guderian any day of the week.

No "if" about it, really. He had been given the choice, and he'd made it. Whatever new world Wallenstein and his ruthless generals made out of Bohemia and eastern Europe, Morris didn't think it could be any worse than the world the Habsburgs and their officials had made—not to mention the Polish szlachta and the Russian boyars.

Wallenstein, whatever else, was looking to the future. He'd get rid of the second serfdom that was engulfing eastern Europe and its accompanying oppression of Jews, if for no other reason, because he wanted to build a powerful empire for himself. Of that, Mike Stearns was sure—and Morris agreed with him. Wallenstein had said nothing to Stearns—or Torstensson, Gustav Adolf's emissary in the negotiations—about his plans beyond seizing power in Bohemia and Moravia. But neither of them doubted that Wallenstein had further ambitions. He'd try to take Silesia, for a certainty—he was already the ruler of Sagan, one of the Silesian principalities—and probably other parts of Poland and the Ukraine.

In short, he was—or hoped to be—a seventeenth-century Napoleon in the making. That could obviously pose problems in the future. But for Morris, as for most Jews, Napoleon hadn't simply been a conqueror and a tyrant. He'd also been the man who broke Germany's surviving traits of medievalism, had granted civil rights to the Jews—and had had a short way with would-be pogromists.

* * *

Jason was still worrying. "If they know we're Americans—even if they don't realize we're Jews—won't that cause trouble in its own right?"

Ellie's grin was lopsided and a tad sarcastic. "Where the hell have you been for the last two years? In the here and now, people don't give a fuck about 'patriotism.' Ain't no such animal. You're loyal to a dynasty—or work for one, at least—not a country. Wallenstein's paying us the big bucks—he is, too, don't think Len and me didn't stick it to him good—and so everybody assumes we're his people."

Morris nodded. "I don't think the word 'patriotism' has even been invented yet. She's got the right of it, Jason. The Habsburgs will be suspicious of anyone connected with Wallenstein, right now, because of the strains between them. But until and unless they're ready to move against him, they won't meddle much with us."

"Nothing dramatic and open, anyway," added Uriel. "Though I'd keep an eye out for a stiletto in the back in dark corners. And we need to make sure we hire a trustworthy cook or we'll need to hire a food-taster." He grimaced. "Food-tasters are expensive."

Jason gave Morris a meaningful look. Morris sighed.

"Oh, all right, Jason. We'll start eating kosher."

He wasn't happy about it. Still . . .

The dietary restrictions of Orthodox Judaism irritated Morris, but they weren't ultimately that important to him. Compared to such things as separate seating for women in the synagogue, no driving on Shabbat, family purity laws, women not being allowed to participate in the service, the divinity of the oral law—oh, it went on and on—keeping kashrut barely made the list.

"It's a good idea, Morris," said Jason softly. "At least that'll remove one obstacle. And the truth is, it's a safer way to eat anyway, in a time when nobody's ever heard of FDA inspectors."

Then, he looked faintly alarmed. Morris chuckled harshly. "Yeah, I know. You can't cook worth a damn, kosher or not. Neither can I."

Morris looked toward the bank of windows on a far wall. Somewhere beyond, over one hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies, lay Grantville—where his wife was getting ready to join him with the rest of the workforce that was moving to Prague.

"Judith is gonna kill me," he predicted gloomily.

"Nonsense," pronounced Uriel. "Hire cooks from the ghetto. You have no choice anyway, under existing law. It is illegal for a Jew to hire Christian servants—and you'll need servants also, living in this almost-a-palace. Or Judith will surely murder you."

"That's a good idea," Jason chimed in eagerly. "It'll help dispel suspicions of us, too, if people from the ghetto get to know us better. If you have cooks and servants coming in and out of the house every day, as well as jewelers and gemcutters coming to the workplace . . ."

That just made Morris feel gloomier. "Great. So now I've got to be an exhibit in a zoo, too?"

"Yes," said Uriel firmly.

Chapter III: Fianchetto
June, 1633

1

"Please come in, Bishop Comenius, all of you." Morris waved his hand toward the many armchairs in the very large living room.

Morris still thought of it as a "living room," even though he suspected that "salon" was a more appropriate term. Despite having now lived in this mansion in Prague for a number of weeks, Morris was still adjusting mentally to the reality of his new situation. Three months ago, by the standards of the seventeenth century, he had been a well-off man. Today, after the results reported by his partners Antonio Nasi and Gerhard Rueckert in the letter Morris had received two days earlier, he was a wealthy man—by the standards of any century.

Seeing the entourage Comenius had brought with him and who were now filing into the room—a room that was already occupied by a large number of people—Morris was glad that the room was so enormous. It was a very proper-looking room, too, since he and Judith never used it as a "living room"—for that, they maintained a much smaller and more comfortable room on the second floor of the mansion—and the small army of servants they had recently acquired kept it spotlessly clean.

That was another thing Morris was still trying to get accustomed to. Servants. And not just a cleaning lady who came in once a week, either, but a dozen people who came and went every day. In fact, they would have lived in the mansion except that, following Uriel and Jason's advice—which was the law, anyway—Morris had hired exclusively Jewish cooks and servants. By the laws still in force in Prague, they were required to return to the ghetto every night, just as they were required to wear distinctive insignia identifying themselves as Jews whenever they left the ghetto.

Morris did not share the ferocious egalitarianism of such people as Gretchen Richter and her Committees of Correspondence, although he was, quietly, one of her chief financial backers. He wasn't even as egalitarian as some of the more diehard members of the United Mine Workers and their growing number of spin-off unions. Still, he found the situation somewhat embarrassing—and was growing angrier all the time at the restrictions placed on Jews in his new day and age. The restrictions were being ignored in his case, true, since Morris fell into the informal category of a "court Jew." But they still left a smoldering resentment.

Seeing the last man filing into the salon after Bishop Comenius, Morris felt the resentment vanish.

"Hey, Red! Long time. I was wondering if you were still alive."

Red Sybolt squinted at him. "Hi, Morris. Oh, yeah, I'm still around. Still kicking, too." He jerked a thumb at the very large man by his side. "Hell, even Jan here is still alive, which is a real miracle given how crazy he is. Things got hairy now and then, especially in Saxony, but the worst that happened is my glasses got busted. I still haven't managed to scrounge up a new pair."

Morris had always liked Bobby Gene "Red" Sybolt. He wasn't sure why, exactly, since on the face of it Red and he shouldn't have gotten along all that well. Just for starters, Red was one of those union activists who, though not really a socialist himself, had been influenced by socialists he'd run across in the course of his activities before the Ring of Fire. In his case, by the Socialist Workers Party, which had, off and on, had a certain presence in northern West Virginia going back to the late 1940s. One of the things Red had picked up from the SWP was a hostility toward Zionism. And while Morris had been uneasy about some of the policies of the state of Israel toward Palestinians, both he and his wife Judith had always been supporters of Israel.

But Red was such a friendly man that it was hard for anyone to dislike him. Even Quentin Underwood, the hardnosed manager of the mine Red had worked in for a while, was known to allow that "the damn commie" was personally a decent enough fellow. And Morris knew that Red's anti-Zionism was not a veiled form of anti-Semitism. It was simply a political opposition to what Red considered a colonial-settler state. As he'd once put it to Morris:

"Where the hell did Europe get off exporting its anti-Semitism problem onto the backs of the Arabs? I got no problem with the Jews having a homeland. Since it was the Germans massacred 'em, they should have been given Bavaria. Or Prussia. Instead, the British offered them a choice between Palestine, Kenya and Madagascar. Guess what those all have in common? Natives of the swarthy persuasion, that's what. Typical British imperialism! Lord Balfour said it all: 'We will create for ourselves a loyal Jewish Ulster in the Middle East.'"

Morris had disagreed, of course. But it had been a friendly enough argument, as his arguments with Red usually were. And, besides, in one of those odd quirks of human personality which made the real world such an interesting place, the radical Red Sybolt had also been the only inhabitant of Grantville before the Ring of Fire except Morris himself who had been genuinely interested and knowledgeable about gems and jewelry.

Red claimed that was due to the residual bad influence of his ex-wife; Morris suspected it was due to the residual regrets Red had concerning the life style he'd chosen for himself. The life of an itinerant union organizer and "hell-raiser" did not lead to expansive bank accounts. Red had spent many hours in Morris' jewelry store discussing gemstones, but he'd never bought so much as a single gold chain.

"Did the faceted jewelry make as big of a splash as I told you they would?"

Morris smiled wryly. In another of those little ironies of life, it had been Red Sybolt who brought to his attention the fact that faceted jewelry was first introduced into the world in the second half of the seventeenth century. Simple faceting and polishing had been done for a long time, to be sure—which meant that the needed tools and experienced workers would be available—but the art of gemcutting had not advanced much in almost two centuries. People in 1633 were still accustomed to nothing fancier than polished stones and, at most, the simple design of the "Old Single Cut," which dated back to the fifteenth century. The first real advance in gemcutting wouldn't come until the middle of the seventeenth century, with the introduction of the Mazarin Cut.

In short, Red pointed out, Morris had had the great luck of arriving in the right place at the right time—riding just ahead of the wave. The tools and skills were in place, all that was needed was the addition of Morris' knowledge. For a few years, if he played it right, Morris and his two new partners would be in a position to make a fortune.

So it had proved—as the letter upstairs verified. It had taken Morris and his partners a year before they could begin producing modern-style faceted gems. Morris knew the theory, yes; but he had the skills of an uptime jeweler, which was not the same thing as an experienced gemcutter. They'd had to hire and train seventeenth-century jewelers, which had taken time. Fortunately, two of the jewelers they'd taken on had turned out to be very adept at grasping the new ideas. So adept that both of them had been given hefty shares of stock in the company, lest they become disgruntled and take their skills elsewhere.

"Yes, you were right." Morris grinned. "Sure you don't want some stock? My offer's still good."

Red shook his head fiercely. "Get thee behind me, Satan! Me? What kind of respectable agitator owns stock in a company which is no doubt plunderin' the poor?" But he was smiling as he said it, and, after seating himself in one of the expensive armchairs, luxuriated visibly in its comfort.

"Okay," he admitted, "plunderin' the idle rich is probably more accurate. Still, I wouldn't feel comfortable with it." He gave Morris a nearsighted squint. "Mind you, I will expect some hefty donations to the cause."

Morris looked around the room, all of whose inhabitants except him were now seated. "Which cause, Red?" he asked mildly. "I see at least . . . what is it? Four or five present."

Red's smile widened. "Bit of a problem, isn't it?" His own eyes moved across the room, and if he was nearsighted and without glasses, he seemed to have no problem at all assessing its occupants.

"Yup, quite a collection. You got your Committees of Correspondence—that's me—your Brethren, and I figure at least three different varieties of Zionism. Not to mention the other budding exploiters of the downtrodden—hey, Len, Ellie, how's it going?—and, lounging just outside the front door, I figure at least two flavors of military dictatorship we poor lambs seem to have allied ourselves with. Three, if you count that pig Holk, even though he's too stupid to even make a respectable fascist."

At the mention of Holk, Morris grimaced. So did Jan Billek.

"His troops have been ravaging northern Bohemia just as badly as they did Saxony," Jan growled, in his heavily accented English. "Even though they are supposed to be 'protecting' it."

Morris had no trouble believing him. In preparation for his relocation to Prague, he'd studied what he could find in Grantville's libraries as well as Judith's genealogical data. One of Grantville's bibliophiles had donated a copy of some plays written by the eighteenth-century German writer Schiller. Morris had read the following passage in one of them, Wallenstein's Camp:

In Bayreuth, in the Vogtland, in Westphalia;
Wherever we have survived—
Our children and grandchildren,
Will still be telling stories,
After hundreds and hundreds of years,
About Holk and his hordes.

* * *

Heinrich Holk was one of the major military commanders of the Habsburg forces now stationed in Bohemia. He was the worst type of condottiere in the Thirty Years War—a breed of men who were none too savory to begin with. A one-eyed, primitive, drunken mass murderer; a scourge who persecuted and mistreated the people he was charged with protecting; and a dishonor to the imperial army. Holk, born into the family of a Danish Protestant official, had not only changed his allegiance several times during the course of the Thirty Years War, but also his faith—which, admittedly, was nothing especially unusual for the time. Wallenstein had done the same, early in his career, converting from his native Protestantism to Catholicism in order to ingratiate himself with the Habsburgs.

Unlike Wallenstein or such men as Tilly and Pappenheim, however, Holk did not have any significant victories to his credit. His military prowess was demonstrated only by raids, plundering and atrocities, and he had been defeated on several occasions—by Wilhelm Christian of Brandenburg near Magdeburg, in 1630; later the same year by the Swedes near Demmin; and again by the Swedes at Werben in 1631. Not to mention that Holk had failed to bring his troops to meet Tilly's in time for the battle of Breitenfeld, which had been partly responsible for Tilly's defeat there at the hands of Gustavus Adolphus.

Unfortunately, Holk's services were much in demand, because whatever his multitude of faults Holk was also a thoroughly competent commander in the major criterion by which that was usually judged in the Thirty Years War: he could hold together a random heap of mercenaries with consistent firmness. But he did so by making his army a refuge for the dregs of loot-hungry, brutal soldiery.

Morris was still a bit mystified why Wallenstein accepted the crude Holk as one of his top subordinates. As a rule, Wallenstein was a better judge of men—at least their capabilities, if not their morality. Morris thought it was probably due to the simple fact that Holk seemed to admire Wallenstein, which he demonstrated by imitating his master in Holk's own gross and coarse manner. Like Wallenstein, he threatened to punish people "through taking them by the head"—which meant hanging them, in the slang of the time. And when a subordinate reacted sluggishly to orders, Holk accused him of having the "inborn speed of Saturn"—another one of Wallenstein's favorite expressions.

Morris knew that in the history of the universe they had come from, after Pappenheim's death at the battle of Lützen, Holk had become Wallenstein's prime factotum. Whatever else, Wallenstein had been able to assign tasks to Holk with the certain knowledge that whatever could be done by harshness and brutality would be done well. Or thoroughly, at least. But without Pappenheim's ability to generate genuine loyalty in the army, and Pappenheim's sense of strategy, Wallenstein had soon fallen foul of the Byzantine factionalism within the Habsburg forces. Not that Wallenstein hadn't been guilty of the same factionalism himself, of course—but with Holk instead of Pappenheim to rely on, he had been outmatched.

"What's Wallenstein going to do about him?" demanded Red. "If this keeps up, Morris, there won't be much left of northern Bohemia. Wallenstein—there, at least—will be 'King of Nothing.' "

Morris almost snarled: Why ask ME?

But he didn't, because he knew the answer, as much as it discomfited him. In the months since he'd arrived, Morris had indeed become Wallenstein's "court Jew." It was an odd and informal position, but one which was not all that uncommon in the Europe of the day. Despite all the restrictions and sometimes-savage persecution of Jews, most of the European courts had a few wealthy and prominent Jews in their entourage. For the most part, of course, that was because Jewish money and medical skill was wanted by Europe's monarchs and high nobility. But there was more to it than that, at least for some of Europe's Christian rulers, especially the smartest ones. Being "outside the loop," their Jewish courtiers could often be relied upon for better and more objective advice. Queen Elizabeth of England, when she'd been on the throne, had often consulted with her Jewish doctor Roderigo Lopez on her diplomatic as well as medical affairs.

And . . . from what Morris could tell, Wallenstein even seemed to like him. It was hard to be sure, of course, with a man like Wallenstein. But Edith Wild had told Morris that Wallenstein spoke well of him in private. And Edith—talk about miracles!—had somehow managed to become one of the few people whom Wallenstein trusted. Edith herself thought that was because, after an initial period of hesitation—even veiled hostility—Wallenstein's wife had taken a liking to her. If not for her own sake, then because Edith was keeping her husband alive. And, in fact, under Edith's bullying regimen, Wallenstein's shaky health had improved. Rather dramatically, in fact. Edith even managed to intimidate Wallenstein's pestiferous astrologers into not contradicting her medical and dietary advice. (And there was a true miracle. Seventeenth-century astrologers, as a rule, made the "snake-oil salesmen" of Morris' time look like downright saints and wise men.) Finally—oh, the world was a wondrous place—it had turned out that Wallenstein had developed a fanatic enthusiasm for the multitude of Agatha Christie mysteries that Edith had brought with her to Prague. All that keeps me alive! he'd once sworn to Morris, to all appearances dead seriously.

"I'll talk to him," Morris said gruffly. "Though I'm not sure if he'll listen."

"What is he up to, anyway?" Red asked. "There are rumors flying all over, but nobody really knows what he's planning."

Morris shrugged. "Don't ask me. Uriel might be able to give you a good educated guess, but he had to go back to Grantville on mysterious business of his own. Whenever I ask—very diffidently, let me tell you—Wallenstein just gets grimmer than usual and more or less tells me to mind my own business. 'Soon,' is all he'll say."

Morris had been about to sit down himself, but instead he moved over to one of the windows and gazed up at the Hradcany across the river. He couldn't see Wallenstein's own palace, from here, since it was perched in the Malá Strana at the bottom of the hill instead of the summit. But St. Vitus Cathedral, which dominated the Hradcany, always reminded him of Wallenstein. For all of Wallenstein's forward-looking temperament, there was ultimately something Gothic about the man.

Ellie Anderson seemed to be sharing his thoughts. "Fucking vampire," he heard her mutter.

For some odd reason, the image of Wallenstein lurking in his palace like Count Dracula cheered Morris up. Granted, Dracula was a monster. But at least he wasn't stupid.

Morris turned away from the window. "Enough of that. Wallenstein will do whatever he'll do, and whenever he chooses to do it. We have no control over that, so let's concentrate on what we can control. Influence, at least."

He knew why Comenius and Billek had come. Comenius, to pay his official regards, since the central figure in the Church of the Brethren had just arrived in Prague. But he was really here to lend his authority to Jan Billek—and Red's—long-standing proposal with regard to the paramilitary forces that were being quietly organized to support Wallenstein when the time came.

Morris had wrestled with his decision for days. More precisely, he had wrestled with his reluctance to have a confrontation with his own people. But, now, the decision came into clear and hard focus. He braced himself for a brawl.

"Red and Billek are right, Dunash. Your people and those of the Brethren should form a joint unit. It's stupid to do otherwise."

Dunash Abrabanel shot to his feet. "Our interests will be pushed aside—as always!"

"Shut up, you—" Morris caught himself, almost laughing, before he added: young whippersnapper!

Still, his jaws were tight. "What the hell do you know about it, Abrabanel?" He glared at Dunash and the young Jews sitting around him—all except Jason Gotkin, the only young up-time Jew in their midst, who was seated off to the side, a bit isolated from the others.

"What do any of you know about military affairs?" Morris demanded. "In the world I came from, the worst enemy the Jewish people ever faced was not defeated by Israel. Nor could he have been, even if Israel had existed at the time. He was defeated by the great armies of the United States, England and Russia—all of whom had Jews serving in them. The Russians, especially. There were over two hundred Jewish generals in the Red Army. Berlin was first penetrated by Russian soldiers under the command of one of them—and Auschwitz was liberated by another."

He lapsed into one of his rare uses of profanity. "So shut the fuck up! Not one of you has any real idea what to do with those guns you festoon yourselves with, like a bunch of would-be bandidos. I leave aside what Pappenheim had to say."

The one and only time that Pappenheim had observed Dunash's band of youngsters attempting what they called a "military exercise," his comments had been vulgar, brief and to the point. Most of which he had uttered as he trotted his horse away, shaking his head in disgust.

"Look, Dunash, he's right," said Red mildly. "The truth is, the Brethren aren't really what you'd call 'seasoned soldiers,' either. But at least they're familiar with firearms, and a lot of them have seen some actual fighting. Most of all—" He hesitated a moment, gauging Dunash's temper. "Most of all, they aren't arrogant."

He left unspoken the obvious implication: like you are. "That's why they've agreed to let some of Wallenstein's officers train them."

Dunash said nothing, but his jaws were even tighter than Morris' felt. Red kept on, talking smoothly. Morris decided to let him handle it. Whatever Morris sometimes thought of Red's political opinions, the fact remained that Red—not Morris—was the experienced organizer in the group.

"Look, I'm not too fond of the situation either. Neither is Jan or any of the Brethren. But the truth is that Wallenstein—probably Pappenheim, actually—seems to have been careful in their selection of officers. They're really not too bad."

Jan Billek nodded. "Two are quite good. I even have hopes of converting one of them."

"And look on the bright side," Red continued. "Officers be damned. We'll be the grunts with the actual guns in our hands, if push comes to shove. Neither Wallenstein nor Pappenheim—sure as hell not the officers directly over us—have any doubt at all what'll happen if they order us to do something we don't want to do."

He and Jan exchanged a meaningful glance. Morris' anger faded, replaced by his earlier good humor. "Ha!" he barked. "Red, should I start calling you 'commissar'?"

Red smiled a little sheepishly. "Well . . . the word doesn't mean anything, in the here and now. But, yeah." He gave Billek another glance. "Actually, you oughta apply the title to Jan. He's really the one all the Brethren soldiers listen to."

Jan's face was stolid, but Morris thought he detected a little gleam somewhere in the back of his eyes. "Indeed," he said. "And why should they not? Good Brethren, so they understand the difference between 'orders' and 'what should be done.' "

Suddenly, to Morris' surprise, Jason Gotkin spoke up. "Do it, Dunash. They're right and you're wrong—and the truth is, I think it'll help you recruit more Jews from the ghetto, anyway."

Dunash seemed to be even more surprised that Morris was.

"How so? An exclusively Jewish force—"

"Will seem crazy to them," Jason interrupted forcefully. "Cut it out, Dunash. How many have you managed to recruit so far, since you've been here? All of five, I believe—three of whom are orphans, two of those too young to use a gun—and of the other two, one of them is not much more than the village idiot. You know as well as I do that the only recruit you've gotten in three months who'll be any use is Bezalel Pitzkler."

Jason's eyes examined the eight young men sitting around Dunash. "At that rate—one real recruit every three months—you won't be able to field more than a squad when the balloon goes up. What's the point?"

"We have special weapons!" one of Dunash's followers said stoutly.

Morris had to fight down a sneer. Red didn't even bother. "Oh, swell. 'Special weapons.' Which translates to: maybe three dozen rockets you got smuggled into Prague, supplied by sympathizers in Grantville—do notice that I'm not inquiring as to the particulars, but I somehow doubt that Mike Stearns or Frank Jackson authorized that—and none of which you really know how to use."

"Do you?" demanded Dunash.

"Me? Don't be silly. Rockets are dangerous. Besides, I'm a man of peace. Well, a man of words, anyway. But I know someone who does know how to use them, and he happens to be a friend of mine—well, associate—and he's willing to come here for a bit and teach us. I hope you noticed the functioning pronoun there. Us."

Red leaned back in his seat, spreading his hands in something of a placating gesture. "Dunash, if it'll make you feel better, you and your guys can stay in charge of the rockets. As well as that pickup truck that you've also managed to smuggle into this city, piece by piece, to use as a jury-rigged katyusha—a truck which you have no fricking idea in the world how to assemble. Or drive, even if you did manage by some kinda miracle to put it back together in working order."

Red looked smug. "I, on the other hand, am a crackerjack auto mechanic. I've rebuilt more cars and trucks than I can remember. And I do know how to drive."

"In a manner of speaking," Morris muttered under his breath. He'd driven with Red, on two occasions in the past. And while the union organizer wasn't quite as reckless as the now-infamous Hans Richter, riding in the passenger seat of a vehicle driven by Red Sybolt was no pleasure for anyone other than a daredevil. Or teenagers, among whom Red had always been surprisingly popular for a man in his forties.

"That's the deal, Dunash," Red went on. "You can keep the rockets, and I'll volunteer to show you how to put together the truck—even get you some fuel, which you haven't given any thought to at all. And I'll drive it for you when the time comes. But you give up the idea of a separate Jewish combat unit and integrate yourselves with us."

Dunash was still looking stubborn, but his cousin Yehuda spoke up. "Who is 'us,' exactly?"

Red hooked a thumb at Billek. "The Brethren, mostly, other than some people from the CoC we've managed to get started here in Prague. By now, me and Jan—mostly him—have managed to recruit about four thousand volunteers from the Brethren. Half of them are already in Prague, with the others on the way."

Four thousand. Red let the words hang in the air, for a moment. Four thousand—as opposed to Dunash Abrabanel's handful. For that matter, Morris didn't doubt for a minute that Red would provide more people from his newly organized CoC than Dunash had following him. Say what you would about Red Sybolt, the man was a superb organizer.

"We will be buried," hissed Dunash.

For the first time since he'd entered the room, Bishop Comenius spoke. "No, you will not be 'buried,' young man. I give you my word on that. My oath before God, if you will accept it."

Comenius was, by nature, an immensely dignified man, and even Dunash was visibly affected by his words. The more so after the bishop rose to his feet.

"I am recognized by all the Brethren as the foremost religious authority in our church." To the side, Deacon Billek nodded firmly. "Tolerance was one of our watchwords from the beginning of our faith. And now that I have had a chance to study what would have happened in the world of our future, my faith has been fortified."

He turned and pointed to Len Tanner and Ellie Anderson. Then, to Morris himself; then, to Jason; and finally, to Red Sybolt. "Consider, if you will, these five people. One, a Catholic noted for his lapses; two, a man and a woman who believe in no God at all; one, a Jew who is considered a heretic by most other Jews living today; the last, a young Jew who is trying to decide whether he can be a rabbi in these times, because he is no longer sure exactly what he believes."

Morris was astonished by Comenius' accurate assessment of five American strangers whom he had never met before. Obviously, the Brethren (with Red's help) had an excellent espionage service in all but name. True, it wasn't quite accurate. Except for a few places like Amsterdam, most rabbis were loath to proclaim someone an actual "heretic," since Jews didn't place the same emphasis as Christians did on doctrinal purity. What most of them would have said about Morris was that he was "practically an apikoros"—an uncomplimentary term indicating someone who was much too loose and self-willed in his interpretation and application of customs and observances.

"Yet in the world they came from," Comenius continued, "it was people such as this who built a nation which, in the fullness of time, provided a sanctuary for my people as well as yours. Most of the world's Brethren wound up living in that 'United States,' as did the single largest grouping of the world's Jews. There is a lesson there for any of God's children, in whatever manner they see that God. Unless you are blind. Which I am not. Freedom of religion must be the banner for both of us—a banner which, by its nature, must be held jointly."

He sat down. "That is my pledge—and the pledge of the Unity of Brethren. You will not be 'buried.' Unless you are buried by our enemies, along with us ourselves."

The decision hung in the balance. Then—and this surprised Morris more than anything that happened that morning—Dunash turned to Jason.

"You will be our rabbi, if anyone is to be. You are sure of this?"

Jason was obviously as startled as Morris was. But he still managed to nod as firmly as Billek.

"Yes, Dunash. It's—ah—kosher."

2

Over dinner, Comenius raised the subject that Morris had suspected was his primary reason for coming. Normally, he would have had to suppress a sigh, but in this instance . . .

Rich, remember. You are now stinking rich, Morris Roth, so stop thinking like a small town jeweler. Judging from the letter I got from Antonio and Gerhard—and I think they're right—within five years I'll be one of the richest men in Europe. Especially if I divest and diversify intelligently. Our monopoly on faceted jewelry will bring us a fortune for a few years, but it won't last.

"Yes, Bishop, I will finance your proposed university."

The words came out more abruptly—even curtly—than Morris had intended. The thought of his new wealth still made him feel awkward and out of place. The last thing Morris Roth had ever expected, in all the years he'd spent as the jeweler for a small town in northern West Virginia, was that someday, in another universe, he'd become the equivalent of the founder of a new house of Rothschild.

Comenius looked a bit startled. "How big—I mean . . ."

Morris smiled wryly. "How big a donation? If you give me two months—let's say three, to be on the safe side—to have the funds transferred, I can finance the entire thing. Enough to get it started, at least. I assume you intend to locate the new university here in Prague, yes?" He shifted in his seat, feeling awkward again. "There will be some conditions, however."

"Of course." Comenius inclined his head, inviting Morris to elaborate.

"First. I'll agree to have theological schools attached to the university, so long as there are no restrictions with regard to creed. That will include a Jewish rabbinical seminary."

He looked over at Jason, whose expression was a little strained. Forcefully, Morris added: "Yes, I know the rabbis currently in Prague will probably want no part of it. That's their problem, not mine. If they want to stick to their yeshivahs, so be it. Even if it's nothing more than a plaque on a door, with nothing behind the door, I want some building in the university—or part of one, anyway—set aside for that purpose."

He turned back to Comenius. "But the university itself will be secular. Open to anyone, regardless of creed, and unaffiliated to any religion. Agreed?"

Comenius nodded. "Yes. But that still leaves the question of how the theological schools themselves will be regulated. Herr Roth—"

"Please, call me Morris."

"Ah, Morris. You will find it difficult—perhaps not impossible, but difficult—to find anyone who can serve as the regulating authority of this university who is not affiliated, in one manner or another, with an existing creed. Most of the scholars in—ah, how strange the thought—in 'this day and age' are religious figures." Comenius hesitated a moment. "Unless you choose to select someone from your own people."

Morris chewed on the problem, for a moment. He considered, and then discarded, various possibilities from the American uptimers. The problem was that any of them he could think of who'd be qualified, even remotely, to become a university president—or "rector," to use the seventeenth-century term—were overwhelmed already with other responsibilities. And if any of them were available, the top priority anyway would be the new university that was taking shape in Jena, which was, after all, part of the CPE rather than a foreign country.

"No . . ." he said slowly. "It'll have to be someone from this day and age."

Comenius nodded again. "So I thought. But, as I said, such a person will most likely be affiliated already with one or another creed. If they have authority over the theological schools . . ."

Morris grunted. "Yes, I understand the problem. Fine. We'll set it up so that the religious schools have complete control over their own curriculum and methods of instruction. They'll also have complete control over hiring and firing their teachers. The only authority the university will have over them will involve such things as the building code, fire regulations, sanitation, and so forth. How's that?"

Comenius looked a bit dubious. "Workable, perhaps. There will still be a great deal of suspicion."

Morris had to restrain himself from slapping his hand on the table. There were things he liked about seventeenth-century Europeans. Most of them, anyway. There were also some things he detested. One of them was their seemingly inveterate and obsessive religious sectarianism.

"Let them be suspicious," he growled. "The way I look at it, Bishop, the main point of this university—one of them, at least—is to start overcoming those suspicions. In practice, which is always the best way to do it."

He gave Comenius something just barely short of a glare. "Understand something, Bishop. I know a secular university will work—and way better than the alternatives you have today. I know it—because I've seen it. My own kids went to West Virginia University, which was a far better university than anything you've got in Europe today. And in the world I come from, WVU was just considered a middling-rate university."

Judith interjected herself. "Morris, don't be so hardnosed. A lot of those universities got started as religious ones, remember. Including Harvard and the University of Chicago, if I remember right."

Morris suspected he was looking mulish, and the suspicion made him still more mulish. "Yeah, I know. I also know how long it took to haul them kicking and screaming into the modern world. Harvard didn't even go coeducational until—"

He broke off, rubbing his face. "Oh, hell, don't tell me."

Comenius' brow was creased with a frown of confusion. "I am afraid my English is perhaps not as good as it should be. What does that term mean? 'Coeducational,' I think it was."

Morris glared at the table. "Well, that's the second thing . . ."

* * *

Eventually, they got past that hurdle. But only because Morris finally agreed—under Judith's coaxing—that the university would have two colleges, one for men and one for women, with separate faculties. He did manage to hold the line on a common curriculum—"I want women educated, damn it; I'm not shelling out money for a lousy finishing school"—as well as a common library. And he took a certain sly pleasure in having gotten Comenius to agree to a coeducational "student union"—mostly, he suspected, because Comenius didn't quite understand what was involved.

That would be a fight in the future, he was sure, but Morris was willing to deal with that when the time came. Somewhere in the middle of construction, he suspected, once Comenius finally realized that Morris proposed to have young men and women socializing and dining together at all hours of the day and night with no real supervision or chaperonage. But since Morris would control the purse strings, he imagined the construction workers would obey him.

* * *

The rest of it went smoothly enough. They settled on the name "University of Prague," which wasn't a problem since the only existing university in the city was named the Karolinum—or "Charles University"—founded in the fourteenth century by the same Emperor Charles who'd had the city's great bridge erected. The Karolinum was located in the southern part of Staré Mesto, so they agreed to find land for the new university somewhere in the northern part of Old Town, even though that would be somewhat more expensive. Morris was pretty sure that a certain amount of friction between the two universities was bound to happen. The Karolinum was no "cow college." Even after the ravages of the past fifteen years, it was still considered one of the premier universities in Europe. In the long run, he thought having two major universities in Prague would simply enhance the city's prestige—and its prospects. But in the short run, competition between the two universities was likely to be a source of trouble. He saw no reason to aggravate the situation by placing them cheek-to-jowl.

Besides, a location in the northern part of Old Town would have the further advantage, to his way of thinking, of being close to the Josefov. Already, in the few short months since he'd become resident in Prague, Morris had come to realize that the Jewish inhabitants were going to be at least as resistant to change as the gentile ones. In some ways, more so, even in ways that objectively benefited them. Morris thought that having a university open to Jewish students just a short walk from the ghetto would have a nicely subversive effect.

Of all the things he missed about the universe they'd lost forever, the thing he missed the most was the atmosphere in his old synagogue and the Hillel House attached to the campus at WVU. That relaxed, sophisticated, cosmopolitan modern Judaism that he'd grown up with and cherished. He knew that Jason had come to have a real respect for some of the orthodox rabbis he'd encountered in Prague's ghetto. But, to Morris, they were as much a part of the problem as the Cossack butchers who would soon enough be slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews in the Ukraine. Their stiff necks bent over, endlessly studying the complexities of the Torah and the Talmud and the midrash, completely oblivious to the disaster that was beginning to curl over them. Morris had every intention of undermining their control and authority over the largest Jewish community in Europe, as best he could, using any legitimate means at his disposal.

* * *

Comenius had tentatively advanced the idea of naming it "Roth University," but Morris declined the honor immediately. He said that was because he thought it would create unnecessary problems by having the university too closely associated with its Jewish founder. But the real reason was simply that he found the idea too self-aggrandizing and presumptuous. In times past, in the universe he'd come from, he'd been known to make wisecracks about the swelled egos of the men who'd founded "Carnegie-Mellon Institute."

Judith had given him something of an odd look, then. Morris wasn't sure—he'd find out soon enough, of course, once they were alone—but he thought he was probably in for a little lecture on the subject of false modesty.

So be it. In times to come, he might get comfortable enough with his new status to consider the possibility. Morris had a feeling this was not going to be the last university he provided the financial backing for—assuming, of course, he and Judith survived the years to come. If this new world had greater opportunities than his old one, it also had much greater dangers.

The last item remaining was the first: who would they find to become the rector of the new university?

By the end of the evening—quite a bit early on, in fact—Morris had already made up his own mind. So as soon as Comenius raised the subject again, he had his answer ready.

"I think it should be you, Bishop."

Comenius, startled, began to say something by way of protest. Morris raised his hand.

"Hear me out, please. Yes, I know you're the central leader of the Unity of Brethren, recognized as such all over Europe. You're also famous for being an advocate of educational reform. To the best of my knowledge, you're the only person in this day and age who's actually written books on the subject. Well, okay, outside of the Jesuits. But while I'm perfectly willing for the new university to have Catholic students—Jesuit teachers, for that matter—there's no way I want a Jesuit in charge of it. Not in today's political climate, anyway. So I think it makes perfect sense for you to do it. As far as the religious issue goes . . ."

Morris shrugged. "You said it yourself, Bishop—we'll face that with almost anyone we select. The advantage to it being you is twofold. First, you've become just about as well-known for advocating religious tolerance. And second—not to put too fine a point on it—the Brethren are a relatively small church. Certainly compared to the Catholics or the Lutherans or the Calvinists. So you won't seem as much of a threat to anyone, even leaving aside your own views on toleration."

Comenius was still hesitant. Morris regarded him for a moment, and then added: "And, finally. I think you and I can get along pretty well. Better than I think I'd get along with anyone else."

Comenius stared at him for a moment. Then, with a wry little smile, inclined his head. "So be it, then. I can hardly refuse, since without you none of this would be possible at all."

Judith was giving Morris that same odd little look. This time, he understood it completely.

Okay, fine. Yes, I'll have to get used to it. But I draw the line at the "Baron" business. I am NOT a Rothschild. Just a Roth.

3

After dinner, most of the guests left. The only ones who remained behind, at Morris' quietly spoken request, were Ellie Anderson and Len Tanner.

"So. Why'd you ask us to stay, Morris?" Ellie's question was asked with a tone of voice that indicated a certain suspicion on her part. Of course, Ellie was usually a little suspicious of most things.

In this case, however, with good reason.

"That's why I asked, as a matter of fact. I'm hoping to talk you into staying."

For a moment, both Len and Ellie looked a little confused. Then, as his meaning registered, Ellie gave Len a quick, hostile little glance.

"Did you put him up to this?" she demanded.

Len looked aggrieved. "I had nothing to do with it! This is the first time Morris has ever raised the subject."

Morris found the interchange both interesting and heartening. He'd had no idea that Len had given some thought himself to remaining in Prague.

"He's telling the truth, Ellie. This is the first time I've ever brought it up."

Ellie transferred the hostile look to him. "The answer's 'no.' Prague's okay, I guess, but I have no intention of staying here after we get this job done."

"Why not?" Judith asked. "It's not as if you have any family in Grantville." Diplomatically, she did not add what she could have: or all that many friends either, when you get right down to it. Ellie's abrasive manner didn't bother either of the Roths, but the woman's temperament was not one that had ever made her very popular.

Diplomacy, as usual, was wasted with Ellie. "Or any friends either," she snorted, half-barking the words. "So what? Grantville has toilet paper."

Len made a face. Ellie scowled. "Okay, fine. It's that crappy stuff that they're starting to make in Badenburg, which is all there is since the modern stuff ran out. So what? It's still toilet paper and it still beats the alternatives."

She raised her left hand and began ticking off fingers. "Two. It's got modern plumbing. Fuck squatting over a hole. Here, even in Wallenstein's palace, that's about all you've got. Three. It's got electricity—I am so sick and tired of reading by lamplight at night."

"Prague will have all of those things before too long, Ellie," Morris said mildly. "And if it really bothers you that much, import what you need in the meantime."

"With what money?" she demanded. "AT&L is still scraping by and will be for at least another year. We can't even afford to pay Dougie to start running the company full time, which is a fucking waste because he'd be great at it. Instead, half the time he's galloping off into the countryside somewhere running messages for the king of Sweden. He'll get killed, you watch. If Wallenstein hadn't come up with the dough for this special project here in Prague, I'm not sure we wouldn't have had to close our doors. That's the only reason Len and I agreed to come here at all. We didn't have any choice."

"With what money? With the sudden influx of money you'll get from me. From the new company—or subsidiary, if you prefer—that I propose to form here in Prague. Call it AT&L Bohemia, if you want. I'll put up all the capital and you give me forty-nine percent of the stock—you can remain in control of it, I don't care—and agree to live here for another, say, five years. If you're still unhappy five years from now, fine. You go back to Grantville, if you want. No hard feelings."

Ellie and Len stared at him. Morris found himself swallowing. "Me and Judith would miss you guys. We really would. Right now, except for the two of you and Jason, we really don't have anybody to talk to here in Prague who . . . You know. Understands us."

"How long do you plan on being here, Morris?" asked Len.

Morris and Judith looked at each other. Judith shrugged. "Who knows?" she mused. "Either a very short time—if Wallenstein's plans go sour and we wind up having to run for it—or . . . probably the rest of our lives. Except for trips."

Morris rose from the table and went over to one of the windows. Pushing aside the heavy drapes, he stared out over the city. At night, in the seventeenth century, even a large town like Prague was eerily dark to someone accustomed to American cities at the turn of the twenty-first century. A few lamps in windows, here and there, one or two small bonfires in open areas, not much more than that. The Hradcany, at a distance, was just a formless lump of darkness, with the towers of the cathedral barely visible against the night sky.

"We've got fifteen years to prevent one of the worst massacres ever perpetrated on my people," Morris said quietly. "And I'm just a small-town jeweler who really doesn't have any idea how to do it—except, maybe, do what I can to turn Bohemia into a country that can start drawing those Jews—some of them, anyway—out of the line of fire. And, maybe—most of this is completely out of our control—help built this into a nation that can intervene ahead of time."

"You're talking about Wallenstein, Morris," Ellie pointed out harshly.

Morris' lips twisted into something that was half a grin, half a grimace. "Ah, yes. Wallenstein. Actually, this was his idea in the first place. Trying to get you to stay here and set up a telephone company, I mean. Just like I know when I go talk to him tomorrow about the new university the bishop and I want to establish that he'll agree immediately. That's an idea he's also raised with me, on several occasions."

He turned away from the window. "In fact, I won't be surprised if he provides the land and the building for both projects, free of charge—assuming you agree to stay."

Len and Ellie were back to staring at him. "Look," Morris said abruptly, "Wallenstein wants it all—a modern nation that will give him the power he needs to become the historical figure he thinks he deserves to be. In some ways, he's a raving egotist, sure enough. But he's smart. Bohemia is not big enough for him, unless he modernizes it. That means the whole works. An electrified capital city, one of the world's premier universities, factories, you name it—yes, and toilet paper. Why else do you think he's agreed to remove all religious restrictions, even on Jews? The goodness of his heart? Not hardly. It's because—I'm as sure of this as I am of anything—he plans on grabbing most of the Ukraine and probably a good chunk of Poland and the Balkans. Maybe even part of Russia, who knows? And the only way he can do that, starting with little Bohemia as his power base, is to make Bohemia the Japan of eastern Europe. And he can't do that without stripping away all the medieval customs and traditions that get in the way."

Morris barked a laugh. "He spent a lot of time in Edith Wild's house in Grantville himself, you know. I've heard him complain about the lack of toilet paper here in Prague several times."

"So have I," muttered Len, giving Ellie a glance. "I also heard him pissing and moaning about no electricity, too."

Ellie's face looked pinched. She'd undoubtedly heard the same thing from him. Morris knew that Wallenstein spent a lot of time with Ellie and Len, watching them as they set up a telephone center in his palace. Not so much because he was trying to oversee the work, about which he knew effectively nothing, but simply because he was interested. Wallenstein was a curious man, interested in many things. Except when his shaky health was acting up, or he was distracted by his obsession with astrology, Wallenstein's mind was always alert and active.

The pinched look on Ellie's face went away, replaced by . . . something else. She cocked her head sideways a bit.

"I'm curious about something. It sounds like—no offense—you're almost planning to set up Bohemia as a counterweight to the CPE. Even a rival. Doesn't that bother you any?"

Morris shrugged. "Some, sure. But I talked to Mike about it before we left Grantville, and he agrees that it's the only way to do it. That's not just because of the Jewish question, either. Mike's thinking about the whole picture."

"What Wallenstein wants is one thing," Judith chipped in. "What he winds up with . . . well, that's something else. He's not the only player in the game."

Mention of the word game jogged Morris' mind. Like him, Len was a chess enthusiast. "Think of it as a fianchetto, Len. You move up knight's pawn one rank, creating a little pocket for the bishop. Then the bishop sits there, protected, but ready to attack at a diagonal."

"Yeah, I know. I like the maneuver myself. But what's the—oh."

" 'Oh,' is right. And that's just what Wallenstein might be saying, one of these days. Chess is just a game, so it has firm and hard rules. Real life doesn't. A bishop can take out its own queen, in the real world, if that ever proves necessary. Try to, anyway."

While Len chewed on the analogy, Morris returned to the table and sat down again. "It's a race, really. That how Mike puts it. A strange kind of race, because we're trying to beat the same man we're allied with—without ever attacking him directly. He'll try for one thing, but the means he has to use for his ends can turn around and bite him on the ass. In our world, the Japanese wound up being saddled by a military dictatorship as they modernized. But who's to say the same thing has to happen here? Maybe it will. Then, again, maybe it won't."

Honesty forced him to say the next words. "It'll be dangerous, I admit. You'd be a lot safer staying back in Grantville."

Oddly, that did it. Ellie sat up straight. "You think I'm afraid of these assholes? Bullshit. Len, we're staying."

"Yes, dear," he murmured.

"And stop smirking."

"Hey, look, they got the best beer in the world here, just like they did four hundred years from now. You admitted it yourself, just the other day."

"I said, stop smirking."

* * *

The last conversation Morris Roth had that day was the one he hadn't foreseen or planned on. After everyone had left and he and Judith were getting ready for bed, his wife said to him:

"There's one last thing, O great Machiavellian prince of the Jewish persuasion."

"Yes?"

"I want you to stop bullying Jason."

Morris stared at her. Judith was busy turning down the covers, but she looked up at him squarely.

"Yes, you are," she said firmly. "He's just a young man who wants to become a rabbi, Morris. That's all. There's at least one of those rabbis in the ghetto whom he likes a lot, and wants to study with. So let him do what he wants, instead of trying to force him to be your Reform champion who'll slay the dragon of Orthodoxy. Let him study and decide for himself what he thinks. And if he winds up becoming an Orthodox rabbi, so be it."

Morris felt his jaws tighten. "You really want to listen to him at prayer, thanking God for not making him a woman?"

Judith shook her head. "That's neither here nor there, Morris. No, of course I don't. So what? I know how much you miss Rabbi Stern and our old synagogue and Hillel House. So do I. But you can't force Jason to become something he isn't. He's not even twenty-three years old, for Pete's sake. Steve Stern was a middle-aged man with all the confidence of someone who'd studied the Torah and the Talmud for years and was an experienced rabbi. How can you possibly expect Jason to substitute for him? Just because you want to launch a Reform movement two hundred years ahead of schedule? Well, then, why don't you do it yourself, big shot? Instead of trying to jam a kid into it, while you turn yourself into another Rothschild."

Morris winced. That struck . . . a little close to home. As much as Morris prized his Reform beliefs, he knew perfectly well that he'd be completely overmatched if he tried to cross theological lances with Orthodox rabbis.

Judith smiled. "Thought so. You chicken."

She straightened up from the bed. "Has it ever occurred to you, even once—because I know it has to Jason—that maybe, just maybe, you ought to apply your fancy chess terms to this situation also? Who is to say, Morris Roth, how Judaism will develop in this universe? They don't even use the term 'Orthodoxy' in the here and now. Maybe . . ."

She waved her hand, half-irritably. "I don't know. Maybe everything will shape up differently. Maybe it won't. What I do know is that you've got one unhappy kid on your hands, and you're driving him away with your pressure and your demands. Leave him alone, Morris. Let Jason Gotkin do whatever Jason Gotkin winds up doing. You never treated our own kids the way you're treating him. So why are you doing it to someone who's become something of an adopted son?"

Morris thought about it, for a moment. Then, heaved a deep sigh. She was right, and he knew it.

"Okay. I guess I look a little silly parading around as 'Baron Roth,' huh?"

His wife looked at him calmly. "No, actually, that's not true. Give it a few more years, and I think you'll have the role down pat. Come as naturally to you as breathing. Surprises the hell out of me, I admit, being married to you for over thirty years. But . . . there it is. Morris, if we survive, you will—we will, I guess—become the new Rothschilds of this universe. So what do you say we don't screw it up? I'd hate to be remembered as a pack of overbearing bullies. I really would."

4

"We cannot postpone a decision on this matter forever, Isaac." Mordechai Spira spoke softly, as was his habit, but firmly nonetheless.

His friend and fellow rabbi sighed and looked out the window of his domicile. Beyond, the narrow and crooked street was as crowded as it usually was at that time of the morning. Prague's Jewish population was really too big for the Josefov's cramped quarters, and it showed. People were almost living on top of each other.

"Things are still very tense, Mordechai," Isaac Gans pointed out. "Between the mess with Heller and then—just what was needed—the strains with Auerbach . . ."

Mordechai nodded, understanding the point. Prague's last two chief rabbis had been something of a disaster for the Jewish community. Heller had fallen afoul of the Habsburgs and had wound up being cast into prison in Vienna. Mordechai thought Heller was personally blameless in the matter, having simply had the misfortune of being politically inept in a tense political situation. The Habsburgs had imposed a harsh tax on Prague's Jewish community in order to help fund their military activities in the savage war that had been rolling across Europe for over a decade. Forty thousand thalers! Heller had tried to resist, and then, when resistance proved futile, had done his best to collect the tax fairly.

But . . . he had enemies, and they had taken advantage of the situation to lay accusations against him before the emperor. In the end, his supporters in the Jewish community had been able to get his death sentence commuted, though only because Ferdinand II's greed was such that he had been willing to ransom him for another 12,000 thalers. Still—and probably for the best, all things considered—Heller had not been able to return to Prague. He'd accepted instead a position in the rabbinate of far-off Nemirow.

Probably for the best, Mordechai reflected. It was hard to say. Alas, he'd been replaced by Simon Auerbach, who, if he had better political skills had been a much harder man for Mordechai and other rabbis to get along with. Auerbach had been a renowned Talmudist, true enough. But he was one of those men whose great learning was coupled to a harsh and inflexible temperament. Throughout his career he had clashed with those around him—at Lublin, with Meïr ben Gedaliah, another famous Talmudist; later, at Posen, with the city's rosh yeshivah, Benjamin of Morawczyk; and, soon after his arrival at Prague, he'd had a quarrel with Heller himself.

Auerbach had died, a year and a half earlier. But he'd done enough damage in the two short years he'd been at Prague that it was still felt, especially coming on top of the continuing strains in the community over the Heller imbroglio.

The current chief rabbi was a mild-mannered sort of fellow, thankfully. Alas, he was one of those people whose mild manner was principally due to his reluctance to make any decisions. Not a good characteristic for the chief rabbi of the largest Jewish community in Europe—at any time, much less these.

"Still," Mordechai said abruptly, "a decision must be made. We cannot continue to simply ignore Jason Gotkin."

"We haven't ignored him, Mordechai," protested Gans.

Spira waved his hand. "Stop avoiding the issue. First of all, even in social matters we've avoided him. And the Roths, even more so. Yes, we speak to Jason in the street. But have you invited him to your home for Shabbat dinner? No. Neither have I. Neither has anyone. It's grotesque. A schande!"

He waited a moment; Issac looked away.

"No," Mordechai repeated. "A complete breach with our customs. And, as I said, neither have I—despite the fact that I like Jason Gotkin. Quite a bit, in fact." He chuckled softly. "And don't forget that I have three unmarried daughters."

Gans started to grimace; but, then, as his innate fairness and good humor rallied, the grimace shifted into something of a sly smile. "Well, true. And I imagine Sarah in particular would take a fancy to him."

Mordechai must have looked somewhat alarmed, because Isaac's sly smile started bordering on a grin. "Yes, I know she's your favorite, even if you'll never admit it. But that's because she's sprightly. Just the sort of girl to find an exotic fellow like Gotkin of interest. He's a rather handsome boy, too, you know. To be sure, his Yiddish is somewhat pathetic."

"His Hebrew isn't," Mordechai pointed out, forcefully. "In fact—spoken, at least—I suspect it's better than yours or mine. Or any other Jew's in the world today."

Isaac rubbed his forehead. "Do you really believe it, Mordechai?"

"Say better: is there any way to doubt it, any longer?" Spira's eyes moved to a table in the corner of the room, atop which sat a book whose appearance was unlike that of any other Mordechai had ever seen. He'd lent it to his friend Isaac a week earlier, after Jason Gotkin had lent it to him.

On one level, the book was simply another edition of the Tanakh—the Jewish version of the ancient holy texts which, in a slightly different variant, Christians called "the Old Testament." Jason had told Mordechai that he'd had it in his possession when the mysterious event had taken place which had brought him and his town into the world from . . . somewhere else. "In my bags in the trunk of my car," as he'd put it, whatever that meant.

Mordechai rose and went over to the table. He opened the book and began fingering the pages. He'd lent it to Isaac, in part, because Isaac knew how to read English—a language of which Mordechai himself was completely ignorant.

"Leave aside the pages and the printing, Isaac—though I know you've never seen anything like it." He swiveled his head around, to regard his friend. "It is the Tanakh, yes?"

Gans nodded.

"The Tanakh. In English. At a guess, Isaac, how many copies of an English Tanakh—in any edition, much less one so fine as this—do you think exist in the world?"

Gans looked away, staring back out the window. "I suspect that is the only Tanakh anywhere in the world, printed in English."

"The world today, Isaac. Our world. This one. Which means—to me at least—that the boy must be telling the truth. The rest—"

He waved his hand at the window. "—all of it, this new Confederated Principalities of Europe, Gustavus Adolphus grown so mighty, Wallenstein's disaster at the Alte Veste, the political turmoil. All of that I might possibly ascribe to something else. Those are things of the goyishe princes." Then, softly: "But how can I explain such a fine edition of the Tanakh, printed in a language which very few Jews in the world today use? Except some Sephardim, and they would have no more use for an English Tanakh than we do."

He closed the book and returned to his chair. "We are rabbis, Isaac, not princes. All that faces us, right now, is that a Jewish boy who is—in any manner that you or I can determine—qualified to do so, wishes to join the yeshivah. He does not even ask for financial support, though he is entitled to it. On what grounds can we deny him that wish? For weeks now, I have searched the Talmud and as much of the commentaries as I could, and found nothing."

"Nothing? He is probably a heretic, Mordechai."

"Be careful, Isaac," replied Spira softly. "Yes, he comes from what appears to be heresy—to me as well as to you. Appears to be, I remind you. Heresy is not that simple to judge, as you well know. And so what? Has he told us he wishes to advocate heresy? No. He simply wishes to study. On what grounds can we refuse him—without, ourselves, abandoning the traditions we would accuse him of having abandoned?"

Isaac went back to his window-watching.

"And what is so fascinating out there?" demanded Mordechai. "Besides too many Jews in too little space, as always. Stop avoiding this, Isaac. In the end, it is our souls that are being tested here, not the soul of Jason Gotkin."

Gans sighed. "True enough. Very well, Mordechai. I will support you in this. But I warn you, I do not think we will be able to convince the rosh yeshivah."

Spira shrugged. "No, I don't expect we will. But with your support, no one will oppose me if I begin instructing the boy myself. And I already have a chevrusah for him."

Gans burst out laughing. "Mordechai, you schemer! I assume you asked young Hoeschel. I think that boy would accept any challenge."

"Schmuel is a bold one, true enough," allowed Spira, smiling. "But he's met Gotkin, you know, several times. He likes him and tells me he would be quite happy to become Jason's study partner."

Now that he'd finally made his decision, Gans seemed to relax. That was his usual pattern, Mordechai knew—and the reason he'd begun with him. Isaac Gans was perhaps the best scholar among the rabbis in Prague; careful and deliberate in coming to a conclusion, but firm and confident about it thereafter. His support would mean a great deal.

"And why shouldn't he?" said Isaac. "He is a nice boy, whatever else may be said about him."

He was smiling slyly again. "You watch. The first time you invite him to Shabbat dinner, Sarah will start pestering you the next day. As sprightly as she is, she'll be hard to resist, too. Especially after she enlists your wife—which she will. You watch."

Mordechai Spira did his best to look stern and patriarchal. Master of his house. But Isaac's smile just kept widening.

5

That same morning, in Vienna, a prince of the goyim came to a decision.

"Very well. I agree. We have no choice, any longer."

Emperor Ferdinand II eyed General Piccolomini skeptically. He didn't trust the mercenary, though he understood the man's reasons for refusing to remain in Prague. Piccolomini had once been one of Wallenstein's closest subordinates. But had he remained within Wallenstein's reach, after the Alte Veste, the Bohemian magnate would surely have had him assassinated. By now, the emperor was sure—so was Piccolomini—Wallenstein had obtained his own copies of books from Grantville. In another universe, Piccolomini had been one of the chief conspirators in the plot that had resulted in Wallenstein's assassination.

As he still was in this universe, to be sure—but now he proposed to keep his distance.

"It will work, Your Majesty," Piccolomini assured him. "Wallenstein is on his guard, yes. But he also listens to his astrologers—and two of them are now on the imperial payroll. With their influence, Rossbach has ingratiated himself with Wallenstein. He assures me he can manage it."

"How much?" the emperor grunted.

Piccolomini understood the terse question. "He wants thirty thousand thalers—but he will settle for twenty, I think, if your Majesty makes him a Freiherr."

Ferdinand grunted again. Then, decided he could live with it. If the imperial purse was too straitened, when the time came, he could always simply refuse to pay the full amount. What could Rossbach do, after all?

"And Pappenheim?"

"Rossbach says he will do his best, but—" Piccolomini made a face. "Assassinating Pappenheim is a different matter. Risky, much riskier. Unfortunately, Pappenheim doesn't listen to astrologers. And, up close . . ."

He shrugged. So did the emperor—although, in his case, the gesture was one of a man relieving himself of a load. Who was to say? If Rossbach made the attempt on Pappenheim, either he would succeed or he would fail. Mostly likely, he would fail.

So be it. Wallenstein would still be dead, which was the key thing. And the emperor would be relieved of the burden of paying 20,000 thalers to his assassin.

"Let it be done, then," he commanded.

* * *

"He won't listen to me, Edith," complained Isabella Katharina. Wallenstein's wife shook her head. "Those damned astrologers! All he listens to! And they are telling him he has nothing to fear in the year ahead."

Edith Wild scowled and glanced at the door. Her bedroom directly adjoined the suite that served Wallenstein and his wife as their living quarters in the palace. That was due to Isabella Katharina's insistence that Wallenstein's nurse be readily available in the event his poor health suddenly deteriorated. In the months since she'd arrived in Prague, Isabella had come to trust Edith's advice far more than she did those of her husband's doctors. Much less his astrologers.

Smart woman, thought Edith. "What does Pappenheim say?"

"My husband won't listen to him either. I spoke to Gottfried myself, and he says he can do nothing beyond make sure that a guard is always stationed at the entrance."

"Well, that's true enough. He can't very well force the Duke to accept guards in his own suite."

Isabella seemed close to tears. Edith patted her on the shoulder. "All right, then, you'll just have to rely on me, if something happens."

As much as Isabella trusted her, the look she gave Edith now was definitely on the skeptical side.

Edith sniffed, and marched over to the chest in the corner that held her clothes. After rummaging in the bottom for a moment, she brought out something and showed it to Isabella.

"This'll do the trick."

Now more intrigued than anything else, Isabella came over and stared at the thing.

"Is that one of your American pistols?"

Edith grunted. "Don't call it a 'pistol.' It's a revolver. Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum Chief Special. Holds five rounds, 125 grain. Kicks like a mule and it'll damn near blow your eardrums, but it'll drop an ox. I wouldn't have bought it myself, it's my son's. But he gave it to me after the first time he fired it on the shooting range." She sniffed again. "I hate to say it, but he's something of a sissy—even if he does like to hang out with those bums at the Club 250, pretending otherwise."

She was wearing seventeenth-century-style heavy skirts with a separate pocket underneath, attached by a drawstring. Using a slit in the skirts designed for the purpose, she slipped the revolver into the pocket. "Anyway, relax. If anybody gets into the Duke's rooms, I'll see to it they don't leave. Except in a coffin."

Isabella gazed up admiringly at the large American woman. "What would we do without you?"

"I don't know," grunted Edith.

It was the truth, too. There were ways in which taking care of Wallenstein and his wife was like taking care of children. Still, she'd grown very fond of the two of them. The Duke himself was always courteous to her—far more courteous than any "fellow American" had ever been, she thought sarcastically—and Isabella had become a real friend.

Edith Wild hadn't had many friends in her life. That was her own harsh personality at work, she understood well enough. She'd never really been sure how much she'd like herself, if she had any choice in the matter. So it was nice to have a place again in life, and people who treated her well.

"Don't worry about it," she gruffed. "I like it here in Prague, and I plan on staying. Anybody tries to fuck with the Duke, they're fucking with me."

"You shouldn't swear so much," chided Isabella. The reproof was then immediately undermined by a childish giggle. "But I'm so glad you're here."

Chapter IV: En passant
July, 1633

1

"I feel silly in this getup," Morris grumbled, as Judith helped him with the skirted doublet. "Are you sure? I mean, I've gotten used to wearing it—sort of—when I go visit Wallenstein in his palace. He dresses like a peacock himself and insists everyone does at his little courts. But I'm just going next door!"

"Stop whining, Morris," his wife commanded. She stepped back and gave him an admiring look. "I think you look terrific, myself. This outfit looks a lot better on you than a modern business suit ever did."

She was telling him nothing more than the truth, actually. Judith thought he did look terrific. Her husband had the kind of sturdy but unprepossessing face and figure that a drab up-time business suit simply emphasized. Whereas that same figure, encased in the clothing worn by seventeenth-century courtiers, looked stately rather than somewhat plump—and it was the shrewdness and intelligence in his face that was brought forward, rather than the plain features, when framed by a lace-fringed falling collar spilling across his shoulders and capped by a broad-brimmed hat.

"The plume, too?" he whined.

"I said, 'stop whining.' Yes, the plume too." She took him by the shoulders, turned him around, and began gently pushing him toward the door of their suite. "Look at it this way, Morris. For years I had to listen to you crab and complain about how much you hated wearing a tie. Now—no ties."

He hadn't quite given up. "Damnation, I'm just going across the street—barely inside the ghetto—to visit Jason in the new community center."

They were outside the suite that served them as their private quarters, and moving down the hallway toward the great staircase. Judith was no longer actually pushing him ahead of her, but she was crowding him closely enough to force him forward.

"Which you have never yet visited," she pointed out. "Not once in the two weeks since it was finished and Jason started working out of it. Even though you paid for the whole thing—buying the building, refurbishing it, and stocking it with what's becoming a very fine library as well as a kitchen for the poor."

Now, they were starting down the stairs. Judith wasn't crowding him quite as closely any longer. Not quite.

"I won't feel comfortable there," he predicted. "Especially not wearing this damn getup. When I went to Hillel House—"

"This is not Hillel House in Morgantown, Morris," Judith pointed out firmly. "And this is not the twenty-first century. Everybody in the ghetto knows you're the benefactor who financed the new community center—just like they know you're the source of the not-so-anonymous funds that went to help refurbish the Rathhaus and improve the Old-New Synagogue."

They'd reached the bottom of the stairs. Morris turned around and planted his hands on his hips, almost glaring at his wife.

"Yes? And did they use the money the way I wanted?"

Judith gave him a level look, for a moment, before responding. "Yes, as a matter of fact, they did. Avigail and Hirshele thanked me for it just yesterday. They say the seats in the womens' section of the synagogue are much improved—and the air circulation even more so."

That only made Morris look more sour yet. "Swell. So I'm aiding and abetting 'separate but equal'—which it never is."

It was Judith's turn to plant her hands on her hips. It was a gesture she did a lot more authoritatively than he did.

"Morris, cut it out. You're fifty-three years old and I'm only a year younger than you are. Neither one of us is going to live long enough to see a tenth of the changes you'd like to see—and you know it as well as I do. So what do you say we keep our eyes focused on what's really critical?"

She was actually a little angry, she realized, not just putting on an act. "What do you think those Jews are, over there in the Ukraine, whose lives you want to save? A bunch of Mendelssohns and Einsteins and Oppenheimers? Hundreds of thousands of budding Stephen Jay Goulds, champing at the bit to study evolution and biology? They're every bit as set in their ways and customs as the crankiest rabbi here in Prague—a lot more so, in fact. So?"

He looked away. "I just don't like it," he murmured.

Judith shook her head. "Husband, I love you dearly but sometimes you are purely maddening. What's really going on here is that you just have a bad conscience because you know you've hurt Jason's feelings by not showing up sooner at the community center. And now—men!—you're taking it out on everybody else. Starting with me. So cut it out. Just do your duty and march over there. Wearing your Jewish prince outfit."

She took him by the shoulders and spun him around, facing the door to the street. A servant was standing by, ready to open it. Judith was a bit startled to see him, only realizing now that he would have heard the whole conversation.

How much of it he would have understood, of course, was another question. So far as she knew, Fischel spoke no English at all.

So far as she knew—but she'd never asked. Mentally, she shrugged her shoulders. Nothing had been said that would come as any surprise to anyone, after all. Unlike Morris, Judith never let her own attitudes blind her to the fact that seventeenth-century traditional Jews—and certainly their rabbis—were no dummies. By now, months after the Roths had arrived in Prague with a big splash, the people of the ghetto would have made their own assessment of these exotic foreign Jews.

Well, perhaps not "assessment." Not yet, anyway. But Judith was quite sure that she and Morris had been studied very carefully by their servants—and their observations faithfully reported to their rabbis.

"Go," she commanded.

* * *

After Morris left, Judith went to the kitchen—insofar as the term "kitchen" could be used to describe a huge suite of interconnected rooms on the lowest floor devoted to the storing, preparation and serving of food for the inhabitants of a small palace. And not just food for the lord and lady of the mansion, either, and the guests who came to their now-frequent dinners and soirees. Judith was well aware that the midday meal that the cooks and servants made for themselves was their biggest meal of the day—and that they quietly smuggled food out every night, for their families back in the ghetto. Quietly, but not particularly surreptitiously. Judith had made clear to them, long since, that whatever disputes she might have with aspects of their beliefs and customs, she was a firm believer in the Biblical precept about not muzzling the kine that tread the grain.

Avigail, as usual, was tending the big hearth in which the actual cooking was done. Even after the months she'd been in Prague, Judith was still always a little startled to see that hearth, and the profusion of kettles hanging over it and smaller skillets nestled directly in the coals. It was such homely things as the absence of stoves that really drove home to her, more than anything else, that she was now living in a different universe.

Avigail straightened up and smiled at her. "Good morning, gracious lady."

Avigail spoke Yiddish, not German, but Judith had no trouble understanding her. Except for some loan words, the languages were almost identical. The spoken languages, that is. Yiddish was written in Hebrew characters, which Judith couldn't read at all. One of the reasons Judith had hired Avigail was because the woman could read German also, which allowed Judith to leave notes for her when need be.

Now, she wondered what other languages Avigail might speak. Judith knew the woman was fluent in Czech also. But—

She blurted it out. In English. A language she had just assumed—without ever asking—would be completely foreign to the cook.

"Avigail, do you speak English?"

The cook hesitated for a moment. Then, her face a bit stiff, replied in heavily accented but quite understandable English: "Yes, gracious lady. I do."

Judith suddenly realized that the normally-bustling and busy kitchen had fallen very quiet. She scanned the room and saw that all five of the cooks and helpers present were staring at her. All of them with that same, slightly stiff expression.

"Do all of you speak English?"

Again, that hesitation. Then, again, nodding heads.

For a moment, Judith wavered between anger and . . .

Well . . .

She burst out laughing. "Does every servant in this house speak English?"

Nods. A bit hastily, Avigail said: "Young Jacob upstairs, not so well." She pointed with a ladle at a teenage girl standing in a corner near the pantry. "And little Rifka over there, even worse. Lazy youngsters, they don't do their studies like they should."

Judith had to fight to bring her laughter under control. "Their 'studies,' no less!"

She shook her head, grinning. "They must have scoured the ghetto to find this many English-speakers. Avigail, if you have any questions—or if the rabbis do—you need only ask. I really have no secrets. Neither does my husband."

There didn't seem anything else to say. Still grinning, she left the room.

* * *

After she was gone, Avigail and the three women who'd been employed since the first days after the Roths arrived, turned their heads to regard Rifka. The young woman was new to the household, having only started working there the week before. Their expressions were identical: that of older women finally and fully vindicated in front of skeptical and callow striplings.

"You see?" demanded Avigail. "Did we not tell you?"

"I will study harder," Rifka said meekly.

"That's not what I meant!" snapped Avigail. "And you know it perfectly well."

She sniffed, turned away, and went back to work with her ladle. It had a very long handle, because the hearth was large and the fire was hot. But the ladle in Avigail's mind had just grown shorter still. By now, it was not much longer than a spoon.

2

The first thing Morris saw when he entered the community center—the first thing he really noticed, at least, because of his nervousness—was the rabbi standing next to Jason and another young man.

He assumed he was a rabbi, at least. Partly from the clothing the man was wearing, but mostly from certain indefinable things about the way he carried himself—and the very evident respect with which Jason and the other youngster were listening to what he had to say.

Morris found himself almost gritting his teeth. He had a better knowledge of history, in general, than most residents of Grantville. And because he'd always been especially interested in Jewish history, he had a particularly good knowledge of that subject. He felt like shouting at the three of them: Your damn rabbinate didn't start running the show until not much more than a thousand years ago! Those old men in Babylon who started throwing their weight around after the destruction of the Second Temple. Our history goes back at least two thousand years earlier than that. Ask David and Solomon—or Abraham and Moshe—if they kowtowed to a bunch of old men with long beards and stupid hats!

But, he didn't. It would have been unfairly one-sided, as well as rude and pointless. And, besides . . .

Well, the fact was that the rabbi in question was not particularly old. In fact, he looked to be younger than Morris himself.

Nothing for it, then. Morris took a deep breath and marched over.

Seeing him come, Jason smiled widely. It was the biggest smile Jason had given Morris in at least two months, and Morris felt himself warming. As Judith had said, since the Ring of Fire Morris had come to look upon young Gotkin as something of an adopted son. The estrangement that had grown between them since their arrival in Prague had been painful.

The rabbi turned his head and regarded Morris. He obviously knew who he was, even though they'd never met. Morris was not surprised. This was not the first time, by any means, that Morris had entered the ghetto. He'd made a number of trips—right into the center of the Josefov—to meet with Dunash and his people. And, every time, although people had not been rude about it, Morris had been quite aware that he'd been carefully and closely observed everywhere he went. And was just as sure that the people who watched him passed on their observations to their rabbis.

As he neared, the rabbi smiled politely and addressed him. "Good morning, Don Morris. Since I have never had the opportunity, let me take it now to thank you for your generosity in providing for this center. And your many other generosities."

The rabbi's German was excellent, if oddly accented to Morris' ear. By now, Morris' own German was almost fluent. What he found more interesting, though, was the way the rabbi had addressed him. Don Morris—as if Morris were a Sephardic hidalgo. True, it made a certain sense, because most court Jews in the first half of the seventeenth century were still Sephardic rather than Ashkenazi. Still . . .

Morris decided it was a workable compromise, for him as much as the rabbi. Although there were some differences in the way Sephardim and Ashkenazim observed their faith, which resulted in friction and even occasional clashes, neither one of the branches of Judaism considered the other to be heretics. Not to mention that Italian Jews, in this day and age, constituted something of a third tradition of their own.

Truth be told, the friction between Ashkenazim and Sephardim was due more to social factors than religious ones. Sephardim, as a rule, were more comfortable with cultural accommodation to gentile society—and, as a rule, considerably wealthier than most Ashkenazim. So, they tended to look down on Ashkenazim as the equivalent of "country rubes"—a disdain which the Ashkenazim returned in kind, much as Morris' hillbilly neighbors made wisecracks about city slickers. But, since he'd arrived in his new universe, Morris had discovered that the interaction between the two—and with the Judaeo-Italians—was quite a bit more extensive than his study of history had led him to suspect.

Besides, the man was being courteous. Whatever his underlying attitudes, Morris had never found it possible to be rude to someone who was not being rude to him.

He nodded. Graciously, he hoped. "My pleasure, rabbi. Ah—"

"This is Rabbi Spira," Jason said promptly, almost eagerly.

So. This is the one.

Morris had to fight down a momentary surge of jealousy. Although Jason had been veiled about it, Morris was well aware that the young man had come to develop a deep admiration for Mordechai Spira—and something that bordered on filial respect.

Now that Morris had finally met the man, he could understand that better. As much as Morris was inclined to dislike zealots—and he considered all Orthodox rabbis to be zealots, by their nature—he couldn't miss the intelligence in Spira's eyes. Nor the quite evident warmth and kindliness in them, either. Jason had told him, more than once, that even when Rabbi Spira corrected him for his errors, he invariably did so with good humor. Even wit.

For Morris Roth, "witty Orthodox rabbi" had always been something of an oxymoron. Unlike Jason, who'd lived in Israel for a year as a student, Morris and Judith had never done more than visit the country for a couple of weeks at a time. Morris had not had much contact with Orthodox Judaism in the United States he'd come from, since his area of the country was dominated by Reform Judaism. So his main personal impression of Orthodox rabbis came from what he'd seen in Israel—which, to him, had been their constant interference in Israel's politics, their narrow-minded obsessions, the readiness with which they threw their political weight around. He'd been particularly angry at their refusal—well, some of them—to allow their adherents to serve in Israel's armed forces, at the same time that they demanded those armed forces be used to carry out policies they wanted.

He had to remind himself—as Judith reminded him constantly—that they'd left that world behind. There was no Israel in this universe. Not yet, at least; and not for some time to come, if ever. The rabbinate that existed here was one that had been shaped by the life of Jews in central and eastern Europe's ghettos and shtetls. It simply wasn't fair for Morris Roth to pile atop Mordechai Spira's head all the sins of a rabbinate in a different time, in a different universe.

He began to say some words that would have been simply friendly. But he'd barely begun before he heard noises coming from the entrance. The sounds were very faint, seeming to come from a great distance, but Morris thought he recognized them.

Gunshots. Then, a moment later—

Lots of gunshots.

"It's starting," he said. "Finally."

3

Ellie leaned back in the chair before the console, and took a deep breath.

"Well, Duke, there it is. Finished. Finally."

Wallenstein examined the telephone center, his eyes bright with interest. "And you have the people trained to operate it, yes?"

Ellie nodded. "Three, so far. Enough to keep shifts going round the clock—for a while, anyway. You'll need to give them some time off, though, now and then."

Wallenstein was frowning a little, as he often did listening to Ellie's idiosyncratic blend of German and English. Belatedly, she realized that the expression "round the clock" wouldn't have meant much to him. True, they had clocks in the seventeenth century. But the devices were rare and expensive, too much so for their habits to have entered popular idiom yet.

Wallenstein shrugged irritably. "I see no problem." He jerked his head toward a door. "They will sleep here, anyway."

The new telephone center, at Wallenstein's insistence, had been built directly adjoining his personal suite in the palace. He'd even had living quarters connected to it prepared for the eventual telephone operators. Ellie thought that was an odd arrangement. But, given Wallenstein's shaky health—not to mention the terrible wounds that Julie Mackay had inflicted upon him at the Alte Veste, which he would never fully recover from even with the help of American medical care—she could understand it. Wallenstein had to spend a lot of his time, now, resting in his bed. But with a telephone literally at his fingertips, he would have the wherewithal to continue managing the empire he intended to build for himself. Ellie and Len had already built and put in place a direct phone connection between Wallenstein's bed in his private room and the telephone center itself.

By now, Ellie had gotten to know Wallenstein well enough not to be afraid to contradict him. The Duke of Friedland was insistent upon his privileges, and had a very harsh way with anyone who was impolite to him. But he did not bridle at being opposed over a matter of substance, as long as it was done respectfully and not too insistently. And, fortunately, he cut more slack for Ellie than he did for just about anyone else except his wife Isabella and his nurse, Edith Wild. And Pappenheim, of course.

Ellie shook her head. "Duke, this is not that simple a system to operate. It takes a lot of mental alertness—at least, assuming you wind up using it as often as you think you will. What I mean is—"

There was an interruption at the door. More precisely, in the large room beyond that served Wallenstein's private suite as an entry salon. A man was pushing his way in, overriding the protests of the guard stationed at the entrance to the suite. There seemed to be several men standing in the corridor beyond, as well.

Ellie recognized him. It was Eugen Rossbach—Ritter Rossbach, as he insisted on being called—one of the mercenary captains who had attached himself to Wallenstein's service. Wallenstein was rather partial to the man. Ellie despised him, herself—but then, admittedly, Ellie despised most of the mercenaries who surrounded the Duke of Friedland. Perhaps oddly, Pappenheim—in some ways the most frightening of them all—was the one she disliked the least.

Wallenstein, now frowning fiercely, stepped out of the small telephone center into the main salon. "What is it, Rossbach? I am occupied at the moment."

Rossbach, still fending off the protesting guard with one hand, waved a document with the other. "Yes, my apologies—but you must see this immediately! It's from the emperor!"

Ellie rose and came to the doorway. Wallenstein took a step forward to take the message, which Rossbach extended toward him.

It suddenly dawned on Ellie that the three men with Rossbach were coming into the main salon, now that the guard was distracted. Why?

One of them—then the other two—reached for their swords. Without thinking, Ellie grabbed Wallenstein by his collar and yanked him backward.

The Duke cried out in protest. Rossbach snarled. Then—Ellie never saw the stabbing itself—the guard suddenly screamed and staggered forward. Behind him, as he fell to his knees, she could see one of Rossbach's companions with his sword now in his hand. The tip of it was covered in blood.

Wallenstein cried out again. A curse of some sort, Ellie thought. Rossbach shouted something, dropped the document and drew his own sword.

Ellie hauled Wallenstein back into the telephone room. He stumbled on the way and fell backward, landing on his rump. She just had time to slam the door shut in Rossbach's face.

Then, fumbled to find the lock which—

Didn't exist.

Goddamit! There'd been no reason, after all, to put a lock on that door. In fact, Wallenstein would have been furious if they'd done so. It was his telephone center, not that of the men who would be operating it for him.

She heard Rossbach's fist slamming the door. Then, a moment later, a much heavier wham as his boot slammed into it.

Ellie's fear and fury were, for a moment, penetrated by an absurd impulse to cackle with laughter. That idiot Rossbach thinks the door IS locked.

But it probably wouldn't take him long to figure it out. And besides—another wham—even if he didn't, that door wasn't really that solid. He'd be able to kick it in easily enough.

Wallenstein was now rising to his feet. Unfortunately, in his own personal suite, the Duke wasn't carrying his sword. They were both unarmed.

"Bullshit!" Ellie snarled. She stooped over and rummaged through the big tool chest that had been in the room for weeks now. An instant later, she came up with a modern Crescent wrench—Len's 12-incher—as well as the two-foot cheater pipe he used for extra leverage when he needed it.

She tossed the pipe to Wallenstein and hefted the wrench. It wasn't much, but it would have to do.

Wham!

Wham!— and the door came off the hinges. Rossbach and another man started pushing through the doorway, their swords level.

WHAM! WHAM!

Both of them sailed through the opening, as if shot from a cannon, their swords flying out of their hands. Wallenstein clubbed Rossbach down, but Ellie missed the other man. Her swing had been wild, accompanied by a shriek of fear as she dodged the sword sailing ahead of him. Now it was her turn to fall on her ass.

It didn't matter, though. The swing had been more of a reflex than anything else. She'd seen the erupting exit wound on the man's belly. That WHAM had been a gunshot.

She stared through the open, shattered doorway. She could see Edith Wild standing in the salon, now. The big woman's face was contorted with anger and she was holding a modern-style revolver in both hands. The two remaining assassins were out of Ellie's range of view. But she could just imagine how astonished they were. Ellie was astonished herself.

WHAM! WHAM!

Now that Ellie wasn't completely overwhelmed by adrenalin, the sound of the gunshots seemed ten times louder. Edith must have been nearly deafened. Each shot from the short-barreled revolver was accompanied by a bright yellow muzzle flash. The gun bucked in Edith's big hands—so badly that Ellie was pretty sure the second shot had gone wild.

But Edith didn't seemed fazed at all. The snarl stayed on her face and she brought the gun back into line.

"The Tatar," indeed. Don't fuck with Nurse Ratchett.

Ellie heard a man shout something. A protest of some kind, perhaps, or a plea for mercy.

Fat lot of good it did him. WHAM!

* * *

Ellie shook her head to clear it. When she looked up again, Edith was no longer in sight. Hearing some sort of noise—she couldn't really tell what it was, her ears were ringing so badly—Ellie scrambled over on her hands and knees and stuck her head out the door.

Edith's last shot had gone a little wild too, it seemed. The man had only been wounded in the shoulder—from what Ellie could tell, nothing more than a flesh wound—and Edith's gun was out of ammunition.

Fat lot of good it did him. Don't fuck with Nurse Ratchett. Edith had wrestled him to the floor and was now clubbing his head with her revolver.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

Wallenstein stuck his own head out the door, crouched a little higher than Ellie. "Rossbach is dead," he announced.

He studied Edith at her work for a moment, then straightened and helped Ellie to her feet. When she looked at him again, to her surprise, Wallenstein was smiling thinly and stroking his badly scarred jaw.

"A pity there are so few American women," he announced. "If I had an army of you mad creatures, I could conquer the world."

Pappenheim charged into the salon, his sword in his hand. Behind him came at least half a dozen soldiers. When he saw Wallenstein, obviously unhurt, the relief on his face was almost comic. It was odd, really—not for the first time, the thought came to Ellie—how much devotion a man like Wallenstein could get from a man like Pappenheim. She didn't think she'd ever really understand it.

But, she didn't need to. The fact itself was enough. Wallenstein was still alive and kicking and now Pappenheim was on the scene. Which meant that—finally—all hell was about to break loose.

"Best stop her, Gottfried," said Wallenstein, pointing to Edith. The nurse was still clubbing the would-be assassin, though he was now completely limp and lying on the floor. "It would help if we could get him to talk."

Even ferocious Pappenheim seemed a little daunted by the project. After a moment's hesitation, he sheathed his word and walked over, taking care to remain outside of Edith's reach.

He knelt to bring himself into her field of view and gave Edith his most winning smile. Which, on Pappenheim's face, looked about as out of place as anything Ellie could imagine.

He extended his hand in a carefully nonthreatening plea for restraint. "Bitte, Frau. We need the man to talk."

Edith let up on her thumping and glared at Pappenheim. Then, gave the assassin one final thump and rose heavily to her feet. "All right. But he better never try it again."

Pappenheim studied the man's bloody head. "No fear of that, I think."

Now Isabella came piling into the room, shrieking with fear, and practically leaped into her husband's arms. As he comforted her, Wallenstein gave Ellie a meaningful glance.

"Yes, boss," she muttered. She went back into the telephone center and started making the connections.

As Ellie expected, it wasn't long before Wallenstein came in. He was a considerate husband, but some things that man would always insist on doing himself.

"The first time it is used," he confirmed. "I will do so, and no other."

Ellie had already made the connection to the barracks adjoining Wallenstein's palace where he kept his trusted officers and troops. (Except Pappenheim and the most trusted ones—they lived in the palace.) Len was handling the phone center in the barracks itself, and they'd had time to exchange a few words.

Wallenstein leaned over and spoke into the tube. "Do it," was all he commanded.

Pappenheim crowded in, giving the telephone equipment no more than an interested glance. "I will see to Marradas myself."

"Make sure there's not another miracle, Gottfried."

The smile that now came to Pappenheim's face didn't look out of place at all.

* * *

Ellie never saw it herself, since she spent the next many hours closeted in the telephone center. But she heard about it. In the famous "defenestration of Prague" that had been the incident usually cited as the trigger for the Thirty Years War, the Catholic Habsburg envoys thrown out of a high window in Prague Castle by rebellious Protestant noblemen had landed in a pile of manure. Their survival had been acclaimed as a miracle by the Catholic forces and had been disheartening to the Protestant rebels.

Marradas fell about the same distance—seventy feet—after Pappenheim threw him out of a window in the castle. But, as commanded, there was no second miracle. Marradas landed on a pile of stones on the street below—placed there by Pappenheim's soldiers at his command, while Pappenheim kept the screaming and struggling Spanish don pinned in his grip for ten minutes until the work was finished.

4

Ellie heard about it from Morris Roth, who had watched it happen—at a distance, through binoculars, from the room in the uppermost floor of his mansion that gave him the best vantage point.

Morris had gone back to his mansion as soon as he realized the coup was underway. Jason had followed him along with, somewhat to Morris' surprise, Mordechai Spira. The rabbi had not even taken the precaution of wearing the special badge that Jews were required to wear under Habsburg law whenever they left the ghetto.

For the first few hours, it was hard to tell exactly what was happening. Morris had tried to reach Len and Ellie with the CB radios they'd brought with them to Prague, but there was no answer. That meant neither of them were in their private rooms in Wallenstein's palace. They always left their CB there, hidden in one of their chests, since the existence of the radios was supposed to be a secret from their new allies. None of them really thought that Wallenstein was fooled any, but since he also never raised the issue, they'd decided that maintaining discretion was the best policy. Soon enough, no doubt, now that the conflict was out in the open, Wallenstein would start pressuring his American allies to provide him with more in the way of technological advancement.

But their protracted failure to answer was enough by itself to confirm Morris' guess. That had to mean that both of them were busy in the new phone centers, which Wallenstein would be using to coordinate the first stages of his coup d'etat.

The defenestration of Marradas took place early in the afternoon. A few short minutes later, a new standard began appearing, draped over the walls of every prominent building on the Hradcany—even the cathedral. Morris didn't recognize it, but he was sure it was the new coat of arms that Wallenstein had designed for himself.

Duke of Friedland, Prince of Sagan—and now, King of Bohemia and Moravia.

Morris lowered the binoculars. "Well, that's it. For the moment, anyway."

He heard Mordechai Spira clear his throat. "We will not take sides in this, Don Morris. None of us have any love for the Habsburgs, but . . . Wallenstein . . . It was he, you know, who had poor Jacob Stein guarded by dogs under the gallows while he extorted eleven thousand florins from us."

"Yes, I know. But the fact was that Stein had broken the law—even if unwittingly—and there are plenty of goyishe princes who would have executed him after squeezing the silver from us. And it is also a fact that Wallenstein eventually exonerated Hanok ben Mordechai Altschul, who had also been accused, when many a goyishe prince—most of them—would never have bothered distinguishing a guilty Jew from an innocent."

He turned his head and looked at Spira. The rabbi's eyes were a little wide. "You know the history of it?" he asked, obviously surprised.

"I know a great deal of history," Morris said harshly. He was on the verge of uttering some bitter phrases—more than phrases, entire paragraphs—on the ineffectual role generally played by Orthodox rabbis when the Nazi Holocaust swept over eastern Europe's Jewry.

But, thankfully, he managed to swallow them. Mordechai Spira seemed a well-meaning man, and young Jason liked and admired him—and, most of all, it was simply unfair to blame a man or even a group of men for the faults and failures of other men in a completely different time and place.

"I know a great deal of history," Morris repeated, but this time softly, almost sighing the words. "I only wish I knew what to do with that knowledge."

Inadvertently, his eyes drifted eastward. Spira's eyes followed his gaze.

"You are worried about the Ukraine, I know. Jason has told me."

"Will you help me, then?"

The rabbi hesitated, but not for more than a second or two. "I will do everything I can, Don Morris, which I feel I can do in good conscience."

Morris thought about it. "I guess I can live with that."

He went back to studying the city with his binoculars. "I do not know what is going to happen now, Rabbi. But you are not pacifists."

"No, we are not."

"You will defend the ghetto, whether or not you take sides in this business." It was a command, not a question. "I do not know if there will be trouble, but there may be. Not from Wallenstein or Pappenheim, but the Habsburgs. Or, for that matter, who knows what Holk and his butchers will do, when they get the news."

"Yes," replied Spira. "We will do our best, at least. Though we have no weapons beyond tools and kitchen knives."

Morris chuckled, and lowered the binoculars. "That's what you think. Show him, Jason."

* * *

Ten minutes later, Mordechai Spira's eyes were wider yet. Jason and Dunash's people—who'd arrived at the Morris mansion just moments earlier—were hauling the muskets out of the crates in the basement and stacking them against the walls.

"I was able to bring two hundred, which was all Mike Stearns told me he could spare," Morris explained. "These are the new flintlocks. You'll need to have Jason explain how they work. They're not really much different from matchlocks, just better. I assume that in a ghetto of some fifteen thousand people, there have to be at least a few hundred who've handled firearms before."

Spira nodded. "Oh, yes. Many are here from the small villages, where things are less regulated. And there are at least a few dozen former seamen."

"We can help too!" Dunash said eagerly.

Morris glared at him. "You are taking sides in this business, young man—and you have commitments already. Red and Billek are counting on you to man the katyusha. So get your ass out of here."

Dunash hesitated. But Jason spoke up, very firmly. "Do as he says, Dunash. All of you."

The young Abrabanel firebrands and their new recruits—there were almost twenty of them, now—immediately left. The rabbi turned his head to watch them go, before bringing his gaze to Jason. It was almost as he were examining him.

Then, he smiled. "I have great hopes for you, young man. I think you will make a splendid rabbi."

Now he looked at Jason's chevrusah. "Spread the word, Schmuel. We want only men who know how to use guns. No point in trying to teach complete novices."

After Schmuel raced out, Spira chuckled. "Such as myself. Tell me, Don Morris, are you familiar with guns?"

Before answering him—by way of answer, rather—Morris went to another crate and drew out a different weapon. This one, unlike the others, was encased in a fancy covering rather than simple cloth.

He unzipped the guncase and drew out the rifle. "This is a much better gun than those flintlocks, Rabbi. I've owned it for many years. It is called—well, never mind. Yes, I know how to use it. I was a soldier in the American army, some years ago. In fact, I'm quite a good shot."

Spira seemed to be examining him, now. Morris shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. "Look, Rabbi, it's not just my military training. In the world I came from my wife and children and I were the only Jews in our town. And it's a mountain country town, where everybody hunts."

He looked down at the rifle, caressing the sleek stock. "The strange thing about it—perhaps—is that I never actually hunted myself. Hunting is not part of our traditions and customs."

Spira nodded. "No, it is not. We may only eat meat which has been properly slaughtered by a schohet."

Morris smiled wryly; almost bitterly. "Ah, yes, all those rules. Most of which I do not agree with but still often find it hard to ignore completely. Like hunting." He raised the rifle a bit, as if starting to bring it to his shoulder, and then lowered it again.

"But, you see, Rabbi . . . it would have been standoffish for me not to join my friends in their favorite sport. So, I did, even though I never shot any deer. I just went along. I always enjoyed the outdoors anyway. And—I don't know—I suppose just in order to prove that the reason I didn't wasn't because—well—"

He shifted his shoulders again. "I was one of the best shots on the rifle range and everybody knew it. So my friends—yes, gentile friends, I had lots of them—still do—would tease me about it. But not much, and not hard, and only in fun."

He gave Spira something of a challenging stare. Spira looked away, but Morris didn't think it was because the rabbi was afraid of the challenge, or trying to avoid it.

"There are many wise and wonderful sayings in the midrash, Don Morris. 'When in a city, follow its customs' is one of them."

Morris swallowed. He'd heard that one before, from his rabbi Steve Stern, in a universe now impossible to reach.

Spira brought his gaze back. "But I think there is perhaps an even more apt saying—though not from the midrash. It is one of your American folk sayings, Jason tells me."

The rabbi gestured toward the west, where, faintly, the sounds of fighting could still be heard across the river. "We will not takes sides in this affair. But, however it is settled, we will be guided by the wisdom of the ancient Babylonian sage Schmuel. 'The law of the kingdom is the law.' That will suffice for you, I think, in the immediate period."

"Yeah," Morris gruffed. "I can live with that. For a while, at least. So can Wallenstein."

Spira nodded. "And, in the meantime, Don Morris—"

"I prefer to be called just 'Morris,' " he stated abruptly.

Spira nodded again. "As you wish. And, in the meantime, Morris . . . don't be a stranger."

With that, smiling, the rabbi turned away and headed for the stairs. "Now," he said over his shoulder, "I'd best see after young Schmuel—who is no sage. Indeed, he can be excessively enthusiastic. Please come with me, Jason, I could use your help."

* * *

Morris stayed alone in the basement after they left, silent, for perhaps five minutes. Then he began loading the rifle.

"Did you think it was going to be simple?" he muttered to himself. "You dummy."

Chapter V: Castling
July, 1633

1

For the next two days, while Wallenstein and Pappenheim fought a chaotic and swirling series of small battles in and around Prague with military units who opposed the rebellion—or simply wanted to remain neutral, which Wallenstein wasn't going to tolerate—Morris Roth remained in his mansion. He stayed on the uppermost floor most of the time, except for brief snatches of sleep; moving from window to window, rifle in his hands, keeping watch on the streets below. He hadn't planned it that way—certainly Len and Ellie hadn't, when they purchased the building on his behalf—but because of its location just outside one of the main gates in the ghetto wall, his mansion served the Josefov as something in the way of a ravelin. An exterior little fortress from which enfilade fire could be brought to bear on anyone attempting to assault the fortress itself.

He only used the rifle once, during those two days. That was on the evening of the first day, just before sundown, when a small band of ruffians—possibly soldiers operating on their own, possibly just criminals; it was hard to tell—advanced toward the ghetto brandishing a haphazard collection of swords, pikes and arquebuses. Morris warned them off when they were fifty yards away. When the only response he got was a small volley of arquebus fire that did no damage at all beyond making a few pockmarks in the thick walls of the mansion, he shot three of them.

One round each, good center mass shots. Not hard to do, at that range, especially for a good shot like Morris. All of them fell in the street, in the space of less than ten seconds. The rest promptly fled.

One man had been killed instantly; the other two were mortally wounded, dying within minutes. One of the men managed to crawl perhaps twenty feet before he finally collapsed.

Morris slept hardly at all that night. Early in the morning, Judith found him back at his post, rifle held firmly in his grip. He avoided her eyes, though, when she approached and placed her hand on his shoulder.

"Talk to me, Morris."

"What's there to say?" he asked, shrugging. "I'm a small-town jeweler who hasn't even been in a fist fight since I was a kid in boot camp. Over thirty years ago. Yeah, sure, I was in Vietnam. Big deal. I spent my whole tour of duty as a supply clerk in the big army base at Long Binh, and I didn't get there until long after the Tet Offensive."

While he spoke, his eyes kept ranging across the streets below, looking for possible threats. He never looked at Judith once. "I guess you could call it 'combat duty,' since I always knew that some of the explosions and shots I heard during the night was stuff aimed into the base rather than our own Harassment and Interdiction fire. But nothing ever landed close to me—and I never once had to fire my own weapon at any enemies I could see." Very softly: "I've never even shot a deer before, much less a man. Then stare at their bodies afterward, while they bleed to death."

Judith gave his shoulder a little squeeze; then, disappeared for a while. When she returned, she had Mordechai Spira in tow along with another rabbi who seemed to be a close friend of his. A man by the name of Isaac Gans. The two of them kept Morris company the rest of the day. There was little conversation, because Morris was not in a mood for talking. Still, he appreciated their presence. Not so much for anything they said or did, but just for the fact of it.

Neither Spira nor Gans was wearing Jewish insignia. During the afternoon of the day before, just a short time before Morris had his confrontation with the band of thugs, a small squad of soldiers led by a sub-officer had placed posters on buildings near the ghetto—as well as two posters flanking the entrance to the ghetto itself. The posters were proclamations by Wallenstein. The first proclamation announced that he was now the king of Bohemia—and Pappenheim was the duke of Moravia.

There were many proclamations on those posters. Among them, Wallenstein had kept the promise he'd made to Morris long months before, in a small house in Grantville. Freedom of religion was guaranteed. Distinctions between citizens (that was a new word, just in itself—citizens) would no longer take religious affiliation into account. And, specifically, all restrictions on Jews were abolished.

It was pretty impressive, actually. At least, the words were. A lot of the language was cribbed from texts of the American Revolution as well as the Declaration of the Rights of Man adopted in 1789 by the National Assembly during the French Revolution. One, in particular, was taken word-for-word from the French declaration:

No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.

True enough, there was wiggle room there, if Wallenstein chose to exercise it. "Disturb the public order" could become a weasel phrase easily enough, in the hands of an autocrat.

Which Wallenstein would be. His proclamations, needless to say, did not include the political aspects of the French and American declarations. The rights and liberties of citizens would be respected—or so, at least, Wallenstein proclaimed. But political power would remain in the hands of the new king. There was a provision for the formation of a National Assembly, but it was obvious that Wallenstein intended it to remain purely advisory.

So be it. What Wallenstein intended was one thing; what eventually resulted, another. And, in the meantime, at least Jews no longer had to wear badges or distinctive yellow hats whenever they left the ghetto. They could build synagogues anywhere in Prague—in all of Bohemia and Moravia, in fact—and could henceforth own the guns to protect them, if need be.

There was one part of the proclamation that almost made Morris laugh. Wallenstein had also ordered the dismantling of the wall of the ghetto. And, sure enough, Dunash and his firebrands immediately began eagerly tearing down one little section of the wall near the quarter of the ghetto where they lived—ignoring the protests of most of their neighbors.

Their Jewish neighbors, for whom the wall was something of a comfort as well as a curse. The neighbors had even gone to register a protest with the rabbis.

The chief rabbi had hemmed and hawed. But most of the other rabbis—led by Spira and Gans, according to Jason—decided soon enough that the wisdom of the ancient Babylonian sage still applied: The law of the land is the law.

* * *

So, Dunash and his men had been able to proceed in the work cheerfully and unmolested.

But only for two days. In midafternoon of the third day, having established their control of Prague itself, Wallenstein and Pappenheim took most of their soldiers out of the city, marching to the southwest, to meet an oncoming army dispatched by Ferdinand II.

There was to be a second Battle of the White Mountain, it seemed.

The day after Wallenstein and Pappenheim left, Holk—who had been ordered to guard the northern frontier against any possible Saxon interference—announced that he was marching into Prague instead. "To secure the city from disorders," he was reported to have said. Or words to that drunken effect.

Whether he had decided to throw his lot in with Emperor Ferdinand, or simply couldn't resist the opportunity to loot a major city, no one knew. To the inhabitants of Prague, it hardly mattered. Not even the still-considerable body of residents who were Habsburg loyalists wanted Holk around. Nobody in their right mind, except his own thugs, wanted Holk anywhere nearby.

Morris got the news from Red Sybolt and Jan Billek.

"Is it true?" he asked.

"Seems to be," said Billek. "There is already a small stream of refugees coming into the city from the north. They believe it, certainly—that is why they are trying to get out of Holk's path."

Morris leaned out the window, scowling toward the north. "What does Holk think he's doing? If Wallenstein wins, he's dead meat."

"Does Holk 'think' at all?" Red shrugged. "He's a drunk and a thug, Morris. For all we know, he didn't decide anything at all. Maybe his own soldiers put him up to it, and he doesn't dare refuse them. Sacking a big city like Prague when it's got no real army to defend it is the kind of opportunity every mercenary dreams about in the Thirty Years War. Look at it from their point of view. At the very least, they'll have two or three days to plunder and pillage before Wallenstein and Pappenheim get back and they have to run for it. You think the average mercenary—sure as hell in Holk's army—thinks in the long run? 'Planning for the future' for guys like that means 'gimme what I want—now.' "

Morris brought his head back, still scowling. "All right. It'll be up to you and Jan, then. Wallenstein didn't leave more than a thousand soldiers here. Good thing he didn't take your Brethren volunteers with him, too."

Red smiled lopsidedly. "Pappenheim still doesn't trust us. Not our loyalty, just how much use we'd be in a battle. He's more set in his ways than Wallenstein, you know—and with Wallenstein in the shape he's in, Pappenheim will have to do the actual commanding on the battlefield."

Morris' smile was even more lopsided than Red's. "I never thought I'd say this, but I really wish—really wish—Wallenstein had stayed behind. What a world! To think I'd ever find Wallenstein's presence a comfort." He shook his head. "But . . . there it is. I surely would."

He glanced up at the Hradcany. "What about the soldiers he did leave behind?"

"Oh, I think we can count on them, well enough," Billek assured him. "Pappenheim left one of his protégés in charge—young Kastner, I do not think you know him. His unit is one of the best, actually. Wallenstein and Pappenheim want something to return to, assuming they win their battle. There are still plenty of Habsburg loyalists in the population, especially among the Catholics."

"Why'd they take almost everybody with them, then?"

"Morris, be realistic," said Sybolt. "If you were Wallenstein, you'd do the same thing. If he loses this upcoming battle against the Austrians, he's finished. He's burned all his bridges behind him, now. It's not as if he figured on Holk running wild, after all—and even if he did consider the possibility, so what? If Wallenstein whips the Austrians and comes back to a wrecked and plundered Prague, he's still the king of Bohemia. Cities can be rebuilt, too, you know. Look at Magdeburg."

Morris took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "True. Tough on the people living in the city, though."

"Yup. Unless they protect themselves. Speaking of which, what are your orders?"

"My orders?" Morris stared at him. "I'm not in charge here."

Red chuckled. "Morris, sometimes you're a real babe in the woods. What does 'in charge' have to do with anything? Nobody put Holk 'in charge' either—but he's still on his way."

Sybolt stepped up to the window and studied the Hradcany for a moment. "Kastner's just a youngster, Morris. He hasn't got the confidence to take charge of the whole city. What he'll do is fort up in the castle and the key buildings in the Malá Strana below the hill—including Wallenstein's palace, of course—and just be satisfied with fending Holk off."

"He is right," said Billek. "And Holk will make no real effort to take the Hradcany. He and his men are looking for loot, not a protracted siege." He came forward and joined Sybolt at the window, examining the city. "From the direction they are coming, they will strike Prague on the west bank of the Vltava first. Then, they will recoil from Kastner's men in the Hradcany and the Malá Strana and head for Stone Bridge. Most of Prague is on this side of the river. Not the richest part, to be sure, but Holk and his men are not fussy looters. And this is the soft part of the city."

Billek glanced at the two rabbis standing not far away. The faces of both Spira and Gans were calm enough, but tight with worry. "Especially the Josefov. Jews are not armed and everyone knows it. They will begin their plunder and ravages in Old Town and move north to the ghetto."

Morris was no military man, but, as he studied the layout of the city, he decided that Red and Jan were right. Given the nature of Holk and his army, that was exactly what they'd do.

"We should try to trap them on the Stone Bridge," he said abruptly. "Never let them get across at all."

Then a bit startled by the sureness with which he'd spoken, Morris added: "I think."

"Well, so do I," said Red. "So does Jan—we talked about it on our way over here. Good thing we've got a smart boss."

"Who made me the 'boss'?" Morris demanded. "I still don't understand—"

Billek interrupted him. That was unusual, for the normally reserved and polite leader of the Brethren. "Do not be stupid, Morris," he said forcefully. "Don Morris, rather."

Billek nodded toward the two rabbis. "The only way this plan will work is if the Jews hold the eastern side of the bridge and keep Holk pinned on it. While we Brethren and Red's CoC volunteers hammer them from fortified positions in the Malá Strana. We have most of the guns and will do most of the killing. But the eastern end of the bridge must be held—and firmly."

Spira and Gans looked startled. Billek shook his head. "As Red says, we must be realistic here. Who else except the Jews will hold the eastern end of the bridge from Holk—hold it at all, much less firmly? Except for the Brethren, the Christian population on the east side of the river is still confused and uncertain. They won't fight—not most of them—not against such as Holk. They will simply flee the city."

Morris felt his jaws tighten. "Whereas the Jews don't have any place to run to. If they try to leave the city, in this chaos, they'd likely be plundered by"—he almost said the stinking goyishe villagers on the way, but didn't—"you know, everybody. Just about."

Billek said nothing. After a moment, to Morris' surprise, Red grinned cheerfully.

"Hey, Morris, look at it this way—it happened once before, didn't it? Well, in a manner of speaking."

Morris couldn't help but smile himself. Talk about a topsy-turvy world! In the universe they'd come from, in the year 1648, a Swedish army had marched into Prague and taken the Hradcany and the Malá Strana on the west bank of the river. Convinced that they'd do better even under the heavy hand of the Habsburgs than at the hands of a conquering Swedish army—by the end of the Thirty Years War, Swedish armies were no more disciplined than anybody's—the Jews of Prague's ghetto had joined with Catholic students and burghers to fight off the Swedes when they tried to cross the Stone Bridge and pillage the eastern half of the city. It had been the last major battle of the Thirty Years War, in fact. It didn't end until nine days after the Peace of Westphalia was signed—and the Swedes never did make it across the bridge.

Less than a hundred years later, under Empress Maria Theresa, the Habsburgs repaid the loyalty of Prague's Jewry by expelling them from the city.

"Right," Morris growled, his smile fading. "Let's do it again—and we'll hope, this time, it turns out better in the long run."

He turned away from the window and faced the two rabbis. "Will you agree?"

Spira and Gans looked at each other. Spira nodded. Gans shrugged. "Do we have a choice? Not that I can see. And I am sure all the other rabbis will agree."

"You will be in command, yes, Don Morris?" asked Spira. He gave Billek and Red a somewhat apologetic glance. "Our people will follow you. Not . . . others."

"See?" Red demanded, smiling wider than ever. "Like I said, you're the boss."

"Make sure you are on a horse," Billek added. "Biggest horse you can find. And wear something suitable."

2

Morris had been prepared for a brawl with Dunash. He was sure the young militant would try to insist that he and his men should remain with the other Jews on the east bank, rather than fighting with the Brethren as they were supposed to do.

But, to his surprise, Red Sybolt scuttled the problem before it could even emerge.

"We may as well keep me and Dunash and the katyusha on this side anyway, Morris. Those rockets are about as accurate as spitting in the wind. If we fire them at the bridge from the Malá Strana, we're as likely to kill our own people over here as Holk's people on the bridge."

Red pointed across the river. "The Brethren will be sheltered in fortified positions over there. At the beginning, for sure. So they'll be safe enough from friendly fire, since those warheads really aren't that powerful. We designed them as antipersonnel weapons. A small charge and a lot of shrapnel, basically."

"Jan's okay with that?"

"Yeah, he and I already talked it over." Red's easy grin was back. "Besides, the truck's in your basement, remember? That was the only place secret enough to assemble it under Wallenstein's nose. Well, under Marradas' nose. I'm pretty sure Wallenstein knows we have the thing. It'll be hard enough to haul it out of there, much less try to get it across the river and under shelter. The Malá Strana doesn't have too much in the way of garages, you know."

After he thought it over, Morris decided Red was right. If nothing else, even if the katyusha proved ineffective in the battle, just having a fabled American war machine show up in the midst of the motley "army" assembling on the eastern end of the bridge would do wonders for morale. Especially with Jews manning the thing.

Besides, he was tiring of fighting with Dunash.

"Okay, done."

* * *

He had a bigger problem with the horse. Big enough that he even lapsed into profanity for a moment. "Where the hell did you get this thing? I didn't think Clydesdales even existed in this day and age." A little whine came into his voice. "And how am I supposed to even get onto it, anyway? Especially wearing this stupid getup. With a winch?"

He was coming to detest Red's grin. "Why not? According to a movie I saw once, that's how the old knights got lifted onto their horses." Red gave the horse in question an admiring look. "And quit exaggerating. It's not a Clydesdale, not even close. Just the second biggest horse Pappenheim owns. He took the biggest one with him."

Morris grimaced. "Oh, swell. Now I'll have Pappenheim furious with me, on top of everything else. Do they hang horse thieves in Bohemia? I'm sure they do."

Red shrugged. "If you keep Prague intact, I really don't think Pappenheim's going to mind much that you used one of his horses to do it. Look, Morris. Nobody ever said being a champion wasn't risky."

"Champion." Oh, swell. Like I need a hole in the head.

Gloomily, Morris went back to studying the horse. He was a good horseman, to be sure—within the limits of what "good horsemanship" meant for an American whose experience was almost entirely with the sort of horses one encountered on riding trails and pack stations. Whether that would translate into being able to control a seventeenth-century warhorse . . .

* * *

A bit to his surprise, it did. The warhorse was more spirited than Morris was accustomed to, but on the other hand it had been trained to remain steady in the middle of a battlefield. Once he got accustomed to it, in fact, he found himself enjoying the experience. It really was quite a horse.

And, there was no doubt of one thing: as silly as he felt, riding a horse while wearing the fancy garb of a seventeenth-century nobleman, his appearance before the crowd now erecting barricades at the eastern end of the Stone Bridge had an impact. He even got cheered. A very big cheer, in fact. Jason had told Judith that the story was already widely spread of how Don Morris had slain goyishe bandits seeking to victimize the ghetto, with his powerful American arquebus. As many as ten bandits, in one version of the story.

As big a cheer as it was, though, it was not as big as the cheer the katyusha received, when Red and Dunash's people finally managed to get it out of the basement—they used dozens of people with ropes to just lift it out—and Red drove it slowly forward onto the little square abutting the bridge.

Morris was startled when the initial cheer evolved into a chant: APC! APC! He wouldn't have guessed that the population of far-off Prague—certainly not the Jews in its ghetto—would have ever heard of that acronym. It was ironic, of course, since the "APC" was nothing of the sort. True, Red had mounted some thin armor plate to protect the engine and the driver and gunner in the front seat. But the thing was no solid and heavy coal truck. It was just an old Dodge Ram with a jury-rigged and flimsy-looking rocket launcher fixed in the bed.

It didn't matter. None of Prague's civilians had ever seen an American war machine before, but they'd heard the rumors. For them, "APC" was more in the way of a spoken talisman than anything else. And this was an age when most common folk believed in the power of talismans and amulets. That was as true for the Jews as the Christians, although the forms were different. The so-called "Book of Raziel the Angel"—the Sefer Raziel ha-Mal'akh—hadn't been produced yet in printed form, but parts of the ancient manuscript went back to Babylonian Talmudic times. It had drifted around the world's Jewish communities for centuries, never really approved by the rabbinate but never banned either. Morris wouldn't have been surprised to discover that a goodly percentage of the Jews building the barricades had little metal or paper amulets under their clothes, using the formulas of the Sefer Raziel.

When Red finally brought the pickup-cum-katyusha to a halt, after positioning it in the firing slot left open in the barricades, he rolled down the window and gave Morris an admiring look.

"I do declare, perched way up there on that great big horse—hell of a nice plume to the hat, too—you look like the spittin' image of a hidalgo. Damn near a conquistador, in fact."

"My family came from Krakow," Morris groused. "The closest I ever got to Spain was eating tapas once in a restaurant in Philadelphia."

"Don't knock it, Morris. All that matters is that you look and act the part. They've got a recognized leader now, instead of everybody fumbling around wondering who's in charge. That'll help steady everybody's nerves—a lot—as long as you don't get yourself shot."

For some odd reason, the warhorse had a delayed reaction to the Dodge Ram. It was accustomed to the sounds of gunfire, not internal combustion engines, to be sure. But Morris never did figure out why the blasted critter chose the moment when Red turned off the motor to start getting jittery.

Very jittery. Morris had a few tense and interesting moments, though he managed to stay in the saddle. He did lose the hat, though.

"Or fall off the horse," Red added sarcastically.

3

That evening, after looking for Len all over the Hradcany, Ellie finally figured out where he'd be. She realized it within seconds after she returned to the rooms in the castle that the young commander Kastner had assigned to them. Kastner, worried lest Wallenstein's precious American technical experts might get hurt in the fighting, had insisted that Ellie and Len move from Wallenstein's palace into the greater safety of the fortress above.

There'd been no point arguing with him. Kastner had no idea how the telephones worked, so he had no intention of trying to use them. In what was coming, Len and Ellie would just be fifth wheels on a cart. So, Len grumbling the whole time, they'd spent the morning hauling their belongings up the hill. Then, having made the last trip alone for a few final items while Len stayed behind in order to arrange their new living quarters, she'd come back to find him gone.

She'd spent most of the afternoon searching for him, growing increasingly worried. But when she finally returned, half-exhausted from endless hiking, she noticed that the lid to one of the chests was cracked open. That chest was normally kept locked, because it was the one where they kept their personal weapons.

She opened the chest and looked. Len's 12-gauge was missing.

What could he possibly—?

—I'll kill him if the idiot—!

Oh.

It all fell into place. Not sure whether she was more relieved than exasperated, Ellie closed the chest and sat down on it. For a moment, half-slumped, she tried to decide what to do. For that matter, what to think.

Then, shrugging, she got up and left. That was her man, when it was said and done. Quirks and foibles and all.

Although even for Len, this is a doozy.

* * *

She found him where she'd thought she would—the one place it had never occurred to her to look the entire afternoon. The place she must have circled at least four times while she searched for him. Impossible not to, of course, since it dominated the Hradcany.

Len was sitting in one of the rear pews in the huge Gothic cathedral. Just staring at the altar, his shotgun across his knees. Ellie was sure he'd been there the whole afternoon. The handful of priests watching him were still nervous, clearly enough, but it was the kind of nervousness that had worn itself down after a few hours. A few hours while the bizarre intruder—monster from another world, with a monstrous weapon—just sat there and did nothing.

She slid into the seat next to him. "You might have left me a note, dammit!"

Len looked uncomfortable. "I started to write one, but . . . I don't know. I didn't know what to say. How to explain it."

Ellie sighed. Then, felt all her exasperation going away. That was the nature of the man, after all. She reached out her hand and stroked the back of his neck.

" 'S okay. I shoulda figured you'd unlapse your own way. You weird duck. What? You figure on protecting the cathedral all by your lonesome?"

She gave the priests a skeptical glance. "I don't think they'd be much help, if Holk's hordes came pouring in. Not that they will, without taking the Hradcany from Kastner. Which they won't."

Len flushed. "It's the principle of the thing, Ellie. Kastner's people didn't want me underfoot anyway, so I figured . . . Look, religious freedom's for everybody. That means Catholics too, even if the bums running the show here screwed up. And this cathedral's ancient. It's a holy place, even if I don't think much of the current tenants."

His hand tightened on the stock of the shotgun. "So anybody tries anything . . ."

"Ha! Saint Len and the Dragon, is it?"

Len's flush deepened. His eyes now seemed riveted on the altar.

"Will you marry me?" he asked abruptly. "I've been thinking about it all afternoon."

She studied him for a moment. "I'm not getting married in a fucking church, Len."

"You shouldn't swear in here."

"Not in a fucking church. I can't stand churches."

Len took a deep breath, sighed. His hand finally left the stock of the shotgun and came up as if to stroke his absent mustache.

Feeling the bare skin, he sighed again. "You are one hard woman, Ellie Anderson."

There was nothing much she could say, since that was true enough. So she said nothing.

Neither did he, for maybe five minutes. Then, finally, he looked at her.

"Was that a 'yes'?"

Ellie chuckled and went back to stroking his neck. "Yes, Len, that was a 'yes.' Just not in a fucking church. If you can't live with that, you can't live with me."

She looked at the altar, then at the priests. "But I don't mind if you decide to pull crazy stunts like this, now and then. So I figure we're square."

"Okay." He stroked his nonexistent mustache. "I can live with that."

4

The first detachments from Holk's army started showing up in the outskirts of the city early the next morning. By midmorning, they were exchanging shots with Kastner's men forted up in the Hradcany; by noon, with his men forted up in the Malá Strana. By mid-afternoon, most of Holk's ragtag army had poured into the city's west bank—as undisciplined as you could ask for—and decided they'd had enough of cracking their heads against Kastner's troops.

Holk himself showed up then, on his own big warhorse, and led the charge. He waved his sword to the east, very dramatically. That way! To the Stone Bridge!

Tanner stayed in the cathedral the whole time, Saint Len faithfully at his post in case the dragon showed up.

Ellie, on the other hand, joined the soldiers on the walls of the Hradcany. She had a better vantage point to see what was happening than Morris and Red did, across the river. So, using her CB, she kept them informed all day of the movements of Holk and his men. Insofar as that rabble could be said to have "maneuvers" at all, other than the mercenary equivalent of Brownian motion.

When Holk showed up, though, waving his stupid sword, she put down the CB and drew her pistol. Then, cursing a blue streak, clambered up on the wall and emptied the entire clip at him.

"Where'd you go?" Red asked her, when she got back on the CB. Ellie explained in a few curt sentences, about every other word of which was short and had an Anglo-Saxon pedigree.

"Fer chrissake, Ellie—with a 9mm automatic? What're you, nuts? That's gotta be at least six hundred yards. You'd be lucky to hit the river at that range."

"It's the principle of the thing," she stoutly insisted.

Chapter VI: Discovered Check
July, 1633

1

By the time Holk finally got his men organized—using the term loosely—it was almost sundown. He began to send men onto the Stone Bridge, but the small detachments retreated quickly once they started getting peppered by shots fired from the flintlock-armed men now perched behind the barricade.

So far as Ellie could tell, looking down on the bridge from the distance of the Hradcany without binoculars, that initial volley—using the term loosely—didn't do more than scare off the thugs. She didn't think a single one of them had even been wounded.

Ellie was sure Morris hadn't ordered the volley. The Stone Bridge had a span of some five hundred yards, with a little dogleg in it about one-third of the way across from the west bank. The flintlocks had started firing as soon as Holk's men made it to the dogleg and came in sight of the barricades—a range of well over three hundred yards. Maybe James Fenimore Cooper's fictional marksman Natty Bumpo could hit something with a flintlock at that range, but ghetto-dwellers with meager experience with firearms hadn't much more chance than Ellie had with her 9mm.

Red confirmed her assessment. "Naw, just buck fever. Morris is fit to be tied. Good thing he ain't a cursing man. He's doing a pretty good job right now of flaying them alive with proper language. He's even waving his sword around."

Ellie stared at the now-darkening western bank, dumbfounded. "Morris has a sword? Where the fuck did he get a sword?"

Red's chuckle crackled in the CB. "Judith had it made up for him, believe it or not. Presented it to him this morning, scabbard and everything. She even had a special scabbard made up so he could sling his rifle on the horse."

Ellie burst out laughing. "Judith Roth—the gray eminence. It's like they say: 'behind every successful man there's a woman.' "

"No shit. And you should see the collection of women she's got around her, right here on this end of the bridge. Every prestigious matron in the ghetto, near as I can tell. Oh, sure, they're all being proper as you could ask for—but you can't fool me. Patriarchy be damned. That's the biggest collection of political clout in one city this side of old Mayor Daley's grave."

A moment later he added, in the satisfied tones of an longtime union agitator: "We're pretty well organized over here, actually. If Morris can just keep those eager beavers from wasting all the ammunition. And if he can keep from stabbing himself with the sword. He handles it like a butcher knife. Except he ain't an experienced butcher. Personally, I wish he'd start swinging the rifle around. THAT he knows what he's doing with."

Ellie shook her head firmly, even though Red couldn't possibly see the gesture. He was perched in the cab of the Dodge Ram, over half a mile away. "It's the principle of the thing, fella. You don't rally troops with a rifle. You do it with a sword. Haven't you ever seen any movies?"

* * *

Had Judith Roth heard the exchange, she would have disagreed. She was watching Morris also, and while she'd have admitted that he wasn't exactly handling the sword with panache, he was doing a fair job with it nonetheless. There was certainly no danger that he'd stab himself. Cut himself, maybe. Judith had made sure that the sword's tip had been blunted when she ordered it made.

Still and all, everything considered, she thought he looked superb. The horse was magnificent, Morris himself looked very distinguished in his nobleman's garb—the big plumed hat helped a lot—and nobody watching on this side of the river really had any more idea than Morris did how a sword should properly be held anyway. It was enough that he had one and was swinging it around authoritatively while bellowing authoritative-sounding orders.

Most of all, he didn't look afraid. Not in the least. In fact, he looked downright fearless.

And that was such an odd sensation, for Judith. That her husband was a brave enough man, in those myriad little ways with which people confront the challenges of daily life, Judith had known for many years. But that was the quiet courage of a husband and a father and a countryman, not the same thing at all as the dramatic valor of a commander on the battlefield.

She wasn't really that surprised that Morris could do it. But she was well-nigh astonished that he could do it so well in public.

One of the women standing next to her, on the far side of the little square where the barricades had been erected, spoke softly in her ear. "I am very glad your husband is here, gracious lady. And you also."

That was Eva Bacharach, a woman just about Judith's age. Her brothers Chaim and Napthali were noted rabbis, and Eva herself was the widow of a rabbi who had died almost twenty years earlier. Since her husband Abraham had died, Eva had raised their three daughters and one son, somehow managing at the same time to gain quite a reputation in the ghetto as a noted Hebraist and a scholar in her own right. Even the rabbis were known to consult with her on difficult textual problems.

When Judith first learned that, from another woman in the ghetto, she'd been so surprised that her expression must have shown it. The woman had chuckled and said dryly: "Gracious lady, we are in Prague, not Amsterdam."

That short phrase had crystallized Judith's growing conviction that her husband's projected head-on collision with orthodox Judaism needed to be sidetracked before the inevitable train wreck ensued.

Prague, not Amsterdam.

Amsterdam's rabbinate was notorious all over Europe for pigheadedness, intolerance and authoritarianism. Whereas the rabbinate of Prague had been shaped, in the previous century, by one of the few rabbis of the era whose name would be remembered for centuries: Judah Loew ben Bezalel, also known as the Maharal. A man who became a legend in his own time for his learning and wisdom—a legend which only grew after his death. One of the great rabbis of the early modern era, a shaper of the orthodox tradition—yet also conversant with the scientific knowledge of the time and on friendly terms with many of its great scientists. One of his disciples, David Gans—a cousin of Mordechai Spira's friend Isaac—had studied for a time with Tycho Brahe.

The Maharal. Eva's grandfather, as it happened. And one of Judith's own ancestors.

Judith turned to look at Eva. "I am very glad we are here also. And will be staying. But—please—call me Judith. We are related, you know."

Eva's eyebrows went up. "Oh, yes," Judith said. "I am one of your descendants, Eva Bacharach. Very distant, of course. And also a descendant of your grandfather—I can remember how excited I was when I learned that."

Judith laughed softly. "In the world I came from, they even made what we call a 'movie' about him. True, it was because of the legend that grew up that he created the golem. But I knew enough to understand how much more important he was for all his other work."

"The golem!" Eva choked. "That silly story! Do you mean to tell me that—that—in some other world, wherever that may be—people actually believe it?"

Judith wagged her head in a semi-jocular manner. "Maybe yes, maybe no. It's one of those stories that people want to believe, even if they really don't."

Now Eva was laughing softly also. "My grandfather would have been mortified! Ha! The golem!"

When the laughter ebbed, Eva cocked her head and regarded Judith a bit sideways. "The rabbis will probably need to spend a hundred years—maybe two hundred—chewing on the significance of that other world of yours and what we should think about it all. But since we are women, we are not under their obligations. Much easier for us."

"Yes, I agree. Much easier. Quicker, too."

Eva nodded sagely. "Yes. Much quicker."

* * *

Perhaps twenty yards away, on the same side of the square as Judith and Eva, Mordechai Spira and Isaac Gans were also watching Morris.

"We will not be able to ignore this man," Mordechai stated, quietly but firmly. "Never think it, Isaac."

His friend and fellow rabbi made a little snorting sound. "I didn't think we would. Or should, for that matter. By now, I don't think even Joseph ben Abraham Khalmankhes retains that delusion. Certainly none of the other rabbis do."

Mordechai nodded. "Good. The beginning of wisdom is like everything else. Always the hardest part."

"It won't be so bad," Issac predicted. "In some ways, even good. Complicated, though, yes."

Spira chuckled. " 'Complicated,' applied to this problem, is like saying the sun is bright. Just for a start, do we decide to accept or not those books of young Jason's? It is one thing to respect wisdom. But are we also obliged to respect the wisdom of another universe altogether?"

"You know my opinion. Does not the midrash say that the Holy One, Blessed be He, created many universes before this one? Could He not continue to do so?" Gans shrugged. "How can it matter how many universes there are? There is still only one God."

"Yes, I know your opinion—and I am inclined to share it. Still . . ."

Mordechai Spira shook his head. "I am not one of those Amsterdam blockheads who finds heresy everywhere he looks. But I started reading that translation you made for me of that one book of Jason's—the one by Mordechai Kaplan—and . . ."

Gans smiled slyly. "It's interesting, though, admit it."

"Oh, yes. 'Reconstructionist' Judaism, if you will! The number of schisms our descendants seem to have managed to find." Again, he shook his head. "Almost as bad as Christians."

"On the other hand, there is a lot to admire also. And, whatever else, if Jason's commentaries add to our understanding of Him and his Holy Torah, we must respect them. Subject them to searching analysis and criticism, to be sure, as Rabbi Moshe Ben Nachman did to even Maimonides' work. But respect them nonetheless." Isaac's smile widened. "And the truth is, I am particularly taken by the works of the Chasidim that Jason had with him."

Mordechai cocked a questioning eyebrow. Isaac made a little apologetic gesture with his hand. "Sorry, I haven't had time to translate those yet. But—"

He was interrupted by a commotion on the southern side of the square. As the crowd there parted, Mordechai and Isaac could see that a large group of young men was advancing—somewhat tentatively, almost diffidently—toward the Stone Bridge. All of them were armed, though only a few of them with firearms.

They were all gentiles, clearly enough. After a moment, Isaac identified them.

"Christian students. From the Karolinum."

Mordechai brought his eyes back to Morris Roth. The American don was now trotting his horse toward the oncoming students. He had sheathed his sword and was not projecting an aura of menace. But he nonetheless managed to look authoritative. Very authoritative, in fact.

Spira found himself quite thankful that Don Morris was handling the situation, which could easily become tense. Then, found himself pondering his own reaction.

Indeed, it was so. Don Morris could not be ignored. Nor should he be, even if it were possible. For good or ill, Spira was quite sure that the man would bestride their world in the years to come. Whether as a champion or a menace—or both—remained to be seen. Supported, perhaps; combated, perhaps. Most likely both, Mordechai suspected, at different times. But whatever else, never ignored.

Mordechai and Isaac were too far away to hear the exchange between Don Morris and the Christian students from the Karolinum. But, within a short time, the resolution was obvious. With Don Morris on his warhorse prancing in their lead, the students came to join the Jews already on the barricade.

"So it is," Mordechai stated. "It will be complicated. But you were saying something?"

As he watched the students begin intermingling with the fighters on the barricade, Isaac spoke softly. "There is a lot of wisdom in those pages Jason brought to us, Mordechai. The wisdom of the Chasidic folktales, in particular, I think will serve us well in the time to come."

"And what do those stories relate?"

"I will give you two. In the first, a simple wagon-driver stops his cart at the side of the road to speak the Hebrew alphabet, one letter at a time. 'God,' he cries out, 'I don't know the prayers, so I am sending you the alphabet. You must know the prayers. Make them up out of the letters I am sending.' "

Mordechai barked a laugh. "Oh, I like that! And the other?"

"Ah, that one is my favorite. It seems one day a disciple came to complain to his teacher. 'Rabbi, some of the congregants are gossiping in the midst of prayer!' "

Spira smiled crookedly. "Not such a different world after all, then. And the rabbi's response?"

" 'O God,' said the rabbi. 'How wonderful are your people! Even in the midst of gossip, they devote a few moments to prayer!' "

* * *

Shortly thereafter, the first campfires began springing up on the opposite bank of the river. Holk and his men were settling in for the night, it seemed, and would make no further attempt to storm the bridge until the next morning.

At sundown, Mordechai Spira returned to his home in the ghetto. The fighters would remain on the barricades, keeping watch through the night, with Don Morris there to lead them and keep them steady. But there was no reason for him to remain. Mordechai would return before daybreak, to do what he could. But he wanted to spend this night—perhaps their last—with his family.

Over the dinner, he told the stories to his wife and children. And was still smiling himself when he finally went to bed.

* * *

The rabbi slept soundly that night, but Holk and his mercenaries did not. Jan Billek took advantage of the darkness to move his Brethren forward, from the positions they'd initially taken farther south in the Malá Strana. From their new positions, skirmishers were able to harass Holk's mercenaries all through the night. Occasionally with gunfire, but usually with grenades and swords, in constant probing sallies.

It was a bitter, nasty sort of fighting. And if none of the Brethren were as nasty as Holk's men, they were considerably more bitter. They had been victimized for years by such men, and were finally able to take some revenge.

They were also a lot more determined and resolute. Holk's ruffians had come into Prague expecting an easy and pleasant few days of murder, rape, arson and looting. They had not expected to spend their first night in the city worrying about getting their throats cut by dimly seen figures lunging from the darkness—or getting shredded by bomblets suddenly launched into their campfires.

Not all that many of Holk's men were actually killed or wounded that night. Less than a hundred. But none of them slept well, and a considerable number didn't sleep at all.

Except Holk himself. He was drunk by sundown, and comatose by midnight.

2

"Okay, Red. Tell Morris they'll be coming any minute. Holk's done with the cursing and he's starting to threaten people with his sword. No, I take it back. I can't see too well from here, but I think he's put the sword away and now he's threatening them with a wheel-lock pistol."

"Thanks, Ellie, I'll tell him." Sybolt leaned out of the cab window and hollered the news to Morris. Then, quipped to Dunash in the passenger seat: "It's the old story. 'Go get 'em, boys! You first!' "

Dunash was too nervous to appreciate the jest. The young man was doing his best to retain his composure—and doing quite well at it—but only by adopting a stern and stiff demeanor. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. In fact, Red thought, you could probably use it for an icebox.

"Relax, old son. This is gonna be a cakewalk. Trust me."

Dunash made no reply for perhaps half a minute. Then, abruptly, almost harshly: "Why would anyone walk on a cake? And what does that mean, anyway?"

Red shook his head ruefully. "Gawd, all the work it's going to take me to recover my reputation as an endless source of wit and wisdom. Oh, well. What it means, Dunash, is that we're going to win this battle. Easily."

"Why do you think that?"

Red pointed at the roof of the cab. "Because of this thing. Mind you—in general, that is—I think it's about as useless a gadget on the battlefield as you could imagine. I guess the Russians did pretty well with katyushas in the Second World War, but they used jillions of 'em. Just one? Pointless."

Dunash was inordinately proud of the katyusha. "Why?" he asked, in a very aggrieved tone.

"It's an area effect weapon, Dunash. Rockets—sure as hell these—aren't that accurate. If you've got a ton of them the way the Russkies did, that's one thing. Saturation bombardment, they call it. But just one? Pointless. On a battlefield, that is."

"Then why did you—"

"On a battlefield, I said." Red jabbed his finger at the quarter-inch steel plate that covered the windshield except for small viewing slits left for the driver and the gunner. "But that's a bridge, not a battlefield. A bridge that's the only way to cross the Vltava without boats—which Holk didn't think to bring with him, and he can't round up now that he's here because Jan and his boys made sure all the ones in Prague were taken up the river."

Red leaned forward over the steering wheel and peered through the viewing slit. "A bridge that I figure is not more than fifty feet wide and at least five hundred yards long. With no cover on it anywhere—not even the statues that Len says used to be on it hundreds of years from now—and only that one little dogleg way over to the other side of the span. Oh, those poor bastards. They've gotta cross about a quarter of a mile in plain sight with only maybe fifteen of them—okay, make it twenty with that mob—in the front line."

He leaned back, very satisfied. "Would you want to be one of those fifteen or twenty guys? I sure as hell wouldn't. Not with two hundred flintlocks and a fair number of old-style arquebuses banging away at me." He rapped the roof of the cab with his knuckles. "Not to mention after this baby cuts loose."

"Morris won't let them fire until they get within a hundred yards," Dunash pointed out. "So what does the rest of that distance mean?" Sourly, he looked at the firing switches mounted on the dashboard in front of him: "And you won't let me fire this until they get within fifty yards."

"All it'll take, boy. You watch." He opened the door to the cab and began climbing out. "But now that you bring it up, I better make sure those hotshots of yours didn't fiddle with my instructions."

They hadn't, although Red was sure they'd been tempted to. Most down-timers, in his experience, even ones with considerable military experience, tended to exaggerate the capabilities of American weapons. Enthusiasts like Dunash's followers, even more so. But the young men tending the rocket launcher in the bed of the pickup had left the settings alone. Even though it must have aggravated them to see that Red had lowered the elevation until the rockets were pointed at the ground right in front of the truck.

Well, almost. Red estimated that the rockets would hit somewhere between fifty and a hundred yards ahead. Exactly what he wanted.

"Those rockets could hit the Hradcany from here!" one of them complained, as Red started to clamber down out of the bed.

Once he was back on the ground, Red squinted at the fortress in question. He was still without glasses, so it wasn't much more than a blur to him.

"Oh, sure, they can fly that far. But hit it? Be a pure accident." He pointed toward the Malá Strana. "They'd be just as likely to hit Wallenstein's palace. Just do it my way, boys. Holk's got as much chance of getting across this bridge as a pig does of flying. You watch."

After he got back into the truck and closed the door, Red cocked his head and smiled at Dunash. "Pigs can fly, you know."

Dunash frowned; as often, not sure whether Red was kidding or not.

"Sure they can," Red insisted. "Throw one off the highest wall in Prague Castle sometime and see for yourself."

The CB squawked. "They're starting the charge, Red! They're on their way!"

His eyes came back to the firing slit, as he reached for the CB. "Yup, that pig'll fly. All the way to the ground."

* * *

Only seconds thereafter, Morris could see the first ranks himself, charging across the bridge. Using the term "ranks" very loosely, of course. Holk's men just looked like a mob.

For a moment, he reached for the sword, ready to start swinging it around again as he bellowed meaningless but reassuringly martial words. But, as if it had a mind of its own, his hand went to the stock of his rifle instead.

He decided his hand was smarter than his brain. So, he drew the rifle out of the saddle holster his wife had had made for him. Then, with motions than were much surer than those with which he held a sword, jacked a round into the chamber and propped the butt of the rifle on his hip.

And said nothing. He just couldn't think of anything to say, since it was all too obvious. The brigands were coming and he intended to shoot them down. Simple as that. What was there to say about it?

* * *

His hand was smarter than his brain. Morris Roth had no way of knowing it—and never would—but the easy and assured motion, and the silence that followed, had precisely the right effect on the men on the barricades. Almost all of whom had been nervously watching him, once they realized the fight was finally underway.

In truth, it had a much more profound effect than any amount of sword-waving and speechifying could have had, at least with that assemblage of warriors-that-weren't. Shopkeepers, butchers, bakers, students—rabbinical students, some of them. With the exception of a few of the former seamen, who'd dealt with pirates, almost none of them had ever been in a battle before of any kind—much less a pitched battle against an army with as ferocious a reputation as Holk's. True, the tactical situation was completely in their favor, but they didn't really have the experience to know that.

But Don Morris did—or so, at least, they blithely assumed. He'd told them they could win, hadn't he? In speech after speech given the day before. And, now that the fury was finally about to fall on their heads, wasn't Don Morris sitting on his saddle not more than ten yards behind the barricade, as calm as could be? Not even bothering with his sword—not even aiming his rifle. Just . . .

Waiting.

* * *

He didn't speak until Holk's forces were within two hundred yards. "Fire when I do!" he commanded. Quite sure, this time, that he would be obeyed.

* * *

Red glanced into the side mirror of the pickup. "Shit," he snarled. "Dunash, tell—"

He opened the door. "Never mind, I'll do it myself."

Hopping out of the truck, Red took several steps toward the rear, making broad shooing motions with his arms. "All of you get the hell out of the way!" he bellowed. "The backblast on these rockets is fierce!"

A number of women and children and old men had started crowding in behind the pickup to get a better look at the oncoming soldiers. They didn't really understand what Red was shouting at them, but they got the gist of it well enough. A moment later, Red had a clear firing lane again.

He clambered back into the truck.

"They're almost here!" Dunash hissed.

Red squinted through the slit. "Oh, bullshit. I can't see the whites of their eyes."

He glanced over and saw that Dunash's hands were twitching, as if they couldn't wait to flip the firing switches.

"Whites of their eyes," he growled. "You don't flip those switches till I say so."

* * *

The day before, just to be sure there wouldn't be a problem, Morris had fired the rifle while in the saddle. The warhorse hadn't even flinched.

When the first of Holk's men was within one hundred yards, Morris brought the rifle butt to his shoulder. He'd removed the telescopic sight the day before, seeing no use for it in the coming fray. Peering over the iron sights, he saw that his guess had been correct. At that range, firing into that mob, he could hardly miss with a blindfold on.

He squeezed the trigger. Oddly, as he did so, thinking only of the horse.

I wonder if Pappenheim would sell it to me?

3

The stern control Morris had managed to gain over his motley troops had its effect. This time, the first volley was actually that—a volley. A single, hammering blow at the enemy, shocking men with its power even more than the actual casualties inflicted.

The casualties themselves were . . . not as good as they could have been, had experienced troops fired that volley. Many of the shots went wild, more than usual with such inaccurate firearms.

So, Holk's men reeled and staggered, but they came on nonetheless, almost without breaking stride. Granted, these weren't men of the caliber of the great armies of Tilly or Gustavus Adolphus. Holk had known what he was doing when he delayed his arrival at Breitenfeld. On that battlefield, his thugs would have been coyotes at a wolf party. Still, they were mercenary soldiers with fifteen years of the Thirty Years War under their belts. They'd charged into gunfire before, and knew that the only way to get through it was just to plunge ahead, pikes leveled.

They were all pikemen in the front ranks. The clumsy arquebuses of the seventeenth century would have been almost useless in this kind of charge across a long and narrow bridge. And pikes always had the advantage of sheer terror, in a frontal assault. Outside of a cavalry charge, there was perhaps nothing quite as intimidating as the sight of hundreds of pikes, each of them almost twenty feet long and tipped with a cruel foot-long blade, charging directly at you.

Of course, it would have helped if Holk's men had been able to level the pikes. But, in that pressing mob, with no ranks being maintained, that was impossible for all but the very foremost. The first thing a pikeman learned was that a pike could easily kill or main the man in front of him, if not handled carefully. Those who didn't learn it—and quickly—found themselves out of the army. Sometimes, in a coffin. The term "fragging" didn't exist yet, but nobody had to teach seventeenth-century mercenaries how to deal with a fellow soldier who was a danger to his mates—or a sub-officer, for that matter.

* * *

The second volley was more ragged, but it struck even harder. The range was shorter. Fifty yards. Holk's men were definitely staggering, but still they came on. They had no choice, really, since by now there were thousands of men behind them on the bridge, pushing them forward.

"Okay, shoot," Red said quietly.

Dunash's fingers flew to the firing switches.

* * *

That volley broke the charge. To Holk and his men, it seemed as if a dragon had suddenly belched. Licking down the bridge with a tongue of fire that just seemed to engulf men whole. Swallow entire ranks of them.

The katyusha was firing the second generation of rockets that Grantville had been able to manufacture in quantity. It was a variation on the old nineteenth-century Hale 24-pounder rotary rocket—2.4 inches in diameter, slightly less than two feet long, with a maximum range of 4000 yards. The propellant as well as the warhead were black powder. The rockets were fired from a single-level rack, twelve tubes mounted side by side on an adjustable framework fixed into the bed of the Dodge Ram.

Red had foreseen the impact of the rockets fired at such close range on such a narrow target. The maximum flight time for a Hale rocket was about twenty seconds, most of it ballistic. At that point-blank range, the Hale rockets struck the advancing troops in split-seconds. But what he hadn't foreseen—was almost aghast when he witnessed it—was the effect of the stone retaining walls on either side of the bridge.

The rockets struck the paving of the bridge, just as Red had foreseen, between fifty and a hundred yards ahead. Some of them exploded instantly, but not most of them. Red had chosen to use contact fuses for this battle instead of the self-lit fuse that had been the standard for the old Hale rockets. But since the somewhat jury-rigged contact fuses available in this day and age made him nervous, he'd adjusted them to fire only in the event they made a direct hit.

Which most of them didn't. They struck the stones at a low glancing angle and kept on, sailing and skidding down the bridge—caroming off the low walls—until they finally ran out of fuel and momentum or hit something solid enough to explode. The narrowness of the bridge concentrated the impact, but it was the walls that channeled it into sheer havoc.

Without uptime propellant the black powder rockets were occasionally prone to explosion—CATO, as the rocket club kids called it ("Catastrophe At Take Off")—caused by an unforeseen bounce or bump that cracked the grain. Then the rockets were little more than large bombs, more black powder burning than could be safely ejected as the pressure rose. Red preferred not to have twenty pounds of black powder exploding near his head, so he'd inspected them carefully. One of them did burst, nonetheless. But that fact didn't make the charging enemy infantry any happier. The rocket exploded some fifty feet in front of the truck and became a huge ball of fire and flying debris hurtling towards Holk's troops at hundreds of miles per hour. A shot of grape from a six-pounder couldn't have been more effective. Grape didn't set the recipient on fire.

Two of the rockets, on the other hand, never exploded at all. Red later found one of them lying on the stones not more than fifty yards from the other end of the bridge. But that didn't matter, either. All twelve of the rockets in that volley did their damage, even those two—and far more damage than Red had foreseen. It was as if the dragon had a dozen serpent tongues, licking down the great Stone Bridge for hundred of yards, racing the length of the span up to the dogleg in less than two seconds. Hissing with fury, belching smoke, upending dozens of terrified men for every one they killed or wounded—which meant dozens of pikes flailing about, gashing and bashing and wounding still more.

The sheer weight of the charge would probably have kept it going, struck only by bullets. Men at the front being shoved forward willy-nilly by those at the rear. But the dragon-tongues ravaged the men in the first hundred yards, paralyzed and confused those behind them—and gave those at the very rear the time to do what soldiers rarely have in a frontal assault.

Time to think things over.

Even the best mercenary soldiers are not given to mindless obedience to orders. And Holk's men were far from the best. The charge staggered to a halt, and the men at the rear began coming back off the bridge. That relieved the pressure on those ahead of them; and, inchoate rank after rank, Holk's charge started disintegrating.

It took time, of course. Perhaps fifteen minutes, in all. But the critical furious momentum of the initial charge had been lost, and Holk's officers were neither good enough nor respected enough to rally the army. They did manage, four times, to paste together small charges from those men toward the front who could be convinced or cajoled or bullied into it. But the first three of those charges were driven off, easily enough, by the flintlocks and the arquebuses.

By then, Dunash's rocketeers had been able to reload the katyusha, and the dragon belched again. The fourth charge was shredded, and Holk's men had had enough. This was even worse that the Hradcany. They hadn't signed on to fight a damn dragon.

So, back they came, in a hurry, leaving hundreds of dead and dying and wounded behind them on the bridge. Two of the corpses were those of sub-officers, too stupid or inexperienced to understand when it was time to stop trying to force mercenary soldiers to do something they really, really, really didn't want to do any more. One of them bled to death from no fewer than five stab wounds.

4

"For Chrissake, Red, it's obvious even from here. Tell Morris to quit screwing around with his stupid modesty act and start waving his hat. And while he's at it, do the Roy Rogers bit with the fucking horse. Y'know, rearing up on the hind legs. Whatever they call that silly stunt, I don't know. I can't stand big fucking animals. Damn things are dangerous. Even cats make me nervous, with their fangs and shit."

5

After Red whispered in his ear—well, shouted in his ear—Morris did take off his big, wide-brimmed plumed hat and wave it around, acknowledging the enthusiastic roars of approval from the crowd. He drew the line, though, at rearing the horse.

It didn't matter, really. Ellie was too nervous about a lot of things. After that sunny day in Prague, in July of the year 1633—as Christians counted it; for the Jews who made up most of the crowd it was the month of Av and the year was 5393—it wouldn't have mattered if Don Morris had fallen off the horse entirely—or lost his hat in the river.

Don Morris, he was; and Don Morris he would always remain. For them as well as their descendants who heard the tale. It had been a long time, after all—a very long time—since the Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe had had a martial hero of their own. The ancient Hebrews had had a multitude, of course; and the Sephardim, in their Iberian heyday, more than a few. But for the Ashkenazim of Europe, for many centuries, heroism had been something that could only be measured by martyrs.

Martyrs were to be cherished, certainly. But it was nice—delightful, in fact—not to have to do it again.

And who was to say? Perhaps never again. There were those other men, after all, who would outlive Don Morris. The much younger Jews who looked very bold and handsome, perched up there on that strange thing that was so much bigger and more deadly than a mere horse. And didn't seem to be afraid of it at all.

Perhaps the golem was not simply a silly legend. The Maharal had been a very wise man. One of the wisest, even in a city of wise men like Prague.

6

As usually happens in history, the famous Battle of the Bridge didn't have a neat ending. Holk and his men never tried to charge across the bridge again. But they did remain in Prague for days thereafter, burning and plundering what they could in the Malá Strana.

One part of the plan had not worked. Billek and his Brethren had tried—quite valiantly—to trap Holk's army on the bridge and slaughter them wholesale. But Holk had twice as many men in his army as he could get onto the bridge in one charge, and if he was a drunk and a brute he was not actually incompetent. So, he'd stationed half his army to protect the western entrance to the bridge, and the Brethren were unable to drive them off. Indeed, they suffered fairly heavy casualties in the attempt.

And continued to suffer them, the next day. The crude fact, soon evident, was that Billek's inexperienced volunteers simply couldn't stand toe-to-toe with Holk's toughs in a pitched battle. They tried, the next morning, fighting in the open in the streets, but by noon Billek realized his mistake and ordered a retreat. Thereafter, in the days that followed, the Brethren went back to their tactics of harassment and fighting from well-fortified positions.

At that, they were extremely capable—just as their Hussite ancestors, from the shelters of their armored wagons, had been very good at breaking noble cavalry. They couldn't defeat Holk—couldn't even drive him off—but they could certainly bleed him. And, what was most important, bleed the morale of his army.

* * *

Morris, during those same days, lapsed frequently into profanity. Understandably enough, having driven off the charge across the bridge on the first day and being in no real danger thereafter, the Jews of the ghetto were reluctant to get involved in the fighting still taking place in the Malá Strana. That was a goyishe battle in a goyishe part of the city where few of them had ever gone, and fewer still had ever lived. All of Morris' attempts to plead and convince and cajole them—even curse them, which he did more than once—had little effect.

But Dunash and his young firebrands came into their own, during those same days. They did participate in the fighting. First, at irregular intervals, by racing onto the bridge—almost all the way across, on one occasion—and firing rocket volleys at Holk's encampment. Then, racing off before Holk's cannons could retaliate. (Holk had finally brought in his artillery, three days too late to do any good.)

Secondly, perhaps more importantly, every day after sundown at least some of Dunash's men made their way across the river in a few small boats that they'd kept safely hidden away. Once there, they joined the Brethren in their nightly harassment of Holk's forces. In purely military terms, they were not much of a factor. But the political effect was significant—and, by the fourth day, was starting to result in a steady trickle of recruits to Dunash's miniature army. In any population of fifteen thousand people, there are a fair number of bold youngsters who don't see things the way their sage elders do.

* * *

Most of the Malá Strana was in ruins, by the end, though civilian casualties were minimal. Fortunately, the inhabitants of that section of Prague had fled before Holk arrived. For that matter—much to the disgruntlement of Holk's troops—they'd taken their valuable belongings with them. The destruction wreaked by Holk's army during the week it spent in Prague was not so much due to looting, as such; it was simply the mindless destruction and arson visited upon a town by frustrated and angry troops. Who became even more frustrated, the more they wrecked and burned, because their own living quarters and rations got steadily worse as a result.

Holk would have tried to restrain them, had he not been Heinrich Holk. Being Holk, it never once occurred to him to do so.

Then, a week after the siege of Prague began, word came from the southwest. A second battle of the White Mountain had indeed been fought. Actually, the battle was fought a good twenty miles away from the White Mountain, but since victors get to name battles, "the Second Battle of the White Mountain" it was.

It seemed that Wallenstein thought it made a nice touch, to inaugurate the new kingdom of Bohemia and Moravia.

Oh, yes. He'd won. Pappenheim and his dreaded Black Cuirassiers had pursued the retreating Austrians for miles, slaughtering pitilessly.

"Practicing for Holk," Pappenheim was reported to have said afterward.

* * *

The news arrived in the morning. By late afternoon, Holk's army was out of Prague, racing for the north. Holk, it was said, had already opened negotiations with the Elector of Saxony, John George, looking for a new employer. And shelter from the coming storm.

7

But there was no storm on the day that Wallenstein and Pappenheim finally returned to Prague—other than a storm of applause from the residents of the city who greeted his victorious army, on both banks of the river. Whatever private reservations any of them had regarding the change of power, nobody was willing any longer to speak out in open opposition.

Not even the Catholics in the city. First, because the Jesuits dominated the Catholic church in Bohemia. Wallenstein had always been partial to the Jesuits, and had sent them a friendly private note assuring them that they would be able to remain in Prague unmolested—provided, of course, they agreed to cease and desist their activities against Protestants on behalf of the Austrian Habsburgs.

The Jesuits hadn't decided yet, how they would react to that last provision. But they didn't have to fear for their own lives in the immediate period.

The second reason they decided to stay, however, and abide by Wallenstein's conditions—at least for the moment—would have amazed Ellie Anderson. Whatever she thought of Len Tanner's behavior during the siege, the Jesuits had reacted otherwise. Quirky—even foolish—he might have been. But, as the days passed and the pudgy American kept returning to his self-assigned post of duty in the cathedral, always with that bizarre weapon in his hands, the Jesuits came to the conclusion that whatever Wallenstein might think, his new American allies had their own opinions. And, whatever else, were clearly stubborn about them.

That was an interesting datum, with interesting possibilities for the future. The Jesuits in Prague duly recorded their impressions in several letters they sent to their Father General in Rome, Mutio Vitelleschi. They did so, of course, in the full knowledge that Vitelleschi was close to the Pope and would pass along their letters. The gist of them, in any event. So, the Jesuits would be patient. They were trained, and accustomed, to thinking in the long run.

* * *

Most of the crowd gathered to cheer Wallenstein's army, however, were Protestants of one sort or another—counting the Brethren and the Utraquists in their number, although they predated Martin Luther—and the Jews. Those people were far less ambivalent about the situation. Granted, Wallenstein was still an enigmatic figure, and a somewhat unsettling one. But the Habsburgs weren't enigmatic at all. Most of Prague's residents had had more than enough of the royal bigot Ferdinand II, sitting on his throne in Vienna.

And, finally, there was this: Wallenstein did not return alone. He had Pappenheim, of course, but he also brought with him tangible proof that his new regime had secured at least one redoubtable ally: the United States in Thuringia, if not perhaps the entire Confederated Principalities of Europe.

The proof came in the form of two APCs that Mike Stearns sent to Bohemia the minute he got word from Morris Roth—yes, there had been a long-distance radio stashed in that great mansion's basement, along with so many other treasures—that the political crisis had finally erupted and it was time for the United States to forego all secrecy. The APCs had not arrived in time to play any role at the second battle of the White Mountain, but they did arrive in time to join Wallenstein's triumphal procession back into Prague.

The only unfortunate episode in the day's celebrations—and that, only mildly unfortunate—was that the biggest cheer of all was not reserved for Wallenstein himself. That cheer erupted, quite spontaneously, when the two APCs from Grantville rumbled onto the Stone Bridge from the Malá Strana side and were met halfway by the katyusha coming from the east bank. Now that they could see what a real APC looked like, almost dwarfing the katyusha drawn up before it, Prague's citizens were greatly heartened. Their own little one had driven off Holk, no? Who knew what the big ones could do?

* * *

Best of all, perhaps—at least for fifteen thousand of the city's residents—was that the katyusha was festooned with banners. One—the largest, of course—was Wallenstein's new banner. But there was also, resting alongside it, the banner of the Josefov. The central image on the flag was that of a hexagram—a symbol that had, in another universe, evolved over the centuries into the Star of David.

There was something very fitting about it all, they thought. So far as anyone knew, Prague had been the first city in Europe whose Jews were given the right to fly their own flag. They had been given that right in the Christian year 1354—by the same Emperor Charles IV who had built the Stone Bridge it was now flying over, and which that katyusha had so valiantly defended.

* * *

Uriel Abrabanel had returned also, with the APCs. He'd come onto the bridge with the war machines, but he'd kept going, walking all the way across.

Morris came out of the crowd to greet him. " 'Bout time you got back," he grumbled. "Where were you when all the dust was flying?"

Uriel grinned, quite unabashed. "I was busy. Never mind with what, I won't tell you. Besides, flying dust is no place for a proper spy. That's the business of princes and soldiers—and hidalgos, I hear."

"Just what I need. More rumors." Morris made a face. "So? Are you staying?"

"Certainly. Spies are all mercenaries at heart, you know. I also hear that the new hidalgo in Prague is a very generous patron."

Morris sighed. "Et tu, Brute? Soak the rich Jew, that's all anybody thinks about. Even other Jews."

"Stop whining. You need a good spy. Better yet, a good spymaster."

Morris thought about it. Not for very long. "Boy, isn't that the truth? Okay, Uriel, you're hired."

Chapter VII: End Game
August, 1633

1

"That is a ridiculous price for that horse." Pappenheim was smiling when he said it, though. A rather cold and thin smile, true, but—

From Pappenheim, that was good enough.

"All I can afford," Morris insisted. "It's not the horse that's the problem, Gottfried, it's the cost of feeding the great brute."

"And that statement is even more ridiculous. Not about the horse's appetite—I know what that costs—but the rest of it."

Pappenheim's eyes ranged up and down Morris' figure, examining his apparel. "What, no pearls? They're quite in fashion, I'm told, in Paris and Vienna—and you needn't worry about the sumptuary laws any longer, because the King of Bohemia has abolished all of them."

Morris was tempted to state that was because Wallenstein was a clotheshorse himself, but he wisely refrained. It was an autocracy, after all, even if Morris Roth was about as well-respected and well-regarded a courtier—in Bohemia, at least—as any in Europe. And he didn't even have to fawn all over his monarch to maintain the status. Clotheshorse or not, Wallenstein was far more interested in results than flattery.

Pappenheim rose from his chair. "Oh, let's be done with it. Morris, I give you the horse as a gift. In fact, I'll even include a full set of cuirassier armor to go with it. In recognition of your valor at the bridge."

He grinned at Morris' startled expression. "Don't worry. I promise I won't hold it against you if you never wear it. Miserable heavy stuff, I'll be the first to admit."

"It's not you I'm worried about, Gottfried," Morris replied. "It's my wife. She'll never let me leave it stuffed safely away in a chest. You watch. The first big ceremonial occasion—eek."

How Pappenheim could manage a grin that wide, and that cold, Morris would never understand.

"Indeed so," said the Duke of Moravia. "The coronation is less than two weeks from now. Still, that's more than enough time for me to have the armor ready. Do try your best not to trip during the procession, Morris. You'll never get up again, not at your age. Without a winch."

2

That night, Jason came back from his first Shabbat dinner at the home of Mordechai Spira.

He seemed in a peculiar mood, and said very little before he went to bed. Morris didn't notice, but Judith did.

The next morning, she pressed Jason about it.

"I don't know. It's hard to explain. A lot of it I liked—a lot. The discussion was almost exhilarating at times. The rabbi was at his best, too. I learned a lot and I laughed a lot at the same time. But . . ."

He ran fingers through his hair, which had gotten very long. "I don't know if I'll ever get used to men dancing alone. And it was weird, having the women do all the serving and cooking as if they were menials. Although I was even more surprised—pleased, but surprised—when the women participated in the Talmudic discussion after dinner. I didn't think they would."

Judith was surprised herself, hearing that. Although . . .

She reminded herself not to make the mistake her husband Morris was prone to making. People are not categories, not even categories to which they belong. Unusual rabbis were still rabbis, after all. So why should it really be that surprising—in the same city which had produced a woman like Eva Bacharach—that the wife and daughters of Mordechai Spira would be unusual women?

"One of the rabbi's daughters even made a joke in the course of it," Jason continued. "Pretty funny one, too."

His eyes got a little unfocused. Judith had to struggle not to smile.

"Tell me about her. The daughter, I mean."

Jason mumbled some vague phrases. The only ones that weren't hopelessly murky had to do with the girl's eyes—very bright, apparently—and the fact that her name was Sarah.

But Judith let it go. There was no reason to pursue the matter with Jason, at the moment, since it obviously made him uncomfortable. Eva Bacharach would be coming for a visit later that day. Judith could find out everything she needed to know from her.

"I just don't know what to think," he complained. "Everything seems gray, and complicated. It's confusing."

"And you think that'll change? It won't. Trust me. But for the moment—"

She gave the young man a very warm smile. "Welcome to your life, Jason Gotkin."

3

In late afternoon, Mordechai Spira visited his friend Isaac Gans.

After seeing Mordechai to a chair, Gans sat in his own.

"And?"

"You were quite wrong, Isaac. Sarah didn't start pestering me until after lunch."

"Ha!" Isaac chuckled. "That's because she spent the whole morning conspiring with your wife."

"I know," said Mordechai gloomily. His eyes moved to the books on Isaac's study table. "It's a puzzling and tangled problem, given who the fellow is. But I'm sure I can find something in the Talmud—perhaps the responsa—to guide me properly."

"Of course you can. Everything pertaining to proper conduct is contained somewhere in the Talmud or the midrash or the responsa. I'm more the scholar than you are, though I don't have your stature as a judge." Stoutly: "So I will be glad to help!"

Gans leaned forward, spreading his hands wide. "But we must begin by facing the truth, Mordechai my old friend. We're rabbis. Studying the sacred texts takes time—hours and hours, days and weeks, poring over the words—and we are dealing with women."

Spira grimaced ruefully. "They're quick."

"Indeed. And so, I think, are these new times. We will just have to do our best."

"Always."

1634: The Galileo Affair

Eric Flint and
Andrew Dennis

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-8815-6

Cover art by Tom Kidd

First hardcover printing, April 2004

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flint, Eric.

1634 : the Galileo affair / Eric Flint, Andrew Dennis.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7434-8815-6
1. Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642—Fiction. 2. Italy—History—17th century—Fiction. 3. Americans—Italy—Fiction. 4. Astronomers—Fiction. 5. Time travel—Fiction. I. Dennis, Andrew. II. Title.

PS3556.L548A618 2004
813'.54--dc22
2003027413

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America

To the memory of Johnny Cash, 1932–2003.

I Fell Into A Burning Ring Of Fire
I Went Down, Down, Down
And The Flames Went Higher

In this series:

1632 by Eric Flint
1633 by Eric Flint & David Weber
Ring of Fire edited by Eric Flint
1634: The Galileo Affair by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis

BAEN BOOKS by Eric Flint

Joe's World series:

The Philosophical Strangler
Forward the Mage (with Richard Roach)
Mother of Demons

The Shadow of the Lion
(with Mercedes Lackey & Dave Freer)

This Rough Magic
(with Mercedes Lackey & Dave Freer)

Rats, Bats & Vats (with Dave Freer)
Pyramid Scheme (with Dave Freer)
The Course of Empire (with K.D. Wentworth)
Crown of Slaves (with David Weber)
The Warmasters (with David Weber & David Drake)

The Bellisarius series, with David Drake:

An Oblique Approach
In the Heart of Darkness
Destiny's Shield
Fortune's Stroke
The Tide of Victory

The General series, with David Drake:

The Tyrant

Prologue:
Spring, 1633

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Chapter 1

The palace was over-heated, Mazarini thought. That came of Cardinal Richelieu being a man who had more than his share of ailments, despite being only in middle age. Richelieu felt the cold as an old man did. He had his servants build fires if there was even the slightest chill in the air—and early spring in Paris was considerably more than slightly chilly. Fortunately, the cardinal was a polite man. The wait in the anteroom was brief enough that Mazarini was able to fight off drowsiness.

Now Mazarini was in the presence of Richelieu himself, trying to achieve—in spite of the heat—that chilly sharpness a diplomat needed. The cardinal's hard face, now that the pleasantries had been dealt with, indicated that the real negotiation was about to begin.

After only four weeks in Paris, at that; Richelieu must, Mazarini thought, have something in mind. The protocol of his nunciature had been brief. Mazarini had arrived from Rome with a retinue provided by Cardinal Barberini and augmented it from the permanent nunciature in Paris. His American companion, Harry Lefferts, had tried to pretend that he saw the likes of the procession through Paris every day back in Grantville, but Mazarini could see him frankly staring at everything. Pressed afterward, Harry had admitted that the twentieth century had not wanted for spectacle, but that it never came to country towns like Grantville. As it was, Harry had gotten only these few short weeks of mayhem, debauchery and drunkenness in Paris before a message that had missed him narrowly in Rome had called him home to Grantville; he was due to leave in the morning.

As much as he would miss Harry, Mazarini would be relieved to see him go. The flamboyant young American made friends everywhere he went. Unfortunately, the friends were concentrated in two classes of people:

Flamboyant Italian and French young men, who found the exciting and exotic American something of a role model—to the perhaps everlasting ruin of proper attire for proper young men. (Their habits had already included brawling and drunkenness, so those sins could hardly be laid at Harry's feet.)

Shortly after they'd arrived in Rome a few months earlier, Harry had gotten a formal suit done to his own specifications by a tailor who'd done it purely for the chance to take Harry's old rented tux apart to see how to make the style of trousers his customers were demanding. This time around, Harry had reasoned, men's formal wear would be done right. Pockets ranked high in Harry's scheme to anticipate the mistakes of fashion. The gentleman of this future would not be stuck for somewhere to put a wallet, cigarettes, a few items for personal defense and his companion's spare lipstick. Jackets were replaced with tailcoats, as Harry had seen enough performances by someone called Lee Van Cleef to appreciate the practicality of the style for a man who wanted to wear a gun-belt. The swordsmen about town in Rome were glad of it, too.

The city's authorities were not.

The second category of people who made friends with Harry almost instantaneously were Italian and French young women. Alas. That characteristic had produced even more in the way of excitement than the first.

Mazarini was still a bit astonished that only two duels had resulted. That was probably because of the outcome of the duels themselves. As the challenged party, Harry had been able to choose the weapons. The first duel having been a very informal affair—a tavern brawl which escalated rapidly—he'd naturally chosen pistols, that being the nature of the weapon carried under his coat. Harry had had the mercy and the good sense not to actually kill his opponents—but it had been blindingly obvious to all who witnessed the affair that he could have easily done so instead of inflicting minor flesh wounds.

The second duel, a more formal affair, was worse. Having been accused of cowardice by relying on unfairly superior American firearms, Harry had chosen a different weapon. Another American one, true, but hardly something that could be labeled unfair—a very large knife which he called a "Bowie knife." He had even grandly allowed his opponent to retain his rapier.

The choice had obviated his opponent's greater skill with swordsmanship. Harry had had no intention of trying to match him. He'd simply managed to avoid the first lunge and grappled with his opponent, Bowie knife against main gauche. Thereafter, fighting with knives at close quarters, those qualities which Harry possessed in abundance—great athletic ability and an outlook sanguine enough to be the envy of any Mongol khan—had come to the fore. The end result had been thoroughly fatal and incredibly messy.

Now that he was in the presence of the cardinal, Mazarini suppressed his sigh. Hopefully, Harry Lefferts would be gone from Paris and on his way back to Grantville before the very wealthy and very belligerent Fasciotti brothers—all five of them—discovered that their sister had been dishonored and came to Paris from Rome to seek satisfaction. There would be no duels, dealing with the Fasciotti. Hiring assassins came as naturally to them as hiring servants. All the more so since the sister in question was not complaining about the episode herself. Awkward, that.

But Richelieu was finally speaking. Mazarini pushed aside thoughts of his rambunctious American companion. There were many dangers in the world, after all. Compared to Richelieu, Harry Lefferts was a minor problem.

"Monsignor," said Richelieu, "You have visited Grantville, perhaps?"

"I have, Your Eminence."

Mazarini responded politely, despite the fact that the question was moot. It did not do for one gentiluomo to admit to another that he had had him spied on—or, in his response, for the one spied upon to draw attention to the fact. Mazarini's trip to Grantville had neither gone unnoticed nor unremarked. The resulting icy blast of Cardinal Richelieu's displeasure had been directed straight at Cardinal Barberini, who had in his turn deposited the whole lot on Mazarini once he'd arrived in Rome. Richelieu had a long reach; his eyes were everywhere and there were few within Europe who could not at least be apprised of his opinions if not made to suffer for his displeasure. He had latterly come to have most of the resources of France at his disposal; in a sense, he was France.

"Perhaps," Richelieu went on, "some things passed between the monsignor and—"

Mazarini interrupted him silently, staring with a carefully blank expression and placing his hand on his heart, before casting his eyes down. The gesture of one who, for ritual reasons, could not speak. If ritual had an advantage, it was the language of subtlety it allowed the cognoscenti to converse in.

Richelieu sighed. Ritual could also be a shield for those who chose to dissemble. He chose not to look upon the dissimulation. "Monsignor," he said after a little time, "you are aware, perhaps, of the news of the future brought by the Americans?" Richelieu rose and took the two steps that carried him to the window. "I ask in a spirit of genuine enquiry; you need not vouchsafe how much you know or where you have it from."

And such a freight of meaning in that! Mazarini found himself cold despite the heat, his palms sweating. He had never underestimated an opponent in his career to date, but he wondered whether it was possible to do anything else with the cardinal who ruled France.

For a wonder, his voice remained under control. "I am aware, yes." He thanked God silently for the calm; it was his best weapon at the card table and in negotiations.

He had already heard enough to deduce what was coming next. More than a few men had emerged, shocked and grinning, from the Palais in the last few weeks. The cardinal was promoting men, young and unknown men, and it was—well, not the talk of all Paris, but certainly noticed.

Richelieu remained at the window, looking out over the garden he had torn down the adjoining buildings to create. He could surely see little, Mazarini reflected. Paris in the spring meant mist and soft, clinging rain as much as fresh air and balmy breezes. The sky was the gray of over-washed linen and the streets a mire, clinging and glutinous. Everywhere was the stink of wet wool.

Richelieu let out a long breath. Not quite—but almost—another sigh. He half-turned, and addressed Mazarini over his shoulder. "It is more difficult, if you will say nothing?"

Mazarini frowned.

Richelieu clasped his hands behind his back and turned further. A long blink, then, both eyes closed for a whole breath before they opened, and he leaned forward a little. Earnestly: "I beg of you, Monsignor, not to take what I said as a suggestion that you might betray a confidence. I fancy we are both"—a little quirk of a smile to underline it—"professionals. Not so?"

Mazarini nodded. Richelieu had used the English word—a word that the seventeenth-century English almost certainly did not have and certainly would not understand the way that up-time Americans did. Mazarini felt his very frame lighten in his chair with the speed of his thoughts. The sheer celerity that came when one matched wits with a master—there was no thrill like it. To gamble all-or-nothing on one's own genius—and with a man who might say so much with the mere choice of a synonym! The mere turn of a clever phrase, a well-parsed statement, these were the common coin of diplomacy. Richelieu was one of a select few in another league altogether.

Richelieu closed his eyes again for another breath. "But I must broach a sensitive subject," he said, and turned back to look out at the dishwater sky.

Richelieu said nothing for some time, and it was Mazarini who broke the silence. He knew it was a trap, a trick he used himself. To break a silence without disadvantage was a delicate business.

"Sensitive?" he asked.

Richelieu, turning, saw Mazarini's raised eyebrow and smiled. "Monsignor, you are the man I crossed wits with at Lyons three years ago, not so? Perhaps I might be candid. Sub rosa, and the understanding between us that neither shall bear rancor for what passes here today?"

"Oh, surely." Mazarini permitted himself a broad smile. "Do any of those who were present at Lyon bear rancor?"

Richelieu's face missed not a beat, segueing into a worldly, knowing chuckle. "Ah, yes. Two of my dupes. I am sure that neither bear any rancor, where they are now. I feel sure they have more burning concerns."

Mazarini was impressed by that. Discussing the execution of two men who had been to all appearances his faithful allies, Richelieu actually twinkled. "Perhaps, Cardinal. But you were mentioning candor?"

Rubbing it in to begin with would not hurt. After all, the cardinal had asked specifically that neither party take offense. Mazarini harked back to what Cardinal Maurice of Savoy had told him about Richelieu: He must be made to feel that the decision depends on him alone. And there was little to achieve that better than an initial resistance.

"Candor, yes." Richelieu's eyes grew hooded. "I have something quite outlandish to suggest."

"I am sure, Your Eminence, that this room—" Mazarini waved at a wall at random "—and Servien back there has heard more outlandish propositions these last few weeks. And will again. Does not the delegation from Grantville arrive here in a few weeks?"

Richelieu smiled thinly. "Etienne is behind there," he said, pointing at the wall opposite that at which Mazarini had waved. "He and his clerk take notes. So much more discreet a man than his cousin at the Ministry of War."

Mazarini noted that Richelieu had neither confirmed nor denied what the Holy See's spies claimed to have discovered. "And Your Eminence's proposition?"

"Do you read English?"

"Very well, of late."

"Perhaps I might trouble you—" Richelieu opened a cabinet and took out a thick volume fringed with ribbon bookmarks, "—to read the passage I have marked."

Mazarini frowned at the volume as he took it. It was new, and well made, apparently the work of a Parisian bookbinder. He riffled the pages; they were printed on the smooth and slightly marbled Turk's-paper that French bibliophiles loved so well. He looked inside the front cover to see that the frontispiece was—his eyebrows shot up. "From 1991?" he asked, looking up at the cardinal.

"Just so. I have had printed copies made and more securely bound." A slight sneer. "Whatever else the next three hundred years may bring, improvements in bookbinding were not among them. The books we have from Grantville began to fall apart quite quickly. I needed copies to refer to, and to distribute to . . . various persons. Hand-copying would have engaged every stationer and monk in Paris for weeks and the originals were too fragile to pass around. So I ordered them typeset and the illustrations carefully cut by the best engravers I could find."

"Just so," Mazarini echoed. "And the passage to which Your Eminence wishes to direct my attention?"

"Ah, I do apologize. I began to muse on other matters. Permit me—" Richelieu leaned over to flip a page open by a bookmark. "Here," he said, tapping a bold-face heading.

Mazarini looked. It read: Mazarin, Cardinal Jules.

Mazarini focused his eyes on it, confirming that—as with other versions he had seen—they had gotten his birth date wrong. Two days, but still—

He looked up at Richelieu. "I have read this. Or one much like it."

"They are all much alike, that I have seen."

To keep silence now, that was painful. Mazarini could not. "I have spoken with—I have spoken with a number of people—"

And the words dried up. He felt his palms start again with sweat, his pulse hammer in his ears. The abstract—the dry statement of a textbook that spoke of a future world, that spoke of events that would not happen for years to come—was as nothing next to a living, breathing prince of the church directing that he read the future course of his life.

Richelieu took pity on him. "You will have heard, perhaps, that I made a number of promotions rather earlier than"—he took in the cabinet with a languid wave—"these texts say that I would have done?"

"And when last we met you offered then that I might come into—" Again, the sudden drying of the mouth. This time, the words came after only a slight fumble "—your confidence?"

Mazarini wondered that the cardinal did not hear the thunder of his heart. It was like holding the perfect hand at cards, hoping against hope that the betting could be run up to higher and higher levels without—but Richelieu was nodding, slow and liquid, dreamlike, as if under water.

"Confidence," mused the cardinal. "As good a word as any. Knowing what you would do, what you are capable of. I saw some of it at Lyon—I greeted you thinking you came to spy, not to treat, convinced you adhered wholly to my king's enemies. Two hours and you had convinced me of much that turned out to be for the good of everyone involved. And then your theatrical coup at Casale—magnificent!"

"Your Eminence is too kind."

"Ah, Monsignor, but what you will do—it justifies your promise now, if my humble opinion counts for anything. Yes, justifies it amply. Revolution, war, heresy—through all of these to make France the great power of Europe for a hundred years." A sigh, and a deep one. "And for nothing."

"Your Eminence?"

Richelieu smiled in response, small and sad, suddenly wearing every one of his years. "Neither of our other selves was to know. Not Cardinal Richelieu, nor the Cardinal Mazarin who succeeded him so capably. While we made France anew in the image of a beautiful, strong, holy nation, the English simply spread out over the world and . . . stole it."

Mazarini nodded. The governance of the English might be in the hands of fools and outright villains more often than not, but there was no denying the inventive, indefatigable wanderlust they seemed to imbibe with their mothers' milk. Or the roving commission of violent larceny each Englishman seemed to grant himself as soon as he could walk. Other nations fought the Algerine or the Dunkerker to suppress piracy. For the English, it was to serve the competition a bad turn.

How typical of such, thought Mazarini, to steal the whole of a future, for there was much in what Richelieu had said that he had seen in the little of the future's history that Harry Lefferts had known. Harry had cheerfully admitted having paid precious little attention to his studies, but his every act and thought spoke of the domination of the Anglophone peoples of the world he had come from.

On the other hand, that hegemony had also created Grantville. On which, Mazarini reminded himself, he had felt called to wager so much.

"I see," was all he said.

Richelieu nodded. "I will not find extravagance of use, here and now, will I? I should keep my hat on, not so?"

Mazarini smiled. He remembered the theatrics Richelieu had displayed himself at Lyon, tearing off his hat and stamping on it. The cardinal as well as the monsignor could take pleasure in executing a coup de theatre.

"You wish time to think about this?"

And there it was, finally, laid out as clearly as possible. In another world, another future, another universe, Richelieu had groomed Mazarini—by then known as Jules Mazarin—to be his successor. And such a glorious career he had had, under that Francofied name! Reckoned, in the annals of France, to have been the equal of Richelieu himself.

There were precious few ministers of state in the history of the world whose names would be remembered by any but antiquarians centuries later. Richelieu was one of them. Mazarin, another.

"If you please, yes." With those words, Mazarini felt himself grow cool, more ordered.

"There is no urgency," said the cardinal. "For the time being you have obligations as nuncio extraordinary, and doubtless there are many with calls upon your time."

Mazarini nodded. "Monsignor Bischi's office has much work for me, augmenting the regular offices of the nunciature here. And I find my lodgings with le comte de Chavigny most congenial."

"Ah, yes. Young Leon is very much the coming man among my creatures, you know. A promising young fellow, very much in the image of his father. I understand he and young Monsieur Lefferts found much in common?"

Mazarini grinned. "I fear I may not mention much of what they found in the presence of a churchman of Your Eminence's famed piety."

Richelieu chuckled. "There are times when I do feel my age, all—what—forty-eight years of it? I remember when it was thought that I would follow His Majesty's colors rather than take the cloth—oh, the stories I would hear of military debauchery."

"I could tell you more than one such of Harry Lefferts. A man to watch, that." Mazarini smiled at the memories. Now that Harry was leaving, he could afford to do so. Granted, the disemboweling of Agnelli had been perhaps excessive. Then again, Agnelli had been a notorious bully and there had been few, even in Rome, who had mourned his passing. Had he been an outraged husband or father, sentiment would have been different. But Agnelli had simply been a rival for a lady's affections—and one whose own past conduct did not bear close examination.

"As are all the Americans." There was a trace of acerbity in the cardinal's voice. "I shall be meeting some of them in a few weeks, sent by way of an embassy, if my intendants report aright. Apparently they propose to send the wife of their president, Monsieur Stearns. I do look forward to—" Richelieu shook his head. "But you have met the young lady."

"She is charming, of that there is no doubt. Very intelligent and well read, also." Mazarini shrugged. "As a diplomat? Hard to say. She is certainly pleasant to talk with, as well as look upon."

He choked the rest off. Richelieu had almost, he realized, drawn him out into the betrayal of confidence—even by what might be inferred from what he said. None other of the notables he dealt with would cause him to speak so. It was, he felt, unfair to require a diplomat of his comparative youth to deal with beautiful women in the course of his work. What could he say, after, that could not be misconstrued?

Richelieu interrupted his indignant reverie. "While we are on the subject of diplomats, has Sable spoken with you? He has a few things he wishes to discuss about our deployments in northern Italy."

"Sable? Oh, you mean the cousin of—" Mazarin waved at the wall behind which Richelieu's dark-lanternist lurked. It made sense to refer to the senior Servien by his marquisate de Sable when there was room for confusion. Although the near-invisible man in the next room could hardly be confused with the elder Servien in the flesh. The instantly forgettable factotum was one creature. The caustic, bombastic military intendant Mazarini had met at Casale could scarcely be credited to have come from the same family. "Yes, he has sent me a note on the subject. There are doubtless some small issues along the Pinerolo border that we must discuss. Tiresome, but necessary."

"Now, to change the subject. Have you been presented to Her Majesty?" Richelieu returned from the window and perched on the edge of his desk.

"Formally? Naturally, when I arrived. I have not had the pleasure of closer acquaintance, as yet."

"If you will forgive an old prelate's idle curiosity," said Richelieu, stroking a little at his beard, "does the monsignor speak Spanish at all well?"

Mazarini inclined his head in mock modesty. "Your Eminence is perhaps aware that I spent some time in study in Madrid, and learned the language there?"

Richelieu held up a hand. "Of course, of course." He was waxing positively avuncular, and Mazarini felt a sudden twinge of unease. "Her Majesty is a native speaker, and takes great delight in being so addressed."

"Indeed?" Mazarini raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, indeed." Richelieu rose from his desk. "If the monsignor will do me the honor of accompanying me to the Louvre this evening, Her Majesty will be holding an informal levee, where I would be honored to effect a more personal introduction. Her Majesty will be pleased to make your acquaintance, I think. You have something about you of someone she once held very dear. Yes, very dear indeed."

* * *

As Richelieu's carriage bore them to the queen's levee, Mazarini had time to ponder his situation. He and Harry Lefferts had set out from Grantville almost half a year before, barely a week after the Americans had fought successfully no fewer than three prongs of attack that had threatened to eradicate them.

Harry had been an officer in the American army that had defeated many times their number at Eisenach, and the next duty he had been given was to accompany Mazarini back to Rome. Mazarini had talked with the President of the United States about Harry before leaving Grantville.

"Monsignor," Mike Stearns had said, weary and rambling, "I've had any number of folks give me lectures about how this place ought to be defended. The longest one was from the guy I'm sending with you. What he thinks isn't my position, frankly. I want to see the new United States prosper, and since King Gustavus is right here it's him I'm talking with. But what I want isn't Fortress America, like Harry thinks we should do. I think it'll be good for him to see why not, eh? And for the people who think there's a military solution to what the United States represents in this time and place, well, I think it'll be good for them to hear Harry talk about what we're capable of."

After that, Stearns' wife Rebecca, the Jewess, had taken over. She had had more to say, and in more detail, and had put the Grantville Constitution in terms Mazarini was more familiar with—passages from Plato and Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli and Tacitus. It was pleasant to see that at least one of the members of the U.S. government had had a proper education.

It turned out that Harry was, like a lot of Grantville's natives, possessed of some Italian ancestry and knew a few words of the language. He was also nominally a Catholic, although Grantville's priest Father Larry Mazzare could not recall having seen him inside a church more than eight times in as many years. Midnight mass at Christmas—conspicuously filled with Christmas cheer—was about the limit of Harry's observance. And, come to that, his religion.

Mazarini didn't mind that so much. He had only lately even troubled to wear the dress that went with his being, technically at least, a clergyman. No more than a deacon with a couple of lucrative benefices to support him—and his expensive sisters and profligate father, he reflected—as he scrambled at the greasy pole of Europe's power politics.

A revolving greasy pole in a high wind, now that half of the old verities had vanished in the harsh glow of the Ring of Fire that had brought the up-time Americans. Mazarini, gambler, diplomat and showman that he was, had tried to slip a few cards off the bottom of the deck by opening a direct, unofficial channel with Grantville.

He had succeeded in that, certainly. In Grantville he had made friends, left one of his own behind as a contact there, been mightily impressed by the parish priest of the town and dined, with him, with the other pastors there who were all different kinds of Protestant. He had also seen Grantville's civilian population chew up and spit out more than a division of Croat horse, the most reckless and brutal light cavalry that Wallenstein had had under his command.

Mazarini had been impressed by the feat of arms. He had seen two wars at first hand, the first of them—the Valtelline War, to give it a bloodier name than it deserved—as a soldier himself. His captaincy in the papal regiment of the prince of Palestrina had largely been a garrison command, though; his main distinction was in being the only liaison officer sent to Gonsalvo de Cordoba who was not frightened or offended by the fiery Spaniard's rages. By the time of the real bloodletting of the Mantuan War he had been a papal diplomat.

He understood just enough to know how much nerve it took to stand and keep your head in the teeth of a cavalry assault. It had nothing to do with military training or nobility or the peculiar merits of any nation as a nursery of virtue. Just people who did what was needed to do right by the people beside them.

There were so many places in Europe where one found no one but the selfish and the self-glorifying, who wanted nothing better than to be—not even wolves, for wolves hunted in bands, but lone raptors—the better to eat the soft and weak they happened upon. Rare were the places where people felt themselves to be part of something greater and acted as such, individuals who felt the greater good in their bones so deeply that they would not even think to ask the questions that so troubled the philosophers of altruism. Grantville was such a place. Even Mazarini's cynical aide, Father Heinzerling, had taken to behaving more like a decent human being than a wild boar given the power of speech and walking upright.

Mazarini had come away impressed.

He had also come away with a mission. A mission, what was more, that might well see him humiliated by abjuration before the Inquisition, if the political winds did not blow right. Or worse, more imprisoned than not for the rest of his days, like that poor fool Campanella.

Father Mazzare, the parish priest of Grantville and a man who lived up to the vows of his ordination in a way that verged on sainthood by seventeenth-century standards, had asked Monsignor Mazarini, priest in name only, to carry books that showed three hundred years of the Church coming ever closer to curing the abuses that Luther nailed to that church door. And which showed the Church refining and developing its teaching and tradition and its understanding of Scripture to the point where wars became impossible to paint as wars of religion. If the catechism exhorted a man to reject nothing that was good or holy in the religion of others, where then for the call to burn heretics?

Either the light at the end of the tunnel of the Council of Trent or the blackest of heresies. The books had weighed little in the hands, but in the mind—oh, in the mind!

Mazarini was no theologian. For him, faith flowed naturally from all that was good in the world, was part of who he was and where he was from. But nevertheless he had had to examine himself closely as he picked his way through the unfamiliar doctrines by lamplight at inns on the way from Grantville to Rome. Had it not been for the cheerfully vicious earthiness of the young American with him—it was easy to think of him that way, despite there being only a few years between them—Mazarini felt sure his journey to Rome would have ended with him in the deepest of melancholy humors.

That journey had been easy enough. The year's campaigning had settled into the siege of Regensburg, so there were few enough soldiers about on the route he led Harry along. The difficulties of the trip had been those of finding decent inns and good horses. Harry had demonstrated himself a competent rider and, on the one occasion when bandits had accosted them in the Piedmont, an excellent shot. Other than that, no one had troubled with two respectable-looking and well-armed young men with no obvious wealth about their persons.

* * *

"We have arrived," announced Richelieu.

Mazarini looked up from his brown study. "Ah."

By the time he alit from the coach and followed Richelieu toward the palace entrance, Mazarini's good spirits were back. Yes, yes, it was all very difficult. Vexing to the soul, trying to the spirit, an endless palpitation of the heart.

It was also supremely exciting.

* * *

In person, in casual and intimate discourse, Mazarini found Anne of Austria quite a charming woman. The queen of France was now entering the eighteenth year of her marriage to King Louis XIII—a marriage that had taken place when she and her spouse had been merely fourteen years of age. By all accounts, the marriage was one of name only, and always had been.

Anne of Austria seemed to find Mazarini equally charming. Not surprising, really. In addition to his fluency in her native tongue, Mazarini was charming—as one would expect from a man who, despite being a year younger than the queen, was already a top diplomat in the service of the papacy. He was even—or so he had been told—fairly handsome.

So.

On his way back to his domicile after the levee, Mazarini had time to reflect on the full dimensions of Richelieu's offer. That the cardinal would wish to discreetly arrange an affair between a new protégé and Anne of Austria made perfect sense, of course—at least, a protégé intended for the highest honors. The marriage between Anne and Louis was childless and likely to remain so. In the absence of an heir, that meant the line of succession passed to the king's younger brother, the duc d'Orleans, better known simply as "Monsieur Gaston." And should Gaston ever ascend to the throne . . .

No one had any doubt at all that the first act of the new king would be to send Richelieu to the executioner. Monsieur Gaston was a thoroughly treacherous schemer who had proved willing to ally with anybody to advance his designs upon the throne. Rebellious nobles, foreign enemies, anybody. That he had so far failed—quite miserably—was due to Richelieu's opposition and the cardinal's far greater skill in the savage infighting of French politics.

So.

Chapter 2

"Bonsoir, Monsignor." The servant seemed nervous as he took Mazarini's coat.

Mazarini's fatigue-blurred mind was still alert, despite an evening of glitter and repartee that had tired him more than a week's riding. He nodded acknowledgement of the servant's greeting. "Is something wrong?"

"Monsignor?" The question was in an almost affronted tone.

Mazarini had not yet learned the names of all the servants at the maison Chavigny—come to that, he had not seen all of them yet—but they were generally a lively lot, less cowed than most. Something was definitely up with this one; his manner went beyond the usual scraping of the servants that so annoyed Harry. "Is Monsieur le Comte at home?"

"Non, Monsignor. He is with Monsieur le Vicomte de Turenne."

That would be the younger Tour de l'Auvergne, the elder being largely out of Paris these days, while the younger basked in the sudden favor of the king and Richelieu.

"Monsieur Lefferts has passed the evening in your chambers," the servant finished.

Mazarini was not surprised. Harry was set to depart in the morning, and had decided to take an evening's rest. He needed it. Rome had had its high spots for Harry, but Paris, to any young man with dash and money and a hint of the exotic was a city that opened its . . . arms.

Mazarini smiled slightly at the thought of what he had all but left behind, middle-aged before his time. "I shall retire, then. Have something brought to me in my chambers. I shall take supper before my bed."

"Very good, Monsignor."

Mazarini walked up alone. Now that he thought about it, the house seemed entirely normal. Even with its owner out for the evening, the place was home to dozens of servants. Only in the very small hours was it free from the tick and rustle of people distantly going about life and work. Those sounds—for all that there seemed to be no one around—were still there, muted to their night-time level.

He paused at the door of the apartment that the comte had given to him and Harry for their residence while in the city. "Harry?" he called. The room—the first, a salon—was lit only by the dim glow of red embers. "Harry?" he called again, feeling slightly foolish.

He looked to either side. The corridor was well lit. Lamps, and a chandelier over the stairwell. That was not normal, the risk of fire usually caused all lamps to be doused by this hour. He suddenly realized that standing in the doorway—

Mazarini was on the floor before he heard the snap of a flintlock. A jet of burning powder roared out through the door.

Somewhere in his—yes! There—his pistol! He tugged at the hilt of the thing through the pocket-cut of his soutanne, at the same time scrabbling across the floor. Out of the door stepped a man—dark-dressed, rough, villainous-looking. Mazarini took in the twist of his mouth where a scar—but he was raising a pistol and Mazarini, cursing, could not get his own free of his soutanne; all he was doing was pulling at his own leg and—

A blast of noise, and scar-face jerked sideways and was crumpling, his face screwed up. Somehow Mazarini could see the detail that his breeches were stained.

Within the room—"Fuck!" Harry was definitely alive in there—another shot. Harry's shotgun, by the sound.

Silence, then. Mazarini got to his feet, saw that scar-face was down, unconscious and bleeding in several places. He shook at his pistol, drew it free. He rapped the butt against his palm, then hauled back on the lock. His mouth was dry. He sidled up to the door.

From within, a slight noise. The light was behind him; if he went in, whoever was within would see him first. "Harry?" he called out.

The only answer, two shots. The first, the throaty cough of a pistol. The second, Harry's shotgun. Then a thud. As, perhaps, of a body hitting the floor.

Mazarini swallowed, then thought to check either way along the landing. Movement. "Arrête-là!" he called out, spinning to level his pistol. Whoever it was, a shape at the far end of the corridor by the stairwell vanished. He ran, realizing only halfway down the corridor that he had just exposed his back. He got to the head of the stairs, shouted down: "Stop him!"

"Stop who?" came back the answer, and mocking laughter.

The twentieth century had some things worth the Ring of Fire to bring them back. "Motherfucker," Mazarini snarled, and felt better for it. On the wall, there was a display of old swords. Better than nothing. He took one down, felt the weight and ill balance of a weapon meant more for battering armor than the singing phrase of steel. He brought it up to a badly balanced mockery of a sabreur's guard and edged back along the corridor, pistol leveled in the other hand, his back to the wall.

A body flew out of the doorway to his chambers; the fright made him squeeze the trigger. Somewhere, something shattered. Whoever it was hit the opposite wall and landed badly.

"Giulio?" It was Harry's voice. "You there?"

"I'm here, Harry."

Harry Lefferts swaggered out of the doorway, the bravo's pose only mildly spoiled by the fact that he was sucking on the knuckles of his right hand. "Three of 'em, there were," he said, taking the knuckles out of his mouth. There was a scorch of powder up the left side of his face. His sawed-off shotgun dangled almost negligently from his left hand, broken open and empty.

"Four," said Mazarini. "One ran."

"Two," said Harry, looking down.

Scar-face was gone. The other seemed to be in poor shape. Mazarini bent to see. "Dead," he said, "or soon will be. I think his skull, perhaps his neck is broken." The man had fouled himself where he lay, his eyes rolled up white.

Harry was looking left and right along the corridor, his hands reloading the shotgun almost automatically. "Glad Dan Frost never took this 'un off me. I gave my other one to Becky."

"Your pistol?"

"I got it. In there." Harry nodded his head back toward the room. "Stripped down for a little servicing. When these jokers turned up I was behind the screen, taking a leak. Lucky I didn't have a lamp on, and the bastards didn't think to check in the wardrobe, which was where I hid."

"Monsignor!" It was the servant from the hallway. "I heard someone shoot—" He stopped, breathless. "Assassins!"

"Well, that was just as convincing as all hell," drawled Harry Lefferts. A flick of the wrist and his shotgun snapped shut.

The servant's face went into a parody of puzzlement. "Monsignor? What did he say?"

"He wants to know how much you were paid not to warn me."

"But Monsignor, I—" The outraged bluster cut off, as Harry poked the muzzle of his sawed-off into the man's belly.

"Ten livres," he said, simply.

"Fair." Mazarini nodded. "And you did not tell them that Monsieur Lefferts was in?"

"Non. I told them he was out. When I heard nothing, I feared the worst for Monsieur Lefferts, and thought that they must have succeeded in killing him quietly."

Harry snorted.

"Now, Harry, let us not be harsh. He thought he could take his ten livres and let these ruffians die at your hand, eh?"

The servant nodded.

"It is probably for the best that I do not know your name, eh?"

Another nod.

"For if I did know it, I might denounce you and you would suffer death on the wheel as an accomplice to murder, yes? But if you leave Paris so I never see you again, you might live a long life."

Nod, nod.

Mazarini took a deep breath. "Go. Now." He did not raise his voice.

The servant ran.

Harry broke open the action on his gun, pulled out the cartridges. "What the hell was that all about?"

Mazarini raised both eyebrows. "But surely you have some idea? Which father or brother or husband—cousin, for that matter—have you outraged most these few weeks past?"

Harry twisted his lip. "Funny, Giulio. Funny. They spoke French, that I do know."

"Which means nothing. Such as they can be hired in any tavern you care to name in this city." He sighed. "I could use a drink," he said, and walked into his chambers.

* * *

Shortly thereafter, the real alarm was raised. Servants—frightened-looking ones, who approached nervously, not wanting to get shot—turned up. Harry spoke to them, and they began to remove the two corpses. The one in the corridor had been relatively decorous. The one Harry had shot at close range was missing a face, mostly.

"The fellow who came a-running was just some footman, been here maybe a week."

"Ah. Perhaps he was a little too glib."

"Whatever. He wasn't going to tell us anything anyhow, Giulio. Nor is anyone else. They thought those guys were just regular visitors. For me, that is." Harry paused a moment. "I think your guy was telling the truth, actually. He didn't tell them I was in, did he?"

Mazarini pondered the matter, briefly. Then, shrugged. "He's gone now."

"Well, perhaps it was an outraged husband. Or father. It'd have to be one from Rome, though, on account of I've steered clear of that here."

Mazarini raised an eyebrow.

Harry grinned. "Honest!"

Mazarini felt his head beginning to ring a little, and sat down. Harry sat as well, reached for the drink that a servant had brought. "Never mind. It's got to be something from Rome, yes?"

"Has it?" Mazarini was suddenly not feeling very subtle.

"Sure, I mean here—in Paris, I mean—you're an ambassador. The one group of people who ain't going to kill you are the French."

Mazarini thought about it. True, he was quite sure the assassins had not been sent by Richelieu. Certainly not after the cardinal's veiled offer that very day and the evident rapport between himself and the queen that very evening.

But "the French" numbered in the millions. Had he somehow gotten wind of Richelieu's scheme—or, more likely, simply read one of those cursed American history books—Monsieur Gaston and his confederates had every reason to want Mazarini dead.

Giulio Mazarini, envoy of the Papacy and possibly the future chief minister of France, rubbed his face. Of course, Monsieur Gaston was only one possibility. In the Europe of the year 1633—and never leaving out of the equation, as Americans liked to say, the long arm of the Ottoman Turk—the workings of diplomacy were often hard to distinguish from murder. The American history books had simply—again, to use an American expression—poured gasoline on the flames.

"Motherfuckers," he said again. And, again, felt the better for it.

* * *

The next morning, Harry Lefferts departed for Grantville. Once astride his horse—he rode the beast easily and gracefully; it was almost frightening the way Harry had adopted the seventeenth century—the young American looked down at Mazarini.

"You'll be all right without me?"

Mazarini smiled crookedly. "I shall certainly miss the security of your shotgun. Not to mention that barbaric knife of yours. But, yes, Harry, I'll be fine. I did somehow take care of myself for thirty years before you showed up, you know."

"Okay, okay. Just checking." Lefferts' face was unusually solemn. "They're all going to be playing for your loyalty, too, Giulio, not just trying to cut your throat. You know it and I know it. Betcha anything the cardinal made you a hell of an offer yesterday."

Not for the first time, Mazarini reflected that there was a keen brain underneath the young American bravo's swagger. Harry had taken to everything in this century with panache and gusto—including scheming and maneuver.

The months they had spent together, if nothing else, would allow no dissimulation. Now that Harry was leaving, Mazarini realized with a bit of a start that he had come to cherish the young American's friendship.

"Yes, he did. And, no, I don't know yet how I will respond."

Harry nodded. "Fair enough. I'm glad my loyalties ain't so complicated." He leaned over and extended his hand. "So long, then. It's been a pleasure, Giulio, really has. However we meet again, I promise there'll be no hard feelings on my part."

Mazarini returned the firm handshake. "Mine, neither."

It was all true enough, he thought, watching Harry trot away. Not entirely comforting, of course. Mazarini had also been one of the witnesses at Harry's duel with the brute Agnelli. Whatever fury there had been in Lefferts' bloody actions of the moment, there had been none shortly thereafter.

"There's a man needed killing," Harry had commented casually, almost cheerfully. "Glad to have been of service."

He'd been quite relaxed about it all. Mazarini had no difficulty at all imagining Harry standing over his own corpse. Sorry, Giulio. No hard feelings, but . . . it had to be done.

So be it. What would come, would come. Mazarini turned back into the comte's domicile, his mind already turning to the maneuvers of the future. Besides, he still didn't know what decision he would finally make, in the end.

Who was to say? The next time he saw Harry Lefferts, he might be shaking his hand again.

Chapter 3

"Fascinating."

Antonio Barberini looked sharply at Vitelleschi. "I do believe, Father, that that is the first word you have spoken in my presence today."

"My apologies, Your Eminence. I was deep in thought." Vitelleschi gave every sign of still having his faculties at their utmost concentration.

Not surprising, that. The narrow, bladelike man who stood in one of the many elegantly decorated reception-rooms of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome had a potent reputation. Father-General Muzio Vitelleschi, like every General of the Societas Jesu before him back to Father Inigo Lopez de Loyola, was a man to be reckoned with. Part of it was the reputation for ferocious learning. Another part, the famous fourth vow of the Society, of personal loyalty and obedience to the pope. Still another, the Society's iron-hard rule of regular and full reporting that made the man who sat at the center of all its lines of communication arguably the best-informed man in Europe.

Mostly, though, it was the sheer effectiveness of the organization that he headed, an effectiveness that had made the Jesuits the target of every Protestant propagandist in Europe. The Jesuits, they said, were like the night: they always returned.

Vitelleschi was regarding Cardinal Barberini with a cool gaze that few cats could have matched. The Jesuit general was an old man, but not stooped. The high-boned, ascetic face was of a piece with the narrow hungry frame. The calm blue eyes and unwrinkled mien spoke of ice water in the veins. Close-cropped hair, a short beard, both snow-white and fussily trimmed.

"You have some thoughts?"

"I was thinking about Giulio Mazarini. The young monsignor is worthy of watching. I have a man who has marked him, and he is most marvelously disingenuous. But the principal matter has to be the doctrine, no?"

"Ah." Barberini looked at the papers on the table. They were a summary, in essence, of the books that Mazarini had brought with him some months earlier from Grantville. Mazarini had written the summary himself, before he left for Paris. It contained the distilled wisdom and positions of a Roman Catholic Church centuries in the future. The American priest in Grantville, a certain Father Mazzare, had insisted that Mazarini present them to the Holy Father.

Barberini had read the accompanying letter written by Father Mazzare. It had been politely—even deferentially—worded, but neither Barberini nor his uncle Pope Urban VIII had any doubt that the letter and the accompanying documents were, in essence, an ultimatum. A declaration of war, if you would—except that the priest was making a final offer to make peace instead. Provided that peace was made on his terms.

Not that Mazzare would have put it that way. Barberini had the sinking feeling that Mazzare was one of those pestiferous clerics who felt quite firmly that he was simply the organ for a greater truth—in his case, the distilled truth of the Roman Catholic Church to which he belonged. He wasn't demanding, however politely, that the Church make peace on his terms, but on its own.

Barberini sighed. Another church, in another universe, whose spokesman in this one felt himself to be its voice—and had the documents to back up his claim. And, clearly, not a man easily intimidated. If the matter was not handled properly, Mazzare could become even more explosive than Martin Luther.

"The doctrine. You have read it?"

Vitelleschi stared hard at the cardinal.

"Forgive me, Father-General," said Barberini. "Have you formed an opinion?"

"I have formed—" Vitelleschi paused. "Several opinions. The first is that any hope of another immediate Counter-Reformation is a slim one. The second is that, while I do not know what the reaction of the Protestants of the future might be, the ones of the present day will almost certainly denounce any new doctrine as strongly as the existing."

Vitelleschi lapsed into silence. Barberini waited him out.

When Vitelleschi spoke again, he turned as much away from Barberini as he could without offering his back. He stared into space, his eyes half-closed. "If we are to act on this at all, we must act subtly. An elegant stroke, I think, needs to be found. One blow that sets in motion all that follows. A 'Vatican Council' is not, I think, that blow."

Barberini was inclined to agree. "I know nothing of the council they have in that other time, but now? I doubt we could even hold the Council of Trent again in these times. Not so? After the breviary fiasco?"

Vitelleschi nodded. His Holiness had, a couple of years before, tried to convene a committee to reform the breviary; it was overdue to be done. Months of bickering had resulted in a testy pope ordering the discussions ended with virtually nothing to show and a breviary that was, if anything, worse than before.

"And have you an opinion as to these new doctrines?" Barberini's aesthete manner was as arch as he could make it. He only technically outranked the father-general, otherwise known as the Black Pope for the power he usually chose not to wield.

"When His Holiness has read sufficient, heard sufficient and prayed sufficient to have an opinion, that will be my opinion also." Vitelleschi's eyes seem to close still further. "If His Holiness wishes my advice, I shall give it, of course. I have, as it happens, read the entirety of the books which Mazarini brought back with him, not simply the summary. But I will speak on each point separately, and in public only if His Holiness asks that of me."

"Thank Christ for hierarchy, eh?" Barberini guffawed, briefly.

Vitelleschi smiled. "I believe we need to take one immediate action. Information is our principal need at this time, and I will send to Grantville for a summary of what they have that we have not already seen. That will inform our thinking in more detail. Most important."

Barberini nodded. "It is. And your plan beyond that?"

"It is not a plan as yet. But I believe that Richelieu is suitably warned of what he is up against, as we took pains to send Monsignor Mazarini and his American companion Signor Lefferts to Paris, however briefly either might have remained. And, in the fullness of time, we will take further action if the Church remains beset by France and Spain in concert."

"You believe this United States could be an ally?"

"I believe they may be convinced to be an effective enemy of our enemy. Allies?" Vitelleschi shook his head. "In a hundred years, perhaps. With much reform in both the Church and in the United States. Perhaps."

Barberini stared hard. "Muzio, either you really are addled in your wits or you are playing the deepest game I have ever seen."

Vitelleschi's smile was, again, brief. "I have learned a thing or two from my brethren in the Japans. I commend their reports to your reading."

Barberini cocked his head on one side. "Muzio, you mentioned reform in the United States. What are you planning?"

"No more than the Society ever plans. We open schools and wait. Give us boys of impressionable years, Your Eminence, and we will answer for the actions of the men."

"Including Tilly? Wallenstein?"

Vitelleschi was not smiling, now. "Yes, Your Eminence. Including the Tilly who tried to prevent the sack of Magdeburg. And including the Wallenstein whose administration of his estates is among the most enlightened in Europe. We will answer for them, for good or ill."

Barberini looked away. It was at moments like this that he was reminded of the vast gulf that separated him—and all of the Barberini clan, including his uncle Pope Urban VIII—from the Father-General of the Societas Jesu. All of them were pious men, to be sure. But none of the Barberini, not even the pope himself, had the pure raw faith of Muzio Vitelleschi.

It was odd, really. Vitelleschi was much like them, in so many other ways. Immensely sophisticated, learned, cosmopolitan—as astute in the devious and intricate corridors of political power and maneuver as any man in Europe. He even shared the Barberini pleasure in art and science. But, in the end, he was no Renaissance prince of the Church. He was shaped and stamped, molded and formed, in the same manner that had produced the Basque soldier who had founded the Jesuits. There was something ultimately medieval about the man.

Not for the first time, also, Cardinal Barberini was relieved that Inigo Lopez had included that fourth vow of obedience. He shuddered to think what Muzio Vitelleschi would be like as an enemy, instead of—as he certainly was—the pope's most faithful servant.

"Venice, then?" he grunted.

"I think so, yes," replied Vitelleschi softly.

Barberini grimaced sourly. "They're difficult, the Venetians."

"So are the Americans." The Father-General of the Jesuits shrugged. "Where better than Venice, to begin the probe?"

Barberini grunted again. "Mazarini as our go-between? That might be dangerous. The man is leaning in three directions at once—toward us, the French, and the Americans. Who knows where he might wind up, in the end?"

Vitelleschi was back to that unnerving, cool stare. "Who better, then, than Mazarini? Do not forget, Your Eminence, that it remains unclear where we might wind up. In the end."

Part I:
September, 1633

She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Chapter 4

"Trade, Michael, trade."

"I know, Francisco, I know." It was late, and Mike Stearns' office in Grantville was as clean and tidy as the presidential staff could keep it after a day measured in the remorseless rhythm of twenty-minute meetings and a two-hour radio exchange session. That is, not very. It felt . . . in need of laundry.

Opening a window wasn't an option. The autumn night that Don Francisco Nasi was musing on was a filthy one, slapping its rain and wind against the glass. It was the kind of night on which bad novels began. Real life, however, served up nights like this in their season without regard to melodramatic need or—Mike winced at the thought—a President who had a hundred-yard dash through the open to get to his bed. His very empty bed, since his wife, Rebecca, was hundreds of miles away, trapped in the Spanish siege of Amsterdam.

"There is still nothing from the vizier," Francisco sighed. "There will be nothing to come."

Mike nodded. Almost a year and a half, from the spring of 1632 onward, of patient and carefully drafted letters, friendly overtures carried to Istanbul by a dozen or more hands, had dropped into a black hole for all the good they seemed to have done. "I'll say this for Richelieu. He may be a damned snake but at least he answers his mail. And accepts ambassadors, even if he does try to—"

Francisco turned and raised an admonitory finger. "Now, we cannot prove that. The English Channel is notoriously thick with pirates."

Mike let out a theatrical groan, and leaned forward to knock his head on his desk. "Francisco," he said, his voice muffled through two inches of paperwork already accumulated for the morrow, "I appreciate you're head of the secret service, but do you have to be quite so cold-blooded? That was my wife on that ship."

"Um." Nasi smiled thinly. "Your wife, yes . . . along with Heinrich Schmidt and as tough a selection of soldiers as you could make. Not to mention Gretchen Richter, who causes bowel movements in princes. As I recall the report, the pirates were lucky to survive at all."

His head still lying on the desk, Mike chuckled harshly. Whatever sour thoughts he had toward the world in general, on this sour night, Mike approved deeply of some of the people in it. Tough soldiers and young women who caused princes to squat on oubliettes being right at the top of his list.

Nasi echoed his chuckle. "You would prefer I stormed to Paris and called the cardinal out? Or just offered to meet his gentiluomo on his behalf? At dawn, with coffee and pistols?" Francisco twisted his mouth in the wry smile that, with a glitter of his dark eyes, served him as uproarious laughter did other men. "The talk of Europe, it will be—the Jew and the Cardinal! To the death! We would get the attention of the grand vizier's diwan then, no error. The sultan, too—he likes a jest, especially if it involves someone getting killed."

Mike sat up. "Yeah, what's the deal there? From your briefings . . ." He suppressed a little laugh. The corps of Jewish merchants who were Grantville's coffee lifeline to Istanbul had taken to PowerPoint and overhead projectors in a way that made Mike despair of the soul of early modern capitalism. One thing their reports were not, as a rule, was brief. "He's mad as they come, according to you, but he seems to be running Istanbul like an effective and dynamic ruler, for a despot. So what is the problem with the sultan?"

"What is not?" Francisco shrugged. "He is a drunkard, a bully and a raving lunatic. He counts a day wasted in which he does not have someone strangled, or better yet kill the wretch himself. At the moment he is convinced that purity of Islam will make his empire the equal of Suleiman the Magnificent's, and so wine and coffee are illegal in Istanbul at last news. Any who disagree, die. He reminds me of a phrase I recently heard Harry Lefferts use: 'shoot a fellow for lookin' at me funny.' "

Mike nodded. Francisco's impersonation of Harry's hillbilly tones was good. "Sounds like Harry. One day I'm going to have me a talk with that boy. Assuming he survives Amsterdam and . . . later ports."

"Oh, no—I rather think Harry was warning his men—pack of pirates, rather—off doing that." Francisco smiled. The friendship that had grown up between the quiet Jewish intellectual and the swaggering—but increasingly suave—hillbilly hard-ass was notorious in the world of Grantville's dark-lanternists.

Mike raised an eyebrow. "You surprise me. Still, it's of a piece with the way Harry's—hold on, where were we?"

Francisco held up a hand. "The digression was my fault. Now, where Harry sees the value in restraining his gorier impulses, the sultan revels in them. He genuinely will shoot a man for looking at him—looking at all, that is."

"So he might take another notion tomorrow?"

"No. Insane, but rational, is my assessment. Of course, I last saw him when he was still a child and under his mother's regency, but—no, leave that aside. Where the sultan's actions may proceed from insane premises, the conclusions and his resolution are remorselessly rational in their deranged context. Mike, have you read Hume's work on this subject? It falls to be published in only a few decades."

"Francisco, I cherish my bone-dumb hillbilly ignorance. Unless it's useful, in which case make sure I get a copy. But for the moment, let's see if I've got this right. We figure he's taken the notion that we're bad news and won't shift unless we make him feel he wants to?"

"Just so. And I think the Hume might be passé in your case, Mike."

Mike harumphed noisily. "Whutaiver," he said, in his best hillbilly drawl. "Don't be telling Frank Jackson about that, willya? The man's looking at me like a dangerous intellectual as it is. Anyway, who put the notion in there, then? His own courtiers, religious leaders, who?"

"Worse. The French."

"Why in the hell—and I ask this in a spirit of pure inquiry—is the sultan taking the word of the French for a single damned thing?" Mike rubbed at eyes grown raw and gritty with a long day's work. "Forgive me, Francisco, if there is something in what you've written that covers this, but . . ."

"I know. We are all at a busy time. What with—" He waved a hand that took in everything from Bohemia to the British Isles, Sweden to Spain. "We are all busy. Now, perhaps some coffee? This discussion may be protracted."

"Sure," said Mike, "a last one for the evening while you tell the story."

Eventually, coffee in hand, Francisco sat on the sofa that was there for the more informal meetings. He looked at it and barked. "Ha!"

"What?" Mike frowned over the rim of his mug.

"Sofa. Kiosk. Divan." He raised his mug in ironic toast. "Kaveh. Coffee. The amount of your language that comes from the Empire—the real Empire, not this cheap imitation Holy Roman thing—"

Mike snorted, nearly having an accident with his coffee.

Francisco continued remorselessly. "All these words in English that started in Turkish. There are probably more, but I have only been here a little less than two years. But I keep hearing little drips of home in a shower of English."

And then he sighed, once, and deeply. "They are all that really survive of the Refuge of the World, as we call it, in your twentieth century's strongest culture. The nation that is there called 'Turkey' was only built, I understand, by sweeping away the rotting shell that it had become. But the glory that was, and still is! Mike, for all that Christian kings of this time talk of dividing the world between them, they are a sorry pack of scoundrels at best. Robber barons, if that. Not all put together could they match the Moghul khan, or the Ming emperor of far Cathay. And even they are as nothing compared to the Sultan of the Two Seas. It is still the strongest empire in the world. Hah! What a thing it is, to know the fate of an empire and mourn the glory it yet has."

Mike nodded, said nothing. For all his own experience of the places Don Nasi talked about, they might as well be on Mars.

Francisco, Don Nasi, man of great affairs in the Confederated Principalities of Europe and the Empire of the House of Osman, sighed again. The weight of four centuries lay heavy on his mind. "Kemal Ataturk and a hundred years of humiliation, Mike. That's what it took, to rescue even a nation from the wreckage of the Empire. You can see it now, if you are told where to look. A people who call novelty heresy, and—but I am rambling. The pith and marrow of the thing, you see, is that France and Germany and England are the edges. The heart of civilization—the very word, civis, says it—is the City. And the City—the City—is Istanbul that was Constantinople that was Byzantium. Mike, out here beyond the edges of that, we are the barbarians. We are without, and within is civilization with its faction fights and revolts and insanities. Out here we have trinkets to sell, each barbarian coming to set out his stall at the center of civilization. And, as the sultan sees it, the biggest barbarian of all is the padishah of the Franks. After all, half of the empire's European trade is with France, since the empire won't let the Venetians be first in anything."

He grinned, then. "And since Richelieu saw us for a threat when first he clapped eyes on us, every message from the French ambassador has dwelt on our irreligion—no established church, practically atheist!—and dangerous innovations. I need hardly mention the detailed accounts of every sedition and fomentation of unrest practiced by the Committees of Correspondence."

Mike grinned at that. "Trust Richelieu to find a way to make capital out of Gretchen! Wait 'til I tell her! She'll love it."

"Truly, Mike, she will. But it goes this far, and no further. There is to be no ambassador from the CPE or Sweden. There is to be no trading capitulation for us. Any person who enters the empire claiming to be from another time shall suffer death. But we subjects of the empire may go forth and buy whatever we wish and bring it back, and any other trade capitulation may sell whatever it wishes also."

"So provided we can get a sales rep in there, we're fine?"

"Oh, even without a formal representative we can do something. But I think you need to talk more with Messer il Doge of Venice."

Mike chewed on his lip, now thoughtful. The outbreak of war had, in some ways, made his job easier. When there were fewer options, the decisions became clearer and the worry was over what the future would leave open to him when he acted as he was forced to. In some ways, this was easier than fretting over whether he had made the right choice. In all the important ways, infinitely harder. This one was a doozy. Trade within the CPE was all very well, but they needed much more than that; if nothing else, critical raw materials that simply couldn't be found within their own borders.

To the west, England was hostile and most of the Low Countries had recently fallen under the Spanish heel. The rump of the United Provinces had little to offer; aid, rather than trade, was the best the CPE could do there. To the east, Poland and the Russias were hellbent on their precious "second serfdom," shackling half a continent back into medievalism. Given luck, a following wind, and a Peter the Great not written out of history by the changes Grantville had made, they might be worthwhile trading partners someday—but not soon. To the southeast, the Austrian Empire was implacably hostile. Granted, since Wallenstein's recent rebellion, Bohemia had become something of a bright spot. But little Bohemia was scarcely going to do more than dent the CPE's need for foreign trade.

To the southwest, France. With whom they were at war. To the south, Bavaria, likewise. Switzerland was the only adjacent territory that was not hostile, but it wasn't worth much as a trading partner. The status of the Swiss as the world's moneybox remained far in the future, though they would cheerfully take money to let anyone cross their land on the way elsewhere. Fortunately, Gustavus Adolphus held enough of the Rhine as their southwest frontier that there was a clear route to Switzerland.

From where, southward, one might reach the Venetian Terrafirma, the hinterland of the port that was the home of the Most Serene Republic of Venice. And, until Switzerland invented the cuckoo clock and no-questions-asked deposit banking, Venice was the only nonhostile trading partner in Europe with money to spend. And, through Venice—if the doge and the Senate and the great houses of Venice could be persuaded—there was access to the Adriatic, the Mediterranean and the Levant.

"Who to send, though?" asked Mike of the air around him.

"Hard. We cannot make the usual consular arrangements there. They don't like Jews in Venice, even if they tolerate our presence. Oh, they like our money and our trade well enough, and they are a polite people for the most part, but we will not get far without a proper embassy with a Christian in charge of it." Francisco sat forward, set down his coffee mug. "You have, as I see it, only two potential ambassadors left who fit the bill and can be spared from other duties."

"Who?" asked Mike.

Francisco told him.

"Well, I will be damned. You reckon they'll do it?"

"Yes. There is the matter of their confidence in their own abilities, but—" He shrugged. "I think they will overcome those qualms if they are convinced it is their duty. One of them is a most conscientious cleric, after all, and the other . . ."

Francisco made a vague gesture, groping for the words.

Mike laughed. "Ha! The phrase you're looking for is 'flower child.' Except that he's old enough now to be willing to grow the flowers himself."

Chapter 5

The Reverend Jones began to cough theatrically.

Father Augustus Heinzerling, SJ, glared at him over the brim of his stout briar pipe. "Ja? We are in the open air here, not so?"

Jones looked back at the heavy German priest with an expression of stunned disbelief. "What? Is there such a thing as open air around that—that substance you smoke? Dang it, this nation isn't supposed to be using chemical warfare."

"Oh, knock it off, Simon." The third pastor at the table came to Heinzerling's rescue. Father Lawrence Mazzare, parish priest at St. Mary Magdalene's church, Grantville, looked up from the page of the book he was holding open. "Gus, smoke if you want, but get downwind."

"Auch Sie?" Heinzerling adopted a wounded tone, but couldn't help his grin. As one of the seventeenth-century clerics who had joined Grantville's cadre of twentieth-century pastors, he had had nearly a year and a half to learn the hard way about the barbaric practice of making the smokers stand outside.

It was, he reflected, one of the odder differences the "up-timers" showed. The Ring of Fire had brought a town full of twentieth-century English-speaking Americans into seventeenth-century Germany. The exigencies of diplomacy, statecraft and espionage—along with the ambition of Mazarini, one of the pope's more promising young ambassadors—had washed Heinzerling up in Grantville. Settling down with his wife and three children—to the mild consternation of the twentieth-century Catholics in town—he was becoming less and less like the Jesuit that the Society had usually been embarrassed to admit it had. Not so much like a proper Jesuit, perhaps, but he could certainly fake being a decent parochial priest on a good day. With a following wind. It was, he thought, a good life if only one didn't weaken.

And now they were putting the finishing touches on a paper intended for the pope—or, at least, the pope's closest advisers. Somewhat to Heinzerling's surprise—and to Father Mazzare's complete astonishment—the shipment of twentieth-century Catholic texts that Mazzare had asked Mazarini to take to the pope the previous year had borne fruit. In the spring of this year, Harry Lefferts had returned from his long sojourn in Italy and France—bearing with him a polite letter from Cardinal Barberini requesting a further amplification of the texts.

The "paper" that had resulted was more in the way of two massive tomes. One of them dealt with the next fifteen years of the Thirty Years' War, and the other with the history of the Catholic Church to the late 1990s.

Giving the war a name was odd, to Heinzerling. He'd never thought of the troubles in Europe as being one war all taken together. He had bounced around the chaplaincies of two imperial armies and an assortment of other postings out of the sight of people of quality. He had never really seen anything to tell him that the series of unpleasant events and occasional bouts of slaughter were part of some larger whole. Somehow, the war didn't seem to deserve anything so grand as a title when you saw it from the inside. It was just an inevitable part of life's condition that had been with him since, practically, his ordination to the priesthood.

Now, Heinzerling had begun to take a keener interest in peace. He was entering upon his fifth decade of life and his little Karl was nearly ten and clamoring to be a soldier—a soldier, yet, with a company of horse manned for the moment almost entirely by Scots Protestants whose current commander Lennox had had the lights punched out of him only six months before in a barroom brawl. By one Gus Heinzerling, SJ. (Only temporarily punched out, alas. The surly Calvinist had regained his senses and his feet and acquitted himself thereafter better than Heinzerling liked to admit.)

Giving the "paper" practical effect was like being back at school, though. Gus had staggered out of the collegium at Köln with his head crammed full of logic and rhetoric and the rest of the trivium and quadrivium and fit to be a faithful soldier of Christ. And now he was having to go through it all again on this latest project of Father Mazzare's.

They had the garden furniture out behind the rectory in the fresh autumn air. Fortunately, yesterday's rains had been replaced by sunshine. Karl, Aloysius and Matthias were getting the barbecue alight in the intense and scientific manner of small boys allowed to play with fire. Hannelore, to his constant pleasure lately become the Frau Heinzerling, was keeping one eye on the boys and the other on her knitting as she chatted with the Reverend Mary Ellen Jones. The Reverend Simon's wife was a minister in her own right and quite the most bizarre thing or person in Grantville as far as Augustus Heinzerling, SJ, was concerned. He kept watching his own wife for signs of getting ideas in that direction and was ready to put his foot down for the first time since he had married Hanni.

The table was spread, for the moment, with books and papers and scribbled notes. Father Mazzare had received a letter from Cardinal Antonio Barberini the Younger asking—asking, mind—for an appreciation of the three hundred years of history, so far as Grantville had the books to give it, that had led to the doctrines and dogma that was in the bundle of books lately sent to Rome by the kind agency of the good Monsignor Mazarini.

It had been easy enough for Heinzerling; the cardinal gave an order, he jumped to it. For Mazzare, it had been more complicated. The first thing he had pointed out was the hedge of ifs and buts and pleases, not an imperative mood in the whole thing. And that glaring subjunctive in it, inviting a caveat wide enough to ride a squadron of lies through, should Mazzare find it so convenient. Someone was setting a subtler test than Father Mazzare's research and reporting skills. His obedience was on trial as well.

There was also nothing in the letter that demanded secrecy, so Mazzare had made an appointment with Mike Stearns as soon as he could, which turned out to be late in the evening. He had been kept waiting, Heinzerling with him, patient in the presidential offices. Mike had returned from some official business or other with Don Nasi and, of all people, Harry Lefferts. Neither of the priests could figure out why, after Mazzare had explained what he had been asked to do, both Harry and Mike had snorted with laughter.

"Just keep it quiet, okay?" Mike had said, "We don't want anyone getting the idea that it's open season on giving out information to the crowned heads of Europe. And run everything you come up with by Francisco here, he's in charge of this stuff now."

Apart from the outburst of laughter, Harry had kept silent, looking thoughtful as Mazzare had explained what Cardinal Barberini wanted. Later the same evening, the young miner-cum-commando had knocked on the rectory door and spent an hour in conversation with Father Mazzare, a conversation that Heinzerling had only vaguely been aware of as muffled voices from downstairs. Heinzerling knew that type, all right. Decent enough on the straight and narrow, well dressed and polite, what the Italians would call an galantuomo. Unleashed or gone bad, nothing but a cold-blooded murderer with a polish of high manners.

The writing-up of three hundred years of theological history was not going to be done overnight, of course. And none of Grantville's Catholic priests—there were five, now, doing pastoral work, two of them in the chapel at what had been a refugee center, one settling in as the high school's Catholic chaplain and Latin master beside the two of them at St. Mary's—had a lot of time to spare. A note went back to the cardinal explaining that the work was in hand amid the pressure of pastoral work and the thing began to take shape.

The pastors of the other churches had pitched in to lend an ecumenical perspective—even the endearingly deranged Reverend Al Green, whose effort to portray three hundred years of post-Reformation rapprochement as the Catholic Church's progress toward the doctrine of justification by faith alone had had to be quietly but firmly edited out. The one exception, of course, had been the Reverend Enoch Wiley, whose blistering denunciation of the papacy as the Antichrist and the Whore of Babylon had smoked its way into the rectory mailbox in response to the invitation. Father Heinzerling, formed in a world in which people tended to take action on the basis of their convictions, had been somewhat dubious about Mazarre's reassurances that no mayhem would follow. His fellow down-timer, the Jesuit Von Spee, had actually admired the letter: "Classical Calvinist imagery, Gus, deftly applied. It's astonishing, really, how well he employs it, given that Father Mazarre has informed me that the man is neither a scholar not trained in rhetoric."

Now there remained only the final edit before any of their dwindling supply of electric typewriter ribbon was committed to the project. And there was another of the many little ironies created by the Ring of Fire. The up-timers considered typewriters "antiques" and made jokes about using them. But down-time artisans would pay a small fortune to get their hands on one—manual typewriters even more than electric—so they could disassemble them and begin designing what would soon become the cutting edge of a new world's literary technology. Indeed, the first seventeenth-century typewriter had just appeared on the market. It was a great, monstrous clumsy thing, which almost needed to be operated by fists instead of fingers. It was also selling like the proverbial hotcakes.

The Reverends Jones had suggested a barbecue, and so the crisp autumn air was being blued with smoke while the ladies maintained Grantville's internal lines of communication and the menfolk finished what Jones kept calling the "First Letter of Mazzare to the Romans."

"Nope," said Mazzare, interrupting Heinzerling's smoker's reverie. "Unitatis redintegratio was 1964. We've been admitting you heretics were human for nearly twenty years longer than you thought, Simon, and I suspect even before that."

"Ha!" Jones reached for his beer. "Typical of the Whore of Rome. Denying innocent Protestants the joy of a good propaganda line. You'll be telling me next that all the stuff I got out of Jack Chick comics has to come out, too?"

"Well, if it stays in, we have to explain why the Church in the twentieth century sanctioned the eating of babies at mass—"

Heinzerling broke in. "—when as any fool knows it is only on high days and holy days we do this in these more civilized times, ja?"

Mazzare shot him a look that suggested there might be a lecture later. Damnation, the man was only two years older than he was, there was no need for him to pretend to be some kind of father-figure.

The Reverend Jones was trying not to snork beer out of his nose. When he recovered, he said, "But seriously, though, what do you expect the cardinal will do with all this, beside use it to dither even longer about what to do with all this?"

Heinzerling realized that that was one he could answer. "Perhaps I might assist, ja? It is not perhaps the cardinal who wishes it, I think. I have made such reports before."

"Oh?" asked Mazzare.

Both of the up-time clerics looked at him expectantly, and at each other. Behind him, he could all but hear the other Reverend Jones—another cleric, he forced himself to remember—staring at his back. "Ja. You do not forget that I am of the Societas Jesu? Such reports are the common coin of life in the Society, if one is about its work. All go, eventually, to the father-general."

"And he's asked for this through Cardinal Barberini?" Jones looked thoughtful.

"From what I hear of this particular Cardinal Barberini he is not much given to deep reading." That much he had had from the gossip in Avignon, and confirmed from Mazarini as well. Cardinal Antonio Barberini the Younger was not in the studious, pious mould of his namesake uncle or his elder brother. A butterfly who ended up in the Church for no compelling reason and whose sole mission in life was to beautify his surroundings. Worthy, certainly, but hardly a scholastic heavyweight. "He is more concerned with things of art and beauty, and hang the consequences."

"Quod non facet Barberi, facerunt Barberini," quoted Mazzare.

"Uh, whut? This here hillbilly preachuh don't get none of that thar Romish jabber." For all his affected accent, Jones was the only one present not wearing a meshback cap against the bright sun, even if he was the only one with actual hillbilly roots.

Heinzerling could parse the Latin. " 'What the Barbarians did not do, the Barberini did,' " he translated. "But what does this mean?"

Mazzare smiled. "I shall add a note to our report. The Pantheon at Rome had its bronzes stripped for a Barberini creation of some sort, I forget what. I do remember the pasquinade, though. I think we need to warn the cardinal that he should not tear down ancient monuments to save a few scudi on the beautification of Rome."

"Well, since we're warning against every other error the Church made, I don't see why not." Jones eyed the pile of manuscript in the middle of the table. "There's a lot there. A good ten inches of history, all stacked up neat."

Heinzerling regarded the pile thoughtfully. He had ended up writing most of it longhand, having the only decent handwriting of the three of them. His hand still ached at the memory of it all. "I was telling about the father-general. Muzio Vitelleschi."

"Oh?" Mazzare looked more alert. "I didn't think you had to do with him, Gus."

"No, ordinarily I do not. The father-general commands the provincial, who commands the heads of houses and collegia, who tell the priests what to do. And reports go back the same way. This is how it is done. But I came here by accident, found myself doing pastoral work, and was ordered to stay. The Society takes the resources it finds to use."

Heinzerling paused a moment. "I speak no secrets, you understand? The Society does God's work as well as it may and with what it finds to hand. It gives the opinion of stealthiness, dishonesty at times. What some would call . . . I am sorry, I do not know the English word. Scheinheilig? Holy-seeming, but without the reality?"

"Hypocritical," Jones supplied. "I guess the Jesuits do have a reputation for a certain, uh, moral flexibility?"

"Moral flexibility, no. Moral absolutes, and practical flexibility." Heinzerling nodded. He couldn't think how long it had been since he read Saint Ignatius' Exercises. Or, for that matter, how long since he'd even owned a copy. He felt a pang.

"You were saying, Gus?" Mazzare's tone was gentle.

Heinzerling realized how transparent he had been. "So, the Society does what it may. Here, it has me in place and must needs ignore the fact that I have twice been so close—" he held up thumb and forefinger "—to being declared incorrigible."

The other two priests nodded. Heinzerling was not proud of the way he had been. He was prepared to admit that he had been a sorry excuse for a Jesuit, even if he was about par for a regular priest in the seventeenth century, of any denomination. It was only being able to settle down, acknowledge Hannelore publicly and follow what shreds of his vocation remained to him that had let him be anything other than a brawling, drunken loser. There were very few clerics that weren't, but the Society expected—and usually got—better.

"And so," he went on, "I am instructed direct from the father-general that I must see that Father Mazzare does not stint with his researches, that he is complete and thorough and finds time to do it in a timely manner. Be a good curate, in other words."

Mazzare chuckled. "Actually, you are that. All we have to get you cured of is that filthy thing." He waved at the pipe.

"This is not so bad," Heinzerling said. "It is a less rough smoke than the clay pipe. And lasts longer also. And the Turkish tobacco is much sweeter, not so?"

Heinzerling cringed as his wife spoke from behind him. "No, Herr Mazzare, you tell this fat fool! As soon as I hear from the Doctor Nichols about the canker in the lungs, I am telling him to quit. And telling him and telling him."

"Oh, leise," he said over his shoulder. "Nur ein, ja? Just a little pleasure?"

Hannelore rolled her eyes to heaven. "Did I think he would listen, when he said he would marry me? Did I? Mary Ellen, tell me it is easier if you are a minister yourself, please? Might I become a nun and make this fool see sense?"

"Hanni," said Mary Ellen, "if there's any of them that aren't so dumb they wouldn't listen to Almighty God Herself, I haven't met him yet."

"Gus, you see what you've provoked?" said the other Reverend Jones. "And I'd give up now, frankly."

Heinzerling looked sharply at Mazzare, who was keeping his face straight. He harumphed. "As I was saying. The father-general writes to me, saying that this report is to be made. And that the order will come from Cardinal Barberini. Of course, it must. How can the father-general of the Society order a lay father like Herr Mazzare? So he asks a cardinal and a prince of the Church, and the pope's nephew, to send the order."

Mazzare nodded. "And so here it is," he said. "Three hundred years. Three hundred years of every book we have left in town, everything the schoolteachers could supply from the French and Spanish history they had at home and, God help us, some stuff we cribbed from historical romances."

"Yup. Just got to get it typed and sent off." The Reverend Jones looked at the pile of notes, and at the beer stein in his hand. "Hmm," he said, "Gus, how are those boys of yours coming along with the fire? I feel a primal urge to burn food coming on."

"I should never have let him read that stuff about pre-Christian religion," said Mary Ellen. "He took to burnt offerings a mite too well."

Chapter 6

The barbecue had done its work and they were munching on ribs and chicken to Mary Ellen Jones' recipe. The boys were sticky all over with barbecue sauce. The adults were being as careful as they could with napkins—which, as always with barbecue, meant just about as sticky. Father Mazzare reflected that on afternoons like this, with a good bellyful of barbecue and a stein of good beer, it was possible to be very content with life.

"Hello the house!" came a call. Mazzare thought he recognized the voice of Mike Stearns, and he got up to greet him.

"Hello yourself!" he called back, heading toward the path around the side of the rectory. "We're in back; come on round."

It was indeed Mike Stearns, and he had brought Francisco Nasi with him. "Resting from your homework, Father?"

"Just about done, as it happens. Have a seat, Mike, Francisco. A few bits left to add, one more read-through and then we can type it up."

"Good, good," Mike said. Mazzare sensed he had something on his mind, and decided to let him come to the point however he saw fit. Nasi was his usual serene self, nodding as greetings went around and deferring to Mike in the making of small talk. The weather continued fair, the Heinzerling boys were looking well, and small wonder, the cooking smelled like it had been good, everyone was well, the pressures of the Mike's job were bearable for the moment but, of course, everyone was worried about Rebecca in Amsterdam and the people in the Tower of London.

"In fact," said Mike, after that last topic had been appropriately commiserated on, "that was what I came to talk to you about."

"The situation in England?" Mazzare frowned. He didn't know much more about that than he could have gotten from any newspaper. And if it was a theological problem, it wasn't his field at all. In fact, the nearest thing Grantville had to the Anglican Communion was the Reverends Jones and their congregation, and the history of Methodism didn't start for another century, and that with their divergence from the Church of England. Mazzare idly wondered what Wesley would do when he showed up.

Except he wouldn't, Mazzare knew. There would be no John Wesley in this universe. Wesley hadn't been born until early in the eighteenth century, and Tom Stone had once explained to Mazzare that the so-called butterfly effect would have started scrambling the gene pool in Europe immediately after the Ring of Fire. Within days, apparently, spreading out from Thuringia with incredible speed. By now, Tom had said firmly, it would have swept the entire globe.

Mazzare had found that hard to believe, at first. That the butterfly effect was real, of course, he didn't doubt for a moment. He had only to look around him to see the many ways in which the Ring of Fire had changed Europe in less than three years. But the idea that its effects could be felt that quickly, and across such a great distance . . .

Tom had shaken his head. "You're mixing apples and oranges, Father. Sperm cells are a lot more sensitive to the environment than kings and queens—or housewives, for that matter. You'd be amazed how little it takes—"

There had followed a lengthy explanation in far more detail than Mazzare could follow. But, at the end, he'd been convinced that almost anyone who'd been conceived very long after the Ring of Fire in their old universe would never exist in this one. Although he had, smilingly, cautioned Tom not to tell Rebecca Stearns whenever she returned from Amsterdam that her much-prized adopted son "Baby Spinoza" probably wasn't Spinoza at all.

"Not to worry," Tom had replied, grinning. "In the immortal words of Muhammad Ali, 'I'm bold but I'm not crazy.' " Then, much more seriously: "It doesn't matter anyway. Whoever the kid is, genetically, he'll be awfully close to the original. And since his environment's been completely changed, he wouldn't grow up the same even if he does have the identical genome. So who cares? All that matters now is that he's Mike and Rebecca's kid."

It made Mazzare dizzy, sometimes, trying to follow the logic of the causal loops caused by the Ring of Fire. In this universe, "Methodism" would be founded, more than by anyone else, by the only two Methodist ministers in the world: his good friends Simon and Mary Ellen Jones. But when he'd said that to Simon once, his friend had shaken his head. "No, not really. Because we trace where we come from back to John Wesley—so he still does exist in this universe. If you look at it the right way. His soul exists here, even if his chromosomes never will."

Mazzare could hardly argue with that. Whatever other doctrinal disputes he had with Simon Jones, the primacy of the spirit over matter was not one of them.

But he was woolgathering, he suddenly realized, while Mike had been talking. He was jolted out of the half-reverie by the last phrase Mike had spoken.

"—like to offer you a job."

Mazzare sat up abruptly. "I've, ah, already got one." He gestured vaguely at the bulk of St. Mary's over the fence of the rectory garden. He was uncomfortably aware of having missed something important. Beer at lunchtime probably wasn't a good idea, however nice a day it was, and whatever down-time custom might have to say on the matter.

"Yes, but this one's important, and for the government," Mike replied. "And I don't think we've got a better man for the job available, frankly. I want you to be an ambassador."

"I can't!" Mazzare protested, almost as a reflex. "Anyway, parish priest's a very important job by itself." So's ambassador, a treacherous little part of him said. He grabbed for the first lifeline to hand. "Anyway, I can't. Separation of Church and State."

"Ah, not so," said Nasi. "We rather ignore your status as an ordained minister—"

"Priest!" Mazzare barked, wincing as soon he did so. Just because he was suddenly panicking, there was no reason to be rude.

"Priest, I thank you for the correction," Nasi continued smoothly, "but we employ you in a secular capacity, if you follow me?"

Mazzare spotted the flaw immediately. "My parish, Don Francisco. This is my first responsibility, the cure of souls or to see it discharged. If you found a curate for me, another curate rather, while I'm away, that's the state funding the church right there."

"Again, and with the greatest of respect, not so, Father." Don Nasi gave every impression of already having reached this point in the argument and having passed it some time ago. "Your stipend as an ambassador will be suitably generous to compensate you for the expenses of the post. Insofar as you choose to disburse some of it to a curate, that is done by you in your private management of what is, in law, your own household. Not a matter for the State at all."

Mazzare detected the authentic whiff of lawyering. A sort of brimstone reek. He fumed to himself, keeping his face straight the while.

For all of Nasi's smooth legalese, there was still a real problem involved. Since the Reformation, southern Thuringia's Catholic Church had ceased to exist—there were no archdeaconries, no dioceses, no Catholic ecclesiastical administration of any kind. The impact of the Thirty Years' War, especially since Gustav Adolf's decisive victory at Breitenfeld two years earlier, had spread the disorganization into the parts of Franconia that made up the remainder of the territory that Grantville was managing for the Swedish king. The bishops of Wuerzburg and Bamberg were in exile at the Habsburg court, as was the prince-abbot of Fulda. The archbishop of Mainz had fled in the other direction, to Cologne, also outside of the CPE, which removed that link in the religious chain of command.

The normal clear hierarchies simply didn't exist any longer in Thuringia and Franconia. For all practical purposes, there was nobody between Father Larry Mazzare and . . . well, the pope himself. Although Mazzare always insisted that he was simply a parish priest, in fact he'd increasingly been playing the informal role of "the bishop of Thuringia and Franconia."

That was part of the reason, of course, that the Jesuits were so eager to come to Thuringia and set up shop. Protestants in the area tended to view their activities as part of a fiendish Jesuitical plot. But Mazzare knew that most of the explanation was simply that the Jesuits were delighted not to face the usual hassles with a diocesan bishop.

So. It would have to be a curate hired by Mazzare himself while he was off—he stamped down hard on that thought. Granted, it was flattering that they thought he was up to . . .

No. Blast it, I'm just a parish priest!

"I can't," he said, trying to be as firm about it as he could. Listening to himself, he thought he was just doing a good job of sounding obdurate.

"Sure you can," replied Mike, relaxed. "In fact, you're perfect for the job."

"I'm not related to you," Mazzare retorted. "That was why you had to send Rita and Rebecca, wasn't it? Put your own good name on the line, and all that?"

"Priests do the same job, you know. Look at what Father Joseph does for Richelieu, or the emperor's confessor, what's his name—"

"I'm not your confessor. You're not even Catholic, Mike." Mazzare had an inkling of where this particular line was going, and didn't much like it.

"I'm not really much of anything, religion-wise," Mike said, raising his hands. Rough hands, Mazzare noted. No strangers to hard work. Hard, unsentimental work. "It's something I rather tend to gloss over, of course, when it comes up. Especially these days, when everyone and his dog in Europe wants to know."

"So you're sending me somewhere Catholic, then? Is that how it is, Mike?" Mazzare realized he sounded peevish, which only made him more peevish. "You want to dissemble yourself as a Catholic?"

Mike never even blinked. "I swear, Father, that thought hadn't occurred to me."

He looked as sincere as Shirley Temple. Mazzare didn't believe it for an instant. Whatever else he was, Mike Stearns was the slickest politician Mazzare knew.

"It had occured to me," said Francisco Nasi, suddenly blunt and pugnacious in his manner; from the courtier to the bazaar-haggler in barely a heartbeat. "Father Mazzare, I will not try to pour sugar on this. A mission to Venice, which is indeed Catholic, is vital to our interests—and possibly even our survival. Your presence as leader of that mission represents the best hope we may have of the success of that mission. And, yes, the fact that you are a Catholic priest is part of what fits you so well for the task. For all that nearly everything in Venice turns on money and trade, Father, they need to see a face of Grantville they can trust. Even had we all our pool of potential ambassadors present in Grantville to choose from, most are women, or Jewish."

"Or Jewish women," Mike added, with a brief flash of a grin.

"Just so," said Nasi. "You, Father, are a Catholic priest and, however indirectly"—he gestured at the notes, now weighted down with a brick on the chair where they had been put out of the way—"you have the ear of the pope. Added to this, you are an up-timer and, if you will permit me the compliment, renowned as a man of conscience and integrity among the diplomats of Europe."

"Come again? That last part?" Mazzare shook his head. "Hardly anyone outside this town knows me at all, let alone well enough to give me a character reference."

There was genuine warmth and humor in Nasi's laugh, for all its quietness and brevity. "No, Father Mazzare, many have heard of your reputation. For one thing, you count among your acquaintances one of the rising stars of modern diplomacy, Monsignor Mazarini, and he is, when not keeping secrets, a terrible gossip. Well, not a 'gossip' exactly—nothing that man says is uncalculated. For another thing, surely you cannot think you have escaped the notice of the spies that infest this town?"

"Place is thick with 'em," Mike added. Though he didn't seem terribly aggrieved at the thought.

"Oh, quite," said Nasi, smiling widely. "It is all I can do not to have a guidebook printed so as to be sure that they get everything. Most helpful, in the matter of sending clear messages to our adversaries."

Mazzare gave a little shudder at the kind of mind that would welcome and take advantage of pervasive espionage. For all his affable urbanity, Don Francisco was a deeply devious man. He was, after all, from the city that gave the world the term "Byzantine" in the first place.

"Why would they be interested in me?" he asked, almost afraid of the answer.

"They pay attention to all the churches in this town," Nasi answered. "Also attracting them was the fact that Monsignor Mazarini paid you close attention and in his own person carried your first message to Rome. A message, I might add, that it is widely known was read by either the pope or one of his closest advisers. Hardly the sort of thing that characterizes 'a simple parish priest.' "

Mike snorted. "Hardly. Come on, Larry, cut it out." He gave Mazzare a hard and level gaze. "You know perfectly well that you're in a special position in this world. And, by now, probably the most famous 'simple priest' since a guy named Martin Luther." He pointed a finger at the thick stack of paper on the chair. "Do you really think the pope asks every 'simple parish priest' to send him a tome on theology?"

Mazzare didn't try to meet the gaze. Mike was right, and he knew it. He'd known it since the day he decided to ask Mazarini to take those first books to Rome.

For the first time, be began seriously considering the matter. Where would he do more good?

Hesitations came first. "I don't know anything about Venice, especially not in this day and age. And what I know about diplomacy and negotiations you could . . ." Metaphor failed him. "It's not very much. Nothing, come right to it."

Nasi waved those objections aside. "Briefings. Training. Weeks of it. We do not propose to send you on the morrow. Then, when you reach Venice, there will be a staff from the Abrabanel and Nasi holdings in the city to advise you and to handle the details of negotiations. Finally, Father Heinzerling here has some experience as a diplomatic aide."

"Gus?" Mazzare looked sharply at his curate. "Did you have a hand in this, this—?"

Not a muscle moved in Heinzerling's face. "Don Nasi inquired, and I informed him that there would be no difficulty in obtaining the services of a curate or two during any time we spent away. He did not say for how long, where, or on what particular business."

The trouble with Gus, Mazzare thought as he parsed that, was that it was desperately easy to assume that he was plain and straightforward all the time, rather than just most of it. The man could be damnably devious when he put his mind to it, and his loyalty to his parish priest would probably cause him to. The trouble was that his idea of Mazzare's best interests was decidedly seventeenth century. Heinzerling was bound and determined that Larry Mazzare would become—bare minimum—a bishop. In this day and age, that almost required political prominence.

Mazzare sighed. He didn't doubt that Gus' conversation with Francisco had gone considerably beyond the possibility of getting curates while they were away. Nasi seemed to be altogether too well prepared for this meeting for Mazzare's liking.

Nothing for it, then, but to bull ahead. "All right, Gus, who did you sound out for the job?"

"Father Kircher." Again, not a muscle in Heinzerling's face betrayed him. "He is willing, and kind enough to find his own assistant priest if asked to undertake the parochial work here at St. Mary's in addition to his duties at the school."

Mazzare tried not to laugh at his own defeat. Kircher, no less!

Athanasius Kircher, SJ. Scientist, scholar, and all round genius, was willing to cover his parochial work? The Jesuits must be very keen to see Mazzare get on. Kircher had made the first serious attempt on Egyptian hieroglyphics, some of the first experiments in rocketry, was a known man in the fields of physics and chemistry. The only reason he hadn't been remembered as a great astronomer was because Galileo and Kepler were his contemporaries and were more dedicated to it than he was.

And this—this genuine polymath—was willing to add ten masses, confession, novena and benedictions to his working week? So that Father Lawrence Mazzare could junket to Venice?

"It's a done deal, isn't it?" he said to Mike.

"You can always say no."

"How? With everyone, including at least one leading light among the Jesuits, greasing the rails, all this effort to get me to agree, how can I refuse?" There, that put it in terms his conscience could handle.

Mike had the good grace to look embarrassed. "Look, Father, I'm sorry and all, but I wouldn't be pressing so hard if it wasn't so important."

A sudden wild whim overtook Mazzare. He turned to Jones, who had been watching the conversation in silence, his head following the action like a tennis spectator. "Simon, how about it?"

Jones swallowed, hard, before replying. "Larry, I can't decide for you, you know that. It sounds like there's nothing to get in your way, though, and I think you'd be good with a bit of training. Seriously."

"No, not that. I mean, do you want to come to Venice with me? Call it 'assistant ambassador,' or whatever the appropriate diplomatic title is. Show 'em we're not just Catholics here, and that religion is completely separate from politics?"

"He's starting already," Mike said.

Jones went a little pale. "Me? Why?"

"I'm going to need help."

"You should, Simon, if there's a place for you," said Mary Ellen, over her knitting but not actually looking up. "I can fill in for you while you're gone. And you can bring me back some of that nice Venetian glassware I've always wanted."

Jones, in that moment, looked like Mazzare felt.

Chapter 7

Frank Stone had every nerve, every fragment of concentration on the ball, the wide-open goal, Klaus off his goal-line and with the evening sun in his eyes—

—and so he never saw Aidan pounding in from his left to slide in for the ball in a spray of turf and distinctly seventeenth-century English.

Frank's cry of alarm was part scream, part roar, part a word that would have gotten him a real old-fashioned look from Magda. His new German stepmom had learned about some parts of modern English with surprising speed.

He kept his feet, just barely. The ball went out of play in a low, curving loop, just as the whistle blew for full time. "Damn," said Frank. And, with more feeling, "Damn!"

Away on the other side of the eighteen-yard box, Heinrich jogged to a halt. His expression said it all. Had Frank managed to cross the ball, Klaus' sloppy goalkeeping had left the net wide open for the winner to go in: as it was, the game had finished three-all. Freda, back at the other end of the pitch, wasn't much better than Klaus—she got focused on the main attack and a good cross or diagonal through ball could easily leave her off her line and the net wide open for a sneaky striker to score.

Part of the problem, Frank decided, as he heaved air back into his lungs, was that most of the sports-minded Germans seemed to have taken up baseball. That just plain wasn't fair. True, the up-timers had fixed on baseball as a strong reminder of home. On the other hand, they had been dropped back in time into the nation that had produced Beckenbauer and Klinsman and . . .

Frank decided wishing soccer was more popular wasn't going to get him to the showers any quicker. He staggered over to where Aidan was flat on his back in the penalty box, and leaned down to help him up.

Aidan was just about everything Frank wasn't. Frank was an up-time American, raised on a hippie commune dedicated to peace, egalitarianism and really, really good weed. Aidan Southworth was a seventeenth-century Catholic English mercenary, formerly of the Spanish army in Flanders. He'd been taken prisoner at the Wartburg the year before, when the Spanish troops had surrendered after the fortress was bombarded with napalm. Thereafter, he'd elected to stay in Grantville and was now back at school to "get his letters." Aidan had decided to try to make a military career in the armed forces of the CPE, in the Grantville regiments of which literacy was a requirement to advance beyond the rank of private soldier.

Aidan had said he knew no other trade and wanted to learn none for the time being. Soldiering was what he knew and he'd stick with it until he had a little put by. Privately, Frank wondered if Aidan knew what he was letting himself in for. From Aidan's accounts of drinking, fornicating and fighting his way across Europe since going to war alongside his father as a twelve-year-old drummer boy, he was likely to find life in the CPE's increasingly professional armed forces a mite boring.

"Th'art quick, Frank," said Aidan, as he got to his feet, "but not quick enough, eh?"

Aidan's English had been all but incomprehensible when he'd first arrived at school. He'd been from Lancashire, where apparently the English were mostly still Catholic, and had never bothered to learn the more comprehensible speech of the south of England, and simply got by in Spanish and Dutch instead. He'd picked up American English fairly quickly, though.

"Aidan, I'm quick enough not to get cropped by a dirty fouling English bastard like you."

Aidan laughed. "That'd be dirty, fouling, literate English bastard, thank ye kindly."

"Cool!" Frank grinned. "You passed, then?"

Aidan grinned back. "That I did. I learned on't this day, and shall have my ticket for it directly."

"Great!" Frank realized his own feelings were a bit mixed on the subject. On the one hand, he'd rather looked forward to a spell in the army—he'd been just that bit too young for the fighting the year before. On the other hand, reforms had just been announced to the effect that the army was going all-volunteer and more professional. Frank Jackson's take on military punctilio—which was largely that it was horse manure that he couldn't be bothered with—was going out of the window. There were already uniforms and drill starting to appear around town, and the U.S. Marine Horse were looking decidedly smart lately.

Frank wasn't sure he wanted any part of that kind of thing. Even if he'd be allowed to join the military at all, for that matter. Frank served as his father's chief assistant and bottlewasher in the pharmaceutical end of his business—with his brothers, Ron and Gerry, being respectively the second and third assistants—and Frank knew that the powers-that-be considered him far more useful in that capacity than as another spear-carrier. He fell into the category of "critical industrial worker." The one time he'd raised the matter with Frank Jackson, the head of the army had quietly told him he'd be a lot happier if Frank kept working to save ten sick or wounded U.S. servicemen than signing up to maybe kill one French or Spanish soldier.

"Wouldst have a beer with me?" Aidan asked. "In celebration?"

"Oh, sure. We'll get Gerry as well, and Ron if he's not busy." That was something neither Frank nor his two younger brothers had any trouble with. Up-time and down-time attitudes to drinking had met somewhere in the middle, though probably a bit nearer the seventeenth-century side of the issue. The down-timers in Grantville had gotten used to water that was relatively safe to drink, and the up-timers had gotten used to beer that was worth drinking for its flavor.

"Uh, I'd better check in with home first, though." Frank and his brothers Gerry and Ron had come home the best part of paralytic one night, and their father had gotten the nearest he ever did to angry. The sons all thought Tom Stone's attitude was decidedly irrational. Not to mention unfair. He'd spent a lot of his twenties in alternative states of mind, after all. But now he regarded getting anything more than a little buzzed as a serious personal failing. Tom had pulled his usual sneaky parental trick of relying on his sons' senses of personal honor and responsibility, and Frank felt he had to check in now when he was going for a beer.

"Okay," said Aidan, "Telephone after we get out of the shower, yes?"

* * *

The telephone rang and rang. "Come on, Dad," Frank muttered.

"No answer?" Frank heard the English accent behind him, and turned around. Aidan was out of the shower, and dressed up for the evening. Frank was briefly thankful that his dad's dyeing business brought a lot of samples and spare swatches of cloth, so lately the whole family was very well dressed—except his dad, whose fashion sense had run aground somewhere around 1973.

"No, not yet—" he said, but then his stepmother's voice came on the other end of the line.

"Lothlorien Farbenwerke," she said.

Frank still found his stepmom's telephone manner funny. Magda might have been married to Dad for well over a year and part of an up-time equipped household for a little longer, but for some reason she still retained a slight awe of the telephone. Television she had no trouble with, and the washing machine and vacuum cleaner she regarded as God's fitting apology to womankind for inflicting untidy males on the world, but telephones still left her slightly nervous.

"Magda?" Frank found it best to give her something simple to settle into the conversation with. He knew she would have hesitated while the phone rang, looking to see if someone was around to answer it instead.

"Ja, hier," she said. "Is that you, Faramir?"

Frank winced. Cringed, in fact. The big, big downside to a hippie upbringing, the thing that completely made up for the freedom other kids didn't get, was the wanton cruelty with which the flower-children had named their own kids. He was, by his paperwork, Faramir Stone. And his brothers—the relationship wasn't quite that clear-cut but his brothers they were—had the names Gwaihir and Elrond to live down. Any one of them would sooner have been called Sue. Every record bar their birth certificates—Dad had had this much decency—recorded them as Frank, Gerry and Ron. Magda, German right the way down, insisted on using the names with which their birth certificates had been gestempelt.

On the plus side, there were a lot of folks in Grantville these days with more exotic names, and apart from the few who'd bothered to look Tolkien up they were just three more foreign-sounding names out of hundreds.

Of course, in Thuringia, Frank, Gerry and Ron could be said to sound foreign anyway.

"Yes, Magda, it's me. Frank. I'm calling to check if it's okay if I—and Gerry and Ron if I can find them—go for a dinner and a few beers at the Gardens? Aidan is celebrating finishing summer school."

"Aidan?" Magda was an artist in the kitchen and Dad had high praise for her as a business manager—her own father had taught her to keep books—but she sometimes had trouble matching faces to names before the sixth or seventh meeting.

"Sergeant Southworth." Frank braced himself.

"Ah." There was a freight of meaning in that syllable.

Frank held his breath. The general attitude toward soldiers among the Germans was not good. The professionalization of the U.S. Army—even Frank Jackson's loose attitudes were practically Prussian by local standards—was helping, but few people had shaken off the attitudes of a life during wartime and Magda was no exception. Frank could also see her trying to place Aidan's face among the small army of lifters and shifters that the Lothlorien commune had employed. A lot of summer-school students had supplemented their money by doing a few hours a week casual work at the new dye plant.

"Your father should speak of this," she said at last, "but he is out. With the President, and Doctor Nichols."

Frank could practically smell the snobbery coming out of the telephone, and saw his chance. Magda was still smitten with Dad—and rightly so—but she visibly wanted him to act more like the captain of industry he was well on the way to becoming. Hobnobbing with the President was about the speed she wanted him at. "Well," said Frank, "if Dad's with the President, we don't want to distract him because Gerry and Ron and me are going for a beer at the Gardens with Aidan. Can you tell him when he gets home?"

Silence at the other end of the phone. Then: "Just so. Don't be late, and be respectable, yes?"

"Sure, Magda. And thanks." He put the phone down after saying goodbye with the definite feeling she was no more fooled than anyone had been the last time a couple of Dan Frost's boys had brought all three of them home from where they had "just been tired" on a bench halfway between the Gardens and home. On the other hand, Magda hadn't minded so much. They hadn't been fighting, and as far as she was concerned overdoing it and having to be helped home was something boys did from time to time.

"A'reet?" Aidan was waiting.

"Sure. C'mon, we'll see if we can find Gerry and Ron before we head back to town. I figure we earned them beers."

Aidan grinned. "I've scrip and reason to spend it," he said, and held up a wad of the new funny-looking dollar bills. Frank found them a bit embarrassing, frankly, what with the hand his dad had had in the design.

It was another of those oddities—weirdities, Frank thought of them—that the Ring of Fire had produced in the world, in the Year of Our Lord 1633 in Universe Whichever. With the influx of American technology and the political stability provided by the army of the new U.S., Thuringia had quickly become the strongest economic province in war-ravaged Germany. That meant the U.S. dollar was also the strongest currency in Gustav Adolf's ramshackle Confederated Principalities of Europe.

On the other hand, given that "George Washington" and "Abe Lincoln" meant nothing at all to ninety-nine percent of the population of the CPE, Mike Stearns had decreed that new designs were needed for the various dollar bills. And, since Frank's father Tom was the only manufacturer of a waterproof green ink in the world, he'd more or less been able to finagle his designs onto an unsuspecting universe.

Frank could live with an eight-point buck as the central symbol on the one-dollar bill, hands kneading dough for a five-dollar bill and a loaf of bread for a ten-dollar bill, even if he thought the puns were pretty outrageous. But, even for his dad, putting Johnny Cash on the twenty-dollar bill was going over the edge.

* * *

Some people joked that the Thuringen Gardens ought to have been the location of the new Grantville mint. Since the place seemed to have a license to print money, they said, they might as well actually do it there and save on freight.

It was not that there was any shortage of places in Grantville for the hungry—and thirsty—to seek refreshment and unwind. There were places with fancier food, finer drink, and all manner of other selling points.

The Gardens, though, had been there first with the mix of up- and down-time comforts and customs, and had become something of an Official Institution in Grantville. In fact, from what anyone could tell it had become famous all over Germany. Now that central Germany had been politically stabilized—by seventeenth-century standards, anyway—and the armies that had ravaged it driven off, Grantville was not only a boom town but the central tourist attraction for anyone in Europe with the money and leisure time to afford to come there. And each and every one of those visitors sooner or later made a beeline for the Gardens.

The management of the Gardens had cheerfully—and haphazardly—kept expanding the establishment to match the clientele, to the despair of Grantville's more snooty citizens and the sheer outrage of anyone with any sense of proper architectural design. It had become a sprawling giant of a "building," growing up as well as out.

But, like most people, Frank didn't care. If the owners were cavalier about the design of the establishment, they were quite careful to stay within Grantville's building code when it came to what mattered. And, whatever else it was—usually overcrowded, loud, smoky and hot—the Gardens was almost always a good-humored and cheerful place. Even the inevitable and constant disputes over theology and politics always seemed to be friendlier in the Gardens than anywhere else.

Granted, that wasn't perhaps saying much, looked at from one angle. A "moderate dispute" in the seventeenth century would have been classed as a "brawl" in up-time America. But at least, in the Gardens, people settled their disputes with fisticuffs instead of sabers, stones and the gibbet.

Frank pushed open the door and the noise and smoke hit him like a wall. The main bar-and-dining room was colorful and busy. Especially colorful, now that the bright hues that Lothlorien was turning out were making inroads into the brown and tan and goose-turd green of mass-market fabric. It looked like a good night in the Gardens, and it was a pity they hadn't found Gerry and Ron. Frank called over his shoulder: "Get the beers in, Aidan, I'll find us a table."

It was usually as well to get a round from the bar, since the service sometimes got a little slow of a Saturday night. As Frank wandered in, though, he saw that the room wasn't quite as full as it had looked. There were still some tables at the back. People hadn't wanted to get too close to any of the fireplaces, where the fires were still roaring with fresh wood. Later in the evening, when the crowd had throttled back to the die-hards, they would cluster around the softer embers.

"Frank?" Somehow the voice cut through the hubbub and the tunings of the evening's pickup band. That was all the more impressive because of the mellow and relaxed tone.

Damn . Frank looked around for his dad, panicking slightly before he realized, No, it's cool, I told Magda.

He spotted his father's table and headed for it, none too eagerly. Tom "Stoner" Stone was Grantville's leading ageing hippie, general good guy, pharmacologist, recreational horticulturist and lately owner and CEO of the Lothlorien Farbewerk, the Lothlorien Commune as once was. And, on account of being the aforementioned hippie, almost impossible to generation-gap.

"Dad, hi, what's up, what're you—" Frank dried up. Around the table were Mike Stearns, Balthazar Abrabanel, Doctor James Nichols, Don Francisco Nasi, Frank Jackson, Father Mazzare, the Reverend Jones and—Frank's attempt at calm assurance turned to cold gray slop in his guts—Mister Piazza. Now the secretary of state, but—more to the point—the former principal of Frank's high school.

"Probably the same thing you are, Frank," his dad said. "Did you tell Magda you were coming? Are Gerry and Ron here with you?" There was no note of accusation in his dad's voice, just concern that proper procedure had been followed. He used the same tone of voice to run down the checklist when his sons helped in the lab or the greenhouse, confirming that the sensible things had been done and useful lessons learned.

It would be easier, Frank sometimes thought, if his father was dumber or meaner or a hypocrite or something. What in a lot of hippies—and Frank had met more of the breed than most guys his age—was a lot of New Age hypocritical crap was, in his dad, the genuine article. Tom Stone was reasonable, gentle and good, most of the time, and when he wasn't, he was trying to be. And, unfortunately, he had a fine mind when he felt like using it. He was not impossible to fool, but it wasn't easy.

In short, as a father for sprightly teenage lads, a first-class pain in the ass.

"Sure, Dad. She said you were, uh, with Mister Stearns here. Uh, Mister President, I mean."

Mister President grinned. "You figured the Gardens was safe, then?"

"Um . . ." Frank didn't feel much like talking. Technically he was an adult, now that he was nineteen, but the presence of so many authority figures affected him like so many alarms replete with red lights and sirens. He was not only tongue-tied, he found he was wanting to look down to check he was wearing trousers, and that his zipper was up. He definitely didn't like the way Mister Piazza was grinning. If there was a bright side, he supposed, it was that Miz Mailey—air-raid sirens and maroon flares, here—was in another country. And locked in jail, besides. The Tower of London, no less.

Frank Jackson broke the silence. "Siddown, son. Your dad was saying earlier as how this might concern you, and if you followed proper reporting procedure you've every right to be here. You bring friends?"

"Ah, yes, Mister, I mean General—I, that is, my friend Aidan was celebrating graduating and we figured dinner and a few beers—"

"Excellent, good thinking," beamed Doctor Nichols. "Had the same idea myself every time I passed something, when I took to getting edumacated. Join us, do—is this Aidan friend of yours at the bar?"

"Don't tease the young man, now." That was Father Mazzare, who had always seemed a slightly odd and exotic figure to Frank. "Do, please, join us. As the general says, your father thought it might be good for you and your brothers to come along."

Frank looked around, saw Aidan carefully working his way between tight-packed tables under the weight of four steins of beer. Sigh; leave it to Aidan. Frank caught Aidan's eye to be certain Aidan knew where to head for and sat down. He took a deep breath. "Come along where, Father Mazzare? Dad?" Frank looked from one to the other, trying for an effect of slightly intrigued rather than baffled and terrified.

"Venice," said Mister President.

"Venice? Cool—but why me? Uh, I mean us? And what about the pharmaceutical work?"

"Mike asked me to go along as the scientific and medical attaché and I agreed," his dad explained. "I could really use your help down there—same with Ron and Gerry—getting a pharmaceutical industry off the ground in Italy. The truth is, that work's gotten pretty routine here. You've already trained enough people to replace you and your brothers."

Nasi nodded. "And a grand tour is a vital part of every young man's education, Señor Stone. I spent some months in Venice myself, at your age. I have a cousin there who is a factor for Messer Mocenigo."

"I wasn't quite so lucky," Doctor Nichols chuckled. "When I was your age, Frank, the educational choice I was given was either a hitch in the Marines or considerable time—never mind how much—in one of those downstate establishments that really don't look too good on a job resumé." The doctor raised his beer stein in ironic toast to Don Francisco's cultured upbringing.

Aidan picked that moment to arrive and set down the beers. "Mister Stone, Doctor Nichols, good e'en to ye. Father Mazzare, good evening." Aidan looked at Frank for introductions.

Ah, thought Frank. Aidan's exhausted everyone he knows by sight. Now for the fun part. "Aidan," he said, taking a beer from in front of his friend. Then he thought a moment, and moved a second one over. This could get—explosive. "I don't believe you know Doctor Abrabanel, Don Nasi, Mister Piazza, General Jackson and—" Frank completed the round of beer-stein gestures "—Mister President Stearns of the United States."

Aidan's face must have been a treat. To his credit, the Englishman didn't spray beer or choke. Whatever he did, though, made Doctors Abrabanel and Nichols suddenly look very professional. Frank's dad grinned, Mike Stearns smiled and Father Mazzare shot Frank a sharp look.

Mister Piazza snorted, briefly, but without cracking his face. Frank Stone found that oddly satisfying, that all his student pranks hadn't been wasted in keeping the old guy interested in his work back when he'd been a principal.

"So, young feller, I wouldn't wait on your friend to introduce you prop'ly," said Jackson. "And we don't care much about fancy manners anyhow. Pleased to meet you, Aidan, and what are you going to do now you're quittin' school?"

Aidan leapt to his feet. "Sah! Private Southworth, Sah!" he bellowed, and came to quivering attention with a salute that practically echoed off the walls.

"I will get you for this," muttered Frank under his breath, although he doubted Aidan heard him.

"At ease, Private," said Jackson. "Aw, hell, siddown, son. I think you got your own back, there."

Aidan sat down. "Much obliged, General, sir."

"You been a soldier before?" asked Jackson, squinting suddenly in half-recognition.

"Sir, I was a private soldier after I got out of prison for a while, sir. I was a sergeant in Colonel Stanley's Regiment in the Army of Flanders, sir. I took a leave of absence to get my letters again at summer school, sir." Aidan picked up his beer and took a drink. It had been quite a long speech for the usually laconic soldier.

Frank seethed slightly. A moment of surprise was all he'd managed to inflict, damn it. He'd hoped to see Aidan in the grip of that no-trousers feeling, but then a man who had had to take cover from napalm in the line of duty was probably a little harder to faze than most.

"Ah," said Jackson. "Frank said you'd graduated something—you're looking to be a corporal?"

"Sir, yes, sir. As I said, sir, I was a sergeant with the Spani—" Aidan paused a moment, apparently realizing who he was addressing.

Stearns waved Aidan's concern aside. "Don't worry, son. Lots of folks in this town spent time, uh, elsewhere. It's where you are now that counts."

"Even some Americans," said Jackson, "weren't on the right side to begin with." He exchanged a look with Stearns that Frank couldn't read. "So, Private Southworth, how have you done with the rest of your training?"

Aidan shifted on his seat. At last, Frank thought, he's having the good grace to be embarrassed. "Sir, I needed but the ticket of having my letters and I shall be fit to be a corporal of horse, sir, and to be an officer some day."

"You go, son," said Doctor Nichols, and the others around the table murmured assent, lifted their glasses or just nodded approvingly.

Mister Piazza beamed particularly widely. "Our adult literacy program," he said. "Most folks hereabouts can read, but a fair few need a refresher or to read something that isn't the Bible. Quite the success, and the best spend of a taxpayer dollar I have seen in some time. Actually, half the battle is teaching folks to read our script."

"Eh?" Frank frowned, trying to pick out the right mental image.

"Fraktur," Mister Piazza said, "Gothic script. If you grew up reading it, you need to learn any different alphabet you want to use all over again. We're doing classes for up-timers to learn the other way around, of course, but Roman script is catching on here in Germany the way it did in our timeline."

"Ah," Frank nodded. He'd known that, actually.

"Venice," his dad said. "We were talking about Venice. Father Mazzare is going to be our ambassador to the Most Serene Republic of Venice."

"What?" said Frank, and realized immediately how that sounded. "I mean, cool, but that's not your scene, is it? Your thing is chemistry, and growing stuff—"

Dad was grinning, as was—no, in fact, all of the adults were grinning. Adults. He was an adult, damn it. Legally, at least. It was just hard to think that way with your high-school principal across the table.

"Oh, such confidence you have in me. I am so stoked." Even being sarcastic, Frank's dad sounded gentle and reasonable. It wasn't fair. "Frank, I told you—I am of-fi-cially the medical and scientific attaché." Tom Stone tucked his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, puffed out his chest and sat up straight in mock pride. "The Venetians asked us to send them some medical advisers. Which they certainly need. As you may remember—or maybe not, if you weren't paying attention—Venice just got hit by a terrible plague a couple of years ago."

"Ah." Frank wondered when he would get to either say something meaningful or just get the hell out of there. Beside him, he realized, Aidan might be feigning cool but his spine was creaking with the effort of sitting at attention without looking like he was doing so.

"So," his dad said, "do you want to come? We'll be there maybe a year. I thought we'd all go, Magda and your brothers. The basic processes are working at the factory, now, and Magda's dad can run the business side for the time being. Better than I can, to be truthful."

Frank nodded. "Cool. Uh, that is, that would be just fine, Dad."

"Great." His father grinned brightly. "Maybe you and Aidan want to go find another spot? If you're uncomfortable around authority figures and all? From here on in it's shipbuilding, drains and commercial links, I'm afraid."

Frank and Aidan got while the getting was good.

Chapter 8

The steam crane made things easier, of that there was no doubt.

When the bastard thing was working, that was. Yard Foreman Conrad Ursinus stared at the machine and tried, under his breath, threatening it. The verdammte thing was squirting steam in all directions and held a mid-rib in the air like a hooked fish where it was no good to man nor beast.

Threatening it did no good, alas. Conrad took a deep breath and drew on an English curse word or two. Somehow they seemed—filthier? Stronger? More satisfying. Earthier somehow. He certainly felt better for wishing that the stinking thing get fucked. Sideways.

That attended to, he cupped his hands and hollered over the screech of the safety valve. "Was fur shit ist es now? Ist broke, oder was?"

Aloysius the crane-driver leaned out of the cab, his fat Frieslander face sweating red while he wafted steam away from himself. "Das verfuckter packing noch immer. Funf minutes while es kuhlt, dan kann ich es fixen."

That made Conrad chuckle. They had two new words: fucken, straight from English, and fixen, which meant to mend something, but sounded exactly like the word they used to use for fucken.

There was probably a scholar somewhere writing about it even now.

Conrad put his fingers in his mouth and whistled for a short break, and heard his gangers along the slip echo the call. There were benches down the side of the slipway, and he went for a sit-down while Aloysius broke out his toolbox.

The boat they were building, having only a contract number and not yet named, was to be a river craft. She could carry light and medium guns at need—everything they built at the U.S. Navy shipyard in Magdeburg had some military capability, even ships being built for civilian customers—but what she would mostly be was a means of hauling cargo along the Rhine and Elbe and whatever canals were built.

One of the very nice things Conrad had discovered about being in the U.S. Navy was that the shipyard had deliberately been planned by the admiral to have more capacity than he needed for his heavy warships. Which meant, especially given how many bottlenecks there were in the production of the ironclads he'd designed, that most of the shipyard was often twiddling its thumbs. "Twiddling thumbs" and "the Devil's work" were pretty much synonyms so far as the admiral was concerned, so he'd eventually started cheerfully accepting the many civilian contracts that had been pressed upon him.

Then, when those contracts proved to be a significant source of income—American up-timers were given to obsessing over "moral issues" that no down-timer could make sense of—the admiral had decided that the civilian work needed to be handled by a separate official concern than the Navy itself. This, to avoid what he called "conflict of interest," something which so far as Conrad could determine was the American equivalent of fussing over the precise status of the body of Christ during communion. So, with the agreement of Mike Stearns, the President of the U.S., Admiral Simpson had created the "U.S. Naval Shipyard Corporation." The USNSC was technically a private corporation and not part of the Navy—even though all the employees and all the facilities did belong to the Navy.

Whatever. The delightful side of it was that, although the admiral himself scrupulously refrained from buying stock in the corporation, he did allow his sailors to do so. So far as Conrad knew, the only member of the USNSC who hadn't bought stock in it was the admiral himself.

The Rhine was already a major artery for goods, and the Elbe was bidding fair to join it. Having a paddlesteamer to haul boats and cargo upstream was going to make the new shipping line that had commissioned her very rich indeed. Or spectacularly poor, perhaps—but, either way, the yard would have had their money by then, Conrad's stock options would mature and he'd be into the serious money, maybe even thinking about getting married.

Stern-wheeled, twin-engined and with a ketch rig for fuel-saving, the ship they were currently working on was broad-beamed and shallow-drafted. Her keel was forty meters of rock-elm with an iron keelson on top, and the iron frame of her hull was taking shape from one end to the other. As the frames went on, the carpentry teams bent on the strakes and fixed her lower deck onto the cast-iron cross-beams as the shape of her advanced. At her stern, the carpentry crew making the paddle-box were lighting up for their own break, while one of their apprentices was climbing down to rake the fire over and get some coffee on. Conrad decided he'd wander over in ten minutes or so and take a yard-boss' privilege of glomming a cup.

"Halloooo!" Conrad looked around. Dietrich Schwanhausser, the admiral's mother hen and a prize pain to all sailors while the admiral was out of town, had come through the gate and was walking along the slip to where Conrad was sitting. Well, if Mother Hen wanted to cluck a word or two while the scheissfressender crane was being fixed, now was a good time.

"Wie goes it?" Schwanhausser was looking as cheerful as he ever got. Conrad figured he must've counted the frames they'd gotten in so far. He was a schwein for only being cheerful with progress and looking like someone hanged his favorite dog if the margin they kept ahead of schedule ever dropped, even if there wasn't any Navy interest in the job at hand. Like everyone in the yards he spoke a mix of German and English—with so many dialects of German, his own different from Dieter's and each of them different again from most of the others (and the Ostfrieslanders communicating largely in grunts and swearwords), they all had to standardize somewhere. Conrad's up-time friend Billy Trumble claimed it was the beginning of a new language altogether. Maybe he was right.

Conrad hawked and spat, his throat good and gummed with coal smoke. "Crane is upgefuckt again. We should save more time to fix him than trying to horse the rib in by hand." And wasn't that a prize schweinerei for a job?

"Ah." Schwanhausser nodded and pulled out his pipe. "This is going to be someone else's problem soon, Ensign Ursinus. The admiral has another job for you if you will."

"Eh?"

"Ja. Naval attaché." Schwanhausser held up his clipboard and read carefully from the radio office flimsy.

Conrad frowned. "That is a French word, ja?"

"Another English word too, it seems. I asked. However fussy the Americans might be when it comes to most forms of robbery and swindling, they are veritable Barbary pirates when it comes to plundering other languages. It means someone with a job helping an ambassador. There is an ambassador to go and you are to go with him to tell the Fremde how to make boats. And whatever else he wants."

Schwanhausser handed over the written order. "You go to Venice, Lieutenant Ursinus. The rank is a temporary commission, do not let it swell your head."

Conrad felt his face break out in a big smile. "Fuckin' A," he said.

Truly, the English language had some very useful words in it—and Conrad was bound and determined to see that whatever new language might be emerging contained each and every one of them. He rather approved of linguistic piracy himself.

* * *

"Lieutenant Trumble, sir, reporting as ordered."

Lennox was still getting used to the idea of soldiers reporting to him with a salute and the position of attention. His own military experience was as a sergeant in a borderer cavalry company, where things were, if not exactly free-and-easy, at least relatively informal. Watching young Billy come to attention gave him an odd feeling, even after all these months.

"At ease, Lieutenant." That was another thing. When did young officers start looking like children? This one was most famous around town for playing that foolish game, and who would credit that? Mister Mackay, now, he was perhaps on the young side to be a captain, but had the cardinal virtue of being able to listen to his sergeants.

That was never going to be a problem for Captain Lennox, USMC, who carried his own Inner Sergeant wherever he went. Young Master Trumble here looked too young to be any kind of officer except an ensign, although the papers that said he was twenty were reliable. Twenty! And that was too old for a proper ensign. Again, the Americans had different ideas, and as they were paying the bills for the Marine Corps Cavalry, they got to write the rules.

Several people had thought the idea of Marine Cavalry was hilarious, and Lennox could see their point. Transporting horses by sea was a chancy business at the best of times, and expecting them to be in condition to fight after any more than the shortest sea passage was ludicrous. King Charles had a Marine Regiment of Foot to send aboard his ships, and that made a certain amount of sense.

The United States had some traditions, though, and one of them was that the troops attached to the President, and the troops who guarded embassies, were Marines. The trouble was that the job of guarding ambassadors in this day and age wasn't an infantry job. Dragoon cavalry were needed, if only so as to be able to keep up with the ambassador's coach, and also to rank properly in precedence with the ambassador himself. Infantry were socially a long way below cavalrymen. Even such salt-of-the-earth sorts as himself.

So the United States Marine Corps had a couple of companies of cavalry, over-officered so they could be sent in penny packets to embassies everywhere under an officer of appropriate rank. The lessons of the earlier diplomatic missions had been well learned.

Not that they'd get Captain Lennox and his horse aboard a ship without dire need. He'd puked every mile across the North Sea to Flanders, and only the prospect of never sailing from Scotland again would get him back to sea.

Lieutenant Trumble was looking at him expectantly. As well he might. Two weeks an officer, and knew nothing yet. May as well start to teach him a thing or two.

"Richt, laddie. D'ye speak Italian?"

"Sir, no sir," said Trumble.

Lennox grinned. "Weel, that's right enough. They'll not be seducing you to Romish ways, then, and ye can't be charming the lassies if ye haven't the language."

"Am I being posted to Italy, sir?"

"The Venetian embassy, laddie. Where I'll be tae keep an eye on ye, and ye're to report to Lieutenant Taggart. For instruction in ye're officerly duties and sich, d'ye see?"

"Sir, yes sir."

"Dismissed, lad, dismissed."

"Thank you, sir." Trumble saluted again, and left.

Taggart would see to the preparations; they had already picked a solid crew of lads for the embassy guard. It only remained to see if he could spend all those months alongside that sot of a papist Heinzerling without breaking his head for him again.

Part II:
February, 1634

Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least.

Chapter 9

"Well, here we are, then. Venice." Father Mazzare flopped down on a chaise longue of some sort, producing a small cloud of dust.

"Venice?" The Reverend Jones waved a hand in front of his face. "So that's what that smell is."

It was late afternoon of the day the USE delegation had finally arrived in Venice, after a long and arduous trip from Germany that had taken them up the Rhine by Constance, cross-country through the Graubunden to the Valtelline, and from there down toward Lake Como while being careful to skirt Milanese territory.

Most of the day had then been spent in pageantry, being paraded about and bombarded with pointless speeches entirely free of content. The experience seemed to have caused the Methodist minister to dig deep into reserves of sarcasm that even Mazzare had not suspected he possessed. For some hours now, Jones had taken to calling himself and Heinzerling "cultural attachés."

The Grantville party—Mazzare still had to keep reminding himself that he was now an ambassador representing the newly formed United States of Europe—had been asked to stop for the night at a villa outside La Serenissima while the appropriate reception had been mounted for the embassy. Other states, other nations and cities had all but dispensed with the displays of outright potlatch that greeted a formal ambassador's arrival. But Italy, and especially Venice, was still beggaring itself with Renaissance standards of behavior.

"Renaissance" was being charitable. The standard of organization shown so far by the Venetians had been downright medieval. The overnight stop while the procession had been organized had turned into a three-day jamboree. Three days, it had to be said, of good food, fine wine and general Italian hospitality, but Mazzare couldn't help feeling it was probably symbolic of something to come.

The time had not been entirely wasted, of course. The ambassador would not be so rude as to arrive before his hosts were good and ready to receive him in style, to be sure. But the ambassador's curate and general factotum, the good Father Augustus Heinzerling, SJ, was under no such restriction. Heinzerling had ridden ahead to apply his stout German boot—ad maiorum Dei gloriam, of course—to the collective backside of the staff at the lodgings that had been booked for the embassy pending the acquisition of a permanent base. Heinzerling had returned grumbling, with all his prejudices about Venetian housekeeping fully confirmed, but had pronounced himself satisfied. Just.

Francisco Nasi's briefing on the Most Serene Republic of Venice had warned Mazzare of what he was likely to find. Venice positively reeked of a town keeping up appearances. The days when her fleet was the terror of Mediterranean pirates were long gone, her great houses of merchants were losing their ongoing trade war with just about everyone, and cash was tight. The plague that had devastated the city just two years earlier had piled ruin onto decay.

In the streets: gilded barges and processions of livery; fine dress and sumptuary for public display. Within doors: maintenance budgets had gone by the board, housekeeping was a poor second to ostentation and the fare a sharp contrast with the good living of the countryside.

And so a procession of boldly dressed cavaliers, gilded barges and an escort of stamping, bright-cuirassed soldiers had conveyed them to what Jones had christened the "Roach Hilton" for its mix of gilt and tawdriness. Mazzare couldn't help feeling, with Jones, a certain annoyance at the thoroughly impractical approach these people took to their particular mix of shabbiness and gentility. All the more so since he himself was probably distantly related to them. Nice people, but perhaps not well focused on what was important. They—but he caught himself.

"Better keep a lid on the comments, Simon," said Mazzare.

"The very model of tact, Larry. Tact is my middle name." Jones lasted perhaps two seconds before snorting. "Death in Venice! Ha! How could anyone tell?"

The door opened and Heinzerling strolled in, the very picture of florid, big-boned good health. "Mein Herren," he nodded to the other two clerics.

That clued Mazzare. Heinzerling got more and more German as his thoughts wandered away from the immediate mental effort of thinking about what language he ought to be speaking, especially in English, which was his sixth or seventh language. "Go ahead, Gus," he said.

"Monsignor Mazarini is arrived as nuncio extraordinary." He said it baldly, paused, and then took out his pipe.

"Giulio?" Mazzare was startled. That was unexpected.

"Ja. He came here these few days past. Il Doge has not received him yet. Indeed, he refuses to do so."

Jones turned, frowning, from the window he had been staring out of. He had been looking off to the east, where the first dark of night was hazed by angry purple bruises of cloud. "Mazarini's supposed to be in Paris. He had a job to do there, last we heard."

"Genau das. I have this from an old friend at the Society's house here. His Holiness recalled the monsignor from Paris in the middle of summer, apparently."

"Just after war broke out?" Mazzare raised an eyebrow.

"Yes, but wait a minute." Jones held up a hand. "The recall would have been sent before then, no?"

Mazzare nodded. "That figures. You think—?"

"It's what I'd have done, Larry."

"This I thought also," said Heinzerling. "The monsignor was known in the future history as a cardinal of France, no? So the Vatican seeks to prevent this?"

Jones sucked at his lip, began to pace. "Maybe. But would they? By now, you can be sure the Vatican has gotten its hands on all the histories available, just like Richelieu did. Remember that Mazarini—Mazarin, as he would be by then—sponsored the Peace of Westphalia. And sheltered the Barberini when it all hit the fan after Urban VIII's death. Surely they'd leave him in post to take root?"

Mazzare sat up. "On the other hand, is this place getting to us so soon? Blasted intrigue and double-dealing! Perhaps the pope and his advisers just wanted their best troubleshooter here—especially since he's more familiar with Americans than anyone else they have. Someone good enough to do the job, junior enough to shunt aside if he stalls. Whatever. We're here to do a deal with the Venetians. If Giulio wants to talk, he'll talk. Gus, who else is in town?"

"Moment, bitte." Heinzerling crossed to where a pitcher of wine had been left out, took a goblet and drank. He made a face, perfectly reflected in the polished silver of the cup from where Mazzare sat. "Ach, nasty cheap wine. Essig. So, the ambassadors. The Spanish one, the count de Rocca, is a pompous ass. He's the regular ambassador sent directly from Madrid. But Cardinal Bedmar is also here for Spain—indirectly, at least; officially, he's 'special ambassador from the Spanish Netherlands'—and that is causing trouble, of course. D'Avaux for France, and he is Richelieu's creature and bag-man. The representative for the empire is another nonentity—I've already forgotten the name—since the empire and Venice are usually so far"—he held up thumb and forefinger—"from war that any ambassador is wasting his time here. There is not a Dutchman to be found for love nor money and the English ambassador does little and says less."

"Dutch are out of it. The English ambassador, though. Why's he so quiet?"

"He is too busy making money, from what I am hearing."

"Hmm." Mazzare scratched a chin that, twentieth-century razors having become largely a memory, was developing a fine beard. Local fashion was for a properly trimmed goatee for a reason: it kept the blade away from all the hard bits to shave. "No surprise that the Dutch aren't about. Why is Bedmar trouble?"

Jones groaned. "Come on, Larry! Didn't you pay attention in Causes of the Thirty Years' War, 101? Bedmar! The Venetian Conspiracy! Osuna's Fleet!"

"Assume I didn't, Simon," Mazzare said patiently. "And wasn't the Defenestration of Prague the cause of the Thirty Years' War?"

"Sort of. In the same sense that Archduke Ferdinand's assassination was the cause of the First World War. It was just a trigger, that's all—one of many possible ones. In fact, the other major candidate for the trigger event happened right here, just a few days before."

"It would be better to say it did not happen, ja?" Heinzerling was now leaning against the buffet table where the wine-jug was, using his goblet to gesture. "Bedmar had paid a fifth column to open the city to Osuna's fleet, it was said, and the state inquisitors hanged the principal conspirators shortly before the fleet sailed—after breaking their legs, in time-honored Venetian custom. The conspiracy ended, and Venice remains independent. There was trouble; I recall it even from the seminary. But a week later, there was the worse trouble in Prague and war began in Bohemia instead of in Italy."

"And Bedmar's back? I see the concern that might raise." Mazzare was pointedly not looking at Heinzerling. A drink or two was fine, but he had promised Hannelore that he would not let his curate hit the sauce too hard.

"Ja, he is back." Mazzare heard Heinzerling put the goblet down. "And I hear that he is bribing anything with hands to hold scudi. I hear only rumors, you understand."

Mazzare sighed, and looked up at the ceiling a moment, noting the cracks in the plaster. "It all sounded so simple when Mike and Francisco set it out for me. A trade deal, they said. Stand there and look solemn and sign things, so the Venetians can pretend they're not dealing with Jews, they said. D'Avaux is your only problem, they said. Bah!" He swept a hand across an imaginary chess-board, scattering the pieces of a game grown tiresome.

"Come on, Larry." Jones' grin looked as forced as his tone. "If it wasn't hard, they wouldn't need us."

"Well, the women are going to be upset," said Mazzare.

Heinzerling nodded. "Ja. If Hanni saw the filth in here, she would be ganz verruckt."

That set Mazzare to chuckling. The formidable Frau Heinzerling governed domestic arrangements at the rectory with an iron will. Preconceptions about early-modern attitudes to cleanliness were crushed under her regular blitzkriegs with duster and beeswax. The place gleamed; not a surface in it couldn't have been used for surgery.

"Speaking of domestic arrangements," he said, "how are the troops and the various technical missions settling in?"

"Ganz gut," said Heinzerling. "Captain Lennox and his troops are comfortable and probably looking for a drink."

Heinzerling made a face as he mentioned the Scotsman. He and Lennox, in many ways, were two of a kind. One of the more famous brawls in the Thuringen Gardens had transpired when the two of them had debated their competing doctrines of justification one night. The Jesuit had won the debate and—narrowly, he insisted!—lost the ensuing fistfight. Lennox had paid the price in a broken tooth, two broken ribs and the finger he had dislocated on Heinzerling's jaw. Carried back to the rectory, Heinzerling had had a black eye added to his injuries by a furious Hannelore keen to enforce her ambition of getting her man to settle down to parochial respectability. Gus had behaved himself, more or less, ever since.

"And the technical folks?" Mazzare dragged himself back from memories of happier, if harder-working, times.

"Also settled. The Stone boys are suggesting a few drinks with the local Committee, and I mean to go with them."

Mazzare nodded, then frowned. "Is that wise? Should we be seen to have links of any kind with the Committee?"

"He has a point, Gus," said Jones. "If we're talking to the grandees, surely they'll take fright if we're also hobnobbing with revolutionaries and the like?"

Mazzare sat up straighter. "For the moment, let's not take risks. Gus, have the Committee here been in touch yet?"

"Not so far as I know. Frank is a member of the CoC in Grantville, as I'm sure you are aware—all three of the rascals, probably—and he will be looking to make contact." Heinzerling stroked his chin a moment. "In fact, I think it cannot be that the local Committee has been in touch, since it is all staff of the palazzo or the embassy in here so far. They will of course place someone with the servants."

"Right." Mazzare nodded. "What teenage boys do is one thing. You, Gus . . . another. So keep them out of trouble, if you can. And ask Sharon to help."

Jones grinned. "For a man with no children you've got a surprising grasp of teenage psychology, Larry."

Mazzare grinned back. "I have memories of being a teenaged male myself, Simon, before I turned my thoughts to Heaven."

Heinzerling was looking puzzled, so Mazzare took pity on him. "Sharon'll be the key to keeping the Stone boys under control, Gus. Even more than their father and mother. She's the most glamorous woman they know—well, leaving aside Becky Stearns—and close enough to their own age to leave room for fantasies."

Now Heinzerling was frowning. "She is grieving for her dead betrothed, Hans Richter."

Jones smiled. "Yup. Like Larry says: glamorous. For Pete's sake, Gus, weren't you ever a youngster?"

Heinzerling shook his head. "Americans are all insane. What has 'glamor' to do with anything? Much less fantastical delusions? Fraulein Nichols is a respectable young woman grieving for her betrothed, and those boys are much too young to be entertaining notions of marriage anyway.

"However," he said, shrugging heavily, "I will do as you ask."

* * *

After Heinzerling left, Jones cocked an eye at Mazzare. "It might be good for Sharon, too, having to concentrate on keeping those juvenile delinquents out of trouble. Give her something to think about other than . . ." He groped in the air, a bit feebly.

"That's what I was thinking." Mazzare sighed heavily. He was worried about Sharon.

Sharon Nichols had been added to the diplomatic delegation at the very end, just two days before it left Grantville. That at been at her father's urging.

"Anything to get her mind off Hans," he'd told Mazzare. Seeing the question lurking in the priest's mind, James Nichols had chuckled harshly. "Oh, I'm not worried about that, Father. My daughter is about as suicidally inclined as a brick. But . . ."

He'd groped in the air too, then, and just as feebly as Jones was doing now. Mazzare understood both gestures. Sharon's romance with Hans Richter had been a storybook one, ended when her fiancé died in true storybook fashion at the Battle of Wismar less than six months earlier. The woman was in her early twenties, to make things worse—that treacherous age when deep grief could insidiously slide into a quasi-romantic melancholy that lasted for years and years. A lifetime, in some cases. The priest had seen it happen, from time to time.

And what a waste that would be! Not just the waste of a life, but the waste of a person whose intelligence and skills—not to mention sheer energy, when Sharon was her normal self—would be an asset to many other people. Including—Mazzare admitted to some selfish motives here—the delegation from the USE to Venice. Sharon's hands-on medical skills would be a valuable addition to Tom Stone's more theoretical knowledge.

He rose from his chair and went over to a window, looking out over the city. "God knows Venice could use her," he murmured.

Loud enough, apparently, for Jones to hear him. The Protestant reverend snorted sarcastically. "And that's another thing the guide books didn't mention! The glamorous pestilence."

Jones wasn't really being fair to Venice, Mazzare thought. Or Italy as a whole, for that matter. Yes, Venice had lost about a third of its population in the recent plague. But that wasn't an unusual percentage, in this day and age, for a city struck by bubonic plague. Many cities suffered worse. The truth was that medicine and public sanitation were more advanced in Italy in the seventeenth century than probably anywhere else in Europe.

Which . . . wasn't saying much.

Mazzare was a conservatively inclined man, by temperament, and found the constant changes in his life more than a little taxing. In three short years he'd gone from a small town in up-time America where disease didn't include bubonic plague and typhus, through a jury-rigged little "United States" restricted to the southern half of Thuringia, through an equally jury-rigged "Confederated Principalities of Europe," to yet a fourth nation—the only- months-old "United States of Europe" which Mike Stearns was busily jury-rigging right now.

And—it needed only this!—one Father Larry Mazzare was the ambassador from that country to Venice. It was almost funny, in a way. He'd been appointed as ambassador from one country—the CPE—but by the time he'd finally been able to take up his post, his country had changed underneath his feet.Oh, well. He tried to brace his spirit with lines of poetry, which he murmured aloud.

"How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!"

Again, he'd spoke louder than he thought. Reverend Jones frowned. "Sounds like something from the King, although I don't recognize it. Since when did you become an Elvis Presley fan, Larry?"

Mazzare sighed again.

Chapter 10

"Cool." Gerry put the enthusiasm into the word that only someone sixteen could manage.

"Yeah, it'll do," Ron drawled, looking around.

Frank couldn't quite figure out if he was looking at the decor or the help—who clearly thought the Stone brothers' various attempts on the Italian language were funny, but were being polite about it. At least, he hoped that was what they were finding funny. They had also insisted on doing, more or less, everything for him and his brothers when they had lugged their bags up to their rooms, short of—

He let that thought die a natural death. True enough, the help was worth looking at. All four of the servants assigned to them were girls about their own age. If only two of them could properly be called "pretty," all of them could certainly bear the label of "healthy" with great ease.

But if there was one thing that Frank's not-so-great weight of experience with the female of the species had taught him it was that not pushing too hard on the first date—don't hump her leg, as his dad had once put it in a jocular mood—did wonders for the success rate in the long run. Things had been decidedly fluid on that front these past two years, though, and he was a free agent for the moment. Part of that was the way in which German attitudes were rubbing off on everyone he knew—including himself, truth be told. Everyone seemed to want to get themselves set up and steady before they got romantic. Which was odd, but then again most of the things everyone had taken for granted as opportunities for dating had gone away. And then the rubbers had run out, and things had gotten decidedly chilly on that front, damn it.

So, he looked around. "It isn't quite how I imagined it."

"Oh?" Ron sounded interested.

"Sure. I looked it all up. You wouldn't believe how many books of photographs of Venice there are. Well, you would now you've seen it, and this town's famous for looking pretty. But all the photos have captions about how such-and-such a palazzo or the Casa-de-that was refurbished in the eighteenth century. So I figured it'd all look more—different—than it did in the pictures, and all."

"Oh," said Ron. Frank's younger brother was trying very hard not to stare at the rump of the chambermaid who was bending down to sort their linen into drawers. Frank sympathized with his struggle. She was the only maid left in the room, since the others had left in a swirl of giggles—and easily the best-looking.

"Whoah!" Gerry called out, "Not that one!" He stepped smartly across the room to where the maid was about to try to lift his bag of tricks. The one that clanked when he moved it.

Frank didn't doubt that someone would take a peek later anyway, but by then the Stone boys would have taken the more outré stuff out of it and hidden it somewhere safer. Gerry was the youngest of the brothers and he'd packed the thing—which meant that "outré" would be outré indeed.

The maid gave Gerry an odd look. Not puzzled so much as . . .

Calculating.

A thought came to Frank, and he decided to take a chance. "Committee?" he asked, making sure to use the English term.

"Yes," the maid hissed softly. "You are the Committee with the Grantville embassy?" Her English was surprisingly good, aside from a heavy accent. But Frank thought the accent was a charming as the rest of her.

"Yup," he said, extending a hand. "All three of us, actually. You learned English for us?"

"No." She took his hand a bit shyly, not shaking it so much as just holding it. "My father make us learn, so we can work with Sir Henry Hider. And then he made us study even harder, when we learned you were coming to Venice."

"Who's Hider?" Frank asked, feeling a sudden twinge of anxiety. Well. Jealousy, to be precise. Did some lousy Brit already have the inside track with the girl?

"Steady on there, podnuh," Gerry said. "Ma'am," he said, sweeping off the silly cavalier hat he'd taken to wearing, "might we have the privilege of your name?"

Frank nodded. The courtly manners thing might be a good idea after all. It had seemed excruciating stuff when a small assortment of Nasis and other gentry had been giving them crash-courses in current manners—Dad's attempts had been hilarious at first until he seemed to just accelerate ahead of everyone—but the effects could be impressive. Frank swept his baseball cap off with the hand that the maid wasn't holding—score one, he realized, she hadn't let go yet. "Lady," he said, in his best shot at the Italian language, "permit me the honor of naming my brothers Gerry and Ron Stone, and I am Frank, very much at your service. And you are?"

The giggles suggested he'd got it wrong, but at least in an amusing way.

"Giovanna Marcoli. My father Antonio is the—what is the word for capo?—of the Committee of Correspondence in Venice." The girl straightened proudly. "All of north Italy—even Milan! Even though he is only a metalworker."

She giggled again, and Frank realized her amusement had been at the notion of herself as a Lady. Craftsmen were respected enough, in Venice, but very far removed in social terms from the Venetian noble merchant families. The Case Vecchie, Frank thought they called themselves—the "Old Houses."

Giggling or not, Giovanna still hadn't relinquished his hand. Frank was in no hurry for her to do so. The hand was of a piece with the girl herself—small, warm, and very well shaped. "Sir Henry is a merchant and a man of some note in Venice," she continued, "if you like I will tell you more of him later?"

"Sure," said Ron. The middle of the three Stone brothers had just turned eighteen, and had a slightly-too-eager tone in his voice. No, make that much-too-eager. He took off his hat, an English foghat he'd gotten somewhere, just to make sure Frank was outdone in the dumbass headgear stakes. "Thanks."

Great, thought Frank, he's going to hump her leg any minute. Actually, he could feel that urge himself. Please, please, please, he thought, let Giovanna not turn out to be attached or something. Short, brunette, dark-eyed, and—and—

Perfect.

Damn. Frank was sure he'd blow it.

As if foretelling his doom, Giovanna finally let go of his hand and frowned. Suddenly, she seemed all business.

"Messer . . . Gerry, it is?" Giovanna asked. "Why must I not touch that bag?"

"This bag?" Gerry said, hoisting it up with a grunt of effort.

"Yes. Is it secret to you or to the Committee?"

"Both, in a manner of speaking." Gerry crossed the room to a table to unpack it.

Frank went over to watch. He'd been kind of curious himself.

"Now," said Gerry, "I expect y'all got a thing or two on sale hereabouts in Venice for the man of action, but I figured on being prepared, one way or another." He looked around to his audience, which was now everyone in the room.

"Y'see," he went on, "I figure never to need any of this stuff. On the other hand, I figure Darryl figured on that, too, and look where he ended up." He paused. "I sure wish I knew what that guy is doing, still locked up in the Tower. I figured he'd have taken it on the lam by now, but maybe he's waiting for—"

"Gerry!" Frank said, pointing. "The bag?"

Gerry visibly wrenched his train of thought back off the track of the mayhem he was missing elsewhere. "What? Oh, sure. The bag. Well, lessee now. We got pistols, six of, modern, for the three of us. Well, not 'modern' modern; I mean state-of-the-art seventeenth-century-style flintlocks. Made by the fellers good old Mister Santee is trainin' up. They're small and look down-time, only they got rifling and they take minie balls. To look at, nothing much, but way better than anything here and they don't say up-time to anyone who sees 'em."

"Messer Gerry?" Giovanna interrupted, "those English words you used? 'Up-time'? 'Down-time'?"

"Oh, sorry," Gerry said. "Up-time is anyone from the twenty-first century. Americans, like us. Down-time means everyone else."

Giovanna nodded. Frank found the effect distracting. Somehow a girl could be a lot sexier buttoned up to the collar than in shorts and a T-shirt. It was all very mysterious. He could see out of the corner of his eye that Ron was not paying a whit of attention to their brother Gerry. It was a mercy his tongue wasn't hanging out.

"Anyway," Gerry was continuing, "we got some explosives and detonators, slowmatch, some corned power for reloads, rope, some tools for bullet-making—oh, and that reminds me, Captain Lennox let me put the ammo crate on the Marines' packhorse, I gotta collect that later."

"Eh?" Frank said. "How much ammo did you bring?" He was surprised that Gerry had brought more than three guns. Still another surprise was that he'd brought enough ammo to show he was expecting to use them seriously, because Gerry wasn't anyone's notion of a good shot. Some plinking and a few sessions with borrowed pistols was all the practice he'd had. Gerry's talents ran more toward pyrotechnic pranks, booby traps and practical jokes. It seemed that Gerry was forgetting that he'd been raised on a hippie commune, not in the hillbilly-hard-ass school that had turned out the likes of Harry Lefferts and Darryl McCarthy. It was kind of sad to watch.

"Just a couple of boxes for the pistols, mostly the special bullets. We can buy powder here, but obviously we won't find any minie balls. I got some sulfa drugs, too. Dad's shop is turning that stuff out at a pretty good clip nowadays, and I figure it'll be a while before we can get set up to do the same down here. Wish it was as easy to make chloramphenicol." He seemed wholly matter-of-fact about it.

Ron beat Frank to it. "Gerry? Are you expecting to fight a war or something?"

That made two mental sighs of relief for Frank. First, that if Ron was spotting it as well, Gerry was clearly off the deep end. And, second, that Ron was finally paying attention to his surroundings and not just drooling down his shirtfront.

"Yeah," said Frank, "hadn't you noticed we have Marines along to do that sort of thing? Like, professional soldiers? Remember? Big, gloomy Scots guys on horses?"

Gerry waved a hand. "Sure, sure. Though Billy's as American as you and me and I'd hardly call Conrad a 'Scot,' much less 'gloomy.' But like I say, better to have and not need, than—"

"Whatever," said Frank, exasperated. "What else'd you bring, Rambo? Nerve gas? Nukes? Punjee sticks?"

"Mock all you want, flower-child." Gerry said it flatly.

Frank could feel the mood turning ugly. All three of them had had to listen to talk like that back up-time, and had gotten a rep for the elaborate revenges they humiliated the offending jocks with. Hearing it from his own brother was . . .

He forced it down. "Cool it, okay, man? Just because I think you're overdoing it, no need to get heavy, all right? Just my opinion, is all."

Gerry took the hint. "Ah," he said. "Mayhem is still on the menu, which is, like a bummer. But the whole destruction trip is just outsville. Because, like, I brought this, in case it turned out this was the bag we were all, like, into, maaan."

He reached into the bag with both hands, grunted a little, and lifted out an oblong steel box with snap-catches holding it shut and wire handles at either end. It was army surplus, and at one time it had been painted olive drab which, along with the rust, still showed through in a few places. Most of it was covered in flowers and peace signs and a really drunken-looking mandala painted on in lurid enamel paint. The lid had Make love, Not war scrawled on it in bright orange balloon script.

"Cool," said Ron.

"Heaveeeee," added Frank, giving the voice everything he had before realizing that Giovanna was now looking at all of them funny.

"Yup." Gerry patted the lid of the box gently, grinning from ear to ear. "I brung the Hippie Flower Child Peace and Love Revenge Kit."

Frank nodded, savoring the memory of some truly outstanding pranks. In the years before the Ring of Fire, they'd often enough been confusion to the jocks. "The Lothlorien Hippie Ninja clan is once again ready to wreak havoc in the darkness." He turned to Giovanna. "On no account open that box."

"Please, why?" She looked worried.

"Because, milady," Gerry said, "this box contains everything you need to embarrass and humiliate anyone who annoys you. We are highly trained and highly motivated pranksters, and this box contains the old standards of our repertoire. Guys, it's all in working order, and what with Dad opening his lab I added a few new items."

The new items probably didn't include nitro, or the box would have exploded already. On the other hand, Gerry was inventive, smart, and had a mean streak in him to reckon with. Frank decided it was time to introduce calm and relaxation. "Say," he said, "now we've made out like we're a crew of madmen, where's the Freedom Arches in this town? Any chance of a few beers?"

Giovanna smiled. "No Freedom Arches in Venice! Not with the heel of the Council of Ten on the necks of the populace."

The words were said lightly, though, not with a snarl. Frank had learned enough of Venetian politics to know that the secret police of the Senate's clandestine governing body were nobody to fool with. On the other hand, they seemed to be more concerned with plots among the nobility than with the doings of Venice's working population. Not surprising, that. The artisans of Venice—especially the workers at the Arsenal—had a rather fearsome reputation themselves, and the Venetian powers-that-be had always been careful not to aggravate them.

Giovanna's smile kept widening and Frank found himself no longer thinking of politics at all. For a wonder, the girl even had straight teeth! Dimples!

He was lost, lost.

"We are free of our duties for the day at sunset—and it is Carnevale!" she announced. "We can meet my father and brothers and cousins at one of the taverna. I know which one they will be at, too, because it is right here in the palazzo."

Lost. And didn't care in the least. Even the prospect of meeting Giovanna's father and brothers on their first not-date didn't faze him at all.

"Frank?" said Gerry. "Do you have a problem with that?"

Frank frowned. "Problem?" How could there be any problems on this most sublime of all days?

"Astlay imetay ouyay amecay omehay unkdray, Frank," Ron said in a sing-song voice. "Aren't you going to have to speak with Dad about that?"

"Ah," Frank said. "No biggie. Dad calmed down, and I think you'll notice he didn't mind us staying up on the way down here as long as we were with Father Gus."

"Oh, yeah." Ron nodded. He could see the plan, right enough.

"Guys?" Gerry was looking worried. "If this is going to be anything like—like—" He gave Giovanna a nervous glance. "I mean like a date—"

Now the nervous glance came to Frank. "Okay, dates, I'm not trying to horn in on you but aybemay eshay's otgay riendsfay—I'd like not to bring the priest, okay?"

Giovanna was frowning. "I don't understand some of those words. But if you want me to give you dates, I warn you it is expensive. How much money you have?"

All three Stone brothers stared at her. Frank's heart stopped. The girl he was completely fascinated with—practically the love of his life already—turned out to be a prostitute!

She spread her hands, a bit exasperated. "What you expect? Dates have to be imported into Venice. From the Levant, I think."

Frank's heart started up again.

"Now, Gerry," said Ron, "leave it to your big brothers to be ahead of this situation. If Frank's thinking what I think he's thinking, I think we're thinking of the same plan." To Giovanna, he added: "Uh, the word 'dates' is just a slang expression. We'll explain it later. It's, uh, complicated. But it doesn't mean those fig things."

Gerry stroked his chin theatrically. "Hmmm. I think I think that I'm thinking what I think you're thinking, Frank, I really think so."

"Then you don't exist," said Frank firmly, "on the best authority, Descartes himself—who's still alive, remember—and so your opinion can and should be discarded. Just try and keep up, okay?"

"We are done here, yes?" asked Giovanna. "When can we go to the taverna?"

Frank hesitated. "Well . . . We won't be unpacking any of the stuff for the pharmaceutical lab today. Dad told me he wanted to make sure we had a safe place to set it up first. But I promised Magda we'd go help them get moved in downstairs and we'll probably run into Father Gus while we're down there. Giovanna, I suspect it's where you're going to get sent next anyway. Our stepmom travels with enough stuff for a medium-sized army and it'll take some doing to get them squared away. Sharon's no piker either, widder's weeds or not."

Giovanna tilted her head on one side. "What is a 'piker' and a 'widder' and why would either of them want weeds? Your father is the buon Dottore, yes?"

"Uh, yeah—but he's a chemist, not a doctor."

Giovanna frowned. "We were told that Tomas Stone was a maker of medicine, the Indian Hemp?"

"Well, yes, he makes medicines, and he sets bones and some other simple stuff, but he's not what you'd call a doctor. Sharon Nichols is really the Dottore in our delegation—uh, I think that should be Dottoressa, actually."

That made her eyebrows shoot up. She rattled off something in Italian that Frank couldn't follow at all.

"What? I mean, please say that again, slower?"

Giovanna tried it in English. "You have a lot of doctors—even female ones—that your father seems like nothing special?"

"Uh, I guess," said Frank, unsure where this was leading.

"From what we hear, you see, he makes physics and medicines that are better than anything we have ever known. The mist that kills lice—the diditi, I think it is called—and the specific against all illnesses, the clorfeniculo—"

"Chloramphenicol," Ron said.

"Si—chlorafenico, we hear that your father makes all these."

"He makes some other stuff, too," Frank said. His father would want to be modest, but Frank thought he overdid it. "He makes hash for pain, and some disinfectants and some herbal medicines. He consults for some of the other chemists on the drugs they make. Dad knows a fair bit about making medicines, but it's not what he does for money." He scratched his head a moment. "I guess you could say he's the best . . ." He searched for the word in Italian, but couldn't find it. "—drug-maker in Grantville, but that's practical industrial chemistry. He's one of the two with the theoretical training to understand how it all works, though. Dad's good at research." He grinned. "You won't get what this means, but he made LSD in the sixties."

"No," said Giovanna, looking thoughtful, "I do not know what it means. Do I need to?"

Frank exchanged a look with Gerry and Ron. "On the whole," he said, "I don't think you do. Let's just say it was a hard thing to do, and he did it. Now he makes dye and disinfectant and some other things. Yes, and medicines."

"Anyway," said Gerry, "what were you saying about Dad?"

"Oh," said Giovanna, "only that it is always the way with the natural philosophers that they have a huge amount of baggage. There are many in town, and we have been working in many places that have needed extra chambermaids, and we see a lot."

Frank nodded. "True enough. So let's go see how they're getting on."

Chapter 11

"Tom?" Mazzare put his head around the door. Within was the kind of controlled chaos that Tom Stone either liked or just seemed to generate by his mere presence. The man still clung firmly to his relaxed sixties-era hippie ethics, principles and aesthetics—although he now owned the biggest and most profitable coal-tar dye works in Europe.

Which was to say, the only one. So far, at least. Years of recreational pharmacology on top of a nearly completed masters' degree in the real thing made Tom Stone—also known as Stoner, for reasons that were not hard to deduce—the leading research, industrial and medical chemist in seventeenth-century Europe, if not the world. Not much in the way of spectacular dyeing chemistry was "scheduled by history" to happen until after the Napoleonic period—which meant that Stoner had better than a two-century lead on his competition. In their old timeline, dyes along with soaps had been the first real make-money-hand-over-fist branches of chemistry. So Stoner had a very profitable business ready-made once circumstances—and Magda and her money-minded father—had rubbed his nose in it.

For that matter, the man could probably be making a second fortune in pharmaceuticals, since he was also the principal manufacturer of the new medicines the Americans had introduced into the world. But on that subject, Tom Stone had drawn the line—quite firmly, too, despite the mild squawks of his wife and the loud splutters of protest from his father-in-law.

Medicines, Tom Stone made at cost—and, even there, tried as much as possible to cover his costs through barter rather than money. Given that the electricity he used that was produced by Grantville's huge power plant was essentially free anyway—the power plant produced far more electricity than Grantville could possibly use—he was in effect subsidizing his own pharmaceutical business.

As Tom Stone put it, he was not about to become a bloodsucker on the misery of others. Just about everyone agreed with Stoner's wife and father-in-law that he was a hopelessly impractical man, to be sure. But it was no accident that he was also becoming one of the most popular people in central Europe, especially with the poor German immigrants who were still flooding into Thuringia. If anything, he was even more highly regarded by the rapidly growing population of Magdeburg, the new capital of the United States of Europe rising out of the ruins on the Elbe.

There was even a rumor that one village in Catholic Franconia was petitioning the pope to declare him a saint. Not even a rumor, really—Father Mazzare knew it was true, although he'd seen fit to keep the knowledge to himself. No point in disappointing the villagers prematurely, he felt, with such picayune details as the fact that canonization was reserved for dead people. And had never been extended to someone who was not only not a Catholic but whose religion—such as it was—revolved largely around mandalas and alternative states of mind.

"Tom?" the priest repeated.

Again, Stone didn't hear him. Mazzare wasn't surprised. Frau Stone was somewhere in the background marshalling Frank, Gerry and Ron, a couple of shanghaied soldiers and what looked like a platoon of chambermaids—where had they come from?—into arranging the medical mission's quarters. Although more of a bluestocking than Hanni, Magda conceded the dreadnought-class hausfrau nothing in haus-pride.

Tom stood in the middle of it all holding a small stack of books with the air of a man who would definitely remember where he meant to put them in but a moment. He regarded his wife's drill-mastering of the all-out effort to get order out of chaos with blatant bemusement. He had explained to Mazzare, once, that chaos was not always disorder and dirt not necessarily mess. The natural order of things, per good organic principles, could be persuaded to suck in the gut and make itself useful, but could never be hammered into line.

Magda hewed to a different line, though. The "hash ranch" as the Lothlorien Commune was oft known had looked uncommonly neat and tidy since she moved in.

Finally, Stoner saw Mazzare standing in the doorway. "Hi, Father!" Tom called out, his face a sudden plea for rescue.

Mazzare repressed a smile. "Tom, could I have a word?" He led a relieved Stoner out into the corridor.

Stoner closed the door behind him, leaned on it and sighed, then shook his shaggy head. His hair was graying now, but just as thick and bushy and disheveled as it had always been. "I had me some bizarre domestic arrangements in my time, man, but this just about beats them all. I am o-fish-ully boor-jwah now, henpecked and everything."

"Stoner, that's kind of why I'm here to talk to you."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, it's Hanni." Mazzare chewed his lip a moment. "I, ah, promised her—"

Stoner frowned. "The boys were saying that they might go out for a drink or two with Gus, after he dropped by. I kind of wondered."

Mazzare nodded. It was no wonder Stoner knew. News from Hanni tended to get around fast, and everyone knew Father Heinzerling. It was obvious to anyone with more brains than God gave a rabbit what he suffered from, as well. Even by the standards of a time when drunkenness was the norm, Gus could put it away. And, left to his own devices, he did. It was Mazzare's guess that without Hanni all these years, he would have wrecked himself long since. Not as fast, perhaps, as he would have without Jesuit discipline, but still wrecked. For all his playing of the long-suffering henpecked husband, he actually clung to Hanni like the rock she was.

"Tom," he said, "I promised Hanni I wouldn't let Gus hit the sauce too hard. Now, I persuaded him to persuade the boys to cool it for a few days, since I'm sure they're planning to contact the CoC here in Venice—small as it probably is—but I don't think it makes sense to keep everyone grounded for the duration."

Tom smiled. "Wouldn't work, anyway. Not with my kids. Chips off the old block."

Mazzare managed not to wince. "So, could you ask the boys to keep an eye on Gus? Keep him talking, at least, since that seems to keep him from drinking so much?"

Stoner nodded. "I'll tell them. They're good about that sort of thing. And they like Gus; they consider him a superannuated jock but without the attitude."

* * *

Mazzare walked back down to the embassy reception room in a thoughtful frame of mind. On the way, he turned the corner on the staircase and bumped into a small, dark-haired man wearing a pointed yellow hat. Literally bumped into him, since it seemed neither of them was paying much attention to where he was going.

"Please, forgive me," Mazzare said, "Can I help you?" The man was short and slight and looked—yes, Jewish. He was wearing a distinctly lawyerly gown and had a tooled-leather briefcase under his left arm. That would mean he was—

"Signor Luzzatto?"

"Ah, yes," said the little man. "Benjamin Luzzatto, at your service. Might I assume that you are Father Mazzare, of Grantville?"

"Indeed. Were you at the ceremonies earlier today?"

"No, Monsignor. Jews were not permitted to be present at that. I watched from a window. Do I find you settling in here?"

Mazzare frowned. "Should I take it up with the doge? I mean, if you're to be our permanent man here—"

Luzzatto waved a hand. "Oh, please, Monsignor, take no trouble on my account. We must live apart, and are thus subjected to severe overcrowding in the ghetto, but otherwise we suffer only minor disabilities in Venice."

"Really? I thought the restrictions on Jews were severe."

"Perhaps I should restate the matter. Yes—officially—the restrictions are indeed severe. We are required to live in the ghetto; may not pursue many vocations; are required to lend money at unprofitable rates. Oh, indeed, it goes on and on." He shrugged. "In practice? They like to pretend that they have no Jews in La Serenissima, but so long as we are discreet and the pretense is maintained, we are usually left unmolested. In business matters, 'being discreet' simply means finding a Christian partner to be the, ah, what is the expression—?"

"Front man," Mazzare provided, using the English term.

"Yes, precisely." Luzzatto smiled wryly. "Such a devious language, your dialect of English. I have grown quite fond of it. As I was saying, so long as we are discreet the Venetian authorities ignore most of it. For all their pretensions at nobility, you know, the Case Vecchie are merchants before they are anything else. To tell the truth, other than the overcrowded conditions of the ghetto—which makes it very bad for us in times of epidemic—the only regulation which causes real aggravation is the requirement"—he gestured at his headgear—"that we must wear yellow hats or veils."

Here, his good humor seemed to slip. "For quite some time now, we have petitioned to have that color changed. It sometimes causes unpleasantness for our women—my own wife was solicited, just yesterday!—since prostitutes are also required by Venetian law to wear yellow veils when practicing their trade on the streets."

"Oh." Mazzare thought on that a moment, and decided to drop it for the time being. "Come, let us go to the reception room. There are some people I should like you to meet."

"That would be the Reverend Jones and Father Heinzerling and Dottores Stone and Nichols, yes?"

"Yes, and some others." They walked back down the stairs. "Are you from Venice originally?"

"No, I was born in Oporto, where my father was a doctor. We left when I was eight years old, for the City, after the great pardon freed him from jail. Then when I was eighteen I came to Italy to study law at Padua. Ever since, I have been a lawyer and a commercial agent here in Venice." Luzzatto smiled. "Much less exotic than your own origins, of course."

"Well, I don't know," said Mazzare. "Until less than three years ago I was nothing more than an ordinary small-town priest. Here we are." He opened the door.

Back in the reception room, some more of the delegation had finished unpacking and had come down to wet their whistles. "Everyone!" Mazzare said loudly. "This is Maestro Benjamin Luzzatto, the man Don Francisco picked to advise us once we arrived."

Luzzatto gave a little half-bow to the people there.

"I guess it's introductions all round, then," said Mazzare. "We decided that the thing to do was to hand off as much of Grantville's knowledge as we could, to help Venice be as effective a trading partner as possible and to give an earnest of our good faith. We'll be advised by you about that, of course, but for the time being we have a few people with us who're going to be able to help. Doctor Stone, as you call him, is still upstairs getting settled in. No doubt he'll be down later. With him is—ladies first—Sharon Nichols. She's really our doctor here."

Sharon nodded solemnly, as she had done everything for the past months. The statuesque young woman was not wearing "widow's weeds," true—and never had—but she was still grieving deeply.

"Sharon's a doctor of medicine where Tom Stone is a doctor of chemistry." That was something of a fib, designed to augment her status. Sharon wasn't an MD. She wasn't even technically an RN, although she had the equivalent training and experience—even real expertise, when it came to battlefield traumas. But Mazzare had learned early on that nursing when it wasn't done by nuns was regarded as low-rent scut-work in this day and age. Even the nuns only did it as a sort of self-mortification in most places. Besides, given the state of seventeenth-century medical knowledge and practice, a mostly trained twentieth-century nurse was considerably better than a doctor by local standards. A lot better, in Sharon's case. She seemed to have inherited her father James' skill as well as his very dark skin color.

If the Jewish lawyer was surprised to see a Moorish woman in their midst—and he probably wouldn't think of Sharon as anything else—he gave no sign of it. "An honor to meet you, Dottoressa Nichols," said Luzzatto, half-bowing again.

Sharon nodded. "Charmed, Maestro Luzzatto."

Mazzare thought for a moment about how to continue. Then: "As well as the medical side of the health mission we have brought with us, we propose offering some of our learning in the matter of public sanitation. Venice has a unique position in this regard, having the lagoon to drain into, but there is a deal more that can be done. The experts in these matters in Grantville are of the opinion that improved health begins with improved public sanitation, which is why Herr Mauer has come with us. Ernst has spent the last two years as one of the lead contractors in the reconstruction of Magdeburg's sewer system."

Mauer stood up straight from his habitual slouch and made a half-bow of his own. "An honor, Maestro Luzzatto." The greeting was one of the few bits of Italian that Mauer had reliably learned; half of the challenge in his passing anything to the Venetians would be the translation. Mazzare didn't think the translator would be worked too hard, either. Mauer was, at his most voluble, a laconic man. He was, however, a man with a reputation as a civil engineer. A master builder before the Ring of Fire, he had leapt at the opportunities offered by the rebuilding of Magdeburg and grabbed them with both hands. He had not been the only one to do so, but he had been the first to specialize, and had the kind of detailed mind needed to plan and execute a huge sewer system. Over six months he had educated himself in sanitation engineering and the English language, found his metier and laid the foundations of a modest fortune in civil engineering.

"Next," said Mazzare, "it was thought by our principals in Grantville that advances in shipbuilding might usefully be communicated to the shipwrights of Venice's Arsenal. Perhaps some of those advances will prove less than useful, but we anticipate a great volume of trade through Venice. If it can be carried in improved Venetian hulls there is a greater opportunity for the merchants of La Serenissima to profit. Hence we have with us Lieutenant Ursinus from our naval yards at Magdeburg. He has brought plans for a number of different kinds of vessels and has experience in building several types of craft. The young officer standing next to him is Lieutenant William Trumble, part of our Marine escort."

Billy simply nodded. Conrad Ursinus made appropriately polite noises, and Mazzare wondered again how he would go over with the Arsenal. The guildmasters and workers there were said to be notoriously jealous of their skills and prerogatives. Young as he was, Conrad Ursinus was as senior a man as the ferociously busy Magdeburg shipyards could spare, and another trained down-timer.

He was also a man who had grabbed opportunities; in his case, three of them. First, he was an officer in the growing U.S. Navy. Second, he'd parlayed his nearly completed carpenter's apprenticeship into a job as a shipwright and then as a slip foreman, and had the beginnings of credentials as a naval architect. On top of that, he had been part of the first wave of baseball players when the sport had gotten going in Grantville. The heavily plebeian and often-radical German population of Magdeburg had also adopted baseball, with all the ferocious enthusiasm with which they adopted most things American. Conrad was one of the stars of the Magdeburg Yard Dogs, for whom he played first base—and his friend Billy was the star pitcher for the Marine Corps team.

Whether the two of them would succeed in introducing the sport to Venice was another question. Mazzare knew that baseball was a popular sport in up-time Italy, if a minority interest, but it was as nothing to the Italian national religion of soccer. The Stone boys were enthusiasts for that sport, and Mazzare knew they had plans to introduce it in Italy. They might well succeed, despite Conrad and Billy. Mazzare could remember turning out for a game or two when he'd been in Rome, and the sheer mania that a Lazio crowd was capable of . . .

First, of course, they'd have to figure out where to play either game. Venice was not exactly a city with lots of parks and open space—and Mazzare had already firmly explained to all the young men involved that the Piazza San Marco was strictly off-limits. He foresaw enough problems, without having to deal with a doge aggravated by a baseball or a soccer ball breaking one of his windows. Or, worse yet, one of the windows in the Basilica.

He shook his head and went on with the introductions. "Captain Lennox here—"

"Good day to ye," said Lennox. He had a glass in his hand, and was visibly trying not to stand at attention.

"—is head of our embassy guard, which is a function our Marine Corps discharges for reasons of tradition. We also have with us my good friend and colleague the Reverend Simon Jones—"

"Please to meet you," said Jones, raising his glass.

"Who is one of the ministers at Grantville's Methodist church. And this is my curate, Father Augustus Heinzerling. I believe you've already met."

Heinzerling nodded a greeting, and Luzzatto gave another half-bow in return.

"Forgive me," Luzzatto said, "for I may not understand the Christian religion perfectly, but I understood that your Methodist church was Protestant, Reverend Jones?"

"It is, yes," said Jones, clearly anticipating the question. "If you're wondering whether that means Father Mazzare and I should be enemies, the answer is no, not in the twentieth century. Our churches never settled their differences of doctrine, but outside of a few troubled places and a few small minorities of troublemakers on both sides, Catholic and Protestant never do more than chide each other for their lapses in doctrine. As to our being friends, that is a happy accident of our having shared interests outside our respective religions."

"Indeed," said Mazzare, "a happy accident." He smiled. Jones had learned Italian fairly well in the months they had had before leaving Grantville, but he hadn't quite relaxed into the language. It was bizarre to hear the plain-spoken minister suddenly start talking in that grammatically perfect and excruciatingly pronounced way, in slow and measured sentences, after hearing him in voluble and homey eloquence all these years.

It was a question of practice, of course. Mazzare had grown up with Italian from his parents, refreshed it with a two-year stint in Rome, and was both fluent and colloquial in the language. The twentieth-century version of it, at least. He had had no difficulty with the Venetian dialect once he had attuned his ear to it, but Jones was still having trouble. Indeed, very few people hereabouts could understand his twentieth-century formal Italian, since it was a language hardly anyone in this time actually spoke.

"That is—interesting," said Luzzatto, looking introspective for a moment. Mazzare had an idea that he understood the Jewish lawyer's surprise. Luzzatto had lived most of his life in a place where there were hardly any non-Catholic Christians and non-Christians were formally and punctiliously discriminated against.

Mazzare realized he was being remiss in his duties as host. "Can someone get Maestro Luzzatto a drink? And one for me, as well." He pointed to one of the bottles on the sideboard. "That one—we have some others, too—was sent to you personally from Don Francisco. He asked me to assure you that it was prepared according to the laws of kosher—ah, kashrut."

Heinzerling moved to the sideboard, but Luzzatto intercepted him quickly and smoothly.

"Please," the lawyer said, smiling at the burly Jesuit, "allow me." Luzzatto opened the bottle and poured himself a glass, murmuring something as he did so. Mazzare didn't catch the words but assumed it was a religious blessing. Heinzerling seemed a bit surprised at the notion of a guest serving himself, but made no objection. He simply poured a glass for Mazzare and brought it over.

Mazzare noted with approval that Gus did not take the opportunity to refresh his own glass. But, mostly, he was chiding himself. He'd forgotten that Nasi had explained to him that maintaining kashrut required that the wine not be handled by anyone except observant Jews from the time the grapes were put into the bin to be pressed to the time it was poured into the glass.

He sighed inwardly. This was just one of the many ways in which one Larry Mazzare, small-town American priest, felt inadequate to his new assignment. Grantville's only Jewish family, the Roths, had been Reform Jews and late-twentieth-century variety at that. Dealing with seventeenth-century Jews was another matter altogether. No matter how sophisticated, cosmopolitan and well educated they were, the traditions and customs of Judaism were so deeply ingrained in their attitudes that it was easy to blunder into a minefield without realizing it.

That was even true, in many ways, with nonobservant Jews like Mike Stearn's wife Rebecca and her father, Balthazar Abrabanel. To Mazzare's way of thinking, it was odd. But he was Catholic, not Jewish. He knew that where Christians tended to see theological doctrine as the defining issue of their faith, Jews placed far more emphasis on matters of ritual, tradition and customs. Rebecca had been willing to marry a gentile, and her father had not objected. But Mike had told the priest that, very early on, he had learned to respect and accept the fact that Rebecca kept a kosher house and continued to observe Shabbat and the Jewish holidays. Not as strictly as the rabbis of Amsterdam would require, but to what Rebecca and her father regarded as a reasonable level.

He'd told that to Mazzare one evening in the Thuringen Gardens, as he munched on a ham sandwich. "Only time I ever get to eat pork any more is when I do it on the sly outside the house." But he'd said it cheerfully enough. "What the hell. If Paris was worth a mass to Henry the Fourth, keeping my wife happy is sure as hell worth a few changes in my diet and habits."

Luzzatto came back over to Mazzare's side and held up the glass. "Please pass along my thanks for the wine to my cousin Don Francisco, Monsignor Mazzare." He had a slightly impish half-smile on his face. "The Nasis are quite famous for it, you know."

"Oh?"

"Yes. The Nasis are even famous for it in the City." The words the City contained a freight of meaning. As if there was and could be no other city in the word comparable to Istanbul. "Until quite recently they were sole suppliers of wine to Topkapi palace. The business is still substantial, despite Emperor Murad's recent prohibitions."

"I'd think that would be a bit risky."

Luzzatto shrugged. "Simply living in the City has its risks. But it was the great shelter for the Sephardim after the Spanish drove us out of Iberia. Truth be told, the risks are small provided one does not wave the matter under the nose of Murad the Mad. Like most Ottoman emperors, he really does not care much what Jews or Christians do in his capital, as long as they do it quietly."

Mazzare took a sip of his own wine, which had also come from Nasi. Francisco had ordered several barrels sent to the embassy at his own expense. They'd already been here when the mission arrived.

The wine was good; full-bodied and with a sweet undertone that wasn't sickly like so much of the wine they got in Germany. "Delicious," he pronounced. "I must remember to thank Francisco when I send my first message home. Speaking of which—"

He broke off, remembering the need for security. Smoothly, understanding his quandary, Sharon Nichols stepped forward and engaged Luzzatto's attention. Mazzare took the opportunity to move away a few steps and speak softly into Heinzerling's ear. "Gus, how are the radio people doing?"

Heinzerling put his glass down. "I can find out," he said. "I left them untangling wires in the attic."

He spoke as softly as Mazzare. No one really knew if all the capabilities of Americans with radio were still a secret from Europe's princes. But so long as there remained the possibility that the USE's enemies still thought that enormous towers were needed for the devices, they would do their best to keep the knowledge limited. Although Melissa Mailey and her party were imprisoned in the Tower of London, they still had the means to communicate with home. If Charles I—the Earl of Strafford, more likely—ever got wind of the full capability of American radio . . .

He would surely have their quarters in the Tower subjected to a rigorous search—something he had avoided doing so far.

"Please," said Mazzare. "Tell them there's no pressure, I should simply like to know if I can send a message in tonight's transmission window or whether it should wait."

Heinzerling left, padding with that silent gait that went so oddly with his burly physique.

Mazzare moved back to Luzzatto's side. "Speaking of negotiations, do we yet have a program of discussions with Messer il Doge?"

"Ah." Luzzatto set down his glass and pulled his briefcase from under his arm. "It was for this reason I came to visit." He took out papers and began sorting through them.

"Perhaps we should take a moment to read through . . ." Mazzare broke off, when he saw the amount of paper involved.

"No, Monsignor. These are simply notes, of my own. I find I grow absentminded as I age."

Luzzatto gave a dry little chuckle. Mazzare hoped he was joking. As well as being small and narrow, the lawyer was remarkably baby-faced, giving the impression that he was in his twenties. The life story Nasi had given Mazzare, though, put Luzzatto somewhere nearer to forty.

"Ah," Luzzatto went on. "I am absentminded again. There are some matters for you to attest as plenipotentiary for the United States, the rental of this palazzo and so forth"—he set aside a bundle of documents—"and I shall leave these for you to examine at your leisure. There is no rush before the beginning of Lent, which is some time away yet. Then it will be needful to have your contracts signed."

Mazzare nodded, although he did not relish the thought of reading that pile of legalese in what was rapidly becoming his fourth language after English, German and Latin. Perhaps better to get onto a more immediate subject. "I understand that the diplomacy begins this evening with a reception at the palazzo ducale?"

"This is at once true, and not true, Monsignor. The reception will be to allow the members of the Consiglio to take a look at you and for each to pass some moments, perhaps, in conversation. Nothing can be done or will be done without a vote, and they dislike to act on any vote that does not have a majority of seventy or so."

"Seventy?" Jones had his eyebrows raised. "We have to convince seventy people of everything? I thought it was the doge and a few councillors—ten, wasn't it?"

"Again, Signor Jones, this is at once true and not true. The government of Venice is a complicated thing, and different kinds of decisions require different decision makers. Messer il Doge can decide very little himself; he has influence, not power. Many other decisions require him to act with various other bodies, depending on whether it is to do with the Rialto, the city, the Terrafirma, or foreign matters. There are differences for the Empire and for foreign Christian princes. I could not possibly explain all of these conveniently now, signor, although perhaps we might spare a few days at some point?" Luzzatto looked as though he meant it. Mazzare began to speculate, briefly, how much a top-flight commercial attorney in the up-time U.S. would charge to devote his time to a client like this, and that led him to just how deep the Nasi and Abrabanel commitment to the USE actually was. They were spending money like water.

Mazzare wrenched himself back to the present. He was vaguely aware that Jones had made some polite noises about how it sounded a fascinating prospect, but perhaps he might decline to fix a date just now, and Luzzatto was speaking again.

"—and so for diplomatic matters of this character it will be several votes of the Gran Consiglio to test the waters on particular matters and then a final vote to empower il doge to enter into the treaty. They will turn out in full for that, and I should expect to see perhaps a hundred and sixty votes cast. If they believe more than a few will vote against or abstain, they hold off voting. It is safe to do very little without consensus in the most serene Republic of Venice."

Luzzatto was smiling ever so slightly, his eyes twinkling. Mazzare had the distinct feeling that the irony had been intentional and intended to convey a very real warning of weirdness ahead. It was a warning of another kind, too: that they were in a town where it paid to be oblique about politics if you were opening your mouth anywhere near money or power. That was a kind of town that had been mercifully rare by the dawn of the twenty-first century, but was all too common in the seventeenth. Even diplomatic immunity was no sure guarantee; the Spanish ambassador Bedmar who was supposed to be back in town had had to get out of Venice one step ahead of a lynch mob.

Luzzatto was shuffling his notes, apparently preparing for a more formal presentation. Mazzare decided to prompt him. "Maestro Luzzatto, what are our chances of a favorable settlement here in Venice? I trust Don Francisco sent you a briefing on what we hope to achieve?"

Luzzatto cleared his throat. "Monsignor Mazzare, I will say in summary that the chances are good, with perhaps some reservations. Don Francisco has been instructing several of us here in Venice, in the ghetto and the Rialto alike, in rumors and information to feed to various interested parties. We have, I think, been successful in making the case for a strong commercial tie with the United States of Europe as it has now become. Venice has been in a precarious situation for some years now, and came close to crisis with the Mantuan war, for there was great risk of losing the French alliance, such as it is. The designs of both Spain and France on Venice and the money it represents are obvious and long standing. Spain is perhaps not so great a threat as once it was, but France has grown powerful in recent years. And while the Habsburgs in Spain and Austria are strong enough to contain them, the Terrafirma party in Venice have been worried. The maritime party is also concerned; for all that they pretend to care little for any wealth that comes from the land and to cleave to the view that Venice will make all its wealth from the Levant trade, they know that without the landward ties they are less powerful. In this, at least, the two parties see eye to eye."

Murmurs of understanding and assent went around the room. They had all sat through briefings from Nasi.

Luzzatto went on. "I believe that this interest is well recognized to be served by trade with the United States and the commercial opportunities it represents. There is no prejudice about trading with Protestant states, after all. The Dutch and the English have for some years had significant customs concessions here and the merchant houses are grown used to dealing with such. One of the current matters of debate before the Consiglio is the admission of an Englishman to farm the customs on certain goods here, such is the presence of the English in this town. You will doubtless meet this man, Sir Henry Hider, although his interests are in dried fish and cloth and so your commercial aims will not cross with his to any great extent."

Heinzerling came back into the room and padded over to Mazzare. Politely, Luzzatto moved away and began chatting with Sharon, allowing the father and his curate a moment for a quick and private exchange.

"There is good news and bad news," Heinzerling whispered. "The good news is that the radio will soon be functional. Tonight, they say."

Mazzare nodded. Then, braced himself. Gus Heinzerling did not use the expression "bad news" lightly.

"The bad news is that Joe Buckley was just spotted, entering the building next door. With luggage."

It was all Larry Mazzare could do not to groan aloud. As if things weren't complicated enough already!

Chapter 12

One of the great things about the seventeenth century, Joe Buckley reflected, was that you couldn't be left behind. Back up-time, what he had just done would have called for accreditations and passes and all manner of like nonsense and paperwork. If nothing else, airplane tickets.

Here and now, as the coming man in the field of investigative journalism that he was inventing a few hundred years early, Joe had just had to buy a good horse and try to keep up.

There was a downside, of course. A sore ass was only half of it. Name recognition was the other half. Between the Imperial Post and every other one-horse town boasting a printing press, there had been a lot of places on the route that had received his reports from Grantville and Magdeburg. Most of them didn't pay, which was a bind, but copyright and syndication were for the future. Nevertheless, his name was getting well known around Europe, bylined in all manner of odd corners. He'd even seen some pieces he definitely hadn't written but which had his name on them. Which was flattering, even if he never saw so much as a copper groat for it.

Still, he'd hardly put his hand in his pocket from Thuringia through Switzerland to Italy. Even in the rural backwaters where literacy was down around the thirty percent mark, in little towns where lack of practice lost people the letters they'd had, there was generally someone who'd read his stuff out in the tavern. Joe was the only twentieth-century-trained investigative journalist practicing his trade in the here-and-now, so far as he knew—which made him something of an instant superstar.

But—and it was a big but—his every attempt to get something on or about the ambassadorial party to Venice had so far been thwarted. Now, though, he had a top-floor suite of rooms in a building adjoining the palazzo that held the newly arrived embassy of the United States of Europe. The place was something of a dump, even though it had been home to the Swedish ambassador for a while. But there had never been any strong diplomatic presence from Sweden here and, so far as Buckley could tell, most of Venice was a dump anyway.

Joe dropped his bags, and took a moment to reflect on how he had changed. A good eight inches off the waistline, what with a lot more walking and riding and—surprise—a better diet. When the seventeenth century ate well, it generally ate healthily, he'd found. He was also now fairly fluent in three languages and able to get by, just, in two more. Of course, one of the ones he had trouble with was Italian, but he would improve that soon enough.

Behind him, a couple of the palazzo's staff were unpacking his gear and putting it away. He stared out of the window and contemplated the rooftops of Venice. From here he could see—well, no more than two or three streets away, but he was looking east across the city from quite close to the western end. Rooftops, all the way. Under every one, he thought, a story to be told.

And that was the other half of the change in fashion he'd started. He talked to the people who lived just under those roofs, and told the stories of the Rich and Famous from their point of view. Back in the twentieth century, of course, there had been precious little of that. The media was mostly controlled by big corporations, and that meant sucking up to the corporate bosses who owned them. It was the same in the seventeenth century, in a way. Poor people didn't own printing presses here anymore than they had up-time. But there was a big difference in social status. A man who, back up-time, would be a CEO and entitled to some major ass-kissing was, in the seventeenth century, merely "in trade" and thought the less for it.

He turned around and tried his Italian on for size. "Ladies," he said, "what is happening in Venice lately?"

The two maids froze and stared at him. Then, in a moment no choreographer could have bettered, looked at each other and giggled.

Thank you, God, Joe thought. Another town where everyone ignores the help.

* * *

Claude de Mesmes, comte d'Avaux, considered himself a patient and sensible man. A lawyer like his father before him and his grandfather also.

He had seen little cause for concern in the news from the Germanies at first, but then it had all reached him at third hand in Venice and Rome. True, he had met the king of Sweden and knew him for the brute and the bully he was. But d'Avaux had still been as astonished as anyone at Gustavus Adolphus' rapid success once he intervened in Germany. It had been hard work to extract from the Swede even mild limits on his exactions and depredations. At that, he had broken those promises. D'Avaux had heard of all manner of treasure being carted back to Sweden.

For now, alas, the Germanies were the demesne of the Swede—the Germanies and the assortment of bizarre strangers brought into their midst.

That last was the true source of his trouble. Trouble, mostly, in maintaining the proper and seemly patience of his station. It was difficult, sometimes, in the still watches of the long waits that characterized the diplomat's trade, to remember that in all things there were laws. Laws ordained by God for the natural order. Any scourge of God—like the Hun, or the Swede, or the Turk or doubtless others from the dawn of time to the crack of doom—might temporarily and locally overturn that order. But the sheer force of God's design in the world would soon assert itself, through those who acted as God's instruments in the world of time.

So, d'Avaux reassured himself once again, there was no cause for long-term concern. Cardinal Richelieu had that reassertion of the sublime will well in hand. It was the same argument they had long used with Father Joseph and his devots: there were secondary causes in the world through which God worked, and in bringing about the triumph of God's will there was no law save necessity, no matter the distasteful actions required in the short term. Such as, for example, subsidizing the Swede in the past or allying now with Spain. Granted, the feu-de-dieu was feeding newer and yet more pernicious heresies into the mélange of European strife. But how often had short-sighted moral and theological imperatives led to the ruin of all?

Best to work subtly. Hence the cardinal's instructions and their urgent tenor:

To Venice, Monsieur Le Comte. Nothing within your power must be left undone toward the end of thwarting the work of the ambassador of the United States of Europe. Their entire aim and design at Venice must be set at hazard, in which matter I repose my full confidence in you. There is no scruple or nicety as regards the Americans you will find there; there is now hot war between France and the Swede and his accomplices. You might spare some small scruple for the niceties as regards the rulers of the Most Serene Republic, but there is little injury in that quarter that sufficient money cannot repair. Above all, the strategic isolation of the United States of Europe is vital.

* * *

The comte sat at the window of the French embassy and brooded on the cavalcade that carried the Americans and their lackeys through town. Naturally, the Venetians—a frivolous people—had spent their time and money on a foolish dumb-show. A foolish dumb-show that d'Avaux had nevertheless ensured, in several days of furious negotiation, was less ostentatious than the dumb-show that had greeted his own arrival in Venice a few weeks earlier.

The Venetians, after all, had learned many of their habits from the Turk, among whom display and ostentation was all. Reports from Istanbul told always of the furious fights over ever smaller and smaller slices of status among the ambassadors.

But enough of past triumphs, and especially such piffling ones. D'Avaux turned away from the window.

His agent Ducos, awaiting the subtle signal, stepped forward from where he had been warming himself beside the fire against the last chill of a Venetian winter. D'Avaux noted that he had done so by standing on the shadowed side of the chimney-hood where, between the light of the window, the glow of the fire, a natural catlike immobility and the Huguenot severity of his somber suit, Ducos was all but invisible.

D'Avaux found it amusing, from time to time, to chide Ducos for his religious prejudices. Ducos took it largely in good part, for d'Avaux was careful never to press the matter to the point of a serious effort at conversion. There was a use for the hard core of French Protestants whom no edict or religious war would extirpate. There were tasks that had to be undertaken, things that had to be done that the moral flexibility of a theology that denied the value of good behavior could allow where a Catholic, bound to good works for the salvation of his soul, could not in good conscience tread. It would not do to send someone who was not already damned to do such things.

And so Ducos was a heretic servant of His Most Christian Majesty. And a useful one, too. Behind the scenes, in darkened rooms and in places where the likes of Monsieur le Comte d'Avaux could not go, Ducos would go and do and learn things the doing and learning of which were sanctified by the law of necessity and that law alone.

Watching him step forward into the light, d'Avaux was put in mind of some sleek, gray-finned creature of the deep, rising into the sunlit upper waters where men navigated. Woe betide the hapless mariner who found himself in the water when such a one came up from his accustomed darkness.

"Monsieur le Comte." Ducos gave him the little nod of the head that did him the duty served other men by extravagant bows.

"I believe," said d'Avaux, "that we have in place appropriate receptions for the Americans?"

"Yes, Monsieur le Comte. All that could conveniently be laid in advance has been. I have disbursed some three hundred scudi so far."

D'Avaux raised an eyebrow. Not at the sum, which would hire the exclusive services of one of the better class of physicians for a year, but at Ducos' choice of words. "Conveniently?" he repeated. Perhaps he was oversensitive to nuances, but it paid to check. Besides, Ducos was nothing if not precise.

"Conveniently." Ducos nodded.

"I shall leave to your judgment how much I should know, of course."

Ducos paused a moment before replying. "There is another American newly arrived in town," he said at some length.

"Not connected to the embassy?"

"I do not believe so, Monsieur le Comte. A rogue American, I think. He calls himself Buckley. Joe Buckley."

D'Avaux found that intriguing. Joe Buckley was a well-known demagogue and rabble-rouser, for all that his career was a recent one. His vernacular was English but he had a damnable knack of getting translated and passed around Europe by who knew what means. Yet, all the cardinal's spies reported that he was in ill-favor with the Americans themselves, despite being one of their number. "What is that silly term he favors for himself?"

" 'Investigative reporter.' " Ducos made a small shrug. "Which is to say, a spy."

"And who to know better than you?" The small witticism was hard for d'Avaux to resist.

"Just so, Monsieur le Comte. Just so. I have a number of schemes, in outline, for dealing with the Americans. I will add this 'Buckley' to the mix. Some depend on contingencies, but under pressure I will be able to—"

D'Avaux held up a hand. "Enough, Ducos. It suffices that, what? He has taken steps against you?"

"Not yet, since he's just arrived. But he will, be sure of it. He will certainly make himself familiar with the staff at the embassy. That will make it more difficult to safely place my own agents there."

D'Avaux waited a moment after Ducos stopped talking. The starveling-looking Huguenot could sometimes be hard to read. He would pause to marshal words, sometimes for remarkably long times. At other times, he would simply stop talking, without verbal punctuation, when in his opinion his master's conscience was sufficiently informed. D'Avaux admired that. Ducos had the casuistry of a Jesuit—but ten times the moral flexibility that had earned d'Avaux himself the ill name of comforter of heretics among the devots at home.

The comte brought himself back to the matter at hand. "I had heard this of the Americans," he said, as much to himself as to Ducos. "The cardinal warned me specifically. They have a knack—even the pretended nobility among them—to consort and grow familiar with the lower orders."

Ducos said nothing.

"It may perhaps be," d'Avaux mused aloud, "that will prove their undoing in this time and place. Especially in this place, where nobility is false already—merchants with delusions of grandeur—and thus its appearance may not be diluted. In Venice, the facade is all. Ah, yes. There is much that might be said, in the right ears. Ducos?"

"Yes, Monsieur le Comte?"

"Do I understand that some of your methods include the disbursement of funds among the servant classes?"

"Yes, Monsieur le Comte."

"Then I should like, if it please you, to have reports as to those with whom this Buckley, and all the other Americans, choose to consort. No matter how low their station."

"Yes, Monsieur le Comte. And, Monsieur le Comte?"

"Ducos?"

"Has Monsieur le Comte read the notes I have provided as to the Spanish delegation?"

"Yes, Ducos. I thank you for reminding me. It would appear that Bedmar seeks Spain's advantage in Venice—no surprise there—and by like methods as he used before. He failed before, Ducos. Disastrously, in fact. See that he fails again. Simply because we are allied now, I see no reason to cede any advantage to the Spaniards here."

"Yes, Monsieur le Comte."

"I leave the details, as always, to you, Ducos."

"Yes, Monsieur le Comte."

Chapter 13

Finally, they were finished unpacking. Better yet, Magdalena had charged off to take care of something else. Best of all, Gus Heinzerling had appeared and announced he was done for the night.

All was well in Frank Stone's world. Bases were covered, with his dad and stepmom alike—and the rest of the evening beckoned.

"So," Frank said brightly. "This taverna of yours. How do we get there?"

Giovanna gave him that dimply smile that was doing the weirdest things to his stomach. "The kitchen," was all she said.

* * *

The kitchen turned out to be bright, warm, steamy and full of bustle. It wasn't extravagant, there wasn't anything really riotous happening, but there was a definite air of ongoing party about the place.

"Do all these people work here?" Frank asked, as they descended the steps into the room.

"Yes," said Giovanna. "Well, most." She made a beeline toward an open doorway across the large room they'd entered, passing a hearth to her right along the way.

The first big room of several, from what Frank could see. He realized that the "kitchen" should probably be called "the kitchens," in a palace like this one. The rooms were big, and spacious for all their clutter, but they still managed to look full with the number of people who were there.

Not all of them were working, either. The kitchens seemed to combine the attributes of a work place with those of a tavern. Packed into the main room as well as three side rooms that were within his view despite the smoke and steam, Frank could see dozens of people. At least a third of them, although dressed in what he took to be workclothes, were sitting at tables chatting over glasses of wine. In one of the side rooms, out of sight, he could hear what sounded for all the world like a pickup band playing a folk tune.

He followed Giovanna through the doorway, his two younger brothers in tow and Gus bringing up the rear. The room they'd entered was apparently a cellar of some kind, judging from the lack of any hearths or other cooking implements and the casks, jugs, and barrels stacked against two of the walls.

The real function of the room, however, was pretty much "tavern pure and simple." There was a huge table at the center of the room—three tables, rather, fitted together like a T—with at least a dozen people sitting around it on a haphazard collection of stools and chairs.

Using the term "sitting" loosely, that is. Frank immediately recognized one of those people—and Billy Trumble was "sitting" in the manner that a man wrapped around a lot of wine generally "sits." Especially one who was only a year older than Frank himself and almost certainly had less experience with mind-altering substances. His Marine uniform was in such a state of dishevelment that Frank gave silent thanks that Admiral Simpson was several hundred miles away.

"Yo, Frank," slurred Billy. " 'S'up?"

Billy's seat was all the more precarious because the young soldier clearly had a lot on his mind. Or, rather, one single subject upon which he was concentrating as ferociously as a man can concentrate when he's several sheets to the wind. Perched on a stool next to him was a grinning, dark-haired girl perhaps two years older than Giovanna and bearing something of a vague resemblance. A cousin, perhaps, if not a sister.

A moment later, Frank recognized the soldier sitting next to Billy—and with not much more in the way of sober stability. Conrad Ursinus, that was, another of Grantville's star baseball players and one of Billy's close friends. Conrad was wearing a naval uniform that was every bit as disheveled as Billy's. This time, Frank muttered aloud his fervent thanks that Admiral Simpson was across the Alps.

"And they call it a 'security detachment,' " his brother Ron murmured sarcastically. "God help us all."

Now that he listened more carefully, Frank realized that the folk tune being sung in the adjoining room had a definitely Scots air about it. Apparently, Lennox's soldiers had found a better place to ward off the early spring chill than standing at attention outside the embassy.

Heinzerling confirmed his guess. "Lennox will flay them alive, when he finds out," he growled.

"Venizz's great," Billy announced loudly, with the rousing and expansive good cheer of the irretrievably drunk. "Wine, women, song. La dolchy vita!"

Giovanna said something that sounded decidedly arch in rapid-fire Venetian-accented Italian, and the girl sitting next to Billy giggled. She prodded Billy in the chest, and said something in Italian herself. Fortunately, she spoke much more slowly and enunciated clearly, so both Frank and even Billy could understand her.

"Won't you introduce us, Lieutenant?"

Billy tried, and completely failed, to suppress a belch. " 'Scuse me and sorry," he said, "but, uh, not in that order. Or something." He cleared his throat. Then, as solemnly as a man in his condition could manage:

"Frank, guys, permit me to introduce the lovely, the charming, Arcangela. Arcangela, this is my good friend Frank Stone, and his brothers Gerry and Ron. They may be soccer fags, but otherwise they're great guys. The beefy old fellow glarin' at me over their shoulder is Gus Heinzerling." He shifted to English, waving his wine glass. "Forgive me for not rising, gents, but I am shit-faced drunk."

Alcohol consumption was making Billy maudlin. In point of fact, he and Frank were not "good friends." True, they weren't personal enemies, or anything like that. As jocks went, Frank had always found Billy a pretty decent guy—way better than the outright muscle-Nazis on the football team—and so far as he knew Billy had no particular animus against him. Still, they remained on opposite sides of that great high school divide that both were too fresh from to have forgotten or forgiven yet. Here, the in crowd, with their athletes and cheerleaders and class presidents; there, the polyglot semi-alliance of the outcast nerds and geeks and hippies.

Far more important at the moment, however, was that a matter of honor was at stake here. "Soccer fag, is it?" Frank demanded. His Italian was considerably better than Billy's, but he stumbled over the second word. There was undoubtedly an Italian equivalent, but since he didn't know it he just tried to give the English word a foreign flavor. "That's a bit rich coming from a guy who can't even throw a ball in a straight line."

Billy frowned back with grim deliberation, trying to assemble the glower one eyebrow at a time. It looked like he was having trouble controlling his face.

"It's true," Frank went on solemnly, speaking now to Arcangela. "I've seen him. He throws the thing, and it curves." He mimed a thoroughly banana-shaped pitch. "Clearly incompetent."

Billy got it at last, and laughed, nearly falling onto the floor. He would have, too, except he got a good grip on Arcangela's arm. She pried it off, but not too quickly and giggling while she did so. Drunk as a skunk or not, Billy didn't seem to have irritated her any. Frank ascribed that to the unfair advantage of the uniform.

But he didn't care, really. Frank's interest was elsewhere—and Giovanna was already passing him a glass of the wine. Then, moving deftly, she poured three more glasses for Frank's brothers and Gus.

Gus nodded his thanks, but Frank noticed that he didn't make any move to drink the stuff. Suddenly cautious—and not simply because he didn't want to make an ass of himself in front of Giovanna—Frank decided to follow his lead.

Gerry was the first to take a mouthful, and his eyes bulged as he got a taste. "Gah! What is this stuff?"

"Call it 'grappa,' " Billy slurred. "Great stuff onc't get used to it." He transferred his bleary gaze to Frank. "Say, about pitching and stuff, I been telling the folks about baseball here. I reckon we might be able to get a game on."

That figured. Billy had had a real chance of getting picked up for pro baseball when the Ring of Fire had stopped his career before it started. Rather than just swallow the disappointment, he'd helped organize the first big game after the event. Frank was no great shakes at baseball himself, and didn't really like it much. Soccer was his own passion. But Billy was passionate about baseball and had managed to transfer that passion onto a number of young Germans he'd come into contact with—none more so than his friend and now fellow officer Conrad Ursinus. He'd been on the Marine team in Magdeburg before he was posted away to Venice, and Conrad on the naval yard dog team.

There were five or six other regular teams in Grantville and Magdeburg, and teams were springing up in most of the larger towns in Thuringia and Franconia and anywhere else the Americans had a real presence in the USE. The Germans had taken to the game in a way they hadn't to football or basketball and been slower about with soccer. Talk about organizing real leagues had not gotten far, what with the war and all. But that was just a matter of time, especially after the Committees of Correspondence decided that organizing sports clubs was an excellent way of extending their influence still further.

The whole subject was something of a sore point with Frank and his brothers. They'd done what they could to get soccer adopted as well, but—

And then it hit him. They were in freaking Italy. Italy! For crying out loud, there pretty much wasn't any more promising territory for spreading the word about soccer without going to Brazil or—he was reminded by the sight of Aidan talking to some other soldiers with drunken animation—England. Back up-time, soccer had been Italy's other national religion.

Arcangela broke into Frank's train of thought, all but derailing it. "It is true," she said. "Billy has told us all of this game. But it was not very clear to me."

When he stopped laughing, Frank said: "And now let me tell you about the game they play in Italy in the future."

As he explained, he could see the interest taking hold, people drifting over to listen. He'd been right. Better still, Giovanna seemed as interested as anyone.

One of the Venetian guys—Frank could recall seeing him horsing trunks into the embassy—said, "We need a ball?"

"Sure, about so big." Frank held his hands out to indicate the size of a FIFA standard ball.

"And with just the feet and the head?" the porter asked.

"Yup. Handling it is a foul. What's your name, sorry?"

"Marius," the porter said, rising and holding out a hand. "Marius Pontigrazzi."

Pontigrazzi waved his wine glass in the direction of an intense-looking middle-aged man sitting at the center of the T in the big table. "I work for Giovanna's father, over there."

Frank's enthusiasm came to a screeching halt. Giovanna's father. Oh, Christ. Now that he really looked, he could see the family resemblance—just as he could see it in the two younger men sitting on either side of the man.

And her brothers. Oh, Christ.

The father's name was Antonio, he recalled. Antonio Marcoli. Frank couldn't remember the name of Giovanna's brothers, if she'd even told him at all.

Frantically, he tried to figure out where to go from here. Swapping insults with a drunken fellow American and then launching into a fervent speech for the introduction of soccer was probably not, he feared, the best introduction he could have made of himself. He felt like Romeo finally introduced to Juliet's father, and completely blowing it. Might as well pull out the dagger and take the poison now and be done with it.

Alas, Pontigrazzi wasn't going to give him a break, either. The porter was starting to shuffle around. "Just the feet?" he demanded. "Silly!"

"And your head, Marius," Gerry said. He'd gotten a cabbage from somewhere. "Watch," he said, and dropped the vegetable.

Frank winced—et tu, brother?—but Gerry caught it neatly on his foot and balanced it there. Fortunately, the one gulp of the grappa didn't seem to have affected Gerry's reflexes—as he went on to prove with a quick flurry of keep-up moves, flicking the cabbage into the air and knocking it up off his left, then his right knee. As it came down again he caught it on his foot, paused a second and chipped it up and over to Ron, who headed it in a shower of cabbage leaves to Frank.

Fortunately, Frank had the presence of mind to chest-trap the cabbage; then, leaned back as it fell to kick it back up. He fluffed that a bit, and had to hop to get his knee under it, but then he was able to get into the rhythm and drunken cheering broke out.

What the hell, he told himself. Giovanna's dad probably thinks I'm a jerk anyway, so I may as well prove I'm adept at it.

"Marius?" he called out, and saw Marius nod. Frank flicked it up, wincing a bit as he had to hit the thing a lot harder because it had almost no bounce. He was going to have a bruise in the morning. He got under it as it came back down and nodded it over to the Venetian.

Who chest-trapped it like a pro, and took it on the drop for a shot that would have gone clear to the back of the net, but—

It was a cabbage, after all. It exploded in a shower of healthful greens. The heart shot out at about Mach three and landed in the hearth to a shower of sparks and curses from the cooks.

Then, salvation!

Giovanna's father rose to his feet, bellowing praise, and proceeded to slap Marius on the back. Gerry and Ron went into full-on goal-celebration mode, heaving their doublets up over their faces and waving like loons.

Billy was throwing up now. Whether that was because he had actually laughed himself sick or because he'd just seen his plan to pollute Italy with baseball explode in a shower of cabbage leaves, Frank didn't know. The Italians were all cheering Marius, who was grinning like he'd scored the winner.

Which, in a sense, he had. Definitely, Frank thought, promising territory for three missionaries of the Beautiful Game.

Better yet, Giovanna was hauling her father over and making a proper introduction. Antonio Marcoli still looked far more intense than Frank would ever be comfortable with, but the man was smiling and extending his hand. Best of all, Giovanna's smile was wider than he'd ever seen it and the dimples were on Full Charm Display.

Mentally, Frank put away the vial of poison and the suicide dagger. All was well with the world!

* * *

Alas, he should have known.

No sooner did Antonio Marcoli take his hand than he drew Frank close. Then, whispered into his ear.

The whisper even sounded conspiratorial.

"Tomorrow. At night. Giovanna will bring you. Full meeting of the Committee. We must conspire to rescue Galileo."

Chapter 14

Slipping away from the embassy the next day to get a boat to Murano was simplicity itself. Ron had suggested holding the meeting with Giovanna's father in the afternoon, so they could with all honesty tell Dad and Magda that they were going to see the sights and would be back by dark.

Giovanna insisted on not letting them row the boat for her. Watching the more-or-less effortless way in which she'd handled the little craft, Frank was inclined to agree it was a good idea that she had. Apart from some kayaking the one time their dad had sent them off to summer camp, none of the Stone boys could have handled the boat the way she did.

Besides, sitting in the stern and observing Giovanna in action was a sheer delight for Frank. The girl might be on the small side—by twentieth-century American standards, if not seventeenth-century Italian ones—but her lush figure was underlain by plenty of muscle. It was all Frank could do not to ogle her outright.

The journey to Murano didn't take much time, and half of that was negotiating the winding little canals and the heavy traffic that Venice always had on its waterways in the daytime. The taverna was on the same model as the one that was in the basement of the embassy: it was in the back of the lower story of a great house. But this one was a dedicated taverna, rather than part of a huge kitchen. It didn't seem to be a public establishment, though. From what Frank could tell, it was more in the way of a private club for the inhabitants of the building.

It was an odd sort of arrangement, to American eyes, even eyes that had grown accustomed to seventeenth-century central Germany. The big building fronting the canal was not a palace for an embassy but a considerably more dilapidated structure. Most of it seemed to be taken up by artisans' shops below and their associated living quarters on the upper floors. The population density was . . . Venetian.

Giovanna's father, Frank had learned, was a metalworker by trade. Which, in Venice, meant something more like a jeweler than a blacksmith. Apparently, he'd traveled to Thuringia not long after the Ring of Fire in order to improve his skills with up-time techniques, leaving his children in the care of his relatives since his own wife had died in the plague. Antonio had returned with a burning enthusiasm for up-time ideology as well as up-time metalworking techniques. In fact, from what Frank could tell, he seemed to be the perfect illustration of the old saw about the zeal of converts. More Catholic than the pope—or, in this case, more American than the Americans.

* * *

The back room was smoky and dark, since at this time of day no direct sunlight was coming through the narrow windows on one wall. Just right for a conspiracy except that it was very large. There was nobody in it other than the Marcolis, Marius, and one other man, standing next to a large table toward the back.

"You know the new guy?" Ron asked Frank quietly.

"No. I wonder if he's part of this or if he just wandered in?"

Giovanna leaned close, and it was all Frank could do not to writhe in pleasure at the feel of her breath on his ear. "It is Michel Ducos, of the Paris Committee. He is attached to the French embassy, but is one of us."

"The Paris Committee?" Frank hadn't been aware there even was a Committee of Correspondence in the French capital. Gretchen Richter must have been busy when she passed through the city as part of Becky Stearns' diplomatic mission!

He wondered how hard a time of it the Committee people were having in Paris. Richelieu's agents were rough, by all accounts. On the other hand, Ducos looked like a mean customer himself, so maybe they were getting on okay if he was any kind of measure of the rest of them. He was a tall, narrow man with a hatchet face—the kind of face that couldn't say ornery son of a bitch more plainly if you tattooed it on his forehead. He was on his feet talking to Marcoli senior, a tumbler of something unregarded on the table beside him.

"Si," said Giovanna. "Their special embassy came a few weeks before yours, and Michel came with them as one of their servants. He came straight to us, and has given us much information about the comte d'Avaux."

Frank heard the Michel and inwardly snarled. The guy's a fast worker, he thought, and then told himself to cool it. "Who's this Count Devo, then?"

"The French ambassador, and a very bad man."

"That figures. Works for Richelieu, does he?"

"Si. He is infamous for his troublemaking in the Germanies and in Italy, and now he comes to Venice again. Michel tells us he is here to make trouble for you Americans."

Ducos turned his head. "D'accord," he said. Frank realized that while in conversation with Messer Marcoli, Ducos had been keeping track of the conversation on the other side of the room. Ducos went on: "Seigneur le Comte is one of Richelieu's creatures. A man most dangerous to the advance of liberty, Monsieur Stone."

So the guy already knew his name, too. Frank decided to make introductions anyway, and named Gerry and Ron for the Frenchman. Giovanna's father and Marius Pontigrazzi they already knew, and finally he learned the names of Giovanna's brothers: Salvatore and Fabrizio.

There were also Dino and Roberto Marcoli, twin brothers also in their teens, and another older guy in his late thirties or early forties. Frank recognized all three of them. They'd been with Antonio Marcoli in the embassy the day before, although they hadn't really been introduced. The older man turned out to be the father of the twins and one of Antonio's many cousins. He was also Antonio's brother-in-law; or had been, at least, until Giovanna's mother died in the plague.

Frank would have been surprised by that, and a little taken aback, if he hadn't already learned that the general American tendency to avoid cousin marriage was not shared in most of the world. Miz Mailey had once told him the prohibition against it in many U.S. states was a result of a combination of the influence of the eugenics movement in the 1920s and anti-immigrant attitudes. Nowhere outside of North America had it been prohibited and it was actually quite common, even in the twentieth century of the universe they'd come from. He'd found the whole thing rather amusing at the time, given the longstanding wisecracks about inbred West Virginians. In their new world, the former West Virginians were considered maniacal exogamists.

The cousin/brother-in-law was named Massimo Marcoli, and was apparently the intellectual theorist of the group. At least, he had a stack of pamphlets fresh from Germany with him.

"So," said Gerry when introductions had gone around. "When is everyone else getting here?"

"Everyone is here," said Marcoli sternly, "now that you have arrived."

Frank's heart sank. Venice's Committee of Correspondence consisted of nine people, seven of whom were all part of the same extended family, one of whom worked for them as a handyman, and the last being a visitor from a Committee in another country altogether. Not to mention that, of the nine, five were teenagers or just barely past it.

And they propose to free Galileo from durance vile? How?

Alarm bells started going off in his mind. This had all the earmarks of a half-baked scheme concocted by enthusiastic amateurs. Well, except Ducos, who seemed to know what he was doing. But he was a foreigner too.

"Okay, then, what's the plan?" asked Gerry.

Frank strained, but couldn't hear a drop of sarcasm. Damn, he's getting good, he thought. Either that, or his youngest brother was a nitwit.

Marcoli didn't hear any sarcasm either, and set off in a torrent of enthusiastic Italian. Once they got him to slow down, he explained to them the plan, with contributions from Massimo. Frank's heart plunged lower and lower, into what seemed to be a bottomless abyss.

First, they would circulate propaganda, to ensure that there was popular outrage at Galileo's treatment.

Okay, that's feasible. If we can scrape up the money. And if the authorities don't nab us at it. Not sure how they feel about "circulating propaganda" in Venice, but I rather doubt the First Amendment carries a lot of weight here.

Then, they would travel to Florence, where Galileo was being held under house arrest pending his trial.

Um. Travel takes money—from where? I can just see Dad's reaction if we ask him for some spare change to mosey on over to Florence. And just how easy is it to travel across Italy these days, anyway? It's not as if the place is a single country in the here and now.

Frank tried to remember the history lessons crammed into them before they left and on the long way here. Didn't Florence dislike the Venetians? I think so. If I remember right, everybody in Italy dislikes the Venetians.

Then, they would "fall upon" the inquisitors guarding Galileo.

Frank tried to picture himself "falling upon" an inquisitor. The image that came to mind did not fill him with great confidence. He had a dark suspicion that the average inquisitor in the seventeenth century bore a closer resemblance to American high school jocks than old men rubbing their arthritic hands and cackling with sadistic glee. The one and only time in his life that Frank Stone had ever "fallen upon" a jock—a stupid argument in the high school gym which had gotten out of hand—the affair had gone badly. Very badly indeed. Goddam football players.

Alas, Giovanna was beaming at him. Those dimples . . .

Driven by evolutionary impulses way too powerful to be overridden by mere sanity, Frank squared his shoulders and did his best to look "manly."

And said nothing. Made no protest at all. Such is the folly of natural selection.

Finally, Antonio Marcoli concluded enthusiastically, after freeing Galileo from captivity they would "spirit him away" to freedom in the United States.

Galileo's . . . what, now? Just turned seventy, I think. According to what Dad told me, his health is shaky and on top of that he's losing his eyesight. Frank remembered the rigors of their trek across the Alps to get to Venice. Great. I can just see us "spiriting him away." In what? A coffin?

But Marcoli was plowing on, as enthusiastically as ever—and, more to the point, Giovanna was still beaming at him. So, again, Frank kept his mouth shut and just did his best to satisfy the crazed imperatives of evolution by looking as stalwart and masculine as possible. Much like a male peacock spreads his glorious tail feathers in the bright sunshine or a male frog croaks his mightiest in the gloom of night.

Predators be damned.

* * *

Marcoli spent the next few minutes explaining how their "great revolutionary exploit" would bring the downtrodden masses of Italy to their feet. It seemed that—according to Marcoli, anyway—every Italian of the exploited and oppressed lower classes spent every waking minute agonizing over the fate of the great Italian genius Galileo. His liberation would be the death knell for medievalism! The tocsin for revolution!

Frank had his doubts. In fact, he was pretty damn sure he now knew what must have been going through the minds of some of John Brown's more level-headed associates when Brown explained his plans for Harper's Ferry.

He's nuts!

But . . .

Apparently, Frank's mimicry of the male-in-his-prime had served its purpose. Giovanna left off simply beaming and, in her own enthusiasm, gave him a hug. True, it was a brief hug. No matter. The feel of that nubile warm body against his was enough to paralyze Frank in the critical moment.

Critical . . . because his younger brothers—idiots!—opened the door to madness still further, before Frank could stop them.

"Why do we need the propaganda at all, then?" Gerry asked, running fingers through his hair. "Seems to me we'd be better off keeping quiet until we make our move."

Ron chimed in, after glancing at Giovanna. True, Ron seemed to have reconciled himself to letting Frank have a clear shot. But he was still a teenage boy in the presence of an exceedingly attractive teenage girl. Which is to say, a functional imbecile.

"Yeah, that's what I think too." Ron swelled his chest. "Besides, I'm more of an action sort of guy anyway."

Marcoli leaned over, his intense face more intense than ever. His dark eyes now seemed like coal. Glowing coal. "Because without the propaganda, Galileo's freedom is only the liberty of one old man, messers! The people have clutched his cause to their bosom, to be sure. But the subtleties of the matter must still be explained to them or they will not grasp the full significance of his liberation."

Frank finally saw an opening. Propaganda. Yeah. Propaganda takes time. Time to stall . . . and stall . . .

"Good idea!" he said brightly. "I'll start working on something right off. I was thinking a pamphlet—no, maybe a booklet! For that matter—this really is an important and complicated issue—maybe a full-length—"

Alas. Antonio's cousin Massimo smiled and shook his head. "No need, young messer! I have already written it!"

From somewhere on the floor he brought up a satchel, seedy-looking and frayed at the corners. From it he pulled a thick sheaf of paper, closely covered in scrawled writing, cup-rings and other, less identifiable stains. "Everything is explained here, for the people."

"I help to write it," Marius chimed in proudly.

I just bet you did, thought Frank. He'd seen enough of Marius already to realize that the Marcoli family's handyman was, in the venerable old American saying, not playing with a full deck. Frank had an awful feeling that the tract Massimo and Marius had written would be of a piece with the rest of the plan.

He had a moment's wild amusement. Maybe he could send a copy of that screed back to Joachim von Thierbach on an experimental basis. Joachim was the CoC's top propagandist in Germany and a genuine whiz at it. See if a man can really die laughing.

"Maybe you could reduce it to just the essentials," said Ron. "A single, uh, I don't know the Italian. What the Germans call a Flugblätt. Means 'flyer' in English."

Massimo and Marius frowned mightily.

"Most people don't have time to read a whole long argument, you see," said Ron. "You're trying to reach the workers and the tradespeople. They spend all day making a living and when they finish they haven't the energy to go through a whole lot. What they might do is read a sheet that convinces them of the main argument."

Massimo and Marius still looked doubtful. So did Antonio. "But we must educate the people fully!" he protested. "They must understand."

"Oh, sure, sure," said Ron, hastily. "But full understanding has to come a step at a time. Maybe we can break down your book there into ideas a page at a time, introduce the ideas one at a time, let people work up to it. They'll read a page every few days where they won't sit down with a whole book, right?"

Again, Frank saw an opening. From the look of that thick, closely scrawled manuscript, translating it into comprehensible terms on short leaflets—if it could be done at all; he had his doubts; so much the better—would surely take weeks and weeks. Maybe months.

"Good idea!" he chimed in. "That's the way Joachim von Thierbach always works, you know."

The assembled Marcoli clan studied him with bright eyes.

"Si?" asked Giovanna. "That is how the great Thierbach does his . . ." She groped for a moment with the English term. " 'Agitprop,' I think they call it."

She looked at her father. "Thierbach is very good, you know. He is the one who writes as 'Spartacus.' I have read some of his tracts you brought back with you. The ones you translated, at least. My German is still not good."

Bless the girl! Frank was still holding on to the hope that the love-of-his-life possessed all of what little common sense God in His Heaven had seen fit to bestow upon the Marcolis. Not much, maybe. But with those dimples and . . . everything else, he was willing to overlook some minor flaws.

Besides, it wasn't as if Frank's own genetic heritage didn't include a fair share of lunacy. Hypocrisy, get thee behind me. Down with double standards!

Antonio Marcoli's doubts seemed to be assuaged. In fact, he was positively beaming. "If this is as Spartacus says, then we must do it also!"

"Ab-so-lutely," Ron said firmly. "Joachim's a genius with propaganda, and this is something he found works really well."

That was true enough, actually. Joachim von Thierbach was one of the stars of the Committees of Correspondence, after Gretchen Richter, of course. Other people thought about propaganda as something you just did. Joachim lived it, breathed it, and probably spouted it in his sleep. Of the three Stone brothers, Ron paid the most attention to Joachim's lectures and writing. Frank realized with relief that if Ron could get these guys onto the subject of propaganda and tied up in getting out their message then they wouldn't be thinking about doing anything stupid with the Inquisition. Not any time soon, at least.

Praise be. Frank had mental visions of the Inquisition's goons. Huge, mustachioed guys, he imagined, with those crescent-shaped helmets the Spanish used all the time, prodding people with long, wicked-looking swords into cellars to be tortured. Handing out leaflets and doing a spell in the kitchens at the Freedom Arches was his own idea of revolutionary activity. Taking on huge sword-wielding thugs and their sinister priestly masters was not included.

Ron and Massimo were getting into a serious debate, now. Marius was following the talk back and forth, and looked to be getting a little dizzy. Granted, Marius would probably get a little dizzy trying to follow any extended conversation.

Ducos, on the other hand, was silent and reserved. He'd moved away from the table a little, his face looking more saturnine than ever. Apparently, the Frenchman was a man of action and wasn't entirely satisfied with the new developments. Roberto and Dino were discussing something else at another table, something that involved them making notes on a piece of paper.

And Marcoli himself—Marcoli was now speaking to Frank. "Messer Frank—perhaps your brother Gerry also—this propaganda talk does not need us. May I ask you to help with the technology?" He was awkward in pronouncing the up-time word.

"Uh, sure," said Gerry.

Frank nodded vigorously. He was hardly what you'd call experienced and adept at the art of getting on the good side of the Male Parent of The Intended—even leaving aside the fact that he still didn't really know exactly what he intended—but this was a gimme. In West Virginia, showing off one's mechanical skills to the MPTI was hallowed tradition and custom. Even for someone whose real name was Faramir.

And at least, this time, whatever the MPTI wanted wouldn't involve internal combustion engines. Frank suppressed a wince, remembering that one time . . . Missy Jenkins' father hadn't stopped laughing for three minutes.

"It is for the propaganda. Please, come." Marcoli got up and went over to the back of the room, where a big crate was lying on the floor with three smaller ones stacked next to it. "Our printing press, si? But our mechanical skills, they are not great for something like this."

Frank recognized it. One of the things the German Committees were doing—Joachim again—was shipping improved little printing presses out to Committees across Europe. Essentially, they were the seventeenth century's closest equivalent to the mimeograph machines that had been the staple for radical organizations up-time in the years and decades before the advent of copying machines.

"What's the problem?" Frank asked.

Marcoli lifted the lid on the big crate, and pulled out a many-folded piece of paper. "The directions for assembly," he said mournfully, "they are impossible to understand. Even for something in English, it is . . ." He passed the sheet to Frank and threw up his hands.

Frank and Gerry both chuckled. "A law of nature, sir. I've no idea why, but these things are always written by people with no grasp of reality."

"Also, please," Marcoli went on, "what is a 'Philips screwdriver'?"

Frank looked down at the instructions, which were written in English. Sure enough, they had been written by an up-timer. Probably one of the machine-shop guys, who'd assumed that everyone knew what a Philips screwdriver was.

"Gerry, you brought a toolkit, right?"

"Not with me now, but I got one back at the palazzo, sure. We should pass word back to include a Philips with these things?"

"I think we should," said Frank, "although Allen wrenches would be even better, you ask me." Studying the instructions, he shook his head. "Machinists and mechanics are almost as bad as computer geeks, when it comes to assuming that everyone else in the world shares their expertise."

To Giovanna's father, he explained: "Messer Marcoli, a Philips screwdriver is a special tool. We have one at the embassy. We'll bring it and help set up the press."

Giovanna came up then, standing close to Frank. Very close indeed. "You can make it work properly?"

"Oh, sure," replied Frank, doing his level best to exude male-in-his-prime. "No sweat."

Then he had to explain the colloquialism. That segued neatly into an explanation of "piece of cake," which, in turn, segued into "cakewalk" and "milk run."

All was right with the world, again. Better than ever, in fact. Frank was now quite confident that, between the gadgetry and the needs of coherent propaganda, he could postpone any real madness indefinitely. While Antonio Marcoli and his daughter might have been a bit short-changed in the common-sense department—more than a bit, in the father's case—both of them were quite intelligent and were the kind of people who were interested in just about everything. Which meant . . .

Easily distracted. Serenely, Frank foresaw months of distraction, in the most distracting company he had ever met in his life. Oh, brave new world!

Chapter 15

Getting back to the embassy, Frank led his brothers up to their apartment. That was an odd notion right there; suddenly they had their own apartment, which was either a gigantic opportunity or put a whole lot more pressure on them to behave. Or, at least, on Frank. Sometimes, being the eldest sucked big-time.

"Okay, guys, time to plan." Gerry was matter-of-fact about it. Frank realized with no little horror that his brother was actually serious. It'd be a lot simpler if he'd just stick to humping the legs of girls he ran into, he thought. Or worse, maybe he wanted to turn himself into a real hillbilly hard-ass, instead of just the wannabe he was now. Either way, the signs of testosterone poisoning were getting frickin' obvious.

Frank paused to think for a moment. He had to handle this carefully, because there was a real possibility he'd send Gerry off to do the damn thing by himself. Chances were, Ron would go off with him, or at least do something similarly stupid like go handing out leaflets outside the doge's palace.

And leaving aside the need to keep his younger brothers under control, Frank had to be seen doing something or he'd be out of luck real fast with . . .

That though was the real clincher. Cautious enough to keep Gerry and Ron from haring off and getting themselves killed or thrown into a dungeon somewhere—and guess who'd get the blame?—while still daring enough to impress Giovanna.

Worse than that, really. He had to do something daring enough to impress Antonio Marcoli. For all her own sprightliness and brains, Giovanna was obviously a girl who was much attached to and impressed by her father. His opinion of Frank would weight heavily with her.

Damn.

"Yeah, plan," he said, vaguely, distracted by the very clear mental picture he suddenly had of Giovanna.

"We need to find out what the deal is with Galileo's trial," said Ron. "Where he'll be taken, what he's charged with, who his lawyer is, that kind of thing."

That sounded practical enough. "I could see if Father Mazzare knows anything," Frank volunteered.

Gerry looked skeptical. "He's a Catholic priest, remember. Won't he go tell someone if we start asking questions about Galileo?"

"Paranoia, Gerry?" Ron asked. "Been at Dad's stash?"

Gerry didn't answer, but just stood straight up and glared at Ron.

"Well, come on!" Ron snorted. "Father Mazzare, an Inquisition spy?"

"Yeah? You notice why he's called 'Father'?" Gerry demanded.

"Cool it, guys," said Frank. Testosterone poisoning, for sure. "Gerry, you're right, but for the wrong reasons. Now, I'm not saying we should go help spring Galileo, and I'm not saying we shouldn't, but Ron's right, first we need info. And if we come right out and say why we want it, we'll be actually grounded for the first time in our lives."

That brought silence. Their dad and the words "harsh disciplinarian" barely belonged on the same continent, let alone in the same sentence. Tom Stone had the sneaky, awful, borderline-abusive practice of being reasonable with teenagers, which was a lot harder to deal with than other kids' parents' ways of dealing with the occasional high spirits. Be that as it may, there was a line across which they had never taken him, a line on the other side of which there was the real possibility of Dad getting old-fashioned. Taking part in a commando raid on an Inquisition prison was definitely on the far side of that line.

"So, what, you're just going to go ask him?" But Gerry had lost some of the snarl from his tone.

"Yeah, why not?" Frank said, shrugging. "I just got to be subtle, but straightforward so's he doesn't suspect anything. How hard can it be?"

"Um, Frank?" said Ron, "You remember what Father Gus told us about playing poker with Father Mazzare?"

Frank remembered. "Yeah, whatever you do, don't do it, not for real money." To hear the Jesuit tell it—and despite appearances, there was plenty of brain to go with the brawn when Gus wasn't pickling it—Father Mazzare could see clear through playing cards, read minds and had ice water in his veins. There was a lot of admiration on Gus' part for Father Mazzare, although how he squared that with Mazzare being a card-shark Frank didn't know.

"Yeah, so be careful, hey?" said Ron.

"Uh, sure," said Frank. "But how's he going to suspect anything? I don't believe we're planning this, and I'm involved in it."

That, at least, got a chuckle.

* * *

There was a reception room on the second floor of the palazzo, and, the next morning, Frank waited outside it for a good five minutes wondering if they could hear his heart hammering through the big wooden doors. He'd gotten his brothers to agree to leave it to him. Just one of them being curious about the stuff they'd "heard around town" about Galileo was all very well, but all three of them would look suspicious.

Calm, he thought. Use the force, Frank.

He went in. He'd checked with the staff, and he knew Father Mazzare was in there. Sure enough, just as Frank came in the priest was sending Gus Heinzerling off somewhere. Mazzare had laid out a whole bunch of stuff on a table by the window, getting the best use he could out of the daylight to go through what looked like the world's supply of paperwork. Frank didn't envy him that one little bit.

"Morning, Frank," said Father Mazzare. "As you see, growing up doesn't stop the homework." The priest indicated the stacks of paper and vellum in front of him. "And this is just to rent a small palazzo. I'm glad we didn't hire a big place."

Mazzare's face twisted up into a wry grin. "How it's going to be when we start putting together trade deals, I dread to think."

"Morning, Father," said Frank, when Mazzare had run down. "Should, I, uh . . ." He looked back at the door.

"Oh, no, no. Sit down, there's coffee in the pot there; good stuff, too. Get yourself a mug."

Frank got himself a coffee and sat down at the table with Father Mazzare. His carefully rehearsed opening gambits were all failing him. "Uh, I . . ." he got out, and then dried up.

"Something troubling you, Frank?" Mazzare asked.

"Well, not as such, no," he said. "Only you seemed to be the best guy to ask about it, and, uh . . ."

"So, not girl trouble, then?"

Frank nearly fell out of his chair. How did he know? "No, no, no!" he said hurriedly, thankful for the small mercy that he hadn't had a mouthful of coffee at the time. "It's, uh, it's more of a religion thing, actually." There, that'd explain the nerves, he thought.

"Well, don't worry about offending me," said Mazzare. "I've almost certainly heard worse."

"Uh, sure." Frank stopped and thought. He was settling down a bit, and took a sip of his coffee. It was good, just as advertised. Probably the Nasis again, he thought, and then got back on track. "It was just that me and Ron and Gerry were out and about yesterday, and we heard some guys talking about the Galileo thing, you know, with the Inquisition?"

"Hmm. Yes, there would be talk about that, wouldn't there? Where did you hear it?"

"Oh, you know, around." Frank realized that this was heading into dangerous territory. He wondered if that whole silence-of-the-confessional thing would extend to him telling Father Mazzare that he was involved with bunch of lunatic revolutionaries who wanted to stage a raid on the Inquisition, and he was going along because he'd fallen madly in love with the daughter of the head looney even though some part of Frank understood perfectly well that it was probably just youthful infatuation but so what? Look what happened to Romeo and Juliet and they were still talking about it half a millennium later.

Probably not, he decided. Firmly, he fought down the sudden urge to confess everything. If he was grounded, he probably wouldn't see Giovanna again—a thought that was a lot scarier than any number of Inquisition goons.

Mazzare waited, patiently.

"Just . . . around," Frank said, to fill the silence.

Mazzare gave a sly grin. "And not, in any sense, in any kind of taverna or wine-shop where you might have stopped off for a refreshing glass of wine or two, right?"

Frank felt the whole of Venice give a slight lurch under him. How does he do this? Can he really read minds like Gus says?

The grin was still there. "Oh, all right, seal of the confessional, Frank. It's down to you what you tell your father. Just try to stick to the respectable ones, and know your limits, all right? A little wine for thy stomach's sake is all very well, but it's easy to overdo it if you don't have experience in handling the stuff."

Relief. Mazzare thought he was out drinking on the sly. A small sin to cover a greater one.

Frank grinned back. "Don't worry, Father, we learned our lesson about hangovers and throwing up. It's cool."

"Good. Well, no more lecture, then." Mazzare sighed, reached for the coffee pot and freshened his mug up. "About Galileo, then, what did you want to know?"

"Well, it's the whole deal with the Inquisition, you know?" That about covered it, and it wasn't an outright accusation that Mazzare was an agent of a sinister organization trying to hold back the progress of science.

"Ah, I see. You want to know if we can do anything about it?"

Another lurch. He can't know—or can he? Who knows what they teach priests how to do in those seminaries. The Catholic Church didn't stick around for two thousand years by being a bunch of dummies. Play it safe. "Well, it's not so much that, as, well . . ."

"You want to know what I think? Because I'm a priest of the Church that's putting him on trial?" Mazzare's face was taking on a decidedly severe look, now.

"Uh, if it's a problem, or you don't want to talk or anything or if, uh, I should . . ." Frank realized he was gabbling.

Mazzare waved him down. "No, no, relax. I can't say I'm too happy about the whole business, to be honest. Just because I'm on the staff, I don't have to be happy about head office policy, you understand? At least, not on nonreligious subjects, anyway."

Frank felt really uncomfortable about that. Was Mazzare in danger of a visit from the Inquisition as well? He didn't want to think about that. For all that Grantville's priest sometimes intimidated him, Frank genuinely liked the man. He didn't think he knew anybody who didn't. There was nothing ostentatious about Larry Mazzare, but he could have served as a poster model for Priest, Catholic, small town, finest example thereof.

Mazzare sighed, deeply. "It was all very amusing when it was three hundred years ago, you know, Frank. Everyone talking about Galileo like he was some plucky pioneer, fighting against the forces of medieval reaction. Of course, when you looked into it, it wasn't that simple. Just like it never really is. And it's even less simple now that we're here, of course."

"How's that?" Frank asked, intrigued in spite of the slightly icky sight of a priest being very definitely human about something. Being brought up the way he had—which was a long, long way away from anything that could even be slightly described as traditional religious beliefs, Christian or otherwise—made ministers and priests seem like slightly awesome figures to Frank Stone. Either ogres—like the televangelists, or the mad-eyed Reverend Green—or uncanny wizards, like Father Mazzare. Watching him in what was unmistakably an irritated mode was unnerving.

"Well, to start with, his trial's late. In the universe we came from, it would have been over by now. He was found guilty and sentenced in June of 1633—almost nine months ago—whereas in this universe his trial hasn't even started yet." Mazzare took another sip of his coffee. "I don't pretend to understand the mathematics of it, but they call it 'the butterfly effect.' You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in South America somewhere, and it affects how tornados form in Kansas."

Frank nodded. He'd watched Jurassic Park, too, and at least knew the buzzwords for chaos math.

"Well, it seems that we brought some butterflies of our own. Pretty big ones. Somehow, in whatever complex ways, the Ring of Fire scrambled this 'historic result' just like it's scrambled so many others. Galileo's still in Florence in this timeline. In the old history, he'd been tried and was under house arrest by this date."

"Eh? I thought he'd got burned at the stake?" Frank blurted that out, and regretted it. "Uh, sorry."

Mazzare chuckled. "For astronomy? No, the Church has plenty of astronomers of its own. You're probably mixing him up with Giordano Bruno, Frank, who was burned at the stake. No, you see the real story is that Galileo, to use the cop-show phrase, copped a plea to heresy. And, technically, that was right, he was a heretic."

"What, for saying that the Earth went around the sun?"

"Well, that's technically right, but doesn't tell the whole story. Frank, do you know what heresy is to begin with?"

"Well, uh, it's . . ." He thought about it for a moment. "There's probably a proper definition, isn't there? It's not just disagreeing with the Church, is it?"

"Actually, that's rather close to what the real definition is, if the ugly truth be told. It's like this, and I'm simplifying here, you understand?"

Frank nodded.

"The Church is in the business of guiding people to Jesus, right?"

Nod.

"And, for an assortment of reasons that seem good to us, we have a whole hierarchy set up to decide the best way to go about it, yes?"

Nod. Frank wasn't sure he got it, but this probably wasn't the best time to pick an argument he wouldn't know how to conduct, let alone win.

"And, again, for an assortment of reasons we think are good ones, the Church gets the last word with Catholics about what we ought to believe. That's supposed to be one of the big differences between us and Protestants, by the way. They're supposed to believe that it's really down to each man with Scripture and his faith to find his best way to God. If the Reverend Jones were here right now, which he's not, he'd be correcting me six ways from Sunday on the subject, but that's about the theoretical size of it. I don't suppose you followed the Rudolstadt Colloquy?"

"The what?" Frank knew where Rudolstadt was, but—no, hold on, now he remembered something. "Wasn't there some kind of big conference there last year?"

"Indeed there was. A big argument between one lot of Lutherans and another lot of Lutherans about what kind of—but I'm getting off the point, here. A good few of the speakers at that conference reckoned that they were the last word on what a Christian ought to believe as well, and don't think for a minute that I'm taking advantage of Simon's absence to make a few cheap cracks at the expense of the competition." Mazzare smiled broadly.

The smile was infectious, and Frank found himself chuckling. "So where you've got one pope, they've got a whole bunch of 'em?"

"Oh, that's good," said Mazzare, "I'll have to remember that the next time I get Simon going on this topic, I really will. And it's sort of accurate, too, although they do deny it. It's why you get lots and lots of little Protestant churches. I mean, there's something to be said for it, they're all Christians at heart and it must be easier knowing you can just head on down the road if you lose an argument."

Frank got the feeling he was getting a look in on an old, old, argument.

Mazzare sighed. "I shouldn't just sit here and slam the competition, should I? I was talking about heresy, and Galileo. Anyway, the formal definition of heresy goes something like this: 'the obstinate denial, after baptism, of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith.' There's a bit in it about obstinate doubt, as well, but I'm not going to subject you to a lecture on formal theology. The thing is, there's a difference between proposing a subject for debate and deliberately expressing denial, you see, and Galileo got himself on the wrong side of that difference."

"But he was right . . ." Frank was wondering where this was leading.

"Yes, well, we knew that by the twentieth century. Actually, we knew it by the eighteenth as it happens, and Church teaching changed."

"I thought dogma couldn't—" Frank grinned. "You're going to explain it to me, aren't you?"

Mazzare's smile was still on his face "I'm carefully not using words like dogma and doctrine and faith and so on, you know. They're actually bits of theological jargon, with subtle shades of meaning. Let's stick with teaching. You know that if you want to be a Catholic, you have to believe the same things that all the other Catholics believe? I think we established that."

Frank nodded. He'd heard some of the things Christians believed, and figured they had some nerve calling his dad a weirdo for what he believed in. At least Tom Stone didn't claim to be smoking the body of Christ when he lit up a joint.

"Well," Mazzare continued, "in the time we came from, if you stop believing what all the other Catholics believe, you just stop being a Catholic. That's sad but it happens. In theory, at least. There're are some fairly out-there Catholics in the twentieth century. But I digress. Here and now, if you stop believing what other Catholics believe, it's a crime. Heresy both ways, but different ways of dealing with it."

Mazzare stopped to heave a big sigh. "That's Galileo's problem right there. He disagrees with the Church about what Catholics ought to believe about the shape of the world. Now, the pope told him—back when he was plain old Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, I think, although I could be wrong about that date—"

"What, he personally told him?" That sounded odd, to Frank. He'd picked up enough about how the seventeenth century worked to know that who you knew was very, very important indeed.

"Oh, yes. Galileo and the pope are actually old friends. Or they were, at least."

"So how come the pope sicced the Inquisition on him?" This wasn't following the script that Frank was expecting.

"Well, it was more a question of not being able to stop it, or not easily, anyway. I've only gotten this from a book we have back in Grantville, you understand, that was made up of translations of all the papers about Galileo's trial that survived to the twentieth century, plus a book about Galileo's daughter. And, I have to confess, I last read up on the whole thing a while before I went to Grantville because I did a stint as a university chaplain and I got into arguments with scientists about it." Mazzare chuckled. "Actually, I used to really annoy them by pointing out that Galileo got caught by politics, and it was Protestants who suppressed the work of Copernicus and Kepler purely on the strength of it being contrary to Scripture."

"Who and who?" Frank asked.

"Oh, Copernicus was the Catholic priest who first discovered that the Earth orbits the sun, and Kepler was the one who figured out the laws of orbital mechanics. He died only a few years ago, as it happens. But I'm wandering off the point again."

"You say Galileo got caught by politics?"

"Yes. I said before that everyone thinks of it as a plucky scientist battling against the medieval darkness, but it's not that simple. To start with, as I said, Galileo used to be friends with the pope."

Frank heard where Mazzare put the stress on the words, and took his cue. "Used to be?"

Mazzare grinned. "Right up to when Galileo called the pope a simpleton in print."

Frank couldn't think of anything to say.

"Oh, not in so many words," Mazzare added, "but he took every opinion the pope ever expressed on the subjects of science and astronomy and put them into the mouth of a character called Simplicio. Now, at his trial—as I recall—he claimed that was supposed to be Simplicius, a philosopher from classical times. Thing is, he wrote it in Italian, and in Italian, Simplicio means . . ." He pointed to Frank.

"Simpleton. So the pope's really ticked off, huh?"

Mazzare wiggled his hand back and forth. "Hard to know, really. Urban VIII is a very sophisticated man, by all accounts. Not the type to fly into a rage over a minor personal insult—especially since he could, after all, choose to accept Galileo's excuse. Anyway, just to make his own life more interesting, Galileo published his book in Italian, like I say. So he couldn't claim that he was trying to start a learned debate, he'd written for the popular market. Even so, if he could have proven it, he'd have been fine. After all, if nature says one thing and the Church's teaching says another, the Church's teaching has to be wrong and the teaching has to be changed, right?"

"They can do that?" Frank asked.

"We can and we do, Frank. The thing is, a couple of places in the Bible, it talks about the sun going around the Earth. Now, you can read that as a description of what really is going on, or you can read it as the guy who wrote the words down saying what it looked like."

"And the Church is saying that's what it really is, right?" Frank was following the logic, now.

"That's about the size of it. And Galileo couldn't prove otherwise, you see. Part of that was that the astronomer who had the best evidence for the theory he was trying to prove was one of the many people Galileo had annoyed over the years. In fact, he'd denounced the evidence as fraudulent."

"What was it?" Frank was actually getting really interested, now.

"It was a comet, as I recall. Scheiner, who's in Rome right now, or it might have been Grassi, another of the Church's astronomers, I can't remember—"

"The Church has astronomers?"

"Sure. Most of the leading astronomers in this day and age are actually Catholic priests. Did you run into Father Kircher at the high school?"

"He's an astronomer?"

"Among other things, yes. He does just about everything; a very bright man. But as I say, there are these two Church astronomers who've got the evidence that goes a long way to prove what Galileo was saying."

"Then why don't they, I mean why didn't they come forward with it? Didn't they want to get accused of heresy too?"

Mazzare laughed. "This is why I said it was more complicated than everyone thinks. They published it, years ago. And Galileo called them both frauds. Galileo thinks comets are optical illusions in the upper atmosphere."

"He thinks what?" That didn't sound like the Galileo he'd heard about.

"Oh, yes. A lot of Galileo's 'science' was off-base. He came up with a wrong explanation for the tides, too. To make things worse, he's a notorious intellectual bully who rarely sees the need for common politeness. Take Scheiner and Grassi: he called one of them a drunk and the other one a plagiarist. Which is why they, between them, reported Galileo to the Inquisition when he published his last book. In which, as I say, he called the pope a simpleton."

Frank mulled over that for a moment. "Can't we send some astronomy textbooks to Rome, or something? If Galileo can prove it, he gets off, right?"

"Well, again it's not that simple. You know who Galileo works for?"

"I thought he was just, well, a scientist."

"He is, but he has to have a patron to keep him in eating money. There aren't universities with tenure in this day and age, so he gets paid by the Medici family. Now, that means that the Spanish, who as it happens own about half of Italy, are his enemy in order to get at the Medici, who just happen to own one of the bits of Italy that the Spanish want but don't have. Now, I'm simplifying this a whole lot, but basically the pope has a lot of pressure on him to throw Galileo to the wolves to do the Medicis a bad turn. Even so, in our old timeline, the pope stacked the trial as much as he could, and it was his nephew, Cardinal Barberini—"

"Hold on," said Frank, shaking his head with confusion. "I thought you said the pope was Cardinal Barberini?"

"He was, before he became pope. Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, he was then. And his brother's a Cardinal Barberini as well, and both of his nephews are Cardinals Barberini."

"Doesn't that get confusing?"

"Very," said Mazzare, deadpan, and then broke into a chuckle. "We shouldn't laugh, of course. His Holiness had a terrible crisis of conscience over his nepotism later in life, even though it's the way things are done nowadays."

"Right, so one of the Barberini nephews got Galileo a plea bargain?"

"That's right. He admitted that what he'd done gave the appearance of heresy."

"So what did they do to him if they didn't burn him at the stake?"

"Made him promise not to do it again, and sent him home with orders to stay there. He wrote a couple more books after that, and was a lot more careful not to insult anyone." Mazzare sighed again. "It was still a fairly embarrassing business all round, of course, even if the ban on his book never really got enforced outside Italy and was revoked later anyway. I'd like to think that the fact that they're waiting a lot longer to put him on trial than they did in the old history means that someone in Rome is thinking a lot harder about all these issues."

"Isn't there anything we can do? It doesn't seem right, him being in jail. Especially because he's an old man by now. I know that much."

"I don't honestly know what we can do, Frank. I've got a job to do here in Venice, and I wouldn't want to go meddling in a situation I don't fully understand. And no, he's not in jail just now, if they're doing it the same way they did in our history. They've just banned any more sales of his book and ordered him to stay home pending his trial."

"He's not in jail?" Again, things Frank had thought about the Inquisition were turning out not to be true. He'd had a firm image of old Galileo shackled with chains in a dungeon somewhere.

"No. I mean, don't get me wrong, the Inquisition's a blight on the Church and does a great deal that is, by any standard, wrong, but they're not complete barbarians. Galileo got very mild, very respectful treatment from them. Apart, that is, from being made to stand trial and having one of his books banned. But he wasn't ever imprisoned or tortured, and he certainly wasn't ever treated with any physical harshness."

"Um." Frank was wondering how he was going to put this over with the guys. And especially with the Committee. He could just see Antonio Marcoli's reaction to him passing on apologies for the Inquisition and then asking for a date with his daughter.

On the bright side, on the other hand, if worse came to worst . . .

Springing him from house arrest might not be so bad. It's gotta beat fighting your way into a dungeon.

Mazzare interrupted the formation of a truly horrible image. Frank Stone, expiring on a pike in the bowels of a castle, his last sight the slime oozing down the damp stone walls . . . a skeleton nearby still sagging from the chains . . .

"Speaking of the job I have to do in Venice, Frank, the day after tomorrow there's a formal reception for us at the Palazzo Ducale. I was going to suggest to your father that you and your brothers come along. Would you be interested in that? I don't want to drag you along for something you don't want to go to, but you might find it interesting, and certainly educational, to see high Venetian society in action. The palazzo is a sight to see, as well, and going to an event like this is about the only way you'll see it, since they don't do public tours yet."

Suddenly Frank was presented with something he understood with perfect clarity. Before his eyes flashed a clear and perfect vision of him escorting Giovanna into a roomful of nobility, of her turning to him and expressing her admiration for how suave and debonair he was, and the rarified circles he moved in, and—

"Can I bring a date?" he blurted out.

Mazzare burst out laughing. "By all means, Frank. When you said you didn't have girl troubles, you weren't kidding, were you? How long have we been in this town? Three days?" He shook his head. "Seriously, Frank, check with your father first. And, I know this is a cliché, but whoever she is, don't do anything I wouldn't approve of, all right?"

Frank nodded, dumbstruck for a moment. He hadn't meant to check with a Catholic priest if it was okay to advance his love life—what had he been thinking of? Still, Father Mazzare seemed to be okay with it.

Mazzare went on: "And keep in mind that you can have worse troubles—a lot worse—than gaining my disapproval. In this day and age they don't just get annoyed about teenage tomfoolery. If she's got brothers or a father, they might actually come and kill you. Or hire it done, if they're rich. In fact, you make sure you check with her father first, all right? I don't want to have to get you on a fast horse out of town."

"Uh. Okay," said Frank. That actually made sense, now he thought about it. "I'll, uh, go find my dad, and, uh, make arrangements. Thanks for the, uh, you know."

"It was my pleasure, Frank." Mazzare smiled.

Frank left before he embarrassed himself any further.

* * *

Some hours later, Frank stepped out of the Casa Marcoli into the watery sunlight of a Venetian spring evening and heaved a sigh of relief. Discovering that he was shaking, he leaned against a pillar and tried hard not to throw up.

And then he remembered what he had just done, and whooped for joy. "Yes! He shoots, he scooooores!" he yelled, punching the air and drawing slightly alarmed stares from people in passing boats.

"I gather it went well, then?" Ron called up from the gondola they'd hired to get over. Frank had brought Ron for moral support. He'd not brought Gerry, on account of Gerry being more than likely to try something to spoil his chances. A kick me sign on his back would be the least of it, with Gerry.

"Oh, I reckon so," said Frank. He swaggered down the steps to the water.

"You actually got a date, then?" Ron helped Frank into the boat. "I admit, I'm impressed."

Frank grinned. "She said yes! And her daddy said yes, too!" He punched the air again, and drummed his heels on the bottom of the boat in delight.

"You got to bring a chaperone?"

"Nope, Messer Marcoli says he trusts me. Fellow revolutionist, and all. He also thinks it's a great idea I should take his daughter into a reception full of nobs and such because it strikes a blow against medieval privilege."

Ron laughed aloud as the gondolier poled them into the stream of traffic. "He actually said all that? How big a pack of lies did you tell him anyway?"

"Enough, Elrond," Frank said. "I assured him my intentions were entirely honorable. Um. Which they are, actually, and not just because the assorted Marcoli brothers and cousins have me outnumbered and her father's downright scary. I promised I'd bring her straight home."

"Sure, with maybe a detour on the way?" Ron sniggered.

"Jesus, Ron, you think I want to get killed? Besides, I think this is the real deal. Got to do it right, you know?"

"You said that about Missy. And Gudrun. And—"

"This time it is," Frank said sternly. "And you are, I kid you not, dead meat if you mention any of that to Giovanna, understand?"

"Scout's honor," Ron said, raising his right hand.

"You weren't ever a scout, and that's the Vulcan live-long-and-prosper sign anyway," Frank pointed out.

"Same difference." Ron shrugged. "Besides, enlightened self-interest. I may need your silence about my past one day."

"Point." Frank leaned back on the gondola seat. He took a deep, satisfied breath and sighed it out.

In Germany, winter still had its grip on the land. But Venice in March was Venice in spring.

Venice was truly, truly beautiful in the springtime. Even the stink of the canals seemed pleasant.

Chapter 16

There were advantages, Cardinal Bedmar reflected, to being persona non grata in Venice. Sourly, he studied the mob packed into the doge's palace. At least he'd been spared this unpleasantness since his arrival from the Spanish Netherlands a few weeks earlier. This was the first time he'd been invited to participate in one of the Venetians' beloved gala events, as one of the fish crammed into the barrel.

And why had he been invited at all? he wondered. Probably just because the Venetians enjoyed rubbing his nose in the fact that the ambassador from the infant "United States of Europe" enjoyed more status here than one of the representatives from the ancient and glorious Spanish Empire.

"My feet hurt," the cardinal announced.

"Yes, Your Eminence."

"And my back hurts," he went on.

"Yes, Your Eminence."

"And with all this insincere smiling, Sanchez, my God-damned face hurts."

Sanchez shifted from one foot to the other, a slight wince creasing his face. "Your Eminence bears his suffering well."

"Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, did I not know you better I would swear you were being sarcastic." Cardinal Bedmar spoke the words in the low undertone that all diplomats learned for functions like the one they were attending, his face hardly moving from its practiced smile.

"Oh, no," Sanchez drawled, likewise. "For that would be a heretical proposition of disrespect to a prince of the Church, rather than simply suggesting—as one old man to another—that Your Eminence is not the only one who is too old for this."

Sanchez, like the cardinal himself, was two-faced in the service of his country. In theory, a cardinal's gentiluomo like Sanchez was simply his master's close-protection man, the last line of defense for a prince of the Church and the bearer of a sword where a cleric ought not to wield one in his own person. In practice, Sanchez ran errands for his master the one-time diplomat.

Sometimes downright odd errands, those were. There had been few enough of them, though, in past years. Bedmar had been in near-retirement on the Council of Flanders, and until the year before Flanders had been quiet. As quiet, at least, as the nearby presence of the pestiferous Protestants in the United Provinces allowed. But all that had changed since the arrival of the Americans in what had come to be known as "the Ring of Fire." Now these bizarre people said to come from the future and their Swedish ally had kicked over the ant-heap in Germany.

On the positive side, most of the Netherlands was back in Spanish hands since the Dutch fleet had been destroyed through treachery and Cardinal-Infante Don Fernando had led a daring seizure of Haarlem. There were new men all over the place, in the Spanish Netherlands, brought by the cardinal-infante. The old warhorse Cardinal Bedmar had been sent back to Venice after fifteen years away. Some genius had decided he was the man to come in and foil whatever plot the Americans were working toward here, despite Bedmar's notoriety in the Serene Republic.

And so, tonight, Bedmar and his trusted assistant Sanchez were in the Sala de Gran Consiglio of the doge's palace, paying more attention to the magnificent Tintoretto paintings on the walls and ceiling than any of the pomp and flummery the Venetians loved so much. Bedmar had spent the evening so far smiling at people whom he had, fifteen years earlier, tried to have killed, ruined, or subordinated to foreign conquest.

That was from the Venetian point of view, of course. From Bedmar's own perspective, it had been a great adventure in the service of his country, widening the empire and taking back some of what the Venetians had leeched from Spain one way or another over the years. Their defiance, captiousness, decadence, whoring and irreligion were a byword across Europe, and there were better uses for the wealth and strategic position of the great city.

But . . . it had ended in humiliation. For some reason these decadent, coin-counting Italians did not want a change of regime at the hands of the greatest power in Europe. The Venetians had caught every one of Bedmar's Venetian partisans. Labeled them "traitors," no less; then, hung them after breaking their legs in the time-honored Venetian tradition. There had been ugly scenes with mobs of Arsenalotti on the day Bedmar had left the Most Serene Republic in a not-very-serene hurry.

A week after that scramble of a day, though, a couple of Imperial ambassadors had been thrown out of a window in the now-famous "defenestration of Prague." Bohemia had risen in revolt under a Protestant king and everyone had forgotten about Italy and what Bedmar had done in Venice—until de Nevers and his claim to Mantua gave everyone another pretext for mayhem in the interest of extending influence in the Italies. That had only just finished when the Americans turned up, but things had now settled down over the border in Mantua. The troops had gone elsewhere, as well, and Italy looked like a relatively safe place for the first time in fifteen years.

Which meant that it wanted nothing but that someone should turn out singly and severally to make trouble. Bedmar wasn't objecting, really. Winter in Flanders was cold and ugly on his old bones; Venice was a good place to be until summer. In the meantime, he would achieve all he could—which was probably nothing. No one trusted him in this town, and never would. He would simply dump a good deal of money in Venice, report failure, and leave with the coming winter chill.

The cardinal thought that old Count Gondomar, back when he was still alive and Spain's ambassador to England, had been righter than he knew when he wrote his famous complaint before the war. He had written of the energy of the newly rising nations, especially the England whose ruin he had conspicuously failed to bring about, and of the waxing commercial power of the Dutch. By contrast, he had said, Spain was buying doubtful loyalties with the better part of every New World treasure fleet.

Bedmar had agreed with him but, alas, the king of Spain had not. Philip IV and his chief minister the Count-Duke of Olivares had opted for a different solution: war. If Spain was losing the peace, why, then, the truce was about to expire. Spain was apparently to rediscover her glory at the end of a pike.

The cardinal had been skeptical at the time, and the ensuing fifteen years of what future historians were said to call "the Thirty Years' War" had borne him out. The war had simply continued Spain's slide from the top of the pile, and added a mountain of dead and put half of Europe into near-anarchy to compound everyone's problems.

And here, once again, Bedmar was sent to disburse another portion of the last treasure fleet on loyalties that were not even strong enough to be called doubtful. The chances were good that all Bedmar would do would be to fund a few petty enemies.

He sighed. Spain would gain nothing here except perhaps a close look at a few more Americans than had been seen outside their new United States to date. And even that was late. The Venetians might be able to run a State Inquisition able to shut down a well-funded fifth column run by a professional spymaster, but they didn't seem to be able to make a convivial drinks reception run on time. At that, Bedmar couldn't fault their sense of priorities.

The majordomo was announcing something. "Did you hear that, Sanchez?" he asked, nudging his gentiluomo.

"Yes, Your Eminence," said Sanchez.

Bedmar turned to glare at him. The Catalan gentiluomo's sense of humor had irritated him for years. Why he put up with the hard-bitten old fool was a mystery to the cardinal. Probably because that same sense of humor amused him also. Most of the time.

Sanchez's mustaches twitched a little. "It is the American ambassador, Your Eminence. He just arrived."

The Sala di Gran Consiglio, the doge's main council chamber, was a working debating-hall without the kind of elevated entrance that permitted guests already arrived to see who was coming in, so they had to wait. In fact, the only raised part of the room was the presiding dais at one end, where the doge was stationed with his retinue of Senators. The middle of the floor was open to allow the new arrivals to parade up to greet the doge. As they passed, Sanchez was all business.

"The priest in front, Your Eminence, is Lawrence Mazzare, the ambassador from the United States of Europe. He speaks for their President—no, he's called the prime minister now—Michael Stearns. The fat priest with him is his curate and factotum, the Jesuit I told you of, Heinzerling. The other is Mazzare's second in the embassy, a Protestant cleric by the name of Jones. Behind them is the alchemist Stone and his wife. The young Moor is the daughter of the doctor, Nichols; she was also betrothed to the hero of the battle at Wismar last autumn. The one named Richter, who was killed."

Sanchez's voice grew a little distant as he spoke of the black woman. She was definitely worth looking at, although Bedmar didn't think she merited quite the stare that Sanchez, the old goat, was giving her.

Bedmar tried to drag his man back to the matter at hand. "I wonder how Stone will go down," he murmured, "since everyone is expecting the purest of rational natural philosophy from these Americans." Back home, there had been calls for the Inquisition to deal with alchemists as heretics or, at the very least, peddlers of superstition. The Inquisition, for the most part, insisted that fraud was a matter for the secular courts, although from time to time they proceeded against the more egregious examples.

"I wonder, too," Sanchez said, his mind still on the job despite evident distraction, "although I hear stories that this Stone makes it work."

"Really? And who is this behind, now?" That was a sight, if anything, even more remarkable than the prospect of base metal into gold. Well, not anywhere else in Venice, but here in the Gran Consiglio it was a bit much.

"These, I think, are Stone's sons. One of them—the eldest, it would look like—is accompanied by, ah—"

"Quite," Bedmar said. "And such a young and pretty one, too. I think we might have to be tactful about that." One of the American boys was accompanied by a young woman. A Venetian, obviously—and just as obviously a courtesan, even if she wasn't wearing the red shoes of her vocation and was pretending to be otherwise. Nobody else at such an event would be that young, that good-looking, and that awkward in her bearing and poise. A new courtesan, clearly, unsure of herself in high company. She wasn't even wearing a mask—not even a half-mask. Judging from the stares she was getting, she was completely unknown to the crowd.

That might cause a bit of a scandal. Not her status, but the attempt at disguising it. Several of the younger minor notables of Venice present at the reception were accompanied by courtesans, and no one was taking any real note of it. The Serene Republic was notorious for its moral laxity. On the other hand, all the other courtesans Bedmar could see were wearing the red shoes required by custom. Sin, Venetians tolerated; attempting to rise above one's station was another matter.

"The rest I don't know, Your Eminence," Sanchez was saying. He had moved behind Bedmar now and was murmuring over his shoulder. Around the room, other diplomats were being briefed in like manner. "The stocky soldier is the head of their embassy guard, I think. A Scotsman named Lennox. Until last year he was a cavalryman in the Swede's army."

"Guard?" Bedmar murmured back, as the implications suddenly assembled themselves in his mind. It was vanishingly rare that an ambassador had a formal guard while attending a foreign prince. A small crew of professional soldiers, perhaps, to protect him en route and keep the embassy safe from burglars and such. But a formal liveried guard was either outrageous ostentation or very pointed distrust.

Alas, Spanish intelligence in Venice was at best mediocre since the unfortunate business fifteen years before. It didn't help matters any that the regular ambassador from Madrid was a dim-witted and fussy man, who'd made it quite clear that he resented Bedmar's arrival here as a "special ambassador from the Spanish Netherlands" and had refused to be cooperative beyond the bare minimum required by protocol. Bedmar would have given a very great deal indeed to get a reliable account of the negotiations that had let that burly Scot soldier into Venice as a formal guard for the American embassy.

Part of it was probably genuine concern, Bedmar conceded, as he contemplated the possibility of protesting to the doge at this unseemly favoritism. After all, the diplomatic mission from the United States to England was immured in the Tower of London, and another was trapped by the cardinal-infante's Spanish army in the siege of Amsterdam. Not to mention that, by now, all Europe had heard the rumors of how Richelieu had attempted to have that embassy ambushed on their way from Paris to The Hague—an embassy led by the very wife of the U.S. President, to boot.

Richelieu hadn't admitted a thing, of course, nor would he ever. But anyone who did not believe that those pirates had attacked Rebecca Abrabanel's ship on French orders was either a purblind idiot or believed that the indefatigable propaganda mills of the Protestant Germanies were lying. Again.

Bedmar watched with interest as the priest Mazzare formally presented his credentials to the doge. It was, as always in Venice, a highly stylized business: the credentials handed over in a fat leather wallet fringed with all manner of tassels and pendant seals. The formal words were spoken aloud, and then a few words of mutual esteem and friendship.

Not many, though. That was either a good sign or a bad one. If they meant to let it all keep for a serious bargaining session upstairs on the morrow, then it was good for the Americans. If the doge was actually treating Mazzare the way he had treated Spain's ambassador extraordinary . . .

Ha! Bedmar had had to hand over his own credentials in private after a four-flight climb up the Scala d'Oro, and the doge had all but cut him, he had been that curt.

But, no, he saw that the doge was smiling. For a wonder, the Consiglio had permitted him that much expression. True, Don Erizzo, the current doge, was rumored to be a ferocious character next to the usual run of Venetian dukes. So perhaps his "advisers" were a bit intimidated by him. Whatever, it looked good for the United States, this week in Venice.

The Spanish cardinal cared little, either way. He was an old and tired man sent here on a mission he considered barely short of insane. What could the count-duke of Olivares have been thinking, to select Bedmar for this mission? One would almost think the boot-faced bastard meant for it to be a failure, and was simply relying on Bedmar to come out of it with as little humiliation as possible.

On the other hand . . .

From long habit, Bedmar considered all the possibilities. As the chief minister of the king of Spain, Olivares had a finger in every pot—which meant he could get his fingers easily burned. There was that interesting circle who had started gathering around the king's younger brother, the cardinal-infante Don Fernando. Most people saw only the martial glory covering the young prince, since his dazzling success in the Netherlands after so many decades of Spanish frustration. In a few short weeks, the cardinal-infante had accomplished what neither the duke of Alva nor Spinola had managed—driven the stubborn Dutchmen to their knees, if not yet to outright surrender.

But the cardinal was starting to wonder. For all his youth—Don Fernando was still in his early twenties—Bedmar was beginning to think he might be playing a very deep game and trying some remarkably complicated steps in the diplomatic gavotte. Bedmar knew that the cardinal-infante had at least two men in his circle—quite close, as well—who were running on very, very long leashes indeed. Bedmar had been asked, by way of several hints so oblique as to make the usual finaglings of protocol look like a barrage of siege artillery, to open up friendly overtures with the Americans on the tenuous authority of Spanish Flanders. Acting on those requests was technically a betrayal of Bedmar's official principal, who was, after all, the king of Spain, not the prince of the Netherlands. On the other hand, his official principal appeared not to care what happened in Venice. Indeed—

"Your Eminence?" Sanchez was nudging him.

It was good that he had. In his reverie, Bedmar had turned his eyes to the marvelous coronation of the virgin that adorned the wall above and behind the doge. Thus he had not noticed that Mazzare had come, in the proper order of protocol, to the extraordinary ambassador from the Spanish Netherlands. Purely out of spite, the Venetians had declined to recall Bedmar's last sojourn as ambassador in Venice and so put him considerably farther from the doyenne—some English coin-counter—than he truly merited. Another point on which his mere presence was helping the Americans, he realized. Any nation that defied Spain and the House of Habsburg was sure of a warm reception from Venice.

The cardinal understood the dynamics of power extremely well. The Venetians had gotten cold comfort from France since the Mantuan War and had been at near war with the Turk these hundred years past. Their best option was the United States of Europe, which was powerful enough to be a worthwhile ally against Spain and the Habsburgs where England—still more distant, always penurious, and of late in turmoil—most certainly was not.

Bedmar stepped forward, noting the carefully blank face of the American priest. "Monsignor," he said, feeling that the man deserved at least that much. Mazzare had risen from parish pastor to, Bedmar estimated, ambassador from the third most powerful nation in Europe to perhaps the fourth or fifth richest. Bedmar extended his hand with its ring of office.

A test, there. Mazzare took it and kissed the ring in the proper manner, betraying the work of a far better tutor in protocol than most parish priests ever ran into.

"Your Eminence does me much honor," Mazzare said, resorting to Veneziano, the local dialect of Italian. That wasn't protocol. The meaning—yes, to meet on neutral ground. Bedmar raised his estimate of the American a notch or two. It had been high enough to begin with, of course. Few were trusted in his position that were not at least confident and competent.

"And how does monsignor find Venice?" Bedmar decided that he would confine himself to the pleasantries. Should Mazzare wish to try a more aggressive approach, he would presumably not do it in front of witnesses.

"Venice is a beautiful city, and I hope to do a great deal of business here."

Oh, so it was that way, was it? At least Bedmar hoped so, although he realized it was perhaps some American quirk that made such a blatant ploy into a mere pleasantry. They were a new folk to him.

"Business?" he asked pleasantly.

"Oh, yes," Mazzare replied, smiling gently with his two aides behind him.

A peculiar arrangement, that. A Catholic ambassador, with a Jesuit and a Protestant as his assistants.

After a moment, Mazzare broke the brief silence. "Many people have expressed an interest in doing business with us, Your Eminence. All save Seigneur le Comte d'Avaux, who gave us his back publicly."

Bedmar had wondered what the murmur had been a few moments before. He had assumed that—no, he had been distracted by the art on the walls and his musings about the situation in Flanders.

Mazzare's words finally registered fully. "Ha!" he barked, amused. Then, cursing himself—getting too damned old!—he got a grip on his momentary lapse and shut his face down while his mind worked. "What was the oily little French toad thinking, to play his hand so publicly and so soon?"

"I had expected some coldness," Mazzare said; wryly now, apparently disarmed by Bedmar's own forthrightness, "with our nations at war. This was more than I thought we might see. The gentleman from England was pleasant, though, and invited us to meet some merchant friends of his. Your own ambassador was courteous, and looked forward to talking with us—"

Bedmar had leapt to a conclusion while Mazzare talked. "Monsignor," he said, interrupting, "disregard that last. My countryman, the permanent ambassador here, Count de Rocca, is a puffed-up fool. He comes directly from Spain and will tell you what he is told to tell you. From me, on the other hand—freshly arrived from the Low Countries, where reality stands in sharp contrast to fantasy—you will get plain speaking. So let me offer my personal hand in friendship, and say that there will be straight dealing between us, as between honorable enemies. We may each of us find nothing to agree on, but it will be fairly haggled for. Like you, I am from a small town. I know what it is to see the women barter in the market-place—" a slight look of bemusement crossed the American's face at that, and Bedmar wondered briefly why "—and perhaps you do, too. Let us be, at least civil; and perhaps reach an understanding as priests, if it can be reached. There will come a time when a larger deal might be done, but let us not force the matter, no?"

Bedmar noted that Mazzare had set his face perfectly for the enlargement and the restriction of what he had said. A professional, then, or at least a gifted amateur.

"Your Eminence, I look forward to it." Mazzare nodded graciously and began to move along.

A moment of mischief filled the cardinal. "By the way," he said, bringing Mazzare back in the very act of turning away, "the young caballero with your party, he moves quickly, no?"

Mazzare's frown of confusion was mild. "Your Eminence?"

"Oh, even in Venice a young man must work a bit to find a courtesan—and such a young and pretty one, too."

The frown deepened. "Your Eminence, I hardly think this is the time or place to cast aspersions—"

"Aspersions, Monsignor? It's quite obvious, despite the woman's improper shoes." Bedmar chuckled, to show he meant no ill-will. "The Venetians may complain about that, you know. They don't mind courtesans here—celebrate them, in fact—but they do insist on the formalities."

Mazzare's face settled into a placid expression. "I thank Your Eminence, for bringing the matter to my attention. You may be assured that it will receive a thorough investigation."

"Shocked, Monsignor? And here I was believing the tales that Grantville was a whole town filled with scantily clad immoral women." Bedmar chuckled. "I am from too rural a town to give much credence to stuffy Venetian notions of proper dress, Monsignor. Lot of hypocrites, they are. But if you have the cure of the boy's soul, Monsignor, you must think on whether fornication between the unmarried is any sin at all or whether, well, boys will be boys, hey?"

It was all Bedmar could do to keep his face straight. Fortunately, he was helped by the arrival of a new party, which distracted Mazzare momentarily. The alchemist was coming along the receiving line in the company of his wife.

"Señor Stone," Bedmar beamed. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance!"

"Thank you, uh . . ." The alchemist looked slightly dazed. Doubtless fumes from some working or other. His wife stood up on tiptoe and whispered into the place where, presumably, an ear was hidden amid shaggy wolf-gray hair. "Your Eminence," Stone finished.

"I have heard that you have divined the secrets of alchemy?"

Another surprised and startled look. "Uh, no. Ah, that is, Your Eminence, alchemy is what they do in this time, and it doesn't work. Chemistry—"

Stone gave the last word a careful and exaggerated pronunciation. As it was a new word, Bedmar surmised that he got asked to repeat it a lot.

"—is what we do in the twentieth century, and it does work. I make dyes, and stains, and paints and medicines, and we may make some other things. Soon. Yes, soon."

He looked uncertainly at his wife, and at Mazzare, as if unsure what he could say and not say.

Bedmar rescued him, or at least pretended to for the sake of a jest he was now thoroughly enjoying. "Dye, eh?" he said. "A coincidence you should mention the color of things. Shoes can be dyed too, of course. It was a matter I raised with the monsignor here, some moments ago. Yes, quite a coincidence."

Mazzare's look in return was pure poison for the moment it took him to get his face under control, a chink in the armor through which Bedmar could see that Mazzare cared for his ambassadorial party. A weakness, perhaps, but one that showed he was a man with whom business could be done. As for the poisonous look, Bedmar thought a man who played the game of princes would do well to be prepared for an occasional unorthodox step in the dance. A mixed metaphor that Sanchez, who had some pretensions to poetry, would wince at.

"Your Eminence," Mazzare said after a long, awkward moment. "It appears we are holding up the receiving line, much though I would like to continue this fascinating conversation. Perhaps later?"

"Yes, perhaps later."

Chapter 17

When the American ambassador had moved on and the lesser lights in their train had passed also, Bedmar turned to Sanchez. "Not bad, for his first time."

"Oh?" Sanchez returned from whatever internal fugue he had been pursuing to save himself from tedium.

"The American priest. There might almost be a diplomat made of him, if he survives this town." Bedmar nodded to himself. The people from the future bore watching, whatever the rest of the hierarchy might say—which was decidedly mixed—if Mazzare was any guide.

"And if he survives your attentions, Your Eminence." Sanchez grinned through his mustaches. "That business over the shoes was a trifle unnecessary, I thought."

"Oh, Sanchez," Bedmar said, "do permit a tired old man his fun."

Sanchez chuckled. "Oh, I will, if he will permit me mine. Did you see the Moorish one?"

Bedmar nodded, although with some reservation. "Looked more like an Ethiope to me."

"You know what I mean. What they all call a Moor here in the Italies that hardly ever see one."

Sanchez's eyes seemed, to Bedmar, to be getting a little dreamy. The man was incorrigible. The old Catalan goat had buried three wives that Bedmar knew about. And while he had been faithful to all of them, so far as the cardinal was aware, he had something of a notorious reputation during those periods he was unmarried. Even now, at his age!

Bedmar reminded himself, on the other hand, that it was that same vigor which made Sanchez such a useful man to have around. Not to mention a comfort, of a certain specific and necessary sort, in the event of dire necessity. Even now, somewhere in his late fifties—no one, including Sanchez, knew the precise year of his birth—only a fool or someone inexperienced in such matters challenged the Catalan lightly. Wives were but a small portion of the people Ruy Sanchez had seen lowered into graves. The chief distinction enjoyed by the wives was that Sanchez had not put them there.

Still, there were times the man annoyed Bedmar. If for no other reason than the many aches and pains from which the cardinal's body now suffered. Sanchez was but a few years younger than he, yet the Catalan still moved with the ease and grace of a man in his thirties.

"Dark meat, Sanchez?" Bedmar asked nastily. "Where did you learn that taste?"

Sanchez gave him a sidelong, blank gaze that would have chilled the cardinal, had he been any other man. Belatedly, Bedmar remembered that the first of the Catalan's wives, won and lost during his youth in New Spain, had been an Indian woman of some sort. He'd also heard that one of the bodies resting in a grave somewhere—Cordoba, he thought, if he remembered the story correctly—was that of a man who had sneered at Sanchez for the fact.

"My apologies," the cardinal murmured. "That was uncalled for."

Sanchez harumphed, clearing the matter aside. Then, smiled slightly. "Tell me, Your Eminence . . . would it matter if I learned it here tonight?"

Bedmar was still feeling a bit testy. "It would indeed matter, Sanchez, if it turned out you did something foolish to compromise our—" He stopped.

"Ah, Your Eminence has perhaps seen the difficulty with that notion?"

Sanchez trying to be arch was laughable. Bedmar knew for a fact that the man's alleged nobility was an arrant pretense. Sanchez had no less than seven certificates of limpieza, not a one of them saying the same thing as the others. A gentleman Sanchez might be reckoned today, but sometimes the Catalan peasant-soldier just shone through.

Bless his iron little heart. Two of those corpses rotting in graves—two, that the cardinal knew of—had tried to kill Bedmar himself.

"No, no." Bedmar waved an admonitory finger. "Am I not a diplomat? A prince of the Church? A man of learning?"

Sanchez snorted. "You are the man I had to get out of this town one step ahead of a mob of angry Arsenalotti. And it was not the step of a man with long legs, I might add." He looked down on his cardinal. Bedmar's short stature next to, well, just about anyone was a running joke between them.

"Hush, you Catalan dullard. Where such as you see only problems, I see only solutions."

Bedmar paused a moment, assessing Sanchez, assessing what little he had yet gleaned of American manners. A foolish scheme, of course—hardly worth calling a scheme at all. But then, there was hardly anything for it but foolish schemes, with the ridiculous mission he had.

A decision. "Yes, Sanchez, pursue your Moor, your Ethiope, your whatever. It may prove helpful."

Sanchez's eyes narrowed. "Prince of the Church or not, Your Eminence, you will not command me to . . ."

Bedmar waited until Sanchez trailed off. "Now, Sanchez, let us not leap to conclusions. We have done much together, you and I, but have I ever asked you to betray the confidence of a lady? Even a Morisco?"

"And how do you know she is not a Christian?" Sanchez was—no, not joking at all. Interesting. The man was usually levity itself, but now he seemed to be on the edge of a frosty pique.

Bedmar sighed. "Be quick, Sanchez. I will tear you away from her soon enough tonight, whatever she may be—and however receptive. My feet still hurt, my back aches, every Venetian here will cut me as if his life depended on it and no one else has any cause to speak with me."

"As you wish, Your Eminence." Sanchez stroked his mustachios and moved off. The cardinal watched him go for a moment.

Irritating, sometimes, truly irritating. How did a man of his years still manage to swagger?

* * *

Buckley stamped his feet. It might be spring in Venice, but that didn't mean the warm sunshine of the afternoons stayed on the Piazza San Marco past sundown. It was probably all right if you were moving about, but Joe had picked a shady spot under the Imbroglio to wait for the evening's action.

Well, some of that had been and gone, of course. He hadn't expected to be let in, and had really only tried to insinuate himself for the sheer hell of declaiming, in a loud voice, "Do you know who I am?"

The ducal retainers at the door—bouncers, in any other context—had given him their best sneers and inquired, oh-so-politely, who exactly he was? He had to give them credit for that. He'd told them, in a rather more reasonable tone of voice, and they in their turn had told him that his name wasn't down and he wasn't coming in. Or words to that effect: the bouncer's litany was a little different in seventeenth-century Venice.

As far as he could tell, the last of the diplomatic parties had gone in. He'd only stayed out front to check their various arrivals. Shortly, once the evening's festivities settled in, he'd mosey on around the corner to find what, grand though it might be compared to the ordinary run of doors in this town, must be there to serve the doge's palace as a tradesman's entrance. He'd find the back door in to the story he needed. He just, he figured, had to give it a few minutes.

He spent those few minutes wandering around the piazza, taking in the sights. They were worth taking in, actually. Centuries in the future, in another universe, this was the place the tourists always mobbed when they came to Venice. At least, that's what Joe had read in the travel guide to Venice he'd gotten his hands on—he'd never been any farther outside the United States than a trip to Montreal, himself, back before the Ring of Fire.

He didn't spend much time looking at the famous cathedral, the Basilica di San Marco. Buckley wasn't that taken by any kind of old cathedral, especially not one that was as much of an hodgepodge as the Basilica. His tastes in architecture were pretty much like his tastes in writing—Buckley was a newspaperman, not a pretentious literary author. The one time he'd tried to read a novel by William Faulkner—twenty pages' worth—he'd come away convinced that the entire literary establishment were a bunch of lunatics. Worst prose he'd ever seen.

The Campanile was more to his taste. The ancient lighthouse was the tallest structure in the city, and its clean and simple lines appealed to Buckley. If he got a chance, sometime over the summer, he'd see if he could finagle his way into it. The climb would be strenuous, but Buckley was in decent shape and the view from the top of the lighthouse just had to be spectacular.

Then he ambled around the western half of the piazza. There wasn't really much to see there, though. If he remembered the guide book correctly, a lot of that area would be changed by Napoleon. The French emperor had even demolished a church somewhere in the pile of buildings to build a dancing hall. In this day and age, however, the buildings were just devoted to Venice's elaborate bureaucracy.

Buckley found bureaucratic edifices even more boring than bureaucrats. So, deciding he'd fiddled away enough time, he headed toward the back of the Palazzo Ducale. There had to be a rear entrance somewhere.

Rounding the corner, he saw it—but that entrance was, if anything, as strongly manned as the front door. Right, nothing else for it. He marched up, and hacking out a sentence as best he could in Veneziano Italian, said: "Joe Buckley, Associated Press," and made to march past.

Unlike twentieth-century bouncers, the bouncers in this day and age had big guys with halberds backing them up. More for show than in any expectation of an armed rush of gatecrashers; but in best guard-style, they crossed their halberds over the door, staring straight ahead the while. Buckley could feel the liveried footmen he'd just breezed past smirking behind them.

"There is no entry this way, friend," said one of them.

"Aw, come on," Buckley said. "All I need is to get in and see what's going on. Don't you read newspapers?"

"No, Messer Buckley, I don't," the guy said, still smirking.

Buckley became aware that there was a crowd nearby. Time, he decided, to withdraw with as good a grace as he could. "So," he said, "been a busy night, then?"

That earned him a blank stare.

"You see," he went on, into the silence, "I figure guys like you, you get to see who sneaks in to this place without everyone out front seeing, right? Guys like you could probably tell me more about what's going on at a function like this than I could figure out by going inside, yeah?"

He looked hopefully from one to the other. Usually, by this point, they started bragging about luminaries they'd served at whatever banquet the night before. Or better, dishing the dirt on what lousy table manners they had. That was always a good way in to the real juicy stuff.

Not from these guys, though. One nodded to the other, or some sort of signal passed, and then two guards he hadn't seen stepped up smartly, one to each elbow, and he was frog-marched back to the steps down to the street. He ended up hopping down the steps, trying to keep his balance, his hat and his dignity and managing two out of the three.

He snarled a word that had been old-fashioned in his own time but was futuristic here.

"Americain, monsieur?" The voice was somber yet light in tone, the diction oddly stilted somehow.

Buckley looked at the fellow who'd detached himself from the crowd that was, basically, lounging about in the street. Tall and narrow and clad in what looked like dark, dark brown. Buckley pegged him as a high-end servant, as these things went.

"Uh, Francais?" he asked, diffidently.

"Ah, oui," and the man launched into a gabble of French that Buckley couldn't follow.

"Uh, plus lentement, s'il vous plait," he said, looking hard at the guy. He had a broad-brimmed hat on, shadowing much of his face, but there were guys with torches moving about and Buckley could get glimpses of what lay under the hat. So that's what hatchet-faced means, he thought.

The torrent of French slowed, and the volume went up slightly.

Glad it's not just Americans who do that, Buckley thought. He still wasn't following the guy. He had some kind of broad accent that was giving him serious static.

"You got any Italian?" he asked, in that language.

"Why, certainly, Monsieur Buckley."

"You caught my name, huh?"

"Yes, you announced yourself as well as any majordomo might have done that service for you. Permit me to introduce myself." The Frenchman held out a hand. "Michel Ducos. You are with the embassy from Grantville?"

"Pleased to meet you. As to the other, no, I'm not. Well, not really. I'm from Grantville, though."

"Yes. Tell me, are you that Joe Buckley?"

"The one and only," Buckley said, smiling broadly. It was always a pleasure to meet a fan.

"I have read some of your writings, you know." It was said almost shyly. "Are you trying to find news of the diplomatic reception?"

"Yes, I am. Are you with the French embassy?"

"I am, indeed. A humble clerk, which is why I must wait outside with the other servants. The Venetians are most strict about such things."

"I noticed. Their people are a lot less talkative than most, too." Buckley waved up at the doorway, where the bouncers had relaxed back into their formation. He noticed that no one else was trying to gatecrash.

"Ah, that is because they are not ordinary servants on these doors. I think it would take an uncommon sort of fellow to get past such as they." Ducos leaned close. "Agents of the State Inquisition," he whispered.

"No kidding?" Buckley said, raising his eyebrows. That was unusual. Not just rent-a-cops on the door, but the genuine article. Secret police, at that. He suddenly had a burning desire to get inside, and a crushing disappointment that he wouldn't.

Still, he might see what he could do here. "The French embassy, you say? A clerk? Tell me, what exactly does a clerk do in an embassy? And why don't we find somewhere out of the cold night air? My treat."

"That does indeed seem like a most convivial suggestion." Ducos beamed. "I warn you, though, I know very few secrets, and I am duty bound not to divulge what paltry things I do know."

Yes, he could salvage something from this evening after all. A clerk would be bound to know a thing or two he could print. Buckley looked around for the nearest taverna.

Chapter 18

As they left the end of the receiving line the Stones came over to Mazzare.

"Father?" said Tom, "Do we, uh, mingle now?"

It was all Mazzare could do not to break into laughter. Tom Stone was wearing a face that said Beam me up, Scotty—which completed the remarkable picture he made in the suit he was wearing. After their marriage, Tom's wife Magda had fallen on the purple velvet drapes at Lothlorien, declaring them too good for mere curtains. How she had gotten a jacket and britches out of them was nobody's business but her own, but the tie-dyed vest and canary-yellow shirt made the whole ensemble truly eye-watering.

And . . .

As nothing next to the Venetians. Nearly two months of the year were Carnevale to these people, and conspicuous consumption their national religion. Between the cloth-of-gold and other bright colors, the room looked like a mating dance for birds of paradise. Stoner, if anything, blended in fairly well with the other dowdy birds from northern Europe.

If Tom had been used to being the most garishly dressed individual in any given room, he was going down in purple-velvet flames tonight. "How are you bearing up?" Mazzare asked.

"Oh, fine," Stone said, frowning the question back at Mazzare.

"Fine too," said Mazzare, suddenly slightly embarrassed. "I thought you'd find this sort of thing, oh, I don't know—" He waved a hand in the air, and was startled when a glass of wine was put into it by a passing servant.

Stone snagged a drink for himself. "Formal?" He shrugged. "Sure. But, you know, folks seem friendly enough. And, frankly, once you've negotiated the hierarchies and pecking orders of a typical commune full of anarchists and individualists, this sort of thing—" He snapped his fingers for it, ducal display and noble hauteur and all.

"I suppose it must come as something of a relief to have rules to follow."

Stoner grinned. "Sure, man. Hippies take vacations from disorder in the army. Two weeks of drill and discipline and orders and we're refreshed and ready for another year of letting it all hang out."

Jones had walked up to catch the tail end of the joke. "Speaking of things hanging out, I just got taken aside by one of the Sestieri's men."

"Who?" Stoner asked.

"Henchman of one of the—well, I guess 'town fathers' does as well as any other way to put it. He wanted a word about the boys. Frank, to be precise."

Almost as one, they all looked down toward the bottom of the room where, spared the ordeal of the receiving line, Stone's three sons were surrounded by a crowd of younger folk and were keeping the waiters busy.

"What about the boys?" Magda asked, suspicion in every syllable.

"Ah, well. That, ah, that is to say—" Jones began to color slightly, realizing that he was speaking to the boys' stepmother.

Stoner began to look worried, and Mazzare realized his own suspicions were building to match Magda's. The comments that Bedmar had passed were falling into place in Mazzare's mind with a certain lubricious inevitability. He narrowed his eyes. "I think you'd better overcome your embarrassment, Simon."

Jones took a deep breath. He was now a fairly fetching shade of pink. "It's like this. You know we asked the boys to come here with us as much to keep them out of mischief as anything else?"

Nods went around. It had, in point of fact, seemed like a good idea at the time. Mazzare could feel those words in the air, just as damning an indictment as ever they had been.

"And, ah, Frank asked if he could bring a date?"

The penny dropping with Magda was almost audible. "Schweinerei," she murmured.

Stone put a hand on his wife's arm. "Now, Magda, let's not leap to conclusions—"

"I am not leaping to conclusions, Thomas," she hissed. "I am making a reasonable inference from the data as reported to me." She glared at him.

Mazzare winced. That one seemed to be common to all marriages he had seen in action. Hanni gave fair warning that she was about to go nuclear with Gus by quoting theology and Scripture at him. Magda used scientific jargon. In a moment of utter whimsy, he wondered if Stoner had learned any classical philosophy to use in his turn when—

He lost the train of thought to what Jones was saying "—but mostly the Venetians seem to be upset because she's not wearing red shoes."

"Red shoes?" Mazzare said, realizing that for a supposed diplomat he was altogether further behind this conversation than he ought to be. "That means—oh."

Magda's expression was a sight to scare children.

"Tom," said Mazzare hastily, in the faint hope of smoothing this over before the mushroom cloud erupted, "will you have a word with Frank? Not so much about embarrassing us a little—"

"Speak for yourself, Larry," Jones cut in, "but I am more than a little embarrassed."

"Quite. Tom, I think we may have a problem here. We just brought three country boys and turned them loose in a city which is famous for its, ah—"

Magda muttered a very old-fashioned word in German.

"I was going to say courtesans, actually," Mazzare said firmly. Not only had he heard what Magda had called the girl in question, but he'd also heard it used of women who'd been perfectly respectable before, and gone on to be perfectly respectable after they'd played out the bad hand of cards they'd been dealt. Clear moral categorizations were double-edged things, in his view. The world had some very tight corners in it. That was no life for a woman who wanted any self-respect, and he figured the alternative had to be very hard indeed to get her there. The last one he'd spoken to had narrowly escaped burning as a witch.

Then the incongruity hit him. "Hold on," he said. "I thought I recognized that young lady." Maybe two-thirds of the people present were wearing at least half-masks, and most of the people who were masked were wearing full grotesques of one sort or another. The various diplomatic parties were bare-faced, though, as were the doge and his retinue of city dignitaries. So was the girl accompanying Frank, which hardly fit—

"What's the huddle for, guys?" Sharon asked, walking up.

"Hello, Sharon." Mazzare nodded in the direction of the Stone boys. "Do you know anything about Frank's date?"

Sharon grinned widely. "Someone told you?"

"Yes, someone told us," Magda said. She was looking serene now, Mazzare noticed. Perfectly composed, serene and smooth. Like the flawless concrete curve of a mighty dam.

"Oh." Sharon caught the mood. "I was just talking to the Spanish bishop's guy—more like, he was talking to me—"

"The cardinal's gentiluomo," Mazzare murmured.

"Whatever," Sharon said. "I already think of him as Feelthy Sanchez. He's an old lecher."

Magda barked once, a "Ha!" that summarized her current opinion of the male of the species.

Sharon tilted her head to one side a moment, thoughtful. "Well, maybe I'm being unfair. He was kind of twinkly, really. I bet he's pushing sixty."

"Nothing wrong with being mature," Jones said, his face as innocent as all get-out.

"Reverend," Sharon said, "this guy is ripe. Anyway, he was saying Frank had done well to get himself fixed up so quickly."

"Ha!" Magda barked again.

"Oh, Magda honey," Sharon said, suddenly emollient. "It's not so bad. Courtesans are nearly respectable around here. Of course, I didn't realize it was something anyone did part-time."

"Part-time?" Stone looked confused.

"Well, she was working at the embassy this morning." Sharon said it matter-of-factly.

Mazzare suddenly realized why the girl had looked familiar. "One of the chambermaids at the palazzo? That's who Frank brought?"

Mazzare decided the conversation had gone far enough. It also finally occurred to him that perhaps everyone was jumping to conclusions. Venice, he was beginning to realize, was a contagious sort of place. The kind of city where Think no evil is a laughable motto and rumors are guaranteed to be as wicked as possible.

"Let's not get into any more detail, everyone. It may be the girl is just what she seems to be—to anyone except Venetian gossips, at least. Or, well . . . okay, maybe not. If not, we raise the chambermaids' pay so they don't have to, ah—well, you know."

"Quite," Jones said.

"On the other hand," Stone said, "I think I need to have a talk either way with the guys. Like you say, they're young men abroad in a big city for the first time and I think they need to be warned—"

He trailed off, clearly reminiscing. "Heh. I remember the first time I went to San Francisco. The Haight was past its prime, but it was still—" He cleared his throat, seeing the look Magda was giving him. "Well, never mind."

"Did you wear some—" Jones began, but Mazzare waved him down.

"Only you, Simon," he said, "could take that conversation downhill. People, let us mingle. We are supposed to be diplomats. Be nice, listen, give a friendly impression and go easy on the sauce."

"Speaking of which," said Jones, "where's Gus?"

"Unfair, Simon." Mazzare frowned. "Anyway, I left him with the monsignor who's the state theologian here. Gus doesn't usually get to hobnob with the rich and famous, so he's knocking himself out. Anyway, raus, the lot of you. Mingle." He made shooing gestures, and as they broke away he saw the first of many coming to pay him their regards.

Mazzare found he didn't even have to think about it. Whatever the other Americans were doing, he was kept busy being affable—easy enough, the company was all witty and polite—to a constant stream of people. He'd done similar duties in the past, and had learned the trick of the thing. Sip only, because otherwise helpful people come along and freshen your drink without you noticing, and before you know it you're paralytic.

He was barely an hour in, on perhaps his fiftieth how-do-you-do of the evening, when he realized that perhaps he should have passed that tip on. Especially to Jones, who had no capacity for booze and—but he'd surely been—

With an effort of will, he forced himself to stop worrying.

"Still worrying, Monsignor?" The mask was the traditional Mask of Comedy, worn with a close-fitting hood and a cape and a merely moderately lurid doublet. The voice he recognized, and would have even if it hadn't spoken in English.

"Monsignor," Mazzare said. "I had heard you were in Venice to receive short shrift from Messer il Doge?"

"Indeed. And I must also call you monsignor now, yes?"

Mazzare felt a sudden chill. He had last spoken directly to this man nearly eighteen months before.

Canon Monsignor Giulio Mazarini, Nuncio Extraordinary, was a man who gave Mazzare great hopes and the shivering willies in about equal measure. He was another of the great names of history that Mazzare, and all the other up-time Americans, were having to grow used to sharing a world with. In Mazarini's case, rather earlier than the events for which he was mostly famous, but shortly after his actual rise to prominence.

In the timeline that had been, Mazarini had been a rising star in the Vatican's diplomatic corps. Famous in his twenty-ninth year for rescuing the settlement of the War of the Mantuan Succession that had nearly been blown by Richelieu's creature, Father Joseph. Fortunately for France, the manner of the treaty's near-undoing was completely forgotten in the drama of its rescue. Mazarini had galloped his horse between two armies at Cherasco, waving a blank piece of paper and calling out that peace had been made. His flamboyant coup de théâtre, founded in a flagrant lie, had convinced the near-combatants that there was a treaty just long enough for one to be remade in reality.

Later in that timeline, after the time when the Ring of Fire had split the here and now away from what would have been, Mazarini had gone on to take service with Richelieu, and had become a naturalized Frenchman, changing his name to Jules Mazarin. On Richelieu's death he had succeeded to the position of prime minister of France as Cardinal Mazarin, the architect of the absolute state of Louis XIV. There were monuments to the man in the Paris Mazzare had briefly played tourist in, even a Mazarin library.

Grantville had not had a detailed biography of the man, but the basic facts were there in the better encyclopedias. Mazzare was fairly certain that Mazarini's future career was known, for good or ill, in every quarter where the knowing was thought worth knowing. Mazzare himself, ordered by the pope to report on the future, had listed the known details of Mazarini's career, giving particular prominence to the man's later support for the Barberini after their patron Urban VIII—born Maffeo Barberini—died and they began to lose faction-fight after faction-fight within the Church. Not that they couldn't have guessed at Mazarini's future sympathies; he counted at least one Barberini cardinal among his close friends, by all accounts.

The best bit was his key role in the Peace of Westphalia, the treaty that ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648. That was important. Mazarini's career, a few blips apart, was—had been, the normal tenses didn't seem to work properly—devoted to the making of peace after peace. The man had been an inveterate diplomat throughout the life he'd led, and probably saved a good many lives by his efforts.

Mazzare wondered whether Mazarini had fully digested any of it. Or if—no, but Harry Lefferts had come back to Grantville with the news that Mazarini had gone to Paris. If Richelieu had not used the knowledge of future history that he undoubtedly had to make Mazarini an offer, there was no hope at all for France.

Was there a tactful way to ask?

Mazzare realized that the moment was stretching and that Mazarini's having called attention to his new title was in itself a message. Reminding the American priest that he was a diplomat himself now, that they were both at work in the practice of what was now their mutual trade, and there was no such thing as idle chit-chat for such as they.

"Yes," he said, "although that title is much less official than it was—or will be—back in my day." He grimaced. "Doubtless you too have noticed the trouble that normal tenses have with these circumstances."

Mazarini chuckled. "One's conception of oneself can be a little shaky, as well."

Mazzare had been braced, he had thought, but not for that. One could never be ready for that kind of revelation. He felt his pulse bound and then settle as he decided on a tactical misinterpretation. "Quite," he said, smiling ruefully. "There I was, a simple parish priest in a simple country town, and now here I am an ambassador. Perhaps I could prevail upon our acquaintance to sit down with you for a few pointers from a professional?"

Mazzare realized as he said it that he actually meant that. Whatever Mazarini's final allegiances would turn out to be, he was actually a genuinely nice man. When first they had met, Mazzare had been at the bottom of a long, deep depression brought on by his doubts about his place in this time, and the church that represented God to its people and their world. Mazarini had said and done the right things to make Mazzare feel that there was some hope. It could have been a diplomat's professional patter, of course, but then there had been the raid on Grantville by Wallenstein's cavalry, and the bloody aftermath. Mazarini's response had been too smooth, sustained and practical for anyone to believe that it was entirely or even partly feigned. The man cared, and seemed to have the natural touch of friendship about him.

Mazzare had seen all kinds of faith in his years as a priest, throughout his career in the hierarchy. Some outstanding, in both scales as such things are measured. Most, the workaday belief of those whose faith is part of who they are and their family history. That was the reliable sort, Mazzare felt. A man whose trust in God fell with the dew, that he soaked up in warm spring sunshine and the mists of autumn was a man you could depend on.

The mask in front of Mazzare was nodding. "I would be honored, Monsignor."

"That is good to hear, " Mazzare said. Mike Stearns had told him that listening was better than talking in these sorts of situations, something Mazzare had already known. He allowed himself a silent snort at politicians everywhere, for thinking they had a monopoly on the stratagems by which people could be induced to open their hearts to others. And for thinking that the only reason to use those stratagems was in conflict.

Mazarini had the advantage, since behind the mask his thoughts were inviolate. Of course, with Mazarini, that was something of a moot point. His genial, ever-smiling face was the carefully controlled instrument of a trained negotiator and card-player, as much a mask as the painted thing he wore. He knew it, too, and the apologetic tone sounded sincere. "I should take off the mask, Monsignor, save that I am not here."

Mazzare confined himself to raising an eyebrow.

"Yes. Not here at all. The doge has not invited me and it is strictly forbidden to speak with me."

"Forbidden?"

"Forbidden. Perhaps this should be your first pointer from a professional? If, that is, Don Francisco did not instruct you."

Nasi had, but Mazzare let Mazarini go on, since doubtless he meant to pass on some other information.

"The doge is merely the mouthpiece of the Republic. Messer Erizzo is, perhaps, more effective than most such. He seems to have the Senate firmly in hand for all that he is no Foscari reborn. But he must still respect the formalities of the thing. My mission, you see, is a matter of etiquette and protocol. His Holiness sees the dignities of cardinals as an issue of the highest importance."

Mazzare nodded understanding. There was a joke about it, he had heard, that the three bees of the Barberini coat of arms had once been horseflies, a joke prompted by the numbers of Barberini and Barberini placemen that were now in Rome, taking their share of the Church's revenue. There were no less than three cardinals Barberini, and the pope himself was another; he was yet to have the famous repentance of his nepotism. Between the current situation and that repentance in the old timeline was a near war over a failure to show the proper respect and to employ the correct etiquette in dealing with one of the Barberini cardinals. Part of that etiquette was the new title of "Eminence" for all cardinals, and their rank in protocol as princes. Both were Barberini innovations under Urban VIII, and part of Mazzare's briefing had been about Venice's refusal to acknowledge either.

"Venice," said Mazarini, "is—as it always has been—unwilling to knock its head on the floor at Rome's bidding. This is a city that has laughed off Interdicts in its time. On the other hand, Venice wants Rome's support in the matter of Cyprus. Let the pope declare in favor of Venice, the doge has said, and the pope may have his cardinals addressed however he pleases. That may affect you, incidentally."

"How does that affect me?" Mazzare asked.

"Because, Monsignor, Cyprus is part of the mercantile party's holdings at sea. The sway of the island represents a powerful symbol for the merchants. With Cyprus in Venetian hands, and the doge of The Most Serene Republic able to number 'King of Cyprus' among his titles, the merchant party can maintain their claim that the Terrafirma is of less importance than the seagoing trade."

"And so we deduce that those merchants are strong enough in Venice to procure that the doge defies the pope's own nuncio extraordinary?"

"Just so," said Mazarini. "Quod erat demonstrandum."

"Ah," Mazzare smiled. "You have picked up some of our scientific jargon as well—"

He stopped. He had been about to turn the talk to the scientific mission Tom Stone was leading, as a way to turn the conversation away from potentially dangerous topics with some mild and harmless bragging, but he could feel the grin even through the mask.

"Monsignor," Mazarini said, his tone deeply and comically reproachful, "the scientific jargon is ours, not yours. I spent some hours in that wonderful library at Grantville. I found a number of interesting biographies in there and I see that two of the most famous natural philosophers of the twentieth century were born in this one."

Mazzare realized, watching those eyes twinkle through the eyeholes of the mask, that he must have let his bafflement show.

"Newton, the Englishman, and our very own Galileo Galilei," Mazarini said.

Mazzare laughed, rueful. "Of course. And Germany's Leibniz is from this time as well, and many give some of Newton's credit to him. And Father Descartes, as well."

"Just so. But please, Monsignor, let me not keep you, for I suspect that Messer il Doge will want to speak with you, as tête-à-tête as may be permitted him, before this function is over. I should be gone by then. Monsignor, if I may, I shall visit with you at the embassy before long."

"That would be a genuine pleasure," Mazzare said, meaning it.

"Seeya," Mazarini said, and vanished into the plumaged crowd.

It was a second or two before Mazzare realized that the parting word had been spoken in a West Virginia accent, and a fair imitation of Harry Lefferts at that.

He kept the surprise off his face, he hoped. He took a quiet moment, then, standing alone in the crowd and listening to the faint strains of the musicians at the other side of the room playing something with a lot of strings in it; Mazzare was ill-equipped to recognize it. He tried to focus on the memory exercises to match names to faces in their proper pairings. Then the flow started up again, no important business to be done but introductions being made and pleasantries offered and returned in their turn. It was perhaps another fifteen minutes before the flow of introductions dried up again.

Jones, who had been at his elbow throughout, took advantage of the lull. "What was all that about?"

Mazzare chose to misinterpret the question. "I believe the last fellow was a factor for the Foscari."

"Larry." The tone was reproach enough.

"Didn't you recognize him? Don't say it, though, he's not supposed to be here."

"Oh. Someone we met back when?" Jones was looking around, apparently trying to see if Mazarini was still present.

"Back when, yes," said Mazzare, resisting his own urge to rubberneck. "Gus mentioned that he was in town earlier."

"Sure. Not a popular man, in Venice. Got some nerve, showing his face in here. Or not, as it happens."

"Got some nerve, period," Mazzare agreed.

"What's he doing it for, anyway? If someone recognizes him, he's in big trouble. Blows whatever chance he's got of getting on the doge's good side." Jones had finally stopped looking around, and took a sip of his wine. Which was a full glass, and not appreciably lowered by the sip, Mazzare noted with a mixture of silent relief and self-admonition for not having confidence in his old friend.

"His chances were slim and none anyway," Mazzare said. "But if there's one thing that man is down in the history books as liking, it's a touch of the theatrical."

Jones simply chuckled, and then: "Eyes front, Monsignor."

The doge was approaching, much in the manner of a ship under full sail in his robes—although, to American eyes, there was something faintly comical about the ducal cap. It resembled nothing so much as a smurf's hat.

The doge was flanked and trailed, as everywhere, by a small retinue of Venetian nobility. Not so much an honor guard as a prisoner's escort, the Venetian constitution being what it was.

There was a famous piece of architecture in Venice—Mazzare had read about it once in a travel guide—which tradition said was a gallows to hang misbehaving doges from. The office was a strange one, so hemmed about with checks and balances and separations of power that Venice appeared to be governed in spite of the doge, not because of him. In practice, the position carried a lot of influence that made up for the near total lack of power, an influence that the Venetians thought worth having and foreign diplomats had to cultivate. And, Mazzare thought, recalling their first formal meeting earlier that day, had to cultivate after climbing four flights of the Scala D'Oro to get to his receiving room.

It was a classic Venetian trick, that. Classical, including the sense of bygone, greater days. The times when the Venetians were genuinely a power in the Mediterranean rather than just a major player among several were long past. Every year, still, the doge symbolically married the sea. But the joke about him being cuckolded by the Turk was almost a century old by now.

"Monsignor," the doge said.

"Your Grace," Mazzare replied, making the formal bow. Not being Venetian, he had no right to address him as plain old Messer il Doge, without salutation. And in these years of declining power and waning influence, of shortened profits and rising costs, the Venetians clung to every little artifice of power and petty trick of haughtiness they could. Method acting in reverse, you might call it. They acted like haughty patricians granting audience to unlettered barbarians, in the hope—fond hope, really—that their audience would come to believe in the reality of it.

Especially, Mazzare thought, after that four-story stair climb.

"It will, we are sure, be a pleasure to receive your formal embassy. The Gran Consiglio meets in three days' time. Doubtless one of our secretaries will deliver your invitation tomorrow. We look forward to increase in trade and friendship with all who would truly be our friends."

Mazzare resisted an impulse to add warm praise for sunlight, motherhood and apple pie, or whatever dessert the Venetians favored. Doge Erizzo, it seemed, spouted meaningless hot air like a hairdryer, at least in public. The meeting earlier had consisted largely of a similar speech. Mazzare looked past the doge at the halo of attendants around; he could put names to some of the faces, but not all, and they seemed to be arrayed to give truth to the polite fiction that the doge was first among these equals.

Francisco Nasi had told him not to trouble himself about what stood behind the doge, though. He was to deal with the doge as if he were really the Renaissance prince he assumed the styles and airs of, and further to assume that every senator he met was one of the Ten. Every single one, bar a few misfits, reported to at least one of them.

Mazzare satisfied himself that he could not in fact pick out any obvious members of Venice's shadowy ruling council—no tattoos on foreheads, alas—and reflected on Nasi's advice. The Ten were the real government of Venice, when they could agree. Certainly there was not one item of Senate business that that anonymous, unrecorded body would not have carved up in detail before the Senate met to vote on it, with the result that every vote of the Senate was nearly unanimous. There would always be three or four dissenting votes, of course. Venice, as everywhere, had its leavening of misfits and the occasional downright lunatic among its governing classes. The Ten was one of the many compromises and anomalies by which the Most Serene Republic of Venice actually worked. It was an oligarchy, true enough, but one which allowed for democratic decision-making among the oligarchs themselves.

The doge might even be one of the Ten himself. Since the Ten was not officially part of the Venetian constitution, there was room for more than a modicum of doubt about who was saying what in its councils.

But, as Nasi had said, from the outside at least, the doge was a prince. Sometimes, it paid to focus on the illusion and ignore the reality. Nasi had then proceeded, with malice aforethought, to use words and phrases like interface and interaction metaphor. Mazzare was sure that Nasi made those things up just to enliven dull briefings, after having been mightily amused by twentieth-century management-speak as recorded in the few MBA texts Grantville had had. The man's sense of humor was oblique and bizarre. Both Jones and Mazzare had laughed about his account of the ducal promises that governed the doge's role in Venice's government. The one about his being obliged to buy five ducks for every adult male patrician in the city as a New Year's present had especially entertained them.

At the time, Mazzare and Jones had assumed the story was one of Nasi's embroideries—until they'd arrived in Venice and discovered that it was actually true.

The pleasantries concluded, with no mention of ducks for good or ill, the doge moved away.

"We're not in Kansas any more," Jones murmured.

Mazzare smiled, and looked around. That left only—but no, the entire French party were visibly and pointedly giving Mazzare their backs.

The rest of the soiree passed quietly.

For Mazzare, at least.

* * *

Frank thought it would probably take surgery to get rid of the cringe he was feeling.

Tom Stone had a truly awful way of reaming out his sons. Perfectly reasonable, calm and polite, his soft-spoken admonition littered with hippie ethic and the wisdom of the nineteen-sixties. That was why Giovanna looked thoroughly bewildered. As well she might. She'd been born and brought up in seventeenth-century Venice, and on the wrong side of the tracks at that. So the sight and sound of a twentieth-century hippie deploying his thoroughly weird parenting skills in a lecture on the rights of women, sexual politics and Respect For Cultures Not Our Own was completely outside her experience.

Frank didn't feel that it helped any that his father, hippie that he was, still referred to women as "chicks" despite being nearly three centuries away from the sixties.

Chapter 19

"I embarrassed you?" Giovanna asked, her tone an odd combination of cool challenge and nervous anxiety. She was now sitting next to him in the gondola taking them back to her father's establishment—she'd not tried to work a boat herself, this night, not wearing those fancy clothes—and regarding him with narrowed eyes.

"No, Giovanna," he said. "I'm not embarrassed by you. It's just . . . It's just that, well, I'm told it's not a big deal in Venice—prostitution, I mean, uh, courtesanship rather—but it is a big deal where we came from. And, uh, it's a different kind of big deal depending on who's talking about it."

He could sense he was babbling but saw no alternative but to babble further. Babble he did, thus, with all the fervor that a drunk with a hangover seizes upon the hair of the dog. "What I mean is that some Americans will denounce you for consorting with harlots and others—like my dad—will denounce you—well, my dad doesn't really denounce anybody, it's a lot worse than that—for being a sexist pig and exploiting women." Keep babbling, keep babbling, maybe there's a bottom to this pit. "And, uh, we didn't know the customs, and it took us by surprise. And we're supposed to be part of a diplomatic mission."

Giovanna's eyes weren't narrow now. They were slits. It suddenly dawned on Frank . . .

Giovanna put it into words. "You think I am a whore?" Her tone of voice was decidedly dangerous, and Frank could feel panic rising. He hunted frantically for reverse gear.

"No, no!" he said, louder than he'd meant. "That's not what I meant! I never thought so, please—not once!—it's the filthy minds of those aristocrats, that's what really caused the trouble!"

Bingo. Even a babbler, now and then, babbles his way clear of disaster. Giovanna's eyes were still slits, but her hostile gaze shifted from Frank to scan the surroundings. By great good luck—oh thank you whatever gods may be—the gondola was passing a stretch of Venice where the mansions of the Case Vecchie were concentrated. The mansions, like the merchant nobility themselves, had the feel of tawdriness under the glitter.

"They are pigs," Giovanna hissed. "Just like them—to flaunt their whores by making them wear red shoes!"

A light at the end of the tunnel. Frank could only hope it wasn't a freight train coming. "Yes, yes—that's pretty much what my dad was talking about." In his own screwy way, but Frank saw no reason to dwell on that subject. "I had no idea it would cause any problem, honest! I just wanted to take you to a party where we might have some fun, and, and—"

Go on, say it, said a little voice in the back of his mind; but he couldn't, not yet. "I'm sorry," he managed at last. "I thought you'd like to be taken somewhere fancy like that. I should have thought about what kind of mess it might drop you in."

Giovanna was visibly softening now. Very rapidly, in fact. She even put her hand on his. It was like she'd touched him with a live wire.

"It is not your fault, Frank."

"I guess. I just screwed up tonight. It was me embarrassed you. I'm sorry." He wondered if he should try puppy-dog eyes, and then thought better of it. The dating tactics that had worked in up-time America—okay, occasionally worked, Frank was really no Lothario—were completely out of place here. Hippie upbringing or not, Frank was no fool. The Marcolis might be revolutionaries, but they were still seventeenth-century revolutionaries. Their radicalism, he was quite sure, only went so far—and probably not that far at all on some subjects. One of which undoubtedly included what they would regard as matters of family honor. With a capital H. In red ink, with a border of daggers and skulls-and-crossbones. The fact that Antonio Marcoli had magnanimously waived the necessity of a chaperone didn't mean that he would have casual up-time attitudes about sex. "Freedom" was one thing; "free love" another.

And besides . . . Frank wasn't really just interested in getting laid. Not that he wasn't interested in that, of course. For an instant, he had to fight down a ferocious surge of hormones that threatened to addle his wits completely at the worst possible time. But sex was only part of it. He didn't understand why, exactly—maybe he had a taste for the exotic—but something about Giovanna excited him far more than any American girl he'd ever had the hots for.

Giovanna sniffed, putting her nose in the air. It was a very pretty nose. For the first time, ironically, it dawned on Frank that it was also what people usually called an "aristocratic nose." A lot like Sophia Loren's, in fact. Odd that he hadn't noticed that before—since he'd certainly noticed the resemblance to Sophia Loren's figure. Um. Well, maybe his dad was right. A little bit. Maybe Frank did suffer from a touch of callow adolescence. What his dad called "infantile boob fixation."

Giovanna sniffed again. The sound, this time, had the flavor of doom about it. A very aristocratic sound, as it happens. "You should not apologize, Frank! I will not have it!" Then, more softly—oh, very softly indeed—and with suddenly warm and open eyes: "I am not embarrassed to prick the pretensions of the parasites who grind the blood and flesh of the Italian nation under their filthy heels."

Frank almost choked. The tone was of a piece with the moonlight on the water of the lagoon, with the soft strains of distant music that reached them from a myriad of Carnevale parties. The words? Straight from Revolution 101. Or Introduction to Storming the Bastille. No, wait, that was the French revolution. What had the Italians called theirs? The risorgimento, he thought. It was led by some guy in the future named . . .

The only thing Frank could remember was that the name rhymed with Pavarotti. Of course, that was no help, since half the names in Italian rhymed with Pavarotti.

Verdi? No, that was the opera guy.

Whatever. It didn't matter, because that had all happened in another universe. In the here and now, it looked like the name was going to be "Marcoli." At least, that seemed to be the ambition of Giovanna's father. Frank had a horrible feeling he had no choice but to get with Messer Marcoli's program completely, if he wanted to get anywhere with Giovanna.

"Well," he said, trying to be as gruff and manly about it as he could, "if it's all right with you. I should have checked first, though. Wasn't respectful to just drop you in all that with no warning." Yeah, make out you planned it all along, that's right. Dumbass. At times, Frank wondered if there was any way to get rid of that treacherous little voice in the back of his mind. Stand it against a wall and shoot it, maybe.

But he couldn't dwell on the political risks involved, not with Giovanna looking at him like that. She had a smile on her face again. A shy one, to his surprise—though not so shy that those glorious dimples weren't showing.

A moment of truth dawned on Frank. That moment of truth, he dimly understood, that eventually comes to young males who aren't hopelessly self-absorbed—which, of course, excluded most of the beastly critters—that girls have minds of their own. And that they, too, have treacherous inner voices that they'd often like to send to the chopping block. They, too, plan and plot and scheme and—most of all—wonder what they look like to the young man they're fascinated with.

Hot damn! The little voice was back online, and finally saying something he wanted to hear. She's actually interested in me! REALLY interested! No fooling!

He gave himself a little mental shake. The plain truth of it was that he was now almost certain that she was The One. The last thing he could afford was to lapse into teenage folly. Be cool, Frank. Maintain!

But she was talking again—and, Frank guessed, had made her own decision that The Right Thing To Do Now Was Stay Cool. "As to the diplomacy, Frank, I think you are fretting unnecessarily. Who cares what the stinking Case Vecchie think? My father will have his own opinion."

Oh, swell. Antonio Marcoli's reaction, when he heard about the evening, was exactly what Frank was worried about.

That he would hear about it from Giovanna, Frank didn't doubt for a moment. What separated Giovanna's father from a comic opera figure was that the man was genuinely charismatic. Even Frank had felt the pull of Antonio Marcoli's magnetically intense personality. And that charisma was something he exuded as a father, not simply as the leader of a political group. Giovanna and her brothers—the cousins, too—were closely attached to him and obviously trusted him and confided in him. It simply wouldn't occur to Giovanna not to tell her father.

Frank cringed, right there on the gondola seat. Another vivid image had just flashed through his mind. If earlier fantasies about Giovanna had caused certain organs to swell, this image caused them to shrivel right up. The Marcolis, lined up in order of seniority, each with a knife in his hand, waiting their turn to carve a large and painful piece out of Frank's hide. Or—

The organs in question raced for cover, gibbering with terror. Frank almost clutched himself. Fortunately, a further image brought surcease from pain: Antonio Marcoli, passing out pistols to his clan, so that the lot of them could riddle Frank's poor mutilated body with bullet holes for good measure . . .

To his astonishment, Giovanna burst into laughter. He gaped at her.

"Oh, Frank! The expression on your face—it's priceless!" She covered her mouth with a hand, trying to stifle the laughter.

"I don't see what's so funny," he growled.

"Why do you think—" She had to break off, overcome by giggles. By the time she recovered, Frank saw that the gondola was about to moor.

I'm dead. The organs in question seemed to have vanished entirely, now. Not that it mattered, of course, since Frank Stone would never have any use for them. Not in the short span of life left to him.

As the gondola drew up, Giovanna came lithely to her feet and extended a hand. "Come. My father will react differently than I think you expect."

Seeing no option—what the hell, at least he'd go down holding her hand—Frank started to follow her. Over her shoulder, Giovanna smiled and said: "But do not forget to pay the gondolier. That is something to really worry about."

With a start, Frank realized that he had completely forgotten that small matter. Hastily, he handed over some coins without even trying to figure out if they came to the right amount. From the look on the gondolier's face, though, he'd overpaid him considerably.

Frank didn't stop to get change. He had other things on his mind; and, besides, at least the gondolier would mourn his passage.

* * *

Once he stepped ashore, though, he felt himself relax a little. The gondolier had let them off at a pier rather than enter the narrow canals of the island. Murano was a small island just to the north of Venice's main islands, where Venice's glassblowing industry had been concentrated since the thirteenth century. But since Murano had a somewhat unsavory reputation, most gondoliers refused to enter it directly.

That meant they had a bit of a walk to get to the Marcoli building. Blessedly.

Even more blessedly, because Giovanna tucked her hand into his elbow. She was almost snuggling him. She'd never done that before.

"If you don't mind, I'd like to use your arm," she said sweetly. "The footing is not good here. And it's very dark."

The excuse was transparent. The footing was no worse than anywhere in Venice, and Frank had seen her earlier, practically dancing across it with light and sure feet. True, that had been in daylight, and it was now well after sundown. But there was a full moon out, and visibility really wasn't that bad.

Not that Frank was about to object, of course. He felt quite light-headed. In the moonlight, Giovanna seemed more beautiful than ever.

"Oh, yeah. Sure. Of course. Be my pleasure."

So, they made their way. Slowly. Giovanna didn't seem to be in any more of a hurry than Frank.

Alas, it couldn't have been more than a few minutes before they were in among the alleys and courts inside the block that held the Marcoli building. It seemed like mere seconds. A dim and still-sentient corner of Frank's mind—insofar as Frank could be said to have a "mind" left at all, between his fretting over Papa's Fury, the Venetian moonlight on Giovanna, and she on his arm—was trying to shrill a little alarm at him. This neighborhood at night really did have the appearance of a rough one. A downright nasty one, in fact. Distant sounds of arguments in tenements high above the street, the wail of a cat on a roof somewhere, dark and lurking shadows in narrow alleys—

One of those shadows moved, and Frank tasted the cold coppery flavor of fear. All other thoughts fled from his mind, as adrenaline worked its magic.

Another movement.

They were brought up short by two grimy customers stepping out from a doorway in front of them. Grimy customers with knives that were far and away the best-kept things about them. Shiny, bright, and obviously sharp knives.

A low, deep growl came from somewhere behind. "Hand over the purse and strip off the good clothes."

Frank looked around. Surrounded. Two in front, two behind. A mugging. Just great. The perfect end to a disastrous evening.

He sighed. No way to deal with this heroically, they wouldn't stop at kicking his ass, not with those knives.

Besides, he was Tom Stone's son. Frank's dad considered "macho" a synonym for "moron." He was known to say that he hadn't trusted the theory of evolution since he'd seen his first John Wayne movie. His first and only.

So, as reached into his pocket, Frank summoned up the spirit of his hippie father to guide him through this momentary unpleasantness.

"Okay, guys, you got us. Everybody just relax. Take the money with no argument, but we keep the clothes, all right?"

"Frank—" Giovanna's hand was clutching his arm tightly.

"No, it's okay. It's only money. Money can be replaced. And these guys look like they need it more than us, anyway." That was true, at least. Scruffy wasn't even close to being the word for the way these guys looked. You'd have to add scrawny, unshaven, mean and ugly to get anywhere close. If you looked upon it as aggressive panhandling, which was pretty much the way his father would, it was almost compassionate to give them some eating money.

Not that Frank looked at it that way. He really didn't see eye-to-eye with his father on this subject. Granted, Frank wasn't any too fond of machismo himself. In fact, he'd been known to express pretty much the same skepticism concerning evolution as his dad, except that Frank's preferred example was the average high school jock. Still, Frank was just naturally more combative than Tom Stone, even if he usually tried to figure out a way to get even instead of getting mad.

On the other hand, as long as all that was involved was money . . . Well, the truth was that Frank didn't care about money much more than his dad. So piss on it.

But then the guy who seemed to be the head thug spoke again, and all of Frank's reasoning fled in an instant. Genetics and upbringing can lead a boy to pacifism, but they can't make him drink.

"Not just the money," the guy said. "The clothes too." His eyes moved to Giovanna, roaming up and down like a visual tongue. "And we'll want your whore for a while. Maybe we'll give her back."

Frank discovered that an old hackneyed expression was actually true. A red mist appear in front of his eyes. The fury was so intense that he couldn't make himself do anything. Like in a bad dream—

And then Giovanna ended the moment. Her intake of breath was quick, and sharp. The scream that came back out was high, piercing and incredibly loud.

The sound broke Frank's paralysis—at the same time that it held the thug in front of him momentarily frozen.

There was no thought at all involved. Just the immediate lightning reaction of a nineteen-year-old in very good health who was also—false modesty aside—one hell of a good soccer player. Frank's kick to the crotch didn't double up the goon. It lifted him about a foot off the ground; and, when he landed, he was curled up like a spider caught in a flame.

Unfortunately, muggers have good reflexes too. Vaguely, Frank realized that shutters and doors along the alley were beginning to bang open, letting light into the alleyway. But his attention was on the thug next to the one he'd kicked, who was already swinging his knife.

Frank managed to avoid the first stab by just backing away. Giovanna's hand yanking on his arm helped a lot too. Frantically, he grabbed Giovanna and pushed her into a doorway, which was the best he could do to get her out of danger. When he turned back, the same thug was coming in for another stab.

Frank had no training at all in the martial arts. Luckily for him, some things are just automatic reflex—and blocking an awkward looping stab with a forearm is one of them. The thug's snarling face was now less than a foot away from Frank's own.

Again, soccer substituted for kung-fu, and Frank had one hell of a head-butt. The goon staggered back, dazed, blood pouring down his face. Frank was pretty sure he'd broken his nose.

He backed up again, protecting Giovanna in the doorway as best he could, his eyes ranging, looking for the two other muggers. Giovanna's lungs were as impressive as her bust. Coming from just inches behind, her second scream almost blew out his eardrums.

But it was all over. Those opening doorways were open, now, and people were spilling out of them. Among those people—right in the fore—were Marcolis. Marcoli males. Many Marcoli males.

And they were looking even meaner and angrier than they had in Frank's nightmare reverie. Oh, lots meaner and lots angrier.

The muggers hesitated, and that was their undoing. None of them got more than a few steps before they were brought down.

Shortly thereafter, Giovanna hugging him tightly—boy, did that feel great—Frank was able to observe an interesting tableau.

Antonio Marcoli was at the center of it, standing in front of four would-be muggers held by what seemed like eight pair of none-too-gentle hands apiece. Well. In the case of the one Frank had kicked, "held up" was probably a more accurate description than "held." The guy was still curled into a ball. Even with Antonio's cousin holding him by the hair, his head wasn't more than waist-high.

You couldn't actually say that Marcoli was swaggering or strutting. But that was only because "swaggering" and "strutting" were words that had a slightly comical connotation to them, and there was nothing at all comical—oh, no, no, no, no, no—about Antonio Marcoli's body language.

Frank found himself titling the tableau like a picture. Street-life, with lynch-mob. A moment of murmured reassurance that his daughter was unharmed, and then Marcoli had taken charge. By then, all the Marcolis had plenty of neighbors and friends to lend them a hand. Not that they probably needed it. Truth to tell, the Marcolis looked right at home in a dark alley. Natural denizens.

And Messer Marcoli suddenly wasn't the screwball radical he'd been in daylight, either. The guy looked about as comic opera as a rattlesnake. He had a thin smile on his face, which contained no humor at all.

Marcoli bestowed the razor smile on the man Frank had kicked. "I guess we won't need to cut his balls off." He swiveled his head and bestowed the smile on Frank himself. For an instant, there actually seemed to be some warmth in it.

But the instant passed. Marcoli's head swiveled back to regard the captured muggers. "I warned you," he said softly. "And now—you assault even my own daughter."

Frank could only see the faces of two of the muggers. Well, three—but it was obvious now that he had broken that man's nose. His face was still covered with blood.

They looked very scared already. The moment Marcoli said the last sentence, Frank discovered that another hackneyed old expression was true. Men actually could turn as white as a sheet.

They must not have recognized Giovanna, Frank realized, wearing that borrowed finery. Apparently, they really had thought she was—

"They called me a whore, Papa!" Giovanna hissed. "Hissed" as in locomotive. Very healthy lungs.

Marcoli nodded judiciously. "Yes, outrageous. But we must not allow personal animosity to enter the business. This is a matter of revolutionary justice, not family vengeance."

That didn't seem to cheer up the muggers any. Frank suddenly had a very bad feeling about the situation.

"Uh, Messer Marcoli," he said, half-protesting. "If it had just been the money, you know, I would have given it to them. I mean, it's only money."

Again, that judicious nod. "Yes, I understand. Very generous, your spirit—and it is true that money is not something we should worship. But that is not the point."

He gestured, his hand sweeping the surroundings. "See where these carrion lurk? They prey on their own kind. Too cowardly to rob the nobility. We will put a stop to that, by making this more dangerous still. I gave them one warning, and they paid no heed. Let us see if they will pay attention this time."

He didn't pause at all, so far as Frank could see. "Beat them to a pulp. Slit their noses. Then cut off one ear each. We will nail them up in prominent places."

The Marcolis and their confederates set to it immediately, and with a will. The one Frank had kicked and the one he'd head-butted got no bonus points for their existing injuries either.

But Frank didn't watch it, after the shock of the first few seconds of violence held him immobile. He blew out his breath and turned away. Giovanna was still hugging him and now he finally returned the embrace. With a will.

Frank didn't really know what to think. He'd heard of stuff like this happening in Magdeburg. That raw boom town had nothing much in the way of a police force, outside of the few areas where Swedish or U.S. soldiers patrolled, and the crime rate had initially rocketed. Until the Committees of Correspondence had established their own rough-and-ready street law. "Rough-and-ready" was the right expression, too. Frank knew that some criminals had wound up in the Elbe river.

He'd even approved of it himself, when he'd heard about it. But somehow "street justice" was harder to take in person than at a distance. He found himself wishing—for the first time in his scapegrace life, ha!—that Dan Frost were here. Grantville's one-time police chief had been a pain in the ass often enough, sure. But nobody had ever worried about being beaten in a cell, much less the ley de fuega, when Dan Frost took them into custody. There was a lot to be said for professional law enforcement, when you got right down to it, at least when it was done fair and square.

By then, though, Frank discovered that he was nuzzling Giovanna's hair. Which was every bit as luxuriant and healthy as her lungs and . . . well, everything else. So he found it easy enough to forget about the rest.

At least, until he realized that Antonio Marcoli had left off supervising the mayhem and was standing at his elbow.

Frank froze. Okay, so he wasn't doing anything with Giovanna you could really call "feeling her up," but . . .

On the other hand, she was practically feeling him up—boy, those little hands felt great—and he suddenly remembered that The One's papa standing at his elbow was the very same guy who'd just calmly given orders on the subject of broken bones, slit noses, sliced-off ears . . . judicious decisions that castration wasn't probably necessary even though it was a charming idea and maybe another time . . .

I'm dead.

But all Marcoli did was slap him on the shoulder. Then, pried him loose from Giovanna and pulled him close for a very Italian embrace of his own. And then, back at arm's length, one hand on each of Frank's shoulders.

"Splendid man!" Marcoli pronounced. "You are a credit to our cause—and to your own nation, of course."

Back into the embrace. Back out again, at arm's length, hands on shoulders. Frank couldn't help being reminded of any number of mob movies he'd seen. It was kind of eerie. The father of his girlfriend—well, he had hopes, anyway; and things were sure looking good—was a cross between John Brown and the Godfather.

Eek.

"Frank," said Marcoli, "your generosity speaks well of you personally. But—trust me!—fine feelings are wasted on such as them. Criminals in the end are but lackeys for the exploiters. Because of their poor origins, we allow them one warning. More would be a waste of our time and effort—both things of which the revolution is in short supply."

He was dead serious, too. There wasn't a dishonest bone or a poseur's fingernail anywhere on Antonio Marcoli's body. Goofy or not, Frank realized, this man was no parlor pink. Words he used like exploiters and lackeys and The Revolution—you could practically hear the capital letters—came trippingly from his tongue. He might be an impractical man given to harebrained schemes, but a faker he wasn't.

Oh, well. For Giovanna . . .

Frank did make a note to himself that, if there was ever a next time—not that he wanted there to be—he'd try to pick a Love Of His Life with a different kind of father. Maybe a bookkeeper whose idea of adventure was reading a novel. A Jane Austen freak. No westerns or thrillers. Short. Scrawny. A ninety-seven-pound weakling. Nearsighted—no, practically blind . . .

"Come, Frank," said Marcoli, putting one arm around Frank and the other around his daughter. He guided them back down the alley toward his door, away from the final grisly moments of the street justice he'd dispensed. "You must stay the night with us. You should not carry that away as your memory of Venetian hospitality, eh? We can send a note to the embassy by a gondolier, so they won't worry."

Frank hoped like hell Marcoli meant the mugging, and not what had been done to the muggers. The guy might seem like a rather endearing, barmy coot when it came to his enthusiastic plans. But when it came to action, he had all the old Venetian charm of a mob capo.

On the other hand . . . there was the prospect of spending the rest of the evening with Giovanna. Not the night, of course. The one thing Frank Stone was not about to contemplate—in Antonio Marcoli's own house!—was trying to sneak into his daughter's bedroom.

"See?" Antonio demanded. "It is too cold to return, this late at night. Already you are shivering."

Chapter 20

Joe Buckley drained the last of his glass, and thought about pouring another. He thought better of it. He'd matched the Frenchman Ducos drink for drink in the earlier part of the evening, and the hangover was already starting to nibble at the frontal lobes of his brain. He looked over his notes and decided they were legible, although how they'd look in the cold hard light of morning was anyone's guess. His last ballpoint had died months ago. Thankfully, the modern-style fountain pen had proven a massive hit with Germany's stationers and while they weren't cheap they were very good indeed. In fact, the only ones being made yet were the kind of finely crafted high-end items he'd always liked back up-time. Good notepaper was the problem, since the Turkish stuff fine enough for handwriting tended to be expensive, and the newsprint of the time turned into a blotched rag if you wrote on it with anything harder than a feather pen.

The embassy's reception room was quiet, the silence marred only by the crackling in the grate and Captain Lennox's heroic snoring. Jones and Mazzare were looking bone-weary and ragged. Everyone else seemed to have gone straight to bed. If they'd had a debrief, they hadn't done it anywhere journalistic ears might catch a word or two. Buckley was bone-weary himself, and wanted nothing so much as to drag himself across the way into his own building and his own bed. But he was still on that fine line between drunken bravado and sober enough to know better, which was why he was aching to start asking questions but keeping quiet anyway. Besides, with no deadline to meet, he told himself, he could leave the polite request for an interview for the morning, when everyone would be better rested and feeling more accommodating. There was that to be said for biweekly publication and filing stories by horse-borne mail; you could take a few hours off now and then. He had the Ring of Fire to thank for never having had the tyranny of a daily news hole to fill, and this week's was already nicely plugged with a damned good story about d'Avaux.

Tom Stone came in as Buckley mused on the ruckus that was going to cause. The old hippy-turned-industrialist—and wasn't that a switch!—picked an armchair by Jones and plopped into it.

"Man, am I beat!"

"Tell me about it," said Jones. "My feet are killing me." He had kicked off his shoes and had both much-darned socks on public display on a handy hassock.

Mazzare sat up straighter. "How's Frank?"

Stone grinned. "Mortified, Father. You'd be pleased."

Mazzare chuckled. "Somehow, Tom, I doubt you play the stern father very well."

"Honesty and sweet reason, gentlemen, has always been my watchword in raising those boys."

"Ouch," said Jones. "That's just cruel, with teenagers. Makes me glad my own father believed in sparing not the rod. Or the belt, in his case."

"Man, I don't even like jokes about that."

"Sorry, Tom," Jones said, sounding like he meant it.

Buckley, almost automatically, wondered what lay behind that exchange. He knew altogether too little about any of the three leading figures in the United States delegation. Mazzare's background he had from the State Department press-pack on him, at least as far as his clerical career went. Chaplaincy for the USAF posted in England, a spell at the Vatican, work in the office of the archbishop of Baltimore before coming to pastoral work in Grantville. From Chicago originally. Other than that, nada.

Jones . . . Buckley had only what Rita Stearns had told him. No—Rita Simpson; he'd gotten the information from her after her marriage to Tom Simpson. He and Rita were friends from college, which was why Joe had been in Grantville on the day of the Ring of Fire.

All he knew about Jones was that he was a Grantville local boy, settled as the town's Methodist minister alongside his wife, who was from out of state. There had been that business back in 1631 when he'd somehow come by a sudden surge in church funds. The story had dried up in one cold lead after another and Buckley had reluctantly dropped it, but not without putting acres of bad blood between the two of them, however polite Jones might be to his face.

Stoner—what about him? There was a story waiting to be written. Probably an easy one to get, too, with the man's hippie openness. The problem was finding a time when Stoner was free and available. For a supposed counter-cultural slacker he worked long hard hours. Hippie, commune founder, chemist—like the reason for that wasn't obvious—and growing hash for the government.

Joe had tried to work that angle precisely once, when word got out. There was always good copy to be had from the War on Drugs. But then he'd had a visit from Doctors Nichols and Abrabanel after he'd published the first piece. Nichols had offered—no, insisted on—an interview in which he and Doctor Abrabanel had explained, in excruciating detail, all of the medical uses of cannabis, opium, cocaine and just about every narc—Buckley stopped himself. He'd used the word narcotic precisely once in relation to the drugs under discussion, which had prompted a long, technical and utterly patronizing digression from Doctor Abrabanel about how precisely none of these medicines were in fact narcotics at all, but euphoriants, analgesics, anti-whatevers and whocaresiates.

Whatever. The DEA came in for some trenchant comments from Doctor Nichols, before he'd gotten back to the topic at hand, which was how banning any one of the formerly illegal drugs would condemn hundreds, thousands, to unnecessary pain and hardship.

It had been a thoroughly dispiriting interview. Especially since, for a doctor, Nichols was a thoroughly menacing individual when he put his mind to it. Doctor Abrabanel, on the other hand, had been a lot more urbane and Buckley had turned his "suggestions" on how to make a face-saving retraction and change of line into, though he did say so himself, damn good copy. But the memory was still tender.

Mazzare was speaking again as Buckley's mind wandered. "Does he understand what the problem was?"

"Sure," said Stone, "although I think Frank figures we're being a bunch of old squares about it."

"What did he do?" Buckley asked. He decided it wouldn't be honest just to sit there and listen in, and besides it sounded like a story. If one of Stone's kids had gone along to the first major diplomatic function of the USE embassy to Venice and screwed up—maybe an article on the scandal of nepotism—the viper in the bosom of liberty—

"Not him," Stone said. "He's just having his first real crush. That's the teenage version of trying to get laid with panache and style." The old hippie was grinning. He clearly didn't think that whatever the offense had been was that great, although Mazzare and Jones were both frowning pastoral disapproval.

Buckley didn't ask the obvious question, but Stoner answered it anyway. "His date turned out to be a girl from an artisan family, dressed up in finery. No sweat—except the Venetian upper crust assumed she must have been a whore—since no lower-class girl could have afforded those clothes—and they were a bit miffed that she wasn't wearing the customary red shoes. Go figure."

"Oh." Buckley saw the story vanish before it even formed. Who wanted to hear about horny teenage boys and the fixes they got themselves into thinking with their dicks? Any villager in Germany could tell you that story. By the baker's dozen.

But maybe there was a different angle. A political angle. "Was she one of the chambermaids here?"

Stoner nodded.

Buckley smiled thinly. "Bet you dollars for donuts she was inserted into your staff by the local Committee of Correspondence, then. I know there's one here in Venice, although I haven't been able to find out much about them."

"Mister Buckley," Mazzare said sternly, "I'd really appreciate it if you'd be a little careful there. We are trying to avoid obvious links with the Committee. I realize asking that of you is probably a waste of my time. Still, I am asking." He sighed. "How many of our staff do you think belong to the Committee?"

Buckley shrugged. "Hard to say. For women, membership in the Committees of Correspondence tends to be elastic in areas outside of the United States itself. At a guess, I'd say Frank's new girlfriend is the only actual member of the Venice Committee—but if you looked closely, you'd find that lots of the other chambermaids are friends and relatives of hers. Think of them as Committee, once removed. Most of your staff, of course, are Francisco Nasi's people."

Jones groaned. "Our security's perfect, then, and we're totally compromised anyway. Wait'll I see Luzzatto again."

The Jewish commercial agent was back in the ghetto for the night. Venetian law might be elastic on the restrictions on its Jewry, but Luzzatto liked to observe the proprieties. Doing so practically defined the man, in Joe's limited experience with him. Buckley realized that Jones had a point about Luzzatto's handling of the set-up of the embassy. His own sources said that Luzzatto had regarded the Committee as a good voucher for the reliability of prospective staff. If he hadn't, he'd have had trouble getting any help at all for the embassy. The plague a couple of years before had sorely depleted Venice and everyone from the doge on down was having trouble keeping servants. Being picky about who one hired was a recipe for a very short queue of applicants.

Still, it sounded like Mazzare didn't want to frighten the notables, and there was every chance that the Committee connection would be spotted. Whatever the history books might say about Venice being in the first years of its decadent period, the Council of Ten's agents were still justly feared.

"The girl probably wasn't a prostitute," he said, in an attempt to change the subject. "She could have borrowed the clothes, easily enough, assuming she's connected to the local Committee. The CoCs almost always have a presence in the needle trades. It's easy enough to get your hands on finery for an evening, if you know a seamstress working on something. Just hope you don't run into the real owner or that she doesn't recognize her own outfit on someone else."

"If you wind up doing a story on them, Joe, let me have a copy. Although I did get a briefing and I should have—" Mazzare let out another deep sigh. "What's done is done. I suppose we should look at what we're paying our staff, make sure the girls don't have to sell themselves."

Buckley bit down on what he'd been about to offer, that the embassy was in fact paying very generously—even by the standards of Venice, a town where plague had made pretty much every job market a seller's market. He was, he told himself, a reporter, not a researcher for the embassy.

"I gave the boys a lecture about exploitation, just to be on the safe side," Stoner said, looking considerably more serious now. "Maybe we should say something to the soldiers?"

The two pastors digested that in silence.

"Doubt it'd do any good," Jones said at length.

"True," Mazzare agreed gloomily. "Although I suppose they'll be discreet about it. Maybe we should say something to them about security?"

More silence.

Buckley thought the gloom was misplaced. First, there was something downright comical about two ministers fretting about security lapses on the part of the soldiery when they had a Scotsman named Lennox in charge of that very matter. Buckley knew for a fact—he'd gotten two different accounts, both agreeing on all the major points and both wickedly amusing—that Lennox had thoroughly reamed out Billy Trumble and Conrad Ursinus for their behavior the night the embassy had finally arrived in Venice. Since then, the two young officers looked to have ramrods up their ass.

Secondly, and more important, Mazzare and Jones underestimated—by about an order of magnitude, Buckley thought—the difference that up-time social habits made in the attitude of their hired help. Just being treated like a regular working stiff was a major step up from the condescension of the served to their servants that was the norm in the seventeenth century. Half of Buckley's journalistic success depended on that simple fact, which infected even the journalists of the time. They went for interviews with the Great Men and their hangers-on and wrangled for admission to the councils and conferences at which great matters were discussed and decided. Buckley just asked the waiters and footmen what they'd seen and heard, and so got in on things that others were excluded from. He had to be careful sometimes to cover up sources, but it worked every time.

He'd gotten the idea while doing a story on Admiral Simpson. The man's household staff had fallen over themselves to dish on the man and his wife. To Buckley's surprise, it had all been praise. But getting that experience stood him in good stead in Venice. The French embassy, in particular, leaked like a sieve.

Which reminded him of what he'd actually written. "I'm for my bed," he said, gathering up his papers and nodding to the other three.

They bid him good night, and he left with all the dignity of a half-drunk journalist getting the hell out before anyone asked him what he was actually going to file for this week's story.

* * *

After Buckley's departure the two pastors and the hippie lapsed into companionable silence for several minutes. Lennox's snores took on the breathy, whistling tone of a man well away in the land of Nod.

"You think pinching that Scot warthog's nostrils would help?" Jones finally grumbled.

"Oh, I don't know," said Stone, "I find the noise kind of restful. Almost as good as a ticking clock."

Mazzare chuckled at the banter. Jones's acid wit and Stone's casual, good-natured humor had eased a lot of the frustration of their journey to Venice. Switzerland in winter had been no joke, even for the hard-bitten cavalrymen of their Marine guard. "What we could do with, I think," he said, "is pinching Buckley's mouth."

"You think he's up to no good?" Stone asked.

"Depend on it," Jones said, still glaring at Lennox. "Man's a damned nuisance. He's bound to be up to something that'll bite us all on the ass."

Jones' run-in with Buckley had been a fairly quiet business, for all the newsman's efforts at scandal-mongering after the Ecumenical Relief Committee had gotten its mysterious boost in funding over the winter of 1631. Away from prying ears in the garage at Mazzare's rectory, Jones had waxed positively sulfurous, using a great deal of what he called "agricultural metaphor" to describe the journalist and the inquiries he'd been making.

"Has anyone heard what he's been up to?" Mazzare asked. "I asked Gus to look into it, but he hasn't gotten back to me. Fortunately, Joe can't use the radio to file anything—although I'm sure he knows we have one. But Joe's plenty ingenious, so he'll figure out some other way to get his stories across the Alps."

"Set Gus and his sneaky Jesuit tricks onto him," recommended Jones. "Of course, knowing Gus, he'd probably start by laming every horse in Venice."

Mazzare laughed out loud at that. Whatever the reputation of the Society of Jesus for subtlety of approach and cunning casuistry, Father Augustus Heinzerling, SJ, was one of the most direct and straightforward men anyone knew. Gus was about as devious as a charging boar.

"We can't just shut him up, can we?" Stone asked, sounding a little worried.

"No, Tom, we can't." Mazzare said. "I just think we should all be very, very careful about what we say when Joe is around."

"And then some," Jones grunted. "Man's a muckraker. Emphasis on muck."

"Should we give him press releases to distract him, then?" Stone asked.

"Tell him Elvis was spotted rowing a gondola, be about his speed," Jones snarled.

Mazzare snorted. "Leave off, Simon. Two years—more than that, now—is a bit much to be bearing a grudge, even for you. But yes, Tom, I think giving him a prepared statement or two to use would be a good idea. If we can plant ideas in his mind we may influence what investigations he actually goes off on. In fact, if he thinks he's going to get the straight goods from us without having to work for it, he'll go off and annoy someone else."

Jones grinned, and snapped his fingers. "That," he said, "for the Jesuits."

* * *

The next morning, as he returned to the embassy in a gondola in bright sunlight, Frank was in a much more sanguine mood. All was well with the world.

It must have still showed when he reached the embassy. His brothers took one look at him and simultaneously shook their heads.

"Boy, do you look like the cat's meow," Gerry commented.

"Something exciting happen?" asked Ron.

Frank was grinning from ear to ear. "Sure did. Giovanna kissed me. Twice. Once before she went to bed—right in front of her dad! Okay, it was more like a peck on the cheek, but still. And this morning, she kissed me again when I left—and that was a real one, since her dad wasn't watching." The grin was in serious danger of dislocating his jaw.

"That's it?" Gerry demanded. "Nothing else? Then what caused that bruise on your forehead? That's one hell of a hickey."

"You have a dirty mind." Frank thought about it. "Well. There was a spot of trouble with some goofs outside her house. No big deal. Did I tell you she kissed me?"

Part III:
March, 1634

She thanked men,—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift.

Chapter 21

Francisco Nasi looked out of the window at the winter snowscape, savoring the cool air of the window alcove after stifling in the heat of the offices. Growing up in Istanbul, he had come to relish, cherish even, the cool of northern Europe. When, that is, it was not raining. The first year in Grantville had been marvelous, while the air conditioning still worked. Most of it had broken down since, one way or another. Still, the summers had been tolerable.

The winters were still marvelous, though, even here in Magdeburg. Nasi missed the hills around Grantville, but there had been no way to keep that town as the capital of the now greatly expanded United States of Europe. Henceforth, Grantville would be the capital of a province, not a nation. The small United States restricted to Thuringia had not lasted even two years. It had given way—given birth, more accurately—to a much larger nation that encompassed perhaps half of the Germanies. A nation great enough, in fact, to add "of Europe" to its title without causing the slightest snicker anywhere. Many scowls, of course, and more than a few curses; but no snickers.

Magdeburg was the capital of that new nation. And, since Mike Stearns had been appointed as its prime minister by the USE's Emperor Gustav II Adolf, he'd transferred himself and his staff to the city on the Elbe.

It was a brand new city, in everything but its name. Tilly's army had destroyed the old Magdeburg less than three years earlier, massacring most of the population. The people living here now—pouring in every day—were as new to Magdeburg as were the buildings they moved into and labored in. Between becoming the capital of the USE and the industry rising up in and around the city, Magdeburg was now a boom town, with all the completely uncharming characteristics thereof.

Still, Nasi liked the place, at least in the winter. The raw, flamboyantly industrial ugliness of the city was disguised by snow; it even seemed to improve the flatness of the landscape. Nasi had always had to travel to see snow, in his youth. To have it right outside his door could make him forget his dignity. He'd even been known to throw snowballs.

He smirked slightly about that. Rising before dawn—no great feat at this latitude—he had walked to work past a small gang of schoolboys earning pocket money by shoveling entrances clear. Out of the corner of his eye, he had seen one of them bend to prepare a snowball practically behind him, and had turned and let the junior-league bushwhacker have it between the eyes with the snowball he'd had in his pocket. He'd gotten pelted, of course, but it had been worth it for the look on the little rascal's face.

And now he was going to savor another expression. He'd had time to read the morning paper before Mike Stearns came to the office, and Mike was now at his desk taking a moment to look at the day's news. He should be reaching the offending piece about . . .

Now.

"Why, that son of a bitch," Mike murmured. Then, louder: "What an asshole."

Nasi permitted himself a small moment of self-congratulation. He was coming to anticipate the prime minister perfectly—his reaction to some things at least—and certainly his reading speed.

"Francisco?"

"Yes, Michael?" Nasi had also learned some of the American habits of informality. That mode of address, used back in Topkapi, would have earned him a bowstring around the neck and a place of his own at the bottom of the Sea of Marmara.

"Did we send Joe Buckley to Venice?" Mike's tone could have been used to etch steel.

Nasi turned away from the window and smiled. "No, we did not."

Mike rested his elbows on his desk and his head in his hands. "Francisco, are our spy networks up to finding someone in France—a village idiot, maybe, in a remote province—who will actually believe that?"

Nasi pantomimed giving the matter heavy consideration, cupping his chin in his hand and frowning, brow furrowed and eyes narrowed. "No, Prime Minister. Perhaps, did God lend us the service of his every djinn and angel—to use your heathen terms—we might scour Europe and find one such unworldly trusting fool. But certainly not in France."

Mike didn't look up. He just groaned, deeply and theatrically. "What does this do to our own operations in Venice?"

"Surprisingly little, as it happens." Nasi had checked that first thing. The story—more like an editorial—that Buckley had filed on d'Avaux's intrigues in the Venetian state had come as no great surprise. Only a few details differed in Buckley's account from the reports Nasi had gotten himself. Francisco suspected that was due to the journalist making mistakes rather than to any defects in the organization his cousin was running in the Most Serene Republic. Unlike Buckley's, those reports came with sources attributed and with reliability assessments.

"Little?" Stearns was looking up and frowning. "Surely they're about to have the mother of all mole-hunts right about now?"

"Oh, surely they will. The French embassy there has an efficient and effective man in charge of—things." Nasi didn't want to put it more specifically than that. A man handling espionage and counterespionage could have surprisingly wide duties. Especially if his name was Michel Ducos.

"He probably already knew that Buckley was speaking to the servants at the embassy, Michael. It is a standard enough ploy, even if few people do it as effectively as Joe Buckley. The only surprise will have been the publication of the material. As far as we can tell the French were assuming that Buckley was one of our spies—one of the reports they filed even suggested that he wasn't the real Buckley but an impostor."

Stearns chuckled. "Makes a change for them, doesn't it? Decades of journalists who either printed the press release, relied on rumor and hearsay or just flat-out lied. Suddenly they've got a for-real investigative journalist out after them. Ha! Do that French viper some good."

"D'Avaux or Richelieu?"

Mike snorted. "Pair of 'em. Had far too much freedom of action, you ask me. Bit of publicity beyond pamphleteering and state-approved sermons, just what they're short of." He grinned.

Nasi snagged a tablet and a pencil to make a note. "We will encourage—oh." Nasi looked at that grin.

The grin got wider. "Time to stir this particular pot, I think. Get the propaganda guys on it. The line is that we deny all knowledge of Buckley, and while we deeply regret any inconvenience caused, we can't intervene and the appropriate remedy would appear to be a slander action—no, strike that, let's just have some standard ringing declaration for freedom of speech and the press, rule of law, contrast with the despotism of other and by definition lesser nations, France and her tyrannical Hapsburg allies, iron heel of Charles Stuart, et cetera, et cetera."

"But we keep our distance from Buckley?"

"Oh, sure. Maybe warn our folks in Venice to do something if it looks like he's going to get killed. Say, how likely is that?"

"In Venice? Should the Venetian authorities decide he should die, he will die. Quickly, overnight, with no one to see how the thing is done."

Nasi remembered a scene he had witnessed as a boy, visiting Venice. Corpses, hanging with their legs broken, twisting in the light sea air over the Piazza San Marco. They had been hung there overnight, with no witnesses to the deadly and secret work of the Council of Ten. The same day, a mob of Arsenalotti at the Spanish embassy chasing Bedmar out of town. A little later, all of Europe catching light, and the sparks seeming to flare up at home. The mad sultan Mustapha enthroned and deposed three months later, the world gone mad.

He brought himself back to the present, away from the pull of memories of a former home. "So unlike the civilized manner in which these things are done in the City," he said. "The pasha who offends the sultan is ordered to report for execution, and report he does. If he does not, the executioner goes to him, and—" He drew a finger across his throat. "All done out in the open. Honest. Healthy."

Mike nodded solemnly. "Oh, couldn't agree more. Can't be having executions in the dark and on the quiet, oh no. Publicity, that's the ticket."

Neither of them held their faces straight for more than a second or two, breaking out in matching broad smiles. Nasi treasured moments like this, when Mike was not feeling the load so much. The world that Nasi had grown up in had far more idle nobles and underworked functionaries, a wealth of sinecures for hangers-on to occupy and work at in dilettante fashion. It might make for a great deal of waste, but it also made for plenty of leisure time among the governing classes. The sultan, to pick the most obvious example, generally had all his state business over with by lunchtime—and him no early riser, at that—on any given day. It left him with his afternoons to fill with a regular schedule of the arts, literature, science and drinking. Mostly drinking, as it happened.

Mike, meanwhile, was running one of the biggest political units in Europe, by most measures, with a staff that in the empire would be thought barely sufficient to run a small provincial town. Even here in Europe, where they made do with less government—and in Nasi's humble opinion it showed—the running of the United States of Europe was a lean business.

The result was a set of chronically overworked politicians and civil servants. That last was being remedied, slowly, as Amtmänner and their like took retraining in the new style of government and began to take on federal responsibilities in their areas. It was half jury-rigging and hodgepodge, but it did the job and rationalization could wait for the war to end. As could, apparently, any hope of anyone taking a vacation, which was why Nasi tried to make a moment or two, now and then, for the slightly oblique gallows humor he liked and that Mike was getting a taste for.

But Mike was back to scanning the news again. "This one, Francisco," he said, stabbing a finger down a few columns over from the Buckley piece. "Franconia's still not settled down?"

Nasi heaved a weary sigh. That one escaped him, truly it did. Getting any intelligence on the situation in Franconia—and a dozen other places like it—was like trying to read fog, even if he had thought he had a hope of ever understanding the underlying business. It seemed that when they lacked Jews to pick on, Christians would name some of their own "heretic" or "witch" and vent their spleen on them instead.

"No, Mike," he said, "although now they have a regiment or two to worry about and hopefully that will settle them down. Instead of fantastical Hexerei, they can worry about real—and unruly—soldiers and how they will feed them."

The policy was a simple one. It was a while yet before the monstrous size of the army could be made more manageable; simply demobilizing tens of thousands of men at a time was a recipe for disaster. So they were being used as a crude police force, sent to sit on an area that was becoming unruly for reasons unconnected with the government, such as witch-panic, and giving the populace concrete concerns to deal with to take their minds off burning their neighbors.

"Still. Two near-lynchings this week and another riot. We know what that's about, yet?"

Nasi shook his head. "No. I expect the reports shortly. The last time it was the rumor of Jesuits."

Mike grunted. "Figures. Why they can't be like every other place and not give a damn if there's no one breathing down their neck—" He waved a hand, as if to clear away the stink of bigotry. "Part of it's just the way folks who are a gnat's ass away from poverty behave, I suppose, when they get to thinking about it."

Nasi waited. Silence. He raised an eyebrow. "Usually there is more to this particular Stearns rant," he mused.

"I know, I know. This—" Mike stopped, chewing on his lower lip. "Francisco," he said at length, "I am getting sick of this crap." The last word was punctuated with a slam of his big hand, palm down, on the desk.

"It could be worse."

"Sure, it could be worse. They could be sitting there in sullen resentment and boiling up like a frigging abscess. God, I wish they'd march on the capital and burn this place to the ground, it'd make more sense. It ain't gonna happen, though. What burns my ass is that instead of folks actually getting on and making something out of it, or saying they're mad as hell and not gonna take it any more, we get this penny-ante crap whenever there's a hitch. Never because they're pissed at me—although God knows there's plenty are—but over religion or the number of Jews in the town or because some idiot thought he saw a witch or—" He ran out of wind.

Nasi waited.

"This business in Franconia. Not a damned thing to do with witches or Jesuits. It's really happening because the rural places—you look, Francisco, and you find all these riots are in backwater little towns—are losing out to the bigger towns that are getting the factories and industries. Nothing I can do about it, either, except try and sit on 'em to keep the peace. But do they get pissed at me? No, they don't, they mob up and pick a neighbor to lynch."

"There are troubles in the cities, too. There is a new pamphlet, by someone you may recognize, from the style."

There had been a particularly nasty one, entitled Pestis Pontifica, Pestis Judaica. It had started with unpleasant suggestions about Rebecca Stearns and Cardinal Richelieu. Tracing the thing to the printing press was a tall order; in Germany every town, many of them not even big enough to afford so much as a one-fourth share in a horse—and a second-rate horse at that—regarded having its own press as a must-have status symbol.

Dan Frost had taken some persuading to help with the search. Grantville's former chief of police was now in private practice as a police consultant, but he was just as much of a stickler as ever. He'd only agreed on Nasi's promise to leave the printer alone and follow the trail back to the source of the money that had paid for the typesetting and printing. Whatever the pamphleteer was saying, Frost had argued, he was free to say it. Tracking down and suppressing dissenters was against the Constitution.

Dealing with restrictions like that had been Nasi's biggest learning experience as an official of the United States government. He had had a good theoretical understanding of the science of government. It had been, of course, a favored subject of learned writers these two thousand years past. A grasp of the theory and an understanding that came from growing up in a system were, however, completely different things. There was what the Americans called a "learning curve." The system of government Nasi had grown up in might have its rules, laws and established custom, but anything in it could simply be decreed out of the way if it proved inconvenient to a sufficiently powerful official. If the sultan ordered a thing done, the choice was obedience or rebellion. That set the usual political limits, of course. But the system included, required on occasion, that the sultan or one of his pashas should make a firman to cover some unusual situation. Such an order was just that: an order.

The American tradition was very different. The laws covered far more, to begin with. The room for an official to maneuver in was stiflingly small, or so it seemed at first. In practice, the constraints forced one to move in different ways, and exercise other political faculties. In many ways, actually, Nasi had more freedom of action as head of the United States' intelligence service than any Ottoman pasha below the grand vizier had ever had. The ability to make special rules for special cases was gone, though. The Rule of Law, they called it, although when he looked that up it turned out that the technical definition was slightly different from the practical one, which was that everyone had to be treated by the same rules. Bending them was as bad as breaking them and no one wanted to set a precedent that would be hard to live with.

Dan Frost had a particularly hard line on the issue of the unknown pamphleteer. The objections he had raised to the treatment of Freddie Congden had been, in essence, that there was no precedent for what they were doing and he didn't want to set one. They'd made an end-run around the policeman's logic by pointing to his own precedent. He'd bent a few rules in his own time. It had been a logical misadventure that Dan hadn't spotted, and one which Nasi still felt a little guilty about not pointing out at the time.

Still there had been a good solid gain from that operation, and since it was kept very nearly entirely secret, it had not set any kind of precedent. A considerable amount of misinformation had been fed to an assortment of rival powers and great chunks of perfectly accurate scientific and technical knowledge had been spoon-fed them as well. That was knowledge that would do little short-term good and might tie up their better intellects in blue-sky projects. It was also knowledge that they would never have taken, Nasi remained convinced, if they had been freely offered it. The operation had turned a modest profit, too, funding a few of the more outlandishly secret projects Nasi had running.

Mention of that particular pamphlet had put Mike into a brown study to match Nasi's own. "Pamphlets," he said at length, musing on the Pestis. The improbable sexual geometry of his wife and Cardinal Richelieu had been funny, to Mike, in a way Nasi would never have found it. Had it stopped there, it would have been another blowhard political diatribe to laugh off, like the ones that featured woodcuts of Americans eating babies, or "Use of nonnes to triall hell's-armes upon," with engravings of habited sisters being napalmed by leering Americans under the direction of Satan. This one, though, had included lengthy quotations from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the author alleged the witches from the future had brought back in league with Jews of the present time.

That had made Mike go quiet for the longest time Nasi had ever seen. The so-called Protocols must have come from an up-timer, since the text was quoted literally and it had not been created until the nineteenth century. In fact, the final version quoted in the Pestis pamphlet was forged by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, in the 1890s. There was no way to make enquiries as to who had had the thing and brought it back to the seventeenth century. Freddy Congden had certainly denied it, hadn't even heard of it, he claimed. Nasi wasn't sure, but he thought he could believe Congden. He hadn't the imagination to lie convincingly.

After a while, Mike spoke again. "Pestis guy is back? That one?"

"The same. The latest is more temperate, alleging, among the wilder material about Jews and Catholic treachery, only that the mission to Venice is in truth a mission to Rome, to sell the whole of the United States of Europe to the pope."

"How's it being distributed this time?" Mike sounded genuinely curious. The first Pestis pamphlet had enjoyed a day or two of uninterrupted sales, mostly from street vendors who, when questioned, had invariably been given bundles of them to sell by a man they'd met in a tavern. A stranger to them, German or so they thought, of varying descriptions. From the times of appearance of the pamphlets across Germany, there were perhaps four or five different people distributing it.

After the Committees of Correspondence had gotten a look at the thing, sales had dried up quickly. A good threat of a beating backed up with an occasional demonstration—with the promise of broken bones to follow—would discourage even the most avaricious vendor. Of course, the actions of the Committees were thoroughly illegal. But not even Dan Frost had made any serious effort to put a stop to it. Tactically speaking, the author of the pamphlet had made a serious error by including the obscene material about Mike Stearns' wife Rebecca.

Anti-Semitic prejudices or not, a big percentage of the USE's population regarded Rebecca as something in the way of their commoners' princess-of-choice. Even those who didn't tended to get surly when she was attacked personally. In Magdeburg's province, the percentage was well-nigh astronomical. Mike Stearns didn't expect to win a nationwide election running against Wilhelm Wettin, whenever the first regular election was called. But neither he nor Wilhelm nor anyone else doubted for an instant that Rebecca would sweep the senatorial election in Magdeburg province—even if she ran in absentee from Amsterdam. Maybe especially if she ran while still in Amsterdam. Hopefully, of course, the siege would be over before the election, but . . . who knew? The election wasn't even scheduled yet, much less the end of the war.

Still, the Committees weren't everywhere and the Pestis pamphlet had kept turning up from time to time in the smaller towns and the villages. Apparently at random, although Dan Frost reckoned that to be an artifact of the reporting. He thought there was probably an underlying pattern to it that they'd see if they only had reports from everywhere that got the things.

"This time?" Nasi said. "This time, they are trying not to draw the attention of the Committees. The pamphlet contains no slanderous attack on Becky—ha! the cretins!—and they simply leave stacks of the things in tavern privies, under the tables and so forth. Left anonymously in places where they will be found and picked up. They're no longer even trying to use open vendors."

"I'm surprised the Committees aren't hoovering the things up," Mike said.

"When they find them, they are. Usually when the tavern owners bring it to their attention—and quickly, lest suspicion fall on them. Heh. The Committees of Correspondence—especially here in Magdeburg—are, ah, territorial about propaganda."

Mike chuckled. He, too, knew many of the firebrands involved with the Committees. They had no such troubles as the anonymous pamphleteer in getting their message across. They didn't even have to threaten anyone to get vendors to distribute their propaganda in the open. Well, not in Magdeburg, at least, or in Thuringia. It was hard to know what practices they might be following in the smaller towns in such provinces as Pomerania or Mecklenburg.

"What they did not notice," Nasi went on, "is that the author is the same as the author of Pestis. I, however, am certain of it. The style, the word-choices. As good as a fingerprint. Dan Frost's suggestion of examining the letters in their small details allows me to say the two pamphlets come from the same press. We have, though, yet to find that press."

"You're assuming it's in Germany?"

"Yes, I am assuming that. I have to. Loose as our borders are, from the point of view of smugglers printed matter is bulky and hard to transport unseen. Did a foreigner wish to circulate this material among us, he would do better to buy a press within our borders and produce it here."

"Figures," Mike agreed.

"We are trying to trace the type, and the paper. Dan's experience of the police techniques of the future gives us methods that the perpetrators do not, I think, know of. The problem is that there are thousands of presses and hundreds of papermakers in the Germanies. Until we stumble upon something from that particular press which we can trace, we are stymied. The paper is even worse. No two batches are alike, whereas in the twentieth century there was quality control and everything was milled to the same grade. Now? The papermaker probably isn't using the same mix of rags any more. Although we do know something about the shape of his roller."

Mike sat silent for a while. "You think this guy's a threat," he said finally.

Nasi decided he had to approach this carefully. "Mike, no. This fellow, by himself, whoever he is, is not a threat. His pamphlets appear too infrequently and too widely scattered for me to think there is a big organization with him. It's just . . ."

Stearns was ahead of him. "You want to know who's funding this stuff. It's the money that bothers you."

Nasi nodded.

"You're sure it's not just internal, then?" Mike was talking slowly and carefully. Nasi understood his concern. However ebullient Mike had been with Dan Frost over the Congden business, he had himself had misgivings about it. Sometimes, he'd said privately, what looks like a crime is in fact the exercise of a right.

"No, Mike." It was as well to lay the whole thing before him. Nasi had seen Mike's response to faits accompli and it was not pretty. Not that Herr Prime Minister Stearns wasn't above doing it himself, but he regarded it as a tactic for use on opponents, not on one's own side. "I'm sure of nothing at the moment. It takes no great stretch of the imagination to find that there is a group—a small group, I would guess, or they would be more overt—who have done badly, but not too badly, out of the last three years."

"Why not too badly?" Mike asked, and then: "No, forget that. Printers have to be paid. Papermakers, too."

"Just so. Such a group would be smart enough to evade ruin, but not so smart as to see what is taking shape, in these United States of Europe."

Mike flashed a grin, leaned back and stretched. "A mess, Francisco. An unholy, godawful, don't-know-my-ass-from-my-elbow mess."

"Quite." Nasi stepped away from the window to pace a little. "The problem is that such a mess is a novelty to much of our population. The spoliation of armies and the ravages of plague, these things they could take for granted. They have been facts of life for so many for so long."

"Too many, too long," Mike growled.

"But they have had a taste of better, now. This economy is in a boom, if I understood the theoreticians I have read correctly. People are learning—forgive my borrowing a rather foolish metaphor, coined so far as I can determine by someone who had never so much as gotten his feet wet—that a rising tide does not lift all the boats. Something which the first author of that metaphor missed, Mike, but that many people here and now do not, is that the rising tide has surges and eddies that smash boats and drown people."

"Francisco, I know all this, please—"

Nasi gave a slight bow of apology. He knew he had a slight tendency to lecture. "Forgive me. The point I seek to make, Mike, is that it is not those swimming for the wharf or outright drowned that need concern us. Our malcontents are those still in their boats, watching the harbor water come in through sprung planks. They have time enough from bailing to blame you for the light damage to their boat."

"And I am to blame," Mike said, "and don't think I don't know it. Thing is, I don't think it's an inescapable law of nature, like a lot of folks back up-time did. It's the casualties you take to win a battle. Ask Gustavus Adolphus some time. It's not pretty, but it beats losing."

"Nothing, save a battle lost, is half so melancholy as a battle won." Nasi liked that quote.

"You get that from Eddie Cantrell?" Mike asked. The young naval officer, for the time being in Danish captivity, was fond of quoting Wellington.

"Originally, yes. But I first heard it said in what I suspect was its original spirit by Colonel Wood."

"Ah." Mike nodded, suddenly more solemn than angry. Colonel Jesse "Der Adler" Wood had won—helped win; Eddie Cantrell had been maimed and then captured in the same action—the battle of Wismar late in the year before. In that battle, the colonel had lost his star pilot, Hans Richter. Jesse had become a grimmer man, since then.

Nasi let the silence gather a moment. Hans' death had been a dreadful personal loss to many in and around Grantville. Still keenly felt, for all that his death had been the standard around which the new United States had rallied.

"You know," Mike said, "all that—" He gestured to take in the last few months, the mass demonstrations and the flood of volunteers to the new brigades. "—is probably scaring the daylights out of our pamphleteer. Out of a lot of them, actually, but especially this Pestis guy."

Nasi answered that with a grin. "Probably. For it speaks to him of yet more success for the Jewish conspiracy to ruin the honest and spill the blood of Christians."

Mike chuckled. "So we could believe Pestis guy is a native-born asshole. But you suspect—?" Mike raised an eyebrow.

"Mike, I find myself asking who benefits by incitement and sedition."

"Free speech," Mike corrected him.

"Free speech, fine," Nasi allowed, "but directed at provoking criminal activity. And who has a proven record of working with agents provocateurs . . . ?"

"A French term," Mike said. "Richelieu? You think he's funding this?"

"I have no proof. But the telling factor, for me, is how unlikely it is that someone might suffer misfortune enough to provoke this much hatred without becoming bankrupt. Without, even, losing that level of funds required to get several thousand Flugblätter printed and bound. That suggests to me that a better hypothesis is that the disaffected party is getting its funding from somewhere else."

"Stipulated. It still isn't a crime, is it?"

"No. But it may be something that criminals are doing. If they will take money from foreign powers—I do not assume, entirely, that it is France—to print leaflets, they might well take it to do other things."

Mike chewed his lip. "What does Dan think?" Dan Frost had gone from being head of Grantville's tiny police department to being a consultant to a good many town constabularies throughout the United States. Social advances were not just limited to the making of tools, they covered developments in technique as well, as Dan was proving. Like a lot of small-town cops, he had had little time away from the job for formal training and had substituted a slew of subscriptions to professional journals. He was putting the articles to good use, now, reselling copies of them around the USE and, everyone hoped, raising the usually pitiful level of European law enforcement in this day and age. That library of technique had also proved helpful to Nasi, when he had detection problems that conventional seventeenth-century counterespionage was ill equipped to handle.

"Dan agrees that the behavior is suspicious, and merits investigation. If only to rule out the possibility of sabotage or some other, actively criminal, subversion."

Mike nodded, slowly "Fine. Francisco, trust Dan's instincts on this one. I mean no disrespect, but your instincts in these things come from a culture that—no, that's not right, and I'm sorry. You know what you grew up with, and what the United States is all about, and how it's different."

Nasi grinned broadly. It was rare that Mike dropped into such lazy habits of thought, and the effect was amusing, not offensive. Still, that was no reason not to have a little fun.

"True," he said, deadpan. "The sultan would have set his torturers to work, found out who was responsible, and devised some suitably humorous way to put him to death. Run through his own press, most likely, before an appreciative audience of pashas and beys."

Mike gave him an old-fashioned look.

"No, Mike, seriously, I take no offense. I do try to take account of how my upbringing and training and the standards of this brave new world may differ. It was for this reason I consulted with Dan, you know. A good spymaster checks his assumptions."

"Sorry, Francisco. I'm teaching granny to suck eggs again."

Nasi dismissed the apology with a wave. "In truth, the operational details need not detain us. The substance of the report I sought to make this morning was the report from Venice and that this pamphleteer is back at work, both of which you needed to know."

Mike raised his coffee cup. "Cheers, then," he said, and took a gulp. "Damn fine coffee your cousin is getting for us."

Nasi sniffed. "Which you Americans then proceed to ruin. I was served a cup yesterday that I could actually see the bottom of." He sniffed again. "I shall not repeat my opinion of the barbaric pollutants used."

"Be off," Mike said, waving his coffee cup toward the door, "and take your coffee snobbery with you. Some of us like to have a cup of coffee and not take three days to get the use of our taste buds back.

"Anyway," Mike went on in a more sober tone, "I need time to compose myself for my first meeting. Wilhelm's coming in to tell me what he's viewing with alarm this week."

"Exasperating?" Nasi asked, knowing what the answer was. As Wilhelm Wettin—formerly Duke Wilhelm von Saxe-Weimar—grew into his role as the leader of the newly founded Crown Loyalist opposition party, he was giving Mike more and more trouble.

Mike sighed. "Very. The man's got more sense than to be anything other than totally straight with me, all the time, even in private, and it's getting wearing. I was thinking at first that he'd have no experience of this kind of politics, but if he's learning on the job he hides it well."

"And what is he viewing with alarm this week?"

"I don't know yet," Mike said. "He's got the media part down pat, I have to say. I get a long list of grievances, condemnations, views-with-alarm, occasionally—very occasionally!—some point of commendation. And it all appears in the same day's papers. I could do with a press office that good, really I could."

"Do you want to know in advance—" Nasi began.

Mike stopped him. "No, Francisco. In fact: hell, no. Did you read about Watergate?"

"Yes, Mike," Nasi said, recalling his own reaction: that Richard Nixon would have fit right in at the Sublime Porte. "No, what I meant was to suggest that you ask the Crown Loyalists to set the agenda for the meetings. The day before, perhaps, so that you can be ready with the facts at hand to answer questions?"

Mike smiled. "Nice try. That works in Congress, for Prime Minister's Questions, but Wilhelm's too good an operator to give me any advance warning for one of these little chats. Wide-ranging discussion, he'll say. Loyal opposition, not the foreign delegation at a summit, he'll say. And more like it, and he'll look like he means it all. No, he suckered me into having these briefing sessions for the leaders of the opposition parties, and now he's got them he's not going to let me take the teeth out of them for him. So, no agenda." Mike sighed.

"Well, I might hazard a guess as to what is on the agenda you do not have for this morning might be."

"Venice, what else?" Mike said, with more than the merest hint of a groan in his voice. "As it has been these six weeks past. Viewing with alarm the possibility of any extension of the mission in the direction of Rome. Drawing to my attention that our enemies are all among the Catholic powers, our friends among the Protestant ones. Except for England and Denmark, of course, but Wilhelm claims that doesn't count since Charles Stuart is a notorious papist sympathizer and Christian IV an equally notorious drunkard."

Mike sighed again. "I am resolutely not using the phrase 'religious bigot' either here or in public. So far, he hasn't used the words 'Catholic Menace,' either. So I guess we're even—or, at least, still being reasonably civil."

"He needs at least a goodly chunk of the Catholic vote if he hopes to win a nationwide election," Nasi pointed out. Then, shook his head. "But I leave that to you."

"Along with Wilhelm," Mike said, gloomily.

Chapter 22

It was good for Michel Ducos that he was quiet and impassive. The comte d'Avaux could feel a rage boiling in the quiet depths of the man's heart, a rage that would take no more than a word, a gesture, an expression out of place to make good on its threat that he would abandon the pretense of calm reason that he was maintaining. There was something not sane at the core of Ducos' soul, the comte had long known. Of course, the same could be said of any heretic, he supposed; but of Ducos, more than most. He reminded d'Avaux of one of the watchdogs the comte owned on his estate back in France.

It was a dangerous beast, improperly handled. On the other hand, also the best watchdog on the estate—and d'Avaux knew himself for a superb handler, of either dogs or men.

Ducos had delivered the news-sheet without comment beyond a grave, "Seigneur le Comte should read this."

So he had, and having gotten no more than a third of the way down the page he had put the piece of refuse down. Bad enough that this Buckley had outwitted a staff of professional spymasters to penetrate to their more secret counsels, although such was more or less to be expected. There was this much to take comfort in: the encyphered dispatches that only d'Avaux, Ducos and their cypher clerk had seen appeared not to have been relayed to the wretched American.

But to publish! That was the larger half of d'Avaux's upset. There were customs in such matters, hallowed by time so as to be all but law. By his actions, Buckley had put the American delegation in flagrant mockery of that law. D'Avaux wondered, with unwonted grim humor, whether this meant that the Swede's creatures wanted matters in Venice played out à l'outrance? They had certainly spared no pains to provoke such. For what purported to be a communiqué of news the thing had the brutal tone of an incendiary pamphlet.

The Americans had almost certainly acquired that habit in the Germanies. Or, rather, added it like a gloss onto the boorish customs they had brought with them. The Germanies sprouted presses like mushrooms, waxing in the fecal darkness of their Protestant benightedness. The product of those presses was no more wholesome than what they grew in.

But that brought the metaphor of mushrooms to an abrupt halt, since d'Avaux was partial to the delicacies. So, he forced himself back to the matter at hand.

To write, in what purported to be news, in the tone of a demagogue exhorting the mob, was—exactly what he might have done, or at least ordered done, had he thought of it first. The realization drained the unaccustomed rage away, unexpressed now save as mild annoyance.

"Ducos, how did he come by this?"

A brief smile was Ducos' first answer. Then: "Monsieur Buckley fancies himself as a spy. An amateur, only."

D'Avaux cocked an eyebrow.

Ducos nodded. "He fancies himself quite the master of espionage, seigneur. He speaks with servants."

D'Avaux felt his own face twitch into a smile. It was, of course, impossible to keep many secrets from one's servants. Ducos was as good an example as any, and better than most, but below Ducos' exalted level as factotum, the footmen and valets could not help but overhear a great deal. The astute spymaster would cultivate such sorts and their gossip, and it was seldom needful to disburse more than nominal bribes to procure an essential appreciation of one's opponent's counsels and habits of thought. The trick was to sort the wheat from the chaff in the information thus gathered, the genuine intelligence from the idle talk of the lower orders. It did not do to be vexed by this, of course, since those same lower orders were constitutionally incapable of genuine, higher loyalty.

All that mattered was that the most central secrets be kept. And, when he thought further on the matter, d'Avaux realized that not only had Buckley not penetrated any of those, he had no hope of doing so. He pursed his lips, and set to thinking hard; a calm consideration was called for.

He tapped his finger on the offending newspaper where it lay on his desk. Once, twice, thrice. "He has, of course, insulted us."

"Yes, seigneur."

"Ascribed to us base motives. Suggested that all we have said to the doge of our mission is a sham. That we seek to continue the war on neutral ground."

"Yes, seigneur." Ducos impassively awaited instructions.

"Is there a statement yet from the Americans?"

"Not as yet, seigneur."

"I thought not. I shall compose a letter to the doge. Naturally, we are upset at this callous libel, which we regard as damnum iniuria atrox, calling for satisfaction. Naturally, His Most Christian Majesty Louis XIII of France is likewise insulted, and would esteem it a great favor were the Americans proceeded against, or at least expelled from the Most Serene Republic." D'Avaux drew pen and paper toward himself and contemplated the feather of his quill as he flicked it back and forth.

"It is my assessment, seigneur—"

D'Avaux waved him quiet. "No, I know, Ducos. The Venetians have had gold waved under their noses. They would insult God Himself to get it. But they will respect the forms and take the counsel of their fear of our doing them harm at Istanbul. They will at least reprimand the American priest, and repairing the damage will set him back somewhat."

Ducos nodded.

D'Avaux decided to check before dismissing Ducos. "Is there anything further?" he asked.

"Yes, Seigneur le Comte." Ducos produced another paper. "Word is sent us from Istanbul, as it happens. The grand seignor of the Turks is to send an emissary."

"This came from our own embassy there?"

"Yes, seigneur. Our courier believes he got the message here a full day before the official message from the Sublime Porte, which will be for the doge first in any event."

"Good," d'Avaux said. "We are, I believe, much in favor with the Grand Turk lately."

"Seigneur?"

"Well, I suppose there's no reason you shouldn't know," the comte said, putting down his pen for a moment and using his best tone of condescension. Ducos responded well to that; the Huguenot underling treasured the little tidbits d'Avaux handfed him as much as did the savage watchdog on his estate.

"His Eminence has spared no pains in his efforts to confine the Swede in northern Europe. Cardinal Richelieu has had profuse warnings carried to the grand vizier, to the sultan and to the priests of the Mahometans. The Turks much dislike novelty and disorder, you know, and are easily persuaded by news of the Committees of Correspondence that the Swede's new United States is a wholesale fomenter of revolt."

"Which is true," Ducos said, in a rare excursion into commentary.

"Naturally," d'Avaux agreed. "The truth was all it needed. And by representing the League of Ostend as a matter of distracting the Spaniards from the Mediterranean where they compete with the Turk's Algerines, we ingratiate ourselves further with the Turk. It is simple work to advance ourselves in this matter by the most traditional of means, while the rest of Europe is more pressingly engaged elsewhere and trade outside the Mediterranean is disrupted."

"And so the emissary?"

D'Avaux permitted himself another smile; this session was proving quite pleasant after its inauspicious beginning. "The emissary has been sent—you may depend upon it, Ducos—to satisfy the Grand Turk's curiosity about these peculiar Americans and to warn Venice to have no truck with them, on pain of the sultan's displeasure."

"What does the seigneur want done?"

D'Avaux paused, while he composed his thoughts. Ducos was a good servant in this, especially. He stood always ready to do his superior's bidding. "I believe," d'Avaux said at length, "we should see that the Turk's undoubted prejudices are validated in full."

Ducos remained silent and attentive, while the germ of an idea sprouted in d'Avaux's mind. "See that Buckley's attention is diverted toward the Turk. Let us see how they react to perceived insult."

"Yes, Seigneur le Comte."

D'Avaux fixed his man with a steady gaze. "The Turk's response, of course, will most likely be sanguinary."

"Yes, Seigneur le Comte," Ducos said, and withdrew.

When the room was silent and d'Avaux was sure he was alone, he permitted himself a small chuckle, and then a brief prayer of thanks. Sometimes, the secondary causes through which God worked were truly remarkable. The Turk, indeed! How pleasant to use such a tool, atop another like the Huguenot heretic.

It was, of course, a given that the Mahometan religion was of the devil. They were also notorious funders of Protestant arms in the Germanies. The current Grand Turk had a reputation as more of a monster than most. A prodigious brute of uncommon size and strength, he was by repute taking the Turkish state all the firmer in his grip by the simple expedient of terrorizing all who opposed him. Executions by the thousand were reported in some years. Of course, lacking the Law and the Order that it brought with it, such brutal measures were all that would answer the Turk's purposes.

And having to resort to such in his own home land, who would doubt that his emissaries would do otherwise to someone who offended them in Venice?

Did d'Avaux care to wager, he felt, he could do worse than to hazard a small sum that Ducos would not need to act on his instructions at all.

* * *

"Well, that didn't go quite as I expected," Sharon said.

Magda's only response was to stump along toward the gondolas tied up at a pier, muttering a litany of some kind in German. Sharon was catching, perhaps, one word in three. She understood those because they were swear words. It was a wonder that the paintwork on the palazzi they were walking past didn't blister. Even the Marines who had been sent along because they were carrying cash were probably learning some words, and Sharon was mildly worried because their officer was Billy Trumble, who seemed like such a sweet kid under the uniform.

"I wonder what we were doing wrong?" Sharon tried, when the pyroclastic flow had subsided.

"Going to the place of business of an ill-mannered arschloch, that is what we were doing wrong!" Magda snapped. And then: "Oh, please forgive me, Sharon. I should go back and give that, that—" She shuddered. "I should give to him a piece of my mind, that is what I should do."

Sharon tried a smile on for size. "You already did that, honey."

She was rewarded with an answering grin. "Oh, nein. I gave him a talking-to, quite mild for me. I should go back and insult him properly, I think."

Sharon pantomimed horror. "But, Magda, we'd get arrested. He all but died of fright right there on the spot."

That was almost true, she thought. They'd gone into Casa Falier to keep an appointment with one of their senior agents. Maestro Luzzatto had given them a list of brokers who dealt in the goods on their "shopping list," and they had decided that the simplest way to go about it was to visit one of them and ask him. Luzzatto had cheerfully admitted he was not a specialist in the kind of trading they were doing, but would hunt up some friends and acquaintances who could help more directly when they had scouted the lay of the land. After all, most of the stuff on their list he'd never even heard of.

At Tom Stone's request, his wife and Sharon had taken on one of the secondary tasks of the USE mission to Venice, which was to try to fulfill as much of the wish list of chemicals, raw materials and useful items that had been thrown together by the combined efforts of Grantville's and Magdeburg's corps of technologists. A lot of the stuff—certainly the material in the smaller quantities—was needed for research into things that probably weren't going to pay off for years to come. Others were vital strategic supplies. Zinc, for example, which was already being imported from Asia but which few Europeans outside of Grantville recognized as a distinct element.

Magda actually chuckled. "I think we need to make a better plan, Sharon."

"I think we may well, at that. It seems they want us to buy wholesale."

"If we do not want to buy retail, 'with the other peasants,' " Magda muttered.

"Did he really say that?"

"Ja, he did! He muttered it, but I heard him. Filthy manners, that swine."

There was a rumble from the Marines behind them.

"Ma'am?" asked Lieutenant Trumble, "you want we should go back and maybe have a stronger word with the man?"

"Oh, no, Billy," said Sharon hastily. "That won't be necessary. He just doesn't get any more of our business, is all. Bad service, and we tell everyone who wants to hear. Simple." She smiled at him as brightly as she could, having visions of the repercussions of three of the USE's uniformed finest turning up to terrorize a respected Venetian merchant house. Billy Trumble would be for diplomacy what a bull would be for a china shop.

Magda sighed. "We go back to the embassy, then, and plan afresh."

"Well, maybe." Sharon was seized by a sudden wild impulse. "How about we go do a little personal shopping instead? We've got money of our own, after all—and three big strong boys here to carry our purchases. That's a rare opportunity, let me tell you."

"Shopping?" Magda looked intrigued.

"Yeah, shopping. We call it retail therapy. Just the thing after a disappointing experience. One of the finer inventions of the twentieth century."

Magda smiled her agreement. "Shopping!" she said.

Sharon looked back at the Marines. Billy was the only up-timer of the three, and his face was a picture.

* * *

The embassy was quickly settling into a routine of drinks before dinner, which was just getting going when Sharon and Magda got back. The down-time Marines had been introduced to the pleasure of accompanying ladies in a serious retail frenzy; thereby proving, to Sharon's satisfaction, that blank-faced stoical response was hardwired into the male genetic code. Born three hundred years before the invention of the mall, they had developed the stance and the face without even having to think about it. Sharon had been amused, despite herself. And besides, shopping was just plain fun.

They'd gotten back, squared accounts from their own funds, and changed for dinner.

"Any success, ladies?" Father Mazzare asked.

"Not yet, no," Sharon said. "Explored a blind alley this morning, and took the rest of the day just exploring. We're going to get hold of Maestro Luzzatto as soon as we can and work up a real plan of action."

She and Magda hadn't just been shopping, actually. They'd crossed and recrossed the Rialto district as they'd picked up souvenirs, clothes and assorted pretties, and watched deals go down left, right and center. Venice was a town that, however tight margins currently were, lived and died by dealing. When the weather was good, Venetians came out and did it in the street, strolling across the piazza and in taprooms and tavernas everywhere. Wander into the right part of town and you heard everything being bought and sold. They'd even taken a look at the Palazzo Ducale, and walked through the Imbroglio, which had given its name to the kind of insanely complicated political and commercial deals that were put together there.

Eavesdropping had been fruitful. Sharon and Magda had gotten some idea of the kind of trading they wanted to do here, and they were already revising their plan of attack.

Tom was over by the fire, sprawled sideways across an armchair and perusing his notes. Given the volume of requests that had poured in as soon as the embassy arrived in Venice, Stoner had decided to postpone setting up his own laboratory in favor of purely educational work. He was about to start his lectures with a series on the practical problems of scaling lab processes to industrial ones, right here in Venice. He would be going to the university in Padua later, to do the more academic stuff on scientific method and real chemistry. He was absorbed in his material, so much so that he wasn't paying any attention to the room around him.

"I should go reassure my husband," Magda said. "He seems nervous."

"I think you're right," Sharon agreed. "And Magda?"

"Ja?"

"I think we maybe ought to turn out for Tom's lectures, don't you?"

"Well, naturally . . ." Magda said, frowning at the implied suggestion that she hadn't been going to support her man.

"No, that's not what I meant. I mean we should go with our trading hats on. Not every chemist is as unworldly as your Stoner." She smiled to take any possible sting out of the words. To hear Magda tell it, as well as being the most frustrating thing about Stoner, his impracticality was one of the things she loved most about him. "And maybe there's a slice of that action to be had."

Magda, grasping what Sharon was driving at immediately, grinned back. And it was not a friendly grin, either. Sharon realized that there was something deeply predatory about her friend, something that had been aroused to a terrible hunger by the scent of deals in the water.

She suspected that the next few weeks were going to be very interesting indeed. As Magda crossed the room to mop Tom's fevered brow, Sharon began looking around for Luzzatto to make an appointment.

Chapter 23

Singing. Some damned idiot was singing, somewhere in the street below. He'd been at it for some time, too, long enough to wake Buckley up. Joe rolled over and grabbed his watch. No need for the backlight function, it was already full day.

That helped wake him up as well. The fact that he'd gotten a suite of rooms with a nice, big, east-facing window that gave him a view of the Isola di Sant'Elena and its cathedral, and beyond that the Lido and the sea, was all very well. But the sun came up right in the window and the first thing it did in the morning was heat the room up to somewhere near boiling point. The bull's-eye panes in the window didn't help; they focused the sunlight onto the far wall in a strange and eye-watering pattern of rippled light.

Just after midday, he saw from his watch. He could probably have figured that by the position of the sunlight on the wall. Joe lived in a permanent paranoia of his watch breaking. He'd had the good fortune to have a self-winding model, nothing fancy, but it was one of the few timepieces from the old universe that was still working. He'd only been half-joking with himself when he'd thought to mark the position of the sun on the wallpaper at every hour. A couple of times he'd had scares that his watch was about to wind down. He wound it anyway, for the reassurance of having the time right.

He rolled out of bed, and stood swaying for a moment before rooting around for the chamberpot. He hadn't gotten into bed before about four o'clock that morning. He'd stayed light on the sauce, but that didn't mean he felt particularly human this morning. Afternoon, rather.

This was a town that liked to party, and party good and hard at that. Would it be too much, he wondered, to do a tourist guide piece? Venice could certainly use the income, and there were plenty of people in Europe with money who might want to come down here for a week or two.

He coughed, good and hard. Those tavernas could be damned smoky. The prevalence of tobacco in seventeenth-century Europe had come as a surprise to Joe, as it had to most of the up-timers. But where many up-timers had been relieved that their addiction could still be fueled, Joe had quit smoking as soon as the cigarettes ran out. Unlike some others, he'd not been able to bring himself to try what passed for pipe tobacco in this day and age. The stuff was so wretched that just sitting in a tavern was as good as going through a whole pack in an evening.

Buckley opened the window and spat out of it, watching the phlegm drop four floors to the canal. Then he sent the contents of the chamberpot after it, flinging it out so it didn't land on the footpath that ran along the edge of the water. He wasn't supposed to do that, but everybody did anyway.

He was right at the other end of downtown Venice from the embassy, now, up under the roof of a mostly empty tenement block. The rent wasn't bad, as no Venetian really wanted to live this high up if he could afford to be lower down. Besides, after the plague tenants were thin on the ground. The landlord had been almost ecstatic to find a renter.

For his own part, Joe liked it well enough. Someone who'd had the room before him—could have been any time in the last couple of centuries, from the rickety feel of the place—had liked to have plenty of light in the mornings, so they'd enlarged the windows. That kept the rent low, as well, because Joe was quite sure the rooms would be very cold in the winter. But he didn't care; he liked the light himself and planned to be gone by midsummer anyway.

The only real downside to the place was that his guidebook stopped working hereabouts. The map in the back had been drawn in the twentieth century and according to the street plan he was living in what would be, from the nineteenth century onward, a park. Finding the embassy was tough, too—where that stood would be Venice's railway station in three hundred years' time.

Buckley opened the package of laundry that he had picked up yesterday afternoon. That was an odd business. The modern clothes generally came back ruined, other than jeans, but the contemporary stuff usually got through fine. He guessed that was due to the local folks knowing how to deal with what they were used to, and not having a clue with care labels. That said, he'd never had a clue either. He'd gotten used to shapeless pullovers and faded colors in college.

Another change for the better in the seventeenth century: he was dressed better now. Natural curiosity had led him to go find out how they did it before the invention of the Laundromat. It turned out that they took the clothes apart to launder them, and then put them back together, an effort that made him appreciate all the more the pleasant sensation of pulling on clean clothes. Not that he did that as often as he used to. Wearing a shirt once and tossing it in the hamper was a luxury he couldn't afford any more.

What to do with the day, he wondered? He got his little stove going and began to brew breakfast. He'd gotten hold of one of Grantville's supply of primus stoves early on in his travels. He'd read a quote from Casanova's memoirs—a local boy, that one—some years before the Ring of Fire, and been mightily impressed by the old seducer's habit of carrying with him a bag packed with a stove and breakfast fixings wherever he went so he could "break his fast like a gentleman."

Living out of a suitcase in upper-floor garrets, Buckley appreciated it more for the ability to get hot coffee down him first thing in the morning without having to lay a fire he wasn't going to need to keep warm.

Still, as the coffee perked, he had a day to fill and no clear plan for what to do with it. And that idiot was still singing by the canal-side. He wished he'd spat on the caterwauling fool. Or worse. Something about love and the springtime, a folksong of some sort.

That put Buckley in mind of Frank Stone, and he grinned. What a perfect illustration of teenage maleness that was! Off at all hours hanging out with the Marcolis, a family of complete loons, because he was besotted with Giovanna. Okay, sure, the girl herself was gorgeous, but still. And hauling his brothers along with him every time! The three of them were fixtures at the Casa Marcoli these days, helping to spread the word of the coming new world order to the largely indifferent population of Venice.

Although . . .

Now that Joe actually thought about it, there was something a little odd about that picture. The two younger Stone boys weren't even Frank's brothers. They were really step-brothers. And Giovanna was the only Marcoli daughter, so what the hell were they getting out of it? Hanging out with an obvious crank while their brother tried to get into the pants of the crank's daughter?

Odd. Was something else going on out there? Something more exciting than just sitting around and jabbering about politics?

Joe decided he'd find out. If nothing else, he supposed, it would be a way to spend the day. Besides, it was probably time he took a look at the Committee of Correspondence in Venice, even if he was pretty sure it was mostly a joke. He checked his watch again. There was plenty of time to get there for the daily public meeting they tried to get a decent turnout for—and failed miserably, from what Joe had heard.

And the idiot was still singing. He'd reached the end of the song and started again! The way it echoed up from the canal and the buildings opposite made it doubly, trebly annoying. Buckley found himself wishing for some traffic noise, a sound he hadn't heard in nearly three years. Definitely, he decided, time to get out of the house. Even if he got nothing from the Venetian committee, he could mooch about Murano and play tourist.

* * *

A boat over to Murano was easily had, and getting out from among the filthy canals of downtown Venice and into the seabreeze and the salt air of the lagoon did Buckley a world of good.

Murano, even in midafternoon with the sunlight across it, looked like a seedy and disreputable pile. Sure, it had its nice neighborhoods, and the glassblowers had always been one of the better-off classes of Venetians. Not dirt-poor, anyway. But like almost everything in Venice, Murano was looking down-at-the-heels. The smoke from the kilns gave it a positively brooding air.

He got off the boat at the right pier for the neighborhood he wanted. Looking around, his imagination immediately painted a set of tracks along the water's edge with a big sign, saying: You are now entering The Wrong Side. All of the clues were there. Peeling stucco, even more than usual for Venice. Great patches of plaster missing, the brickwork grinning through from underneath like the teeth of bleached skulls. The laundry strung across the streets—alleyways, in any other town—was gray and patched. More rats than in the neighborhoods that could afford catchers. And, above all, a hunched, wary surliness about the inhabitants, such of them as there were.

He was almost immediately accosted by a grimy little kid. Urchin, to the life, he thought. Sighing, he dug in his pocket for a coin before realizing that the kid was holding out a piece of paper. He took it. It was as grimy as the kid was, the print slightly smeared.

He looked back down at the kid. The look of pathetic gratitude and the thick sheaf of handbills still in his hand spoke volumes. Buckley looked around. So did the litter of discarded . . .

He checked the paper in his hand again. Ha! Yes! Committee of Correspondence flyers scattered along the path and floating dejectedly in the water.

"No one interested, kid?" Buckley returned his hand into his pocket for that coin. For some time now he'd been keeping a hefty handful of small change in his pocket for just this sort of occasion. Besides, the poor little brat looked like he could use a meal.

"No, messer," the kid said. "Messer Marcoli, he is a good man, he gives me soup and money to give out the papers, but no one wants them." The tone was mournful and the big, brown, hang-dog eyes positively heartbreaking.

"Something for you, then, kid," Buckley said, handing over the coin.

The eyes started to glisten, the lower lip started to tremble. "Aw, hell, here's another. Take a break, on me."

"No, messer. Messer Marcoli wants to tell everyone about the new world coming, and I want people to come and hear him, so I stay."

"How old are you?" Buckley asked, beginning to see his story taking shape and glad he'd followed this whim. "And what's your name?"

"Eight years, I think, and my name is Benito." Benito sniffed, and added a streak of snot to the grime on his already filthy shirtsleeve.

"Does your mama know you're working for Messer Marcoli? Your papa?"

"Messer, I'm an orphan. Messer Marcoli, he feeds some of us and we help him with his papers, si?"

"How many orphans? I mean, kids like you, helping Messer Marcoli?"

"Maybe ten, fifteen. It's not always the same kids. The messer, he is good to us, yes?" Then, suddenly, suspicion was written all over the little face. "What you want to know about Messer Marcoli for, anyhow?" The kid put the sheaf of flyers behind his back, and it was all Buckley could do to keep his face straight.

"It ain't just agents of the authorities who ask questions, kid," he said. He could understand the concern, though. Venice's secret police apparatus might not bother the likes of little Benito. The Council of Ten had bigger fish to fry. But the mercenary soldiers who served the city as its police force were, from the point of view of kids like him, nothing but a goon squad.

"What are you, then?" The insecure little boy had vanished, replaced with a street-smart, hard-boiled little gangster.

"I'm a reporter, Benito. I find out things and write them in a newspaper, like the papers you've got there only bigger, and we sell them. So people can read about things and know what's going on."

"Can't read," Benito said, defiant. Another sniff, another stripe of snot. "Messer Massimo, he's always at us to learn it."

"It's a good thing, Benito. A very good thing."

Another sniff, this time contemptuous. "What's the use of it, eh?"

Hoo-boy. No sense in trying to explain the value of learning for its own sake, or tell him about the wonderful world of books. Cut to the chase, Buckley. "I get paid money because I can read and write."

Head on one side. "For your newspaper?"

"Catch on fast, don't you? Back in the USE, people pay a few pfennigs for every paper they buy. Those pfennigs mount up, and I get enough money to come all the way to Venice looking for new stories to put in the paper." No sense trying to explain syndication, and freelance fees, and staff writers and stringers just yet.

"Stories? You want to ask old Tomaso, when he's sober. He got all kinds of stories about how he's gonna get rich one day." The kid snickered. "And about the real big fish he nearly caught one time. People buy him drinks to get him to tell that one."

Buckley smiled in spite of himself. "Not that kind of story, Benito. True stories, real stories. About people like you, if you'll tell it to me."

"Me?" Benito's eyes were wide. His mouth was open wider still.

"Sure, kid. I mean, not now, you're a busy man, got a lot to do and all. But maybe we could talk after the Committee meeting?"

"You're going to that?"

"Sure I am. That's the story I'm after today, Benito. How the Committee in Venice is getting on."

"Will I be in your story?" Benito asked, now clearly intrigued by the sight of his approaching fifteen minutes of fame.

"Figure you'll get a mention, sure." Buckley made a mental note to focus on Benito and his friends. A thought occurred to him. "Say, that Messer Massimo you mentioned, is he with the Committee?"

Nod. "He's Messer Marcoli's cousin."

"And he's teaching you kids to read?"

"Some of the guys are trying it, a bit. He gives them cakes if they stay for lessons." Sniff. "Me, I never. Figured it was dumb, a guy like me learning to read. Don't wanna be a priest or nothin'. Anyway," he waved the sheaf of flyers, "I gotta job."

Buckley offered up a silent prayer of thanks to whatever the patron saint of journalists was. This one was going to be real, real easy to write. "Say, Benito, before I let you get back to work, you want to know how to do the thing with the flyers? I had to sell papers myself before they let me write in 'em."

That was a little white lie. Joe had distributed flyers for a nightclub a couple of times for a few extra dollars. But it was better to give the kid the idea he was on a career path, here. Do wonders for his self-confidence, with any luck. "Here, gimme a few."

He read one over, and then demonstrated the technique for Benito. Smile, accost, smile, patter, smile and hand over the flyer. There was a rhythm to it, even.

"See?" he said to Benito, after he'd unloaded a dozen or so. "You have to smile and have a little chat with them. They're more likely to take something from you. Lots of confidence, lots of good cheer. They're more likely to buy something from you, too. Go on, kid, give it a try."

A couple of diffident tries and then Benito got the hang of it, getting maybe half the people he approached to take a flyer. Some still tossed the things aside when they'd read them.

"Thank you, Messer . . ." A frown. "I don't know your name."

"Buckley. Joe Buckley."

"Thank you, Messer Buckley. See you at the Committee!"

Buckley grinned. Before he left Benito, he got directions from the kid, but took his time about going there. He had a couple of hours to kill and the Murano glassworks were, if not fascinating, then at least relatively interesting. Until it dawned on him that the bizarre and brightly colored glassware on sale was exactly the kind of thing his mother had liked to annoy his dad by buying. Joe spent a long time after he realized that, staring into the lagoon, homesick as all hell.

* * *

Evening was drawing near when he entered the neighborhood where the Marcolis—he had trouble thinking of them as the Venetian "Committee of Correspondence," accustomed as he was to the political machine that operated in Magdeburg—held their meetings in a taverna. As he turned down the street where it was, he noticed something brownish nailed to a wall. He looked closer. It was a severed human ear, just starting to turn maggotty. Choking his lunch back down, Joe walked on hurriedly, sticking to the middle of the street and trying not to make eye contact. Talk about your rough neighborhoods!

He knew he was in the right place as soon as he turned a corner and saw some young guys kicking a soccer ball up and down, although with what level of skill he didn't know. That would be the influence of the Stone boys, he thought. Stone had been a "soccer dad," back up-time. The Venetian precursor of the sport wasn't anything Joe wanted to see up close, though. He was sure it would be best described as a gang fight with a ball in there somewhere.

There was a signboard, a rather nicely lettered one, proclaiming a meeting of the Committee of Correspondence somewhere around to the rear of the big building. Buckley wound his way to the back and went in. Inside, once through a short corridor, was a standard type of Venetian taverna. It was more in the way of a big room attached to the kitchens that was primarily used by family and residents rather than being a public establishment as such, although they had it set up at the moment to serve drink at a temporary counter under the windows along the western wall. Despite being open, the one row of windows didn't really allow that much air into the place. Between the poor circulation and the direct sunlight coming through the windows, the place was on the hot and stuffy side.

And this was still March. Buckley didn't want to think how hot the place would get in midsummer. He got himself a jug of wine and sat down to wait for the show to start.

"Hi, Mr. Buckley, doing a story on us?" It was Ron Stone, coming over from somewhere in back.

"Hi, Ron, yeah, I thought I might."

Ron grinned. "Do we get copy approval?"

Buckley grinned back. "What, you're here five minutes and you're head flack already?"

Ron laughed aloud. "Sort of assistant to the head flack, which is Massimo over there." He pointed to a slightly rounded-looking fellow having an animated discussion with a shock-headed older guy. "That's Messer Marcoli he's talking to," Ron went on. "You want an interview, just ask. We can use all the publicity we can get, I figure."

"Happy to oblige. A lot of my readers are Committee types, or at least sympathetic. They'll want to know what's going on. Say, what's the deal with Massimo teaching little kids to read?"

"Yeah, he's a nice guy about that sort of thing. He covers it all up with a lot of guff about advancing national consciousness, raising the awareness of the Italian masses and all, but I think he's basically in it for the goodness. Get a square meal into the little scamps and hope some of the three Rs takes root."

"He having a lot of success?"

"Some. A lot of the kids, the boys especially, think they'll turn into fags if they can read."

"I noticed." Buckley gave Ron a wry grin. "I met one of your Baker Street Irregulars on the way here. Name of Benito. Nice kid, under the dirt. I might have given him a clinching argument about learning to read. Told him I made money writing."

"I can't say I know all their names. But I'll mention him to Massimo, see if we can't follow up on that for you."

"Thanks," Buckley said, and then he saw Ducos. He stood up and called out, "Michel!"

Ducos looked around, face blank, and then he saw Buckley and smiled back. "Joe!" He came over. "You know, Monsieur Buckley, you nearly got me into terrible trouble at the embassy, publishing what you did."

"Eh? What's that?" Marcoli rose and came over, a suspicious note in his voice. "How in trouble, Michel? And who is this?"

"Monsieur Marcoli, permit me to name Monsieur Buckley to you, American journalist. Monsieur Buckley, if Monsieur Stone has not already had the honor, this is Monsieur Marcoli, who is the leader of this Committee of Correspondence."

"You know each other?" said Marcoli, and then, "Jesu! That Buckley? Are you?"

Buckley nodded and Marcoli favored him with an enthusiastic embrace and a flurry of protestations of how honored he was to have Buckley there.

"But what is this talk of trouble?" Marcoli asked at length.

"Monsieur Ducos was kind enough to give me some information for my story about d'Avaux," Buckley said.

Marcoli beamed. "Michel? That was you? You kept that quiet!" And he was off again, this time embracing and congratulating Ducos. Phrases like blow against the oppressor, and struck the serpent with the sword of truth drifted out like flecks of foam from a torrent.

And with that, they were all friends. Marcoli promised Joe a full interview, perhaps the very next day but not today, since they had a private business meeting right after the public meeting.

Buckley saw Gerry Stone with oil up to his elbows emerging from the back room, where apparently he was chief of maintenance on the Committee's printing press. Frank wandered in too, but hardly seemed to notice Joe's presence beyond a murmured: "Oh, hi, Mr. Buckley."

Come to that, the lad hardly seemed to notice his own presence, when Marcoli's daughter was in his line of sight. Which was . . . almost always. Buckley snickered to himself. Teenagers. It was pretty clear that Giovanna herself was very happy with the situation.

Not that anything was "going on," Joe was certain. Frank Stone and Giovanna Marcoli moved around each other like a double star. Constant glances back and forth did for the force of gravity—pretty damn ferocious force, judging by the frequency of the doe-eyed looks they gave each other—but Buckley noted that they almost always maintained a certain distance. The double handful of Marcoli sons and cousins were watching the couple all the time, from what Joe could tell. Not with any hostility, no—in fact, it was obvious they all approved of Frank. But there'd be no hanky-panky here, either, fervent revolutionists or not. Lurking somewhere under the approval was the hint that if their sister might cry—or ought to, even if she didn't—one Frank Stone might bleed.

But that was the only positive note. The meeting started as advertised. A few of the urchins drifted in—Benito among them, Buckley noted. But other than them and the members of Marcoli's extended family, Ducos, the Stones and Buckley himself, the meeting had the traditional audience for such events: three old men and a dog. One of the old men remained fast asleep throughout Marcoli's hour-long speech. So did the dog.

There wasn't even anyone Buckley could peg as the Obvious Cop, who might at least have explained the execrable turnout. Which was a shame, in a way, because while Antonio Marcoli was not rowing with both his oars in the water, he was a damn fine speaker. Buckley got most of it down, and figured he could let the guy revise and extend it later to fill in what he'd missed.

And that was it. A chorus of good-byes and good nights, and almost the entire inner corps—Messers Marcoli and Massimo, Giovanna, three of the boys, Ducos and the Stones—departed. They were going to deal with "routine administrative business," according to Ron Stone.

Fair enough, Buckley thought. He stayed in the main room of the taverna for one last drink before quitting for the evening and returning to his rooms to sit down and write up his notes.

He was halfway down his glass of wine when he realized something didn't make sense. Routine administrative business?

That didn't require three USE visitors or their visiting rep from the Paris Committee. My journo-sense is tingling, Buckley thought.

* * *

One advantage of narrow alleys and no street lighting was that it was comparatively easy to sneak around the back unseen and crouch under a shuttered window.

He listened to what was being discussed. Something about Galileo, was all he caught at first. Then, as his ears adjusted after maybe a minute, he silently reached for tablet and pen.

Dynamite. That patron saint is getting candles for a year. And if I can't find out which saint it is, the way my luck's running tonight, I might as well give up.

Chapter 24

Maestro Luzzatto's office wasn't what Sharon Nichols thought of when she heard the words Expensive Commercial Lawyer. It was more what she thought of when she heard the words broom closet. Actually, given the amount of paper and vellum stuffed into every available nook and cranny and piled atop the desk—albeit in neat, fussy piles—it was still more what the words filing cabinet brought to mind. The office was absolutely tiny, and part of a building shared with about thirty other lawyers. Some of the less well-established ones were crammed two and even three at a time in rooms about this size. With her and Magda and the man Luzzatto had brought them here to meet, the place was stuffed wall to wall with bodies and legal impedimenta.

She would have ascribed it all to ghetto crowding, but she knew this was pretty much what real law offices always looked like, even back in the century she'd come from. She'd dated a law student in college for a few months—whose father had been a lawyer before him—and he'd told her that all law offices had a population-and-paper density that shamed Calcutta. The aim of the game was to pack as many fee-earners as possible into as little rented space as possible. The elegant, book-lined rooms they showed people on TV shows were modeled on the conference rooms reserved for client meetings. The actual working space, he'd told her, usually looked like an explosion in a paper mill followed by a commando raid by the coffee-ring gnomes.

Still, she was sure this level of crowding was extreme. That was, of course, the ghetto effect. The word still gave Sharon a touch of conceptual whiplash, not least because this neighborhood was the original "Ghetto" for which all the others would be named in the centuries to follow. Plus, this was the place where the Jews lived, rather than the black folks. Not that Sharon had any real personal experience herself with the black ghettos of the old United States. She only knew the ghettos of up-time America from stories her father occasionally told, and the few months she'd spent working for him in his clinic.

The Jewish ghetto in Venice wasn't really a poor neighborhood, either, even if the severe crowding could make it look that way at times. The inhabitants might live packed in like sardines, but they did pretty well—although they suffered disproportionately from fires and disease. Venice might not like their company much, but Jews could do business just as well as Christians on the islands of the lagoon; and when it came to making a deal, they made the same deals as everyone else. They even had the advantage—if you were prepared to go looking for a bright side to the seventeenth century's equivalent of Jim Crow laws—of sumptuary regulations which forbade them the extravagant finery of the Venetian upper crust. Maintaining that facade could be extremely expensive, so the Jews probably weren't doing quite as badly as the rest of Venice out of the current lean time.

"Not doing as badly" was a relative term, of course. The ghetto was as down-at-the-heels as most of Venice, and the plague had probably hit it worse than it had the rest of the city. Having met them on the way in and walked them up to his office, Luzzatto had remarked that the place felt empty these days. Hard as it was to imagine, before the plague it had apparently been much more crowded.

Luzzatto sent an office-boy running for coffee and began with introductions. "Signora Nichols, Signora Stone, may I present to you Messer Giuseppe Cavriani, who is the agent in La Serenissima for the Cavriani family." That provoked a round of charmed-to-meet-yous and a rather lengthy one, as Cavriani insisted on rising and bowing. Sharon wondered how he managed it without knocking something over.

Coffee came, presented on quite a nice tray—although the tray itself had to be balanced between two stacks of parchment briefs tied up in bundles with actual by-God red tape. While Luzzatto was fussing over the tiny cups and the Turkish-style coffee pot, Sharon took a good long look at Cavriani.

She knew the name—the family name, at least—even if she'd never met the man. That had been part of the briefing which Ed Piazza had given them, before they left on this mission to Venice. Today, Piazza was the appointed governor of the province of the USE known either as "Thuringia" or "East Virginia." (That depended on who you talked to. No official decision had been made yet regarding the eventual name of the province which had once been a semi-independent nation under Grantville's leadership. In fact, the official government stationery of the province still read "United States.") But before that he'd been the secretary of state of the original small U.S.; and, during that time, he'd been approached by one of the representatives of the Cavriani clan. Ed hadn't gone into the details, for reasons he had declined to give—which, to Sharon, meant diplomatic skullduggery and maneuver. She'd asked her father about it, and he'd told her he was pretty sure the Cavrianis were also agents of the Neapolitan radicals as well as legitimate continental businessmen.

Although he hadn't explained his reasons, Ed Piazza had asked all of them to report to him if they ran across any Cavrianis in Venice. And . . .

Now they had.

Sharon was a bit intrigued to see that a Cavriani in the flesh didn't look at all like the combination of bomb-throwing anarchist and suave Genevan man-of-affairs she would have imagined. If anything, he looked like a younger, shorter version of Father Mazzare. Less gray at the temples, a little fuller in the face, he had the same aquiline profile and deepset eyes. He smiled rather more readily, though, and had an animation that contrasted with Mazzare's habitual cool demeanor.

Luzzatto explained that he wanted them to consult with Messer Cavriani, because although he wasn't Case Vecchie or even a retainer of one, he did have a lot of connections throughout Europe by way of his extended family, which was based in Geneva. After Luzzatto had finished explaining all the things the Cavrianis did, what Sharon gathered was that they were professional middlemen. Luzzatto did not say anything about whatever their political proclivities might be.

Well . . .

Sharon decided she'd go along with Luzzatto's inclinations. He was probably right, she reflected, that using a middleman like Cavriani gave them better prospects than trying to deal directly with the trading houses themselves.

"So, please," said Cavriani after Luzzatto's prologue was done, "tell me what you are trying to achieve on the Rialto. Maestro Luzzatto has given me sight of your list of desiderata, and I have heard a great deal from my cousin at Geneva about how you Americans work."

"Nothing bad, I hope," said Sharon.

"Oh, no, no, no—quite the contrary. Dear Leopold attended your Rudolstadt Colloquy, you know, and heard the argument there."

Leopold Cavriani. Yes, that was the name Ed Piazza had mentioned, Sharon could now remember. She relaxed a bit. If this Cavriani wasn't trying to hide his connection with the other one, he was presumably not up to anything worse than middling-level skullduggery. Of course, in Venice—all of Italy, so far as she could tell—middling-level skullduggery probably put you somewhere on the third or fourth level of Dante's Inferno.

"He was much impressed," Cavriani continued with what seemed to be real enthusiasm, "by the contrast between the manner in which these things are traditionally done in the Germanies and the way in which you Americans approach business. He also had high praise indeed for your Maestro Piazza. A very able and forthright man, according to Leopold."

Sharon nodded, but decided to say nothing. In point of fact, she thought Ed Piazza was a very able and forthright man herself. She also liked him personally. On the other hand, he'd spent most of his adult life as a high school principal. High school had not agreed well with Sharon Nichols. She'd been one of those bright-but-easily-bored kids who had been habitually labeled an "underachiever" in high school and hadn't really come into her own until she reached college. She'd admit it was probably childish, but even after several years of college and almost three years of the seventeenth century, she was still nursing something of a grudge. In her opinion, high school principals were probably assigned somewhere to the fifth or sixth level of the Inferno.

"Now, let us to business!" Cavriani said brightly. "Just how were you proposing to get some of this? Half of it I never heard of, to be honest. And I hear you got short shrift from the Casa Falier a couple of days ago. Yes?"

"We certainly did, and the fellow was very rude!" snapped Magda. "I should like it if we do not use their services at all for this business."

Cavriani rocked a hand back and forth in doubt. "I think maybe you got Messer Petro Falier on a bad day." He snickered. "Not that he has many good days, you understand. He's a sharp customer, that one, although as you say, lacks in the manners department. You aren't the first he's been that way with, and the story surprised no one when it got around that you'd had bruises off him. And, Signora Stone, may I add that all the Rialto heard what you called him to his face, and two-thirds of it agrees with you. But, as I say, he's good and his House is good, too. So, if we need Casa Falier for anything, we try to delay it until we've got you, ah, raised in the profile a little, yes?"

He'd tried out an English phrase on them. "I think you mean, 'until we've raised our profile a little,' " said Sharon. She'd heard some of that about the Rialto. Occasional boulders of English in the stream of Veneziano Italian. She'd decided it was because there were a lot of English merchants in town, handling this end of the Levant trade, and that she was probably missing other imported words from other languages that she didn't recognize. On the other hand, that phrase was straight out of the twentieth century. Had the tendency of visiting Nasis and Abrabanels to pick up MBA-babble started to spread to other communities than the Jewish one? Sharon hoped not.

"Ah, I thank you," said Cavriani. "When we are visibly making deals in this town, there will almost certainly be a brief fashion to be seen trading with your good selves. Brief, but if we work quickly we will be able to do much in that short time to establish ourselves. And if, in that time, such business as you take to Casa Falier is expressly reserved for factors other than Messer Petro Falier, the prestige he will lose . . ." Cavriani's face was the very picture of schadenfreude. "And, of course, just to rub it in, his fellow factors will ask him for advice on the deals they are doing for you, so we will even get the benefit of his experience."

"Will he not simply lead them astray?" Magda asked.

Cavriani's grin turned wry. "Petro? I think not. The man's a notorious pedant. And besides, what price his good name as a trader, for everyone acknowledges that he knows his business, if he publicly gets it wrong?"

"Ah, I see," said Magda, nodding in satisfaction.

Sharon almost giggled. Magda, concurring in a plot to visit humiliation on the pompous, abrasive Messer Petro Falier, looked like she was going native in Venice real fast. "Thanks for that pointer, Messer Cavriani. Now, to our own business, we've spent the time since we arrived going about and getting a feel for the place, and we've revised our ideas about the kind of deals we want to put together. You see, we've got some money that might well amount to down payments on everything on our list, but hearing the traders talk we thought we might be a little more ambitious and perhaps use it as seed money. Also, we've been cultivating the people to whom Signora Stone's husband has been talking, some of the businessmen he's been advising on chemical industry—"

"Ah, the good doctor! Yes, he has been making a stir. For a long time before he came, as well. New dyes, new medicine, some of it coming through Venice, and getting richer by the day, so we hear."

Magda preened. "Also, he has spoken with many artisans and master dyers and apothecaries here in Venice, and we have begun to make deals for the new processes they will be trying."

"We think a lot of them will be ordering things from our list as well," added Sharon.

"Ah. Then perhaps we will want to organize a collegamento and send a ship to some of the places—" began Luzzatto. But Cavriani cut him off in a sing-song voice:

"Oh, you who follow in little boats . . ."

Luzzatto gave him a half-glare. Cavriani waved him down. "Please, please, no offense! I am here to consult, maestro, so let me consult."

Luzzatto held up a hand. "Fine. But—please—keep the crazy schemes to a minimum."

Cavriani harumphed. "He's going to tell you what they call me," he said to Sharon.

" 'Crazy Giuseppe.' "

Cavriani harumphed again, and louder. "Yes, yes. But you'll notice they don't call me 'bankrupt Giuseppe.' Or even 'poor Giuseppe.' "

"Granted," Luzzatto admitted. "But I hear the Christian God has a special providence for the incurably mad."

"Luck is where you go looking for her. And if I choose to go looking for her in places where no one else is looking, who is the crazy one, eh?"

Luzzatto rolled his eyes. "Was I mad myself, to invite him?" To Sharon and Madga: "Ladies, I will allow that Messer Cavriani is very good. But I will advise you to leave him to risk only his own money on the more insane ventures. Yes, he does well, but he's not always so lucky, and it's only the big wins he brings home that keep him ahead."

"Risk, that's the thing." Cavriani turned visibly more serious. "But if the ladies wish to be safe and secure, I can do those kinds of deals as well. To tell the truth, they're the deals we make the money on, to risk on the crazy ventures. And I do come out ahead more often than I come out behind, or I wouldn't still be in business. I wouldn't be the first Cavriani to get put behind a desk somewhere and left in charge of ordering the wherewithal for more capable Cavrianis."

Sharon found herself smiling at the byplay. "Gentlemen, assume that we are prepared to run perhaps a few risks. What do you propose?"

"Ah, now that's proper talk!" Cavriani actually rubbed his hands. Sharon was beginning to realize that beneath the unprepossessing exterior lurked the soul of a ham actor. "First, do I understand that you have the radio between here in Venice and the Baltic?"

Sharon and Magda looked at each other. That was supposed to be a secret. It was Sharon's turn to roll her eyes. Magda just looked pained.

Cavriani went on: "Please, please! It's all in confidence here. I assure you that the Cavrianis have ways of knowing things that are beyond the grasp of the miserable Spanish and French heretics. Not to mention the pitiful Venetians, who are long past their prime." He gave Luzzatto the kind of raised-eyebrow look that Sharon had only seen before in the movies. Bad movies. "The Jews are another story; they will naturally know also. They are an especially clever people. Why else would they have attached themselves to you so readily? So there's no danger there of idle words slipping."

Now he sighed, histrionically. "A pity they are all condemned to everlasting torment, of course. It grieves me to think of my good friend Benjamin Luzzatto, his flesh torn for eternity by hot pincers in the hands of demons— But!" Again, that histrionic sigh, coupled with outstretched hands. "What can you do? These are a stubborn folk as well as a clever one, and insist on denying the Savior."

Throughout, Luzzatto had simply smiled serenely. Sharon had the feeling this was an old game between the two of them. She also had the feeling that Cavriani wasn't lying at all when he referred to Benjamin as "his good friend." For reasons she couldn't begin to explain, she was starting to like Cavriani. Whether that was because of the ham acting or despite it, she wasn't sure.

For the moment, though, she decided there was no point in trying to deny the existence of the radio. She'd tell Father Mazzare about it afterward, of course. But whatever damage was done—if any—was already done.

Sharon nodded. "Yes, we have a radio here. We can reach as far as Grantville, most evenings. Sometimes as far as Magdeburg. Through relays, as far as Luebeck and Wismar with no more than a day's delay."

"And Hamburg?" Cavriani asked. He was all business now. "Hamburg is, ah, very important."

Sharon thought about it. They got only condensed news reports, down here, of the progress of the war. But with spring coming, nobody had any doubt at all that the League of Ostend was going to try to finally capture Luebeck and Amsterdam. Nor that, if they failed, Gustav Adolf's counterattack would roll over a good chunk of northwestern Germany, in the middle of which—right smack in the middle—sat the still-neutral city of Hamburg.

She shrugged. "Impossible to say, at the moment. But even using couriers, I'd think no more than a few days' delay. Why? What are you thinking of, messer Cavriani?" She had a feeling she knew what was coming.

"Well, if we had advance news of cargoes, ahead of anyone else . . ." Cavriani grinned, looking more sharklike by the second. "You might find that you could make some very good trades in futures."

"And get yourself hanged!" Luzzatto snapped. "Some of those cargoes will be underwritten with state bonds. Insider trading"—again, an English term—"is illegal where state bonds are concerned. And the penalty is death."

"But the ladies have diplomatic immunity—" Cavriani began.

"You don't!" Luzzatto said forcefully. "More to the point, I don't—and I won't even be able to get away from it the way you might, with enough money. A Jew on the run in Italy is as good as a dead man."

"Who'll know?" Cavriani said, brightly. "Besides, we can just make discreet enquiries and make sure we don't play a trade on anything with state bonds riding on it."

Luzzatto seemed to relax. Apparently, Cavriani's willingness to avoid anything that involved state bonds—whatever those were, exactly—was enough to mollify the agent. Sharon had been in Venice long enough to understand how the city worked, that way. Crossing the Council of Ten was a desperate business. Whereas simply crossing commercial rivals, while it had its own dangers, was more or less taken for granted.

Sharon was impressed with Cavriani already. As far as she could tell, no one so far had thought of that as a way of making money out of radio. No need to tell Cavriani that, through relays, they had radio all the way to the embassy in London—overlooking the main commercial port, at that—and in Amsterdam as well.

"Would this enhance our working capital?" Madga asked. "Maybe we could use this to generate quick cash flow?" From the tone of her voice, Magda was starting to get into the excitement of the scheme. She smelled money in the air. And for all that Magda was happily married to a hippie, she'd been brought up the daughter of a hardnosed German merchant.

"Oh, certainly," said Cavriani, leaning forward. "Now, Signora Stone, here's what we do to begin with."

Sharon demoted herself to note taker for what followed. It seemed Magda had found a kindred spirit in Cavriani. About halfway through, just as the German hausfrau and the Venetian wheeler-dealer were concocting a scheme that would, if Sharon followed it right, involve them selling futures to themselves in a cargo they'd never actually need or want and which would never come within five hundred miles of Venice, she stole a look at Luzzatto who had become almost invisible in his own office.

His shrug and upturned eyes spoke volumes. But so did the sly smile on his face.

Sharon wondered about that. Mostly, though, she wondered at herself. Unlike Magda, Sharon had been brought up in the household of a doctor. To be sure, her father had always provided well for his family. But he could have provided even better if he'd been willing to forego his ghetto practice for more lucrative work. He hadn't, because money had never been the principal motive in the life of James Nichols.

Nor was it in the life of his daughter. So why, now, did she too feel that growing, almost feral, excitement?

The answer came to her on the very heels of the question. She rose quietly from her chair and moved as far off as she could in the tiny room, staring blankly at a wall. At first, just to fight down the spike of sheer pain. There were times, even after all these months, when she wondered if the hole ripped in her soul by Hans' death would ever heal.

Maybe not. But, if it did . . .

Quiet fury came to flush aside the anguish. If it did, Sharon knew, it would be a fine clean anger that managed the trick. Only if she struck her own blows at the world that had led her beloved to fly his plane into an enemy warship, would she find surcease from sorrow and acceptance of his passing. She understood that now.

She smiled at the wall. She would do it in her own way, of course. Hans had been flamboyantly heroic, which Sharon would never be. Had no desire to be, really. Still, there were many ways to strike a blow at that cold, callous aristocracy that ruled all of Europe and most of the world beyond.

One of them was money. A predatorial, ruthless willingness to use every advantage to cut the bastards where they lived.

Oh, yes, money was where they lived—their pretensions about "blood" notwithstanding. A bankrupt nobleman was just another beggar, after all. Sharon thought the aristocracy of Europe and their factors and financiers—as many of them as she could manage, anyway—would look splendid lined up alongside the roadway. All of them with signs around their neck.

Will act haughty and superior for food.

The image made her laugh aloud. Smiling, she returned to her seat and took up her notepad and pen.

"So let's get rich," she murmured. "Stinking, filthy rich."

* * *

When they returned to the embassy, the doorman handed Sharon a note. It was written on fine paper and sealed with wax. The only thing written on the outside was her name, in handwriting she recognized immediately.

"Another one, signora," the doorman said with a small, half-apologetic smile. This has gotten to be something of a joke between them.

"What's this, now?" Sharon snorted. "The twelfth? Thirteenth? I'll say this for the man. Whatever else he is, he's a stubborn bastard."

Madga came up to look at the note over her shoulder. "Feelthy Sanchez again! What is wrong with that man? By now, even an old lecher should understand the situation."

Sharon shook her head. She'd never opened and read any of them after the first two. Not that what Sanchez had written had been anything other than respectful. Simply polite requests to allow him the privilege of accompanying her to some public event or other. Perhaps the opera? Whatever the signora desired.

She started to hand the note back to the doorman to be disposed of as all the others. But, then, a new thought brought on by the day's work came to her and she drew it back. On impulse, she broke the seal and read the note.

As she expected, it was another request to accompany her to a public event. She was a bit surprised, though, to see that Sanchez had added a few self-deprecating lines allowing as how he could only hope she might deign to read what he'd written. It was rather droll, actually.

So. Witty Sanchez as well as Feelthy Sanchez. Hmm . . .

"You can't seriously be considering to agree!" Magda hissed.

Sharon tapped the note against her chin. "Well . . . maybe. You know, Magda, it occurs to me that we should have paid more attention to Ed Piazza's briefings. One thing I do remember, though, is that he stressed that any contacts we could make with the Spanish Netherlands would be exceedingly valuable. And if what I've picked up here and there is accurate, there seem to be some doubts—fuzziness, anyway—as to exactly who holds Sanchez and his paymaster Bedmar's leash. The king of Spain—or his younger brother the cardinal-infante?"

She reopened the note and studied it. "Be interesting to find out, don't you think?"

Magda still looked dubious. Very dubious.

Sharon couldn't help grinning. She and Madga had gotten to be pretty close friends, all these months they'd spent together as the only two women on the mission since leaving the U.S. late the previous autumn. But, now and then, she was reminded of their very different life experience. Madga had no experience with the freewheeling American custom of dating.

Sharon did. Quite a bit. She'd be the first to agree she was hardly what you'd call a beauty queen. But her features were attractive enough and she had the kind of full-bodied figure that plenty of men were drawn to.

Um. Drooled over, some of them.

She patted Madga reassuringly on the shoulder. "Relax, girl. I've got no intention of sleeping with the old goat. But how hard can it be fending him off, at his age? Especially if he's got a sense of humor? Someday I'll tell you about a basketball player I went out with once. Him, I had to threaten with a kitchen knife."

Again, she felt that spike of anguish. Briefer this time, fortunately, and not so painful. She hadn't had to fend off Hans Richter, for all that he'd made his interest in her crystal clear. In that, as in everything, he'd been transparent and . . . sweet, was the only word.

She pinched her eyes, for a moment. When she took the fingers away, her vision was a bit blurry.

"Still," said Madga. "I think you should get advice from someone. Perhaps . . ."

She glanced up the staircase which led to the ambassador's suite. Then, simultaneously, she and Sharon burst into laughter.

"Oh, right!" choked Sharon. "I can see it already. 'Father Mazzare, please guide me through the proper maneuvers involved in keeping an old Spanish lecher out of my pants while I try to finagle information out of him.' Yup. I bet he'd be a fountain of wisdom on the subject."

Madga shook her head, still chuckling. "Still. You should ask someone."

The answer, also, came to them simultaneously.

"Cavriani!"

"The very man!"

Chapter 25

"It's like negotiating with a committee, Larry," said Jones as they mounted the stairs to the reception room of the embassy, which they used as their main center of operations.

"In a sense, we are," Mazzare said. Then, thinking about it: "No, we are negotiating with a committee of the Council of Venice. The Grand Council is Doge Erizzo's compromise between all the factions he has to please."

They reached the top of the stairs, where one of the maids was waiting to take their coats. Mazzare was never quite able to keep them straight, except for Frank Stone's would-be enamorata Giovanna—impossible to forget her, and not simply because she was the prettiest!—although he thought this one was Maria.

"That's what I meant, Larry," said Jones. "Thank you, Maria."

Mazzare handed over his own coat, thanking the maid as he did so. Then he turned to Jones. "I know. It's frustrating, thoroughly frustrating, having to listen to twenty senators say more or less the same thing in seventeen or so subtly different ways."

"Well, except for—" Jones said, reaching for the doorknob.

"Yes, Simon," Mazzare said as Jones opened the door, "and I think we can lay that before the principal offender, ah—right now."

"Buckley!" Jones called out, seeing the young journalist across the room sharing a bottle of wine with the civil engineer Ernst Mauer. "You idiot!"

"What?" Buckley looked around in surprise.

Jones strode across the room, playing the agreed-upon role of Bad Preacher to the hilt. Mazzare ambled after him, taking his time so that the Good Preacher could go in after the preparatory barrage. He stopped halfway to collect a glass of wine from—he guessed—Raffaela.

Jones was in full pulpit fire-and-brimstone form and giving it his Methodist best. Buckley was, to his credit, not flinching, but getting a word in edgewise was proving beyond him. Mazzare decided to let him roast a few minutes longer as Jones enumerated his various defects of character, intelligence and consideration for his fellow-man.

The rest of the room was gawking. Ernst was edging discreetly out of the splash-zone and Sharon, who seemed to be dressed up to go somewhere for the evening, had gone from open mouthed amazement to badly concealed amusement.

He decided it was time, and sauntered over. "Joe," he said, "Why?"

"Reverend," he said, "I have a right—"

Mazzare held up a hand. "I know. Back in the USE, freedom of the press is written into the Constitution. Here, there are—differences. You can have all the rights you want, but—"

"The silly bastard—" Jones began.

Mazzare stopped Jones with a look, as much to control his laughter at the sight of Buckley flinching when Jones swore as anything else. It still shocked people when it came from a pastor.

"Reverend Jones is annoyed, Joe, because we both just got chewed on, politely, by the doge of Venice for permitting one of our servants to slander another ambassador."

"Servant?" Buckley grew a little flushed. "I'm not—" Then, he dried up, apparently having started after all this time to think about how things looked.

Mazzare smiled while Jones glared. "Joe, almost no one believes that. The French embassy is seething right now. Because, as far as they're concerned, we just pissed"—another cringe from Buckley—"all over every canon of diplomatic protocol."

Buckley was now visibly bewildered.

Jones' voice was fit to pronounce curses in. "Sure, we're all polite. You idiot. We're all good friends with the greatest of respect for one another. We're all reasonable men, diplomatic-like. And one thing we do not do, idiot, is carry on our private fights on the territory of our generous, benevolent and above all neutral host. This includes, dumbass, publishing—across a third of Europe, yet, and how a pissant muckraker like you got syndicated beats me—a full indictment of what one of our fellow-diplomats is doing."

"It's also dangerous for you, Joe." Mazzare gestured at one of the windows. "That's not Magdeburg out there, much less Grantville."

"Safety's not something I lose sleep over," Buckley said breezily. "Father, look, I'm sorry if I've caused you a problem, but—"

Mazzare frowned, realizing what was coming next. "Joe, I think you should think hard about that. 'Just doing my job,' when you get down to it, is only a hair away from 'just following orders.' "

"Now hold on, Father! My job is to get important information to the people who matter, which is all of them."

"And the hell with the consequences?"

Buckley wasn't going to back down. "Well, not all of them. It's just that most of them are worse than shutting up."

"Point," Mazzare admitted. He notched his estimation of the journalist up a point or two. Joe had been caught in the Ring of Fire when he turned out for Rita Stearns' wedding. He'd been a friend of Rita and Sharon's at college, a graduate student in journalism, and he'd found himself in at the birth of modern journalism. The first newspapers of a recognizably modern type had been in print for perhaps twenty years, with pamphlets and broadsides before that. Nowadays, the Imperial Post service carried news dispatches around Europe to feed hungry presses.

Like everything else, news reporting had developed an arsenal of tricks and techniques over three and a half centuries, and Buckley was equipped with a beginner's arsenal of them. So when he'd discovered that there was work for him in this time, he'd gone at it with enthusiasm. Dedication, even.

Mazzare had read some of his stuff. Buckley would never have won a Pulitzer Prize. On the other hand, by seventeenth-century standards he was polished, crisp, informative, original and readable. Whether he was popular for his originality or whether the twentieth-century style would catch on remained to be seen, of course.

"Look," Joe said, "I moved out of the building next door a while ago." He hesitated just an instant, then: "I did that precisely to put some distance between you and me, so nobody would think we were connected politically. I live all the way across Venice now."

That was a fib, Mazzare thought. He was quite sure that Joe had moved simply because he discovered he couldn't afford the rent in this rather ritzy part of Venice. Buckley's argument was silly anyway, since the reporter spent perhaps half his nights taking advantage of the hospitality at the USE embassy. Not that Mazzare begrudged him the free food and drink. He had his own memories of life on a tight budget.

Mazzare wondered how Buckley had managed to stay so fundamentally naive after almost three years of the seventeenth century, and especially after all the digging he seemed to have done in Venice. Beneath the patina of a tough street-wise news reporter was a young man who still really thought it was all something of an exciting game.

"Joe," he said gently, hoping Buckley wouldn't take it as condescension, "the fact that you don't live nearby anymore means exactly nothing to the people you need to worry about. These are people who routinely scheme and maneuver on a continental scale. Please—be careful. Try to be at least a little discreet. Powerful people in these times can have you killed or jailed, and they will get away with it. Or you'll find yourself having to fight a duel, or getting sued or something."

Buckley's grin was pure joie de vivre. "But, Father," he said, "I'm young and popular. That makes me invulnerable!" After a moment, he went on, "Seriously, though, I do watch my back. The thing is, there's a lot of journalists out there, and the powerful tend to ignore us. They think that they're taking the long view that a lot of yapping nuisances—"

"Good phrase, that," Mazzare put in, in a sudden spirit of pure mischief.

Buckley snorted his amusement, acknowledging the hit, and went on. "They think that sooner or later everything blows over. But it doesn't, of course. Woodward and Bernstein are a long ways off yet, but there's already a lot of light being shone on the doings of the muckity-mucks."

"Some of it's less than honest, though," Mazzare said. "I know they've already invented the press release. What's that piece of slang? 'Tear off and print'?"

Buckley smiled ruefully. "I know, I know. Laziness wins nine times out of ten. But the principle is there."

"Still. Be careful."

"I will, Father, don't worry. Both ways before stepping into the, uh, canal."

Mazzare chuckled. Anyone who fell into one of Venice's canals had more pressing problems, even assuming he could swim, than being run over by an oncoming boat. There was all manner of ordure and filth in them; the ebb and flow of the lagoon as the Adriatic's gentle, almost nonexistent tides washed back and forth cleaned them a little, but there was still the unmistakable whiff of eau de sewer down close to the water.

"Anyway," Buckley said, draining his glass, "I should get going. It's a long way home for me these days." He rose and left hurriedly.

* * *

Jones came back over, now with a drink in his hand. "He's really a pretty nice guy, underneath that damn Woodward and Bernstein act," he admitted. "Not that I'll say it to his face."

"Yes. Although lacking a little in forethought."

"Who wasn't, at his age?" There was rather more charity in Jones' tone than Mazzare had been expecting. "Think I registered my displeasure strongly enough?"

Mazzare laughed outright. "I think he's as chastened as we've any right to expect."

"Whatever." Jones handed over a slip of paper adorned with the seal of the Most Serene Republic. "While you were having your little heart to heart, this came."

It was a note from the doge, inviting Mazzare to a reception at the Ducal Palace for the Turkish delegation which had arrived in the city recently.

Oh, wonderful. Just what we needed. The Ottomans added to the mix!

Mazzare decided he needed some expert and informed advice. He turned, to pick out Benjamin across the room, where the lawyer was going over some kind of paperwork with Magda and Sharon.

"Benjamin? Can you spare a moment? No, better, we'll come over."

As Mazzare and Jones went over to the table they were using, Mazzare asked, "Where's Tom, by the way?"

"Gone to Padua for the week, lecturing," Jones said. "It's just up the river, about twenty miles. A day's boat ride, or a little less, and a bit less back."

The arrived at the table. The paperwork spread across it did indeed look excruciatingly commercial. "So while Tom's away you're handling the chemicals-buying business," Mazzare said to Benjamin and the ladies.

"Sure are," Sharon said. "The going got tough, so the tough went shopping."

"We do well, I think," Magda said, evidently satisfied with how it all seemed to be stacking up, although unlike Sharon she seemed to be settled in for the long haul with the mound of contracts and balance sheets. "Much now awaits my husband's signature."

"Oh, yes," said Benjamin. "We have a number of advantages. Being in—ah, more rapid than usual contact has let us buy some excellent futures in the Baltic trade."

Mazzare sighed. That was a euphemism for "radio contact," of course. Yet another problem! Sharon had told him of the disturbing ease with which the Cavrianis had penetrated the security surrounding the USE's use of radio, which Mazzare had passed along to Nasi in Magdeburg. They could only hope that the Cavrianis would keep it to themselves and that the League of Ostend hadn't figured it out as well.

"Trade is still going on?" Jones asked. "Surely the war—?"

"Nope," Sharon said. "Remember: we're in the seventeenth century, not the twentieth. Wars are the business of princes, got nothing to do with merchants except being another factor in the equation. Trade carries on right through. Prices are way up, is all, and we get killer margins on anything we know got out of the Baltic safely. Killer margins. You wouldn't believe it."

"Oh," said Jones. "But don't we just buy stuff from the Baltic direct? Why are we getting it through Venice?"

"Oh, we are not," Magda said. "But while we are here with the radio to get information, we can make good trades, which means more money to buy the things we need and which we must get through Venice."

Something besides Ottoman politics began to nag at the back of Mazzare's mind. Trading—?

"Hold on," he said. "Isn't that a bit unfair? Insider trading, or some such?"

Sharon flashed a rare smile; she was usually a solemn woman, these days. This smile, though, was purely predatory. "It's not illegal here, Father."

"Except for trades in state bonds," Benjamin put in firmly.

"Sure, sure," said Sharon, "but we didn't buy any of those, and besides, in this town they respect you for sharp deals and stacking the deck."

Mazzare decided he had enough other things to worry about. "Well, if Benjamin says it's legal, and no one's going to be sore at us over it, fine. Just don't get anyone else annoyed at us, please. Mr. Buckley—"

"We heard," Sharon said, smiling.

Jones looked downright smug. The strip he'd torn off Buckley had been country-wide.

After Mazzare showed him the note from the doge, Benjamin nodded. "I will make enquiries. Although I think you might do better to inquire of Don Francisco. Any intelligence from the City will reach him directly, and he has the advantage of knowing most of the principals personally."

Mazzare chided himself, briefly, for the relief he felt at dumping the problem of the Turks in someone else's lap. He'd still have to act here on the ground, after all. He nodded agreement to Benjamin. "You're right about that last, Benjamin. The radio's going to be busy tonight, I fear."

He took the invitation back from Benjamin. "Now," he said, "about this reception. Magda?"

"Yes, Monsignor?" she said.

"Will your husband be back from Padua by the day after tomorrow?"

"No, Monsignor, unless we send for him."

"Invite didn't mention him, Larry," Jones pointed out.

"You're right, Simon, of course. They knew he was out of town for the moment. Wouldn't want to embarrass us, or inconvenience the professors at Padua." Mazzare tapped the invitation onto his palm once, twice, three times. "Can't be helped," he said. "Sharon, can I prevail on you to come back to your attaché role tomorrow morning, and get with Gus to organize our turnout?"

"Sure."

Sharon's elaborate costume finally registered on him. "Sharon? Are you going out, tonight?"

"To the opera," she said cheerfully, rising to her feet. "With Feelthy Sanchez. In fact, he should be here any moment. Ta-ta."

Waving a casual hand, she breezed through the door. Mazzare stared after her for perhaps half a minute.

"Oh," he said.

Chapter 26

Castel Gandolfo, Mazarini decided, would be a beautiful place when it was finished. The villa was perfectly sited, the gardens perfectly laid out, and the prospects magnificent. The gardens themselves were fit to walk in, and His Holiness was wont to do so when he was at his new summer retreat.

Mazarini was not a man to be awed by authority, but there was nevertheless something nerve-wracking about being invited to go for a walk in the pontiff's own rus in urbe, particularly in such august company. Not, he reflected, that there was much urbe around for this to be rus in—Castel Gandolfo was well away from the stern and stony majesty of Rome. He quelled the thought. His Holiness Pope Urban VIII had confined himself to inconsequentialities thus far in the day, but there was certain to be a shift in the conversation at any moment. It was perhaps ordinary for the pope to summon his nephew the cardinal Barberini into his presence. Not an everyday occurrence to bring the father-general of the Society of Jesus into his counsel, but certainly nothing to remark upon. What was unusual was to invite a junior legate to his summer retreat to discuss business, without at any time mentioning what that business might be. France? Grantville? Venice? Mazarini admonished himself. Patience, or your nerve will betray you.

"Young man," Urban said, rising from a minute inspection of something green that was growing by the path. "How much do you know of the keeping of gardens?"

"Almost nothing, Your Holiness," Mazarini said, his mental thread snapping.

"Then I shall explain something I have learned in gardens, Monsignor. Look here—" Urban pointed into the foliage. "There is an insect, if you look closely."

Mazarini bent low. Sure enough, there was something like a grasshopper, big and ugly, though. A cicada, perhaps? "I see him, Your Holiness."

"Some years ago, I essayed a short monograph on the subject of natural philosophy. Part of a small debate I had with a man more famous in that field."

"Ah, I understand, Your Holiness. I had the pleasure of reading that same monograph. Most interesting, and insightful, if I may say so." Mazarini couldn't see where this was leading, and uttered the compliment to cover his confusion. Surely the business with Galileo, however it shook out, was a matter for the Holy Office and, insofar as the pope took part, a matter of political wrangling between His Holiness and the Spanish party? Galileo's patronage made him a target for Spain, and his writing made him a target for accusations of heresy. Mazarini's own concerns were all with the troubles in northern Europe, how did this connect?

"I misdoubt you do, Monsignor," Urban chided him gently. He was nobody's idea of a young man, well into his sixties, but with the wiry frame of an old man who was active. The cares of office had used him reasonably well, but he still gave the impression of greater age than his sixty-six years would account for. Add to that the white soutane of his office and there was a real force to his admonishment. For a moment, Mazarini felt himself back at school. "You wonder, perhaps, why I have digressed on the subject of Galileo Galilei?"

Mazarini nodded. "Yes, Your Holiness," he said, remembering his manners enough to speak. The first meeting between himself and the pontiff, the day before, had been one of excruciatingly correct etiquette and protocol, and therefore easy. To be informal with the head of the church was hard. How far to go, what to leave out of the full panoply of formal address?

"Please, be at ease. I approach this matter in a roundabout way because I wish to have you in my confidence. I wrote, when Galileo was first coming to trouble the counsels of the Church, of the understanding of a cicada, the ability of a naturalist to understand it, and the ability of a cicada itself to understand its world. You understand how we are as insects in our understanding before God, yes?"

"His folly is as the wisdom of the wisest men, Your Holiness," Mazarini quoted, almost certain he had mangled the Scripture.

"Yes, yes, most apropos, my young monsignor," Urban beamed widely. "And I in my turn, learned myself and surrounded by the learned all eager to advise me as best they may, am as nothing before the wisdom of God, would you agree?"

"Your Holiness is most modest." Mazarini was unsure where this was leading at all. Could it be that the pope was going to ask him what to do about a question of dogma?

"Not modest at all, Mazarini. Or should I say Mazarin?" Urban's tone was quiet, now, and in Mazarini's ears the soft breeze and the singing of birds became as thunderous gales and wild screeching.

He stood, straight and barely able to control his shaking. How much of this was genuine intelligence from Paris, and how much from reading of future history? Was he here to be accused of disloyalty, in person, by the pope? He looked across to Vitelleschi, the emaciated and closed-faced head of the Jesuits, and saw no clue. Cardinal Barberini's face was serene and pudgy as ever, and no more than mildly intrigued. "Your Holiness," he said when he felt certain of his voice, "I am aware of the future that might have been, and indeed His Eminence the cardinal-protector of France has—"

Urban waved it aside. His smile remained absent, his eyes a little narrowed like a schoolmaster about to chastise. "I know, Monsignor. I know. The important point for me is the welfare of the Church, not the jostles and stratagems of those seeking authority within it. I pray God that the results of such are guided by the Holy Spirit, but I know enough of my own poor dealings to be cynical about these things. No, I am not concerned that you might take yourself to the party of France in the fullness of time. I also saw in those histories, if it is permissible to call them that, that you retained your loyalty to the Barberini throughout, and sheltered my people at some political cost to yourself after my own play was done."

Mazarini relaxed. Either this was a side issue leading to something else, or there was nothing he could do to escape what was about to pass.

Urban went on. "I have a greater concern than that other Urban did, do I not?"

Mazarini decided to forego subtlety and nuance. "Which greater concern does Your Holiness refer to?" There were, after all, several possibilities.

"In particular, the United States of Europe, Monsignor. A terrible problem, and if this priest from our future has the right of it, a great and terrible opportunity. For both good and ill, depending on the choices I must make."

Mazarini remained silent, waiting for the pope to go on. Vitelleschi moved closer. The man they called the Black Pope had walked a few paces behind, listening intently. In a garden glorious with noonday sun, he created for himself a metaphorical shadow to remain in, behind the scenes. Mazarini tried to imagine what went on behind that blade-thin face, and failed utterly.

"If I might interject, Your Holiness?" Vitelleschi asked. When Urban nodded he went on: "There is a simple point about these United States that many, if not all, have missed outside these counsels, Monsignor. And that is the complete abandonment of cuius regio, eius religio."

Mazarini murmured assent. That was, if anything, the most radical element of what the up-timers had brought. The principle that the ruler decided the religion of his people had been a given in the politics of Europe since shortly after Luther, and was yet another means for princes and prelates to justify their armed robberies under color of just war.

"This principle of freedom of religion, Monsignor," Vitelleschi continued, "bids us reconsider our attitudes to the recatholicization of the Germanies. The Swede can no longer expel the Society, for we have freedom of our own religion there. The Swede can no longer mandate to his people that they shall not hear us, nor be converted. This much the Society shall do of its own initiative. We will win converts for Christ. His Holiness has had other possibilities drawn to his attention as well."

"Indeed," Urban said, "and I am grateful to my brother in Christ for his summation and for the most wise counsel he has offered me. For your own part, Monsignor Mazarini, would you regard this Padre Mazzare as trustworthy? Reliable? A worthy priest?"

"Ah, to what end, Your Holiness?"

Urban's expression turned wintry, a sharp contrast to the sunlight. "To the end of all our service to God, Monsignor. I seek an assessment of the character of the man."

"I beg forgiveness of Your Holiness. I thought to shape my answer to Your Holiness' political needs." Mazarini thought furiously. The pope could not possibly be neglecting his duties as monarch of the Church, or could he? Mazarini dismissed that thought from his mind. There was really nothing for it but to simply tell the truth as he saw it.

"Perhaps if I recount for Your Holiness all of my direct experiences of him? I think this will give you the same material on which I form my assessment of the man Mazzare. I think very highly of him, as it happens."

"Then tell me all, Monsignor," Urban said, smiling a little again. "Tell me all."

Mazarini told the whole story, beginning from his first news of Grantville, brought in with the intelligence reports to Avignon. He had written to Grantville's parish priest, seeking a way in to what looked like being the new politics of the Germanies. Why he had foreseen that, he did not know. It had just seemed so obvious at the time. He had sent the letter with Heinzerling, at the time his assistant and aide de camp, and the opening of communications in that way, coupled with Mazarini's attempts to lever himself into a peacemaker's role, had attracted the ire of Richelieu. Mazarini had had to cool his heels in Rome until the autumn of 1632, when he had traveled, quietly and without fuss, to Grantville to meet Father Mazzare.

He had not gone without foreknowledge. Forbidden to pass any message to Mazzare or anyone in Grantville, Mazarini had sent Heinzerling with no message at all, but required to report back. Vitelleschi nodded a quiet appreciation for a neat piece of casuistry as Mazarini recounted that. Mazarini had eventually gone to Grantville lacking anything better to do. He had seen Grantville at both its best and worst: hard-pressed and in fear of its life, fighting desperately for survival, and also triumphant, haggling the terms of a new ascendancy.

Just so had he seen Grantville's parish priest. At once the harried and overworked small-town pastor, nervous over events which he did not control. And then, after the battle, concerned to see that the right thing was done by a woman who had died, by all accounts, the most obnoxious of his parishioners.

"A true shepherd, then?" Urban remarked, when Mazarini came to a halt in his tale. There was an intrigued expression on the pope's face, an expression that spoke of a renewal of interest.

"Yes, Your Holiness," said Mazarini, suddenly deflating. He realized that as they had walked he had grown animated, had poured much of his own agitation over the business of Grantville into his words.

"Perhaps indecisive," said Vitelleschi, from where he walked behind Mazarini and the Pope.

Mazarini realized that even in his customary terseness, Vitelleschi was saying more than the usually garrulous Barberini, and it was all Mazarini could do not to grin when he realized that Cardinal Antonio Barberini the Younger was somewhat overawed by his uncle's presence, and was being seen and not heard, like a good boy.

"How say you, Monsignor?" asked Urban, after mulling this over for a moment. "Is the priest from the future indecisive?"

"Any appearance to that effect," Mazarini said, realizing that he had at last relaxed in the presence of these two great men and recovered his facility for smoothness, "derives, if I may make so bold with the father-general, from Padre Mazzare's habit of taking as much time as he can to think before acting. I have seen him, in the thick of difficulty and danger, act with decision and dispatch. If the father-general and Your Holiness will recall, he passed only a few hours in thought—perhaps as little as an hour, although I cannot say when the thought first came in to his mind—before deciding to send those first books to Your Holiness through my humble self. I think if there is pressure of time, or great passion working on the man, he will act decisively."

A few more paces, now in silence.

"If Your Holiness . . ." Mazarini trailed off, letting the silence be his request for permission.

The pope nodded his consent.

"If Your Holiness will vouchsafe his intent for Padre Mazzare, perhaps I might make my humble opinion better tailored to the fit of Your Holiness' ideas?"

"Will he make a worthy advocate before an Inquisition?" The question was put with disarming simplicity.

"Your Holiness?" Again, the pope had caught him off guard.

"I am minded to direct that he plead Galileo's case. After all, if it can be proven that Nature gives the lie to our interpretation of Scripture, we must change our interpretation. There is Scripture, Nature, and the theology of men. The creation of men cannot be allowed to gainsay the creation of God, after all, and such revisions to the Church's teaching have happened before and will doubtless happen again. And if this new learning that Grantville brings will spare the Church the embarrassment of causing to be abjured what later is proven true, then—" Urban waved a hand, a hand that sketched all manner of pleasing possibilities in the air.

Barberini spoke for the first time. "Scheiner and Grassi may yet complain."

Vitelleschi answered him. "Scheiner and Grassi are priests of the Society. They will obey." In such tones a man might declare that the sun would rise in the east.

Mazarini had thought about Mazzare as the others spoke, and remembered hearing the American priest speak at Irene Flannery's funeral. A final homily for a woman who had hated everyone, and yet he had spoke eloquently and perfectly for the time.

"Your Holiness," he said, "It is a duty which I believe that Padre Mazzare will discharge well, given time to prepare."

"That he shall have. It will be some time before Galileo stands his formal trial. Time enough for Father Mazzare to come to Rome."

"By your leave, then, Your Holiness," Mazarini said, "I shall depart as soon as may be for Venice. Padre Mazzare is there now, and I can give him warning of your summons."

"Go with God's blessing, Monsignor."

Chapter 27

Cardinal Antonio Barberini watched Mazarini's retreating back for a while. The man had made his excuses—travel to organize, packing to supervise—and set off as if his boots were afire. It was a mark of the man that under the soutane were a cavalier's breeches and boots, a holdover from his younger days. Days, Barberini reflected with a wry smile, when Mazarini had been his own age. Antonio was still shy of his twenty-sixth birthday, and owed his rapid rise in the church entirely to family influence.

Behind him, his uncle was speaking to Vitelleschi. "Muzio, reassure me that this will achieve more than I sacrifice."

"Your Holiness." Vitelleschi acknowledged the command, and paused. At length. "I have repeated several times in advising Your Holiness that it is the doctrine that must be our grounding. I confess alarm at the prospect of further reforms so soon after the Council of Trent, but we cannot ignore what seems so clearly to be messages from our future brethren in Christ."

"And the truth of those messages?" Cardinal Barberini was more of a skeptic about this than either of the two older men. He would cheerfully admit he was no natural philosopher—was not any kind of philosopher or theologian, come to it—but he did make a point of patronizing those who were advancing the arts, letters and sciences. Leave aside the essential implausibility of the story—"Ring of Fire," indeed!—and it resolved to this: that the Americans had more and better devices and engines and weapons than anyone else.

One could either believe that a secret coterie of geniuses had gotten ahead of the rest of the world in artifice and invention, and sprung like a deus ex machina onto the stage of the Germanies with their marvels fully formed, or that they had been hurled back in time three hundred years from an age when such things were commonplace. Perhaps the older generation, unused to seeing what modern natural philosophy could do, might see something miraculous and wonderful in the American engines and weapons. But Antonio Barberini had seen demonstrations of all manner of newly discovered principles and the only feeling they stirred was envy that elsewhere there were better—scientists, to use the new word—than he had been able to attract to his own salon. Yet.

By itself, that was no problem. After all, the watchword of natural philosophy was what worked. Galileo had seen to that, with his trials and experiments. What matter the outlandish story the inventor told, if his invention actually worked? Who cared that he was changing fashion throughout Rome, or was the creator of a string of scandals?

Yet the older generation were looking at the wonders Grantville had released as a token of the truth of their claim to be from the future. And when something that necessarily did not admit of proof—such as religious doctrine, or political theory—was being expounded, the speaker's truthfulness in one sphere was often taken as a measure of his honesty in another.

Both of the older men were looking at him now. "Your Holiness, Father-General, it may be that the Americans can prove Galileo's claims. I for one would welcome it, frankly. The discussions at the Inquisition grow tiresome, and privately the astronomers are saying that Galileo's claims are helpful, even if he cannot prove them. But that logically says nothing about the truth of their other claims."

"It does furnish me with a good excuse, though, Antonio." His Holiness Urban VIII had developed a twinkle that was literally as well as figuratively avuncular.

Barberini seethed inside. These two had concocted something between them, decided on something, and were now mocking him! Or as much mockery as the constitutionally humorless Vitelleschi was capable. "Does the pope require an excuse in matters of faith?" he asked, knowing they probably had an answer already.

"Certainly," Urban said. "If the pope was not visibly commanded by God to reverse himself, what price infallibility?"

"Which is no more than a tradition!" Barberini snapped, regretting it immediately. "Your Holiness, I most humbly apologize for my tone."

"And so you should," Urban said. "But as to infallibility being a tradition, yes, it is. And a most valuable tradition it is, for without it there is no last authority on the Church's teaching and thus no certainty."

"And so we need an excuse to proceed from what is certainly wrong to what is probably right?" Barberini smiled to show he jested.

"Indeed."

"And there is more," Vitelleschi said. "We will have some chance to see the American priest in a sore trial of his wit and learning. A man may lie well and convincingly at his leisure. Under pressure even the most glib will err."

Understanding dawned on Barberini then. "The Galileo affair is not the real trial?"

"Not the real trial," Vitelleschi said.

"Then what is? Your Holiness?"

"That I do not know. I pray for guidance, Antonio. Your elder brother believes there is much to be gained by proceeding down this path, word-for-word and as fast as possible. He is more of an enthusiast than you for the new learning in every sphere of life. San Onofrio, my brother and your uncle, believes that we should place this material from Grantville in some musty corner of his library at the Lateran. Then, admit of its existence to only a few of our more trusted theologians and let the ideas out slowly and with great caution, if at all, and beginning only when we have seen the new politics established for perhaps a century, so as to be certain this has in some sense God's blessing upon it."

Barberini could barely keep himself from laughing aloud at that last. "He thinks that God has ordained a trial by combat in the Germanies?"

"Not really." Urban's smile was a little wistful. "He and I are less than an hour apart in age, but very different in some ways. He has always been the more studious of us, and I think he fears these things for which there is not ancient authority. May God bless him, he has not been well of late, and some of the things he has to say on these subjects are not entirely lucid."

"He grows unwell?" Barberini crossed himself, offered a silent prayer for his other uncle.

"Not so bad that he cannot get about. He grows . . . testy." Urban sighed. "I would that I could grow so testy as well. I prayed God to spare me this, such turmoil. And yet I see no way out of engaging with this new learning. This—basta!"

Both Barberini and Vitelleschi moved closer to the pope, whose face was now drawn and lined. "Are you unwell, uncle?" Barberini asked.

Vitelleschi's mask had cracked, for a moment, and was then back in place. "Shall I have a physician attend Your Holiness?"

"No, no," Urban said. "I am well enough, in body. It is in the spirit I ache, in the spirit. At once an opportunity and a challenge. I am reminded of that English saint, Thomas à Becket."

Neither of the other two priests spoke. Barberini, for his own part, could not place the Saint Thomas that his uncle was referring to.

Urban went on. "He was commanded by his king to overlook some matter of the church's interest, and refused. I misdoubt that that king's penitence after the fact made the swords of his knights hurt any the less."

"I can assure Your Holiness that there is no sign of any current plot—" Vitelleschi began, almost hotly. Whatever the efficiencies of the Holy Office in Rome, the Society of Jesus had its own fearsomely effective apparatus of informers and spies, and had indeed been first on the trail of the last, albeit comical, plot to murder the pope.

Urban waved him aside. "No, no, I do not doubt you or your eyes, Muzio. I know for a fact that there will be such a plot, however."

"Your Holiness has decided—?" Vitelleschi's voice had a note of doubt in it.

"Not in any formal sense, no." The pope's face had turned brooding. "But in my heart I see that there is a way to step ahead of the errors and missteps of the next centuries. I pray every hour for the courage to take that way. For, more importantly, the wisdom to see the path that leads on that way."

"Ah," said Vitelleschi, and fell silent.

"I do not understand," said Barberini after a moment trying to follow. "What way?"

Urban smiled. "My dear, dearly beloved nephew, have you read those papers that the American priest sent?"

"Some of them, yes, but . . ."

"But you are no theologian, or at least no more than you need to be a priest on those occasions when you discharge that small part of your office?"

Barberini felt himself blush. Holiness and piety were no great part of his character and in the august presence of his uncle there was no way to hide that fact. He said nothing.

"Ah, Antonio," Urban said, "even if there is no truth in the picture that the American priest paints for us of that future, there is a terrible plausibility and such a great weight of learning. In itself, this speaks to its truth, does it not? How well might one man fabricate such a thing, with all its inconsistencies and blank spots? A liar would try harder to dress up the rough parts, plaster over the cracks."

"You believe the Americans' accounts of future history?"

"With caution," Vitelleschi murmured.

Urban nodded. "In some regards they may be being selective with the information they release, the father-general tells us. It is what he would do in their place, for in the father-general's eyes the only word that should be passed freely is the Gospel, is that not so, Muzio?"

Vitelleschi nodded.

"But there have been too many unplanned releases, I think. The book that caused such trouble in England, for example, and the Congden Library, which may be under control in Grantville now—" Urban paused to let Vitelleschi speak.

"The change in the information coming out of Congden argues for it. It is no longer the original printed books, but manuscript copy. Who knows what is added by the copyist?"

Urban chuckled. "Muzio, I take counsel of your caution. But it remains"—he grew serious again—"that I have either an opportunity or a sure route to disaster and it lies in a Protestant nation."

"You seek to ally the Church with the Swede?" It was the only Protestant nation Urban could mean, and Barberini could hardly refrain from blurting out his amazement.

"Ah, there is the beauty of it, Nephew," said Urban. "There is no establishment of religion in the United States of Europe. I cannot be their ally, can I? If nothing else, meeting the priest whom their prime minister trusts enough to appoint as an ambassador will give me some clue, some hint about how to harness their strength to the betterment of the Church."

"And what is that?" Barberini asked.

"I do not know, Antonio," said Urban, and turned away to look at his new-growing garden. "I do not know."

The pope spent some time studying a moving insect. "I only know that I had never imagined it would come to this, in the long decades of my life. That, in my old age, God would place me before that same choice he gave Becket. What thoughts move through His unknowable mind, that He would choose two such worldly men for such a test?"

When he had been silent for a quarter hour or more, both Barberini and Vitelleschi left, in different directions.

Chapter 28

Ducos coughed discreetly at the door. D'Avaux nodded, once, permitting the man entry. At least Ducos remembered that Seigneur le Comte deserved a modicum of dignity and took pains to respect it. D'Avaux, feeling guilt at indulging a passion so strong as hatred, darted his glance across the desk to the pile of papers on the corner. All of the reports on Buckley, and by him. He forced calm upon his troubled soul. To grow irrational through the righteous anger of wounded honor would simply not do.

"Seigneur le Comte," Ducos said, after the silence had grown uncomfortable, and bowed.

D'Avaux collected himself. Yes, he had grown distracted and omitted the proper protocol. Permissible between familiars, but with even so exalted a servant as Ducos—not unpardonable, but nevertheless noblesse oblige required otherwise. "Ducos, if it please you, do you have something to report?"

"Several matters, master," Ducos said. His face hardly moved as he spoke, but there seemed to be a faint smile in every syllable his voice spoke. The smile of a cat sauntering away from a mousehole licking his chops. D'Avaux pulled his desk lamp closer—the hour was late, midnight close at hand—and turned to face his man. A crook of the eyebrow invited him to proceed.

"As to the American Buckley, I have arranged matters. Seigneur le Comte's proposal that the Turks be involved or implicated proved impractical, and I have therefore suborned a member of the Holy Office's retinue to the deed."

D'Avaux felt a thrill of shock. "Ducos, I gave orders for no such . . ." He trailed off. "No," he said when he had collected himself again, "first give me the remainder of your report."

"Yes, seigneur. The Turk delegation declines to speak of Buckley. They are well disciplined and bring all their own slaves, so it is very difficult to make any progress with them. Had they a long-established presence in Venice there would be known avenues of approach, but this mission is ad hoc and improvisation has availed nothing in the time I have had. The short time since they arrive also means that Buckley has had no time to give plausible offense. I can do nothing to place any Turk even near the scene of the deed, or Buckley plausibly in the company of any Turk."

D'Avaux leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. "Pray continue, Ducos. How did you proceed from there to the Holy Office?" This was beginning to sound intriguing, particularly as Ducos had had to improvise, a practice foreign to his nature. To both their natures, if it came to it. The unexpected was not an experience d'Avaux relished.

"Seigneur." Ducos made a little bow before going on. "I proceeded with ordinary matters after my rebuff early in the day with the Turks. I had news, perhaps some small moments earlier than the seigneur did, of the latest developments in the business of the astronomer Galileo, when I paid a visit to my contacts with the Holy Office."

D'Avaux began to wonder where this was going. The business with Galileo was a slightly vexing one, to be certain. Few people of education regarded the matter as anything too serious; perhaps the interpretation of Scripture required to be looked at afresh, as the Lyncaeans suggested, or perhaps the astronomers were chasing proverbial moonbeams as well as the real thing. D'Avaux considered himself a man of parts, but there seemed to be a new advance in natural philosophy every year—this Galileo responsible for a fair fraction himself—and just keeping up with his own country's advances in the mathematics was hard enough. Although . . .

D'Avaux had heard, he now remembered, that this affair with Galileo was apparently something of a notoriety in the history books brought by the Americans through the Ring of Fire. Those wretched, miserable history books that had caused so much unexpectedness in d'Avaux's well-ordered life. Cardinal Richelieu could say what he wanted. In private, the comte was quite certain the Ring of Fire was of diabolic origin.

He blinked once, twice, suddenly aware he was wandering away from the point. "He is to be tried, yes?"

"He is to be tried. This will come as something of a relief to the Holy Office, I understand, which will be pleased to stop paying bounties on copies of Galileo's book." There was a hairline smile on Ducos' face. "There are some enterprising souls in Venice who, when they heard there was a bounty on each copy, began printing cheap and shoddy copies and turning them in by the box-full."

D'Avaux frowned back. "I should think such a mockery was hardly a laughing matter, Ducos." To a pious man like d'Avaux, the situation was all the more aggravating in that the Venetian authorities were obviously complicit in the matter. Tacitly, at least. Such a clandestine printing press was quite illegal in Venice, and the Council of Ten's agents were perfectly capable of closing it down had they chosen to do so. Just another instance in which the Venetians were subtly thumbing their noses at the Church and its institutions.

Ducos' face straightened immediately. "Seigneur, my apologies. I simply have regard for an audacious scheme, while at once condemning the motivation for it."

D'Avaux felt his own face cracking. "And the fact that the Holy Office is made the butt of this joke is of no account, eh?"

Ducos nodded acknowledgement. There were subjects troubling even for his icy demeanor—the Holy Office had hardly been needed for his Huguenot coreligionists in France. It was only understandable that Ducos should find jokes at the expense of organs of Mother Church to be entertaining. But it would not do to let him laugh out loud without reminding him he was, when all was said and done, a heretic.

"Seigneur," was all he said. Though his face seemed tighter than ever.

"And how will Galileo's trial assist?" d'Avaux asked, after granting Ducos a moment to compose himself.

"It had been said that the pope would surely instruct the Holy Office that there was to be no revision of scriptural interpretation, seigneur. It was further said that there was no prospect of Galileo's book remaining lawful to possess anywhere in Italy, and there had been some suggestion that Galileo might be prevailed upon to flee to the Swede's territories. To that end, he had been kept under close watch while his ill health prevented him from traveling to Rome."

"And you have reason to doubt this?" D'Avaux was intrigued.

"Until today, seigneur, no. However, there is a factor that is the talk of the lower ranks of the Holy Office here, and that is Mazarini."

"The legate?"

"The same. He has been to and from Venice and Rome repeatedly while the Americans have been here, and it is now emerging that the American priest, Mazzare, has been in communication with Rome. He is commanded to Rome to speak at the trial of Galileo, seigneur."

"I confess I cannot see why." D'Avaux spent a moment turning it over in his mind. "What is the pope thinking? The American is neither inquisitor nor natural philosopher, and he has no name as a doctor of theology."

"It is thought that all these Americans have a great command of natural philosophy, seigneur. It is reported to me—with what accuracy I cannot at present judge—that Mazarini impressed this upon either the Holy Office or the pope himself. For this reason they seek this American priest as amicus curiae or some such." Ducos made a small, dismissing wave of the hand. "I confess I know little of the proper procedure in such matters, and this may be entirely normal."

"It is not, as it happens," d'Avaux said, musingly. "It is not at all. I cannot see that even the See of Rome will lightly prevail upon a priest's vows of obedience to call him away from a secular mission imposed by his prince—even if, in this case, the prince involved calls himself a 'prime minister.' There must be more to it."

However, this troubling issue was not a matter to be discussed with a heretic like Ducos, d'Avaux reminded himself. He crooked a finger to invite Ducos to continue. "But we digress. You were explaining why the Holy Office will kill Buckley."

"Seigneur. Buckley has publicized the scheme with the Galileo books. Every town with a printing press can print copies of the book for a sum less than the bounty offered, and so—"

"A profit margin, yes. And I see the humor in it, Ducos." There was a trace of frost in his voice. "Up to a point."

"The seigneur is most kind. I understand that there was an argument some weeks ago whether a bounty was to be paid on copies that had been bound with the ink still wet. Many pages were apparently blurred and unreadable. The concluding argument was that if the Inquisition wished to announce that the book was now acceptable in the booksellers of Venice, the pious citizens would cease buying up the copies and turning them in. Since there is as yet no firm order banning the book, the Inquisition is in a tricky position carrying out its orders to suppress the thing."

D'Avaux was impressed. Even for Ducos, that had been deadpan. "Do go on."

"Yes, seigneur. Buckley has published a further piece roundly denouncing the folly of the scheme and encouraging others to use the printing press to break the Inquisition. He has even coined a phrase: 'Information wants to be at liberty.' It is beginning to be passed as a slogan, seigneur."

" 'Information wants to be at liberty.' " D'Avaux turned the idea over and over in his mind. "What a remarkable proposition. Is he some manner of pagan, then, believing that mere thoughts and words have their own animating spirit that might express such a desire?"

"Most droll, seigneur. It is nevertheless a slogan that people may act upon. The Holy Office is most concerned." Ducos reported it flatly, in the tones of one remarking that the weather continued fair, rather than the tones of one suggesting that the feared Inquisition was growing vexed with someone.

"And yet it is not heresy, which surely makes it not the concern of the Holy Office?" D'Avaux found the argument of the avocatus diaboli surprisingly easy to formulate. "Is it not the case that absent palpable heresy, there is value in freedom of speech? Many advance this argument."

"None among the Holy Office, seigneur. And Buckley advances the argument in support of suspected heresy. They grow concerned and turn to stratagems to silence Buckley."

"And you have provided them with one?"

"Indeed, seigneur. And in the same stroke I believe we will also prevent any closer contact forming between the Swede and Rome."

"Between the arch-Protestant of northern Europe and His Holiness? Surely there was no great danger of that?"

"There is according to the Inquisition, seigneur. They fear that His Holiness will undertake to co-opt the Catholic presence in the United States of Europe to press further reforms in the Church. There is talk of correspondence already passing between Rome and Magdeburg."

"Ah, so those rumors have reached Venice, have they?"

"Seigneur?" Ducos inclined his head a little. It was rare that d'Avaux's factotum was caught by surprise.

"A briefing at the highest level . . ." No sense in naming His Eminence. "I am given to understand that Mazarini made a number of trips to Grantville shortly after its appearance, and proceeded from his last trip there straight to Rome. It is also reported that the priest was moved to send a great deal of material to the Vatican, although we have been unable to discover precisely what. It centers on what the Americans claim is the future development of the Church, that much we do know. Doubtless the Holy Office is suitably concerned, since many of them in Italy are creatures of Spain, or at least under their direction."

Ducos nodded. "They certainly wish Buckley to be silent, for the moment."

D'Avaux smiled. "Well, if it assists in saving the Church from American heresy at the very highest level, I see no good reason why they should not be suitably obliged. See to it, Ducos."

"As the Seigneur le Comte directs." Ducos acknowledged the order with a bow. "There is further intelligence," he went on. "I am informed that the Venetian Committee of Correspondence, such as it is, has some notion of taking further action over Galileo."

"Further than printing copies of his book? How significant could they be, here in Venice?"

"The seigneur is most perspicacious. Indeed, they are said to be a rather pathetic grouping. Not much more than one malcontent and his family. My assessment is that even with the aid of the youths with the American party they will proceed no further than making tedious speeches to each other in draughty rooms. But my informer tells me they are at least talking about a scheme to rescue Galileo from his impending trial."

"Are they, now?" d'Avaux mused. "You say some American youths are involved with them? Is there not then an opportunity to further divide the Vatican from the Americans?"

"As I observed to the seigneur, there is perhaps little prospect of these particular radicals taking any effective action. They are regarded as something of a joke by virtually every organ of the Venetian state and by the Holy Office."

"And yet more unlikely groups have delivered themselves of great coups in the past, have they not?" D'Avaux stroked his beard, thinking furiously. "Are we certain that there are Americans with them?"

"Yes, seigneur. The three sons of Doctor Stone. They have attended several meetings." Ducos was firm on this point.

"Perhaps they might be impressed with the desire to proceed further?" D'Avaux could hardly hope for a result like that, although Ducos' resourcefulness had surprised him before. "Perhaps a new member with some spirit and drive, a spark of, dare I say, competence?"

"If the seigneur gives leave, I might serve as such an agent provocateur, yes." The idea seemed to amuse the cold factotum, as much as anything did. "I regret I have no operative in Venice who would pass as a genuine adherent, not on such short notice."

"So be it, then. Except I think that perhaps we might press them to go further than simply attempting to spirit Galileo away. The first objection to any such accusation would be that the Americans had sent an advocate to the trial and would hardly cheat themselves of victory. I feel sure that so radical and dangerous a group must be plotting some greater outrage against a prince of the church. Perhaps—perish the very thought—another plot against His Holiness' life?"

"Perhaps, Seigneur le Comte. But again, I would suggest that such a plot might not be considered very credible, even compared with the last such. These are not hardened revolutionists, seigneur, but a small group of wild-eyed artisans and rebellious youths. Competence is not easily to be found among them."

"True," reflected d'Avaux. Indeed, the last publicized plot on the pope's life had been a farce, an attempt to do him to death with image magic, sticking pins in a doll dressed as the pope. "Nevertheless, if we add a soupçon of competence to their armory?"

"I still hold out no great hope of success, seigneur." Ducos sounded almost disappointed.

"That will not be necessary, Ducos. Simply a spirited effort will do. All I ask is that they appear to have intended a prominent outrage. For our purposes, a near thing will be better since it will achieve all of our aims without bloodshed."

"Yes, Seigneur le Comte. With your permission, I shall be about it. You understand, this will almost certainly require me to absent myself from Venice?"

D'Avaux nodded and waved him away. He steeled himself to do without his factotum for a few weeks. In some ways, that would be a relief. Having Ducos around was more than a bit like having a mad dog on a leash. Taxing to the spirit.

* * *

D'Avaux's spirit would have been considerably more taxed had he seen the smile on Ducos' face after his factotum left the comte's chamber. All of Ducos' careful planning had finally come to fruition. Every piece of his scheme, finally in its place.

The smile of a man, finally slipping the leash.

Part IV:
April, 1634

—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
—E'en then would be some stooping, and I choose
Never to stoop.

Chapter 29

Stoner began to realize, as he stared at the forbidding stack of documents in front of him, the truth of two essential propositions.

First, that there was a very real value in the rejection of materialism, which was that it saved you a lot of work.

The second was that a cheerful willingness to be helpful was going to get taken cheerful advantage of sooner or later.

Magda and Sharon and Benjamin Luzzatto had come in grinning from ear to ear. Well, Sharon was grinning from ear to ear, Magda was smiling demurely and Benjamin was wearing his professional po-face with a hint of cheer. It didn't matter. Sharon was grinning enough for seven or eight people, let alone three.

"We have been shopping," Magda said brightly.

"Exactly," Sharon added, "when the going gets tough, the tough go—"

"—shopping," Stoner capped the quotation, just as he went weak at the knees because Benjamin had produced what looked like about thirty kilos of paper and actual by-God parchment, done up in no-messing-around by-God red tape. He dropped the package on the table with an expensive-sounding thud.

Benjamin then cracked a smile himself. "We have been very busy, but we need some signatures and seals to make it proper and legal."

Stoner looked from the paperwork to the short, bright-eyed Jewish lawyer and commercial agent. And back again. And back to Benjamin. At least Benjamin wasn't grinning his head off, although Stoner suspected that was because he took money seriously and not because he wanted to help Stoner mourn his final passage into the world of bread-headdity. Nevertheless, the sight of a lawyer, smiling—even a short, runty, friendly one like Benjamin—would normally have sent Stoner diving through the window into the canal. Had Benjamin been grinning as widely and sharkily as Sharon was doing, he doubted whether he'd have bothered to open the window first.

"So, what is all this?" he asked, gesturing weakly.

"Money," said Magda, uttering the code-word that told him to more or less leave it to her. "And commodities for all of the industries at home, and some other deals to make it all work."

"All this just to buy stuff?" he asked, fishing for a full explanation of some kind. He supposed short words and a diagram were too much to hope for . . .

"Ah," said Benjamin. "I have here—" He reached inside his kaftan. Benjamin sometimes found it convenient to get by in Venice by dressing as a Turk rather than wearing the distinguishing marks of his Jewish faith, and the Venetian authorities seemed willing to tolerate the minor subterfuge as long as he didn't overdo it. Stoner didn't understand the social complexities involved in the little dance, but he always found that garment a bit amusing. The garb of a hippie back up-time had originally been the garb of a rich Muslim.

What wasn't so amusing was what Benjamin was pulling out. Stoner felt his heart sink as Benjamin produced one of Grantville's precious stock of laptops. Powerpoint slides and spreadsheets had been treated as the direct Word of God by every seventeenth-century businessman who had arrived in Grantville. The Sephardim, though, had been particularly enthusiastic; the Viennese scion of the Abrabanel clan, Don Moses, was widely known as a slideshow bore of truly terrifying proportions. Stoner held up his hands. "Benjamin, can I just have the edited highlights?"

Benjamin looked perplexed. "Signor Stone, all of it is important. And the Signora Stone, she has made some most excellent trades in your behalf. There is, first the share in the Mocenigo fleet to—"

Sharon put a hand on Benjamin's shoulder and the birdy little lawyer ran down to a halt. Stoner realized, with the first spark of joy he had felt since the three of them had walked in, that she was genuinely, freely grinning, not just keeping her end up for company.

"Stoner," she said, "it breaks down nice and simple. We sold shares in all the potential mines that our exploratory crews have been finding. We sold metals futures in the mines that are ready to start producing this year. King Gustav's copper concessionaires have been coming through us for the Mediterranean market because we agreed to work—what was it, Benjamin?"

"Del Credere," said Benjamin.

"Del Credere, and maybe I'll explain that later. But we got a few good copper contracts and beat the price up here, which made our friend in Bohemia sweat a bit. He sent a couple of angry messages saying that we were messing up the market deliberately. I understand a number of folks back in Magdeburg told him not to be such a baby. Anyway, that's as may be. Once we started shifting the copper here, and the mining shares in all manner of other things, we had some seed capital and took up a number of margin loans to get into the serious action—"

Stoner sank down to sit cross-legged on the floorboards, feeling rather the way he did after a good deep toke: a little dizzy with hypoxia before the real rush hit.

"I surrender," he said in a weak voice. Then, more firmly: "How much of the stuff on the list could you get? You've been at this for nearly two months, but we haven't had anything delivered yet—"

He looked up, from face to face. He couldn't quite read the expressions. "What?"

Silence. First Sharon, then Magda, and finally Benjamin picked a chair and sat down. Looking harder, Stoner saw that Benjamin was looking faintly pleased with himself, but was waiting for his clients to talk. Magda looked like she had gotten the cream, and was now smiling as widely as a properly-brought-up guildmaster's daughter could. Sharon was back to grinning like a maniac.

"What?" Stoner asked again. The grin was proving infectious, although he didn't know why.

"Well, you know that the biggest item on the list was the hundredweight of lac?" Sharon asked.

"That wasn't one of mine," Stoner said, "but, like, I'll take your word for it."

"Well, we went for that one first and found a place downtown that had some."

Magda sniffed. "That man was no gentleman." She uttered the phrase with the same tone and spin and venom some people used for the phrase baby-eating satanist.

Sharon snorted. "The jerk told Benjamin that if his clients wanted a hundred pounds of anything but spice we could buy retail like the other peasants."

"Ha!" Magda said. "Sharon does the poltroon too much justice. He used coarse language as well."

Sharon looked hard at Magda.

Magda looked back, perfectly calmly. "Well, I know what that word meant in Latin, and from the tone of voice he used I presumed he meant it in Venetian."

"Oh," said Sharon, evidently surprised.

Stoner wasn't; sufficiently riled, Magda could take the hide off a wild boar with her language, much of it from the classics at that.

"Anyway," Sharon went on, "I said to Benjamin that we should buy in bulk and from source if we could."

Benjamin nodded. "The signoras were mostly insistent that we not deal through that house for anything. Naturally, I was proactive on my clients' behalf."

Stoner wondered if his wince had shown. Laptops and PowerPoint weren't the only things that the Istanbul Sephardim—and, apparently their Spanish and Italian cousins—had taken to. Godawful MBA-speak was catching among them like the clap in a whorehouse. Stoner recalled discussing that with Sharon's dad, Doctor Nichols. The good doctor's theory was that the Abrabanels had gone over Grantville's limited stock of legal and financial textbooks looking for any tricks they had missed. Whatever else they had found in the course of those studies, they had been particularly taken by the management jargon. The fact that they seemed to have an eye for the most anus-clenching excesses was, Doctor Nichols reckoned, their big joke at the expense of the twentieth century that most of the up-timers hadn't gotten yet.

Stoner saw that there was a question expected of him at this point. "So, what did you do?"

Sharon put an arm around Benjamin, who looked briefly alarmed and then appeared to force himself to relax. "Benjamin was magnificent," she said. "We spent a couple of days over in the ghetto picking up local information and making contacts, getting notes of introduction, that kind of thing. And then we went shopping. You see, Stoner, this is one of those towns where they don't make much of anything except the glass, which I'll tell you about, but they do make deals. You should take a walk through the Rialto sometime, it's wall-to-wall deals."

"I, uh, heard."

"Yeah, and part of it was all of those shares you got."

"What? What shares?"

Magda sighed, and she and Sharon looked at each other. Magda looked hard at Stoner. "You recall that you have been giving lectures and seminars on alchemy and physic—?"

Stoner leapt to his feet. "Now hold on—you charged admission?" He realized as the words escaped that he had raised his voice. He took a deep breath. "Guys, I'm sorry and all for shouting, but I wouldn't have agreed to that."

Magda was first to get over the shock of Stoner looking angry. "No, Tom, schatz, we did no such thing!" Stoner could see that she was a little upset that he might have thought so.

"That's right," said Sharon. "It's just that when all those guys were asking to hire you on as a consultant, Magda was getting you stock deals instead of just the flat fees they were offering."

"Eh? They have those here and now?" Stoner had hardly been up to speed with capitalism as she was spoke in the twentieth century, let alone the seventeenth.

"Oh, indeed, Signor Stone," said Benjamin, drawing breath for what promised to be a serious lecture. "You see, we have had partnerships and anonymous societies and joint-stock companies for many, many years now and there are—"

Stoner laughed. "Benjamin, please! Have mercy, man. Even if you explain it in short words I'm not going to grok it, okay?"

Benjamin frowned the uncomprehending frown of someone whose learning of the English language had missed the word "grok" entirely. But he did shut up.

"So, what now?" Stoner asked into the ensuing silence. "You got me a bunch of stocks. So. I just wait for my 401-K to mature?"

Only Sharon got that, of course. "What we did was a hair less formal there, Stoner. We got everyone we had stock in to pool their buying through us, and that got us some excellent deals. They're all acting like our subsidiaries now, one big corporate group rather than a lot of little businesses that just feed their margins to middlemen. With which, I might add, this town is infested."

Benjamin didn't even twitch.

Stoner mentally vibed some respect for Benjamin; the poor guy had spent weeks in the company of two of the hardest chicks in Venice right now, and he still seemed to have it all together.

Speaking of which, Stoner realized, he'd better take some positive action before his old lady lost all respect for him. "So, all I gotta do is sign?" Stoner levered himself to his feet and reached across the table for a pen. "Is there a downside?" he asked, poised to sign the first paper. He grinned, trying to disarm his pretense at shrewdness.

"Um, well—" Sharon looked at Benjamin, "do I have this right, Benjamin, that if we lose everything—"

"This would be difficult, Signora Nichols. Very difficult, as we have interests in four fleets and nearly thirty ships."

"Yes, but—" said Stoner, realizing that Sharon probably needed this, since she was in as clear a case of done-deal euphoria as Stoner had ever seen.

"Don't worry," said Sharon, "it's hardly likely to happen. Thirty ships, all in different parts of the world sailing at different times. They can't all sink at once. Anyway, even if it all drops in the pot, we've got so many people in this town tied up in our deals that they'd never . . ." Sharon trailed off.

"What?" By now, Stoner was fairly sure that he had punctured the balloon a bit, but he still wanted to know what the downside really was. "What do we do if we lose everything?"

"Get imprisoned for debt."

"Oh. Is that all?" Stoner immediately began to sign and seal where Benjamin had penciled for him to do so.

As he did, he mentally counted off, and was up to twenty-eight before Sharon spoke up.

"You don't mind?" she asked, apparently surprised.

"Nope," Stoner said, pressing his Deadhead signet ring into soft wax.

"Nope?"

"Nope." Stoner was gratified that Magda hadn't been suckered. "How long do you think I've been in business, Miss Boojwah Nichols? You think the old hippie gets confused and scared around bread?"

"Uh—" was all Sharon could manage.

Stoner found this helpful, when Magda made him turn out to do business that she needed his face or signature at. Everyone expected Magda to be ruthless. When he did it, though, the shock somehow made it more effective. He finished the last indenture, and straightened up to look straight at Sharon. "Pain," he said.

"Pain?" Sharon was the only one of the three to say anything, but the looks Stoner was getting from the other two clearly implied the question.

"Pain," Stoner repeated, as the text of a little sermon he hadn't given in a long, long time.

"You see," he said, straightening the pile of documents and shoving it across the table to Benjamin, "all of this stuff is about pain and when and how we can inflict it. It's the big problem we all have—uh, we all had, I should say, back up-time with the bread-heads and money and all that junk. Every one of those contracts was just a charter for pain and sadism."

He let that one linger a moment.

"Run that by me again?" Sharon said, wearing a grin that had definite undertones of I'll keep him talking, someone call the guys in the white coats.

"It's simple, Sharon. Guys like Benjamin here write a whole bunch of stuff down about what the deal is, and we call it a contract, which is just a deal written down on paper or whatever. But because of this insubstantial substance we call law—ha! and they called me an impractical flower-child who believed in mystical nonsense—the deal becomes stupid serious and metaphysical instead of just a simple matter of trust and friendship."

Sharon frowned. "Well, you've got to make busting a deal more painful than keeping to it, or—"

"Or what?" Stoner demanded. "Outbreaks of gratuitous promise-breaking and other asshole behavior everywhere? Sharon, if I bought that depravity of mankind propaganda I never would have started in a commune in the first place, much less stuck with it. It's just pain-worship, that's all it is; totem and taboo; superstitious dancing before golden idols. I've had nothing but contempt for most of this stuff since, oh, before you were born, and so it doesn't surprise me that debtor's prison is a lot nearer the surface here in the down-time. It's the same deal, it's just in the shop window instead of out back for the special customers."

Stoner looked around the room again. Benjamin's face had gone very professional indeed. Magda was used to his foibles, and was giving him a look that promised a pleasant rebuttal later. Sharon's grin was now just relaxed. She obviously still thought he was nuts, but wasn't looking over her shoulder for the guys in the white coats.

"So, let's recap some, hey, guys? Stoner said. "We've got, what, all the feedstocks that the guys back at Grantville wanted?"

"Yes. The people who wanted zinc will be pleased in particular," said Magda. "We will have two hundred tons of Japanese zinc within a year of midsummer's day."

"Oh." He wasn't too thrilled to hear that. Zinc was handy stuff, all right, but Stoner wondered about the market for galvanized buckets in a time that still had as many coopers as it did. Of course, the stuff could be used for making brass and batteries too, but—he bit down, hard. It was nearly a year and a half before that zinc arrived, and a lot could happen in that time.

"What else?" he asked, in lieu of the rant he could feel building. "Or, perhaps you should say what we didn't get?"

"Well, thorium," said Sharon. "We're probably going to have trouble with the borax, too. The Turks seem to be the only ones who've got it, and they're not being real friendly so far."

"Right," said Stoner, "that's not actually much of a downside, is it?" Apart, he thought, from all that goddammed zinc.

"We have done well, I think," said Magda. "The telephone people are particularly pleased that we were able to source good English graphite, they thought there was not any. Sharon saw it in a pencil from Naples, and asked around about where it came from, and it seems that we should have been asking for wad from England. We have ordered much of that. We also have much lac coming from India, which will come soon. There was a difference between what they said that they needed and what was the smallest lot we could buy. So we have sent a trade fleet with English fustians—"

"What?"

"Cloth," Magda explained, "made with wool and cotton, and woven in the north of England. The return trip will bring batiks and spices and some other things we can sell on for profit."

"Some of the phone stuff," Sharon interjected, "we got right here in Venice. All of the insulators are being made in Murano, just across the lagoon. They're doing them to quality standards to train apprentices, they said, rather than working to the tolerances that the people at Prague said would do." She smiled. "I sent a wireless message to Tanner and Ellie telling them about the tolerances we'd gotten on the samples, and they sent back asking how we'd mechanized so quickly."

Stoner nodded. He'd been surprised himself a few times by that sort of thing, since he'd assumed that craftsmen around Thuringia from whom he'd ordered glasswork for the dye factory could do quality or volume but not both, and been pleasantly surprised. Of course, if you watched how fast a competent journeyman could work and then sat down and did the math, it wasn't so surprising. And if they had to turn out a big batch of something quickly, they reorganized the workshop to throw man-hours at the project until it was done.

"Tell him about the aqua vitae, Sharon," Magda said.

"Oh, yeah, that's a good one. There's a fair bit of wine gets rejected when it's imported here, and some of the local product is pretty poor too. There are a fair few good old-fashioned 'shiners as well. When I drew a Liebig condenser for them, there were a few guys slapping foreheads, and a couple of the glassware shops did a roaring trade in the things for a couple of weeks. They use copper pipes and leather fittings, but they work. Now they're making alcohol a lot cheaper and purer than anywhere else, and with about eleventy-seven businesses back in the USE fighting over the supplies of good alcohol there's a good market. We did middleman trade on that for a while, and got a cut out of nearly a whole year's production even before the factories we took shares in turned a profit. Anyway, we got paper for most of those payments and cash for some of them, which was good, since we fed that back into the mill on the Rialto. Some of the alcohol factories have managed to do mail-order deals back to the USE and cut out the middlewomen, but that's okay, we'll make it up elsewhere. For now we've got cash flow."

"And what are we doing with that cash flow?"

"Servicing the term loans," said Magda promptly, with the air of a woman who regarded memoranda and ledgers as management tools for lesser minds. "With the term loans we underwrote the stock issues. The ghetto already has SEC rules and—"

"What?" Stoner began to feel he was really, really overusing that word.

"Ah," said Benjamin, sitting forward in his chair. "Perhaps I can explain this one best. There was a brief description of your Securities and Exchange Commission and your stock exchanges in several of the management and business textbooks in Grantville, and Admiral Simpson was kind enough to furnish some excellent seminars in the matter. We already had most of the things they variously described, and combining them into more organized and consistent markets impressed many of us as a good idea, if it could be made practical. So we circulated the ideas we found most helpful."

"How?" asked Stoner, pleased at a chance to vary his vocabulary a little, "and who to?"

"Well, first we passed it—ah, I should mention that Don Francisco Nasi wrote a most incisive monograph on the matter, which we had printed. It was circulated here in Venice first, since the Rialto is such an important market among those to which we had easy access in these troubled times. It also went to Genoa, and by some less direct routes, I hear, to Antwerp and Amsterdam and Paris. It has also gone to the City and some other places further east. Everywhere I have mentioned has done some of the things in Don Francisco's monograph and now a few of them are doing more. On some subjects, Don Francisco can be very . . . persuasive, when he is minded to."

"Persuasive?" Stoner chuckled. He had gone in to see Mike Stearns about maybe writing some stuff up to go to the doctors in Venice and Padua and Florence and so on, and maybe make himself available to do seminars and classes for visiting alchemists who wanted to raise their game. If he had time, he'd thought, he might volunteer to train some folks up to teach basic chemistry of some kind. Pay forward a little, he'd thought.

When he came out, he'd agreed—he wasn't quite sure how, but he was certain he had agreed—to learn Italian, decamp his family to Venice for a year, give lectures until his throat was dry and his feet hurt to, as it turned out, chemists and doctors and alchemists and natural philosophers and heaven only knew what else from all over Europe who wanted to hear the new learning from Grantville but thought Venice was a much less chancy prospect for a working vacation than Germany in wartime. They had heard some alarming stories about Croats, it seemed.

Not that Stoner was complaining after the event, of course, what with Venice being a nice town and some of the professors being great guys. But Benjamin was still talking.

"—and so the underwriting and market-making rules proved to be good innovations, and the most widely practiced. Here and at the Antwerp Bourse they have been making daily quotes in this way for nearly six months now. It remains only to persuade the Wisselbank at Antwerp to issue proper banknotes instead of just deposit certificates, although with the manner of their recent move they can hardly be blamed for feeling inclined to conservatism."

"Eh? What about our greenbacks?" Stoner frowned. He actually liked those notes, not least because making the fast green ink was a good, solid government contract and they'd actually gone with his joke of putting Johnny Cash on the twenty-dollar bill. Hopefully that'd make people take the stuff less seriously, although he'd had long and bitter experience of how that kind of dream usually turned out.

"Keep up, Stoner," said Sharon. "We don't spend those outside the USE, we buy them. Because of the exchange rate it's cheaper to borrow Wissel notes. They're as good as bullion and everyone knows that. They absolutely do not issue notes for silver they don't have, and their letters of credit are watertight. We spend greenbacks where they will buy the most."

"Then what's the problem?" Stoner had an awful feeling that he was going to get an answer.

Benjamin saw his chance. "This is about a marvelous concept you had up-time called the money supply. You see, deposit certificates and bills for title to specie are well known in these times. Since Sweden uses those foolish copper plates for money, they must perforce use notes or spend more in carting their money around than it is worth. Now, if we can persuade the Wisselbank to go over to a fidu—"

Stoner straightened up. Time, he felt, to put into practice a little of that business management stuff he'd read about and mostly laughed at. Decisive, that was the key.

"I think I've heard enough," he said. "Benjamin, have we broken any laws?"

"No, signor," said Benjamin, plainly taken aback.

"Good. Sharon, is all the stuff we're doing going to, you know, help people get medicines and stuff?"

"Yes, Stoner."

He nodded and resolved that he would discuss the assorted warlike uses of zinc with her later.

He turned to Magda. "Magda, I think I've signed everything. Would you come for a walk with me?"

Magda grinned and practically skipped to his side as he stepped around the table toward the door.

Once outside it, he dropped from the straight-backed, square-shouldered, chin-lifted pose he'd struck. "Man, that is so, so, not where I'm at," he sighed in relief.

Magda nuzzled up to him. "But, Tom, mein schatz, see how it is you can be a tough and purposeful man of affairs?"

"Sure," he drawled, "I just don't want to make a habit of it, okay?"

"Just from time to time," she said, squeezing him a little harder.

"All right. Except I think tonight we should rent a boat and get some wine and go out on the lagoon in the spring moonlight, and maybe smoke a little. You know, stars, moonlight, rippling water. Because otherwise I'm going to get a haircut and start acting serious and probably get a regular job. Or something."

"I think I should prefer the something," she said.

Chapter 30

Buckley put down his pen. There, finally done. A complete write-up on the current activities—plight might be a better word—of the Committee of Correspondence in Venice. Tiny numbers, worthless budget, reliance on street kids, the lot. Combined, however, with a wild plan to liberate Galileo from the clutches of the Inquisition.

Damn, damn, damn, damn. It might be the greatest story of the year, maybe the decade—like being able to scoop John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry—and Joe wasn't sure if he could print it. No, scratch that. He could print it, all right. But the consequences . . .

He thought back ruefully to a conversation he'd had with Father Mazzare only a couple of weeks before. Worse than the consequences of keeping quiet, indeed.

He'd heard a lot from eavesdropping, and filled in the rest from conversations with Michel Ducos. The French sympathizer of the Committee was generally taciturn, but put a few drinks in him and he sometimes became downright loquacious. Joe had met Michel's type before. The kind of guy who, a few sheets to the wind, just couldn't help bragging about things.

Somehow they'd gotten news of Galileo being moved to Rome. Somehow they'd gotten hold of weapons, too. What kind and from where Joe hadn't been able to find out, except that he was sure that at least some of them had been provided by the Stone boys.

And that was an explosive element to the story, right there in itself. Even if the Stone boys hadn't provided weapons, the fact that they were knee-deep in the plot would be enough to connect it inseparably with the United States of Europe. Only the week before, Buckley himself had done a piece on the copies of Galileo's book that were flooding out of a press somewhere, and he figured he could guess the source now.

Knee-deep? Joe smiled to himself. Say better: up to their elbows in it. He remembered Gerry, smeared up to the elbows with oil and ink, the very image of a hillbilly jackleg mechanic. He must be running one of the Committee's presses into an early trip to the great scrapyard in the sky. How they were getting them out and to the Inquisition was anyone's guess. On the whole, given Joe's record in finding out things he'd rather not have known, he wasn't sure he wanted to make any efforts in that direction.

Buckley himself had spoken out in his article in favor of Galileo, of scientific freedom, of freedom of speech. And here he was with an opportunity to make damned sure the man stayed in the toils of the Inquisition and do himself a good turn into the bargain. On the one hand, the scoop of the year, maybe the decade. On the other, Galileo-Gali-freaking-leo!-in a damp cell somewhere. That was a nice clear image in Buckley's mind. Galileo's fierce, bearded visage, unbowed and defiant, glaring out through the bars of some dank cell.

It was all horsepuckey, of course. Buckley knew about the house arrest and the soft treatment the old guy was getting. No slouches in the PR department themselves, the church, they weren't going to give the man at the cutting edge of seventeenth-century science any treatment anyone could describe as medieval. In truth, there was something more than a little comical about the idea of the Marcolis and the Stones busting him out of a luxury apartment in Rome.

Buckley sighed deeply, looking at the tablet full of notes from which he'd compiled the story. Many of those notes he'd scribbled from hiding under that window. He'd managed to divert any suspicion by spending quite a bit of time in the open with members of the Committee on Murano and elsewhere. Interviews with Marcoli and Massimo, the lot, all of it purporting to be—which was truthful enough, in itself—material for an article on the Committee's overt work.

Well . . . Joe decided he'd send that part of the story in the mail to Magdeburg. He'd send it in the morning, after a good night's sleep. And when he'd done that, he'd think about the rescue story. Maybe he'd send it, too. Maybe he wouldn't. He was too tired to think clearly right now.

He got up from his desk and went to bed.

* * *

The shock brought him awake. He blinked to clear sleep out of his eyes and then focused them. Floorboards. He was lying on the floor. How did I get out of bed? Then someone grabbed the back of his nightshirt and hauled on it.

"What?" he yelled, and scrambled to get his legs under him. Pistol under the pillow, he thought. He made a dive for it, got a hand on the bed, and then pain exploded through the back of his head and he went out again.

* * *

Drowning! Buckley came to from a delirium vision of suffocating under water, to find himself soaked and cold. Something was over his face, clinging and wet, over his whole face; he couldn't see. He couldn't get his breath through it, not properly. He tried to rip it away, but his hands were tied to something, down by his lap. Only a nightmare, I can wake up at any time.

"Good, you are awake," someone said. Murmured, rather, into his ear.

"Who?" It sounded blurred even to Buckley, as he gasped it out through what he could now identify as wet cloth.

"You don't know me?" There was a trace of sly amusement in the voice. "Ah, but no one really knows me any more."

The cloth was whipped away. There was no one there. Looking down, Joe saw that he'd been tied to a chair, wrists and ankles both.

Then the click of boot heels on floorboards, and a figure stepped between Buckley and his desk lamp. Even in silhouette, there was no mistaking that file-thin build.

"Michel?" Buckley asked. His guts sank as he realized what this was about. "Marcoli sent you, right? Look, I wasn't going to publish, all right? I got the notes right there on the desk, you can read the piece I was gonna file. It was just about the Committee, I swear to God. I wasn't gonna say anything about the rest of it. I want Galileo busted out as much as you guys—"

A slap across the mouth silenced him. Bare-handed, but a hand that somehow seemed clawlike, bony and callused. Callous, Buckley thought. Not a flicker had crossed Ducos' face. Suddenly he was Ducos, not pleasant, friendly-if-a-bit-reserved good-old-Michel. The slap hadn't hurt much, more insult than injury, but there was a huge, brimming reservoir of hatred behind the dam that was Ducos' face. And Buckley realized he was starting to see cracks in the concrete. Ducos' eyes, and Buckley could see them now as his eyes adjusted to the light, were boring into Buckley. Intense. Mad.

"Fool," said Ducos, in English. "I have read your scribblings, reporter."

"Then you know—"

"Everything. Marcoli doesn't, of course." A small smile twisted that narrow blade of a face. "Another dupe. A shame. He may be the one honest man in this city. Such a shame, that he should be an imbecile also." Ducos shook his head, slowly and theatrically.

Buckley remained silent. Don't provoke him. He wished he knew more about hostage situations than he'd been able to gather from the movies. Sure as hell nobody's dialing 911 right now, he thought. He put his head down, to avoid catching Ducos' eye.

"You made my own spy most upset, Monsieur Buckley. He wanted to know, did I not trust him to maintain a watch on the building for him? Did I think he was too stupid to keep a proper watch? I had to pay him extra because of you. Pfui. No matter."

Ducos began to pace. "No, that is not the problem I must solve tonight, Monsieur Buckley." He pointed to Joe's article on the table. "No, the problem is that you know nothing about the plot to kill the pope. There is not a word in there about the matter."

He soundly deeply aggrieved, but Joe could sense that it was a pose. Underneath the sorrowful tone was just that hint of maniacal humor.

"What am I to do?" Ducos mused, pacing back and forth. Again, he pointed to the table. "That article must be found, of course. Crucial evidence, pointing the finger in the proper direction. But nothing about the pope!"

Buckley's head spun, and not just with uninterrupted sleep and lingering concussion. "The pope? What are you—"

Ducos was behind him, and slapped him across the head. "Silence!" The Frenchman hissed the word. There was no trace of the earlier humor now. "Of course you know nothing! Imbecile. Seigneur le Comte only gave me the orders last night."

Buckley fought down the question. The last two he'd asked had earned him blows. He stared at a knothole in the floorboard between his feet, and concentrated very hard on not being there.

Another little chuckle. "Ah, the manner in which I have played my would-be master! D'Avaux, the fool, has never—not once!—considered the risks of taking a Huguenot so closely into his confidence. Smug, noble fool!" The voice changed, became a baritone snarl. "As if Saint Bartholomew's Day could have been forgotten. Or La Rochelle. Or the Languedoc."

So Ducos really was a traitor to France after all, Buckley realized. He was working for the count in name only. And he had reason to be pissed about his country, if he was a Huguenot. The Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of the Huguenots, although it was now over six decades in the past, was still a byword among Protestants for Catholic tyranny and butchery. La Rochelle had seen Protestants similarly slaughtered, starved and penned under siege to die of disease. Buckley hadn't heard much about the suppression of the Huguenots in the Languedoc, but that was probably only because the savagery had had to compete with barbarisms in the Germanies. La Rochelle and Languedoc were recent, too, within the last five years. The wounds were still fresh.

"Liars, the Catholics, all of them," Ducos continued. "Did they think I would not read their stolen histories? Did they think I would not learn about the revocation of the Edict of Nantes?"

Joe's brain was still a little muzzy from the effects of the blows. He tried to remember what he could about the Edict of Nantes. Not much. It had been decreed by an earlier French king—Henry the Something-or-other, and given some rights to the Protestants. But what . . .

Oh, hell. He remembered now. He'd read about it. Fifty years or so in the future—the future of another universe—King Louis XIV would declare it null and void.

"Look, Michel," he said urgently, "that's still a long ways off. By then all kinds of things will be different. Just calm down and we can talk—"

Ducos raised his hand and Joe choked off the rest. The Frenchman was obviously in no mood to discuss the matter. And, for the first time, as Ducos raised his hand—his left hand, this time—Joe spotted the hilt of the dagger in the sleeve. Oh, shit.

"Ah, France!" Ducos sighed the name of his country, pacing in circles around Buckley, lost in some reflection of his own. "At least the cretin d'Avaux seeks the advantage of France, even while he mires her in the Roman heresy. He knows I am a patriot also, which is why he trusts me in what I do."

Another long silence. Three, four, five more circuits around the room. Buckley stole a glance out of the corner of his eye, and realized with a chill that Ducos was toying with the handle of the knife in his sleeve. Then, he pulled it out. A short, thin, and very wicked-looking blade.

"Saint Bartholomew's Day." Ducos sighed the words, almost in the same tone as he had spoken the name of France. "It has not been forgotten, Monsieur Buckley." A long pause. "And certainly not forgiven. Finally, after long years of biding my time, I have my chance to strike all France's enemies with a single blow."

The chuckle was becoming more like a cackle, now, as it returned. Ducos squatted in front of Buckley, and grabbed his chin roughly to lift it up. "Several blows, rather, the one riding on top of another." Back to a soft chuckle. Buckley was horrified to see that Ducos' face hardly moved at all as he laughed. "You American heretics—and you will receive one of those blows—even have a name for it. 'Piggyback.' Seigneur le Comte wanted me to mount a piggyback operation on top of Marcoli's ridiculous scheme to liberate Galileo. Make it seem as if the imbecile intended to assassinate the pope as well."

Ducos rocked back on his heels, his mouth open in a rictus than might have served someone else for a grin. "Petits cochons!" he whooped. "All climbing on each others' backs. I clear the way for Marcoli and his children's crusade to go to Rome. I have evidence planted in the Marcoli house after they leave, saying they meant to kill the Antichrist of Rome. So much for d'Avaux's scheme. That, of course, clears the way to lay my own plans. You see, d'Avaux wants Marcoli to fail to kill the pope. Not even to try, in fact—simply to have looked as if he intended to try. Whereas I want him to succeed." Ducos hissed the last word.

Another long silence. "The cardinal is right about that, of course. The English stole the world. Better, though, that it be stolen by foreign Protestants, I think, than French heretics."

Joe was desperately trying to follow the way Michel's mind seemed to skitter from one subject to another. He was quite sure by now that Ducos was not really sane. "You work for Richelieu?" he asked, not really knowing why but simply hoping to divert the maniac. He tensed himself for a blow.

Which never came. "But of course, Monsieur Buckley. Why else would I send back a dispatch describing the foolish, insane, desperate venture that Seigneur le Comte has instructed me to carry out? Seigneur le Comte will be most lucky if he is merely broken and ruined. A traitor's death would suit him better, I think." A pause, and then another soft little chuckle. "Administered by the arch-traitor and heretic himself. Savor the irony, Monsieur Buckley. Savor it."

Ducos stood. "It is perfect, perfect in every detail. Your American abomination, this 'religious freedom' exposed as a cover for bloodshed and duplicity. The Roman Antichrist sent back to the Pit, to be chained by Christ for a thousand years. And the Beast's henchmen on earth, they all suspect France. All the further from Rome goes France. Ah, perfect."

Ducos stopped behind Buckley and laid a hand gently on either of the American's shoulders. Joe could see the edge of the blade protruding next to his cheek. The thing looked razor sharp.

"And there is more, oh, yes," Ducos said, purring. "Monsieur Gaston has his man here in Paris, too. And he has agreed to assist with the plot to discredit d'Avaux. And such a simple matter to show that he, too, compassed the death of the pope. Yes, all of it is perfect—except that one unfortunate detail. There is no mention of the plot to kill the pope in your writings."

Ducos began stroking Buckley's wet hair with his left hand, and in that moment Buckley realized he was going to die. He began to shudder, and felt warmth on his thighs as he lost bladder control.

"You tremble, Monsieur Buckley. You urinate from terror. Just so will France tremble and soil herself, as she is first-born into the Millennium. Just so. As Richelieu and Gaston squabble over the bleeding body of the Antichrist, the new world will come. Yes, the new world. Born of little pigs, climbing on each other's backs. Petits cochons."

He kept stroking Joe's hair. It felt like a vulture's caress. "And both these little pigs blaming the American pigs. I care not who wins, for by then there will be the reign of Christ. And France, reborn. The new Jerusalem, and I shall be the one to lay the first stone of that heavenly city. Mortared with the blood of the Antichrist, Monsieur Buckley, and of the little pigs who pollute France with their heresy."

Another soft little chuckle. "I meant to have an Inquisition guard come to murder you, Monsieur Buckley. What better sport than to set your Americans, and that Jew who is your spymaster, on the heels of the Inquisition? But I must now hurry, for you learned of Marcoli's plan. Alas, the real plan, not the one I require. So I am afraid—my apologies—that I must do my best to question you in the style of the Inquisition."

Torture! Buckley moaned, and began to shake again. The chair he was tied to had a short leg, and it drummed on the floorboards. "I'll talk!" he said, suddenly and oddly embarrassed that his voice was squeaking. "I'll talk!"

"Why? How? I don't mean to ask you any questions." Stroke, stroke. That hand on the top of his head, as Ducos murmured to him softly, almost intimately. Buckley cringed at every touch. Stroke. "I have read all your notes, Monsieur. I know all you know. And I shall send off your writing for you. In this way your death will not go unnoticed. Though for the moment, of course, it surely will. This building is empty, but for ourselves."

Buckley swallowed. He was dead, as dead as if he'd already stopped breathing. What to do? He was still shuddering; his testicles seemed to be burrowing into his belly. The piss on his thighs was cooling, making him shudder all the more.

Hurt him, said a still, quiet voice in his mind. He remembered a line of poetry he'd always liked a lot. From Bob Dylan—no, it was Dylan Thomas.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The hand holding the blade was next to his cheek. Joe snapped his head around like a snake or a snapping turtle and bit the hand. Hard.

Ducos roared with rage and pain. Buckley ignored everything except sinking his teeth into that hated hand. Ducos tried to pull the hand away but it was impossible. Then he grabbed Joe by the hair and lifted him, chair and all, and slammed his head against the edge of the table. The skinny madman's strength was incredible.

Joe was dazed by the impact. Finally, his jaws loosened enough and Michel ripped his hand away. Buckley saw the knife fall to the floor.

Get the knife! Get the knife!

The chair was off-balance anyway. He managed to tip it over and fall next to the knife. There came then the greatest sensation of triumph Joe had ever felt in his life. He managed to clamp the hilt of the knife in his teeth. Try cutting me now, you son of a bitch!

He never felt the slender cord sliding around his neck. Never felt it at all, even when the garrote tightened in the madman's grip. The knife was everything.

Chapter 31

Cardinal Antonio Barberini the Younger—that last an important distinction with his Uncle Antonio in the room—felt mildly out of his depth, and completely out of place. The most he could find to think of himself in this company was that he knew more of art than all of them put together. And that, alas, most of the people in the chamber would be fascinating company if they weren't all concentrating so hard on the business at hand.

Could there be anything in world so tedious as this affair with the miserable creature Galileo Galilei? Not for the first time, Antonio found himself wishing that the nasty old man would simply have the good grace to drop dead. He was seventy years old, after all. It was not as if Antonio were asking for a miracle.

Alas, the terms good grace and Galileo Galilei of Pisa were not to be found in the same sentence. Restraining yet another sigh, the young cardinal's eyes moved across the chamber. The sight brought him no relief. It was a very well populated chamber.

There were his brother Francesco and his Uncle Antonio—for whom he was named—and Cardinal Zacchia. All were theological authorities and Inquisitors and well suited to the business of these interminable weekly meetings.

Fra Vincenzo da Maculano and the Jesuit Inchofer were also well suited to the task. An engineer and a classicist, each well learned in his field. Both of them were also experienced in Inquisition business. But the lead in that matter, among the members of the Commission of Inquiry who were not cardinals, was taken by Sinceri; who, during the rest of the week, was a prosecutor of the Holy Office.

Barberini half-listened to Sinceri's droning, dry-as-dust exposition of the laws of the Church pertaining to heresy. Picking his way, with difficulty, through Sinceri's salvos of hold-and-defends and teaching contrary to magisterium, and what-not else. Privately, Antonio thought that the Inquisition would be better feared for its tedium than its tortures. He prayed, silently, that his other uncle—Maffeo, now Pope Urban VIII—would unilaterally settle the issue with regard to the ranting Pisan so that Antonio would not have to take any decision in what was becoming a wholly vexed matter.

From the sound of the thing, Galileo had tried to weasel out of the charge. That was a joke, if one cared to laugh. After decades of sneering at everyone who dared to contradict him, of publishing viperous sallies against his opponents, he had finally stumbled against the one tribunal that could call him to account. Years of being the biggest bully in Italian natural philosophy had come to a halt when the bigger bullies of the Inquisition summoned him to Rome.

They had been gentle with him, though. They had told him to rest and get well before traveling, seen to it that he had an escort and a litter to ride in, bid him choose his own lodgings and requested, not ordered, that he not make public appearances while awaiting his trial. When they examined him—Antonio read between the lines, here, not having been present as Sinceri and da Maculano had been—Galileo had tried to pretend that the whole point of his book had been to refute the Copernican hypothesis, not to hold, defend or teach it. Had he not written Simplicius in as a character? Aristotle's great interpreter, who gave the philosopher's view and gave it ably and well? Surely, Galileo had asked, the Holy Office could see that he had defended Aristotle against Pythagoras?

The truth was, no one could see any such thing, which was why Inchofer had had to read the whole of the damned turgid book and write a review of it. Antonio felt sure that Inchofer had been more bothered by the tone of the text than anything it might say about the motion of the heavenly spheres. What was the phrase? He slights as mental dwarfs all who are not Copernican or Pythagorean. As well he might, in some cases, since the mental dwarfdom of some of his opponents was not wholly beyond doubt.

Which thought led Antonio, somewhat unfairly, across the room to the other three members of the Inquisi—not the Inquisition, Antonio reminded himself, never to call it that—the Commission of Inquiry.

Scheiner, whose presence was inexplicable since he was the prime complainant. Or, at least, had provoked all the complaints about Galileo—so rumor had it, with some evidence on its side—out of nothing more than desire for vengeance. Perhaps that was one of Uncle Maffeo's little jokes: to make the man who least wanted to be impartial, swear before God that he would judge without partiality. Scheiner would do it, too, out of his fourth vow as a Jesuit if nothing else. But it would take monstrous prejudice in Galileo's favor to acquit him.

Grassi was also an agitator against Galileo, and he again had had good personal reason. Over the years, Galileo had called him about seven sorts of idiot. Including, at one point, for advancing evidence in favor of the Copernican hypothesis that Galileo didn't agree with—which was some measure of the defendant in this trial. Grassi's presence was, if it was to be explained at all, part of the same game that had put his fellow Jesuit on the trial panel. Even if he, too, was scrupulously fair, the only question was Galileo's penalty.

Finally, Cardinal Gaspar Borja y Velasco. Probably not even the direct intervention of God Himself would cause him to vote in Galileo's favor. Too many of the people around the pope, people who opposed the Spanish party in Rome, were Galileo partisans as well. The Spanish Inquisitor would not be in the least partial to Galileo, even if he had come before the Inquisition looking more Catholic than the pope.

The fact that His Holiness Urban VIII had violated every canon of Inquisition procedure with this Commission of Inquiry had almost certainly caused the Spaniards to smell a rat. Six of the regular Inquisition cardinals had been asked to step aside, and been replaced with a third Barberini—Antonio himself, whom nobody including Antonio thought was in the least bit qualified to judge such a matter—and five assorted lawyers, theologians and scientists. And yet His Holiness had not explicitly said that he wished to see an acquittal. The message seemed to be that the committee was to deal as gently with Galileo as it could. It would all be much easier if Uncle Maffeo and Father-General Vitelleschi would let anyone else see the papers that had come from Grantville. Then perhaps the game they were playing might be more obvious to the less exalted members of the hierarchy.

Putting Grassi, Scheiner and Borja on the Commission seemed to be a sop to the anti-Galilean opinion and, perhaps, to the Spanish. Even together, and even assuming Scheiner and Grassi went against their vows, they would not change the outcome. Unanimity was not required, from what Sinceri had said in an earlier meeting. The lawyer seemed to be enjoying his chance to be a judge and was now holding forth, from the one word in three Barberini was catching, on whether the evidence permitted a conviction as it stood or whether all they could find was vehement suspicion calling for a public abjuration.

Barberini half-turned in his chair to see what Inchofer would say to that, and was not disappointed.

"He holds it, it is certain," Inchofer said. "He did his best to respect the formalities, but the man is so full of conceit that he put every contrary case—"

Cardinal Francesco Barberini waved him down. "So long as there is room to say that he did not mean heresy, the details don't matter."

Scheiner cleared his throat noisily, and spoke for the first time in one of these meetings. "If Your Eminence will permit, heresy was the last thing Galileo would have meant—but it was still the first thing he wrote in this book."

Antonio sat up straight. There seemed to be some life in these tedious meetings after all. "Father Scheiner, do you say we should absolve him of heresy?"

"No, Your Eminence," Scheiner said, half turning to address Antonio. "And with Your Eminence's permission, I shall explain."

Barberini nodded. Indeed, everyone in the room sat up straighter to hear Scheiner's contribution. Having their complete attention, Scheiner went on. "What one must always remember of Galileo is that he is capable of great personal malice."

"He is an ignoramus, and arrogant!" Grassi snapped.

"Just so," agreed Scheiner, "and a plagiarist, and bereft of manners. Above all else, a monstrous conceit afflicts him, far above that which must motivate any natural philosopher."

Grassi barked a laugh in agreement. Of those in the room who had had encounters with the Pisan, his had been the most bruising.

Scheiner went on again, glaring. "The fact that he is often—not always!—right is no great soother of our hurts." He paused, and laughed briefly. "And that hurt led me, until these last few weeks, to think him a damned heretic. Which he is! Not a page of his book passes without he arrogates to himself matters of scriptural exegesis."

Sinceri nodded. "The very pith and marrow of the grave crime of heresy," he said, in his best graveside manner.

Scheiner harumphed. "But he meant to win an argument, and perhaps guide and persuade those for whom deciding what is and is not heresy is their duty under God."

"You, too, are Copernican now, Scheiner?" Borja demanded, from his seat beside Scheiner. Grassi just glowered.

Scheiner took a deep breath and folded his hands. "As God is my witness, and may He forgive me, but I despise that man and I pray that he may be wrong in every particular and iota of his work. It may be that he is wrong about the Copernican hypothesis. But then again, he may not be."

Scheiner raised his eyes to heaven. "I would give all I have and all I ever will have to see Galileo Galilei humbled for all the wrongs he has done me. I am a natural philosopher and an astronomer, Grassi, and unlike you I have seen my own work stolen by this fraud, not just reviled as yours was. But in this"—he picked up Galileo's book—"he says much that is true. Did you but compare him with Kepler and the Tycho you championed yourself, Grassi, and with this new learning—"

"Basta!" Grassi got to his feet, shaking a finger at Scheiner. "I can read Kircher's letters from Grantville as well as you can!"

There was a silent moment. Antonio Barberini tore his eyes away from the two Jesuits. Borja was rigid, his small mouth pursed tight as a cat's ass. The regular inquisitor-cardinals were leaning forward, impassive but watching and listening carefully. The other priests were looking decidedly uncomfortable. They were used to the gentle tones of theology or the sedate protocols of cardinals. To see the kind of mayhem that natural philosophers regarded as convivial debate practiced in front of princes of the church was embarrassing them. For himself, it was all Barberini could do not to burst out laughing.

But Grassi was continuing. "There is that in the Congden Library, yes? That was a child's library, full of books for the instruction of children, yes? And they teach the Copernican hypothesis to children in the future! To children! And, I might add, I was right about that wretched comet and Galileo was not. Optical illusion, indeed."

Grassi sat down, evidently much satisfied to have said that last.

"Then where are we in disagreement?" asked Scheiner, spreading his hands in as disarming a manner as he seemed capable of.

"That you want to excuse him his heresy, and excuse him being a bad scientist!" Grassi snapped back. "With these I will never agree."

"Bad?" Scheiner asked, suddenly wearing the face of a man three steps ahead of the argument. "Because he was once wrong and you were once right?"

Grassi snorted. "Because he holds an opinion he cannot prove at a time when such opinion is heresy."

"Then," said Scheiner, "can we perhaps declare his hypothesis true and contrary to Scripture?"

Barberini nearly lost control of his face.

To his credit, Grassi laughed aloud. "Such a contagious heretic, this Galileo! He corrupts his very inquisitors!"

A rumble of chuckles went around the room. Barberini noted that even Borja twitched a corner of his mouth.

"Just so," said Scheiner. "I think the worst we can lay before him is that he has made a thoroughly misguided attempt to convince the Church of a genuine error. And if it be no error, we can add that he is wrong to his tactlessness, indiscretion, plagiarism and arrogance."

Grassi struck a pose of astonishment straight out of the commedia dell'arte. "You—after all we did to bring him here? You find that he—that damned winetaster—acted out of the best of motives?"

Scheiner slumped down heavily in his seat, like a puppet with cut strings. "But it is still heresy," he sighed.

* * *

Neither of the two astronomers said anything further in that meeting. Antonio Barberini was again finding it hard to concentrate. Soon enough, he gave up the effort entirely and went back to the contemplation of matters in which he was an expert.

He was on the verge of deciding to throw his patronage in support of Artemisia Gentileschi. Very generous patronage, to boot. Female or not, the woman was one of the most superb painters of the day. Antonio considered her variant on the famous theme of Judith slaying Holofernes—both her variants, in fact—of being the best ever. Yet neither one of those paintings, magnificent as they were, compared in his opinion to either her youthful Susanna and the Elders or the recent Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting. True, her latest variant on the theme of Cleopatra was perhaps a bit prosaic—but only in comparison to the magnificent version she had painted some ten years earlier.

In truth, Antonio's remaining hesitation was entirely political, not artistic. Despite her sex, Artemisia Gentileschi now enjoyed the patronage—miserly, to be sure—of no less a figure than King Philip of Spain. King Charles of England too, it was said, as well as the duke of Modena.

But those last two were irrelevant, in political terms. It was Philip who mattered, all the more so now that Gentileschi had moved from Rome to Naples. The Spanish were already aggravated with the Barberini clan. If Cardinal Antonio Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII, were to steal Gentileschi away—perhaps he could even persuade her to move back to Rome . . .

Antonio cast a considering eye on his uncle Maffeo. The pope, as he had throughout these proceedings, was sitting silently and simply listening. His face, utterly impassive to anyone who did not know him well.

For a moment, their eyes met. Then the pope looked away.

But Antonio did know his uncle. Maffeo Barberini, he thought, was on the verge of some great and momentous decision. And Antonio thought he could guess which way he would decide. Underneath it all, the man now known as Urban VIII was something of a gambler.

Why else, Antonio thought wryly, would he had taken the risk of elevating so many of his clan to positions of such prominence in the church? That had risks and well as gains. Looked at the right way, it was almost Antonio's duty to gamble himself.

The least he could do! It was not, after all, as if Antonio would be gambling the same great stakes that sat on the table before his uncle the ppe.

So. This session on the Galileo affair seemed to be coming to an end. Thankfully. Antonio was careful not to be the first to rise. Only the third. By the time he came fully erect, he had made his decision.

Yes. He would send an emissary to Naples on the morrow. No point in dallying. Great matters were coming to a head; it was his simple duty to do the same with smaller ones.

Besides, there was this. The Spanish would be furious. But the Americans would be pleased. The reason for that was somewhat mystifying to Antonio. Such odd notions those creatures had regarding the position of women. Still, he'd paid careful attention to the political reports and didn't doubt the reaction at all. Artemisia Gentileschi was the most prominent female artist in all of Europe, of the few there were at all. Were Cardinal Antonio Barberini to advance his public and munificent patronage to the woman . . . stealing her right away from the king of Spain . . .

Once again his eyes met those of his uncle.

Yes. Antonio was sure of it, now. The Americans even had an expression for the thing, he suddenly recalled. Knows which way the wind blows.

Chapter 32

"He's in here, Father." Billy Trumble stood at the door of the suite of rooms Buckley had occupied, leaning against the doorpost in the nerveless way that had come to mean "death room" to Mazzare over the years.

Mazzare studied the young Marine officer for a moment. Very young, he was, just out of his teens. Billy's complexion definitely looked a little green under the surface.

"Perhaps you should stand your guard outside, Billy? Fresh air might do you good."

"Uh, Father, I can't. Lieutenant Taggart told me to take guard here."

Taggart must have been standing somewhere in the room beyond. Mazzare heard his voice drift through the open door. "There's no need for that now, Lieutenant Trumble. I think the father is right. Go outside and get some air."

"Uh, thank you, sir." Billy gave Mazzare a flashing glance of thanks and started marching away. A very military-looking stride it was. The boy's back was ramrod-straight. Mazzare knew the posture was simply young Trumble's way of maintaining himself under the circumstances.

The priest sighed, wishing now he had brought Gus along. The big Jesuit somehow seemed to anchor the world around him to solid, physical verities. The presence of the earthy German would do Billy good that Father Mazzare wasn't entirely equipped to deliver. Silently, he wished the lad well—hardly a lad, now, he reminded himself, a commissioned officer as he was—and went through the doorway.

Inside was the gloomy, smoky half-dark of a candelabra-lit room. Buckley had picked one of the smaller, more cluttered suites higher up in the house, apparently for the view. Or possibly for the profusion of overstuffed and riotously carven furniture it held. In the far corner, by the long drapes that hid the night sky outside, stood Lieutenant Taggart, looking down at something that was hidden from Mazzare by a chaise-longue. Mazzare stopped and waited to be noticed.

Taggart was only a moment before seeing him. "Father," he said. "There's been a murder."

"Is it . . . ?"

"Aye. Mister Buckley." Taggart nodded, downward to what was on the floor by him. "Mistress Nichols has the laying out of him."

Sharon stood up, then. Mazzare hadn't spotted her, kneeling next to the corpse behind the chaise-longue. "Hello, Father."

"Good evening, Sharon." Mazzare nodded to her. The candlelight revealed nothing of her complexion or how steady she was, but she had the hooded eyes and upward tilted face that were the universal signal of the young lady retaining her composure under stress. Professionalism in every line of her poise, Mazzare thought. Her father's influence. He could guess that in a good light the blood would be visibly drained from her face, but that there would not be a tremor in evidence. "How, ah—how did Joe die?"

"I think, um, that is—" She took a deep breath. "I think you should take a look, Father. There's no easy way to describe this."

"Forgive me, I shouldn't stand here like a spare part." Mazzare began to walk over. This seemed all wrong. He had lost count of the deathbeds and sickrooms he had attended. The places where people came in their time to the ends of their lives. Somehow it was easy to give comfort, to be the calming presence, in places like that. Violent death was harsher. Bad enough when it happened in the street, or was carried into the emergency room. To find it like this, in an almost domestic context—Mazzare had never tried to wear what he thought of as his professional face in such a situation. This was something the police did. For the first time in years, he felt himself resist the first step forward. The prayer for strength was almost wordless. Our Father, who art in heaven—and then mute appeal.

Forward he went, feeling his face set into the serenity of his office. Around the chaise, to see the scene that Sharon had found. There was scarcely more to see than Buckley's form, face-down on the floor, dark and shiny stain around him. A dark and shiny puddle, as the candlelight flickered and reflected in it. Red.

"This is how we found him, more or less." Sharon's voice was cool as could be.

Mazzare did not look at her. Felt, somehow, that even so slight a touch as his gaze would cause her composure to collapse. His own didn't feel too strong. Strange, after seeing so many battle-corpses. The context made so much difference.

"Have you determined a cause of death?" He realized as he said it that it was pure cop-show. The urge to giggle was fortunately faint.

"Someone really wanted to make sure." Sharon's voice was flat now, as if the familiar routines of second-rate scriptwriters made the thing seem somehow homey. "I think he died of strangulation, this cord around his neck here. But then they bashed in his skull at the back here and cut him across the belly. They . . . did a lot of other things, too. There are multiple traumas." She put a sleeve across her face and breathed in, deeply.

Mazzare wished she hadn't. The smell was overpowering. He closed his eyes, tried to breathe shallowly through his mouth, to ignore the smell of the corpse and the final stinking indignity of Buckley's death. "How do you know?"

"That he was dead first?"

"Yes."

"If they'd cut him before they killed him, there'd be more blood. He's draining, not bleeding."

Mazzare opened his eyes, looked up a moment. The words. He concentrated a moment, to bring them to mind. Somehow, he didn't want to speak the Latin over this one. It had to be the up-time version. "Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace."

"Amen," said Sharon.

"Aye. Amen," added Taggart.

Mazzare nodded, once. Taggart was stoutly Presbyterian, and made no secret of his dislike of popery. But, a good man to the core, he would not begrudge the dead the right words by the lights of whoever chanced to speak them. "Thank you, Lieutenant. Thank you, Sharon. I think we should see that Mr. Buckley is attended to, yes? Lieutenant, can you have one of your men find someone—"

Before Mazzare could say anything further, Sharon interrupted. "Uh, Father. I'd rather we didn't do anything. Not until Ruy—Ruy Sanchez, I mean—gets here." She glanced at Taggart. "I asked the lieutenant to send for him."

Ruy Sanchez? Mazzare drew a blank for a moment. Then he placed the name. The factotum—to use a polite term—for Cardinal Bedmar, the special ambassador from the Spanish Netherlands. The old Catalan soldier—to use another euphemism—whom Sharon had been spending so much time with these past few weeks. Mazzare was still completely mystified by the relationship.

"Ah. Why Sanchez?"

Judging from the expression on her face, Sharon herself was a bit mystified by her relationship with Sanchez. For just that moment there, she seemed like a confused little girl. Quite unlike her normal self. As a rule, Sharon Nichols exuded a level of poise and composure far beyond what you'd expect from a woman in her early-mid twenties.

It was all Mazzare could do, for an instant, not to bark a laugh—insane laugh, under the circumstances. The nickname of Die Fürstin which the German population of Magdeburg had bestowed upon Sharon—the word meant "princess"—had been more of a tribute to her martyred fiancé, Hans Richter, than anything else. But . . .

The name had stuck, as such things sometimes do. Stuck, and then begun to spread, as other people observed the young woman's stately manner in public. The fact that Sharon was black—and very dark-complected at that—simply added to the glamorous myth. Black people were not unknown in the Europe of the 1630s. They were even somewhat common, now, in some of the major ports like Amsterdam. But they were still exotic, and the continent of Africa itself was almost completely unknown.

The damned human race was quirky, as Father Mazzare had long recognized. God had some purpose there, he was quite sure, though he didn't pretend to know what it was. People had their prejudices; but they also had their love of legendry. So, a woman from an unknown continent and a mysterious future, daughter of a doctor whose medical wizardry was now a legend in itself across half of Europe, betrothed of Germany's great martial champion Hans Richter, had taken on the aspect of royalty. Something similar, if not identical, had happened to Rebecca Abrabanel.

Even worldly wise and often-cynical Venice was susceptible. Mazzare had observed any number of times that, at the public gatherings the Venetian elite was so fond of, the Case Vecchie clustered around Sharon more than any other member of the delegation. Nor were all of them—even most of them—young men with obvious motives. She was even more popular with the daughters and matrons of the upper crust. They tended to mob her a little, in a genteel sort of way. In much the same manner, Mazzare suspected, that Princess Diana had been mobbed in the years before her death by American socialites at charity functions. Even though she too, in her last years, had not technically been a princess at all.

Sharon looked back down at Buckley's corpse. "I'm not exactly sure myself, Father. I did it on the spur of the moment, without really thinking. Ruy, well . . . he doesn't talk much about it, but I'm quite sure he has more experience with—ah—this kind of thing than anyone else I know. And . . ."

She shook her head. "There's something wrong here, Father."

Mazzare choked audibly—half a suppressed, hysterical laugh; half a protest at a naked, bestial universe.

Sharon smiled grimly. "I guess that sounds idiotic, doesn't it? Yeah, gee, no kidding, there's something wrong about a murder. Especially one this brutal. But that's not what I meant. There's something wrong about the murder."

* * *

Coming around the corner, the first thing Frank Stone and his brothers spotted was Billy Trumble. The young Marine was leaning against the wall next to the entrance in front of Joe Buckley's building. Even from a distance, he looked . . .

"He's practically green," hissed Ron. "It must be true. Shit!"

Gerry was scowling in the exaggerated manner that only teenagers can manage. " 'Shit,' is right. Joe was a good guy."

Frank didn't really share his youngest brother's attitude toward Buckley. Hadn't shared, he reminded himself bleakly. Frank had always found the reporter a bit two-faced. Not a bad guy, no, but way too self-absorbed for Frank to like him all that much. Still, he'd hardly wanted anything like this to happen to him.

"Let's go see what Billy can tell us," he said. He began marching over, his brothers trailing in his wake.

When they came up, Billy gave them a weak little nod. "Hey, guys. You heard about Joe, huh? Yeah, it's true." He paused for a moment, clearly controlling his gorge. "Jesus, you oughta see him! No—don't."

Billy glanced at the door. "Don't do up there, guys. Just take my word for it. Lieutenant Taggart probably wouldn't let you in, anyway."

Frank swallowed. So did Ron and Gerry.

"Bad?" asked Gerry, half-whispering the words.

Billy wiped his face with the back of his uniform sleeve. "You wouldn't believe it. They tortured him first. Then . . . oh . . ."

He turned away and doubled up. Vomit splattered the side of the building and the garbage-strewn ground in front of it.

"Jesus," hissed Ron. He looked like he might puke himself.

Frank thought he probably looked about the same. His stomach sure didn't feel good. He was definitely feeling light-headed. Not even so much at the horror of what had happened to Buckley, but at the greater horror of what might happen in the future. To Giovanna.

But he managed to control himself. More than anything, Frank needed to figure out what to do. Now.

He waited impatiently—some part of his mind feeling guilty at the impatience—until Billy was done. As soon as Billy drew in a deep breath and managed to half-lift himself, hands now placed firmly on his knees, Frank stepped up and patted him on the back.

"You okay?"

Billy nodded.

"Look, Billy, I'm sorry but I've gotta know. You say they tortured him? I mean, Joe wasn't just murdered?"

Billy shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was thin but firm. "No. Christ, Frank, there are pieces of him spread around. His fingers—belly—" He broke off, giving his head a shake so violent it was more like a dumb beast trying to rid itself of a swarm of insects. "Just take my word for it, will you?"

Frank nodded and gave Billy another pat on the shoulder. "Okay, man, no sweat. I just . . . needed to be sure." He glanced at his brothers meaningfully. "I guess we'd better . . . uh, be off, now."

Billy finally managed to raise himself erect. He took another deep breath and then gave Frank something that might in really bad light have been able to pass for a smile.

"Probably a good idea." Billy glanced unhappily at the doorway. "I need to get back up there anyway." He took an uncertain step toward it.

But Frank and his brothers were already around the corner before Billy made it to the door. As soon as they were out of sight, they started running.

* * *

When Ruy Sanchez came through the door after a young officer nodded him past, the first thing he saw was Sharon Nichols. The sight of the woman, as it had for weeks now, arrested him for a moment. Had Sanchez known that Mazzare had, not long before, been puzzling over the matter of Sharon's relationship with him, the Catalan would have been mightily amused. Since he himself was only—finally!—beginning to sort it out.

It was not so much that the woman herself was confusing, though there were many times that Sanchez found her so. It was more a matter, he'd finally realized, that Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz—as he'd called himself for several decades now; to his amazement, with complete success—had managed, not for the first time in his life, to place himself in a quandary.

Sharon still hadn't noticed him, standing in the doorway. Neither had the priest standing beside her. So, Sanchez took the moment to examine her.

Then, very softly, sighed. Two weeks earlier, after as serious and determined a campaign of seduction as Ruy Sanchez had ever launched—and he was quite good at it—he'd come to accept the fact that he'd met his match. Not for the first time, to be sure; but it was still a rare enough experience to cause him to sulk for several days. The cardinal had been quite sarcastic about it, too. Not that Bedmar knew any of the details, of course, because Ruy Sanchez never discussed his amatory affairs with anyone. But he and the cardinal had been together now for many years, and the old bastard was hard to fool.

That left only two options: abandon the campaign with a gracious salute to the victor; or . . .

Sanchez had spent a week mulling over the "or." And, by the end, decided he much preferred it to the alternative.

As he'd feared he would, alas. Whatever else he was, the Catalan was no fool. His pretense at nobility had gone unchallenged, true enough, but that was mostly a result of his connection with the cardinal and the fact that few men who knew Sanchez would challenge him lightly. Few, indeed, would challenge him at all; even now, as he approached his sixtieth year of life. In his own way, he was somewhat famous in the insular world of hidalgo Spain and its territories. Well known, at least; and if not esteemed, he was certainly given wary respect.

None of which, he well knew, would make—to use the American expression he'd picked up from Sharon—a "spit's worth of difference" to her. He might as well advance an offer of marriage to a Spanish infanta. Granted, Sharon Nichols would be gracious in her refusal, where an infanta—or her father, more likely—would have Sanchez clapped into a dungeon. Refuse him she would, nonetheless—if anything, even more decisively than a Spanish princess. The Catalan had only a dim sense of the way in which Americans gauged these things, because they viewed the world so differently than other people he'd known. But he understood enough—thought he did, at least—to know that he would be considered an utterly unsuitable spouse for such as Sharon Nichols. By she herself, leaving aside her father or anyone else.

It was all . . . very confusing, and left Sanchez feeling uncertain of himself and what he should do. There was nothing in the world that Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz detested more than being confused and uncertain.

That detestation made him clear his throat more noisily than he meant to. Sharon and the American priest looked over, startled.

"You sent for me, dona?" Stubbornly, as a sop to himself, Sanchez used the Catalan term instead of the Spanish señora or the Italian signora. He knew it was silly, but not even Ruy Sanchez could bring himself to call Sharon Nichols by the girlish diminutives. Not in any language. Unmarried or not, she was simply impossible to address other than with the fullest respect.

"Thank you for coming, Ruy," said Sharon. She gestured at the corpse whose feet were the only thing Sanchez could see from where he stood. "You were told what happened?"

He nodded. "The soldier who brought your summons informed me."

"It was hardly a 'summons,' Ruy," Sharon murmured, smiling. It was a little smile, and a sad one. He wondered about that sadness. Most of it, to be sure, was due to the death in the room. But some, perhaps . . .

Old habit swept his hat from his head in a gallant flourish. "From you, dona, any request sent to Ruy Sanchez is considered a summons. I would no more think to disobey than—"

Sharon barked a little laugh. "Oh, Ruy—give it a rest!" She shook her head, smiling more widely. "I will say you can always cheer me up. Even here, even now. But, still, put a cork in the testosterone, would you? Just for a few minutes—I know it's a lot to ask."

Sanchez smiled back. He understood the term "testosterone" now. Sharon had explained it to him. Twice. The second time, laughing, after he'd strutted for minutes when she explained it the first time. Ha! The truth! Confirmed even by Americans, with their dazzling science!

She motioned him over. "Come here, please. I want you to look at this. I think—no, I'd rather hear what you think, before I say anything."

* * *

It took Sanchez no more than three minutes to draw his conclusions. It was not difficult. Certainly it was not upsetting. Sanchez had seen far worse, as a young man, in the course of the endless border wars in New Spain with the savage indigenes of the mountains and deserts. Not all of which barbarisms, by any means, had been the work of the indigenes themselves. By the time he was twenty, he'd understood that savagery was the common property of mankind. The same skin, whatever its color.

He might have despaired then, had he not discovered in the arms of his first wife that other properties were shared and common also. Those he chose to treasure. For the rest, there was always his sword.

He rose. "This is fakery. The man fought. Not well, I think, but fight he did. Those teeth broke; they were not broken. The rest—"

He made a contemptuous gesture. "All done after he died. The garrote is what killed him. Not a good death—what is?—but better than most. It would have been quick, at least, as deeply as that cord is driven into his neck."

The priest was frowning. "All . . . that? But—why?"

Sanchez shrugged. "Much of it, I think, was done from sheer fury. The murderer probably did not expect his victim to strike back, and flew into a rage when he did." He pointed to the intestines spilling onto the floor. "Why else inflict such a wound? No torturer would, for a surety. And most of this was done to make it seem that the man was tortured."

The priest was still frowning. Whether that was because he was puzzled or simply because a frown was his way of maintaining composure in the midst of barbarity, Sanchez could not determine.

"I still don't understand why."

Neither did Sanchez—and the matter was beginning to intrigue him. Given Buckley's past activities, of course, there were a multitude of possible suspects. One of them being . . . well, Sanchez himself.

He decided it would be best to depart now, before that thought occured to the Americans also. Besides, Cardinal Bedmar needed to learn of this matter at once. So, with a flourish, he made his farewells and came as close to scampering out the door as Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz ever came to scampering.

* * *

Which was not very close at all. After he was gone, Sharon Nichols shook her head and said: "I swear, that man will swagger into his own grave." But she was smiling when she said it. The first genuine smile on her face since she'd entered that horrible room.

Chapter 33

The funeral that took place the next day was wholly lacking in Venetian pomp, but drew a ceremonial all of its own. The arrangements had been simple enough; Gus had dealt with it. It had turned out to be easy to persuade the nearest church to let them hold the service, and a grave was to be had for ready money. Given the state of the corpse, no one even proposed employing the services of a mortician. The Marines, sharing Gus' own grim attitude, had taken care of wrapping the body. The casket, of course, was closed.

Mazzare had not even the beginnings of a notion what religion Buckley had had, if any, and Sharon hadn't known either despite their being at college together. So it was a requiem mass, by default, since there would have been complications at the very least had Jones, as the only Protestant minister in town, done the service in his own native liturgy.

He had expected a quiet affair, with just the staff and the ambassadorial party turning out.

Not a bit of it. Mazzare had stepped out of the sacristy, accompanied by a small squadron of Venetian altar boys, to see a church packed wall to wall. In the front pews, the embassy party minus the corporal's guard they'd left behind. Behind them, Mazzare recognized several Venetian dignitaries. None of them of the first rank, and the highest of them would need to puff himself out to make the second rank, but nothing happened by accident in this town. Someone—likely several someones, some number between one and Ten—was sending a message of support.

Mazzare was not really surprised. Outside, he'd been told by Gus, a small mob from the Arsenal had gathered for the funeral also. Joe Buckley's articles had been passed around the Arsenal too, in special editions printed by the Venetian Committee of Correspondence. For whatever reason—always hard to know with that mysterious body—the Council of Ten had chosen to turn a blind eye both to Buckley's activities as well as the propaganda work of the city's small and oft-derided Committee.

Heinzerling himself thought it was because the Council of Ten saw Buckley and his popularity in the Arsenal as an asset to Venice. True, the Venetian elite itself had often been the target of Buckley's muckraking. Buckley had had the touch, however unpolished he might have been, and the Venetian masses had especially enjoyed one article he'd written on the Council of Ten, which he or some wit of an editor had entitled "A Conspiracy of Harlots."

But Venice had not survived for so many centuries in Europe—a republic among monarchies for a thousand years—because its upper crust was given to fits of pique. The real danger they faced was not rebellion on the part of the city's masses, it was foreign intervention. More than once, Venice's powers had used the Arsenalotti to drive out an alien presence which, for one reason or another, the Council of Ten had not wanted to confront directly.

Mazzare wondered if such a maneuver was being undertaken again. And who would be the target?

The Spanish? Maybe . . .

But, if so, Sanchez seemed determined to be the joker in the deck. He'd turned out for the funeral also, and in full hidalgo formal attire. A message from his master, or just here because of Sharon?

Following the service, Buckley went by boat from the church to his grave, accompanied by a fleet of, not mourners exactly, but people who wanted to be seen to be mourners. It seemed a little unreal to Mazzare as he spoke the words and watched the crowd gather. He had visions of political funerals in South Africa and Northern Ireland, and stumbled over the words of committal as visions of riot crossed his mind.

But the funeral was wholly lacking in drama as well. The gravediggers stepped forward on cue as the mourners began to file out of the graveyard. Mazzare took off his stole, and looked to the gray sky that threatened rain but had not yet delivered.

"Larry?" Jones interrupted the reverie that Mazzare always fell into after funerals. "There's a message from Benjamin."

The Jewish lawyer had remained at the embassy to mind the store. "What does he say?" Mazzare asked.

"The State Inquisition is declining to investigate."

Mazzare frowned. He had, naturally, reported the matter to the appropriate authorities as a murder. "Why?" he asked.

"They think it's the Spanish or the French, and they can't arrest any of the diplomats."

"What?" Sanchez had heard.

Jones colored. "Señor Sanchez," he said, "I'm only repeating what was told to me."

Sanchez blew through his mustaches. "Did they have the courage to make this accusation to my face, I should be much tempted to take advantage of my diplomat status." He smiled in a way that was all the more unnerving coming from a man of almost sixty.

Mazzare decided to try conciliation. "Now, señor, I feel sure the accusation was not meant for you personally—"

Sanchez threw back his head and laughed. "Your Excellency forgets that I was here for the conspiracy. Took part in it, in fact. The Venetians would believe anything of me."

A cold wind was idly toying with the clothes of the few mourners who yet remained in the graveyard, but that was not all that made Mazzare shiver. The sheer Latin ferality of the man, when he chose to show it, was quite intimidating. In that moment Mazzare realized he himself could well believe anything of the stocky Spaniard, whom Sharon had once described to him as "Don Quixote on steroids." It was easy to see him smiling in badly feigned innocence while a windmill was blown to smithereens by stealthily planted charges. Tilting he would regard as pointlessly ineffective.

"Behave, Ruy," Sharon said.

"Forgive me, Dona Sharon." Then, turning back to Mazzare: "And forgive my manner, Excellency. The plain fact of the matter is that our nations are in arms against one another. But neither I nor His Eminence the cardinal would resort to such as this. If nothing else, I am pricked by the suggestion that we should do something so foolish. The man Buckley was an annoyance to us, as I understand he was to you—"

Sharon had the good grace to look a little embarrassed at having apparently released a little diplomatic communiqué of her own. Mazzare decided he would do no more than issue a word to the wise—later.

"—but there are other means to deal with annoyances of his kind."

"Quite," Mazzare said. He'd heard rumors of prosecutions for libel and slander, challenges to duels and so forth. It had been only a matter of time before something had descended on Buckley; it was just that the murderer got to him first.

"Please accept my assurance and my word," Sanchez continued, speaking very formally now, "Your Excellency, that to my knowledge this matter was not conceived of at the embassy of His Most Catholic Majesty."

"Thank you, Sanchez," Mazzare said.

Sanchez bid them all good day, and left immediately. That made sense. If the Venetians were casting aspersions of that character, his master the cardinal Bedmar and the Spanish embassy in general needed to know so as to start protesting immediately. Loudly and in strong terms; Mazzare wondered how Bedmar kept a straight face. The old cardinal was one of the sharpest operators in Venice, for all he played the role of feeble old man in over his head.

And, at that, he might well have to keep a straight face through all those protests. Sanchez was himself a competent operator, and had not gone so far as to pledge his word absolutely for the clean hands of the whole Spanish presence in Venice. There were, in effect, two missions from His Most Catholic Majesty in town right now, and no firm guarantee that the left hand knew what the right was doing. Mazzare had met Bedmar several times, and the other Spaniards likewise. Never in the same place, and always on neutral ground. The regular mission—the one from Madrid—was polite, reserved and distant, saying nothing and giving away less. Bedmar, on the other hand, seemed to be hinting at a second agenda, a possibility that there was more to discuss than just how little personal rancor there was arising from the fact that their mutual nations were at war. There was, however, nothing of substance in that as yet. It was, at best, frustrating.

Jones interrupted this rather gloomy train of thought. "Penny for 'em," he said.

Mazzare looked around and saw that he and Jones were the last to leave, apart from the gravediggers, who were settled into a steady rhythm as they buried poor Buckley in Venice's soggy silt.

"Poor value for money," he grunted.

"Stuck for ideas?" Jones said. "Me too."

They began to walk away from the grave, toward the gate, threading through the ornate monuments under which the Venetians buried their dead. "The Venetians say it's the French or the Spaniards," Mazzare said, "and Sanchez denies it. The Spanish part."

"You believe him?" Jones asked, pulling his coat tighter about him against the chill breeze of early spring.

"I'd like to."

"Larry, don't get all gloomy on me again. Last time I turned out for one of your funerals, you went all serious on me. Did everything but start another Reformation."

Mazzare, suddenly reminded of old Mrs. Flannery's funeral, bit off the smart answer he'd been assembling practically from the moment Jones had opened his mouth. Irene Flannery, retired schoolteacher, dragon and stalwart of St. Mary's back in Grantville, had died in a cavalry raid on the town, too stubborn to leave her home for the safety of the downtown buildings where Grantville's heavily armed population had ambushed and defeated a horde of Wallenstein's raiders.

It had been four days before she'd been brought in for burial, and that sodden, rain-lashed graveside attended by not a single genuine mourner had been the place where Mazzare had suddenly decided to stand up under the weight of his vocation. To finally heed what God had been telling him for over a year since the Ring of Fire.

He sighed. "No, Simon, it's not that. It's just that poor Joe's been murdered and I don't know what more we can do."

"Find out who did it," Jones said, simply, as they came to the graveyard gate.

Mazzare said nothing. He hoped Jones's irrepressible sense of humor wasn't taking a turn for the morbid.

"I'm being serious, Larry," Jones said. "Even if we can't take it to a trial and the hanging someone richly deserves, we need to know who's out to get us."

"Everyone." Mazzare gave a single bark of laughter. "We're not paranoid, Simon, everyone really is out to get us."

Jones chuckled. "We could at least try to identify which of them is prepared to murder us in our beds."

"True."

"Of course, this isn't a cliché yet," Jones added.

"What?" Mazzare looked askance. Jones was being even more oblique than usual.

"Oh, you know. Father Whazzisname investigates." Jones held out his hands in the shape of a frame, to see how Mazzare would look on screen, or possibly in something by Chesterton.

"Knock it off, Simon." Mazzare waved to call for a boat back to the embassy. They were busy a few moments getting in and negotiating with the gondolier.

"Seriously, Larry," Jones continued as the boat pulled away, "we need to look into this."

"Finding the time will be a trick. And how do we do it anyway? I can just see me going to Count d'Avaux and asking him where he was on the night in question."

Jones looked at him sharply. "Why'd you think it's the French?"

Mazzare gave back his best Poirot impersonation. "I zuzpect evreewahn, and I zuzpect nowhan." Then he shrugged. "No, the count was just the first example to spring to mind. Although if I had to draw up a short list of suspects, most of the names on it are French ones."

"Figures. Anyway, since you seem to be in the right frame of mind, who are our suspects?"

Mazzare counted on his fingers. "First, all the countries we're at war with. France, Spain, England, in that order."

"You think Sanchez was lying?"

"No, it's that he almost certainly doesn't know everything. There are really two Spains, these days. He's with the one we might be able to do business with some day."

"Flanders," Jones said.

"Quite. Except it's a lot bigger than Flanders, nowadays. Bedmar's definitely on that side, I think, if he's on any side bar his own. We can probably rule him out."

"England too, on that basis."

"True," Mazzare said. "Fielding's as smooth and two-faced a limey as ever I met."

"Prejudice, Larry?" Jones clucked his tongue slyly.

"No, I lived there, remember. I'm not suggesting he's smooth and two-faced because he's a limey—and they found that term funny, by the way. No, as I was saying, he's as smooth and two-faced as they come, but if he's a schemer then he's a schemer who's doing nicely, I hear, out of us being in Venice. And even if he wasn't, Hider would be sitting on him, and Hider right here has a lot more clout than Charles Stuart at the other end of Europe. So, you're right, not the English. The Danes? We've had hardly a peep out of them here, and I doubt they care what happens all the way over this side of Europe. No, they've got more parochial concerns."

"The Austrians?" Jones suggested. "Come to that, Wallenstein? Yeah, sure, he's supposed to be an ally now, but with that man . . ."

"Doubt either. Wallenstein's hardly on the radar. What are we doing in Venice to annoy him that even comes close to matching his need to rely on us where he lives? Undercutting his interest in the copper market? Sure, he sent off a nasty letter or two, but that's piddly stuff. As for the Austrians, the Empire's pretty much resigned to us cocking a snook at them."

"Really?" Jones raised his eyebrows.

"I'm sure of it. All the bloviating they've been doing has been pretty much for form's sake. They've had to put up with the Venetians for so long they don't seem to care any more, and we're not likely to do them any harm here that we're not doing bigger and better closer to home. Besides, the Spanish Habsburgs regard this as their theater, not for their cousins to dabble in."

"Stipulated. For the moment. That leaves us with France and Spain proper, then, and—who else?"

"Everyone Buckley annoyed," Mazzare said, with a sigh.

"That's me on the list of suspects, then," Jones said. "You too, actually."

"Right. But the first people he annoyed were the French and the last were, at a guess, the Turks."

"Turks?"

"That was going to be his next piece, as far as Benjamin could tell, and I found some notes to that effect in his room. He'd been making himself a nuisance around Bey Koprulu's staff. I understand he'd been told his presence wasn't wanted and would be, ah, reduced if it was detected again."

Jones nodded. "Should have remembered the reports. I do recall reading that a couple of days ago."

They rode the rest of the way in silence, watching the sights and sounds of Venice slide by. It was, Mazzare thought, living proof that there was such a thing as too beautiful. The palazzi were carefully constructed to be light and airy in their facades, of properly balanced proportion and perfectly tasteful adornment. Even the lack of maintenance was part of the charm. Still and all, he couldn't help feeling that a little more austerity would improve the place no end, or at least let some of the poorer neighborhoods front onto the canal.

As they turned onto the narrow canal that led to the embassy, a maneuver that always put Mazzare in mind of sailing into a cave-mouth, they saw an unfamiliar boat tied up in front, slightly ornate despite Venice's ferocious sumptuary laws that insisted on the same kind of gondola for everyone.

"Visitor, then," Jones said as they disembarked and paid the gondolier. He nodded at the new boat. "Someone important, from the looks."

"Wonder who?" Mazzare mused.

* * *

Mazarini met them inside the door, chatting with Sharon Nichols. He must have been practically standing sentry. "Your Excellency," he said, in very solemn tone of voice, "I have a letter for you here. It's from the Holy Father."

Mazzare took the proffered note. It was a very fancy looking thing. He could only stare at the missive, for some moments, while his mind raced over the possible contents. He had a sense that the blood had drained from his face.

What was most likely, he thought, was that the pope had decided to firmly and decisively reject Mazzare's views on the Church's proper theological and historical perspective and future course. If so, Larry Mazzare would finally find himself in that place he had most wanted to avoid since the Ring of Fire. The place where Martin Luther had once stood—almost half a millennium back, in the world Mazzare had come from, but not much more than a century in this one.

Or was it, perhaps, the place where Thomas à Becket had once stood, when he made his decision?

But there was no point in delaying. Very pale, but composed, Mazzare broken the seal and opened the letter.

It took him some time to read it. The Latin was even more flowery than usual. Mostly, though, it took him some time because the contents were the last thing he had expected. In fact, they didn't even qualify as "last." He had never once imagined he might receive such a letter—neither in his dreams nor his nightmares. He had to read it three times over before he finally absorbed it.

"I am summoned to Rome," he said harshly. "I must appear before the Inquisition."

* * *

On the landing above, where he'd been eavesdropping, Gerry Stone pulled his head back and tip-toed away as fast as he could.

"Michel was right," he muttered to himself. "Every which way from Sunday. The bastards are pulling out all the stops."

* * *

Seeing the shock on the face of Simon Jones—Sharon's too—Mazzare belatedly realized that he'd perhaps chosen his words poorly. Simon was such a close friend that the priest sometimes forgot that the Protestant minister would automatically place a different twist on certain things.

He cawed a little laugh. "Oh, for Pete's sake. Simon, to 'appear before the Inquisition'—which is slang to begin with; the correct term these days is 'Holy Office' or 'Commission of Inquiry'—just means about the same thing as 'to appear in court.' In case you'd never noticed, lots of people have to appear in court. The defendant is only one of them. There is also the prosecutor, the witnesses—"

"They want you to be a witness, then?" Jones' sigh of relief might have knocked down walls. The thatch walls of the lazy first little piggie, anyway. Maybe even the second.

Mazzare looked back down at the letter. "No, as a matter of fact. They want me to appear as the attorney—well, that's not the right term exactly—for the defense. I'm to defend Galileo before the Holy Office."

It was all Mazzare could do not to crumple the letter in his fist. Not in anger, but in a sudden and almost uncontrollable surge of triumph.

Simon Jones might be a Protestant, and thus unfamiliar with the intricate workings of the Roman Catholic Church. Not to mention something of a hillbilly naïf. But the Methodist minister had a very good brain, and it didn't take him more than a few seconds to realize the truth.

"Lord in Heaven," he murmured. "It's cracking, isn't it? Cracking wide open."

With some effort, Mazzare took the time to fold the letter back up in a neat manner. Then, handed it back to Mazarini. "How soon?" he asked.

"Immediately, Monsignor." Mazarini smiled. It was a thin smile, but a cheerful one nonetheless. "Not even a man of my modest station is used simply as a courier."

Mazzare nodded. "No, of course not. You're to be my escort and—ah—"

Mazarini raised a stiff hand. The smile was on the verge of cracking open itself. "Please! I assure you, Father, that no one—certainly not Giulio Mazarini!—has ever once contemplated such crude terms as 'jailer' and 'watchdog.' The Holy Father has great trust in you."

The diplomat cocked his head a bit sideways, narrowing his eyes. "Um. Actually, I think that last bit may even be true. And what a rare wonder that would be, in this odd business we practice."

Mazarini now gestured to the door. "I have made all the arrangements, Father. A boat to take us to the mainland. Thereafter, an excellent carriage. We can leave as soon as you are ready."

"I'll just need a half hour to pack some things." Mazzare turned to Jones. "This is something I have to do, Simon. Must. But . . .  can you come with me? I'd find your company a help and a comfort."

Simon didn't hesitate for more than a second. "Yes, of course. But who'll hold the fort for us while we're gone? Stoner's back up in Padua."

"I'll send word for him to get right back," said Sharon firmly. "In the meantime, I imagine I can handle whatever needs to be. It can't be that hard, right? Basically, I just pass the buck until Stoner gets back, and then he passes the buck until you do. Stoner's a world-class buck-passer and I'm no slouch either, if I say so myself." She gave Mazzare a dazzling smile.

Neither statement was actually true at all. Sharon was almost compulsive about doing her duty and, in his own inimitable way, Stoner was even more so. Still . . .

Mazzare had other things on his mind, and the fact was that he had a great deal of confidence in Sharon Nichols. Even, for that matter, in Tom Stone. Besides, he understood enough already just in the short time he'd had to think about it to realize that the pope's decision to appoint Mazzare to defend Galileo was going to transform Europe's politics. Whatever real diplomacy would be practiced in Italy for the next period would be practiced in Rome, not Venice.

"All right, Sharon. Thanks." He started to turn away to attend to his packing, when a last thought arrested him. "Oh. And—ah—explain it to Mike Stearns as best you can when—"

He managed not to glance at Mazarini. "—whenever you can send off a letter."

Sharon's smile was really quite dazzling. And Mazzare noted with approval that she didn't even glance up the stairs toward the radio room. "Yeah, sure, Father. Consider it done. I'll start writing the letter as soon as you and the monsignor are gone."

* * *

"We don't have any choice, Frank," insisted Ron. "You heard what Gerry said. I mean, we're talking about the Inquisition here. They're not even respecting Father Mazzare's diplomatic immunity any more. You think they won't cut our throats—or your girlfriend's—without blinking an eye? Okay, sure, Antonio's a little too sure of himself, maybe. But, you ask me, he's an island of sanity in this crazy place."

Frank ran fingers through his hair, glancing at their youngest brother. For once, the sixteen-year-old wasn't looking in the least bit cocksure. Gerry looked just plain scared.

Frank didn't blame him. He was scared himself. Joe Buckley tortured and murdered—the authorities making it clear they were going to look the other way—and Father Mazzare now hauled off to an Inquisition dungeon in Rome. Michel Ducos hiding out from his own French embassy at the Marcolis—they'd tried to kill him, he said. Given how crazy everything had suddenly gotten, Frank had no trouble believing it either. Michel certainly had a nasty-looking defensive wound on his hand

Worst of all, in some ways, was that their dad wasn't available to talk to. He and Magda were in Padua. As much as Tom Stone could often drive his sons nuts, at bottom they trusted him more than most kids did their parents. Even his good judgment.

The thought of his father in Padua did the trick. Frank knew that Antonio Marcoli was planning to travel through Padua on the way to Rome. Frank could at least get Giovanna out of the murder hole that Venice had turned into and maybe keep her safe. And he could ask his dad what he thought about Marcoli's plan when they reached Padua. Frank had always thought the plan was pretty nutty, but . . .

All of Italy looked to be a madhouse. So maybe it wasn't so crazy after all.

"All right," he said, "we'll do it. As soon as that bastard Mazarini's gone with the father."

Gerry had drifted over to the window in their rooms as Frank had ruminated. Suddenly, he stiffened. "They're leaving now. And—damn it, look!—they're hauling away Reverend Jones, too."

The look on his face combined indignation and fear. "I thought they couldn't do that? I mean, he's not a Catholic to begin with."

Ron shrugged. "I'd say they can pretty much do whatever they want to. What's Mike Stearns gonna do? Send an army across the Alps at the same time we're fighting everybody else in Europe? Not hardly."

Fifteen minutes later, they slipped out of the back door of the embassy and headed for Murano.

* * *

The radio at the embassy wasn't capable of reaching across the Alps during the daytime, so Sharon would have to wait until the evening window to send a message to Magdeburg bringing Francisco Nasi and the prime minister up to date on the most recent developments. In the meantime, she decided she would write a letter.

In the end, after dillying for a bit, Sharon decided to make it a brief note. That would be enough to bring Sanchez to the embassy, and she found herself unable to write anything more extensive. She needed to be looking him straight in the face when she said what she had to say.

Whatever that might be. She still wasn't really sure. She needed to look at him.

Chapter 34

Sanchez arrived the next morning. After he was ushered into the salon in the embassy where Sharon had decided she would meet him alone, she took some time to study him. Sanchez underwent the scrutiny patiently. He simply stood before her where she sat on a chaise, saying nothing. Patience? she wondered. Or was it simply fatalism?

Abruptly, she spoke. "Did you have anything to do with it, Ruy?"

Sanchez began to stiffen. Suddenly angry, Sharon slapped her hands on her thighs. "Stop it, Ruy! This is me. I don't care about your damned hidalgo honor and your solemn vows and your so-called oaths." It was all she could do not to grit her teeth. "I've never seen where any of that precious crap—and that's what it is, crap—has kept any of you from butchering anyone you felt like. Or committing every other crime in the book."

She lifted her head. "So tell it to me, this time. Just straight up. Did you kill Joe Buckley? And if you didn't, do you have any idea who did?"

Sanchez blew through his mustaches. Then, his broad shoulders moved in a chuckle. "Such a difficult woman! In this, as in everything."

He shook his head. "No, Dona Sharon, I did not do it. Nor did Bedmar. The cardinal would have used only me for such a deed. I cannot vow that it was not done by the regular Spanish embassy, the one representing Madrid directly. We have, in truth, little to do with them. But . . . I do not think so."

She believed him. She wasn't sure why, exactly, but she did. It came as a great relief.

Greater than she'd expected, in fact. She found herself starting to wonder about that, but Sanchez continued to speak.

"Your second question, of course, is much more difficult to answer. Do I have any idea who killed him? Oh, certainly—many ideas. But that is all they are, simply ideas. Do you wish me to expound upon them?"

She shook her head. "Not at the moment, no. Later, yes. In fact, that's the reason I asked you here. Well, one of them. I want to ask you to help me try to find out who murdered Joe. You're the only person I know in Venice who'd have any idea where to even start."

Sanchez cut right past that. "Yes, certainly. And the other reason? Or reasons?"

She studied him again for a moment. Then, looked away and studied the Venetian sky beyond a window. "Me. You and me." Impatiently, she flicked her hand. "I'm not saying this well. What I mean is, that I think we need to define our relationship. Finally."

She smiled at the sky. "I really do not want to be fending you off while you and I play Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson—your Sherlock to my Watson, I'm quite sure. I wouldn't mind so much—well, I would, but at least it wouldn't be hard—if you did your groping with your hands instead of your brains. But, you don't."

Which was true. In all the many occasions they'd spent time together, Ruy had not laid a finger on her except for an occasional polite offer of a hand to help her out of a gondola or to cross a difficult patch of ground. He had been courtesy incarnate—while never ceasing his endless flirtation. At times when she'd not been immersed in her quiet melancholy, she'd found it quite amusing. Even, yes, quite flattering. Even, yes, sometimes—not often—quite attractive.

The first time she'd met the man she'd thought of him as Feelthy Sanchez. That image had faded away, as the weeks went by in his company. Ruy Sanchez had the sex drive of a goat, true enough, even at his advanced age. But there was nothing filthy about it. Lust, yes; leering, no. Just the honest if not particularly couth drive of a man with more than his share of testosterone.

And . . . so what? The same had been true of Hans Richter, after all, even if the outer shell had been as different as could be imagined. Hans, a sweet and shy young German boy; Ruy, a self-confident and swaggering old Catalan hidalgo. But Hans, too, had flooded her with that same raw desire. And if you wanted testosterone—Sharon issued a soft, sad little laugh—all you had to do was get in a motor vehicle with Hans at the wheel. Or—a stab a pain, here—fly with him in his beloved airplane. He'd sometimes driven Colonel Wood a little nuts. Sharon could remember one occasion when Jesse had ranted at him: Why don't you try—just once, Hans!—thinking with your brain instead of your balls?

She looked back at Sanchez and discovered an odd expression on his face. It took her a moment to place it. Then, when she did, she couldn't help but laugh a second time. Softly, again, but not sadly.

They'd been speaking in English, as Ruy always preferred. He said that was to improve his command of the language. Sharon knew that for a little lie. Sanchez, an old seducer, would take any advantage he could get. Better to fumble a bit with the intended seducee's language—perhaps she'd find the accent charming—than to place oneself in the dreaded position of an instructor.

It was the word relationship that had confused him, she realized. How delightful. She'd have to remember that. Confusing Ruy Sanchez was an accomplishment. Not like climbing Everest, maybe, but perhaps up there with climbing the Matterhorn.

He understood the word itself, of course. But Europeans of this day and age—the Spanish, for a certainty—simply did not think of people in terms of their "relationship." The word was at once too broad and too individual. They thought in terms of specific relationships. Class, status, age, whatever. Behind that American concept lay centuries of technical and industrial advance and the social looseness that came with it. A world where custom and tradition had lost its firm grip needed that individual substitute. In the world of Ruy Sanchez, it fit about as well as a square peg in a round hole.

A glimmer of understanding came to her, then. Just a glimmer.

"What do you want from me, Ruy?" Sharon looked down at herself. Once again, she slapped her thighs. "Besides this, I mean? Or is there anything else?"

Even covered by the rich material of her gown, the sound was distinctly meaty. Not surprising—the thighs strained at the fabric just as the breasts did. No one would ever mistake Sharon Nichols for a Vogue model. Still, it was the sound of firm flesh, not flab.

She looked back up at Sanchez, challenging him with her dark eyes. "What do you want? Or is it impossible for you to even think that straightforwardly? Do you always need to fit yourself—and me—into categories? Like 'conquest'?"

She looked over at a settee nearby. "I swear, I'm almost—not quite—ready to march over there and spread my legs just so you can get it out of your system." She brought her gaze back to him. "We've got a term for that, by the way. Americans, I mean. It's called a 'mercy fuck.' But it's usually something bestowed on boys."

To her surprise, he did not bridle at all under the implied insult. True, he stroked his mustachios; but, with Ruy Sanchez, that was a given. As well ask a rooster not to crow at dawn; or a tomcat not to prowl at night.

When he took the fingers away, there was a smile there. A sad one, she thought.

"Do not ask, Dona Sharon. The answer is . . . impossible." His square shoulders seemed to get squarer still. "I shall no longer attempt my—ah—courtesies. Although—" His eyes flicked to the settee. "—should you reconsider at any point . . ."

The humor, Sharon realized, was simply a cover for sadness. Why?

The realization came to her almost like the proverbial thunderclap. It was all she could do not to clap her hand over her mouth in shock and surprise.

He wants to PROPOSE? He's old enough to be my father! That was quite literally true—Ruy Sanchez and James Nichols were almost exactly the same age. An old goat is one thing, but . . .

Another realization came to her, then. Not like a bolt from the blue, but welling up from underneath. There had always been something about Ruy Sanchez that had struck an odd chord with her. She'd called it "twinkly," she remembered. For the first time, she understood what it was.

Ruy Sanchez reminded Sharon of her father. The two men were so different in so many ways that she'd never thought of it before. But now . . .

She rose and went to stand by the window. Yes. Two men born and raised in a society's underbelly who had clawed their way out of it. Yet, beneath the smoothly polished exterior, always retained something of that primal origin. Including the sheer testosterone ferocity that served some men in such places as their shield and sword.

That was not often in evidence, with her father, but it was there. Always there, somewhere, beneath the doctor's surface. Sharon remembered, once—she'd been twelve at the time and her mother was still alive—coming out of a movie theater with her parents in a rough part of Chicago. Two young men had moved toward them. Their purpose? Impossible to know, but there had been that sense of aggressiveness about their movements.

Their purpose would never be known because her father had gone through an instantaneous transformation. Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde—or was it the other way around? Sharon could never remember. One instant, a courteous and sophisticated professional man in early middle age; the next—

Sharon could remember being far more frightened by her father than the two young men, even though none of his—anger? pose? who could tell?—was aimed at her. You got some kinda problem, motherfuckers? James Nichols was not a big man. But, in that moment, his entire upper body had seemed to swell, his face jutting forward, the muscles in his neck like stretched cables. If he'd had hackles, they would have been raised. The beast below, filling the man.

The two young men had lost whatever purpose they'd had, immediately. They hadn't run away. Not quite. But Sharon was sure they'd set a new Olympic record for the fifty-yard walk, if there was such an event.

She looked back at Sanchez. He was still just studying her, silently, through hooded eyes.

Yes. Oh, yes. But there is that one great difference, isn't there?

Sharon's eyes went back to the window, moving across the seascape of Venice below. For all the surface glitter of the city and its undoubted beauty, it was ultimately tawdry. Even foul, in this time and place. It was a world with many wonders, to be sure. But it was still the world that had destroyed Hans Richter. A world she loathed, hated and despised, when all was said and done.

Yes, that difference. James Nichols had come into a world which, however uncaring it might often be about its underbelly—and a big, foul underbelly it was, too—allowed individuals from it to claw their way out. Even sanctioned it; even praised the act of clawing. James Nichols was known to publicly joke about his "close encounter with that downstate institute of learning I don't think I'll get into the details about"—and the joke invariably elicited laughs from the men who heard it. Men of a different background and a different color, but it mattered not at all. Always, beneath the laughter, there was that genuine respect. Even admiration.

There would be no such respect and admiration for Ruy Sanchez. Not in this world. The trajectory of his life mattered not at all. The origin was enough. He was tolerated for his skills, and accepted because he had the good grace to cover his origins with the requisite lies. But there would always be certain limits, certain boundaries—and, always, the silence of a man who really couldn't even understand the source of his own bitterness.

How odd it seemed to Sharon—shocking, even—that he should extend those limits to her. Would see her as a suitable object of his lust—his world would accept a seducer, and enjoyed its salacious gossip about nobility—but . . . nothing further. Such a gulf there was between them. The difference in age was the least of it.

The gulf itself drove the decision. In this, too, Sharon Nichols would use anger as her tool.

She turned to face him, squarely, her hands pressed to her thighs. "Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz—or whatever your real name is, and how about telling me some time? I'd actually like to know—and . . . that's a run-on sentence. Sorry. Weakness of mine."

She took a deep breath. "There is only one human being in this universe who will ever decide whether you belong in my bed. In whatever capacity. One-night stand—never mind; I'll explain that some other time, I'm sure you can figure out—ha! you!—the gist of it, anyway—or lawfully wedded husband. That person is me. Understand that in the marrow of your bones, or get out of my sight and don't come back. Comprende?"

Sharon was discovering that there was a real pleasure to be derived from startling Ruy Sanchez. It was fascinating. She'd never been at all interested in climbing mountains, but now she could understand at least some of the thrill involved.

The Matterhorn, all of it, beneath her feet. Ruy Sanchez, all of him, completely taken aback.

"Ah . . ."

"What is so hard to understand?" She gestured angrily at the window. "You think I give a damn what those people think? You'll see hell freeze over first, Ruy Sanchez. Freeze up like an Alaskan glacier. Siberia, with the Devil buried ten miles down."

Sanchez chuckled. "I was actually not concerned about them, Dona—"

"And cut the stupid Donna business! My name's Sharon, not Donna. Plain and simple Sharon. Been that since I was a toddler. Except for that jerk Falasha Jones when I was ten who thought it was funny to call me 'Cherie' until I pounded the crap out of her."

"Um. Yes. Somehow I do not find that difficult to believe. But what I was trying to say—ah, Sharon—is that it was your own people who concerned me. I would not give offense."

It took her a moment to understand what he was talking about. That just made her angrier. "To hell with that. If Mike Stearns doesn't like—whatever I do—I will explain to him that the difference between 'prime minister' and 'prime rib' doesn't mean squat to a nurse. As for my father . . ."

She couldn't help but wince a little. "Oh, sure, he'd have a fit if I decided—which I probably won't, Ruy, I'll give you fair warning—but so what? Won't be the first time. He had a fit about Hans, too, at first. Had an even worse fit over Leroy Hancock, although I'll admit my dad turned out to be right about that one. What a sleaze bucket he turned out to be."

She tried, for a moment, to picture Ruy Sanchez with her father in a room somewhere. Discussing it like gentlemen. The image caused a burst of laughter. "Do me one favor, though. In the event—not likely—that you wind up meeting James Nichols, do try to maintain, will you? I don't even want to think about a room filled waist high with testosterone, between you and my dad putting on the act."

Sanchez suddenly bowed. It was a purely formal gesture.

"Very well, then. I shall respect your wishes, Do—ah, Sharon. Yes. I wish to formally request—what is that American expression?—'your hand in marriage,' I believe."

When he rose, he looked very dignified. Ruy did "dignified" extremely well, too. Sharon had noticed that before. It was one of the things she liked about the man.

One of many, in truth, now that she thought about it. Granted, there were other things she found quite unlikable. However, that had also been true of Hans Richter. The span of centuries could be bridged, but it could not be waved away.

And, so what? Sharon had made no attempt to change Hans, after all, beyond a few habits. She'd always thought it was stupid anyway to accept a man only to immediately try to turn him into something he wasn't. On a practical level, why bother? Find someone else, dummy, if it bothers you that much. On a deeper level, because something about the idea offended Sharon Nichols' concept of basic human dignity.

That concept also included honesty, she reminded herself. "Ruy, understand that the answer will probably be 'no.' There are many—ah—problems—"

"I understand." He gave the mustachios a little flick of the finger. Not a stroke, just a gesture to highlight their color. The mustachios were thick and rich, to be sure. They were also more gray than black. "My age."

Sharon shook her head. "That's the least of it. Well, maybe not the least, but—"

She broke off, startled. It actually wasn't that important to her, she suddenly understood. Not trivial, certainly, but not vital either. Why should it be, really, other than the certainty—if she made that decision—that she would be a widow at an early age. "Old goat," Ruy Sanchez might be, but he was a very, very vigorous goat. The many decades of his life were apparent in the lines of his face. Few of them showed in that stocky, broad-shouldered body, so obviously still muscular even under the rich costume of a hidalgo.

For just an instant, and for the first time since she'd met him, Sharon had an image of Ruy in her bed. Naked, as she herself; coupling. The image vanished almost as soon as it came. But, as she considered the residue, she realized that it was not . . . unpleasing. Certainly not repellent. In some ways, quite the opposite. She'd more than once, laughing, accused Hans Richter of being a goat, after all. To which he'd replied with a grin and an eager nod. The simple fact was—Sharon had to be honest with herself—she reacted with animal heat to that kind of rambunctious male, provided it was a man she cared for. Hans had kept her well exercised in bed, and she didn't doubt for a moment that Ruy would do the same. Nor—don't lie to yourself, girl—that she'd enjoy it immensely.

And, again, Sharon was startled. She'd just crossed a boundary here, she knew. Or made a transition, it might be better to say. Since the morning of October 7, 1633, when she'd seen the column of smoke rising from the Baltic and known that Hans was dead, this was the first time she'd even thought of sex, as anything other than an abstraction.

Only six months? She probed, to find the guilt, and was surprised to find . . . well, some. But not really very much.

You slut. Then she shook her head. It had just been a thought, after all. It wasn't as if she had any plans to act on it. Not soon, certainly.

"No, Ruy, that's not the most of it. Let's start with the fact—awkward little detail, here—that you are the agent of a foreign power with which my country is at war. Eh?"

Sanchez smiled. "That is indeed . . . ah, awkward, as you say. Still—" He waved his hand theatrically. "Here my age comes to advantage! Wars come and go, alliances change—overnight, often enough. We are a wicked, wicked race, much given to depravity and duplicity." He pressed his right hand on his chest and gave her a look of utmost sincerity and ardor. "All except in matters of the heart."

Sharon burst into laughter. John Barrymore couldn't have done that better! Sir Laurence Olivier would have knelt at the feet of his master. Lesser actors would have fled in despair. Many, committed suicide.

She shook her head weakly. "You do make me laugh, God knows you do. All right, Ruy, we'll let that sit on the side for the time being. Do keep in mind, though, that my own loyalties are rock solid. Don't doubt that for a moment."

He examined her with none of his earlier drollery. "Yes, I know that, Sharon," he said quietly. "I have understood that from the beginning. Well, very soon, at least. But—I am serious now, for the moment—my age does have certain advantages. That your loyalties are rock solid, I do not doubt. The fact remains—how to say it?—that 'rock solid' simply describes the substance of the thing. It says nothing about the form."

Her puzzlement must have shown. Ruy stroked his mustache, as if to concentrate his thoughts. "Let me put it this way. The same end can often be achieved by an alternate means. So it may be—I have my loyalties also, you understand—that both loyalties can find a different place to meet than on a field of battle."

He placed his hand over his heart again. The gesture, this time, was solemn rather than theatrical. "More I cannot say, at the moment, because of those same loyalties."

"Oh." Sharon looked away. She thought . . .

Maybe. Could this be another glimpse of that possibility that both Francisco Nasi in his briefings and Father Mazzare in his—usually frustrated—musings had talked about? A distance between Spain itself and its supposed province in the Netherlands? The king here—but the prince there? If so . . .

She lapsed into a bit of theatricality herself. "Well. In that case, it might almost be considered my duty to receive your courtship, wouldn't it? Very depraved and duplicitous of me, of course."

Ruy smiled. "To be sure. A new Mata Hari."

Sharon wondered where he'd heard about Mata Hari. Not for long, though. If there was any principality in Europe that hadn't stolen or finagled or just bought in the open market copies of Grantville's prized history books, she didn't know where it was. Maybe a clan chief somewhere in the west of Ireland.

She grimaced. "That woman got shot. Or hanged, I can't remember which."

"Please!" Ruy drew himself erect, exuding outrage and indignation. Again, Barrymore couldn't have done it better. "That was done by the French!" He scowled. Olivier would have swooned at the sight of that tight-set jaw, the quivering mustachios, the frown like Jove's. "The French. Just like them. Shoot a woman! Yes, it was a firing squad. The ungallant bastards. No Spaniard—well, perhaps the Spaniards—but certainly no Catalan—"

"Oh, give it a rest!" Sharon shook her head, laughing. "You'd shoot a woman in a heartbeat, Ruy, if you thought it was your duty."

"Well. Duty, yes. Simply because it was ordered, no."

There was a finality to that last sentence that Sharon didn't find herself doubting at all. Whatever else he was, she'd understood for some time now, Sanchez was not dishonorable. If anything, she suspected, he would hold himself to a tighter standard than most men would.

I can live with that, she decided abruptly. "All right, Ruy. Still, the answer will probably—almost certainly, to be honest—wind up being a 'no.' But . . . if you're willing to risk the most-likely waste of your time and effort . . ."

Barrymore and Olivier, both, would have collapsed then. Struck down by the sudden realization of their hopeless amateurism.

Sanchez had taken off his plumed hat when he'd first entered the room, and placed it on the back of an armchair. Now, he snatched the hat up, swept it across in a flourish, and gave a bow that no courtier in Madrid could possibly have bettered.

"Dona Sharon! A minute wasted in your company is time better spent than a millennium in paradise! I, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, swear it is true!"

* * *

When she stopped laughing—she had to sit down, for a moment there—Sharon rose and slung her purse over her shoulder. It was very big purse—more like a traveling bag, since she always carried an emergency medical kit in it—which a smaller and less broad-shouldered woman would have found fatiguing to carry for very long. For Sharon, it was almost an inseparable part of her. She even took it to the opera.

She ushered Sanchez out the door. "Come on, Ruy. The main reason I asked you to come here—I, Sharon Nichols, swear it is true—is to ask for your help in finding Joe Buckley's murderer. Remember?"

She cocked an eyebrow at him.

"Certainly! And notice that I did not give it a moment's thought. So sure may you always be of me."

As they moved down the corridor, she couldn't keep the laughter from bubbling up. "Like I said—Don Quixote on steroids."

"Indeed. Whatever 'steroids' are. If they are something like 'testosterone,' it is certainly true. And . . ."

His voice trailed off for a moment. When he looked at her, sideways, the brown eyes were soft, a bit sad, and . . .

"You are indeed my Dulcinea, Sharon Nichols. Believe it true."

Jesus H. Christ. The guy is actually in love with me.

That he'd read Cervantes, didn't surprise her. That he'd embraced the book . . .

Didn't surprise her either.

The answer is still probably NO, she told herself firmly. Tomorrow, next year, whenever.

But she couldn't deny the warmth the knowledge brought to her heart. Nor that it was the first real warmth that had come into it since a column of smoke rose over the sea. She wondered if she were being unfaithful to Hans? Just the warmth, alone?

No, she decided. Hans Richter had been many things, including rash and reckless and often unthoughtful. Petty and spiteful, never once.

* * *

In the foyer below, they encountered Benjamin Luzzatto and Ernst Mauer. Billy Trumble was standing guard at the entrance, along with two other Marines.

"Oh, good, you're both here. Hold down the fort for the day, would you? I won't be back until sometime this evening." Sharon gave Billy a somewhat imperious look. "Lieutenant Trumble, would you be so good as to accompany us?"

"Uh, sure, ma'am. Whatever you say. The father left you in charge until Mr. Stone gets back." Billy's eyes flicked back and forth from Sharon to Sanchez. The youngster was obviously both surprised and more than a little dismayed. "Ah, going out on a date?"

"Today? Of course not!" No duchess could have said it more frostily. The very idea! Then, seeing Billy suitably abashed, Sharon relented.

"No, not a date. Although—" Struck by an impulse, Sharon took Ruy's hand in hers. "I may as well take the occasion to let everyone know that Señor Sanchez has just formally proposed to me."

That brought a delightful round of eyes-wide-as-saucers. It was all Sharon could do not to giggle.

"Of course, I told him there was no question of my accepting his offer, though I was deeply honored. Not for the moment, certainly. But I would think about it. Perhaps, in the future . . ."

She let that trail away. "However, today we are about another matter—which is why I'd appreciate your assistance, Lieutenant. I've asked Señor Sanchez to help us find and apprehend the murderer of Joe Buckley, and he has agreed to do so."

She'd relinquished Ruy's hand by then. The hand went straight to the mustachios, stroking them fiercely.

"The villain may as well cut his throat and be done with it," Sanchez growled.

There was always that about Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, in the end, whatever else might be said of him. He could make a statement like that—and not one person who heard it so much as cracked a smile.

Billy just about snapped to attention. He swept open the door to the embassy. "After you, Mr. Sanchez."

Chapter 35

Once they got out of the embassy, Sharon felt decisiveness leaving her. Pouring out, rather, like water through a ruptured dam.

She looked around, uncertainly. "I really don't have any idea where to start." She gave Ruy a look of appeal.

Sanchez rose smoothly to the occasion. "The last activities of Buckley, I think. I know he was attempting to interview the Turks. Ha! Speak of folly."

Billy Trumble straightened. His hand slid to the pistol holstered to his waist. As an officer assigned to an embassy guard, he was entitled to one of the precious up-time automatics. Sharon knew little of guns, beyond how to fire them—her father had insisted she learn that much—but the thing was certainly wicked-looking.

"You want to start with the Turks, then?" the young lieutenant asked gruffly. As gruffly, at least, as an twenty-year-old could manage.

Sharon saw Ruy disguise a little smile with another stroke of his mustachios. He was amused by the young American's bold front, obviously. But, just as obviously, was not prepared to deride him for it. No doubt Ruy had many memories of bold fronts himself, as a youth.

"No, there is no point," the Catalan responded. "I do not really suspect the Turks."

"Why not?" Sharon asked.

Ruy shrugged. "They are certainly callous enough. But, first, that was not a callous killing, it was a savage murder done by a man in a rage. I am quite sure of that; and I suspect the murderer was not entirely sane as well. Hard to explain some of those wounds otherwise. The Turks would have simply sent an assassin—they have very good ones—who would have strangled him and been done with it. Or slid a stiletto between his ribs. Why torture him? Still further—why fake the torture? The Ottomans have no motive to do such. Not that I can see."

His eyes ranged the canal for a moment, as if he sought inspiration in its filthy waters. "Secondly, they have simply not been here long enough. Even a man as heedless as Buckley could not have infuriated them so quickly. No, whoever it was, it was someone who had known Buckley for some time."

Billy's expression underwent a peculiar shift. From bold front to . . . startled?

Sanchez didn't miss it either. "Yes, Lieutenant?"

Billy rubbed his face. "Well . . . I can't see any reason why they would . . . they seemed to like him, in fact. But, well, he'd been spending a lot of time, there just before the end, hanging out with the Committee of Correspondence." The lieutenant pointed toward the north. "Over there on Murano. You know, at the building where the Marcolis live."

"You have been there?" Sanchez asked.

Billy gave Sharon a nervous glance. As an officer in the Marine guard, he'd presumably been subject to Mazzare's instructions to keep a diplomatic distance from the Committee in Venice. "Well . . ."

Sharon smiled sweetly. "Your secret is safe with us, Lieutenant. Ruy could care less, and me—well, I'm just the temporary buck-passer. Temps are always forgetting to pass things along, you know."

"Uh, thanks. Yeah, well, I did go out there. Twice. Once with my buddy Conrad and once alone. Conrad couldn't come along the second time because, well—"

Sharon smiled more sweetly still. "Yes, Lieutenant. I know about his girlfriend. The whole embassy knows. I remember Father Mazzare muttering just the other day that if one of our Navy officers manages to get the daughter of an Arsenal guildmaster pregnant, he'd strip his hide off. More precisely, he'd have Gus Heinzerling strip his hide off."

Billy grimaced. Then, shook his head. "Not much chance of that! You wouldn't believe the way they watch their girls around here."

"Come on, it's not that bad." Sharon gestured toward the embassy building. "After all, none of the chambermaids have chaperones watching over—oh."

It was Billy's turn to smile. "Yeah. Oh. Sure, they let them work out of the house. But the minute there's a whiff of anything . . . You have noticed, maybe, that Giovanna Marcoli hasn't worked here for weeks. Soon as Old Man Marcoli got wind of Frank—zip—out she came. He hasn't let her out of sight since, let freedom ring be damned. She's under his eye or that of her brothers and cousins every minute."

Sharon frowned. "I'd gotten the impression that the Marcolis approved of Frank. They certainly haven't ordered him to stay away from Giovanna, I know that much."

"Approval's got nothing to do with it, ma'am. They do approve of Frank. I think if he asked her to marry him—and he just might, too, he's that bowled over—they'd agree in a heartbeat. But there won't be any hanky-panky going on before then, if you know what I mean." He glanced toward the Arsenal. "It's the same with Conrad's girl. He's actually gotten pretty damn popular over there, even with the guildmasters. I think they admire his cussing ability, if nothing else. It is pretty impressive."

That was interesting. Sharon hadn't paid any attention to the embassy's progress in the Venetian shipyards, since the first days after their arrival. Between her heavy nursing duties—more like half-faking a doctor's consultations—combined with Magda's round-the-clock commercial ventures, she'd been too preoccupied with her own affairs. The last she'd heard, Conrad had been encountering sullen resistance in the Arsenal to his new-fangled American notions.

She suddenly remembered the heavy turn-out from the Arsenalotti at Buckley's funeral. "What's the sentiment over there, these days? About Joe's murder, I mean?"

"They're really pissed, ma'am—uh, pardon the language. But, I mean, they really are. Conrad told me just last night that if they ever figure out who did it, the bastard'll be lucky to get out of town alive. There are thousands of those Arsenalotti and they're tough as nails. They've run people out of Venice on a rail before, you know."

Belatedly, he realized who was present. He bobbed his head nervously toward Sanchez. "Uh, meaning no offense, Don Ruy."

The Catalan grinned cheerfully. "None taken, I assure you. And you are indeed quite right. I have personal experience with those fellows from the Arsenal. Most forthright, they are, in moments of displeasure. I was reminded at the time of the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Except the bulls were more civilized. And considerably less insensate."

"They do that already, Ruy?" Sharon asked, her curiosity momentarily piqued. "Running the bulls at Pamplona, I mean. I thought—I don't know." She issued a little laugh of embarrassment. "I thought maybe Ernest Hemingway invented that."

"Oh, no. La Fiesta de San Fermin dates back two centuries already. He was the saint who was gored by the bulls, you know. He was probably drunk at the time. He often was, they say. The manner in which this made him a martyr of the Church escapes me at the moment. Saint Ernest, I believe, is the one who was martyred by a great fish of some sort."

He said the last with a perfectly straight face. Sharon didn't dare ask if Ruy had any idea who Ernest Hemingway was, or if he'd ever read The Old Man and the Sea. With Ruy, you never knew. He was just as capable of inventing a story on the spot, and improvising it to incredible lengths without missing a beat.

Sanchez was now looking toward the Arsenal. "Hmm. Interesting," he murmured. "And such a pleasure that would be . . ."

He turned back to her, smiling. "But let us not jump to hasty conclusions. To be sure, it probably was the French. Ungallant bastards. Shoot a woman! Still, other possibilities cannot be overlooked. Perhaps a triton or some other fantastical creature took offense at Buckley." He waved at the canal. "These waters are said to be full of them."

Sharon snorted. "Your prejudices are showing, Ruy."

He shrugged. "Perhaps. For the moment, I think we should begin on Murano. Most likely the Committee had nothing to do with the affair. They are said to be most ineffective. Still, it is a beginning."

* * *

Padua was a nice-looking town, at least in silhouette. As the boats pulled up at the river-dock below the town, Frank couldn't see much more than that, what with the midafternoon sun begin to set behind it.

"We stay here tonight," Antonio Marcoli said. "I know an inn."

"A lot of work to do getting unloaded first," Frank remarked.

"Oh, sure," said Marcoli. "We got plenty of big strong boys with us, though." He grinned. His own hands were no strangers to hard work, it had to be said.

It was still going to be hard work. Frank and Messer Marcoli were in the third boat of three. Rather than get faster, oared boats, Marcoli had hired three smallish sailing boats. Big dinghies, Frank supposed they were. There were twelve of them on the mission, and any of the three boats would have held them all comfortably with any reasonable amount of baggage. For some reason, though, trying to fit all seven Marcolis and the word "reasonable" into the same plan was something that just couldn't be made to happen.

First of all, Massimo had to be forcibly dissuaded from bringing the printing press. Yes, it was portable. Yes, it disassembled into easy-to-carry sections. Yes, you could have the thing up and running from its box in under two hours—once you had a Philips screwdriver and were familiar enough with the thing to do without the instructions. On the other hand, "easy to carry" meant two strong men on each of three boxes, and if it got dropped it'd probably be ruined.

What had clinched it was the simple argument from time and speed. Four hours a day just setting the thing up and taking it down, not counting the time spent actually printing. Time spent buying paper en route. Time spent composing propaganda en route. Time in which Galileo was being held in Rome awaiting trial, and a date would be set any day now.

Massimo had given in. The idea of instant, reactive propaganda . . . Frank hadn't dared ask, but he suspected that Massimo had been thinking of passing out progress bulletins on the rescue as it went along. Frank privately thanked whatever deities, watchful spirits, guardian angels and even Great Cthulhu that they didn't have TV or radio in Italy yet. Massimo would have been trying to lug a transmitter along to do a play-by-play.

Of course, Massimo had only given in for small values of "given in." Then the negotiations had begun as to how many crates of preprinted propaganda they would take along for distribution en route . . .

So now they were approaching Padua slowly, when they could have been here by lunchtime. They were doing it in three boats—eating still further into their store of funds—where they could have used one. And before they got to dinner and a bed for the night, apparently with a friend of Marcoli's wife's sister's husband, they had about a ton of revolutionary propaganda to haul out of the boats and up to wherever they were staying. They wouldn't even start on trying to hire a couple of wagons until the next day. Coaches were out of the question, of course. They had too much baggage for anything that was likely to move.

Bright side, Frank, bright side. Spending the night meant they'd have time to track down their father. In fact, as soon as the boat docked—he'd already arranged it—Gerry would make himself scarce and set off to find him. None of the Stone boys knew exactly where their father and Madga were staying, here in Padua, but they knew it was somewhere in or right next to the university where he gave his lectures.

* * *

Once they were on the mainland and into the carriage Mazarini had obtained for them, Mazzare decided they'd reached a point where their travels would be uninterrupted for a time. They'd be on the road for approximately two weeks, stopping only at night for food and lodgings. The carriage rode much too roughly for Mazzare to even think of writing notes. So roughly, in fact, that the trip itself would be tiring. Too tiring, he suspected, to allow him to make notes during their overnight stops, either.

He'd just have to make do with days of extended conversation. Hopefully, he'd be able to remember what was said and systematize it in writing once they reached Rome.

He turned to Jones, sitting next to him on the plush seat of the carriage. "Simon, can I ask you please to put aside the things you've heard about the Inquisition?"

The Reverend Jones nodded, although Mazzare was a bit amused to see the wary look on his face.

"The truth is this, Simon: Galileo got in trouble, more than anything, for annoying some well-connected scientists within the Church. The fact that he was usually ahead of what he could prove from his data didn't help. Made it look like he was contradicting the Church's interpretation of the Bible out of heresy. So what happened in the universe we came from is that they sentenced him to life in jail and commuted it to house arrest after he, ah, copped a plea. The Inquisition held a trial, but that was all. Galileo went voluntarily and cooperated rather than upset the Church."

Mazarini straightened up from his comfortable traveler's slouch on the seat bank across from them and sat erect, his hands planted on his knees. "It is different now."

"How?" asked Jones.

"There was no Inquisition. His Holiness called a Commission of Inquiry. Half of its membership are Inquisition cardinals. They have a report from a number of astronomers who say that there are errors of fact in Galileo's work and that he holds, defends and teaches something considered heresy at present." He glanced at Mazzare. "The exact words are significant, you understand."

Mazzare turned that one over in his mind a little. At present. "Do we know who the astronomers were?"

Mazarini grinned. "One of them was Scheiner."

Mazzare raised an eyebrow. Scheiner was one of Galileo's most bitter enemies. "And he used that form of words?"

"Yes. I guess it this way, that he is still angry with Galileo, but has begun to read Grantville's astronomy."

"Hold on," said Jones. "If they're prepared to accept that the earth moves on Grantville's say-so, why are they bothering to give Galileo grief? Am I missing something?"

"Politics, Simon," said Mazzare. "The church isn't just the pope, and he can't just order the whole church to follow his lead. There has to be some negotiation, you see, or it's the Church of England all over again."

Mazarini nodded. "There is this, too—the father-general of the Jesuits is involved this time. If anyone can put words in the mouths of kings it is him."

"So it's a show trial in a good cause, then?" said Jones, beginning to catch on. "Tennessee v. Scopes, and this time the monkey wins?"

Mazzare looked at Mazarini, quite intently. "That's my guess, Simon, yes." The last word had an upward tilt to it, which made it seem more like a question than a statement. A question addressed at Mazarini.

The Vatican diplomat smiled serenely. "My guess also. But, who can really know?"

It was all Mazzare could do not to glare at him. Mazarini turned his hands over and spread them wide, still smiling. "I am simply telling you the truth, Monsignor. I really do not think the pope himself knows yet what he intends to do." Mazarini turned his head and looked out at the passing Italian countryside. "The father-general . . . perhaps."

* * *

"Be careful, Magda," Stoner cautioned. He extended a hand to help her into the boat.

His wife gave him a glance that was just short of sarcastic. Magda was some twenty years younger than Tom Stone, more athletic, more coordinated, in better physical condition—and considerably more practical about most everything. Stoner's awkward perch on the side of the boat made his helping hand a dubious proposition. He was more likely to fall off himself and drag her into the river with him than anything else.

However, Magda was a dutiful German wife, at least for public consumption. Besides, she was also a better swimmer than Stoner. So she took her husband's hand—the fingertips only, in case she had to let go—smiled, and hopped nimbly into the rivercraft. Nimbly enough, in fact, that even the slender vessel—designed for speed, not cargo-handling—barely rocked under the impact.

* * *

The vessel's captain and crew were also attuned to speed. The instant the captain saw that the woman was securely seated and that her idiot husband was no longer actively attempting to capsize the boat, he gave the order to push away from the pier. Within seconds, the oars were in the water and the boat was making good speed toward Venice. They'd be there by nightfall.

The captain was pleased. That meant a good bonus. The young soldier who'd come up the river with them to fetch the man and his wife had promised as much. And while this was the first time the captain himself had ever done business with the people from the Swede's embassy, they had a good reputation with the boatmen on the river to Padua. The man was some sort of savant, who made this trip regularly. And, by all accounts, paid well, paid promptly—and never tried to skimp on the bonus.

Thankfully, he hadn't drowned yet. Given his clumsiness in a boat, the captain supposed that was just a matter of time. Still, he'd make sure the man stayed in the boat long enough to pay the bonus for this trip.

Looking around at the riverbanks, the captain noticed some sort of stir at the commercial docks now some distance behind. Other people, it seemed, had difficulty staying out of the water.

The passengers had craned their necks around and were observing the same little ruckus. Idle curiosity, nothing more. It was really too far away to see much.

"What is happening back there?" the woman asked. Her Italian was not bad, though the captain found the heavy Veneziano accent a bit amusing. Heavier than a native's, it was.

"Nothing significant, signora," he replied casually. "I think someone fell into the river and others are trying to fish him out."

"Oh, the poor fellow. I do hope they manage to rescue him."

But her concern was more perfunctory than anything else. She didn't spend more than a moment observing the distant commotion before turning back and facing forward. Her husband and the young soldier escorting them did the same, a few seconds later.

The captain didn't share even her minimal concern. He'd been a successful boatman for almost thirty years now. He'd never even bothered to learn how to swim. What sort of boatman can't manage to stay in a boat? Let the incompetent ones drown. They had no business plying the trade in the first place.

Chapter 36

As soon as they'd left Venice, Michel Ducos had pulled a tarp over himself and the bag he'd brought, and promptly gone to sleep. In truth, Frank thought Ducos looked exhausted. The wound he'd suffered on his hand seemed to be bothering him a lot, too.

Ducos had snored all the way up the Brenta, provoking giggles from Giovanna every time he turned over and grunted. That would have been interesting if they'd been pulled over by whatever passed for cops hereabouts, although Messer Marcoli had said Frank should relax, they were running ahead of even the news of their departure, let alone any pursuit.

Michel woke up in good time to help the boatmen tie up, and while Messer Marcoli paid the last quarter of their passage—his credit wasn't good for much in Venice, apparently—Frank decided to let the Venetians organize the unloading. He and his brothers would take advantage of the moment to see Gerry off quietly to go find their father.

That was no problem, as Frank had expected. Gerry was good at making himself scarce without being seen, and the Marcolis weren't paying the slightest bit of attention anyway. Frank had known they wouldn't. After all these weeks in close proximity to the family, he'd come to know them quite well. As much as he liked them—and he did, all of them, even if Giovanna was the only one he really cared about—he'd long since realized that if this new universe had had a television industry, the Marcoli family would have made the ideal subject for a situation comedy series.

The Marcoli Bunch, maybe. No, that was too sedate. The Seven Screwballs. No, that wasn't fair to Giovanna—which wasn't just natural prejudice on Frank's part. Even Ron would admit that when God had been passing around common sense to the Marcolis, he'd given all of it to the one and only female in the pack. Giovanna and the Six Loose Cannons on the Deck.

Alas, no. The problem with that title was that it implied that Giovanna was in some sense the captain of the crew.

Alas, no. The Marcoli males, revolutionary firebrands or not, were every bit as mired in some customs as any Italian. Listen to what the girl says? Nonsense! Practical matters are for men.

Besides, the title omitted the biggest goof in the bunch—Marius, the handyman. Whatever the Marcolis didn't mismanage, the hired help would invariably make good the lack.

Oh, well. Frank went back to his favorite pastime, which was watching Giovanna. She was something to watch, too, scampering around with her usual energy and giving constant advice to her father and uncle and their assorted sons—to which, of course, they paid no attention whatsoever.

It went well enough until they started to haul out one of the big boxes with the propaganda in it. The boatmen had been about to simply toss them up onto the wharf one by one, two men to a box, but Massimo would have none of it. He had a better idea. He insisted that the whole operation would be smoother and easier if they rigged up a tripod of spars on the wharf and swung a block and tackle off it. They could sway up the boxes onto the wharf without any effort, that way.

Thus spake Archimedes. And so he and Messer Marcoli fell to work, using materials from the boats that were lying around as well as such things as are wont to be found on wharves, even small river wharves like Padua's.

Frank stood to one side with Ron while Massimo and Messer Marcoli fiddled with their jury-rigged crane. Michel had wandered off somewhere. Giovanna had finally given up trying to inject reason into madness, and had found a seat on a barrel. The barrel was close to Frank, but just far enough away so as not to incite the territorial instincts of her family watchdogs. Had the matter not concerned Frank himself, he would have been mightily amused. No matter how enthusiastically preoccupied the Marcoli males got with one of their projects, they never got so preoccupied as not to notice where Giovanna was in relation to Frank. It was downright weird—as if they possessed some kind of automatic daughter navigation radar.

They were never nasty about it, he had to admit. By their own light, he supposed, they could even be considered tolerant. They did not object to Giovanna sitting next to Frank at the dinner table, and never made any attempt to look under the table to see if their daughter and her enamorata were playing footsie. (Which, they invariably were. By now, Frank's ankles were almost callused.) Nor did they object if she and Frank held hands whenever there was the slightest excuse for them to do so—such as helping Giovanna negotiate a street she had been walking since she was two years old. They didn't even object when Giovanna kissed Frank every time he left—although, after enough time had passed, comments would be made. Jocular ones, initially, rising steadily in serious timber thereafter. Frank and Giovanna had learned exactly how long they could maintain the kiss before Antonio would rise huffily to his feet.

They even made earthy jokes about the matter in Frank's presence—so long as Giovanna wasn't around to hear them. On one occasion, they'd been repairing the printing press and had had to fit a new drive shaft into its appointed slot. It proved difficult to get it in, as was often the case when mating a brand-new part to a used one. The Marcolis had lightened the burden with fifteen minutes' worth of ribaldry on the subject of how much more difficult it would be to mate two brand-new parts together—especially in the dark. Grinning at Frank the whole time. Frank's ears were red by the end of it.

They were, in truth, nice people. But they had their customs, and that was that. They weren't prudes about sex, they just set certain limits. By now, Frank was quite sure that if he proposed to Giovanna her family would agree instantly. Enthusiastically, in fact.

And . . . he was almost there. In truth, he would have done so already except that the prospect of having the Marcolis as his in-laws was just that little too daunting to accept yet. Especially when they were on the eve—no, not even that, anymore—of undertaking what was probably one of the screwiest stunts Frank had ever heard of. The Marcolis Go to Rome.

A little flurry of shouts broke Frank out of his reverie. The Marcolis were in the middle of hollering orders and advice at each other. Six opinions, not one of which matched. Naturally.

Frank reflected that in the time Giovanna's father and his cousin Massimo had spent lashing spars together and rigging the thing up, the boatmen, who were standing in the bottoms of their craft, grinning at this display of lubberly ingenuity, could have heaved up all twenty boxes and been on their way. They were both born engineers, that way. Perhaps the two finest examples in the world of the perils of being an autodidact.

Naturally, the boatmen had stopped work to watch the fun. Frank was suitably embarrassed on Messer Marcoli's behalf, although Antonio himself didn't seem to notice the grins, nudges, and sly chuckles he was getting from the peanut gallery down on the water. Giovanna just watched with cool disinterest. Frank was getting good at reading her expressions, and this one said Papa will grow bored of this game soon, don't worry.

That was the other thing that made Frank still hesitate. On most subjects, Giovanna was a levelheaded girl. Well, as levelheaded as a girl just turned eighteen ever gets, anyway. But that was still more levelheaded than Frank himself, half the time, he'd cheerfully admit. The problem was that Giovanna's good-humored sanity seemed to come to an abrupt halt when it reached that border which she and her beloved father both called The Revolution.

It wasn't the ideology that bothered Frank. Except for an occasional curlicue or excess here and there—he didn't think demanding that the church melt down all its gold—the artwork, too?—and distribute it to the poor was really such a great idea—Frank shared most of it himself. Hardly surprising, of course, since the core of the ideology came from the American up-timers in the first place. It was just that . . .

Did they have to be so impractical about everything connected to politics? Look at Mike Stearns, for Pete's sake. He was probably even more radical than the Marcolis, in lots of ways. But that never stopped him from being as canny and slick as you could ask for. Alas, in the Marcoli lexicon, the word tactics seemed to be a synonym for unthinkable.

"Done!" Marcoli shouted, dumping Frank back into the here-and-now. Marcoli and Massimo had spent some minutes pulling on things and, in the finest tradition of pioneer engineers since the dawn of time, kicking at the spars and lashings to make sure they were secure. Massimo sat on the back leg of the tripod to weigh it down. At a word from Messer Marcoli, one of the boatmen put the hook of the lower block under the sling of a stack of boxes.

"Marius!" Marcoli called, beckoning his handyman to come help pull.

Frank and Ron looked at each other, amused. They'd noticed before that whatever Marcoli's pretensions to liberty and equality, he invariably stuck Marius rather than one of his own sons or Massimo's with the worst of the grunt work. Not that Marius wasn't eminently suited to the lifting and moving of heavy objects. That was just about all he could be relied on for. And at that you had to watch him carefully. It wasn't just that the poor guy was on the dimwitted side. He also tended to be watching a completely different channel to most everyone else, most of the time.

And, of course, he was strong as an ox.

Antonio Marcoli shouted "Pull!"

Marius pulled. The boxes shot into the air.

Now, Massimo had paid attention to his Archimedes. He'd figured out where to sit so as to balance the boxes exactly. What he hadn't counted on was having the leg of the crane he was sitting on, left loose as it was, suddenly jerk under him like a spooked mustang. He also hadn't counted on this happening without sufficient warning. He really, really, hadn't counted on losing his balance.

His weight came off the spar, the spar shot into the air, and, in a neat demonstration of angular momentum, inertia, and slapstick comedy, Massimo was turned end-for-end in the air and landed head-first on the cobbles. Meanwhile, the boxes swung on the end of the tackle and plunged into the water between boat and wharf. Marius, ordered to pull on the rope, kept trying to do so—instead of just being sensible and letting go. All that he accomplished was being slammed into his boss' back. Marius fell, still holding the rope, and sent Antonio Marcoli flying into the water.

There was a thud down below, and then a splash. Frank ran over. "What happened?" he called down into the boats,

"The messer hit the boat and then fell in!" came the reply. They were fending their boats away from the wharf, peering into the water.

Frank looked. No sign of Messer Marcoli. There! Bubbles were rising. He looked again. Perhaps three feet to the water. He sat on the wharf, pulled off his boots, and let himself down into the river.

And was brought up short with a jar. It was only three feet deep! Frank felt around in the brown and turbid water and—there! He grabbed a handful of clothes and heaved. Marcoli came up, flailing and gasping, wild-eyed and obviously stunned. He coughed once, twice, and then began to retch. Frank tried to turn him over, put himself under, and then stood up with an arm under Marcoli, letting him throw up what looked like a gallon and a half of the Brenta's finest mud.

And then a groan. Frank tried to help Marcoli to a standing position, and was rewarded with a choked-off half-scream.

"My leg!" Marcoli screeched. He drew in a ragged breath between gritted teeth. "Broken, I think."

Frank looked up. The rest of the Marcolis were still standing on the wharf. Frank realized that he'd moved faster than all of them. A fact that was not, he was pleased to see, lost on a radiantly smiling Giovanna.

He shoots, he scores!

That was habit, though, more than anything else. Whatever else Frank had to worry about in the world, gaining Giovanna's approval was no longer one of them. He knew damn good and well that if he proposed to her she'd say "yes" before he even finished the sentence. She'd told him so. Three times already.

Still, it was hard not to crow with glee. Saved by the bell! He was sorry Messer Marcoli had gotten hurt, of course, and hoped the injury wouldn't be too serious.

Just serious enough to scuttle this whole crazy expedition. That's all Frank asked for. By nightfall, Gerry would have found their dad. Whatever his quirks, Tom Stone just had a naturally calming influence on the people around him. Between him and the leader of the pack being laid up with a busted leg . . .

What could go wrong?

* * *

By the time they finally got Antonio Marcoli into a bed at the inn they'd be staying at that night, Gerry was back.

"Dad's gone. He and Madga both. Got called back to Venice." The youngest of the three Stone brothers looked miserable. "I can't believe it. We must have passed them on the river, going the other way. Nobody even noticed."

Frank sighed and ran fingers through his air. "All right. Bad luck, that's all. Look at it this way. Every project gets its fair share of bad luck. So we just got ours. From here on . . ."

He couldn't finish the sentence. It was too asinine, under any circumstances, much less these.

Combine The Marcoli Bunch with "project" and you just automatically raised bad luck by an order of magnitude. By now, Frank was pretty sure that was a law of nature.

"That may be the stupidest thing I've ever heard anyone say," mused Ron.

"I know," said Frank glumly. "Best I could come up with."

Chapter 37

Sharon had never been across to Murano, before. Within five minutes of arriving on the northern island, she hoped she never would again. Even by Venetian standards, Murano was run-down.

To make things worse, it soon became apparent that Billy Trumble didn't really know his way around the island. He'd set off confidently enough, once they'd disembarked. But after guiding them through part of the island's maze of alleyways—as often as not, just spaces between artisan shops, kilns and dwellings—he more or less drifted to a halt. Then, took off his cap and started scratching his head.

"Lost?" Sharon asked.

"Not exactly, ma'am." Billy pointed to his right with the cap. "I know it's off that way—not even too far from here. The problem is that I don't know how to get there."

Sharon immediately provided the logical solution. "Let's ask somebody."

Billy and Ruy immediately bestowed upon her the inevitable frown.

Sharon sniffed. "I guess some things remain constant, one universe to another. I'd still like to know the evolutionary logic of males being hard-wired never to ask for directions."

Billy smiled crookedly. "I don't think it's really that, ma'am. Just, you know, a guy thing."

Sharon snorted. "Yeah, that's my father said when I asked him. He claims it's too deeply rooted in our culture to do about anything it. He might be right. Why else would it have taken that doofus Ulysses ten years to get home? If he'd just asked for directions . . ."

Fortunately, the directions stumbled upon them. An urchin came around the corner, paying the usual urchin attention to his surroundings, and just barely kept from bumping into Sanchez. A bit apprehensive, the boy backed up a couple of steps.

"Hey, I know this kid," exclaimed Billy. He looked more closely, stooping a bit. "Name ends with an 'o.' "

Sharon rolled her eyes. "Billy, in Italy that's not exactly a big help."

The urchin came to the rescue. To Sharon's surprise, he understood English. "Benito," he pronounced. He craned his neck up at Billy. "You are one of the American soldiers, yes? I remember you."

"Yeah, that's me. We're looking for the Marcolis. I can't remember how to get there."

The urchin looked woebegone. "They left. All gone. Yesterday."

Sharon felt herself stiffen. "Gone? Where?"

Benito shrugged. "I'm not sure. I think they went to Rome. I heard them talking about it, anyway."

Sharon and Ruy and Billy exchanged meaningful glances. Meaningless glances, it might be better to say. The kind of looks people give each other who are utterly bewildered.

"Rome?" Billy almost choked. "Why the hell would they go to Rome? That's—that's—" He groped in the air. "That hundreds of miles away. It'd take them weeks, unless they could afford the best carriage."

Benito shrugged again. "I don't know. I think maybe they're going to see an old friend of theirs. A relative, maybe. Some old man who's sick or maybe in some kind of trouble. It didn't make much sense to me."

It was Sharon's turn to choke a little. "Oh, Christ . . ." A feeling of dread was coming over her. The only old man in Rome she could think of who was in any kind of trouble was . . .

"What was the old man's name?" she demanded.

"I told you, I can't remember." The urchin gave Billy a sly look. "Oh, wait. I remember now. The name ends with an 'o.' "

"Never mind that," said Ruy quietly. "When you say 'they all went,' boy, who are you talking about? Exactly."

Benito frowned. "All of them. Everybody in the Committee." He started counting off his fingers. "All the Marcolis—Massimo and his kids too. The girl, of course." A fleeting grin passed across the urchin's face that was at least a decade too leering to fit a boy whom Sharon estimated was not more than eight years old. "No way they'd leave Giovanna behind. Besides—he's no fool, Antonio Marcoli, whatever people say—that way he could be sure Frank and his brothers would come, too."

Sharon heard herself groan. Benito tugged at his fingers, remembering his count. "Oh. Yeah. Two more. Marius the handyman. He always goes anywhere Antonio does. And Michel. He went with them too."

The name "Michel" had an odd flavor, in Benito's mouth. The way a kid determined to seem sophisticated will fumble at foreign words.

"Michel?" Ruy's face was suddenly blank; all the underlying amusement that had been there a moment before vanished. "Michel who? What is his last name? And don't tell me you don't remember, boy. Or what letter the name ends in. The name."

Sanchez could be genuinely intimidating, Sharon reflected. She'd tell him to stop bullying the kid, except . . . well, she was a bit too intimidated.

So was the urchin. Whatever smart remark Benito might have been contemplating died on his lips, as she stared up at Ruy's face. The mustachios didn't look like a flamboyant affectation now. They looked like they fit that face perfectly. The face of a conquistadore, contemplating a field of battle.

"Oh, I know it," Benito protested. "It's Ducos. Michel Ducos." He pointed to the main islands to the south. "He's a French compatriot. He tells Antonio what's happening in the French embassy."

Ruy straightened. "Ducos." The word came out like a snarl.

"You know him?" Billy asked.

"Yes, I know him," Sanchez said softly. The Catalan looked at Sharon. "This is no longer a joke. Not of any kind."

Sharon had guessed that much just from the expression on Ruy's face. "Who is he?" she asked.

"D'Avaux's agent. Spy, assassin, whatever the comte requires."

"He's a compatriot!" Benito protested.

"He is nothing of the sort," Sanchez pronounced. "If he spent time with your Marcolis, he was acting as a spy. No. More likely as a provocateur." A thought seemed to come to him. "Tell me, young Benito. When the American reporter Buckley came here, did he speak with Ducos often?"

"Oh, sure. He and Michel were good buddies. Once or twice they even came together."

Ruy nodded. "Yes, it makes sense. All of it, now."

"What's happening, Ruy?" Sharon asked quietly.

"Ducos is your murderer. I am almost certain of it. He would have been stirring up some sort of trouble. Ingratiated himself with Buckley as well as the Marcolis—and then used the mutual friendships to reinforce each other." Sighing, he took off his plumed hat and ran fingers through stiff, gray hair. "It is an old trick. Only amateurs would be taken in by it, of course. Use one connection to provide the authenticity for another. Then, back again. Buckley and the Marcolis each vouch for Ducos, and it never occurs to any of them that the principal reason they do so is because the other vouched for him in the first place. Idiots."

He gave Billy Trumble a hard look. "Did you meet this Ducos, the times you came here?"

Billy shook his head. "No." He hesitated. "I do remember somebody mentioning the name 'Michel' once or twice, but . . . I didn't think anything of it."

"No, of course not." Ruy put the hat back on his head. "Ducos would have made certain not to appear at the Marcolis if anyone other than the Stone boys were there from your embassy. Too much risk someone might know who he really was—or start asking questions."

Sharon was trying to follow the logic and making hard going with it. "I still don't understand, Ruy. The Marcolis and the Stone boys, okay. But why would Joe be taken in? He was a pretty damn good investigative reporter, you know. There's no way he wouldn't have found out Michel worked for the French embassy."

But, by the time she'd finished, she already knew the answer. "Oh. Of course. Ducos wouldn't have even tried to deny it, would he?"

Ruy smiled grimly. "No, Sharon. He would have boasted of it. And then provided Buckley with so much good information—what's your American expression? the 'inside dope,' I believe—that Buckley would have been dazzled by the opportunity. You recall that article he wrote on d'Avaux's machinations, the one that caused all the trouble? He got the information from Ducos. Never thinking once that a man who gives silver intends to get gold in return."

"Bait," Billy muttered. "You're right. Joe was a good enough guy, but he was . . . oh, I don't know. Cocksure of himself."

Sharon went back to something Sanchez had said earlier. "Why do you think Ducos is the murderer, though? With this good a setup, I'd think he wouldn't want to upset anything."

Ruy's little frown made Sharon realize that he hadn't understood the colloquial term "setup." The Catalan's English had gotten so good that she tended to forget he didn't necessarily know all the slang and idiom. She began to explain but Ruy stilled her with a raised hand.

"I understand the gist of your question. The answer? Two-fold. First, Ducos would have had no interest in simply spying on the Committee. Why should he? This is Venice, not Paris. His interest in them would have been simply that of tools to accomplish some other purpose. By all accounts, this Marcoli fellow is given to rashness, yes?"

The last question was aimed at Billy, accompanied by the kind of up-tilted eyebrow that translates as Don't bullshit me, buddy.

Billy took a deep breath and let it out. "Oh, yeah. I liked the guy, mind you—almost impossible not to. But, yeah, he wasn't exactly playing with a full deck. Well. That's not quite right. Marcoli's not actually nuts—and he's certainly not stupid. It's just . . ."

Sharon sighed. "I get the picture. I have a cousin like that. Did, anyway, back when and where. She was bright as a tack, and you couldn't really say she wasn't sane." A little chuckle emerged. "I played cards with her, now and then. Not often, because she drove me nuts. She always assumed every card coming up was either an ace or a face card. Just because that's what she wanted."

"Yup. That fits Marcoli to a T." Billy looked to the south. "I guess we'd better get back, ma'am. There's only just a few more hours left of daylight. If Stoner's kids have gone with him . . ."

Sharon could imagine the hell to be paid herself, with no trouble. But she still wished she knew more. She was now pretty sure that Marcoli had decided to try some kind of rescue attempt for Galileo. But that was just a guess on her part. And any assumption that the Stone boys were part of whatever scheme Marcoli had cooked up—assuming there was really one at all—would be sheer speculation at this point.

Nobody really knew anything. From an street urchin's simple statement that the Stone boys had left with the Marcolis, there was only so far you could leap.

Uncertainly, she looked in the direction Billy had indicated earlier was where the Marcoli house was to be found. Ruy put her thoughts into words.

"Yes, I agree. Since we are here, we may as well see if there is any information to be found there. Marcoli or one of his confederates may have left something behind." He tugged at his mustache, smiling a bit derisively. "Judging from their reputation, perhaps a broadside boasting of their not-yet-accomplishment."

The Catalan looked down at Benito. "Take us there," he commanded.

* * *

With Benito's sure feet guiding the way, they arrived at the building where the Marcolis lived within just a few minutes. The building was old as well as big, one of those edifices that gets added on to decade after decade, century after century, in a city as ancient as Venice. Much of the front consisted of workhouses, to Sharon's surprise, which were humming busily at their trades. Glassmaking, judging from what little she could see.

"The Marcolis live in the back part," Benito explained. "This way."

He led them down the side of the building, through a passageway almost too narrow to be called an alley. Then, made two quick turns to thread his way through a little labyrinth of outbuildings. They found themselves in front of a large door.

The door was ajar. "That's funny," Benito said, frowning. "I know they closed it when they left. Locked it, too." The boy looked a little guilty, then. Despite the seriousness of the moment, Sharon had to suppress a chuckle. She had no doubt the little scamp had tried to get himself in. Maybe not to steal, just . . . an opportunity too rare for a respectable street urchin to pass up.

Ruy, though, didn't seem to be suppressing any kind of humor. "The door has been forced." He stepped up and pushed it open. "Dona—ah, Sharon. Please remain outside." A moment later, moving quickly and silently, the Catalan was through the door.

Sharon and Billy looked at each other.

"Like hell," said Sharon. "If there's trouble, he's not facing it alone."

Billy nodded and went in, Sharon on his heels.

Once inside, they found themselves in something of a vestibule. A narrow staircase led up on the left. At the end of a short corridor, on the right, a door stood open. Sanchez himself was nowhere in sight.

Sharon decided he couldn't have gone up the stairs that quickly. "That way," she hissed, pointing to the door.

Billy nodded again and hurried toward it, Sharon crowding him as closely as she could.

So closely, in fact, that when Billy came to an abrupt halt as soon as he passed through the door, Sharon collided with him.

"Goddamit," she heard Billy mutter. Sharon was surprised at the anger in his voice. She hadn't bumped into him that hard. But then, looking over the lieutenant's shoulder, she realized that the curse had been directed elsewhere.

Oh, damn.

They had entered a very big room, lit only by windows along one wall. Despite the narrowness of the windows, the lighting was rather good this time of day, with the afternoon sun shining through. It was the sort of central kitchen-and-taverna that the USE embassy itself contained. Sanchez was standing near a small table toward the center of the room, staring at six men crowded around a much larger table at the back. The men were staring back at him. Most of them were seated. Judging from their postures, Ruy had caught them completely by surprise. They seemed to be doing something with documents spread out on the table.

All of them, alas, were armed. Sharon thought so, at least. She couldn't see any guns in evidence, but two of them were bearing swords and all of them had knives of one sort or another scabbarded to their waists.

Ruy swiveled his head and looked at her. Then, his lips quirking, brought his gaze back to the strangers. "Why am I not surprised?" she heard him murmur. "I predict it will be a stormy courtship."

Suddenly—the Catalan could move very quickly when he wanted to—Sanchez plucked off his hat and sent it sailing toward a row of coat-pegs on the far wall. The hat landed atop one of the pegs and perched there neatly. Despite everything, Sharon almost burst into laughter. Only Ruy would make sure of that detail!

"Lieutenant Trumble," Sanchez said loudly, "I will rely upon you to keep Dona Sharon safe. These are Ducos' men. I recognize three of them."

The word Ducos seemed to break the paralysis of the strangers. One of them shouted something which Sharon didn't understand, although she thought it was French. An instant later, working together, all the men still seated had upended the big table and tossed it aside. And all of them were drawing out weapons.

Three swords, damnation! One of the men seated had been armed with one also. Sharon hadn't spotted it beneath the table. The others simply had daggers. Big, nasty, sharp-looking daggers.

Sanchez planted a boot on the small table next to him and sent it flying against the same wall his hat was resting upon. For all the smooth ease of the motion, the table shattered when it hit the wall. One of the legs landed five feet away. There was now a clear fighting space in the center of the room. Ruy's hands went to his waist. The rapier and main gauche came out easily, hissing their steely way.

For just that instant, as the Catalan's back and shoulders swelled in the act of drawing his blades, Ruy Sanchez reminded Sharon of nothing so much as a cobra flaring its hood. She'd long understood that the man was deadly, beneath the veneer of wit and drollery. The veneer was gone now. Not a trace of it left. Ruy Sanchez was once again in a familiar place—and he was almost sixty years of age. He'd survived that place before. He intended to survive it again.

His opponents sensed that feral confidence themselves. Their initial lunge toward the center of the room, fueled by the bravado brought by greater numbers, stumbled to a sudden halt. The rapier and main gauche had been almost like lightning bolts, flashing in the rays of late-afternoon sun pouring through the windows.

To their misfortune, they'd paused too late. The cobra struck. How a man as stocky and relatively short as Sanchez—he was perhaps an inch shorter than Sharon herself—could manage that sort of lunge was beyond her. Manage it he did, though—and it was a perfect fencer's lunge. Poised, balanced, no awkwardness at all.

The intended target screeched and tried to deflect the blade with his own sword. But Sanchez had not aimed for the easily protected chest and belly. The rapier flashed beneath the parry and sank into the man's upper thigh, just below the hip joint. A quick vicious twist of the wrist and the blade was back out again.

The man groaned and stumbled back, collapsing. He dropped his sword, both hands clutching at his leg. The blood was already spurting out as if through a hose.

Sharon felt numb. She was a nurse and, at that, better versed than most in human anatomy. The man's femoral artery had been sliced right through. He'd bleed to death in a few minutes; lose consciousness much sooner than that. She was pretty sure Ruy had hit the femoral triangle straight on—Scarpa's triangle, as it was sometimes called. He'd probably severed the great femoral nerve at the same time.

The blow was deadly; as deadly, to an expert, as more obvious cuts to the throat or heart. And, seeing the grim look of satisfaction on Ruy's face, she had no doubt at all that the Catalan had known exactly what he was doing.

Sanchez smiled mirthlessly. "My name is Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz," he growled at the five still-standing French agents. "Prepare to die."

This time, Sharon couldn't stop the laugh from bursting out. A semi-hysterical laugh, to be sure. But still—

Where in the hell had Ruy Sanchez gotten his hands on a copy of The Princess Bride?

"Jesus," she heard Billy mutter. "He's not kidding."

* * *

The eruption of violence had paralyzed Billy Trumble for a moment. Soldier or not, Marine officer or not, he was actually a complete stranger to this kind of sudden mayhem. But while Billy had caught the same reference—he'd seen the movie—he understood something immediately which Sharon didn't.

Sanchez hadn't read the book. He'd probably never even heard of it. The character of Inigo Montoya was just an author's comic twist on an ancient and very real model.

Meet Ruy Sanchez. The original.

And he ain't being funny at all.

"Oh, Jesus," he repeated, clawing at the flap of his holster. One of the French thugs screamed something, threw his knife at Sanchez and then stooped to retrieve the fallen sword. The Catalan took a quick step to the left and swept the main gauche across, batting the thrown knife harmlessly into a far corner. Billy knew that he'd taken that little step, despite the risk, to make sure he didn't deflect the knife toward Sharon.

Goddam knight of the round table, too! Sixty years he's spent stewing in that crazy macho stuff.

He had the flap open finally. Thank God. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a sudden burst of swordplay. Just a quick clash of blades before Sanchez and his opponents backed away. This was no idiot Gene Kelly or Errol Flynn movie where swordsmen pranced and danced all over the place smiling gaily and matching sword strokes for minutes on end. This was a deadly serious business where one good stroke or cut left a man dead or dying in a split-second. It was like watching angry rattlesnakes in a cage.

The pistol was coming out. Billy reached over with his left hand to work the slide and jack a round into the chamber. It was an old .45-caliber automatic, the Colt army model, with a heavy slide. He fumbled at it. He felt light-headed, the way he never did in a baseball game no matter how tight the situation. I'm not used to this! some part of him wailed silently.

The slide banged down. The weapon discharged and recoiled out of his hand.

It shouldn't have happened, but a worn sear—or one a gunsmith had stoned to a knife-edge—could slip. I should've checked the goddam thing when I had time!

The bullet ricocheted harmlessly from the floor and off into a corner. The pistol itself skidded across the floor. Right toward the Frenchmen.

How Sanchez knew what had happened Billy would never understand. The Catalan must have had eyes in the back of his head. He stamped a boot, lunged once—twice—skipped aside . . .  caught the sliding pistol with the toe of a boot and send it neatly sliding back across the floor.

Okay, it wasn't done perfectly—the pistol was heading toward the far corner instead of the one where Billy and Sharon were standing. Still. Any sarcastic thoughts Billy had ever had about Ruy Sanchez and his flamboyant ways died a sudden death. Jesus, that crazy old man is good.

But the horror wasn't over. Sharon pushed past him and practically tackled the pistol.

"Sharon—it's armed!" Billy shrieked. The hammer was back, anyway, and the recoil might've been enough to cycle the weapon completely, jacking another round into the chamber. If so, that thing was as deadly as a rattlesnake itself. Some part of Billy's mind made a solemn vow—piss on the admiral and his goddam rules—that he'd never use anything but a revolver in the future.

Sharon hit the floor on her belly and scooped up the pistol. Billy held his breath . . .

Thank God, again. Apparently she knew enough about firearms to realize that the pistol was armed. She had the butt in both hands and was coming up to her knees. Billy started to step toward her, reaching out his hand.

But Sharon didn't even glance at him. "Ruy, look out!" she screamed, leveling the gun.

Billy twisted his head. Another one of Ducos' agents was down. Somehow Sanchez had slashed the man's throat. Damn near cut his head off, in fact. He was obviously deader than a mackerel.

Sanchez had picked up a wound himself along the way. Billy could see a red stain spreading across the doublet on the left side above the waist. It couldn't be too bad a one, he guessed, since the Catalan was still in fine fighting form. The wound didn't seem to be bleeding that much. Nothing like that horrible gushing spray of blood that had happened after Sanchez stabbed the first man in the leg.

The wound on Sanchez wasn't why Sharon had screamed, though. Billy felt himself grow more light-headed still. He wondered if he had any blood at all left in his brain.

One of Ducos' agents had a pistol. Where the hell that had come from, Billy had no idea. The Frenchman had backed up a few steps so he could get a clear shot at Sanchez. Unfortunately—even if Sharon was a good enough shot in the first place—Sanchez was between her and his opponents.

The pistol was some kind of smallish wheel-lock, not the big cavalry variety. An assassin's weapon, and probably no more accurate than—

Billy felt his head clear instantly, as well-trained reflexes took over. There was a small table just next to the door, not more than a step away. Atop sat a bowl of fruit. Those small Italian apples that Billy didn't like because they were too sour.

Right now, he could care less about their taste. They were also very hard—and, if not quite a big as a baseball, close enough.

The apple came into his hand as easily and comfortably as the pistol had not. A quick pitcher's stride—Billy had never dawdled on the mound—and the apple went flying.

Billy could hit the plate, three times out of four, from the sixty-foot range of a pitcher's mound. At considerably less than half the range, the apple hit the man right between the eyes.

His coach had clocked his fastball once at ninety-seven miles per hour. Billy was pretty sure he'd just broken that.

The apple splattered. It was just soft enough that the man didn't die. But he was hurled against the wall, the pistol flying out of his hand.

The pistol hit the same wall Billy was near. Wheel-locks were even touchier than old automatic pistols once they were cocked. The weapon discharged. The bullet hit the bowl of fruit and sent the apples flying everywhere.

I . . . do . . . not . . . fucking . . . believe . . . this . . . shit.

* * *

Frantically, Sharon tried to get a bead on someone. But it was impossible. The way Ruy was dancing back and forth, she'd be as likely to shoot him as one of his opponents. Even at this range, Sharon had no confidence at all in her marksmanship. She'd only gone to the firing range at Grantville—then, later, at Wismar—when her father or Hans had absolutely insisted. She didn't like guns and felt no affinity for the things whatsoever. Especially a great big heavy monster like this one, whatever the hell it was.

There was another of those sudden, terrifying clashes between Ruy and his opponents. Like watching men turn into sharks for an instant. It was all too quick for Sharon to follow clearly. When it was over, though, another of Ducos' agents was stumbling back against the far wall, his sword spilling to the floor. Blood spurted through the hands clutching his throat. That was pure reflex, though. As soon as the man smashed against the wall his eyes rolled up and he slumped lifelessly. Ruy must have severed the spine as well as the throat with that stab.

There were only two French agents left standing, now. But to her horror, Sharon saw that Ruy had been injured again himself. She hadn't seen it happen, but one of Ducos' men must have stabbed Ruy in the leg. Not the fatal kind of strike Ruy had landed at the beginning of the fracas, no; just a cut to the meat of the thigh. As wounds went, from a purely medical perspective, nothing much to worry about. Sharon was a lot more concerned about the wound that had now spread blood across the left side of the Catalan's doublet.

However, what was dangerous in a hospital was not the same thing as what was dangerous in a fight. Ruy was limping, now, pretty badly. And he'd lost a lot of blood, and—Sanchez or no Sanchez—he was a man in his late fifties. He couldn't possibly last much longer.

The two surviving Frenchmen sensed it. They started moving in for the kill. Slowly and carefully, to be sure.

Sharon glanced to her left. Billy was scrabbling on the floor for apples. No help there.

She took a very deep breath. She'd never smoked, was a big woman—and had a pair of lungs to match the rest of her chest.

"GODAMMIT RUY SANCHEZ GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY! LISTEN TO YOUR WOMAN!"

Sanchez instantly flung himself aside, coming to rest on his rump plastered against the wall right below his hat. He gave Sharon a grin that, for all the strain in his face, seemed genuinely cheerful.

"A request from my intended is like a command from God," he pronounced.

Sharon snorted. Took another breath and drew a bead. The two agents were staring at her now.

She decided marksmanship was pointless. She really had no idea what she was doing. On the other hand, she understood why they called these damn things "automatics."

* * *

"It was frickin' amazing," Billy would tell his friend Conrad later. "Truly awesome. She emptied the whole clip. Musta set some kinda time record, too. Sounded like it was on full auto."

A shake of the head, another quaff of beer. "A Colt .45 M-1911A1, to boot. Sure, it's an old warhorse—none of the fancy few modern ones we've got for plebes like you and me, Conrad old buddy—but it's still got enough firepower to shred a bull."

Another shake of the head, another quaff. "Point-blank range. Couldna been more than twenty feet. Frickin' amazing. She never hit the one guy at all and only managed to hit the other once. I grant you, in the chest, perfect center mass shot. Killed him deader'n a doornail. But. Still."

* * *

Billy wondered if he'd ever hear again. It felt like at least one of his eardrums had burst. Paralyzed, for sure. He'd never actually heard what a .45 sounded like fired in a closed room—thick walls, too—and wearing no ear protectors. It didn't help at all that he'd been positioned alongside the firearm instead of behind the shooter.

The one Frenchman still left standing seemed even more dazed than Billy was. Slowly, the man spread his arms wide and stared down at his body. He seemed a little amazed to see no blood.

Billy was downright astonished. How could she possibly have missed—at that range?

Sharon lurched to her feet and tried to do with the pistol itself what she'd failed to do with its ammunition. Hollering something that was probably obscene as all hell—Billy couldn't make out a word of it—she hurled the pistol at the Frenchman.

Alas. She was no more accurate than before. Ducos' agent didn't even have to duck. He just watched the pistol sail by at least two feet from his head.

When he brought his head back, though, there was a smile on his face. A damn cold one. Sharon was disarmed and while Sanchez was struggling to get back on his feet the old man was obviously having a hard time of it now. Leaving aside the wound to the body, his left leg was just about literally soaked in blood.

On the other hand, Billy had finally gotten his apple.

"Hey, shithead," he said. The Frenchman looked his way. Billy beaned him.

A little high. Out of the strike zone. The apple had struck the man on the slope of his forehead instead of right between the eyes. Most of the impact had been deflected with the apple.

Still, that had been one hell of a fastball. Somewhere between ninety-five and a hundred miles an hour, at a guess. The apple itself was now just a fruit stain across the far wall. Ducos' agent was reeling, barely able to stand. And he'd dropped his sword.

Billy started to reach down for another apple but changed his mind. "I never liked that damn designated-hitter rule anyway," he muttered.

He stalked over and picked up the leg of the table Sanchez had shattered. Then, proceeded to start beating the Frenchman into a pulp.

* * *

Sharon stopped him, unfortunately, before he could really get into a good rhythm.

"Hey, don't kill him! We want him to talk." He could just barely make out the words through the ringing in his ears.

Billy took a deep breath. She was probably right.

"Okay. But. Still. This is why pitchers never bat too well, y'know. Nobody lets us get enough practice."

Chapter 38

After Mike Stearns had finished reading the latest report from Venice, he raised his eyes—his head still lowered—and looked at Francisco Nasi.

"Did you expect this? Any idea at all?"

Nasi chuckled. "Would you believe me if I claimed that I did?"

Mike smiled and slid the file onto the desk. "I'd call you five ways a liar. I sure as hell didn't. Never in my wildest dreams. Larry Mazzare summoned by the pope to Rome to defend Galileo. Lord in Heaven, you want to talk about an opening."

He rose from his chair and went over to the window he favored at moments like this. Francisco suspected that looking out the window helped Mike take his mind off his wife, his sister, and his friends who were trapped in cities far away, and about whom the prime minister could do very little, just then. But what Mike found to look at out there, in the still-ugly raw newness that was the city of Magdeburg being reborn, Francisco had never been able to determine. Most likely the Elbe rather than the city itself. Nasi knew that Mike Stearns found looking at moving water something of an emotional comfort and an aid to concentration. That might be part of the reason he had insisted on having the new building which housed the USE's executive branch built along the riverbank.

A small part, though, if any. The main reason was that the building fronted along Hans Richter Square and was named—also at Mike's insistence—the Richterhof. If there was any trick of propaganda and public relations that Mike Stearns would shy away from, Nasi had never encountered it. Magdeburg was the political capital of the new United States of Europe as well as—so far, at least—its major industrial center. Over time, the two aspects of the city would most likely reinforce each other. There was no way to tell, as yet, and wouldn't be for many years. But Nasi thought that Mike's estimate that Magdeburg would eventually come to provide the same center of gravity for Germany that London and Paris provided for England and France was probably correct.

If so, Mike Stearns would take the time and effort now to stamp the city in his own political mold as best he could. Using the memory of Hans Richter as the stamp, every chance he got. Richterhof, Richterplatz, Richterstrasse—there were at least three of those in the city—Richter Park; for all Francisco knew, a Richter lamppost somewhere and no doubt a profusion of Richter Alleys.

Stearns was utterly shameless. Francisco glanced at a nearby wall of Mike's office, which was covered with enlarged portraits. A few of them were photographs; most were paintings. Mike agreed fully with Mary Simpson that drawing artists to Magdeburg was yet another way to ensure that Germany's most radical city also became its most important. As Paris goes, so goes France; the same for London—and if Stearns had any say in the matter, the same would be true of Magdeburg as well.

Most of the portraits were what you'd expect in the office of the new nation's prime minister:

A large portrait of the emperor, Gustavus Adolphus.

A not quite so large—perhaps by half an inch—portrait of Mike Stearns and Gustavus Adolphus and Axel Oxenstierna solemnly discussing political affairs. The emperor seated, his two principal advisers standing. Francisco was particularly taken by those poses: Oxenstierna with his hand atop a globe of the world—well, that was reasonable enough—and Mike Stearns with a sword belted to his waist and one leg turned out in the finest courtier style. Given that Mike Stearns did not own a sword, had no idea how to use one, and had never been seen by man nor beast in any stance that was not either relaxed or what you'd expect of an ex-pugilist . . .

Those type of portraits.

Ah, Magdeburg. Nasi loved the city, despite its multitude of flaws. It was the only city in the world other than great Istanbul that he found truly exciting.

His favorite portraits, however, were two others. One, by far the largest, covered almost the entire wall in the back—where visitors would first enter the room. The enormous painting had been only recently completed by the young Dutch artist Pieter Codde, a student of Franz Hals who had managed to escape Amsterdam just before the siege closed in. The painting was entitled Allegory of the Rebirth of Magdeburg, and it was all Francisco could do not to burst into laughter every time he entered the prime minister's office and looked at the thing.

His amusement was caused not so much by the image of Michael Stearns standing just beside Gustavus Adolphus—but carefully portrayed as barely more than half the emperor's size. Not even by the truly ludicrous spectacle of Mike Stearns as the loyal spear-carrier, wearing a Roman centurion's armor, no less!

Nor was it caused—well, perhaps a bit—by the inevitable mob of cherubs lifting the soul of slaughtered Magdeburg to Heaven, accompanied by the inescapable angels blowing upon their horns.

No, it was the centerpiece that Francisco could never look at without having to suppress the urge to riotous laughter. The babe, of course, was to be expected. Magdeburg reborn, looking much like any babe. But the young mother so tenderly cradling the infant . . .  the obvious symbolism, the allegory to the birth of Christ . . .

He must have choked. Mike glanced at him. "What's so funny?"

Francisco shook his head. "Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of the mother in that grotesque new painting of yours." He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, not daring to actually look. They did have serious business to conduct, this day.

Mike glanced at the huge painting, and smiled. "I have to admit I get a kick out of it myself. I will say that Pieter did one hell of good job, having to work from memory the way he did, with the model still back in Amsterdam." He went back to staring out the window, the smile still on his face. "Spitting image of my wife. Who is, ah, no longer a virgin and has never been a Christian at any time."

He hooked his own thumb over his shoulder. "But don't lie, Francisco. I know you think that other one is even funnier."

Nasi examined the portrait to which the thumb was pointed. It was not a portrait, as such, but one of the few photographs hanging up on the walls. A classic example of that peculiar sub-genre of the visual arts known as Politics, American, Crass Beyond Belief.

"Indeed. Michael Stearns. Cheerfully eating the first Hans Richter Victory Sandwich produced by the Freedom Arches in Magdeburg. What are the ingredients, again?"

"Baltic rye bread, Danish ham and cheese, with, of course, the essential splash of French dressing. It's not bad, actually."

The prime minister turned away from the window. "All right, Francisco, enough of the drollery. I know you could bring down the house with your comedy routines. Well, anywhere except in Istanbul."

Nasi winced. "Risky business, that. Murad the Mad is prone to assuming that all jokes are at his expense."

Stearns pointed to the file. "I also know that you're just stalling because this is one of the few subjects you don't feel particularly knowledgeable about. I understand that. I don't expert a Sephardic Jew from Istanbul to be the world's expert on the inner workings of the Roman Catholic Church. Still, what's your best estimate?"

"The truth? I think we are sensing a tremor beneath our feet. The first sign of a coming political earthquake."

Mike stared down at the file, his hands now planted on the desk. "That's what I think, too. Jesus, Joseph and Mary."

Nasi shook his head. "The man will not take sides, you understand."

"Don't be silly, Francisco. He has been taking a side, whether he liked it or not—which, by all reports, he didn't much." Stearns rapped the file with a finger. "Simply the act of declaring neutrality is taking a side, when you're already on one."

"Not what I meant. Sorry. I only intended to say that I think there is no chance—no chance at all—that the pope will do or say anything overtly which could in any way be construed—formally, you understand—as an alliance of any kind with the United States of Europe."

Mike gave Nasi a very placid look. Francisco braced himself. That sleepy expression invariably signaled the coming sarcasm.

"At a rough guess, Francisco, I could get the same assessment from two out of three urchins in the streets of Magdeburg. Nineteen out of twenty, in the streets of Rome. Maffeo Barberini who was, Urban VIII who is, has been accused of a lot of things in his sixty-some-odd years. Deviousness, manipulation, cynicism—not to mention a truly breathtaking devotion to nepotism—but never once, that I can recall, being a moron. Try again."

Nasi sighed. "Michael, this is not a subject—"

"Try again."

"Tyrant!"

"Try again."

Nasi puffed out his cheeks. "You'd do better to ask von Spee. He's back in town, you know."

"Good idea. I will. Try again. And I'll make it easy for you, since you brought up von Spee. Who is still, I remind you, a Jesuit."

Stearns gave Nasi a little encouraging jiggle of the chin, the way a mother encourages her toddler to say mama. "Don't try to start with a pope maybe undergoing a real and profound crisis of conscience. Start with what you know. Would Urban even consider this if he didn't think he had Vitelleschi in his corner? And I'm not talking about that famous fourth vow of obedience. I'm talking about the father-general of the Jesuits—the Black Pope, they sometimes call him—being really in his corner."

Francisco felt the ground stabilize beneath his feet. "No," he said firmly. "Not a chance."

"What I think, too." Stearns stared at the file on the desk. Then, suddenly, slammed his open palm down upon it. Stearns had big hands. The loud noise almost startled Nasi out of his chair.

"Hot damn!" Mike exclaimed. "Hot diggedy-damn. Chew on that, Richelieu. And you can downright choke on it, you stinking emperor of Austria. And you, puke-face elector of Bavaria, you can take your so-called Catholic League and stick it where the sun don't shine. Y'all just lost your fig leaf. 'Bout to, anyway. If that wasn't enough—you morons!—you just lost the help of what is probably still the most effective political organization in Europe. Maybe the whole world, the way the Japanese seem to be squawking. Sure as hell the most experienced."

Suddenly energetic, Mike slid himself into his chair. "Okay. First. You're right. Get von Spee in here, ASAP. Second, get in touch with Spartacus and tell him I'll want a private meeting. Private as in private. If I have to, I'll use regular soldiers and goddamit firing squads to put a stop to any and all anti-Jesuit riots from now on. But I'd really prefer it if the Committees handled the problem informally."

"Ah, I believe what you're alluding to is actually illegal, Michael, not 'informal.' "

"Sure is," Mike said cheerfully. "And be assured that I will so inform Spartacus in no uncertain terms. If I catch the Committees doing anything illegal like pounding the crap out of stinking bigot lynch mobs, I will have them charged and prosecuted to the full extent and rigor of the laws."

"Amazing, really," mused Nasi.

"What?"

"I do not believe I have ever heard a sentence that long which had almost the entirety of its emphasis upon a single word in it. 'Catch.' The rest was practically a murmur."

Mike just grinned. "Third. Get in touch with Morris in Prague and have him feel out Wallenstein. Shouldn't be a problem, I don't think. Wallenstein's always been partial to the Jesuits. He'll probably be tickled pink." The prime minister paused for a moment. "I don't suppose there's any way we could get him to think we're trying to make amends for the ruckus over the copper business, is there?"

Nasi enjoyed the opportunity to bestow a placid look upon his boss.

"Right," Stearns snorted. "Grow up, Mike. 'Wallenstein' and 'moron' don't belong in the same sentence either. So it goes. Fourth. Start sending out feelers—quietly, you understand; I don't need my stubborn Lutheran emperor hollering at me—suggesting that any Jesuit educational project will be more than welcome to set up shop in the USE. Um. Well, hold off on that until we've had a chance to consult with von Spee. We gotta be slick, here. We really can't afford to show our hand openly. Gustav Adolf hollers really, really good, if I say so myself as shouldn't."

Nasi nodded. Mike Stearns was capable of hollering superbly well himself, though he rarely chose to. But Gustav Adolf was in a league of his own. "We should be able to manage well enough, I think. Freedom of religion is the law in the USE after all—"

"—until Wilhelm wins the election," Mike interjected sourly.

"—and in any event, alas, the emperor is preoccupied on the war front. He's not likely to pay much attention to the complex minutiae of educational affairs. Which—you'd be amazed—can get incredibly complex and minute. And don't exaggerate, Michael. Wilhelm and his Crown Loyalists advocate the restoration of established churches in those provinces whose legislatures elect to do so, but he's always been very careful to stipulate that no minority faiths—even non-Christian ones—will be penalized in any way. He even insisted on writing that in as a formal part of his party's program."

Mike didn't look noticeably mollified. "Yeah, swell. So members of nonestablished churches get taxed to support the established ones, and then have to pay for their own out of their own pockets." He blew out a breath. "Oh, well. I admit it beats pogroms and inquisitions and auto-da-fé. We do what we can, one step at a time. Mostly, by taking ten steps forward and nine steps back."

"Which is still a step ahead," Nasi replied. "That's a quote, by way, from a speech I recently heard. Given by a man who, I regret to say, I have come to conclude is the most brazen politician in Europe."

He swiveled in his chair and gazed back upon the Allegory of the Rebirth of Magdeburg. "It's astonishing, really. I can—just barely—understand how a superb artist could visualize you in that preposterous Roman armor. But how did he manage the expression on your face?"

Mike glanced at his portrait. "That suggestion of stalwart dim-wittedness? The hint of adulation for the emperor? The mouth that looks like butter wouldn't melt in it?"

Nasi nodded.

"I gave Pieter firm instructions, what do you think? Paid him a good bonus, too. Worth every penny. Gustavus Adolphus thinks very highly of that painting, did I mention that?"

"As I recall, you boasted about it for ten minutes straight."

"Don't be sarcastic, Francisco. It's very unbecoming. Okay, back to business. Fifth—"

Chapter 39

Sharon almost stumbled when she came into the salon of the embassy which, by dint of feverish work throughout the night, had been turned into an impromptu operating room. Fortunately, she caught herself in time to turn the stumble into what she hoped would pass for a dignified pause.

"Jesus, Stoner," she hissed, "you didn't say anything about a mob." She forced herself to scan the room slowly, instead of doing what she felt like doing, which would have resembled a small girl frantically looking everywhere at once, trying to find a bolt hole.

"It's hardly a 'mob,' " Tom Stone murmured. "Okay, yeah, it's a lot of people. But—trust me on this one—they're about as hoity-toity as it comes. No rabble here."

He glanced into one corner of the huge salon, where, atop one of the many heavy tables that had been positioned around three sides of the room to serve as an jury-rigged observers' gallery, Lieutenant Ursinus and two men from the Arsenal were standing. "Well, leaving Conrad and his people aside—but I think both of those guys are guildmasters anyway."

Stoner scanned the room also. The gaze, in his case, was genuinely serene—perhaps even smug—rather than Sharon's desperate attempt to fake it. "You've got just about every doctor in Venice worth calling by the name in this room. They're all good ones, too, I know them. They even scrupulously followed my instructions about being freshly bathed and wearing clean clothes, so far as I can tell. The rest of the people—the ones I made stand in the back because I'm not sure about how closely they followed my sanitation instructions—are political bigshots of one kind or another. According to Taggart, they include one of the doge's aides and at least four senators. He thinks one of them might be on the Council of Ten. Hard to know, of course. There's even a cardinal of the Church—Bedmar, the Spanish guy. I sent somebody to invite him, too, seeing as how it's his main man going under the knife. I didn't think he'd show up, actually."

Sharon's eyes went to the great bank of windows along one wall. The windows faced almost directly to the east, which was the reason she'd picked this salon for her operating room. She had agonized over that decision. Given the nature of Ruy's wound, she'd wanted to operate as soon as possible. Waiting twelve hours was a terrible risk—an unconscionable one, had she still been in the world she'd come from. But that world had electric lighting and this one didn't. Sharon had finally decided that the risk of trying abdominal surgery by lamplight was worse than the risk of waiting till sunrise—and would have been, even if she were an experienced surgeon instead of a nurse trying to pass herself off as one.

"It's not even six o'clock in the morning," she protested.

Stoner smiled. "Yeah, but the light's pretty terrific, you gotta admit. The sun's been up for almost an hour, shining right in now, and—" He bestowed a lingering and very approving look upon the eclectic collection of lighting aids that surrounded the operating table. "Billy did one hell of a job. And he was right about those tailor's globes. Filled with water, they make a lot of difference. Especially with the mirrors."

"That's not what I meant," Sharon hissed again. "How the hell did you get all these people here this early? Especially when you just got back yesterday yourself?"

By way of an answer, Stoner simply gave her an ironic little cock of the eyebrow. Sharon understood it, of course. She'd known the answer before she even finished the question. A world which, outside of Grantville and parts of Magdeburg, still had only oil lamps and candles to illuminate the night was a world where early to bed, early to rise was taken for granted. Even for political bigshots.

"I'm nervous enough already, damn you, Tom. The last thing I need is to try to pull this stunt off in front of a crowd."

Stoner started to say something—one of his usual variations on be cool, Sharon was sure—but then hesitated for a moment. Good thing for him, too. If he had said it, Sharon thought she'd just haul off and belt him one. He might be a pacifist, but she wasn't.

What he did say surprised her. The tone more than the words themselves. It was the first time Sharon could ever remember hearing Tom Stone say anything harshly.

"That's crap, Sharon. You want to know the truth? You're one of those people who does better under pressure than they do any other time. That's partly why I did this. Everybody—except you—knows that about you. Your dad makes jokes about it. 'Best way to make sure Sharon aces a test is to give her no warning.' " He pointed a finger at the operating table. "So just shut up and Sharon, will you? There's a man dying over there. What do you care who's watching? Fuck 'em."

The vulgarity jolted her as much as the tone. Unusually, for a hippie—at least, the two-generations-later brand of hippie that Sharon was familiar with from college—Tom Stone very rarely used foul language.

The jolt made her think about what he'd actually said. Was that true, she wondered?

It might be, actually. She'd always ascribed her tendency to goof off in school until the last minute to plain and simple laziness. But maybe that was her own unconscious way of maximizing her strengths when the time came. Sharon had never once turned in a paper until the very last minute, and for her the words "study" and "cram" were pretty much synonyms. Still, she'd graduated from WVU magna cum laude. Would have made summa if that bum Leroy Hancock hadn't blown two whole semesters out of the water, jacking her around with his lies and promises.

"You're treacherous, Stoner," she murmured. But she was smiling by the end of the sentence, and taking her first step toward the table. "Come on, then. At least I managed to get two hours' sleep, which is more than I usually did before a final exam."

She gave him a sidelong glance. "I do hope that you didn't forget to anesthetize the patient. Being so preoccupied like you were with plotting and scheming."

"Oh, he's under all right. I'll keep dripping ether onto the gauze on his face to keep him under, and just have to hope I gauge it properly. I can tell you all you need to know about the chemical structure of ether and how to make it. But how much of it to use . . ."

Stoner glanced at the crowd. "I did tell all of them—really clear—that if anyone so much as looked like they were going to strike a match, we'd wrestle 'em down and slap them onto the OR table. Do an immediate brainectomy to remove what is obviously a malignant foreign body."

Sharon chuckled and put a hand on his shoulder. Like she herself, Stoner was wearing a scrub gown. She'd brought several with her from Grantville, on the off chance that she might be called upon to do . . . well, exactly what she was going to do. She could tell from the warmth and feel of the fabric that Stoner's gown, like her own, had just recently been sterilized in the steam cleaner that had been one of the first innovations the embassy had made in their little palace.

"Relax, Tom. I'm a lot more likely to kill him than you are, much less a casual smoker. Remind me to compliment Billy, by the way. He's done a fantastic job here."

They were only halfway to the operating table, since Sharon was moving slowly to help compose herself. Billy Trumble was lying on a cot not far away with an IV in his arm. One of the older Marines was lying on a cot next to him. Only two donors, which Sharon wasn't happy about at all. Unfortunately, they knew the blood types of only two of the Scot soldiers who made up most of the embassy guard. Lennox was the other one, and he had A-positive which was no use at all since they didn't know Ruy Sanchez's blood type either.

"It's that silly guilt-trip business," Tom murmured. "Billy's feeling bad because he thinks he screwed up yesterday. Dropping the gun the way he did."

Sharon's lips quirked. "I thought he did great, myself. Hey, look, two of us in that madhouse were amateurs. The pro's the only one who got hurt."

"Well, yeah. But Billy probably figures if he hadn't screwed up the pro wouldn't have been scratched." He gave his head a little shake. "As it is, I had to stop him from donating too many units. Especially with him also running around organizing so much stuff. I wish we'd had somebody besides him and Dalziel still here with type O-negative."

Stoner's lips tightened on that last sentence. Sharon knew that Tom had his own worries. His son Gerry had the universal donor's blood type also. But Gerry had vanished, along with Frank and Ron, nobody knew where. The documents they'd found at the Marcoli house after the deadly brawl had referred to crazy schemes to liberate Galileo and murder the pope. True, those documents had obviously been planted by Ducos' agents. But there had also been notes from Joe Buckley—no doubt about it; Joe's handwriting had been distinctive—which seemed to at least confirm the part about liberating Galileo. Lennox and most of his men were out scouring the city, trying to find out what the truth was.

Sharon shook her head. They'd reached the table now, and there was no time to think about anything other than the work ahead of her. The OR table itself was something Sharon had had designed weeks earlier, blessedly, in case of an emergency. It was a well-made local product, heavily shellacked and polished, and now covered with sterilized absorbent fabric. It wasn't quite as good as an up-time OR gurney—and certainly a lot harder to move around, between the weight of the wood and the lack of wheels—but it would do fine.

She looked down at the patient lying on the OR table. She'd wondered if it would bother her, having to operate on someone she knew. To her relief, she discovered that it didn't. The man on the table bore a vague resemblance to a man named Ruy Sanchez, what she could see of the face above the gauze over the nose and mouth that Stoner would use to keep administering the anesthetic. But that was all it was. Just a resemblance. The animation was gone. The skin was pale, the cheeks were flushed. That was fever and blood loss.

The key, though, was the eyes. The patient's eyes were closed now, but Sharon had seen the dullness come into them in the hours after the fight. Not even Don Quixote on steroids could shrug off these kinds of injuries. The cut to the leg, maybe; that had been a simple flesh wound which Sharon had treated and sewn up quickly hours earlier. But certainly not the other trauma.

That one was a killer. The type of abdominal wound which, at any time prior to the late nineteenth century, would have been accepted as well-nigh certain death. A slow and tortured death, to boot. Sharon knew full well that the reason Stoner had been able to pack the huge salon with observers was because they all wanted to see if the exotic American Dottoressa could do what had always been considered impossible.

She took a slow, deep breath. A man named Ruy Sanchez with dull eyes simply did not exist in the world, she told herself firmly.

Could not exist. A contradiction in terms. All that lay here was a patient. A body. If she did her job, a human being might return into that body. But, for now, it was just a body. One of many. She'd studied and handled bodies for years now. The father who had sired her and raised her and given her his own talent and love for medicine had done the same for decades before that.

She felt calm, now. She'd gained that emotional detachment which, however inhuman it might be from one angle, was utterly necessary for what lay ahead of her.

Stoner had already moved to his part of the OR table and was checking the patient's vital signs.

"The last urine sample we got wasn't too bad," he said. "That was a little over an hour ago. Low volume, but I don't think there's any danger of immediate kidney failure. His pulse right now is . . . pretty good, I'd say. Weak and rapid, of course, but I don't think he's missing any beats."

"What's the systolic pressure?"

"That's the good news. A hundred and ten."

Sharon hummed a little note of satisfaction. She needed a minimum of ninety to risk an operation like this, and had wanted a hundred. A hundred and ten was higher than she'd dreamed of.

For an instant, a treacherous little thought tried to worm its way forward. How could I do otherwise? A wish from my intended is like a command from—

She squashed that, right quick. "Please introduce me to my colleagues," she said, more loudly than she'd meant to. "And I think we should begin speaking in Italian"—that last sentence said in the language—"except in such instances where I might encounter an emergency."

In which case, all bets are off and I'll probably start hollering at them incoherently. But she saw no reason to add that. The two Venetian doctors standing at the table in their own scrub gowns looked to be even more nervous than she'd been.

Tom nodded. "To your left, Dottoressa Nichols, is Dottor Fermelli. He has agreed to serve as your first assist and scrub."

He used the English word scrub, not the Italian translation of it. The full term in English would have been "scrub nurse," but that last word needed to be avoided. In the parlance of the seventeenth century, "nurses" were purely scut-work menials with about as much skill and training—and social status—as a janitor. That was the reason, of course, that the embassy had from the beginning introduced Sharon as a Dottoressa. And since the Italian word for scrub was every bit as prosaic as the English term, Tom had apparently decided to fall back on the ancient trick—perfected by French chefs—of making something sound glamorous by using a foreign term for it.

Fermelli nodded politely. Sharon returned the nod and took the opportunity to gauge the man as best she could. He'd be the key assistant. The second Venetian doctor would be the circulating nurse. Which meant, under the circumstances, nothing much more than a gofer. That doctor was standing next to the small table that held the instruments and absorbents. She'd be curious to see what title Stoner had decided to bestow upon him in order to avoid the dreaded "nurse" label. Circulator, probably.

But it was Fermelli she'd be counting on, in case of trouble. And, perhaps more to the point, it would be Fermelli who'd have to be able to help her with the really grisly parts of the operation. Sharon could well remember her very first experience in an operating room. The operation she was about to do wasn't that much different. It had been an abdominal hysterectomy. She'd almost lost it when they pulled the woman's guts out and plopped them on her chest. To this day, she couldn't eat sausage links.

And she'd just been an observer. Fermelli was the guy who would have to hold the patient's guts once Sharon hauled them out so that she could examine them.

Because of the surgical mask Fermelli was wearing, Sharon couldn't see most of his face. But the calm and steady look in his eyes reassured her. She'd told Stoner to make sure he found someone who had real hands-on surgical experience. Most seventeenth-century doctors—in Germany at least; she wasn't sure about Italian practice—were really more in the way of medical theorists. Advisers and consultants, potion-prescribers and the like, not what Sharon thought of as a "surgeon." The word itself was ancient, her father had once told her, deriving from the Greek kheirourgia and passing through the Old French serurgien before entering the English language. But, despite its majestic lineage, it had entered English through the cellar, not the front door. Until fairly recently in the universe she'd come from—not much more than a century, she thought—the distinction between doctor and surgeon had been entirely in favor of the doctor. The "surgeon" was the lowlife who sawed off legs, using booze for an anesthetic—and, like as not, did so while half-drunk himself.

Satisfied, Sharon looked at the other Venetian doctor. "And this is Dottor d'Amati," Stoner completed the introductions. "He has agreed to serve as the gofer."

D'Amati's chest swelled and he beamed at her. It was all Sharon could do not to burst into laughter. She should have known! Leave it to Tom Stone to call a gofer a gofer. There were times Sharon really liked that old hippie. She had no doubt at all that by the time Stoner finished with his lectures in Venice and Padua, Italian medical practitioners would have gofer firmly planted in their prestigious lexicon. He'd probably even manage, somehow, to get them clawing for the honor of being called a nurse. Which, as far as Sharon was concerned—she really looked at the world from a nurse's perspective, not a doctor's—would be just dandy.

She felt good. Really good. She'd been almost petrified in the hours leading up to this, knowing that for the first time in her life she'd have to be the one in charge of a critical operation. Now . . .

Flesh and blood. She could almost feel James Nichols' big, capable hands settling over her shoulders, as if from half a continent away his spirit was calming her and guiding her.

The sensation was powerful enough that by the time Sharon finished sterilizing with alcohol the area where she'd be operating—she'd have preferred iodine but they hadn't been able to turn up enough in the short time they'd had—she decided she would explain what she was doing while she worked. She'd seen her father do that, before students. He'd told her afterward that he found it a steadying influence on himself.

"I'm going to begin with what we call an exploratory laparotomy." She gave Dottors Fermelli and d'Amati a smile, hoping they could detect it under her own mask. "That's just a fancy phrase that means I'm going to cut the patient open and go exploring to see what's happening in there."

They seemed to be smiling back. Judging from his eyes, Fermelli's smile was even cheerful.

Splendid. She made sure of her grip on the scalpel. "The initial incision needs to be made in one firm stroke. It must be firm enough to cut through the skin and part of the initial subcutaneous layer. That's just another fancy word for 'fat.' Judging from appearance, I don't think we'll find a very thick layer of that with this patient. For a man of his age, he appears—make that any age, actually—to have a very low percentage of body fat."

She slid the scalpel in. "I'll open him from an inch or so below the breast bone to about four inches above the pubic bone. Like—"

It was a good cut. Really good.

"So."

* * *

Cardinal Bedmar was not the only spectator who looked away, at that point. But he suspected he was the only one who did so for spiritual reasons.

Like—

So.

The cardinal from Spain understood many things now which had been murky to him before.

Some, which had been murky for a short time, he understood very well. Ruy Sanchez's obsession with the woman had become a mystery to Bedmar, as the weeks had gone by since the doge's levee. The cardinal had assumed, at first, that the Catalan's fascination was nothing more complicated than a taste for exotic flesh.

And indeed, so it might have been, at the beginning. In the costumes they favored for their wealthy women, as in so many things, the Venetians enjoyed thumbing their noses at the Spain that controlled half of Italy. Where the Spanish style that still dominated much of the continent encased the female form in rigid, stiff—above all, high-necked—apparel, the Venetians preferred to see their women. Decadent and lascivious, in this as in all things.

And, see them they did. The first time Bedmar had ever attended a Venetian levee, as a man in his mid-thirties born and raised in Spain, he had thought himself somewhere at sea—with surging half-bare breasts making up the waves. He'd been quite shocked at the time, though he'd diplomatically kept it from showing.

He had not been shocked, of course, when he saw the Nichols woman so attired at the levee in February. By then, the man of thirty-five was a man of sixty-two, the marquis had become a cardinal, and Bedmar was as well traveled, cosmopolitan and sophisticated as any man in Europe. Yet even he had been arrested, for a moment, by the sight of such a magnificent and well-displayed bosom. All the more so when the flesh was as darkly colored as undiluted coffee.

But he had misgauged the Catalan, he now realized. Seeing the same woman wearing garments that, though they could not hide the female form did nothing to display it either, had laid bare the truth.

All his life—and Bedmar had known him since he was a young man—Ruy Sanchez had never been able to resist a challenge. In that, he was much akin to the hero of the Cervantes story that he so adored. The flesh was not the challenge, of course. For a man like Sanchez, flesh was no longer a challenge at all. The challenge came from meeting the first woman in the Catalan's life who intimidated him.

And how delightful a thought that was! Ruy Sanchez, abashed.

A woman so young, yet who moved like a queen, serenely and calmly—even more so in the garments she wore today than she had in the costumes she favored for the levees and operas—and could slice a man open while she described the deed itself. Calmly, serenely; not a tremor in her voice.

It was all the cardinal could do not to laugh aloud. Don Quixote, indeed, facing the largest windmill he had ever seen. No wonder Ruy had seemed so perplexed; yet, at the same time, so exultant. To such a windmill, such a man would devote the rest of his life. If he could only figure out what sort of lance would do the trick. The one between his legs that had served him so well in the past was hardly up to this exploit. Not on its own, certainly.

Bedmar's eyes drifted to the windows. The light was blinding for a moment, as if the rising sun were challenging the cardinal.

Which, indeed, it was. Bedmar sighed softly, all thought of laughter gone. The sun was made by God, as He had made all things. And now, after a long lifetime devoted to matters of the flesh—politics and intrigue, if not the cruder forms—He who had created Alphonso de la Cueva, marquis de Bedmar, was reminding him none too gently that He could and did make much greater things than a marquis and a cardinal.

The sound of many gags being suppressed simultaneously drew Bedmar's attention back to the center of the room.

One of those things was the man lying on the table. Not for many years now had Bedmar fooled himself which was the greater, the master or the servant. Did the rest of mankind fulfill their appointed roles on Earth with as much unflinching courage, honor and loyalty as that Catalan once-peasant, Satan's domains would be far more sparsely populated.

Granted, Purgatory would be full.

Another—and Bedmar suspected a greater still—

There came another and louder simultaneous gag; in two cases, not suppressed. Idly, Bedmar wondered which of these disturbingly efficient Americans had thought to provide those useful sacks he had wondered about, positioned conveniently here and there.

His own stomach, however, had never been given to queasiness. He leaned forward, to see what was happening better.

Yes. As he'd thought. The woman was handing the intestines to her assistant. As much of them, at least, as she could pry out of the body. Bedmar wondered, for a moment, if he might someday be able to prevail upon her to allow one of those magnificent Flemish painters—he was partial to Van Dyck himself—to do a portrait of her in the act.

Probably not. There would also be the problem of keeping the painter to the work, of course. Some of them were delicate fellows.

A pity, really. It would make such a splendid allegory. The world had many queens—and far more kings—who could disembowel men at a distance using the instrument of their armies. How many did it have who could disembowel a man with her own hands in order to save his life?

The sun shone in the cardinal's eyes, asking him God's question. Bedmar, no fool, did not fail to note that it was a rising sun.

* * *

"—can see only one nick on the intestines themselves. I'll sew that up later. That's worrisome, because any cut in the intestinal tract is almost sure to result in peritonitis. But I was a lot more worried that I'd find one of the loops completely severed. That would have been a real nightmare, given what we've got available. This cut is small enough that I'm pretty sure we can contain the infection with the sulfa powder I'll be using as well as the chloramphenicol we gave the patient a few hours ago."

Sharon was almost done running the intestines now. "I'd be a lot happier, of course, if we didn't have such a small supply of the chloram. Uh, that's a nickname we made up for chloramphenicol. But at least we're in pretty good shape with the sulfa drugs."

She then took a couple of minutes to double-check herself and make sure she hadn't overlooked anything. "I don't need to check the liver or the bladder, given the location of the wound. I will need to check the stomach but I'll do that later. Right now, the spleen's in the way."

She pulled her head back. "How are the vital signs looking, Stoner?"

"Holding up. I don't think he'll make the marathon, though. Not next month's, anyway."

Sharon chuckled, making no attempt any longer to maintain her earlier reserve. By now they were well into the operation and her team was shaping up as a good one. Fermelli was splendid. D'Amati was still catching up, but doing better than she'd expected. A little relaxed banter was just part of the process.

That was the way her father ran operating teams, anyway. Sharon knew that some other surgeons didn't. There was one surgeon back in Chicago whom James Nichols always privately called "the pencil sharpener." The reference was not to his bookkeeping fussiness—though the man had that in full measure also—but to a portion of the surgeon's anatomy.

Graveside humor, granted. But what else do you expect to hear on the edge of a grave? Of course, if the patients could hear the jokes, they'd probably die right then and there. Of terminal indignation, if nothing else.

For the first time since she'd begun the operation, that treacherous little voice crept back.

Ruy Sanchez wouldn't. He'd probably kill himself from making the surgeons laugh too hard. His English was even getting the right idiom.

Never has a man been felt up so well by his woman! I, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, swear it is—

SQUASH.

Once she was sure the damn thought was flat as a bug, Sharon straightened and took a deep breath.

"Okay. The main damage was to the spleen and I'm going to remove it entirely. We call that a splenectomy. The 'ectomy' part of it is just a fancy way of saying 'yank it out.' And why am I telling you that, anyway? I'm sure your Latin is way better than mine."

Her assistants chuckled; then again, and more loudly, when Fermelli added: "Actually, it's Greek. We Latins are more inclined to putting things in. Unfortunately, the common term for that does not adapt well to medical terminology."

Sharon bent over, smiling, back to the work. "There's going to be a lot of blood coming out here. From the looks of it, the capsule that surrounds the spleen tampanaded the bleeding. That's good—I was hoping for it—because it means the capsule would have acted as a temporary pressure dressing and slowed the bleeding. That's really important with spleen injuries, since the spleen is the most vascular organ in the body and is normally perfused by something like three hundred and fifty liters of blood a day."

It was an odd little speech. The sentence structure was Italian but so many of the words were English. Sharon knew Fermelli and d'Amati would barely be able to follow her here. So why had she spoken at all?

Was she losing her nerve? Stalling?

The self-doubt made her hesitate until she realized the truth. She was just immensely relieved, and the relief was as much personal as professional. She'd agonized over her decision to wait until daylight. Wondering if Ruy Sanchez would bleed to death internally because of her own fears.

Well, he hadn't. The man's spleen was as tough as the rest of him.

To be sure! The spleen of Catalonia is famous! Ask the wretched Castilians if you don't believe—

"Oh, shut up, Ruy," she murmured, still smiling.

After she perforated the capsule, she reflected that shutting up Ruy Sanchez was easier said than done. Even when the man was under full anesthesia.

"Would you wipe off my face, please, Dottor d'Amati? And we'll need to use plenty of that sterilized gauze to soak up as much blood as we can. Despite appearances, most of it went into the abdominal cavity, not onto me. Loose blood like that is a culture medium for infection."

She waited until she could see well again. "Thank you, Dottor. Okay, I'll start the cut here because—"

* * *

Bedmar had been perhaps the only man in the room not to gasp. Where all others seemed to think a desperate emergency had arisen, because they focused on the frightening gout of blood, the cardinal had been watching the woman's face before it struck. That small, expectant smile.

He could not see the smile itself, to be sure, because of the mask the woman was wearing. But he did not need to. Something in the calm dark eyes, the set of the jaw, the poise of the body, made it obvious. If anything, it was accentuated by the mask.

It was quite amazing, really. Bedmar was reminded of Diego Velasquez's The Adoration of the Magi. Not the wise and solemn face of the black king but the serene face of the Virgin. It was said that Velasquez had used his wife, Juana, as the model. The cardinal could well believe it, now. The serenity in that Virgin's face was not the usual ethereal business. Just a young woman's calm acceptance of God's miraculous handiwork. Whatever the Child's conception, after all, pain and labor had still been needed to bring Him forth.

Quietly, without fuss, the cardinal left the chamber. He would return on the morrow, to see after Sanchez's welfare. That the Catalan would survive this day, Bedmar had no doubt at all. Not any longer.

And he had other matters to consider. Much greater issues that were still murky to him, but less so after this day's instructions. That hidden but so obvious smile, like the blazing sun, had been another challenge from his God.

A warning, it would be better to say. Sixty-two years of life God had now granted Alphonso de la Cueva, once the marquis and now the cardinal Bedmar. God, he suspected, was beginning to lose patience with him.

As well He might. A life of stature, wealth, comfort and considerable ease. Also a life slowly ebbing away in frustration and self-pity as Bedmar watched his once-glorious nation fade in its colors and become frayed in its fabric. A frustration which, over time, had become its own seductive melancholy.

Vanity, all it was. In the end, just vanity. Whose only distinction from pride was perhaps its sheer stupidity. But the cardinal was fairly certain that God would not accept a plea of stupidity as an excuse for one of the seven mortal sins.

Especially given that Alphonso de la Cueva was very far from stupid.

So, it was finally time to think. The cardinal believed in a personal God. He also believed in personal damnation.

Far better, he thought, to while away a limited number of millennia in the company of such as Ruy Sanchez. Even in Purgatory, the disrespectful Catalan was bound to make jokes.

Good ones, too.

* * *

It was over, finally.

"Two hours and nine minutes," Stoner announced. "I am genuinely impressed."

"Vital signs?"

"They're all okay. I'm not going to say 'good,' of course. But if he doesn't catch pneumonia or something down the road, this tough bird should live about as long as he would have."

Sharon winced a little.

"Oh, come on, Sharon," Stoner scolded gently. "Under these conditions, not even your dad would have tried to resect the spleen. Besides, I doubt if Ruy Sanchez was destined to die of old age anyway. Him? Be serious."

"Is something wrong, Dottoressa?" asked Fermelli.

Sharon shook her head. "Not . . . really, Dottor. I considered at one point attempting to repair the spleen rather than remove it. The problem with having the spleen removed is that it helps protects the body against infection."

She looked down at the patient. For some reason, he was starting to look like Ruy Sanchez again. Odd, really, since nothing in his appearance had changed except he had a large new scar to add to an already impressive collection.

"So, Ruy—ah, Señor Sanchez—will be more susceptible to such things as pneumonia from now on. He'll just have to be more careful, that's all."

Ha. Weren't you the one making speeches on this subject not so long ago?

Ruy Sanchez, careful and cautious. Walk with a cane, beware of inclement weather, wear warm clothes—who cares what they look like?—eat the right foods, avoid ruffians. At all costs, stay away from risky women. Which is you, judging from the record, right at the top of the list. Maybe the only one on the list.

Hell, frozen over.

She took refuge in trusty jargon. "That can be done using what we call the omentum—that's part of the lining of the abdomen—as a patch over the site. But it's tricky. If it goes wrong—which it very likely would working as I am now—I'd have had to go back in and remove the spleen anyway. With a much weakened patient and probably much worse infection. I decided it simply wasn't worth the risk."

The crowd was gathering around now, as Stoner and three burly Marines picked up the operating table—no wheeled gurneys here—and began hefting Sanchez out of the room. They were gathering to congratulate her, Sharon understood.

Do more than that, really, judging from the faces she could see. That was applause gathering there, applause and admiration. For the first time, she got a glimpse of what Stoner had been angling for when he invited that damned mob to come in.

She couldn't resist. Just couldn't. It was only a little fib, anyway.

"My father would have undoubtedly attempted the resection," she announced loudly, after removing her mask. Then, with a demure, well-nigh virginal smile: "But a young woman should know her limitations."

* * *

Stoner heard her, on the way out the door. He winced a lot more than she had.

"I'st too heavy then, sair?" asked one of the Marines. "We ken git anot'er man—"

"No, no. I can handle it. I just worry about Sharon sometimes. Bad vibes. The way she can be so nasty and sarcastic, I mean."

Chapter 40

Blinking in the sunlight, Frank Stone turned to look at where the shouting was coming from. Although it was well into the spring, the sun was still low in the sky at midmorning. Some of that blinking was fatigue, too. He'd gotten very little sleep in the day and half since Antonio Marcoli and Massimo's accident. Frank and his brothers had been as quiet as they could, sitting nervously in the next room as the doctor who'd been called out for Messer Marcoli and his cousin Massimo had done his work on the injured men.

They'd had no choice. The problem was that every medic in this town would know the name Stone, and be sure to ask after them. Their dad had been the star lecturer at the university here for weeks now. The Marcolis had expected only to pass the one night and be out of town with the dawn; and here they were, still debating the difference between asses and elbows.

The noise was Salvatore and Dino chest-to-chest screaming at each other. They were both soccer-mad, and with more than just the zeal of recent converts. They had the zeal of Marcolis. They'd been playing a little one-on-one up and down the street outside the inn, where they were all waiting for Roberto, Marius and Fabrizio to get back with the wagons they were going to be using for the next stage of the expedition.

And . . . now they were about to start brawling in the street. Frank took a moment to bring down a silent curse on the entire Marcoli clan, with the sole exception of Giovanna. Then, hurried toward them.

"Guys! Guys! Knock it off, okay? We've got enough problems already."

Both began a blustering explanation of how it was the other guy, and then trailed off, looking past Frank.

Frank looked round. It was Michel.

"Frank is right," Michel said. Somehow, he had chill pouring off him like an open freezer. When he wanted to be, Michel could be a damn scary customer. Dino and Salvatore nodded meekly and scurried off.

Frank turned away, sighing. "Thanks, Michel."

His face must have been a picture. "I, too, worry," said Ducos. "We are about a desperate and dangerous business, and such as this is cause for great worry."

Frank nodded gloomily. "If I didn't know we were being chased, I'd give up now."

Michel clapped him on the shoulder. "Courage, mon brave. We can surely not have been missed until late yesterday, and no pursuit will be properly on its way until today. If we are vigilant, we will see any assassins on our trail before we are struck."

"Assassins?" Frank's stomach churned. "You think so?"

"It comes as naturally to Venetians as hiring a gondolier, especially to their Council of Ten. The Spanish as well." The narrow face creased with something you might call a smile if you were inclined to be charitable. "And so, to be perfectly honest, my own French." Michel held up his heavily bandaged right hand in the way of rueful proof.

Frank had a vivid mental image of some Venetian senator at a big desk somewhere, barking orders to kill someone into one phone and for an anchovy pizza into another. The image wasn't improved by Michel's next words.

"The creature that did for Monsieur Buckley is almost certain to be the closest one on our heels."

Frank shivered. Having poor Joe murdered back in Venice was bad enough. The thought that the murderer or murderers would be chasing after them across all Italy . . .

"Do we, uh, do we need to change our travel plans then?" he asked uncertainly. "I mean, we're taking the main road to Rome, after all."

Michel rubbed his chin with his uninjured left hand, pondering briefly. "There is reason in what you suggest. In fact . . ."

Another ponder, before the hand came away from the chin and clenched into a decisive fist. "Yes! We should change our route! There will certainly be ample opportunity for the assassins of the Inquisition and of the Council of Ten to lie in wait for us on the road to Florence. We should take a less obvious route. Well thought out, Monsieur Stone! Perhaps the route by way of Ravenna?"

"You know the way?"

Ducos shook his head. "Not as such, no. I had to deal with maps and the like when I worked for the embassy, but I have no clear memory of the roads as they are in Italy."

"Maybe Messer Marcoli will know?"

"Better yet, he almost certainly has a map," Michel said. "Let us consult with him."

* * *

Antonio Marcoli looked better than he had the night before, that was for sure. He was sitting up in bed in his room in the inn, being tended to by his daughter. Frank had his usual moment every time he caught sight of Giovanna—warmth; tenderness; okay, yeah, sheer lust too—seeing his girl play the ministering angel for her poor hurt daddy.

Damn, I love her. If only—

He shook the hopeless thought away, and looked around. Massimo was lying in another bed, still out cold. He seemed to be breathing normally, though. In fact, he was more than breathing normally, he was snoring. At least the Paduan doctor who'd attended Massimo also the night before hadn't done any actual harm. Frank had been worried about that, from all the stories he'd heard of the standards of seventeenth-century medicine. But, according to Giovanna, the doctor had never even mentioned using leeches.

"How's Massimo?" Frank asked.

"He rests," Giovanna said. "He was awake a little while ago, while you were outside. He had some bread and some water, and went back to sleep."

"Uh, okay," Frank said, although he was troubled a little. Weren't you supposed to keep concussion victims awake? But he didn't really have a clue. Sharon Nichols would know, but she was left behind in Venice. He hoped she was okay, but then the embassy had guards and that old Spanish guy she was seeing a lot of lately—for reasons that Frank couldn't begin to fathom—seemed to be able to handle himself.

Maybe they should send Massimo back to the embassy? He decided to see what Messer Marcoli thought.

"Maybe we could ask the embassy for asylum or something, for Massimo? I mean, he's not going anywhere like that. They could get medical help, proper up-time medical help that is. I mean, they wouldn't want to help with the Galileo business, but they'd keep Massimo safe while he gets better."

Marcoli digested that for a moment. Then, mournfully: "It is not just Massimo who will be going no further."

Frank nodded. And then realized what that meant. "We're not going back to Venice, are we?" he asked, incredulous.

Venice . . . with its assassins and murderers and inquisitors and who knew what-all else. Not to mention having to face the wrath of Magda without having pulled off the rescue first. Getting reamed out and then assassinated was bad enough; getting reamed out and then assassinated after having failed was just about the most awful prospect he could imagine. He dwelt a moment on the memory of one of Magda's more impressive ass-chewings, multiplied it about tenfold, and realized he was less scared of the assassins than he was of his stepmom, right at the moment. It was all he could do not to smile at the thought of standing in the street and shouting out who he was so that the assassins would get to him first.

Marcoli interrupted his flight of whimsy. "No, of course not!" he said, sounding quite indignant. "Galileo must still be rescued! You must go on without Massimo and me." He sighed deeply. "The doctor, he said that there was a risk I might lose the leg without the hygiene your father taught, and I should stay here and keep clean."

That nearly set Frank off again. His dad had included lectures on aseptic technique, that he did remember. There had been a strong smell of grappa—the stuff was a pretty good antiseptic, even if drinking it took the lining out of your stomach—while the doctor had been working. And it seemed they were taking no chances with how far you had to go with it, either. As well as setting and splinting the bone, the doctor had insisted that Marcoli be washed all over and put to bed in freshly laundered linen. The bed bath, Frank decided, probably wouldn't do any harm and would help keep his temperature down. Dad's teaching hadn't been even close to comprehensive, but basic sick care had been a must, living as they did on a commune with no health insurance.

Frank was no judge, but he didn't think Antonio Marcoli had suffered a very serious break. Just bad enough to keep him off his feet for a while, following any kind of intelligent medical regimen.

Frank realized it was turning into a long, uncomfortable silence. "What do we do, then?"

Another long silence.

Marcoli took a deep breath, and looked Frank firmly in the eye.

Uh-oh.

"Messer Stone," he said, giving the name a portentous roll to it. "You must lead the rescue of Galileo."

Somber, it was. The tone of a man reading a death sentence, Frank thought. How did they execute people in Italy nowadays, anyway?

Was there any limit to folly?

But all he could manage was:

"Uh. Me?"

* * *

"What is it, Lieutenant Trumble?" Sharon asked, doing her level best to keep irritation and exasperation out of voice. Since the operation the day before, Ruy's condition seemed to be stabilized for the moment. But she was still gnawed with deep fear—somewhere in the corner of her brain the words peritonitis! peritonitis! peritonitis! wouldn't stop gibbering at her—and in no mood to be called to the embassy's front entrance to settle some kind of squabble with—

Oh.

She cleared her throat. "Good morning, Your Eminence."

Just beyond the door, Cardinal Bedmar gave Billy Trumble a triumphant little glance. "And good morning to you as well, Signora Nichols. I have come to inquire about my servant, Ruy Sanchez. I have been given to understand that you intend to keep him here at your embassy."

Been given to understand, Sharon thought sourly. That was spook-speak for my spies tell me.

On the other hand, she could understand why the special ambassador from the Spanish Netherlands would be concerned at discovering that his top spy was now residing under the roof of a foreign nation's embassy. All the more so when that nation was at war with his own—and, by the latest reports, the war was heating up rapidly.

"Yes, he is here." A sudden impulse swept over her. Probably undiplomatic as all hell, but . . .

Oh, she just couldn't resist.

"Indeed," she said firmly. "After an extended and relentless campaign—a veritable Champion of Lust, that man—Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz has finally succeeding in worming his way into my bed."

She pressed the back of her wrist again her forehead; the gesture was as flamboyantly histrionic as anything Ruy himself might have done. "I fear I was taken completely off-guard. The flatteries, the flowers—certainly the plying with wine—all that I expected. But I had not foreseen that the man would stoop so low as to take a sword in the guts. That duplicitous stratagem succeeded where all others had failed. I fear my reputation is now ruined."

Sharon was immensely proud of herself. She'd kept a straight face all the way through.

The old cardinal smiled thinly. "Yes, indeed. The man is amazingly stubborn and persistent. He's driven me to the edge of madness with it, at times."

But the smile didn't extend to the eyes. Sharon suddenly realized that Bedmar was a very worried man.

"Signora . . . please." The Spanish ambassador swallowed. "Ruy and I go back many years together. I would know how he is. Please."

Sharon found herself swallowing a lump. However the relationship between Bedmar and Sanchez had gotten started, and whatever its formal nature, she understood in that moment something she should have understood simply from knowing Ruy himself. Ruy Sanchez, ruthless as he might be, was no Michel Ducos. And Bedmar was no Seigneur le Comte d'Avaux, who would treat his most trusted agent and bodyguard as a mere lackey.

"My apologies, Your Eminence," she murmured. Then, stood aside and motioned with her hand. "Please, come in. I'll take you to him immediately. He's awake now. Was, at least, when I left him two minutes ago."

As they moved through the salon leading to the great central staircase, the cardinal gave Sharon a sidelong look. "Did you really put him in your own bed?"

"Yes. It's a good bed—one of the best in the embassy—and I can easily manage in one of the Stone boys' rooms. He is absent at the moment." She decided not to mention that the Stone kids seemed to have all decamped on some hare-brained scheme. Bedmar probably already knew, but . . .

She hurried past the problem. "I'll be spending most of my time in that room anyway, except when I'm actually sleeping. It's big and I'm used to it, so . . . it just seemed like the best place to put him."

She saw no reason to mention the confusing swirl of emotions that had been involved in the decision also. Listen to your woman! she'd screamed at the man, less than two days before, in what could quite literally be called the heat of action.

Had she meant it? She still didn't know herself. Looking back, she could see that it had been, tactically, exactly the right thing to say to get Ruy out of her line of fire. And that's still the party line, she told herself firmly.

But . . .

She hadn't been thinking tactically at all, at the moment she said it. They had just been words, boiling up out of a cauldron of fear and fury. In vino veritas, the old saying went. In wine there is truth. Could the same be said of adrenaline?

She didn't know; wasn't even prepared to think about it now. What she did know was that Ruy Sanchez could quite possibly be dead very soon. That bed was, perhaps, the last bed he would ever sleep in. So had come the decision, as of its own volition, just like the words she'd screamed.

If that was to be Ruy Sanchez's last bed, then it would be hers. Even if it had never been put to its accustomed use between man and woman. He would still die in it.

And, on the plus side, it might help keep the pestiferous man alive. Most doctors and all nurses understood that a cheerful patient—especially a sanguine one—had a better chance of surviving serious illness than one who was morose and gloomy. Finding himself in Sharon's own bed when he came out of anesthesia had certainly seemed to pick up Sanchez's spirits.

Old goat.

The first victory! Then had come the inevitable stroking of the mustachios. Now I must only persuade the slippery woman to get back into her own bed. An interesting twist . . .

Bedmar seemed to understand at least some of what was involved. As they moved up the stairs, he gave her another sidelong glance. "It seems important to tell you that Ruy Sanchez has spoken of you many times." The cardinal's old lips thinned. "Sometimes to the point of sheer tedium. For me, if not him. But he has—never once—told me anything of what, ah, you might call his amatory success."

Bedmar shook his head. "He is something of peculiar man, you know. Where others would lie in order to boast before their fellows, he would—ha!" He gave Sharon an almost gleeful cock of the head. "Do you know that—just five days ago—I had to drag him away from a levee lest he challenge one of these Venetian merchants to a duel? The man had offended him by making sly innuendos complimenting Sanchez on his success in bedding you."

Sharon's eyed widened. "You have got to be kidding. Ruy was going to fight a guy"—she grimaced, now having seen what a Ruy Sanchez fight looked like—"because he assumed that Ruy had seduced me? Which, in point of fact, is exactly what Ruy has been trying to do these past many weeks."

"Oh, indeed." Bedmar barked a laugh. "And they make jokes about we Castilians and our touchy honor! I sometimes think a proper Catalan would take offense at the movement of the heavenly bodies, did the mood take him. Challenge the moon to a duel. Rise before dawn to meet it sword in hand. And then accuse the moon of cowardice and dishonor when it refused to appear on the chosen ground."

Sharon shook her head. "You may well be right. I don't know. Ruy is the only Catalan I've ever met, so far as I know."

They'd reached the door to her bedroom. Sharon opened it and ushered the cardinal in.

Ruy was lying in the bed, glaring at the window.

"You malingering bastard," growled the cardinal. "And who gave you permission in the first place to go pick a fight on behalf of these heretics? Who are also, I might remind you, our king's mortal enemies. For the moment."

"Never mind that," Sanchez growled. "Spanish kings change enemies as often as they change clothes, and you know it as well as I do."

He pointed an accusing finger at the window. "Something's going out there! What is it? I can't hear well enough because the window is closed."

Now he glared at Sharon. "And I can't get up and look for myself because she told me not to move."

Bedmar's eyes widened. "And you obeyed her?" He turned and gave Sharon a very courtly bow. "My deepest congratulations, signora. You have succeeded where princes of state and church alike have failed often enough. Ignominiously, at times."

Ruy slapped a hand on the bedcovers. "Damnation! What is happening?"

"Oh, hold your horses," Sharon snorted, moving toward the window. As she drew near, she realized that Ruy was right. There was some kind of commotion going on out there.

She hurried a little, the last few paces, to throw open the window. Then, leaned over to look out.

"Oh, my."

"What is it, signora?" The cardinal had come to stand behind her. Then: "Interesting."

He took his head out of the window and looked back at Sanchez. "It will be a bit more difficult to escape this time, I fear. With you in that absurd condition!"

Sanchez winced. "The Arsenalotti? Again?"

But Sharon had been listening more closely. And she was probably the only one of the three in the room who could have really followed the—ah, debate—going on below. Most of the exchange between Billy Trumble and his two Marines and the mob gathering outside the embassy was taking place between Billy and his friend Conrad Ursinus. Who, naval officer of the USE or not, seemed to be the leader of the mob.

Well . . . not exactly. Leader, perhaps, but also one who was trying to convince his followers to follow him.

It was her turn to wince. Ursinus really did have an impressive command of the cruder forms of invective. Billy Trumble was no slouch either, come to it.

"Just stay put, Sanchez," she commanded. "The gist of what's happening is that Billy is assuring the crowd that you Spaniards were not complicit in the foul and dastardly and—oh lots of other words—murder of Joe Buckley. Indeed, he is casting some aspersions on the crowd itself—he really shouldn't use language like that—for their, ah, stupidity is the mildest term he's used so far, in even thinking so."

She pursed her lips for a moment, whistling a little. "Um. That was a particularly unnecessary flourish, I think. Now he's pointing out to the crowd—mostly in what we'd call four letter terms—that even sorry imbecilic—ah, that last expression refers to incestuous persons—should have enough sense to understand who was really to blame. The more so since the Venetian residents on Murano who came to our aid immediately thereafter will vouch—I'm really cleaning this up a lot, you understand; maybe in another universe I should look into getting a job as a UN translator—that we found evidence planted by Ducos' agents as well, of course, as having two of the agents themselves now in the custody of the Venetians—although God knows what's happened to them since—and—"

She broke off, recoiling from the window as if suddenly splashed by a wave. "Oh, Lord! Now Conrad's getting into the act—his language really stinks—I wonder if he and Billy set this up ahead of time?—and the gist of what he's saying, leaving aside about five hundred I-told-you-sos, is that they ought to be heading for the French embassy."

The crowd started chanting something. The name "d'Avaux" figured prominently in the chants. Within seconds, the sound of the chants grew dimmer in the distance.

Sharon closed the window. "And that's that. I do hope, for his sake, that the comte has a fast horse."

"Sweet it is," murmured Bedmar. He took three little prancing steps. "I could die now, happily. That stinking Frenchman, on the run!"

Ruy shared none of his glee. Again, he slapped the bedcovers. "Curse you, woman! I want to watch."

"You don't move, Sanchez," she hissed. "You don't even think about it."

Bedmar, grinning, plunked himself on the bed next to Ruy. "So, Ruy, tell me. How were you so foolish as to let"—he pointed a finger at Sharon—"that Gorgon, that Medusa, that black demoness from the Pit, inveigle you into her bed?"

"She tricked me," Ruy insisted. "It was most foully done. Lured me into an ambush, the witch."

Chapter 41

"Yes, Frank, you." Marcoli said. In just such tones might he have ordered Frank to form up a party of men and Take That Hill.

Frank stole a glance at Giovanna. She was gazing at him, eyes shining. Frank knew in that moment that whatever they did to convicted felons in Italy in the seventeenth century, he had no choice but to face it with a smile. Her eyes!

He couldn't see a way out, unless . . . "What about Michel?"

"Non, Frank," Ducos said firmly. "I am really little more than a clerk. Oh, for certain, I am from the back alleys of Paris and I own myself a fair hand in any desperate business. But I have not the temperament to be a leader—whereas you do, Frank."

"Me?" Frank found that particularly mystifying. He'd been brought up a hippie, not an army brat. At least he thought army brats grew up knowing about this chain-of-command stuff. Kids on a commune sure didn't.

On the other hand . . .

Well, yes, he supposed it might be true that he was often the guy who seemed to get things organized. That wasn't just true with his brothers, either, something which could be explained by the fact that he was the oldest. He'd been the one who got the soccer league organized and off the ground, too.

Um. And now that Frank thought about it, if he hadn't been along on this expedition they'd probably still be in the outskirts of Venice. Frank had been the one who'd constantly finagled the Marcolis to settle on a course of action—any course of action—and just do it. Antonio Marcoli was a natural leader in terms of charisma and decisiveness, to be sure. The problem was that his enthusiasm for just about everything led him to change his mind about four times an hour—each new change of plan being advanced just as enthusiastically and decisively as the preceding ones. Following the man was a bit like following a child leading the way in an amusement park. He wanted to take all the rides at once.

Still, there just had to be a better way out of this. "Messer Marcoli, I'm only nineteen years old—well, okay, almost twenty. Still, by your standards—even, some ways, the standards of my own folk—I'm not a grown man yet."

"Nonsense!" Michel exclaimed. "Age has nothing to do with leadership. Consider Alexander the Great. And you have already devised a plan to avoid our assassins!"

Frank stumbled over the analogy with Alexander. "Huh? I did? What are you talking about?"

"The route through Ravenna!" Michel clapped him on the back. The kind of hearty, manly reassurance that raised the hackles of every hippie-trained instinct Frank had. He really didn't like Ducos, he finally decided.

"Hold on, Michel!" Frank protested. "You decided on Ravenna."

"Ah, but I would not have thought to go another way than the main road to begin with! Truly I would not, Frank. I have some small command of the geography of this country, but I lack the supple mind, the decisiveness. You supplied these lacks. I can assist with the details in some small way, but . . ." Michel trailed off with a very expressive, and very Gallic shrug.

"I don't even know where Ravenna is—"

"Have no fear, Frank!" Marcoli said. "I came prepared. I have a map!"

Great, Frank thought. A seventeenth-century map, I'll bet. He wondered whether they should have thought to bust out one of the up-time maps that he knew the embassy had. Too late now, of course. One foot back in Venice and they'd be lucky to get as much as ten yards off the boat before they were jumped by assassins. Did they dress all in black, with masks, he wondered? Or was that just ninjas?

Maybe they had ninjas in Venice. There'd be a hell of a market for their services, he thought sourly. Maybe there were adverts in the Ninja Times of Japan. "Come to Venice for the most lucrative working holiday of your life!"

At that point Frank realized he was on the verge of decidedly unmanly hysterics—which was definitely not the thing to do with that look in Giovanna's eyes. Dark brown or not, the eyes seemed as bright as anything he'd ever seen. "Okay," he muttered.

"So you will lead! Okay! Splendid! And your plan for Ravenna is a good one, for it lets you avoid Florentine lands, where we might have had trouble." Marcoli positively beamed. Like a lot of folks down-time, he'd picked up the word okay very quickly. No wonder, it was a useful word.

Frank had a whole lot more useful words assembled to go, too, right on the tip of his tongue. Words and terms he had to firmly suppress, like out of your mind and you gotta be kidding.

There was just no way, not with that look on Giovanna's face. Her expression was an odd combination of adoration, serenity and smugness. Frank understood that he'd crossed some kind of invisible line here. Giovanna's beloved father had just more or less officially declared him a Certified Adult Male, Prime Cut. Eminently suitable for his daughter in all respects. That magic moment—simultaneously treasured and dreaded in varying proportions by all involved parties—when the Prospective Father-in-Law solemnly avers and avows that The Young Fellow Is Okay With Him.

It was a bit like being branded. As Frank recalled from various movies he'd seen, the calf always bellowed in protest. As much, he suspected, due to its fear of the future—yup, young fella, you're now certified Grade-A meat on the hoof—as the pain of the moment.

He felt like bellowing himself. How in the hell did I ever wind up in this fix? It was as if fate and destiny had guided him as surely—and with as much malice aforethought—as ranchers herded their cattle into the slaughtering pens.

Firmly, he shook his head. Giovanna was at the center of this, after all, as least so far as he was concerned. And she was hardly the equivalent of a slaughtering pen.

Frank took a long slow breath, his eyes closed, doing his best to think everything through. Everything that mattered to him, leaving aside what he thought about the Galileo affair. Getting married at an early age didn't hold the same fears for Frank that it might for most nineteen-year-olds. Rather the opposite, in fact. Most kids hadn't been raised on a hippie commune. Yes, there were advantages; and, all things considered, Tom Stone was probably about as good a dad as you could ask for. But Frank also understood the limits of the "free and easy life." Truth be told, there was something deeply attractive to him about the kind of traditional marriage that he was looking at here. "Traditional," as in seventeenth century.

He opened his eyes and looked at Giovanna. She met his gaze happily, confidently, serenely. The girl was almost two years younger than Frank. But she had made her decision and had no problem with it at all. That she wanted Frank as much as he wanted her, he knew for sure by now. Till death do us part and all that, too. Whatever her ideological notions, Giovanna was really no modern girl. That was part of the attraction, Frank knew. He had no idea where his own mother had wandered off to, after she left the commune. Neither did Ron; neither did Gerry. Whereas none of Giovanna Marcoli's kids would ever wonder about what had happened to her. She'd either be there, or she'd be in a grave.

Say whatever else you would about the Marcolis, not one of them was faithless.

Okay, done, he said to himself. It was time to decide, and the decision was really easy to make. Even if it did lock him into the goofiest set of in-laws anybody could hope to have. And even if it did commit him to lead what was probably the screwiest political caper anybody had ever come up with.

See if you think that on the rack, lover boy, came a little Voice of Treason.

But Frank chose to ignore the voice. Much as Alexander the Great, he fancied for a moment, chose to ignore the odds at Issus.

Yup. He died young too, snickered the Voice. Thirty-three. You'll beat that by a country mile. Here lies Frank Stone. 1984 to 1634. The only Great Hero on record dumb enough to kill himself off two hundred and fifty years before he was even born.

* * *

Dino put his head around the door at that moment. "The carts, they are here."

"I guess we better get loaded up, then," Frank said firmly.

He turned back to Antonio. "Messer Marcoli, I want to marry your daughter."

He heard Giovanna clap her hands, once, but kept his eyes on the father.

"Of course," Marcoli said immediately. "I can think of no man I should rather have for a son-in-law." He gave his daughter a quick, sly glance. "Nor do I foresee any problems in convincing the child to respect her father's wishes."

Frank risked a glance himself. Giovanna's smile was the widest he'd ever seen on any human being. Anatomically speaking, it was a little scary.

But he brought his eyes back to Marcoli at once. The hard part was still to come. "We can't get married today. It's just not possible."

Marcoli frowned. "Well, of course not. Posting the banns alone would require—" He broke off suddenly, glancing back and forth between Frank and Giovanna. "Ah."

The frown deepened. For a moment, threatening to become Jovian. Then, to Frank's relief, began to fade away.

"To be sure," Marcoli murmured. "You will want your intended to accompany you to Rome."

"Yes, sir. Ah . . ." How to say it? "It will be dangerous for you here, sir. You and Massimo both. What with the assassins coming after us."

Marcoli waved his hand. "Yes, yes, I understand. A desperate business. Massimo and I will shortly be on the run, I have no doubt at all. Our chances? Not good. No, not good. I agree. Giovanna would be safer with you."

He swiveled his head and gave his daughter an intense scrutiny. "Intense," as in Marcoli-intense.

Then, seemingly satisfied, Marcoli looked back at Frank. "I give my permission. I will trust you not to take advantage of the situation until you can find the time and place for a wedding. I would not see my daughter dishonored."

"My word on it, sir."

Massimo had awakened, apparently, somewhere in the middle of all this. Frank heard him issue a derisive snort.

"You are mad, cousin. Look at them! As well command water not to run downhill."

Marcoli glared at his cousin. Massimo was now levering himself upright on his bed. "Still," he said, "I agree with the decision itself. We must be decisive at all times—here above all others. Better to risk—"

Massimo gave Marcoli a glare of his own. "—something which has been known to happen in this family—my own sister! Giovanna's mother! two days before the wedding! don't try to pretend!—"

Antonio Marcoli flushed and looked away. His eyes carefully avoided his daughter's.

"—without any noticeable catastrophe, I would point out." Massimo cleared his throat. "Better that than to fail in saving our great Italian savant. The young man here—fine young man, yes, I fully agree—will do far better if he can concentrate on the task without worrying about what might have happened to his betrothed."

Massimo was now sitting fully upright and, concussion or no concussion, was gesticulating with his usual intellectual's enthusiasm. "Besides—I am the theoretician here, don't forget—I suspect we need to modify our program on this matter in any event."

He came to an abrupt halt, eyeing Frank and then Giovanna. "After these two impressionable youngsters have departed, however."

"Leaving right now," Frank announced. He extended his hand. "Giovanna?"

She skipped to her feet. "Coming!"

* * *

"You're sure?" Tom Stone demanded. "I mean, like, positive? They didn't just, you know, maybe go off on a long picnic or something?"

Lennox was shaking his head before Tom had finished the sentence.

"Goan," said Lennox, in a tone lugubrious even for him. "I found yon papist drunkard bemoanin't the lack ae 'em."

Sharon felt a chill run down her spine. This was too much. Buckley dead, Ruy fighting for his life, and now Lennox had brought Heinzerling in to report that all three of the Stone boys had definitely vanished. And, more to the point, that they had discovered several people who'd seen them leaving the city in the company of the Marcolis.

That had been the last, lingering hope—that, maybe, the bizarre "evidence" of a plot against the pope's life which they'd found in the Marcoli house had been entirely faked by Ducos' agents.

Sharon didn't have any doubt at all that the so-called evidence about a plot to kill the pope was fraudulent. No matter how scrambled his brains might be by hormones, she knew Frank Stone well enough to know that he'd never have agreed to something like that. But the other business . . . about rescuing Galileo . . .

It was all she could do not to groan out loud. When she'd passed on the information to Ruy just an hour ago, he'd immediately confirmed her own private assessment.

"Oh, yes," the Catalan had said confidently. "It all makes sense, Sharon. The business about assassinating the pope is nonsense, of course. But a rescue of Galileo? That would be exactly the sort of idiot scheme that a man like Marcoli would develop—and which would seem attractive enough to naive boys. Very romantic. It also explains Ducos' involvement—as well as his murder of Buckley. He would plant evidence trying to implicate them in a much worse design, in order to embarrass your embassy still further, increase the Venetians' ties to the French, and drive a wedge between Paris and the Vatican. But, then, he had to murder Buckley to keep Buckley—the one man everyone would believe, in this matter—from being able to deny it."

Lennox had had the first report from one of his sergeants, the Catholic one named Southworth, that there had definitely been something afoot in Venice among the Committee crowd. The urchin Benito was not the only one, apparently, before whom the Marcolis had carelessly prattled. Lennox had gone looking for Heinzerling then, to ask him if there was anything he was mindful of. When he found Heinzerling, he had practically taken the Jesuit by the scruff of the neck to make his report.

"Gus?" Stoner asked.

"Ja," Heinzerling said, his voice croakier even than usual. "It is that we had drinks—Ron Stone and Fabrizio Marcoli and myself—in the Casino dei Tre Radi, several days ago, and there were more drinks at another Casino whose name I forget. It is Carnivale, ja?"

Stoner nodded. "Go on."

"There was discussion of the Galileo book, which has been recalled recently by the Inquisition." Heinzerling stopped and rubbed his forehead. "It is there that I began to debate with Monsignor—I cannot remember his name—but he is now the state theologian at Venice."

"He was at the casino, consorting with Committee members?" Sharon was a bit intrigued. The monsignor in question was a notorious firebrand who had spoken out for Galileo. The thought of him squaring off with Heinzerling's drunken eloquence was—entertaining, she realized, but not relevant. And the issue of what a senior theologian was doing in a casino knocking down drinks with the likes of Ron Stone and Fabrizio Marcoli could also abide. "Never mind that," she said before Heinzerling could respond, "when did you realize the boys were missing?"

Heinzerling bit his lower lip and sighed deeply. The glum expression made his muttonchop whiskers bristle, reinforcing the impression he gave of being a prize boar in a clerical outfit. "Well. Not until today, for a certainty—but I should have seen it coming then. The problem is that I was preoccupied. The monsignor and I came to words over the proposition of whether summa fideei should be expressed through—"

Sharon held up a hand. Gus' capability for theological excursion was vast, creative and best stopped before it started if there was any urgent secular business at hand. "What should you 'have seen coming'?"

"Galileo." Gus's tone managed to grow a notch gloomier. He looked to Sharon like he was on the verge of tears. "They would rescue him, I am now sure of it."

Stoner's voice was soft, although he sounded like he was on the verge of shouting. "Rescue," he said. "Rescue." And then a long pause. "The Inquisition have got him, then?"

Heinzerling gave a little groan, by way of running up to coherent speech. "The Inquisition have had him since last year," he said. "He was ordered not to travel or to print further copies of his latest book, which is about the motion of the Earth. The news is that he is recovered the illness by which the Inquisition excused him travel to Rome, and is now going there under guard. Some stories say he is in irons. I do not believe that myself but—"

He was interrupted by the door banging open. "Where are they gone?" shouted Magda as she swept in. She was flushed and looked—dangerous. She was a young woman, slender and usually dignified, grave even, in her manner. Spitting fury was not a state Sharon had ever seen her in. Even Magda's anger at the boor Falier had been moderate in comparison.

There was this to be said for Hanni's tendency to haul off and belt her husband upside the head—she could cool off fairly quickly when she had vented her rage and never quite seemed to be unhappy for long. Sharon began to wish one or another of the Stones would cut loose properly at Gus—

And Magda did. She paused hardly a moment before letting rip. Fully five minutes of sustained invective in two languages—no, three, it sounded like there had been some Latin in there.

"And you!" she said, rounding on Lennox. "You will send men! All your men if you have to! You will get them back!"

Lennox joined Heinzerling in the group cringe that looked set to take in every man in the room. "Aye. I'll do that, right enough. I'll take yon papist, wit' y'r permission?"

It was unclear exactly who was being asked for permission. Sharon glanced at Stoner. He seemed in too much of daze to think clearly.

Sharon decided her temporary ambassador status was still operating. "Yes, certainly. Will you leave some of the guard?"

"Aye. Lieutenant Taggart will hae command of't. Young Trumble I'll take wit me—'e can be the second, for his education. No tellin' what mischief the lad would get into if left behind. Sergeant Southworth and four lads will come wi' me too. Sergeant Dalziel will have the running of the guard here, since he's the senior man."

"Why Southworth?" Sharon asked. The young English sergeant seemed to be something of an outsider among the mostly Scots troops, an infantryman who had joined the Marines and been assigned to the wholly anomalous Marine Cavalry Troop.

"He's a friend o' Frank Stone, to start wit'. 'At may coom in handy. Beyond that, Aidan's a guid lad, right enough, f'r a sassenach, an' wi' the lads short-handed I want an old hand here and Dalziel's that. Besides, if yon drunkard"—he nodded toward Heinzerling—"takes to his cups, Southworth has the heathen talk o' these parts better than any other man w'hae."

Sharon nodded. For all Lennox talked a bigoted line, he was actually a lot less prejudiced than most men she knew.

Lennox snapped a salute. "Richt. C'mon Father Heinzerling, ye sot of a Jesuit. Ye're to come and lead us tae Rome or wherever."

"Wait a minute," Sharon said. She had a sudden nightmare vision of Lennox and Heinzerling blundering about northern Italy with no real clue where they were going. "Start by going to Maestro Luzzatto. He won't be any use himself, but he can put you in touch with Giuseppe Cavriani. Tell Cavriani that I—Magda and I, rather—insist that he serve you as a guide."

Stoner stared at her. "Why would he agree to do that? He's got a business to run."

Madga snorted. Sharon just grinned. "Stoner, you really need to pay more attention to all those papers you sign. You are Cavriani's business, these days. Well, in the real world, me and Madga are. It's just disguised by this idiot business—and where's Gloria Steinem when you really want her?—of not accepting women as signatories on commercial deals. The point is, you are now one of the richest men in Italy."

"I am?"

"Yup. And she and I"—Sharon pointed a finger at Magda—"are two of the richest women. She because she's your wife, and me because I don't do anything in business without getting a cut. My father's a bit oblivious to these things, but my momma didn't raise no fools."

Stoner looked back and forth between them. "You are?"

"Are what? Rich, or a fool? Yes to the first, no to the second. But to get back to the point, Crazy Giuseppe is by now easily the most successful Cavriani on record. The one thing he will not want to do is tick off his meal ticket. If we tell him to go, he'll go. Knowing Giuseppe, he'll even go cheerfully. They don't call him Crazy for nothing."

"T'will lose us time," Lennox objected. "Be a full day afore we c'n nab yon swindler and muscle him along."

Sharon managed not to sneer. Barely. "Big deal. You lose a day at the beginning—instead of losing two weeks getting lost. And what's a day? You're tracking the Marcolis, Captain. By all accounts, their progress across Italy will look like Buster Keaton building a sailboat."

That got a round of laughs. Anyone who lived in Grantville for any length of time became a Buster Keaton aficionado. For some reason, Keaton's brand of silent slapstick comedy struck a chord with down-timers that Charlie Chaplin rarely did.

"True enough," Lennox grunted. He gave Heinzerling a glance. "Let's be off, then."

The two big men went out, grimly silent.

"Uh," said Stoner, "shouldn't they be going with more men?"

"I'm sure Captain Lennox knows best how to organize a chase," said Sharon.

"He had better," said Magda. "He had better."

For his sake, Sharon hoped he did.

Part V:
May, 1634

Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave
commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you to rise? We'll meet
The company below, then.

Chapter 42

It was, of course, too hot. Lennox had grown up near Dunbar and spent the last few years rattling around northern Germany. This, by all accounts a balmy spring day for Venice, was what he would think of as a scorching summer day. Venice was still just visible as he looked back, blued in the distance and hazy with the miles.

The horses were sweating already, although part of that was the nervousness of crossing on the flotilla of boats they'd hired in a hurry to take them to the mainland. They'd brought two remounts for everyone except the commercial agent, Giuseppe Cavriani, who'd joined them at the last minute. Cavriani seemed to know what he was doing around a horse, though, even with Lennox not inclined—between the heat and the shudders of his stomach after so short a boat trip on the virtually flat lagoon—to be in the least charitable.

And charitable he'd have to be to describe that fat papist Heinzerling as any kind of horseman. Oh, he was a fine enough fellow, for a damned Jesuit, but putting him on a horse was a cruelty to man and beast alike. Not just for the weight of the man—there were such things as big horses—but for the way he sat the poor creature. They could put a lad behind the horse with a shovel, pile the results in a sack across the saddle, and there'd be a definite improvement in the overall grace of the whole picture.

For all that, the Jesuit could stay in the saddle and ride well enough to cover ground. They'd have to keep to roads, though. The thought of Heinzerling going neck-or-nothing across the Borders of Lennox's youth was almost as good as a Buster Keaton movie for laughs.

Lennox kept his gaze carefully away from the hustle and shift of his fellows getting their gear triced up and themselves mounted, until an expectant silence told him that his sergeant was satisfied with the state of things. That was the hardest thing to do, something that came easy to the likes of Mister MacKay, who'd been born to his gentleman's station and was used to being done for. The Inner Sergeant kept telling Lennox to turn about and fuss over the detachment he'd brought. He resisted it, though, and turned to his men.

Good turnout, he thought, looking over them. Heinzerling and Cavriani were beside him, discussing something about their route in an undertone. Both of them spoke in Italian, Cavriani's first language despite being born in Geneva, and one of the huge number Heinzerling spoke. Lennox didn't have a notion what they were on about, so he addressed his men.

"Lads," he said, "We've tae catch the Doctor Stone's boys before they get in any mair trouble. So we've not to add to yon trouble our ain selves. Beggin' your presence, Sergeant Southworth, we're Protestants in a nation o' Catholics and soldiers o' the United States Marines abroad on duty. So we've to give no bad account o' ourselves." He dropped to a growl. "T'at means keep ye're thievin' honds tae yersels and ye're britches buttoned."

Not that that much needed saying, he thought. He'd picked good lads against that eventuality. Ritson, a sassenach but a solid, older man. Chosen man, in the regiment that was but didn't have his letters well enough for the new armed forces, he'd do if Southworth ever didn't. MacNeish, a teuchter but a solid man for all that, and Faul and Milton, both Scots. Southworth was a new lad, on the young side for a sergeant. He been a corporal until recently—the new American word for a chosen man still sounded odd to Lennox—but he had his letters and seemed to want to prove himself as the only papist noncom in the largely Protestant Marine Cavalry.

Good troopers—Marines, rather. Lennox still found himself occasionally using the old term. Well, to business. He turned to the priest and the facilitator, as Cavriani chose to call himself. "Have you gentlemen decided on our route?"

Cavriani nodded. "Captain, if you can lay us a course due southwest?"

"Aye, right enough I can." Lennox pulled from his pocket one of the new compasses that were being made in Grantville. They weren't much like the Silva ones that had been brought back—those had all gone with the engineers surveying for new roads, canals and mines—but they were a good deal better than the kind of instrument Lennox was used to seeing officers getting lost with.

"I've no good map, mind." The best one, which fit in his sabretache, had been traced from one that showed all of Italy on one small sheet. The major roads of the old Roman Empire were on it, and not much more. The other one, in a roll he'd tied across his saddle, had been drawn a few years before, and they had bought it in Venice just after they had arrived there. Lennox had realized, looking at it, that he had been badly spoiled by the kinds of maps Grantville had had; even the kind of maps they were making now in the USE. From the point of view of a cavalryman, down-time maps . . . sucked.

"We will be able to manage, I think," said Cavriani. "Southwest from here, cross the Adige as soon as we may and continue until we reach the road south to Ferrara. We should be there by tonight. Perhaps thirty, forty miles?"

"We'll be ahead of them?" Lennox liked the sound of a mere thirty or forty miles before sundown. With this small a party and with remounts, that should not be difficult.

"Assuming that they proceed to Rome, and I have every belief that they are going there, yes. I also have information that Marcoli chartered boats to Padua." Cavriani was beginning to sound less like a commercial agent and more like a solder with every word, Lennox noticed. He supposed it was like riding a horse; you never really forgot how. He'd be interested to find out what the man's history had been. He hadn't always been a facilitator, of that Lennox was well-nigh certain.

"Padua?" Lennox frowned. From memory that was off to the west of Venice, and Rome was almost due south.

Cavriani nodded. "From Padua, the road south takes you through Ferrara, Bologna, Firenze, and thence on to Rome. Very simple, very easy, and the most direct route. Coming to Chioggia and going across country to Ferrara, I think we will cut the corner and arrive there first. They will have passed much of the first day traveling to Padua, stayed there the night, and set out for Ferrara on the morrow. Despite having started three days before us, they'll be moving much more slowly. My reports tell me that they are hauling a volume of baggage which borders on the insane. We should expect them either late tomorrow or early the next day."

"You're sure they'll do that?" Lennox had to check, although doing so was ringing all manner of internal alarms. His Inner Sergeant was reacting to Cavriani as an officer, not simply as a civilian and a foreigner to boot. That said, he recognized the tendency and the man had a plan that made sense by Lennox's map. The other route, by way of Ravenna and Rimini, was farther off the straight line, and required that they take back roads that would be hard to find their way on. The embassy was fairly certain that none of the good maps were missing, and none of them showed the small routes either.

Cavriani nodded. "Ferrara it is," said Lennox. He took a sight with the compass. "To yon village first. Lead on, if you would."

Cavriani touched the brim of his cavalier hat in salute, wheeled his mount and moved off at trot.

Lennox turned in his saddle. "Marines! Walk-march! Trot!"

And they were off.

* * *

"Merde."

Frank had a rough idea what that word was French for, and the feeling with which Michel said it removed all doubt. "We're lost, aren't we?"

They were sitting on the driving seat of the first of the two wagons. Giovanna, Gerry and Dino were perched on their gear in the wagon-bed behind them, and the others were in the second wagon. They'd managed to stay somewhere near southwest for most of the morning, while the sun gave them some kind of clue which way they were headed. But then they'd taken a wrong turning somewhere. The sun was coming down in front of them, which definitely wasn't right.

It didn't help that the transport they had was pulled by what had to be the two oldest horses in Italy. Frank had seen, and dealt with, more horses in the three years since the Ring of Fire than he'd had to do with in the whole of his life before. He was never going to call himself any kind of equestrian expert, but this pair of nags were candidates for the glue-factory any day now. As a result, neither of them were in any great hurry to be off anywhere.

"You think we could get more horses? Or just different ones?" Frank wondered aloud, as he watched the bony ass in front of him plod along. They'd tried inspiring the beasts with the buggy whips that came with the carts. The only response had been a flick of an ear and a look over the shoulder with a round, white-edged and rheumy eye that said, in clear Equine, You must be joking. They hadn't tried again. "I think this one's older than I am."

Michel snorted. "Messer Frank, I think this horse is older than I am. I did not like to say at Padua, as Messer Marcoli had gone to such trouble, but . . ." Michel gave one of those wonderfully expressive French shrugs. The one that said, In a perfect world, monsieur, it would be otherwise. But what can you do?

Frank opened up the map, trying to get some notion of where they were again. He was no more successful than he had been the last time he'd tried. That had been—he looked at his watch—five minutes ago. The damned thing had been hand-drawn on something that felt like leather—too thick to be parchment or vellum, he thought, or maybe it was just expensive, hard-wearing stuff. Whoever had drawn it had been a whiz with curlicues and fancy writing. He'd been a world's expert on spouting whales and dreadful serpents in the sea. Frank doubted there was a better man anywhere for intricate little details in the corners or stylized representations of the Four Winds. He had, however, had no truck with fancified modern notions of a map actually representing anything on the ground. If nothing else, Frank knew for a fact that Italy wasn't that shape. The famous boot looked more like a fat slug crawling its way toward Africa.

What the hell were they going to do? This would be a good one for the Committee propaganda mill, he thought. Heroic rescue party dies of old age trying to find first major town on their route. Or, better still: Bold rescue party gets halfway there, horses boldly die of old age, film at eleven. What to do?

There was a rustle of skirts. Giovanna leaned over the back of the driving bench between Frank and Michel. "Should we ask for directions?"

Both Frank and Michel looked at her. "Eh?" Frank said.

"One of these fellows"—she waved to the side of the road—"might know where we are. And the way to Ravenna."

"What, you mean just ask?" Frank demanded. The little voice in the back of his mind muttered, Stereotype warning! You are acting like a stereotype male! Warning! Warning!

There were times when having been raised by Tom Stone was a real pain in the butt. On the other hand . . .

Well, actually, it did make sense. "Sure," said Frank. "Stop the cart, Michel."

Ducos' expression was as sour as you could ask for. But he was hoist on his own petard, since he'd insisted himself that Frank was the leader of the party. So, however grudgingly, he did as he was told.

Frank got down, trusting to Salvatore on the cart behind to stop in time. Or, more accurately, trusting the horse. Near as Frank could tell, the horses were both better drivers than anyone on the carts.

They'd been ambling slowly into a village that consisted of a small cluster of houses and a church. There was a orchard of some kind next to the road. Frank was pretty sure it was an olive grove, although he wouldn't swear to it. They had that dusky grayish-green color to them, anyway, which he associated with olive trees.

By the gate to the orchard was a stone bench. The little old guy who sat on it, taking his ease in the late afternoon sunshine, was straight from central casting. Peasant, wizened, Italian, one of. Frank suspected that he'd probably not get much sense out of the guy. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

"Excuse me, how do we get to Ravenna?"

"Eh?" The oldster cupped a hand behind one ear. Frank's heart sank. Great, he's deaf.

He repeated himself. "Excuse me, how do we get to Ravenna?"

The response was a torrent of . . . gibberish. Well, nearly gibberish.

Recollection shyly raised its hand at the back of class. Of course! Italy was full of dialects, and Frank only knew Veneziano. His heart sank. If he could barely talk to the locals this close to Venice, what was it going to be like when they got further away?

Still, Frank managed to pick out a few bits. "Babble babble, the priest, garble garble, reads books, babble babble, foreign parts."

The machine-gun speed hadn't helped. "More slowly, please?"

The old guy raised the volume as well as slowing down. "Talk to the priest," he said, then a few words Frank didn't recognize at all, finishing with "Foreign parts." The oldster added a hefty wad of phlegm onto the ground beside him to show his opinion of the said foreign parts.

"You say the priest?" Frank tried, slowly and loudly.

"Si, the priest." The old guy lifted a gnarled stick—also straight out of central casting—and pointed down the road toward the church.

Frank turned back. "I think he means we should ask at the church. I'm not sure that's a good idea?" He made it a question.

Michel shrugged. The man had a vast collection of shrugs, each subtly different. Frank wondered if the French had a school somewhere where they taught shrugging. If so, Ducos had graduated summa cum laude.

This one said Maybe, maybe not. I think maybe we should chance it.

"Okay," Frank said. After all, why not? The chances of their pursuers coming here any time soon were slim. If they didn't know where they were themselves, how were assassins going to track them down?

* * *

The priest, when they finally found his house behind the church, turned out to be a little, cheerful, bouncy fellow, who at least had enough Veneziano to get by in and actually spoke formal Italian, which knocked down the communications barrier. And yes, he knew the way to Ravenna, and gave them directions. And indeed, there was a coaching inn only a little way further on, the establishment of his brother-in-law's uncle, who could sell them fine new horses, excellent beasts. They could be in Ravenna in two days with no unseemly haste. Perhaps they could be so good as to do humble Father Rizzi the honor of remaining for a little refreshment? He should so, so like to hear news of the wider world, what they had heard of the war in the Germanies and these strange people who had come, it was said, from the future.

Frank almost had a heart attack at that last bit, until he realized that the priest was just talking in general terms. Father Rizzi clearly understood that Frank was a foreigner of some kind, but in rural Italy—as anywhere in rural Europe and even in most cities—the concept of "foreigner" was blessedly all-inclusive. If you weren't from here—here being the immediate locality—you were a foreigner.

Oh, no, they couldn't possibly impose . . .

But he insisted! Positively insisted! He would not hear of a suggestion that he be inhospitable!

By the time it was all done, they had agreed to stay a little while, to have a light repast of cold chicken and ham and cheese and good, fresh bread, to sample some of the local wine and generally shoot the breeze with the good father and bring the news of the world to his sleepy hamlet.

Frank was nervous, at first, but eventually he realized the priest had no suspicions whatsoever. He was the kind of cheerful soul who simply found suspicion even more foreign territory than the nations whose news he wanted to hear. He even put them up for the night when it got late, and had his housekeeper see to their breakfast in the morning. And refused all offer of payment from their limited stocks of coin, for he had received, he said, quite enough recompense in the news they'd brought of the wider world. The villagers laughed at him for reading books and being interested in foreign places, and so it was a double joy to be brought such a wealth! He hefted the thick stack of broadsheets with Buckley's articles on them.

Setting off down the road to Ravenna, via Father Rizzi's brother-in-law's uncle's inn and used horse dealership, Frank felt kind of guilty about the whole thing. The priest had been kind and generous, feeding and sheltering them out of all proportion to what they'd given him in return. And here they were on their way to strike a blow at the church he represented.

Mostly, thought, Frank was just frustrated. Really, really, really frustrated. He'd spent most of the evening wondering if he dared asked the priest to marry Giovanna and him on the spot. But . . .

It just wouldn't have worked. Las Vegas–style quickie weddings were a universe away. Leaving aside all the lengthy procedures that Frank knew a Catholic marriage required, even in his old universe, Father Rizzi would have insisted on proof of parental permission—for Giovanna, certainly, if not for Frank. To be sure, Giovanna's brothers could have vouched for the legitimacy of the whole enterprise, and there was enough a family resemblance for their sibling status to be accepted. But the priest would still have wanted a full explanation for the reason the father himself couldn't be present.

And what was there to say? He broke his leg in Padua playing engineer and we had to leave him behind and keep going so we can rescue Galileo before the assassins catch up with us . . .

Probably wouldn't play in Peoria. Much less here.

Frank sighed. Giovanna's hand slid alongside his ribs and caressed him. She leaned over from where she was sitting behind him and whispered in his ear. "Maybe when we get to Ferrara. If not, Rome." She punctuated the whispers with a lingering kiss to his ear that was not even remotely chaste.

Frank sighed. The new horse was a lot better, sure, but what he really wanted was a jet airliner. Rescuing Galileo—or dying in the attempt—ranked a long way second to his principal preoccupation.

On the positive side, he didn't notice any of the tedium of their slow progress through the country roads of Romagna. Neither that day, nor the next. So marvelous were the erotic fantasies that flooded his brain. Which was light-headed, anyway, because most of his blood supply seemed to be permanently concentrated in more netherly regions.

Somewhere, that nasty little voice of treason was muttering uncouth phrases about thinking with other organs than brains, but Frank paid no attention at all. Giovanna's hand was now resting more or less permanently on his ribs. Caressing, and caressing, and caressing. Compared to that promise of joy and delight, what was Reason?

Nothing more than the pathetic Persian hordes gathered at Issus. Frank sneered at it like a veritable Alexander.

Chapter 43

"Can we hae missed 'em?" Lennox was an old campaigner, used to the hurry-up-and-wait pace of a cavalryman's life, but for some reason a single day spent in Ferrara was grating on his nerves. They had spent most of it just outside town, by the north road that led back to Padua.

Heinzerling grunted a "maybe."

They'd gotten in late the night before. Naturally, the weather had picked last night to drop an unseasonal rain on them, so they had all the extra trouble of caring for horses that were muddy as well as tired. They'd mounted a watch on the road over the night, and didn't really have enough men to make it an easy watch, so everyone had been tired all day. He'd had Lieutenant Trumble stand the lads down by twos for a nap in the shade of some trees by the road, and that had helped, and there was a roadside inn just outside the town which had been only too glad to take USE silver thalers for food and wine. No sense in wasting their hard-tack, or eating it for that matter, when there was real food to be had. Not that Lennox was overjoyed to be eating the stuff they called food hereabouts. The sausage was all right, he grudgingly allowed, but the rest of it wasn't a patch on what they got back in Grantville. Or even Magdeburg.

It was an improvement on what they got in Venice, though. He'd remarked as much to Cavriani, who'd laughed and told him that Venetians were renowned as the worst cooks in Italy. That made sense. He'd been surprised to discover, when the innkeeper brought dishes out to where the Marines had taken their station, that the stuff called pasta was a lot better if it wasn't served up as near sludge, stuck together in a gluey mass that was a sore trial to a man missing as many teeth as Lennox did. It still wasn't a patch on—

He squashed the homesickness hard, and looked to the sun. Then, remembering, took out his watch. "Four of the afternoon clock," he remarked. The shadows were already starting to lengthen.

Virtually no one had passed their position during the day. He'd ordered the weapons kept out of sight and the horses picketed off the road a short way. It wasn't the way he'd ordinarily have done things, since looking well-armed and alert was a sure way to prevent attacks. On the other hand. they were within sight of a grand big town and he didn't want to have to explain anything to the town guards, or watch, or whatever they had. Best not to provoke any complaints.

Cavriani was pacing across the road, back and forth. Lennox wandered over to join him.

"Could they have taken another route?"

"Hmm?" Cavriani seemed distracted by something.

"Could they have taken another route"

"Ah?" A pause, it looked like for thought, and then, "Not without going far, far out of their way. And taking back roads, at that. I doubt that Messer Marcoli has traveled much outside Venice other than his trip to Grantville, you see. He must rely on whatever map he could afford, which will not be much. He will see the old Roman road through Bologna—"

"Which we're on, aye?" Lennox asked.

Cavriani smiled. "I beg your pardon, Captain. Roman road built by ancient Romans, rather than the road to Rome, which this most assuredly is."

"Aye?" Lennox nodded for the man to continue, intrigued in spite of himself. He'd heard some things about the pagan Romans of old, largely from hearing better-learned men than himself talk. If nothing else, a lot of the officers he'd served under got their drill and tactics out of Julius Caesar, or claimed to.

But Cavriani was carrying on, and Lennox chided himself for getting distracted. Old, and tired, and mithered with this sod of a job. "You see," Cavriani was saying, "on most maps the other route to Rome is shown as departing from this one along the Via Emilia, and that runs through Bologna. I feel sure they will have trouble even finding the route through Ravenna, let along knowing it is there. It is not so important a town as it once was, a backwater you might say, and many maps do not even show it. Especially the cheap ones."

Lennox nodded. Had he not been thinking about the worthlessness of most maps only the day before?

"Aye, weel," he said with a sigh. "Happen they passed us in the night, or hae yet tae get on the road. Or they're coming after us e'en now." He stretched the back he'd made ache by standing up most of the day. "We'll stand our watch here until last light, and have sentry-go on the road from yon inn tonight. We'll wait out tomorrow as well, and then make good speed with rested horses for this Bologna at first light the day after. If we've missed them, we've remounts and we're good Borderers all. If yourself and the big yin there"—he jerked a thumb at Heinzerling—"canna keep up, we'll see ye's in Bologna."

"Oh, I can keep up," Cavriani said, with a smile. "And Father Augustus might surprise you."

Lennox grinned. "Oh, aye, that'd be a surprise, all right."

* * *

By the following morning, Lennox had changed his mind about waiting the day. "We hae missed 'em," he pronounced.

"Probably," agreed Heinzerling, stamping his feet against the dawn chill. He was looking down the road back to Padua, although the chances of anyone coming down it at this early hour were nil.

Lennox grunted. Well, at least Heinzerling could see something that was as plain as the nose on his face. "We'll make a fast ride to this Fee-rensey place, then, since Messer Cavriani says that's where the road goes after the nearest place to cross yon mountains." He nodded over to where the tops of the Appennines were shining in the dawn light over the mist.

"You mean Firenze?" Heinzerling grinned. He pronounced it exactly as Cavriani did. The Jesuit spoke several of the Italian dialects, from being chaplain to an assortment of mercenaries over the years.

"However they say it, mon," Lennox snapped back, but without real anger. He had good English and German and enough of the Gaelic to swear at the few highlanders he'd commanded over the years. A bit of Swedish too, lately. Heinzerling liked to flaunt his learning, one of his more annoying habits. The fat fool still knew as little proper theology—just as Lennox had learned at kirk!—as any other papist. One step from heathens, the lot of them.

He stamped his own feet again. He'd heard Italian summers could be scorching. For him, this was about the only time of day with a civilized temperature and it was only spring. Aye, weel . . .

"Get Messer Cavriani up, will you? I'll see the lads are getting ready for the road. We'll either pass the boys on the way or be waiting for them there. We happen might have Messer Cavriani's people hire a few local lads there to help watch, eh?"

"Turning spymaster, Herr Kapitan Lennox?" Heinzerling grinned through two days' worth of stubble.

Would it kill him to bloody well shave? " Hiring local scouts, ye daft gobshite," Lennox retorted. Spymaster, indeed. It was not as though he had any low opinion of the good Don Francisco, mind. It just wasn't honest work for a soldier. "An' no' another word, ye bugger, o' spyin' or the like. And while we're aboot changes o' career, do ye think to make a cavalryman? For today's ride'll see that fat German arse broken."

Heinzerling's sneer was magnificent; Lennox had to allow him that. It was just possible to admit a sneaking regard for the drunken tub of guts. He might sit a horse like a side of fat bacon, but at least he stayed on the thing and, more or less, kept up. He seemed to be able to look after his beast as well, although he'd passed the word for the troopers to keep an eye on him. Any horse bearing Heinzerling's weight was bound to see more wear and tear than a mere Romish priest could remedy. Lennox himself was no small man, but at least he wasn't carrying a half-hundredweight of butter with it.

The sniff that followed the sneer was another masterwork. "We shall see, Herr Kapitan, which arse is broken, this day. I have the better padding, I think you will agree. Am I not the fat papist?"

Och, the bugger's a smart one. Took ma ain line off me and turned it around. And there was a sting in it, too. Lennox wasn't the young man who could once have ridden days and nights on end and not noticed it, and truth be told he was considerably bonier about the behind than Heinzerling. "Aye, ye've y'ain cushion, right enough. It'll be threadbare by dusk, mind. Now run and get Messer Cavriani up and about."

"You called?" Cavriani stood in the inn doorway, a buff-coat wrapped tightly about him. "Curse these cold mornings."

The worst of it, the man was not joking. Lennox sighed. "The day'll warm up. And I was just saying we'll ride on for—" he paused to get the sound of the placename right "—Firenze straight away. Mind, we'll stop as little as we can, press the pace good and hard."

Cavriani groaned. "Christ, have mercy!" he exclaimed. "My ass is already about broken."

Lennox and Heinzerling looked at each other.

"What?" said Cavriani.

* * *

Florence seemed like a neat and pretty enough town, although Lennox would be the first to admit he was no great admirer of architecture and buildings and what-not.

The ride had been just as bloody painful as advertised, for the horses as well as his own backside. They'd pressed hard for the best part of two and a half days to get to Florence, and gotten away without any serious problems. That the embassy had enough funds to see them right for two remounts apiece had been their salvation, of course, even if it did make them look like a gaggle of tinker horse-copers.

Heinzerling, rot him, had coped admirably. Lennox supposed, all other things being equal, that the fat priest wasn't such a bad fellow, if he could endure a ride like that without complaint. He had to be hurting just as badly as Lennox was.

Cavriani was a sight to inspire pity. Suffering though Lennox was for not having been in a saddle for weeks before this wild goose chase, Cavriani had last sat a horse years before. And he was by no means the youngest man in their party, either. The lads—none of whom seemed to be feeling a damned thing, God rot their callow souls—had ribbed him with a good nature and seen to him without orders. They all, no doubt, remembered their own first days in the saddle.

They'd left Lieutenant Trumble in charge of keeping a watch on the road while the horses were cared for and rested at a livery on the edge of town that had been positively ecstatic to see so much business in one fell swoop. Cavriani had ambled about—conspicuously bow-legged; Lennox would have to see about getting the man some goose-grease for his sores—asking after the Marcoli party.

There had been no sign, yet. So Lennox and Heinzerling had rented a couple of nags—nothing much to look at, just not half-blown from nearly three days' hard ride across mountains—to take a look in town. Walking would have been agony, and a carriage was no way to see a town. They weren't expecting to see anything, it was just that Lennox liked to get a feel for a new place as quickly as he could. They'd wait here for a few days, he thought, keeping a watch, and if Messer Cavriani could—

Heinzerling reached over and tugged his sleeve. "Herr Kapitan? If I might disturb your rest?"

Lennox realized that he had, in fact, been nodding a little in the saddle as they rode along a cobbled streets and into a large, open square. "Aye?" he said, daring Heinzerling to comment further.

"Father Mazzare." He pointed.

Lennox stared. "Aye, so it is." The American priest was standing on the other side of the square with, it looked like, the Reverend Jones, studying the front of some building or other. A Romish church, from the looks of it. Even the outside of the thing looked idolatrous. "I'd thought myself he'd be nearer Rome by now. We should report."

"Ja," agreed Heinzerling, and they rode across the square.

Mazzare and Jones both did double takes when they turned at the sound of approaching hooves and saw Lennox and Heinzerling. It turned out that they'd reached Florence two days before, and were proposing to depart in the morning.

"You nearly missed us here," the priest-turned-ambassador said. "I'd finished writing up my notes from the things we discussed in the coach, and we were just sightseeing before getting a good night's sleep and moving on. You must have just missed us at Ferrara, if I'm keeping any track of the time we've spent on the road."

"Seems like," said Lennox. "And you didn't pass anyone you recognized on the road?"

"Should we have?" Mazzare frowned.

"Aye, weel," said Lennox, sighing deeply. "It's like this, y'see . . ."

The report took a few minutes. The Reverend Jones simply let his face drop open. As well he might.

Father Mazzare's face grew progressively blanker as Lennox progressed with his report.

"Well," he said, when Lennox had finished.

"Aye," Lennox responded. "It's a muckle great stew of a thing, right enough."

"And Ducos is with them," Heinzerling added.

"Aye," Lennox added. "We were wondering about that, as it happens. Yon Marcoli fellow's none of your great schemers, it seems, and the French want to see him succeed and embarrass us all."

"That'd work," Jones said. "What were the boys thinking?"

Mazzare's face was growing eerily still. "I can guess what Frank was thinking," he said, in a voice with almost no tone to it at all.

Lennox saw that Heinzerling was growing even redder in the face than he normally was, and shifting from foot to foot.

"Father Mazzare," the big German said, "Vielleicht we can be charitable toward the boys, ja? They think to do good, by their lights, ja?"

"Good?" Mazzare's tone was still mild. Lennox realized, with more than a little discomfort, that Mazzare was one of those dangerous men who got more controlled and calm the angrier they became. The man was positively icy, now. Lennox realized that he really, really did not want to be the Stone boys when Mazzare next saw them. Come to that, he didn't want to be himself if he didn't stop the Stone boys before they did whatever it was they were planning.

"Yeah, steady there, Larry," Jones said. "You said yourself lots of folks have some, ah, slightly wild ideas about what's going on with the Inquisition and Galileo and all."

Mazzare took a deep breath, murmured something quietly to himself—probably a prayer, Lennox realized—and: "Okay. Getting angry isn't going to help. Captain Lennox, you say you've not passed them on the road?"

"Aye, Your Excellency," Lennox said. Out of reflex, he was calling on all his reserves of sergeantliness.

"And you're certain they headed for Padua first?"

"Aye, Your Excellency."

"Such was the news Messer Cavriani got for us from the watermen, Father." said Heinzerling, "The Marcolis were poor at keeping secrets, it seems."

"Except from us, apparently," Mazzare snapped. "Sorry, Gus, it wasn't your fault. Will they have met Tom at Padua? Maybe he got them to turn back, and you've chased down here for nothing."

"Schade, no," said Heinzerling. "Herr Doktor Stone returned from Padua without meeting his sons. He is very worried, mein' ich."

"As well he might be, Gus. Not that I'm telling you anything on that score. Lord knows I did some dumb things as a teenager, but this has to beat all." Mazzare heaved another deep sigh, pondered for a moment and then seemed to reach a decision. "Let's assume they're definitely on the way to Rome. Captain Lennox, continue your attempts to find and stop the boys on the road, but please try and make sure you're in Rome before they can possibly arrive. Don't let trying to catch them keep you out on the road while they're up to mischief in Rome. I'll be staying at the palazzo Barberini, apparently; get word to me there. I'll let you know where Galileo's being held and when and where the trial's to be, and you can mount a discreet watch. Stop them quietly but firmly, please. Gus, Captain Lennox, I don't know much about the Marcolis, but Tom's boys are three good kids at heart with all their lives in front of them. Try and keep them out of trouble, eh?"

Lennox and Heinzerling murmured their assent.

"And another thing," Mazzare went on, "make yourselves scarce in town until say noon tomorrow. We're traveling with Monsignor Mazarini, and I'd prefer not to have him know anything he might feel duty-bound to report."

* * *

As Gus and Captain Lennox rode away, Jones said "Larry, I'm not sure this is the best way to handle this."

"Why not, Simon?" Mazzare wasn't sure himself, but it was the first improvisation that had occurred to him. Trying to explain about American traditions of teenage independence, about youthful high spirits and the sheer improbability of them doing any harm would cut no ice at a trial for what was, by anyone's standards, a plot to commit a major felony.

"Well, if we explain and all . . . oh." Jones dried up as his thought processes caught up. "Yeah, I see what you mean. 'Cardinal, we need extra guards. The three sons of a friend of ours—one of our delegation, in fact—are plotting to spring the star attraction at this summer's biggest show-trial out of the pokey.' " He snorted. "Go down real well."

Mazzare nodded. "Thinking aloud, here, Simon, we're dealing with a propaganda event. If things really are starting to crack open on this, if it's really like we hope it is, then we can't let anything throw grit in the gears. Although I'd throw it all up in a heartbeat if I could keep those boys from doing something that they'll regret for the rest of their lives."

Mazzare realized, as he said it, that needn't be a very long time at all. While he wasn't familiar with any of the local penal codes, he was pretty certain what the penalty would be for trying to organize a prison-break. This was an era where people could get executed for petty theft.

"Come on, Larry," said Jones, after a long silence. "I think I'm done sightseeing."

Chapter 44

"Well, Rome's better found than Venice was, I suppose." Jones was looking around the apartment that they had been given in the Palazzo Barberini for their stay. "Not as roomy, but it's clean, at least."

"You know, Simon, for a married man you can be a real old woman at times." Mazzare chuckled.

Jones blew a loud raspberry and sat down while a small platoon of servants scurried to sort out their baggage.

Mazzare looked around, feeling uncomfortable sitting down where someone else was working. The Barberinis' general program of beautification of their surroundings had its upside, and staying in their palazzo was part of it. Many years before by his own time—the three-and-three-quarter-century-wide fault line notwithstanding—a much younger Father Lawrence Mazzare had come to Rome for the first time and checked off the tourist sights methodically.

The Palazzo Barberini, by then a museum, was one of the ones he'd gone back to. The place was wall to wall with art and treasures and just plain beautiful things. It was a little sparser now than his own memory of it, but then the place had had over three hundred years to fill up by the time he'd last seen it.

"Simon?"

"Yes, Larry?" Jones had lain back in his chair and draped a handkerchief over his face. The trip down from Venice had been wearing, for all it had been taken in the most comfortably sprung coach they had been able to find. Jones, slightly the older of the two, had a far less ascetic disposition than Mazzare and gave vent to his discomforts and took the load off whenever he could.

"Point of grammar. If I remember having been in this very room, but won't have been here for another three hundred and—let me think—fifty-one years, is that deja vu all over again?"

* * *

"It is this business about Sharon Nichols and the man Sanchez that concerns me perhaps the most, Michael." Nasi leaned back in his chair across from the prime minister's desk and somewhat cattercorner to it. "Mostly, perhaps, because we can do nothing anyway about this Galileo affair, except hope that the Stone boys refrain from sheer madness or that Lennox catches them before they don't. Whereas . . ." The sentence drifted to a halt as if it had simply run out of gas.

Mike Stearns laced his fingers together and leaned forward on the desk. "Explain."

Unusually, the Sephardic banker needed time to organize his thoughts. He'd spoken somewhat impulsively, which was quite unlike him. Since Rebecca was trapped in Amsterdam and Ed Piazza had had to relinquish his duties as secretary of state in order to administer Thuringia as the new governor appointed by Gustav Adolf, Francisco had come to assume many of Rebecca and Ed Piazza's roles for Mike as well as being the head of the USE's intelligence service. There were some ways in which he was very diffident about the business. Rebecca's tasks as national security adviser he felt confident to handle, but he could hardly serve Mike as the same sort of personal confidante. And this was . . .

Perhaps a touchy matter. On this, unlike most subjects, Americans could be quite unpredictable.

"Well, to begin with, Michael, as a spy myself—'spook,' to use that phrase you so enjoy—I am naturally given to suspicion. I am uncomfortable with the fact that a known agent of the Spanish empire with whom we are at war has now been residing for some days in our embassy in Venice." That was the easy part. He cleared his throat. "Yes, I understand the seriousness of his medical condition—Tom Stone explained in reply to one of my queries; at far greater length, I might add, than he normally explains anything; which itself disturbs me a bit because he too seems to have become something of a partisan of this peculiar Spanish fellow—"

"You're prattling, Francisco," Mike said mildly. "Not like you at all. And he's not really 'Spanish' anyway, he's Catalan." There seemed to be a trace of humor there. "Weren't you the one who gave me a briefing not two months ago on the significance of the distinction?"

Francisco smiled, acknowledging the hit. "Well, yes. Still . . ."

"Oh, just spit it out, will you? I won't bite, I promise." The prime minister unlaced his fingers and leaned back in his own chair. "What you're really wondering is why—let's be precise, here—the bed he's been recuperating in belongs to Sharon Nichols."

Nasi must have looked a little startled. Mike smiled thinly. "I do occasionally read the entire reports, not simply your summaries. I made it a point to do so, in this case. If for no other reason, because James Nichols is one of my closest friends."

For some obscure reason, Francisco felt compelled to play devil's advocate for a moment. "You will have noted then that there is no evidence—unless she sneaks about at night, which doesn't seem to match her profile—"

Mike scowled, as he usually did when Nasi lapsed into jargon.

"Well, you know what I mean."

" 'Course I do!" Mike snorted. "So why don't you just come out and say it? Sharon Nichols and 'sneak around at night' is pure bullshit. Bull-shit. A nice, clear term that beats all that psychobabble six ways from Sunday." Mike levered himself back upright. "We're talking about a woman here who told her father straight to his face that she was going to spend the night with Hans Richter. Then did it. In his house. The way he tells the story, even instructed him to have breakfast ready the next morning—although I'm sure James made that last bit up himself. I could tell. He doesn't hardly ever brag about anything except his daughter."

Mike was back to leaning on the desk, using laced fingers to support the weight. "So she's not screwing Sanchez. To use another excellent nonbabble term. Even if that were possible, anyway—which, if I interpreted Stoner's technical details correctly, it probably isn't. Not recuperating from that wound, not this quickly. Not even if this Sanchez guy was a man in his twenties."

Nasi relaxed. He'd never be as comfortable as so many—though certainly not all—Americans were, in the casual way they discussed sex. His own culture was very far from prudish, but had a more circumspect way of dealing with the matter. Still, it was at least obvious that he had not inadvertently stumbled into what Americans liked to call a "mine field."

"I am still concerned, Michael." He forced himself to be honest. "Mainly, I will admit, simply because I am puzzled. Being puzzled tends to make me very suspicious."

Mike smiled crookedly. "There are times I think you are the only fully functional paranoid I know. 'Francisco Nasi' and 'puzzled' is a contradiction in terms; so, on the rare occasions it happens, you immediately suspect the universe of having foul designs."

Nasi chuckled. "Something like that."

Mike rose from his chair and moved to a nearby window. "I think what we're seeing here is just deja vu all over again," he mused. "Do you know much about grief, Francisco? Personally, I mean."

Nasi was having a hard time following Mike's thoughts, but knew from experience that they were headed somewhere. Eventually, even somewhere coherent. "Ah . . . no. Not really. My parents are both still alive and healthy, as are my brothers and sisters. At last report, anyway. A cousin, three years ago, who died in childbirth. But I cannot say I was personally close to her."

When Stearns spoke again, his tone was a bit harsh. "I have quite a bit of experience with it. More than I wish I did, although I think it's probably been good for me in the long run. Emphasis on 'long.' "

"Yes. Your father."

"I wasn't thinking about him at the moment, actually." Mike turned his head toward Nasi. Not looking at him, just showing a three-quarter profile. "Did you ever wonder why I went to Los Angeles? And then left?"

That had all happened long before Nasi had met Mike Stearns. Long before the Ring of Fire, in fact. "Ah. No."

Stearns nodded. "Her name was Kathleen Michael. We used to joke about the coincidence. Kathleen insisted we should name our first kid Michael Michael-Stearns, if he was a boy. Claimed it was her simple feminist duty."

The smile that came to his face was one that Francisco had never seen before. Impossible to analyze; even to describe.

"I met her in Clarksburg, while she was out here visiting distant relatives. This led to that—I even wrote letters, and was that a miracle—and eventually I moved out there. I couldn't in good conscience ask her to move here, seeing as how she had a real career under way and I had the mines, at best. Lawyer, no less, and was that another miracle. Except I could never figure out which way it went—a miracle that I fell in love with a lawyer, or that she'd fall in love with me?"

He was silent for a time, that peculiar smile never leaving his face. "It was the best two years of my life, until I met Becky. She never minded at all that I mostly scraped up work on the docks. Even came to my prize fights, until I finally had the good sense to quit, although she was after me the whole time to give it up. But she always made it a point, at those damn lawyer cocktail parties I hated, to brag to her colleagues about my latest victory. That was Kathleen's way of saying 'this is my man; if you don't like it, tough.' She was the most junior lawyer in the firm, too." There was another long silence. "God, I loved that woman."

Francisco cleared his throat. "You were never married?"

The smile shaded into something more familiar; that wry little twist that Francisco had come to know so well. Mike Stearns had a very fine sense of irony; perhaps the best Nasi had ever encountered.

"This was LA, Francisco, not a small town in West Virginia. Nobody worried too much about such things. The only reason we eventually decided to get married was because Kathleen was starting to get worried about my folks' opinion."

The smile faded away. "She was on her way up to Fresno to tell her own family about our decision when it happened. One of those sudden thick fogs that come into the San Joaquin valley. Kathleen always drove too fast, and she had a bad habit of tailgating. It was a twenty-car pileup and hers was the third car in it. Sandwiched by trucks, front and back."

He took a long, long breath. "The only comfort I ever had was that at least it was quick. She probably never really even knew what was happening."

Another long, long breath. When he spoke again, the voice was almost a sheer rasp. "You have no idea what it does to a human heart to be suddenly ripped in half, Francisco. You really don't, until and unless it happens to you."

For the first time since he'd risen from the chair, Mike looked at Nasi directly. "Grief is weird, Francisco. It's like a drug, really, after an operation. You need it desperately to handle the pain, but it can become its own addiction. You've got to get rid of it, eventually. And that's the dangerous time. I think that's the reason so many societies prescribe a fixed and formal period of mourning. Probably a good idea, to tell you the truth. Because you can wind up doing the screwiest things to start draining it off."

To Nasi's genuine amazement, there came a cheerful little laugh. "And that's why I left Los Angeles. Not because of Kathleen's death—that had happened almost a year earlier. It was because my screwy way of dealing with it was a woman named Linda Thompson. Linda LaLane, to use her stage name. Who, to this day, I think may have been the screwiest woman in the entire LA basin, which pretty much defines 'screwy' to begin with. Three months of that and I was finally ready to come home. Everybody thinks I came back because of my dad's accident—and I saw no reason to correct the assumption, since I figured the less said about Linda LaLane the better—but the truth is that I'd made the decision a week earlier anyway. I'd already given notice to the landlord and was half-packed when I got the news about my father."

Moving easily, now, he slid himself back into his chair. Laced his fingers together, leaned forward on his desk, and gazed upon Francisco serenely. "Does any of that make sense?"

Francisco nodded. "You fear that this Sanchez is Sharon Nichols'—ah—Linda Thompson."

Mike grimaced. "Fer chrissake, Francisco, how can anybody be that dumb? Sharon's . . . what, now? Twenty-four? Pretty close to what I was, at the time. Except she spent her what they call 'formative years' doing sensible and socially useful stuff right down the line—I leave aside some business with a jackass named Leroy that James is occasionally known to still grumble about; but that only lasted a year anyway before she booted the bum out the door; quite literally, the way James brags about it—whereas I spent those years trying to become the best head-basher in my weight division. You see what I mean?"

Nasi was by now completely baffled. "Ah. No. I don't."

Mike rolled his eyes. "It's so frickin' obvious. I didn't say that every relationship a person finds to handle their grief is screwy. I just said mine was. Sharon Nichols is not me. At a rough guess—when I was that age, anyway—the woman's got more good sense in her big toe that I had all put together."

He unlaced his hands and tapped the folder that contained all the files on the Galileo affair. "Look at the age, Francisco. That's the key to it. I picked a woman who had to use a fake driver's license in order to be a go-go dancer in a place that served liquor. Sanchez is pushing sixty."

"Seeking maturity, you mean. Wisdom."

Again, Mike rolled his eyes. "How can a man as smart as you be this dumb about some things?"

He issued a majestically sarcastic snort. "Wisdom? Francisco—you have read the reports, right?—we're talking about a Catalan swordsman who's spent most of his adult life in the service of Spain's most notorious diplomatic intriguer. If that's your definition of mature wisdom, I shudder to think what you'd call 'youthful folly.' I leave aside the fact that the reason the man is lying in Sharon's bed in the first place is because at the age of fifty-whatever he thought getting into a sword fight outnumbered six-to-one was a perfectly reasonable proposition. And I though Linda was crazy!"

Francisco stared him. Eventually, he realized his mind was a complete blank.

"My mind is a complete blank." He stared out the window. "I'm not sure that's ever happened before."

"Do you some good, masterspy. All right, then, listen to the old wise man. The oldest and wisest one you've got, anyway, when it comes to stuff like this. Which, all false modesty aside, I am damn good at."

That was certainly true. Francisco had understood for some time that a large part of Mike Stearns' superb political skill was that the man had an uncanny knack for understanding the human mind. Even more, the human heart.

"It's the challenge that matters, Francisco. It's got nothing to do with wisdom or maturity. Grief will roll over those like an APC over an anthill. I challenged my grief by picking a woman, who, on the best day of her life, couldn't have reached up high enough to shine Kathleen Michael's shoes. Sharon . . ."

His fingers idly stroked the folder. "Oh, I think something very different is happening down there in Venice. I think she stumbled, quite by accident, across a man who—as different as he might be—is something of a match for Hans Richter. And had enough sense to recognize it, despite the lines on his face. Even despite her own grief."

That wry smile came back. "He won't live all that long, of course. But, deep in her heart, I don't think Sharon really thought Hans would either. She just didn't ultimately care. Well, not that exactly. She cared, certainly. It's just that she's the sort of person who will always choose quality over quantity, whatever the cost."

Finally, it all came into focus. If Nasi did not have Mike's intuitive grasp of these things, he had made good the lack—to an extent, at least—by his extensive study of literature. That of the west, as well as his own culture.

"Ah." He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. "How odd. She is indeed a very sensible and levelheaded young woman. Who would have thought, beneath that deceptive surface, lurked the soul of Achilles?"

Stearns was looking very smug. "Besides you, I mean," Francisco added sourly.

"Oh, I imagine her father won't be that surprised. He'll have a fit, of course. I think James does that mostly so he can brag later about how she told him to take a hike if he didn't like it."

Nasi still had some lingering doubts. Hesitations, at least. "It remains a very delicate situation, Michael. Politically, I mean. Dangerous, too. I grant you, the Achilles of the world, whatever their other flaws, are not given to treason. Still—the man is, by all accounts, as good an intriguer as he is a swordsman—"

Mike hauled out his wallet and extracted from it a twenty-dollar bill. He took a moment to admire the portrait. "God, there are times I really like that old hippie." Then, slapped the bill down on the table.

"My money's on Sharon, Francisco. I'll give you ten-to-one odds. No, make that twenty. Put up or shut up. Match it with a dollar."

Francisco eyed the bill. The cost was not the issue, of course. Nasi was wealthier than Mike Stearns by at least two orders of magnitude. He could have reversed the odds and still paid his losses out of what amounted to pocket change.

He had, exactly once, taken Mike Stearns up on a bet. The memory still festered.

"Pass."

"Thought so." Mike scooped up the bill and returned it to his wallet. "Now. What's happening in Bohemia?"

* * *

When Sharon came into Ruy's room, she saw that he was reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The copy belonged to Conrad Ursinus, who'd purchased it simply because he thought that a USE naval officer should probably be familiar with a classic American sea story.

Conrad hadn't made it through more than the first thirty pages. He'd been more than willing to lend it to Sanchez. Who, for his part—to Sharon's certain knowledge—was now rereading it for the third time in as many weeks.

Sharon hadn't really been that surprised to discover that Sanchez was a voracious reader. But she did find that his tastes could be . . . eccentric.

"What is so fascinating about that novel, anyway?" she demanded. "I barely managed to get through it in college—and wouldn't have, if I hadn't had a test coming."

Sanchez didn't look up from his reading. "Americans. Ha! The most—what is that word you used the other day? referring to me?—'schizophrenic,' I believe. Yes, the most cross-headed people in existence. What other nation could produce such a book and then misunderstand it completely?"

When he finished the paragraph, he lowered the book and gave Sharon a sly little smile. "The most magnificent hero in all of literature, matched only by those of Cervantes and Homer."

Thus spake Sanchez.

Sharon shook her head. "How any man in his right mind could think Captain Ahab—"

"Ahab? Who spoke of that pathetic creature? Ahab is simply the literary foil. A mere device." Ruy closed the book—carefully keeping his place with a finger—and held up the cover for Sharon to see.

"Did the author need to be more obvious? Look at the title, woman! It's the whale, the whale."

On some other day, Sharon might have laughed. On this one, her purpose was too solemn. She had spent three days bringing herself to this point.

"What is the traditional period of mourning in Catalonia?" she asked abruptly. "For a widow, I mean."

Sanchez studied her for a moment. "It varies, from place to place. Most often—my village as well—it is a year and a day."

Sharon nodded. "October 8, then. Ask me your question again on that day. I will probably not have the answer, Ruy. But at least I will be able to think about it. Really think about it. I just can't, right now. I've tried, but . . . I don't trust any of the responses I get. They seem to veer all over place, from one hour to the next."

Which, they certainly did. Right now, looking at the man, the response was veering toward sheer passion. Ruy Sanchez could look very, very good, lying in a bed. Especially these days, when his wound had healed well enough to allow him to sit erect. She couldn't imagine, any longer, how she had ever thought of him as Feelthy Sanchez. All she usually saw now were the broad shoulders, eyes younger than springtime in a well-lined face—she'd come to know every line, too—and, perhaps most of all, that seemingly endless and antic wit.

Other days, true, it was all Sharon could do not to throw him out of it. But, even then, the cause was never disgust or anger. Just that Ruy could be the most exasperating man she'd ever known.

What bothered her most of all was not even the wild swings in her mood. It was that she had not failed to notice that the swings were beginning to develop a pattern. An hour, perhaps, wishing that Sanchez was out of the bed. Two hours—more like three, lately—wishing she were in it with him.

She didn't trust any of it. Regarded it all with deep suspicion. Simultaneously faithless to Hans and unfair to Ruy. Not to mention, stupid for her.

"I need structure," she said. "Rules. Or I think I'll go crazy."

"No danger of that," Ruy said firmly. "Do something crazy, yes; go crazy, no." The Catalan stroked his mustache. "Trust me on this matter, young maiden. I am an expert on the distinction."

"I am not a maiden. Haven't been, since I was seventeen."

Sanchez gave the ceiling a long-suffering look. "Leave it to me to fall in love with an imbecile. What else could she be, to confuse Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz with a callow stripling?"

The look became a glare. "Not even that! Even as a callow stripling, Ruy Sanchez understood the proper place of the hymen in God's scheme of things. It was obvious. Higher than the feet, lower than the woman."

When he brought his eyes down—damn the man!—they were twinkling again. "Sharon Nichols, as a crone of eighty, with a veritable horde of children and grandchildren gathered about, you will still think like a maiden. And, thus, will be one." He hefted the thick novel. "If you took the time to study this book, you would understand. What is Moby Dick, but the best man of the day?"

Fortunately, the mood swing had brought Sharon abruptly to her own center. She advanced upon Sanchez, smiling serenely.

"It occurs to me that a man of your advanced age needs to be inspected regularly for the first signs of colon cancer." She described for him, in some detail, the traditional medical procedure to do so.

Ruy's eyes were wide, his cheeks flushed. "You wouldn't!"

An instant later, the cheeks were pale. "You would!"

To her surprise, Sharon heard a little laugh coming from behind her. Turning, she saw that Cardinal Bedmar was sitting in a chair in the corner. She was not surprised to see him, since he came to visit Ruy quite often. But she was still somewhat chagrined that she hadn't thought to check when she came in the door. She'd been that preoccupied.

Perhaps it was the residue of the mood swing, but she decided that she was well centered enough to handle that problem also.

"And how long must I wait for you to ask me your question, Your Eminence? I gave Ruy a date. Give me yours."

Bedmar frowned. "I do not—"

"Cut it out. How long will you continue to mourn the passing glory of Spain?"

The cardinal looked away. After a moment, he murmured: "I thought . . . with the ambassador gone—even Signor Stone, now, I understand . . ."

"Yeah, that's right. Tom Stone—boy, can he be a doofus—finally realized he made a lot better father than a diplomat. So, six days ago, he and Madga packed up and headed for Rome to see what's happening with their kids. That leaves me in charge. So give me a date, Your Eminence."

She cocked her head a little. "How old are you, by the way? Older than Ruy, I know. Are you aware that the risk of colon cancer increases dramatically after the age of fifty? Annual inspections are strongly recommended. When did you have your last one? Let me rephrase that. When did you have your first one?" She waited maybe three seconds. "Right. Never. No sweat."

Sharon glanced at the corner where she kept medical supplies in a chest. "I even have a few latex gloves in there, handy as could be. Each one of which, these days, is worth its weight in gold—and worth a hell of a lot more than a so-called diplomat who goofs off on the job."

Bedmar's eyes were even wider than Ruy's had been. "I'm a cardinal of the Church!"

"And before that a marquis. I know. Ask me if I care. Better yet, let me tell you what do I care about. I am a nurse, Your Eminence. I am not a soldier, I am not a diplomat. Soldiers destroy people when diplomats tell them to. Nurses are the ones who try to put together what they can afterward. I'd like to get about my job, which, judging from all reports from the war front, is going to be a monster. But I can't even start—not really—until the war ends. And even then it won't do much good if the war doesn't produce a good peace. Which is what you're supposed to be doing. Instead of sawing away at the violins, playing a sorrowful tune. Badly. You're not a musician."

From the bed, Sanchez spoke.

"Do it, Alphonso. Do it now. We have talked about it enough."

It was the only time Sharon had ever heard Ruy use the cardinal's first name. She looked over and saw that Sanchez was closing the book. Firmly, without leaving a finger behind. "How did I put it, just yesterday?" he mused. " 'How many barrels of oil will thy melancholy bring thee in Nantucket market?' "

The cardinal sniffed. "Don't give yourself literary airs in front of me, you wretched Catalan peasant. I am no maiden and never thought like one. You didn't say 'Nantucket,' wherever that is. You said 'Amsterdam.' "

"Ah. So I did." Sanchez grinned. "Always practical, my slogan!" He eyed Sharon uncertainly. "Well. Perhaps not in my choice of women."

But the uncertainty was feigned. Not even Ruy Sanchez was that good an actor.

"October 8," Sharon told him softly. Then, bringing her eyes back to the cardinal, she spoke not softly at all. "You, I will expect to see downstairs within the hour."

* * *

The following day, when Nasi slid a new file in front of Mike Stearns, he murmured: "Came in on the radio last night. Good thing I didn't take your bet."

Mike scanned the file quickly. "Boil it down for me, Francisco. Your best shot."

"Well, he won't spy for us. Certainly not regarding military affairs."

"Don't want a spy," Mike grunted. "Got plenty of those already. And I leave the soldiering to Gustav Adolf and Lennart Torstensson and John Chandler Simpson, who've forgotten more about it than I'll ever learn. It's their job to win the war. My job, to win the peace."

He cocked an eye at Nasi. Then, seeing the great smile spreading, nodded his head and went back to studying the report.

"What I think, too. How soon can Bedmar get back to the Netherlands?"

"Not immediately. He'll need to find a plausible excuse to leave Venice. Then there's the travel time itself. That's a bit tricky, between his age and the risks of passing through France."

"France, baloney. Let's smuggle him right through our own territory. Who's the best we've got for that, with Harry Lefferts not available?"

Nasi paused, estimating. "Probably Klaus Grünwald, for something like this."

Decisively, Mike closed the file and slid it toward Nasi. "Set it up, Francisco. Let's get him back right next to the cardinal-infante's ear as fast as we can."

Francisco didn't pick up the file immediately. "Did you see the personal note from Sharon? At the end."

Mike hadn't spotted the note. He pulled back the file and reopened it. Within seconds, had found the note. Not many seconds later, closed the file again.

"Sure. Anything to please such a charming young lady. Tell him he's got to leave Sanchez behind. Invent some kind of plausible reason if he squawks. Sweeten the pot, somehow, if you think he needs an incentive."

Nasi picked up the file, smiling. "Oh, I doubt that. I suspect the young lady has already given the cardinal an incentive to agree."

Chapter 45

"Damn, it's cold." That was about the fourteenth time in—Frank checked—an hour that Gerry had said that.

"Can you change the record, Gerry?" he asked, at last exasperated.

"Are we nearly there yet?"

Ron snickered, and Frank found himself smiling. Truth be told, it wasn't that bad. Chilly, up here in these mountains even in springtime, but nothing compared to a Thuringian winter. During the day, out in the sun on top of the coaches they now had, it was quite pleasant. Of course, all of the Marcolis were inside the coaches, complaining bitterly at the weather. They'd dressed for spring, after all.

Coaches. Frank decided that Michel was on average, a blessing. Mixed, sure. Creepy as all hell, and sometimes exasperatingly French, but useful. He knew the drill for negotiating with innkeepers and livery stables for changes of horses. And he'd stolen all that money from the embassy where he'd worked. That had bothered Frank at first, but then he'd decided, what the hell, we're at war with 'em. If they got caught, a larceny charge wasn't even going to register on the grisly-execution-o-meter. Besides, it was Michel going to the chair for that one. Or whatever they used.

Other than that, Michel seemed to be spending a lot of time on the driver's seat of the second coach, talking to Marius, and both Frank and his brothers wondered what was up with that. Neither of them was what you'd call an astounding conversationalist. Half of Michel's utterances seemed to trail off into that damned shrug that was really getting on Frank's nerves these days; and Marius, while he could string sentences together at great length, was, well, not gifted, put it that way. Not to mention the fact that he managed the rare feat of being the maddest Marcoli, even if only a Marcoli by dint of working for the head of the house. Plus, Frank wasn't too keen on the way he was looking at Giovanna these days.

There was another sore subject. Giovanna had made it perfectly plain she now regarded the whole thing as a done deal. There was, she had hinted, a whole new world she wanted to explore with Frank. But she still had two brothers and two cousins and that damned handyman watching her like a gaggle of slightly goofy hawks. Frank wondered why it was that this was such a glaring exception to the general rule of Marcoli behavior. In every other freaking way they were easily distracted, apt to wander off the point, goofy as all get-out. But they never missed a beat when it came to protecting the sacred sisterly virginity. Whether the sister herself wanted it protected or not.

Your future in-laws, pal, said the Voice of Treason, earning itself another very short stand in front of the heavily scarred wall Frank kept sending it to.

"Are we nearly there yet?" Gerry asked.

"Gnnnh," Frank commented. "Gerry, that was funny once, okay? We are making maybe four miles an hour, tops, my ass aches, I think my leg's gone numb, this breeze is making my ears hurt, and I've been staring at one horse's ass after another for weeks. Just recently, we have joined the ranks of the high rollers, and I get to look at two horses' asses. This is not an improvement. If you start with the are-we-nearly-there-yet joke, I will by God kill you."

"Chill, man. I'm just saying, okay?" Gerry sounded genuinely alarmed.

"It's okay, Gerry," said Frank. "I guess I'm a little tired."

"I know what you mean. If we had a car, we'd have done this in a day." Gerry nodded sagely.

"Sure, and if we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs." Frank regretted being so testy immediately. "Ah, skip it. Yes, it's taking a long time. On the other hand, it's taking them a long time to get to Rome, too, and one thing we know about down-time proceedings and bureaucracy and like that there, it takes a while to get anything done. We'll get there in time. And remember, slow for us is slow for anyone chasing us as well."

"Michel thinks we could go faster," Gerry offered.

"Yeah, well, Michel's the only one of us who's driven a coach before, all right? I'm going as fast as I dare on these mountain roads."

In three hundred years time, Frank supposed, these same roads—maybe even this well-found Roman road—would be a treat for the drivers of the high-performance cars that Italy was famous for. Hairpins, switchbacks and all manner of other delights for the connoisseur of skilled driving in a powerful car with good road-handling. Of course, in that time, such civilities as blacktop and crash barriers would be added. More than once Frank had held his breath and not dared look, convinced he had at least one wheel out over empty air. Most of the time, like now, he didn't go much faster than a walk.

"I'm just saying—whoah!" Gerry's exclamation had come as they rounded a bend on the shoulder of a hill.

"Yeah," said Frank, "I agree. And yes, relative to where we've been up until now, we're nearly there yet."

The view had opened out in front of them. There was still plenty of mountain road to go, of course, but it looked like they were definitely going down from here. Stretched out in front of them was the rolling countryside of Lazio, and somewhere in the blue haze of the distance was Rome.

"What do you reckon that is, fifty miles?"

"Not a clue, sorry," Frank said, and then hazarded a guess. "Maybe a couple of days more?"

"Cool. So we are nearly there. Hey, what say we let our hair down at our next stop? Party a bit before we press on for the last run to Rome?"

"I dunno." Frank chewed on the idea. It certainly sounded good, but he thought maybe it wouldn't be the responsible thing to do. "We'll probably stop earlyish anyway, and if we leave late because we partied—and I say late here bearing in mind how damn' hard it is to get Fabrizio out of bed when he hasn't had anything to drink the night before—we might give whoever's on our back trail time to catch up."

"Aw, c'mon Frank, there's no one on our back trail. Changing routes the way we did threw 'em off."

Frank snorted. "Yeah, who but a madman would decide to come the long way 'round to get to a daring rescue? I keep being afraid we'll arrive a week after the frickin' nick of time."

"Uh, Frank?" Gerry said, "Before you said not to worry, we'd be on time?"

Frank waved the objection away. "Consistency, who needs it? But . . . yeah, I think we're probably all right, too. And you know, I could do with unwinding a bit myself. But I think we should have someone stay sober, keep a watch or something. I don't want to get ambushed because we're all three sheets to the wind, okay?"

"Hey, bring 'em on, I prefer a straight fight to all this sneakin' around."

"Gerry?" said Frank.

"Yes?"

"That has got to be the worst Han Solo impersonation I've ever heard."

"Glad you liked it," Gerry said, climbing down from the moving coach. "I'll pass the word about the party."

There, it was done. Another Leadership Decision. Frank felt they deserved capitals, even though he had the horrible feeling that he was largely being led himself—by events, and by the need to try and keep everyone pointed in the same direction. It was a . . . he strained for a word foul enough for it. He'd not slept properly since they started, his back hurt, and he was grinding his teeth a lot. The constant jaw-clenching as he bit down on what he really wanted to say, what with having to be The Leader, was taking its toll on his teeth. Once more, he took a deep breath of invigorating mountain air, and forced himself to relax.

* * *

They found an inn about two hours later. As these things went, it wasn't bad. A farmhouse, a large villa type of thing; with a big room where, apparently, the locals would come in for a drink or three, and rooms for travelers. They were on a main road, so they got plenty of business.

Michel returned after a few moments haggling with the owner. "No change of horses here, Monsieur Frank." Shrug. "We must continue with tired horses. A pity, for we might go faster now we are to descend from these mountains." Another shrug.

Frank just nodded. Damn, he was weary. He looked around for his usual pick-me-up, a sight of Giovanna, and saw her in animated discussion with Gerry and Ron. More clenching of the teeth. He wasn't even going to think about hauling off at his brothers about it.

And then the party got going. Say that for the Marcolis, they knew how to cut loose. Michel's purse got raided again—more Gallic moping, another shrug, and he retired to a corner with Marius for the evening—and the good wine got brought out, and a few of the locals got friendly, and dinner got going and, well, a good time was had by all. Except for Frank.

No one seemed to be talking to him much. Oh, sure, have another, Frank. You okay, Frank, from his brothers. Giovanna was dancing with her brothers and cousins over in one corner, where a couple of local guys had gotten musical instruments—lutey things, and a couple of flutey things—and were playing something fairly lively. And everyone was getting drunk. Three or four glasses of wine into the evening, Frank realized that if he didn't stay sober, no one would.

Damn. He started to just sip, and stopped letting anyone top up his glass. Gerry and Ron were reeling around the room making sure everyone had refills and freshen-ups. Indeed, they were making sure everyone, mine host and his family included, got good and lathered. They seemed to have the message about Frank, though, and left him alone in his corner.

Was this what they called The Loneliness of Command? Frank didn't know. If it wasn't for the prospect of certain death awaiting them on their return—even more, the fact that it would take longer to get back now than to go on—he'd give it up in a heartbeat. It wasn't like he could talk to anyone either. Hey, guys, I'm getting bored with this game, now. Let's go back, right? Guys? The resulting scene, as it played before Frank's mind's eye, began with a slap across the face from Giovanna, and that was the most painful part of all.

He watched the others get progressively drunker and drunker, Sure enough, the grappa had come out, and the fiery rotgut was wreaking its usual havoc. He looked at his watch. Guess I should get some sleep while they're all still up and watchful, he thought. He watched Fabrizio and Dino trying and failing to play keep-it-up with a jury-rigged soccer ball in the middle of the room to the massive amusement of the rest of the company there assembled.

He got up and, quietly and without being noticed by the others, made his way to bed. Away from the roaring hearth and the bodies in the inn's main room, the place was cold. Mine host clearly didn't believe in spending too much on fuel for the bedrooms, since everyone would be in blankets anyway. That was fine by Frank. He was still warm from downstairs and he simply kicked off his boots and crawled under the blankets fully dressed. He'd done that right through the mountains. He was getting more than a little ripe, to his own way of thinking, but he was too tired to care. He was almost too tired to notice.

What he wasn't too tired to notice was that there was only the one bed in this room. So that was what it had come to, eh? They really, really didn't want anything to do with him. He pulled the blankets up around his ears and tried to sleep. Not that that was any easy task with the near-riot still going on downstairs.

What had he been thinking? The condition they were getting in, they'd be lucky to get out of bed tomorrow, let alone go anywhere. They'd lost a day as surely as if he'd ordered them not to move. For all his bluster to Gerry, Frank was worried that they'd not arrive in Rome in time to find out where Galileo was being held, case the place, and arrange to get him out.

For that matter, they needed to get down to some serious planning of their route away from Rome; trying to flee back the way they had come was going to be impossible. The map he had showed a road heading northward away from Rome up toward Florence and Pisa, and maybe they could head that way. Or maybe go straight south and hope to get a ship somewhere at . . .

But how would they afford passage on a ship? Frank wasn't even sure how much it would cost, and they'd spent better than half what Michel said he'd stolen along with all the money the Marcolis had started with . . .

* * *

He was awakened—damn, how long had he been asleep?—by the creaking of the door. He muttered and rolled over, pretending to still be asleep, but he wanted to see the door. There was no light in the corridor outside, so all he had were dim chinks of moonlight to see by. A dark figure, sidling around the door . . .

Was it just imagination that filled in a dark hood, a mask?

Slowly, Frank slid his hand up to where he had his pistol under the—

Oh, hell! Every night of this journey he'd put a pistol under the pillow, loaded and wanting only to be cocked. Where was the damned thing? By his bed? In his bag? Where? Surely the assassin could hear his heart pounding, knew he wasn't asleep—

Another stealthy step, the door pushed softly closed behind, a quiet rustle. Frank began to think desperately. Shout the alarm and then make a break? Throw a blanket and then shout? What? Would anyone wake up? Was he the last one left alive, everyone else murdered in a drunken stupor? He resolved to throw his blanket over the assassin, scream a warning and get the hell out into the corridor. Keep moving, make as much noise as possible, see what could be done with speed and surprise. He tensed himself to spring. One more step, you son of a bitch, just one more step . . .

"Frank?" the voice was a soft whisper.

A soft, feminine, whisper. One he recognized perfectly because it had been whispering in his ear for weeks now.

"Giovanna?" he breathed.

"Yes. You are awake?"

"Uh, yeah?" He began to tremble. "Jesus, Giovanna, you scared the life out of me!" He clapped a hand over his mouth, realizing he'd spoken aloud. "Oops," he murmured.

She giggled. "I hope I didn't scare all the life out of you," she whispered. "So tragic, a widow before I even marry." She took two more steps, quickly now, and with one motion flipped up the blankets and squirmed under.

Fireworks and cheering started going off in Frank's head. And, he realized, other parts of his anatomy.

And then, hard on their heels, that vision of the queue of Marcolis, lining up with knives and murder in their hearts . . .

"Giovanna, you can't be here, if your brothers—"

"They're all drunk asleep, Frank. A volcano couldn't wake them up. It's cool." She said the last two words in English. Another phrase that was definitely catching on in these parts. Although not in the parts of Frank that were currently getting his urgent attention, where things were growing very warm indeed.

"How, I mean, uh—"

Whatever the linkage was between Frank's brain and his mouth, it stopped working just then. Come right to it, his brain was shut down completely.

And his mouth for that matter, as Giovanna found it and comprehensively shut him up in the best way known to man. She'd kissed him before, but never like this. The fact that the girl was figuring out how to do it as she went along just made it all the more exciting.

Time passed. Something was happening to Frank's sense of time. It was either seconds, or hours. He breathed in, deeply, savoring the scent of her. God, they were both good and ripe. To his surprise, he found it good. That sneaking little voice came again. If you're caught, Romeo . . .

"How?" he asked.

"Gerry and Ron, they helped. We plotted, them and me. Them and I? Whatever. They made sure everyone got good and drunk. Except you. I drank almost nothing, too, I just pretended." Her voice now sounded just that little bit cross. "But forget them. Thank them in the morning. Tonight, you concentrate on me. How can you do a proper job of taking my virginity—you fiend!"—a little giggle there—"if you're worrying about anything else? And I warn you!" She lifted herself up on an elbow, grinning like an imp, and wagged a finger under his nose. "I want it taken lots of times!"

"Uh, I don't think you can do that."

"Yes, you can! If you only concentrate!"

Frank didn't really feel like arguing the point. To put it mildly. As erect as he was now, who knew what was possible?

The problem was that same ferocious erection—they'd all been sleeping in their clothes and seventeenth-century styles didn't go in for handy zippers and whatnot—he was fumbling with the fasteners like an idiot—

"How do I, uh—

"Like this." Her nimble fingers worked quickly. "Here."

Suddenly, gloriously, he was free. A veritable statue of liberty. Giovanna's hand moved from the fasteners to close around him.

"Oh," she said softly, wonderingly. "I never thought it would be so big. Even though I thought about it a lot."

Then, choking down a laugh of pure glee: "Oh! Ten times at least!"

Part VI:
June, 1634

Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Chapter 46

Frank wondered what the hell he was doing calling himself a leader any more. Michel had made the plans that got them into Rome. Michel had done the scouting when they'd laid up in the grotty tenement house that—yes—Michel had found. Michel had sketched out their route into the church where the trial was being held; their way back out again. Michel had found the coaches and the trustworthy drivers who'd get them down to the boat on the Tiber which would take them and Galileo to freedom. Just like he'd found a reliable captain and crew. The coach drivers and boat crew were all members of Rome's Committee of Correspondence, he explained. That had come as a surprise to the Marcoli youngsters as much as it had to Frank and his brothers. None of them had even known there was a Committee in Rome.

Sure, the others had contributed, too. They'd all done a turn casing the Villa Medici, where Galileo was being held. That hadn't gone anywhere, though. All of them agreed that there was no way they could fight their way in past a small horde of Medici retainers, find out which room the old guy was being held in, and get him out.

So, they'd have to spring Galileo from the trial itself. They couldn't even be sure of their moment to do it, but they reckoned it would go best if they waited until the last minute. After all, then would be the best moment. Right after he'd been convicted and they could wring the maximum amount of propaganda out of the forces of reaction. There was no sense not giving them enough rope to hang themselves with, Ron had said—an image that Frank felt he might have chosen a little more carefully.

Still, Michel had planned most of this. He'd really been the one running the show since they'd finally arrived in Rome. Frank was finding his dislike for the man growing all the time, but he was too honest with himself not to admit that Ducos seemed a veritable wizard at this sort of thing, all of his modest protestations notwithstanding.

And, truth be told, the closer they got to the actual deed, the more Frank felt as if he'd entered some kind of weird virtual universe where he didn't trust his own judgment. Too many things just . . . didn't make sense to him, even though he could never figure out exactly why they didn't.

Take the location of the trial itself. The whole thing was freaky, to Frank. The Inquisition held its trials in an ordinary church, it turned out, not a dungeon. A church that happened to have some extra side rooms, but a church nonetheless. Made sense, Frank supposed, when you tried to look at the thing with the sort of bizarre logic that put a man on trial for saying the Earth went around the sun, but Frank still couldn't get his head around it.

The days of leaving church buildings locked were a long way in the future, so everyone had taken a turn over the last couple of days to go in, kneel down, and case the place. That, at least, was easy to do. It wasn't like there weren't whole bunches of other people in there at the same time. It had come as a surprise to Frank to discover that the church was used as something of a social center when it wasn't being used as a house of worship. People met there, and talked, and sat around to shoot the breeze. Frank had actually never set foot inside a church before, which was maybe a little freaky when he thought about it, but it was true. The only idea he'd had about how you ought to behave in a church came from television: hushed tones; respectful whispers; slow-moving priests with hands folded before them, coming to offer wise counsel to troubled souls.

Come right to it, that was mostly where he'd gotten his impression of Father Mazzare from, since he barely knew the man.

And there was something else for Frank to worry about. Despite the best efforts of Michel Ducos, they'd been unable to learn anything about where Mazzare was being held or when his trial was scheduled.

Well, they could only do so much. If Father Mazzare wound up in a second trial in that church, he was going to have to rely on the USE's diplomatic efforts to get him out, or be a martyr or something. That left Frank more than a bit dry-mouthed, but there was just no way they'd be able to pull off a second rescue, even if they managed the first one.

* * *

The plan had been to get to the church at the crack of dawn and take their places down front. Fabrizio was the biggest problem there, although the other Marcolis had warned him the night before that he was getting a bucket of water if he wasn't up smartly just before dawn. Perhaps more to the point, Ducos—in that utterly chilling manner he sometimes had about him—had predicted that the bucket of water would be followed by immersion in the Tiber. An immersion, he gave the distinct impression, that would be permanent.

But . . . it worked, as so many things Ducos did worked. Fabrizio got up with the rest of them.

And now they were on a wide, cobbled street looking across at a church that, later in the morning, was going to be the scene of the Venetian Committee of Correspondence's greatest triumph.

Or greatest disaster, a quiet little voice told him.

He looked around. For, he realized, probably the fifth time in as many minutes. Everyone was here. Well, everyone who was coming. Thankfully, that didn't include Giovanna. Frank had put his foot right down with Giovanna, to keep her back with the coaches. Frank never thought he'd say it, but Gretchen Richter was a prize pain in the ass on that score, just for the example she set. After all, if Gretchen could take part in all manner of daring adventures—fighting off pirates, even—why couldn't Giovanna? The fact that Gretchen was a big and frankly scary Amazon who'd been around soldiers and fighting since she was a kid and Giovanna was, well, none of the above.

It had been a long and ferocious argument. Truth to tell, Frank was pretty sure that there was only one reason he'd won the argument at all. Ever since—his thoughts got really misty and warm here, for a moment—that night, Giovanna's behavior had changed subtly. She was reacting to him as a husband, now, not a boyfriend; and Italy, after all, was the country that had given the world the term paterfamilias. Okay, it was cheating, but Frank was willing to cheat if it'd keep Giovanna alive.

Still, he was pretty sure he'd be hearing about it for a long, long, long time if they got out of this alive. That too, he suspected darkly, was part of the tradition.

Ron and Gerry were along, Marius, Michel, Dino and Fabrizio. Michel had also insisted on bringing one of the members of the Roman Committee into the church with them. He'd even insisted that the man had to be given one of the six flintlock pistols, which left Dino and Fabrizio unarmed. Local liaison, he explained, in case something went wrong and they had to use a different escape route. Frank didn't even know the guy's name.

Salvatore was back with Giovanna at the coaches and Roberto was going to be watching the route back, ready to spring a couple of the surprises from the Revenge Kit that they'd brought with them. Michel had approved of those, and Roberto turned out to have a knack for the gadgetry. So, Gerry had spent days eagerly lecturing the Marcoli youngster on the subjects of pyrotechnics and related mayhem. At least it had kept Frank's often rambunctious youngest brother out of his hair for a good long while.

"Nervous, Frank?" Ron asked. He was doing his best to look nonchalant on the street corner in the first light of dawn. The church was open, all right, there were guards there ambling about and, off to one side, having a quiet smoke. That was a worry in itself.

"Sure, who wouldn't be? I think we wait until we see someone else go in. I want to know if those guys are searching folks at the door."

"Sure." Ron yawned widely. "These early mornings don't agree with me."

Frank laughed. "Yeah, and this is early-early, too. Electric lighting can't come too soon for me, these predawn starts are a killer." The street was starting to get light, though, and Rome was already fairly busy. Not a patch on Venice, packed as it was into a much smaller space, or Magdeburg with its industrial bustle, but there was still plenty going on.

Michel was standing nearby, silent and impassive. Naturally, he'd found a shadow to stand in, and had gone from his usual Gallic morosity to something harder and colder, something that gave Frank more than a bit of a chill. Marius stood next to him; the two had somehow grown quite close over the last few weeks. Talk about an Odd Couple.

"When's the trial start, Michel?" Gerry asked.

"As soon as all is ready, Monsieur Gerry," Michel said. "Everyone must wait on the convenience of these prelates." Another shrug, this one conveying Michel's disdain for the prelates in question.

"Someone's going in," Ron said.

Frank looked. It was hard to see whether the figures going in were old women or priests. The light wasn't good. It seemed fairly clear, though, that the guards weren't searching anyone on the way in. That was damned odd. A courthouse up-time would have cops and probably rent-a-cops around it as a matter of routine, surely? They did on TV, anyway.

Oh, well. A lot of things about the seventeenth century didn't make much sense to Frank. He took a deep breath. "Okay," he said. "Dino, since neither of you have guns, take Fabrizio and see if you get searched on the way in. I figure you can come back out if there's a search and let us know."

"And if there is?" Michel asked.

"Then we've got a real problem," Frank said. "Probably have to figure out a different plan altogether. Maybe wait till Galileo's been moved somewhere else."

Oh, please let there be a search, came the Voice of Treason. Frank squashed it as best he could. Which was not too well at all.

"Maybe we could find some other way in where they're not searching," Gerry said, "Get the weapons in that way."

"Whatever," said Frank. "Get going, Dino. Fabrizio. If you don't come out in ten minutes, we'll follow you in."

And so it was done.

There was no search. Ten minutes later, they all went in.

The church was all but empty.

* * *

Outside of the church of San Matteo where Galileo's trial would be starting soon, the crowd was seething but quiet.

Lennox looked around to Heinzerling, who was holding him up on a stone balustrade. "I can see naught," he said. "Leave me doon, Heinzerling."

"Can we go in?" Heinzerling was already going beet-red in only the mild morning sunshine of a Roman summer.

"Nae the noo. Yon Swiss laddies hae the place ringed." He nodded to himself. "Just as I would do't. The maist fowk'll aye be in an' set, and the place needs closed while the quality arrive."

"The quality, you say?" Heinzerling's voice had taken on a slow, thoughtful character.

Lennox pulled his canteen from his belt and took a drink. By all that was holy, if he'd known he was going to be this thirsty he'd have had another drink the night before. "Ye've a notion how we're to get in, have ye not?" he said, as matter-of-fact as he could be.

"V'leicht," murmured Heinzerling, his eyes growing a little far-away as if he was unfocusing them to see the inside of his own mind a little more clearly. Lennox sympathized; his own head was throbbing gently, and the heat and smell of this abominable city of papists was not helping.

He waited a moment. For all he cursed the big German for a fattened, drunken papist gobshite, he was a frighteningly smart man when he sobered up. What was coming might not be perfect, but—

"Ja!" said Heinzerling, beaming suddenly and snapping his fingers. "We shall need two good horses, the rest of the Marines and for you and Billy Trumble your dress uniforms with all speed. Und Lennox?"

"Aye?"

"Can you sneer?"

"Sneer?"

"Ja, like ein Adel—like a nobleman?"

Realization crept up on Lennox. "Oh, aye," he said, "I can do that wee thing richt enow." He grinned.

Heinzerling grinned back. The pair of them threw their weight against the crowd to get back to the hostelry where the Marines were sleeping off the exhaustion of the last hard-driving stretch of their journey.

* * *

"Simon," said Mazzare, "I'm scared."

Jones snorted. "No kidding, Larry. The pope has ordered you to talk the greatest scientist who ever lived—most famous, anyway—out of the clutches of the Inquisition. This is called a 'pressure situation.' "

The priest chuckled, feeling the tension lighten a bit. Today was the day of Galileo's trial, and Mazzare had prepared as well as he felt he could. Still, and it was a heavy burden he had borne these past weeks past since he received the pope's summons, and there was not a lot that all the science that Grantville had to offer would help. Mazzare knew full well that, when all was said and done, the issue was really theological and political. Both of which were frequently the same thing in this town.

Mazzare sighed, heavily. He had retired early the night before after one last consultation with Galileo, who was now fluttering between terror and ill temper. Now that was most of the problem—but no. This was Mazzare's own burden to bear. He and the Reverend Jones, who was along as his clerk and moral support for the trial, had been given an anteroom in a palazzo next door to the church of San Matteo. Ostensibly it was for use as a workroom, but all the use Mazzare had been able to find for the cool marble floor dotted with elegant furniture was as a space to pace in. On an escritoire by the window there was a bundle of paper, his notes for the day. Every turn he took at that side of the room showed him those notes, and each time he felt his gut sink a little.

"What's eating you now, Larry?" Jones asked after a while.

Mazzare looked at the Methodist minister, where he sprawled on an antique of the future that looked too gracile for his weight. He realized he had known the wise-cracking Methodist for the best part of twelve years, and neither of them could much fool the other any more. They were too alike, for all their differences. Jones was just as full of stage fright as Mazzare was, but he was carefully wearing his professional face in these slow hours before the proceedings began. Jones would doubtless insist that that was for Mazzare's benefit, but it was as much for Jones' own peace of mind. Seeing Jones trying so hard to pretend he wasn't nervous gave Mazzare a sudden sense of warmth. It was all he could do not to fall to his knees and loudly thank God for the blessing of friendship. Al Green, Grantville's Baptist minister, would have done just that. But a pastor had to stay in his own character.

Mazzare stopped his pacing squarely in the bright golden patch of light from the big window that lit the room. He took a deep breath. "It's my client, Simon."

"Galileo? What's wrong with him? Apart from being an ornery old coot without a good word for anyone?"

"He's guilty, Simon." There, far easier to deal with now it was out in the open. There was that much truth in the old sixties saying.

"Guilty." Jones repeated the word flatly. "Go on, then, Larry, tell me about it?"

Mazzare walked over to where the window stood open and leaned against the plasterwork of the jamb. Outside, and some way below, there was the murmur of a crowd. Hushed, like the ordinary street noise of Rome never was, but noisy as thousands of people all together must always be.

"He's charged with heresy, Simon."

Jones frowned. "Well, yes. That's why we're here, isn't it?"

"Yes and no. When he was tried in our history, it happened a year earlier than this. And there was the Bellarmino memorandum, which they hung the plea on that they got him to cop. But that isn't in the papers for this trial, so they can't find him guilty of violating a direct order."

"That's to the good, isn't it?" Jones looked at the stack of trial papers, most of which he could barely read. "I mean, we don't have to answer that charge?"

"We don't. It means, though, that the Holy Office—and forget this stuff about Committees of Inquiry, it's the Inquisition—that, as I say, the Holy Office are only charging him with what they can convict him on."

"Yes, but it's still only vehement suspicion of heresy, isn't it?"

"That's the charge. The trouble is, the only defense for Galileo is to admit the actual charge of heresy."

Jones was silent a moment, working though the implications. "Oh," he said after a while.

"You see? He got off the main charge last time and they caught him on vehement suspicion of holding and defending Copernican opinions he couldn't prove."

"But we can prove them, surely?"

"It won't do any good, Simon. Didn't you pay any attention to the make-up of the court?"

Jones sat up straight and laughed, although there was little humor in it. "Sure I did. Especially the bit of the list that went Barberini, Barberini, Barberini."

"That didn't amount to a message?" Mazzare straightened up from the window-jamb and sat on the windowsill, which was at just the right height and sun-warmed. The sun on his back made him realize how tired he really was.

"Sure. The pope stacked the court with his brother and two of his nephews. He wants Galileo let off."

"Or convicted."

"Eh?" Jones stared hard at Mazzare with narrowed eyes. "That's not what you've been saying. What made you change your mind?"

Mazzare shrugged. "Perhaps simply being in Rome. It's an ancient city, Simon, and the Catholic Church is almost as ancient. The pope, in the end, will do whatever he does because he believes it is for the good of the Church." Mazzare felt strangely light and calm as he spoke. "I find myself much less prepared to state that I am certain what he will decide. His Holiness does not necessarily agree with you—or me—what the interest of the Church might be. And if he decides otherwise, he has made certain that he has a tribunal which will accommodate him."

"Now hold on—" Jones rose out of his chair and wagged a finger at Mazzare. "Don't you be getting all paranoid on me, Larry. The issue is as straightforward as it gets."

"It certainly is not!" Mazzare grew sharp, then, and stood up from his warm perch on the windowsill. "Simon, we aren't preaching to small-town congregations any more. With the best will in the world, Grantville is a rural town full of plain people who don't truck with subtleties."

Jones made a sour face. "Peasants, you mean—"

"Knock it off, Simon, you know what I mean. Pollyanna it up all you want, old friend, but there won't be any straw-man arguments in that church this morning. Every single person in that tribunal is at least as good a theologian as either of us, and most of them are better. And any of them can tell you the difference. Since you're pretending not to know better, and bless you for trying to cheer me up with it, the difference is between assuming that all that is, is by the will of God, and assuming that all is according to God's ineffable plan for the universe."

Jones held up his hands. "Pax."

"Thank you, Simon, graciously done." Mazzare smiled, resuming his pacing with his head bowed and hands clasped behind him. "The prosecution will certainly advance an argument in favour of the law of necessity that is straight out of scholasticism."

"Which I'm too rusty on to know if that's right or not, but go on."

Mazzare waved Jones's objection aside for the mere bagatelle it was. "You can look it up later. The important thing is that among the schools of philosophy His Holiness Urban VIII clove to was—" He smiled encouragingly at Jones.

"Scholasticism." Jones finished the sentence in a weak voice. "And His Holiness is also a temporal ruler who will see an immediate increase in temporal power if he steps on Galileo and publicly thwarts the USE, as represented by you, and especially me, the Protestant."

"Just so."

"Oh, damn," said Jones, with feeling. "I hadn't thought of that. We've been suckered! Set up!"

Mazzare chuckled harshly. "Don't get all paranoid on me, Simon. I didn't say that's what His Holiness would do. Just that it was indeed a very possible option."

Jones cocked his head. "What's your best estimate?"

The American priest shrugged. "My guess is that Pope Urban VIII hasn't really quite made up his own mind yet. He wants to wait and see how the trial shapes up. Which means . . . I'm on the spot, Simon. I think he is leaning in our direction, actually. But I don't think 'the fix is in.' I think he wants to see if I can do the fixing."

"Ah." Jones thought about it for moment. "Pressure situation, then, like I said. But don't forget our trusty motto, Larry. When the going gets tough, the tough go theologizing."

That brought a genuine laugh from Mazzare. "The ending of that, as I recall—the last time you recited it, anyway—was 'the tough change the oil filter.' "

"There's a difference?"

* * *

One of the palazzo's servants ushered in Monsignor Mazarini.

"It is time, Father," he said. Mazarini's voice, as usual, was calm and soft-spoken; intimate, even, without being presumptuous. The voice of a master diplomat, despite still being short of his thirty-second year of life.

* * *

Mazzare stared at the young man who, in another universe, would become France's great minister of state in the fullness of time, in that era when France was the center of the Western world. A universe in which Galileo had been convicted.

A universe where the Ring of Fire had never happened.

It all fell into place for the American priest, in that moment. Larry Mazzare had wondered himself, for three years, what God's purpose had been when he ripped Grantville out of its own time to send it to another.

Many others had as well, of course, and come to their own conclusions. Gustavus Adolphus thought it was a warning to the world's princes. So, in a different way, did Cardinal Richelieu.

But they were princes themselves. Mazzare was not. He was simply a small-town priest; ultimately, a very humble man.

Yes, that was the key. Humility, nothing more.

The Ring of Fire had not been a warning at all. Just the Lord's subtle reminder that, in the end, it was not for mortals to presume to know His purpose.

"Good," said Mazzare. "I am ready."

He gave Mazarini a comforting little pat on the shoulder, on his way through the door. The man needed reassurance, he thought. In his own way, Mazarini too was a humble man—perhaps the only such, among Europe's great diplomats. Mazzare had great hopes for him.

Chapter 47

Lennox felt a prize fool. It was a lot easier to wear a couple of pounds of gold braid, a buffed cuirass and a cavalier hat in front of a rank of smartly turned-out troops than—no, he reminded himself again, Marines. It was important to remember the difference, because that was mainly why he and his men were being thoroughly gawked at.

And no wonder. President—now Prime Minister—Stearns had been caught with his pants down once due to a lack of fancy uniforms. Mike Stearns rarely made the same mistake twice. He'd certainly seen to it that this one wouldn't be repeated, even exceeding Admiral Simpson's budget request.

The new USMC Cavalry dress uniform was therefore very flashy and high-class, even by seventeenth-century standards. No utilitarian BDUs here. The crowd lining the street was suitably impressed. Even the Swiss guards were craning their necks for a good look as he rode past. Was this the normal condition of life for the quality? No matter, he was on parade no matter how foolish he felt.

Perhaps best of all, the uniforms were new. That meant, down here in Italy, that probably no one would recognize them. It would be more than a bit awkward to explain what troops from the USE were doing in Rome at all, much less prancing toward the church of San Matteo where Galileo was being tried.

They'd decided to pass themselves off as Polish, if anyone asked. Heinzerling spoke enough Polish to fake the matter, from that side; and, from the other, the commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania was not only a distant country but one whose political structure was confusing enough to the Poles and Lithuanians themselves to make well-nigh any uniform plausible.

Lieutenant Trumble, decked out almost as fancy as Lennox, rode to his left; to his right, Heinzerling; and to Heinzerling's right, Sergeant Southworth. MacNish, Ritson, Faul and Milton rode behind as an honor guard, in their rather plainer dress blues.

The touch of outright farce came from Heinzerling, who had changed out of his clerical black shirt and jeans and was now sitting ramrod straight in the saddle of a mule, tricked out in sauterne and sash, bands and biretta. Lennox decided he looked like an overweight, sweaty chess-piece.

The mule was the final touch. Heinzerling needed a big horse, a strong and sensible beast that would carry his weight and decidedly rough-and-ready horsemanship both. As it was, it looked like having the Jesuit carry the mule under one arm would probably be more comfortable for the both of them. It was all Lennox could do not to snigger. The picture was truly absurd, but it did seem priestly humble, in its own extravagant way. All it lacked was a hairshirt for the mule.

Sergeant Southworth at least looked the part, riding next to Heinzerling as being the only Marine who could possibly pass for Catholic if pressed. Although, as far as Lennox could see, that appeared to consist entirely in being as drunk and debauched as any other Marine and vanishing to a different chapel on Sundays.

As for passing for nobility, that was even easier:

Flout the livery laws;
Surround yourself with armed retainers;
Sneer.

Lennox grinned to himself. That last was easy. He had but to remember that he was a Scotsman.

* * *

Scotsman or not, noble or not, he still had to wait in line. His own patience wasn't a problem. Lennox had suffered a career's worth of—and this was a phrase he loved the Americans for—hurry up and wait. The horses weren't too bad either. They'd used their own mounts, which they'd been careful with on the way down from Venice and kept as well as they could in the stables they'd found. They were better fed beasts than most hereabout, and plenty of grain had been bought for them since their arrival in Rome.

They were well trained, too, to the parade and to battle, and so they could stand a good while in this street. A beast that had been taught to trust its rider in the heat of battle would not spook at the smell and the noise and the tension of the crowd. His own mount barely snorted as a scuffle broke out somewhere off to his right. Either a cutpurse had worked or someone had jostled too roughly.

Ahead of them in line, as well as behind, there were riders who were not so lucky or sensible in their choice of horses. Several of the retainers and not a few of their masters were only barely keeping their mounts in check.

Lennox shaded his eyes with a gauntleted hand—kid leather, the like of which he'd never have afforded himself—and looked up to the sun. It was getting well up; perhaps nearly eight of the morning clock by a reckoning he'd gotten thoroughly used to. Unfortunately, he'd had to leave his watch behind. Yes, it gave the time splendidly; it would just as splendidly give him away to any observer. No officers in this day and age except those of the USE had watches like that. Certainly not the Poles and Lithuanians.

The line of noble parties moved forward a place. Then, after a little while, moved forward another. Lennox simply let his brain bake under the sun, not thinking, allowing his horse to amble forward to make up the gap. The crowd remained quiet, but restive, although they seemed to be straining less against the Swiss halberdiers than they had been. Looking closely into the colonnades and the mouths of alleyways, he could see gawkers who had grown bored slipping away to be about other business of the day.

Lennox nodded to himself. That would be about right. If they couldn't get in to see the show, there was still the daily bread to earn. A few moments later, another half-gallon of sweat under his cuirass, he had another and less pleasant thought.

That meant only the real hooligans were left . . .

* * *

There was a click. Quite a loud one.

Marius was standing next to Frank in the nave of the church they'd selected as their spot. He grunted; then spoke a word that caused everyone nearby to turn around and glare. Fortunately, all of them were members of the Committee. But, revolutionary firebrands or not, they still disapproved to a man of that kind of language in church.

Frank looked too. Marius grinned weakly back. He had both hands inside his tabard and his eyes were watering. "Sorry," he said, through gritted and grinning teeth. "I got my pistol-flint in my hand."

"What?" Frank looked around, trying not to appear frantic. The cleared area around the sanctuary of the church of San Matteo was busy with clerks and servants, shuffling papers and making ready. There were pews waiting for nobles and a path was kept open between the sanctuary and the pulpit. Everywhere else, it was breathing-room only for the crowd in the nave and the transepts and more were still coming in. At the doors, the Swiss Guard were growling at the pressed crowd to keep them back from the building. The Committee had gotten in early, and they had all been standing for several hours.

And in all this, Marius, the idiot, had started playing with his pistol. Well, it was of a piece with everything else about him.

"I said," Marius repeated with the deliberation of a man in richly deserved pain, "I got my flint in my hand. She went off in my hand, and I got my hand in the way of the flint." He took a deep breath. "My hand is trapped."

Frank groaned, softly.

Gerry leaned forward and tugged Frank's shoulder. "What's the putz done now?" he hissed in English.

"Trapped his hand in his flintlock," Frank hissed.

"Typical," Gerry grunted. He leaned back again. A short moment and a little whispering later, Frank heard a soft groan ripple right along the row behind. Marius Pontigrazzi was becoming a legend in his own lifetime, truly he was.

Another loud click. Frank tensed up. Not content with playing with the lock of his pistol and—surely he didn't deserve the luck—only getting his hand trapped, he had now cocked it to get his hand out.

"Marius?" Frank said, very carefully and slowly.

"Si?"

"I want you to freeze perfectly still with your pistol just as you are." Frank kept his tone of voice perfectly level, which really took some doing.

"Why?" asked Marius, turning his head and frowning back.

Frank's voice stayed low, but he couldn't keep the threatening note out of the monotone he spoke in. "Because if you don't, I'll fucking shoot you myself. I can't believe you'd be dumb enough to mess with your pistol in an Inquisition courtroom."

To his surprise, Frank saw that the Marcoli youngsters were now glaring at him. Why—?

Oh. It was all he could do not to scream with sheer frustration. Revolutionary firebrands, one minute; prim and proper old ladies the next. Frank's Italian was getting very, very fluent, including the profanity.

In church, remember.

He moved his lips closer to Marius' ear and whispered. "Don't. Move. I. Will. Fix. The. Gun." He found himself wishing that Ducos were standing nearby. Frank didn't like the man, but Michel would be the best one to handle Marius. Unfortunately, Ducos was standing some fifteen feet away. Far enough that he wasn't even aware of what was happening.

Marius started to scowl, in that oxlike manner the man had when he decided to be stubborn about something. But then Gerry leaned forward. He was wearing a long coat despite the heat the day promised; from under it came the sound of a lock clicking back. Fortunately, as distinctive as it was, the sound was not loud enough to be heard beyond a few feet in the soft murmur of the crowd.

"Like my big brother said," he hissed into Marius' other ear, "hands out away from the fucking piece. Do as he says."

The Committee boys knew better than to glare at Gerry for his language. The youngest of the three Stone brothers was easily the most pugnacious. He'd just glare back at them. Besides, by this point they were all as desperate as Frank to get the situation under control. And, whatever his language, Gerry had done that.

Frank realized that they were speaking loudly enough that the people in the row in front were trying to lean away from them. Not because they'd heard the specifics of the dispute, but simply because they understood some sort of dispute was happening. Shuffling was out of the question, but they were trying it anyway. Frank knew that the solid block of Committee guys were in danger of starting their own Mexican wave. Worse, once the guys at the edge started shoving back, Marius might get jostled, or worse, someone might take offense and—

"Marius!" he hissed. Marius jerked his hands out of his tabard in a way that made Frank age about fifty years in an instant. A second or two passed in which Frank listened for the sound of priming and . . .

The pistol didn't fire. Frank let out a long, loud breath. From the row behind there was the soft click of a lock being uncocked that told him that Gerry had relaxed too.

Marius, meanwhile, had raised his hands about level to his armpits. "Don't shoot, okay?" His face was white. Frank looked up and saw a deep, painful-looking gouge where the flint had struck. It was bleeding. Serve the idiot right.

"Just hold still," he whispered. Frank reached into Marius' tabard and discovered that, just to add to the list of Dumb Stuff Marius Did Today, he had his pistol stuffed down the front of his britches. It was all he could do not to snarl: You know, I ought to just pull the trigger so's you don't breed and pass on your stupidity.

But he restrained himself. His dad's influence, there. One of the few things that would get Tom Stone really pissed was hearing people make fun of dimwits, even if he didn't like the dimwits himself.

Frank found the priming pan and, by feel, flipped it open. A tap, a shake, and he spilled the powder out. It would dribble down Marius' legs inside the tabard, but Frank couldn't think of any alternative. He didn't dare bring the pistol out into the open.

That done, he reached his other hand in so that, two-handed, he could uncock the thing safely.

Good enough. He didn't even consider repriming the pistol. Given Marius, it would be best to just leave it disarmed. When the breakout happened, Marius could wave it around and bellow. Nothing else, he'd add to the confusion.

Leaving the pistol behind, Frank pulled his hands out of the tabard. "Don't do that again, Marius. Understand me?"

Some part of Frank's brain was astonished at his own tone of voice. The words he'd spoken, however softly, had been sheer menace. Sounded like something young Corleone would have said in The Godfather. Either one of them, father or son. Soft, calm, guaranteeing instant and sure oblivion.

Marius lowered his hands. He was visibly trembling, and his eyes were wide and bright with the starting of tears. As the man could do, he'd shifted in a split-second from a somewhat surly and none-too-bright adult to a bewildered, childish simpleton. Frank was glad now that he'd left those words unspoken. In this as in so many things, his sometimes goofy dad was still smarter than most people—not to mention a lot nicer.

Frank sniffed, and then looked down. Marius was standing in a puddle. A puddle that was already steaming slightly, in a church that was warming up rapidly with the sunshine and the press of bodies. Luckily, like most big cities of the time, Rome tended to smell a bit like a cesspool anyway. Frank didn't think anybody would notice unless they actually looked—which was none too likely, in this jam-packed mob.

He sighed softly. It was going to be a fuc—a long wait. Frank glanced guiltily at the nearest image of Jesus and silently apologized to him for even thinking about thinking a swearword in church.

It was still going to be a fucking long wait.

* * *

"I still dinnae believe that worked," Lennox muttered.

Heinzerling turned back around to him, and grinned. He was aiming for disarming, but the nearest the fat priest could manage was mischievous. "This city is so hierarchical, Captain. What they expect to see, they see."

Lennox grunted. Like all soldiers, he was a practical man, and he wasn't about to argue with success. Besides, he was too busy trying not to gawk. Accustomed as he was to the dour Calvinist chapels of home, and their equivalent in Germany, the interior of the Inquisition's church of San Matteo was a mild shock.

Not the gilt and art and ostentation, in itself. Lennox had seen plenty of that in his travels, and had gotten used to the idea that rich men decorated their homes and places of business in that manner, even if he disapproved on general principles. Seeing it all in a place of worship, however—he'd seldom had cause to step inside a Catholic church before—brought back the fiery sermons he'd heard over and over since his youth.

Idolatry. Whore of Rome. Gilded harlot. Babylon reborn.

Too, now that he thought about it, the last Catholic church Lennox had set foot in had been St. Mary's in Grantville, a church of stark and elegant simplicity inside. Almost Calvinist, compared to this confection of gilt and plaster and stone and just about every artifice or decoration imaginable.

He shook his head to clear it of the gleams of gilt and marble, and craned his neck to peer down the nave. He'd tried to keep an eye out to both sides when he had walked up to the seats reserved for the nobility, but either he'd looked left when he should have looked right or the Stone boys were hiding. "Can ye see 'em?"

"Nein," Heinzerling murmured back. He too was craning his neck, one boot on the pew behind him. Lennox fought down the urge to tell him to get his foot off the seat.

"I see them now," Heinzerling hissed. "In the nave, on the left."

Lennox looked. Now they were pointed out, they were obvious, even though they all had their heads down. Frank was the most visible of the three, and seemed to be preoccupied with someone standing next to him. The other two brothers had to be there, though; the rascals were practically inseparable—something of which, under most circumstances, Lennox highly approved.

Sure enough, he caught sight of Gerry in the next row back. He, too, was staring hard at the man next to Frank.

Frank Stone picked that moment to look up, and his eyes caught Lennox's.

"I think he recognizes you," Heinzerling said. Indeed, Frank's expression was practically a beacon of despair.

"Likely so. And if no' me, ye're ain mug's yin he'll ken right enough," Lennox muttered back, not taking his glare away from Frank for a second.

* * *

"Gerry?" Frank said, when he realized who it was that was staring at him. "It's Lennox."

"He caught up? Where, man?"

"Up front, in the seats." Frank didn't dare point. He retained the fond, slight hope that they hadn't been spotted. Even though Lennox was staring right at him. And, um, glaring. Really glaring. Like Clint Eastwood glaring at a criminal in a Dirty Harry movie.

"I see him now. We still with the plan?"

"Plan? Uh, maybe we should . . ." Frank couldn't think of anything to say. His mind was drawing a complete blank.

"Should what?" Gerry asked, his voice getting a little warmer. "Give up?"

"Well, we—" Frank tried again.

"Don't say it, man. Just don't, all right?"

"Say what? All I was thinking is we're busted, you know, and—"

"You reckon?" Frank's heart sank. He could tell from his tone of voice that Gerry wasn't worried at all. With Gerry, that was a bad sign. A very very bad sign. When he was in that state of mind, Gerry could drive off a cliff and insist he wasn't in trouble until he hit the ground.

"What do you mean, busted?" Gerry snorted.

Frank groaned, softly. "They're right there, man. I see Lennox, and Father Gus, and I bet they got the Marines somewhere nearby. We're busted, I tell you. Totally busted."

"Relax, will you? They can't do anything. They can't just waltz over here and haul us away, because they can't tell anyone who we are or why we're here ourselves. We're talking major diplomatic incident here, man. They've got to pretend they don't know us. We won that one as soon as we got here before them, Frank. We carry on just as we planned."

"Sure, but do they know that?"

"I reckon Gus is smart enough to figure it out."

Gerry spoke with the tone of an empiricist whose evidence is in. Frank, though, was uncomfortably aware of the number of times he'd seen Father Gus get an idea stuck in his head and stick with it past all reason. And Lennox was right there with him. The bare-knuckle "theological debate" the two of them had once gotten into at the Thuringen Gardens was a thing of legend in Grantville.

But . . . Frank couldn't think of anything else to do either, except play it by ear. This supposedly well-planned scheme was about to get very unpredictable. Lyrics by Antonio Marcoli; music by Michel Ducos. What else could you expect?

"I pissed myself," Marius whined. "My legs are getting cold."

That wasn't helping Frank's nerves any, either.

* * *

"If ye've any suggestions, Augustus, ye ken richt weel this is the time for 'em," Lennox murmured to Heinzerling.

The Inquisition's public hearing—an innovation in itself—was being held in San Matteo because that was the Inquisition's "home" church. The ruse Heinzerling had devised had gotten Lennox and himself inside the church; had even gotten them some of the prized seats—but not, unfortunately, the squad of cavalrymen. Those had had to remain outside, with Lieutenant Trumble in command.

They'd gotten seats with the quality at the very head of the nave, close to the pulpit. The sanctuary was behind them, and the Stone boys and their Venetian cohorts had picked a spot to stand right at the front of the common peoples' part of the nave. A small knot of them, right by the aisle. No doubt they had meant to have an escape route clear, but the aisle was also filling up.

"I should have more ideas, mein' ich, if I knew what these knaben were planning, ja?" Heinzerling tried to match Lennox's fixed stare at the Stone boys with a constant scan around the place.

"Och, I ken that right enough."

"Ja?"

"All we've to do is dream up the stupidest thing the bampots could possibly do, and there is their plan."

The note of humor in Lennox's voice was genuine. Heinzerling realized he, too, had a sneaking regard for the Stone boys. At their age he'd been a prize little prig, and would never have dreamed of doing something so glorious, adventurous and utterly verruckt. It had taken him years to learn how to be so daft.

"Perhaps it is so easy as to go over there and insist they leave with us before the business begins?" Heinzerling couldn't think of anything else to do. Besides, simplicity was usually the right solution to a problem anyway. "In fact, we shall, yes? Stop them before they start. They will not know that we dare not try and force them for fear of diplomatic embarrassment."

"Oh, dare we not? I'll hae th'idjits oot o' here by the baw-heers and never mind their eyes watr'in nor any diplomacy, Augustus. Ye've confession an' absolution and like Romish stuff, so it strikes me we'd do better to think on forgiveness and no let frae any man, eh?" Lennox's face was turned away from Heinzerling's, but the brawler's grin was loud and clear in his voice.

"Speak so to our boys, and I think they will believe you." Heinzerling looked down at where the Stone boys, all three, and their Venetian friends had their eyes fixed on Lennox. He could see the effect Lennox's grim smile was having on them. "Shall we not go, then?" he proposed. "Before the trial begins, and while they are still nervous."

"Aye. Wi' me, then," said Lennox, rising from his seat.

At that moment a chime rang and the entire congregation rose.

"Hold," Heinzerling whispered. "It begins."

"Och, bully, we dithered too long. Maybe we should—"

Heinzerling hissed for quiet. Sitting side on to the main axis of the nave, they had to crane to look in either direction. Stealing a glance over his shoulder, Heinzerling saw Cardinal Barberini—the youngest of the three, the one his former master Monsignor Mazarini had worked for—walking down the sanctuary, accompanied by a small flotilla of deacons and altar boys. Barberini was clearly about to make some kind of speech. Behind him came another eight men in the vestments of Inquisitors. Only four of them besides Barberini himself were cardinals, which was unusual in itself.

Barberini stood at the sanctuary rail and cleared his throat.

Probably a standard speech, Heinzerling thought. As the cardinal began to address the congregation, he turned to watch the boys carefully for any signs of movement. Now that he was in a standing position he could see more of the row behind them.

There, suddenly, he saw a man whose description he recognized. All traces of humor vanished.

"Ducos. Scheisse!"

Chapter 48

Cardinal Antonio Barberini had the rare experience of proceeding into a church without knowing exactly what would take place, and knowing he would not. Scheiner was to make the principal speech against Galileo, Grassi having finally agreed that perhaps he was a little too involved, a little too likely to attach undue personal vehemence. And, on the other side, the American priest Mazzare had been ordered to speak on Galileo's behalf.

The church was packed. The day was growing warm, and all Rome seemed to have turned out to see Galileo tried. Or, rather, not tried, but inquired into. The Inquisition had done so much of its business behind closed doors, for so long, that a public hearing raised a great deal of curiosity. Much of it morbid, the cardinal suspected.

Barberini's presence, and the presence of the other inquisitors—it would be as well to put the name to them that everyone else would, even though they were not, lawfully, of the Holy Office—brought the assembled congregation to silence.

"Brethren in Christ—" he began, and realized that off to his right, the silence was not complete.

The cardinal had little of either German or English, but he recognized the one word, a German obscenity. And then something he couldn't follow.

Another voice, in English this time, or so he thought. He glared, trying to place the grossly improper interruption. He could feel his face purpling as his ire and outrage increased—

There! He saw them. A nobleman of some kind and his attendant priest. They fell silent, staring back at him in silent apology, murmurs spreading out from them.

What to do? Any response would carry the whole proceeding into farce, he decided. Today was not a day to stand on dignity at the price of solemnity. He kept silence for a beat or two, and carried on.

"Brethren in Christ, today's proceedings are novel, an innovation before you all. What falls to be decided today is the terms of advice to be given to His Holiness the Pope by the Holy Office and the other learned fathers you see behind me. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit is upon us all—"

He said a simple blessing. The amen that followed it was a quiet thing, but from a thousand or more throats almost thunderously loud.

A few more preliminary remarks, upon the great weight of theological questions, the mortal peril to men's souls of error, and then Galileo was brought in. Another murmur. This was the man about whom the Holy Office had ordered sermons preached. The man whose ideas they had all been told were dangerous. What would they think to see him given an open hearing?

He told the congregation that Scheiner would deliver the first address and sat down.

* * *

Mazzare nodded to Scheiner as the man rose in response to hearing his name. A small area in the transept had been screened off for them to remain in, to take notes toward the addresses they must give if they so chose. Scheiner went to the pulpit to begin the process of damning Galileo, who even now was being seated in the sanctuary, a chair having been brought in for the old man. Mazzare could just see where Galileo sat, facing the congregation, slumped in the chair, head bowed and hands in his lap.

It was hard to square the meek, frightened old man with the fiery disputant who had delivered so many kicks to the backside of Europe's scientific establishment over the last thirty years. And, being honest, more than a few to the crotch. Galileo had often been wrong, too, especially when he delved into astronomical matters, a field in which he really accomplished nothing as a theoretician; his great contribution there was his invention of the telescope and his observational data. He'd been wrong about the nature of comets, when he opposed Tycho Brahe; wrong again when he opposed Kepler on the cause of the tides. Ironically, the popular image of the man as a great astronomer that would emerge over the centuries was due almost entirely to his trial.

Galileo's real contribution to science had been in the field of mechanics, not astronomy. But no matter where Galileo's interests took him, one thing had remained constant through the years: his arrogance, and his abusive conduct toward any who opposed him. Galileo had rarely hesitated to pile personal insult onto scholarly sarcasm. Nor was he given to any great scruples when it came to grabbing credit for himself or denying it to others. He paid no attention to his great contemporary Johannes Kepler, the first two of whose famous three laws of planetary motion had been published as far back as 1609, and the third law ten years later. Newton's three laws would derive from Kepler, not from Galileo.

Galileo had fumbled the defense of the Copernican theory, too. Because he refused to pay attention to what Kepler was doing, Galileo had been unable to solve the apparent contradictions of the Copernican theory—and it was that, as much as anything, that had ultimately led to his trial for heresy. The fact would become obscured in the historical record because of the glamour surrounding Galileo's "martyrdom," but the simple truth was that in the early seventeenth century Ptolemaic theory predicted the movements of the heavenly bodies better than Copernican theory did—with the exception of Kepler, who finally discovered that the planetary orbits were ellipses rather than circles.

Anyone who knew Galileo Galilei, and Mazarre had spoken to several of them, knew that he was abrasive and obnoxiously self-righteous if he was not impressed with the need to be mannerly. His months under the orders of the Inquisition had agreed with him to that extent, at least. The reports that he was by nature a bully had been made false at last, in the way most such reports were made false: the man had encountered a bigger bully.

Out in the main body of the church, Scheiner had ascended to the pulpit and was beginning his oration. In traditional style, in Latin. How much of it the congregation was following was anyone's guess, but the important part of the audience was all fluent in the language. Latin in this day and age was the primary language of science as well as religion.

And there was another of the historical ironies of Galileo's trial, Mazzare thought wryly. The world would come to remember it as a clash between science and religion, the latter embodied in the Catholic Church. Which, to a degree, it certainly was. But the world would forget that most of the great scientists of the day were also Catholic clerics, including Copernicus himself—and that the early track record of the Protestants on the subject of science was considerably more dismal than the Catholics. It was Protestant theologians who first denounced the Copernican theory for being contrary to Scripture. Both Luther and Melanchthon had inveighed against Copernicus, where Popes Leo X and Paul III had provided him with support.

Mazzare had scripted his own speech, and was confident enough in the language to be taking notes. Not at the moment, though, as Scheiner was beginning with a rehearsal of the facts of the matter that, Galileo had agreed, was pretty much accurate.

"Stage fright, Larry?" The Reverend Jones put a hand on his shoulder.

"Yes, Simon," Mazzare murmured, one ear on the dry, German-accented Latin coming from the pulpit. "It'd be easier if what I'd had from Galileo wasn't just a lot of wheedling about being misunderstood."

"Sure. How did the stuff on the space program go down with him? I meant to ask, but you know how it is." Jones waved his hand in a small motion that took in the church, the congregation they could see through the fretwork screen, the inquisitors sitting across the sanctuary like a jury of vestmented vultures.

Mazzare chuckled humorlessly. "Galileo, bless him, whimpered and insisted that it had to all be fraud, because obviously Copernicanism was contrary to Scripture, and hadn't I read his defense of it?"

"Seriously?"

"He thinks I'm an inquisitor, Simon."

"No kidding?" Jones blew out a long, silent whistle, as much sigh as anything. "I suppose two years of the Inquisition could make a man paranoid, at that."

"I reckon it could. I've tried to convince him, of course, but I've only really had a couple of chances to talk to him. I could've pushed it, I think, or at least Francesco Barberini was hinting that way, but at the end of the day this isn't about what the fellow thinks, it's about what he wrote."

"A masterful summation, if I may say so." Mazzare and Jones turned at the new voice.

"Your Holiness," said Mazzare, rising to his feet. "I did not—" He stopped, and began to rephrase his response in Latin.

"Please, in English if you prefer," said the pope. He had entered alone, although behind him in the aisle that led back to the sacristy there was a small cloud of priests and deacons. "But, yes, it is about what he wrote. Please, try not to fear. The worst I propose to sanction is a reprimand to Galileo, and an order that—but no mind to the details. You need not fear that you will fail your client to the extent of his losing his life or liberty. That is an error you have already convinced me away from."

"Your Holiness . . ." Mazzare stopped. What to say? He stole a glance at Jones, whose mouth was hanging open. "Your Holiness, why? If you propose no more than to reprimand Galileo for his ill manners, why do we have this—" He waved over his shoulder, where Scheiner was still droning, not having come to the part of his speech where oratorical flourish would serve.

"You think it a cheat?" If Mazzare did not know better, he would swear that the poker face of His Holiness Urban VIII, Vicar of Christ and head of the Roman Catholic Church, concealed a broad grin.

Somehow that was comforting. "Perhaps I would not use that word," said Mazzare, feeling the tension drain out of him. "But perhaps this has more of the character of the commedia than the congregation think?"

"A dumb-show?" Now the pope was definitely grinning. "Not without purpose, though."

"Does His Holiness care to make that purpose known?"

"Ah, perhaps later. For now, my blessing, my son." Urban raised his hand, and spoke the Latin words of benediction.

Mazzare crossed himself in response, and his ultimate superior—realizing that he genuinely thought of him that way was a great comfort—left the room. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, that Jones had his arm partly raised. Had he been about to forget and cross himself as well? Somehow Mazzare found the idea hilarious.

"I think your nerves just went away," muttered Jones, with an expression that said his were still out in force.

Mazzare just grinned.

"Come on, Larry, you know more than you're letting on." Jones's face was a study. Preacher, growing tetchy.

"I know exactly what you do. I may reach different conclusions from it than you do, but I'm reasoning from the same premises." Mazzare hummed softly beneath his breath. Listening to himself, he realized it was the theme from, of all things, The Magnificent Seven. What that had to do with orbital mechanics or theology—or the price of fish, for that matter—he had no idea.

* * *

"Is this going to go on much longer?" Gerry hissed in Frank's ear.

Frank tried telepathy. Shutupshutupshutupshutup. We'rerightdownfrontyoumoron. Shutupshutupshutup.

It didn't work. "Only we need to do something or get off the pot, you know?"

Frank half turned and whispered out of the corner of his mouth. "Let's just wait, okay? We already agreed we can't make our break until the end of the trial, when there's a crowd leaving anyway. We get in there, drag him back, and use the cover of the crowd to get out. If they can't shoot and they can't shut the doors, we got a much better chance."

"Yeah, but I don't understand a word and he could be reading out a death sentence for all I know." Frank caught the undertone in Gerry's voice that said he was right on the edge.

Of course, there was an undertone from Marius that said he was well and truly over that edge, but it wasn't a voice undertone. More of a warm, ripe, smell. He hadn't just had one bodily accident—now he was farting loudly every thirty seconds or so as well. Frank could see where Gerry's patience might be wearing a little thin. The smell of gunpowder spilt down the inside of Marius' tabard wasn't helping matters any. If anyone caught on to that, they were really in the soup. In a way, it was a mercy he'd wet himself; it kept the smell of gunpowder faint and disguised, which Frank thought only someone standing right next to Marius could detect.

Frank considered that for a few seconds, and had a moment of utter horror. How have I gotten myself into a situation where I'm glad I'm standing in a puddle of piss?

"Frank," Gerry hissed again, and then: "Knock it off, Ron!"

At least one other person back there was thinking straight, Frank realized with relief. From the sound of things, Ron had elbowed his brother in the ribs. He couldn't follow the hissing whispers behind him, but from the sound of things it was pretty intense and Ron was getting the upper hand in the game of Shut Gerry Up Right Now.

And then the priest who was droning on came to a halt. There was a little polite applause, mostly from the old guys who were sitting up by the altar, and everything went silent.

The short fat young guy who'd kicked things off got up again. Before he spoke, he glared to his right where Lennox and Heinzerling were sitting. Then he paused and began to speak in the unmistakable manner of a man announcing the next act. And Frank realized he recognized two names in all that Latin:

One, the name of the town he had grown up in, and the other . . .

Surely not! Here?

* * *

Heinzerling wondered what to do now. There was a definite French agent with the Stone boys, and the big Jesuit needed no reminding that the phrase agent provocateur was seldom translated from its original language whenever it was used. Heinzerling's own parish priest was about to speak at the trial that that agent had come to, probably with the American boys as his unwitting dupes. What had seemed to be nothing worse than adolescent idiot enthusiasm now had a far more sinister flavor. Whatever the role of Ducos, the fact remained that everything was happening in the presence of Grantville's Catholic priest; an accredited ambassador of the United States of Europe; a commissioned officer of the same nation—and any outrage would be committed by three of its citizens.

Right in the home church of the Roman Inquisition, just to make it all perfect.

After chewing on the situation, Heinzerling decided it was comforting. From the absolute bottom of the Pit, after all, the only way is up.

* * *

Mazzare found his nerves returning as he mounted the steps to the pulpit. The congregation was enormous; he had never seen St. Mary's so packed, other than on Christmas Eve at midnight mass. He took a moment to arrange his notes on the lectern, and without thinking, crossed himself. On a whim, he decided to pretend he meant to do that, and folded his hands and bowed his head. He couldn't think of any prayer that suited, other than Please, Lord, don't let me mess this up, which at least had the virtues of simplicity and sincerity.

As he stood, he took in the congregation, and immediately wished he hadn't. In front of the pulpit, ranged on either side of the nave, were the choirstall-seats for the quality. And right at the front of those seats were Heinzerling and Lennox. Which meant—

Yes, there they were. The Stone boys had reached Rome and clearly had plans in relation to Galileo that . . . Mazzare shuddered, and realized that he didn't want to think about that. Please, let it be harmless. Let them be discouraged.

Could he draw attention to—? No, he looked down at Heinzerling. His curate was making motions with his hands that said go on, go on.

Mazzare realized his knees were trembling, but his hands and face felt perfectly steady. He took a deep breath.

"Brethren in Christ, most learned fathers of the Holy Office," he began.

Chapter 49

Mazzare stepped down from the pulpit, on unsteady legs. Somewhere, behind him, he could hear a murmur. Some of the crowd must have understood some of what he'd said, but he couldn't read their reaction from the murmurs. Throughout there had been virtually no reaction from anyone, except Galileo, who had hunched in on himself more and more as Mazzare had spoken, and then toward the end sat up straighter, as if remembering where he was and trying to show—what, exactly? Had it been a response to something Mazzare had been saying?

He couldn't remember much of it. Virtually nothing, in fact. How different from an ordinary sermon! When the audience was familiar, the material well tried, the consequences only a little more of Scripture explained to a congregation who had just heard it, speaking to a crowd was easy. When the audience included princes of his Church, the material in a language not his own and the consequences—

He balked from the thought. What if the gap in his memory covered a string of incoherent babble? He looked down at the notes in his hand. He hadn't turned more than the first page, which was purely introductory material. From then on he'd been extemporizing; expounding on the spot based on nothing more, really, than an epiphany that had come to him only that very morning.

A friendly face. "Simon—how?" He couldn't get more control than that of his mouth.

"You killed 'em, Larry." Jones's voice was deadpan, but his face was grinning from ear to ear. "Couldn't follow but one word in three, but after the first couple of minutes, you really seemed to get hold of it and made 'em listen, by God!" He reached round to slap Mazzare on the back.

Mazzare felt a cold shiver run down his back. Still no idea what he'd really said. He looked across to the sanctuary. No movement there, except for cardinals leaning over to mutter things to each other and to dart glances in his direction. What are they thinking? Cardinal Barberini, the younger one, wasn't moving yet.

"Please, do you speak German?" Mazzare felt dizzy as he whipped his head around. It was Scheiner.

"Yes, of course, can I help you?" Mazzare mouthed the pleasantry, but he couldn't imagine what to say of any substance.

"I simply wish to say that that was very well said. My own efforts will be in the shade now, I think." The Jesuit smiled thinly, and with a little sadness as well. "Your exegesis on the subject of humility was, I think, very well taken."

"On the what?" The words didn't seem to register.

"On humility, Father Mazzare. You were aware that His Holiness was present?" The smile was still there, still a little sad; but now, Mazzare realized, with a little warmth as well.

"Ah, yes. He spoke to me while you were at the podium."

Scheiner nodded. "It always pays to use arguments that you know will go over well, yes?"

"I'm sorry, I don't follow you." Mazzare felt like his skull was stuffed with cotton, his mouth dry and leathery. "Please, forgive me, I need to sit down."

"No, I understand," Scheiner said. "His Holiness grounded much of his opposition to the Copernican hypothesis on the principle of humility, that we should not pretend to know all that God has wrought in the world and in the heavens. To turn that around to show that we must therefore not presume that we have any perfect understanding of what is in Scripture, that any word is the final word, was excellent. I suspect that will be a point of quite vital dispute for some years to come."

"Dispute which I shall be glad to hear before making my final pronouncement." Again, the pope surprised Mazzare with his presence. Distantly, Mazzare could hear Barberini addressing the congregation. "Most eloquent, Padre. I must speak with you later; my secretary"—he gestured to a youngish priest at his elbow—"will make the arrangements. We have much to discuss, little of it to do with natural philosophy. My purpose today was to hear you defend Galileo and take your measure."

Urban smiled, a bit slyly. "Galileo would approve. I made an experiment. I am pleased with the results, and there is therefore a service which you may perform for me. I shall tell you later. For now, I will address this Commission, and the congregation present."

With that, he mounted the steps to the side of the sacristy, and walked across to his nephew, the cardinal.

"Can he do that?" It was Jones.

"Do what, Simon?"

"Just order you about like that?" Jones was scowling.

"Well, he is the pope." Mazzare smiled. "And I am a Catholic priest."

"Yes, but—"

"He can," said Scheiner, in German. "And after today, I think he must."

"Thought you didn't speak English?" Jones shot back.

"Not well, and I prefer German or Latin. Herr Mazzare," he said, turning to his fellow Catholic, "I think perhaps you may find yourself advanced in the Church. Or I miss my surmise—but His Holiness is about to speak."

* * *

Heinzerling sat, stunned. He knew Mazzare could talk, had lived with him for nearly two years now. He knew that, impassioned as he so rarely was, he could speak with fire and power. That had been something else again. To imagine that the truth of the Heavens as it may be seen, and the truth of Scripture as it may be understood, should contradict each other . . . Where Mazzare had acquired the knack of such excellent epigrams was beyond Heinzerling. It made him regret abandoning his studies after he left the seminary.

And yet, there remained Galileo. The speech had seemed to put some spirit back into the old man, but he remained amid his inquisitors, still a prisoner, nothing yet resolved. After a short time, Barberini rose again, and began to speak further.

Inconsequential. Heinzerling ignored it. If proceedings were about to end, now would be the time for the Stone boys to do something stupid. No, he corrected himself, something even stupider.

He watched them carefully. They looked alert. They looked ready. They looked—eager. Some of them must have realized that the quality in the seats where he and Lennox had gotten themselves put would be leaving first, and so they would have a clear run. Would they realize that that would leave the two adults with the initiative to act first? Would they try and pre-empt the final go in peace?

There was a stir in the congregation. Heinzerling looked around.

"Who's yon laddie?" Lennox murmured.

Heinzerling recognized him only by his white soutane. Only one cleric wore that . . .

"The pope," he said.

A sharp intake of breath from Lennox. The principal fiend in the demonology of his own religion. "Aye? He's a man for a' that, is he not?"

"Ja." There really was no other answer Heinzerling could give. He knew how it was with some of these Calvinists. They heard that the pope was the Antichrist from the day they were born. Most of them, naturally, would little expect ever to be in Rome, let alone in the same room as the Beast of Revelation.

Heinzerling sighed. "Please do not call him any bad names, Captain Lennox."

"Wouldnae dream o' it," said Lennox. "E'en the de'il gets his due, and I'll be polite, richt enough."

Heinzerling realized he'd been had. He didn't have to turn around. Lennox's grin over his shoulder could be felt.

The congregation fell silent as the pope raised his arms for silence.

* * *

"Who's that?" whispered Gerry.

"Dunno," said Frank.

"Il Papa," breathed Marius.

Up on what Frank kept thinking of as the stage, the guy in white . . .

"Hold on. Did you say that was the pope?"

"Yes," said Marius, his eyes bright and intent.

"The actual pope? Here?" Frank couldn't believe it. He'd only ever seen one pope, and that was on TV. This was the actual pope, right here in the room with him! "Cool."

"Yes," said Marius. Something about his tone worried Frank for a reason he couldn't quite put his finger on.

But the pope—the actual pope! right here!—was raising his hands like he was a rock star or something, and people were going quiet.

"Urbi et orbi," he said, and Frank lost him right there. Another speech in Latin. Couldn't these guys do something in one of the three languages he did know? There was a long pause.

"Eppur se muove." That got a big reaction, but Frank couldn't understand why.

And then Marius drew out his pistol, shoved his way through the row of people in front of him, leveled the pistol at the pope, screamed, "Information wants to be liberated!" and pulled the trigger.

* * *

Heinzerling never saw how Lennox managed it, but he seemed to spring out of his seat like a child's toy and bounce out of the pew and into the aisle. The pistol that the man standing beside Frank Stone had produced was a flintlock of some sort, which meant it was manufactured in the USE. While Heinzerling's brain was still wincing from that and searching for the logic of the bizarre battle-cry, Lennox was leaping into the line of—

—nothing. The man with the pistol looked down at it, then more closely at his lock, and then colored bright red. Heinzerling noticed, in the clarity that such moments produce, that he seemed to have wet himself.

Lennox landed on his side. He'd loosened the strap of the fancy helmet earlier, once they'd taken their seats in the church. The helmet fell off, bounced oddly because of its shape, and rolled right in front of Frank. The reason it could do that was because the row of people who'd been standing in front of the Stone and Marcoli boys had frantically parted to the side.

The young idiots were now the center of attention of—

The whole world, it seemed.

Heinzerling's eyes quickly ranged about. Not counting Lennox, who was now scrambling back onto his feet, there were expressions of horror on every face he could see.

Including, thank God, the Stone and Marcoli boys themselves.

So, they couldn't have known—but would it save them?

* * *

Silence. Frank felt freezing cold all over, as the sweat started from his skin. Never had he felt so thankful for doing anything as for shaking the primer out of Marius' gun. What to say? What to do now?

Gerry supplied the lack. "You jackass!" he hollered, charging forward and drawing his own pistol. "You just fucking shot at the POPE!" By the time Marius looked up from his own gun, Gerry was standing in front of him and had the barrel of his pistol pressed into Marius' throat.

Everyone else in the church still seemed frozen. Frank hoped that the pause was because no one believed what they were seeing, and not because a horde of hidden marksmen were taking careful aim.

And then Frank saw two other guns, sliding forward between Ron and the two Marcoli brothers standing at his side. Looking up, he saw the faces of Ducos and his Roman Committee member.

It all came to him, then, in a flash of understanding. Not any of the details, just the essence of the matter.

He suckered us.

There was no way Frank could get his pistol out in time, he realized. "Ron! Heads up!" Frank flipped the helmet with his foot, just enough to catch it on his instep—if he tried actually kicking the damn thing he'd break his bones—and flung it at the pistols. Ron looked up just in time to duck.

The helmet missed everybody, but it came close enough to Ducos' Roman confederate to throw off his aim. His pistol fired high, the bullet whanging somewhere above.

Ducos, alas, never even flinched. He took a step forward, thrusting Fabrizio aside, and drew a bead on the pope. With a feeling of complete dismay, Frank was sure that Ducos was a crack shot on top of everything else.

Marius grappled with Gerry. Gerry's gun went off, still stuck into Marius' throat. It looked like he'd almost been decapitated. The blood sprayed everywhere, some of it splattering into Frank's face.

Frank grabbed at his eyes. He heard a hiss of priming and another flintlock firing. Ducos, he was sure.

Someone was screaming something. Was it him?

It was him.

Again, silence. Quite clearly, he heard the pope say a word, in a church in which a pin could have dropped. "Merda!"

It must be okay if the pope does it, he thought.

Then something hit him on the head and he blacked out.

* * *

The gun in the hand of Ducos went off. Stunned, shocked silence. The pope said something very unpontifical, and then all hell broke loose in the church. The Swiss guards were finally reacting. One of them swatted Frank on the head with his halberd; fortunately, using the heavy shaft for the purpose and not the deadly blade. A compromise, apparently; the guard must have realized that Frank was not one of the assassins, but he still wasn't taking any chances.

But Heinzerling only caught a glimpse of that. His attention was on Lennox, who had leapt in front of the pope again and then been slammed off his feet, falling onto his backside. While a scuffle broke out in the front row of the nave, and guards rushed in from the side-aisles, Lennox was doubled up on the floor, grunting something under his breath that sounded decidedly vehement.

The pope, untouched, was staring down at him. His mouth was agape.

* * *

Ron Stone had ducked the helmet more out of reflex than anything else. The only conscious thought he'd had at the instant he heard Frank's warning shout and saw the helmet sailing toward him was: What the hell is Frank doing messing about with soccer at a time like this?

By the time he'd straightened up and could see what was happening, Ducos was hauling out a second pistol. A wheel-lock, this time. So was the guy from the Roman Committee. Ron still didn't understand exactly what was happening, but he understood enough to know that Ducos and his Roman companion had gone from one of us to those dirty rotten bastards.

Even if he hadn't figured it out himself, the sight of Fabrizio and Dino grappling with Ducos to keep him from shooting at the pope again would have made things clear. Clear enough, anyway. Ron didn't like Michel any more than Frank did—Gerry was the only one of the three brothers who thought the cold Frenchman was "sorta cool"—and he'd grown quite fond of Fabrizio and Dino.

He drew his pistol, to give them a hand. Then, out of the corner of his eye, saw the Roman guy aiming at the pope. Ron swiveled and pointed the gun at him.

"Drop it!" he shouted.

The Roman guy stared at him. Then, suddenly, turned his wheel-lock pistol on Ron and fired at his head. Point-blank range, not more than two feet. The bullet missed but if Ron hadn't ducked and shut his eyes at the last instant he would have been blinded by the powder blown out of the barrel. As it was, even wearing a hat—the hat went sailing—he felt like he'd been scalped.

"You son of a bitch!" Furious, he straightened and lifted his pistol. Pulled the trigger.

Nothing. It suddenly dawned on him that the Roman guy was hollering obscenities and trying to hobble away. There was blood on his leg.

Ron stared down at his flintlock. He realized that he must have pulled the trigger when he ducked and fired his shot out of reflex. He'd never even noticed. Apparently it had hit the Roman guy on the leg—or maybe ricocheted into the leg off the stone floor.

He heard another gunshot. Turning his head, he saw that Michel had accidentally fired his second gun in the course of struggling with Fabrizio and Dino. The shot went over the heads of the crowd and struck an icon of Jesus against the far wall of the church. Jesus' left arm and that part of the crucifix were shattered.

Oh, shit. We're in big trouble now.

One of the Swiss guards blew his stack at that point. He hefted his halberd and hurled it like a massive ungainly spear. Fortunately, the guy missed Ron by a country mile. He didn't even have to duck. Ron turned to see where the halberd had gone and—

Oh.

The Roman guy was flat on his belly. Slowly, the weight of the halberd pried the weapon out of his shoulder blade. It toppled to the floor, blood staining the uppermost two inches of the spike. The Roman guy groaned and lurched to his knees, clutching the shoulder. Blood was oozing through his fingers.

"Oh." Ron owed the Swiss guard an apology.

He heard another shout and turned. Ducos, with maniac strength, had finally managed to break free from Fabrizio and Dino. He clubbed Dino down with the barrel of the gun and tried to do the same to Fabrizio in the back swing. But Fabrizio caught the barrel and clutched it with both hands. Cursing, Ducos released the pistol and started racing for the exit. He had to duck a halberd swing along the way that would have taken his head off.

He was headed more or less in Ron's direction but not close enough for Ron to tackle him. Ducos could run a lot faster than Ron would have expected.

No way, asswipe! Ron threw his pistol at him. The heavy butt struck Ducos a glancing blow to the mouth. That split his lip badly but the Frenchman kept going, ignoring the injury completely.

Then . . . he was gone. The Swiss guards had been too preoccupied with ensuring the pope's safety to stop Ducos from fleeing. The only two guards who went after him stopped when they got to the Roman guy and got sidetracked putting him under the Swiss Guard equivalent of arrest. Which apparently consisted of beating him to a pulp with the butts of their halberds.

Swell. The dupes do all the work; the cops come from Keystone; and the Mastermind makes his escape.

Bullshit. Ron raced after Ducos. As he reached the door leading outside, he spotted some bloodstains on the floor. That made him feel a lot better. Although he was still really worried about that busted status of Jesus. God only knew what the Inquisition would do to you for something like that.

Chapter 50

Heinzerling surprised himself with a vault over the pew rail of his own. Immediately, though, he had to jerk to a halt faced by the halberds of four of the Swiss guards. They'd leapt to protect the pope—rather later than Lennox the Protestant had done, he noted with grim amusement, not to mention the Stone brothers.

"My friend, there—my master, he is hurt." He pointed to where Lennox lay, visibly nowhere near the pope. A bit to his surprise, they let him through. No doubt the vestments helped, but he suspected the Swiss guards were just too confused themselves to be thinking clearly.

Whatever language Lennox was cursing in sounded like a good one for it. Or languages. Heinzerling recognized English and German and the Scotsman was going through at least two others.

"If you can swear so, Herr Hauptmann Lennox, it seems to me you are not so badly hurt?" Even as he spoke the mild joke he checked for bleeding, for any sign of injury.

"If I'm no wounded—ye papist swine—why the de'il dae—I hurt so much?" Lennox was getting his breath in great whooping gasps and spending all of them on swearing.

Blood. Heinzerling could see blood. Not much, but . . .

He traced it to a bloody score up one ear, that was welling up bright red and dripping onto the marble floor. "Your ear," he said.

"No mind—ma ear—ye bampot—ma bluidy ribs," Lennox wheezed. "Hit on—the cuirass."

"The what?" Heinzerling tried to remember what part of the body the cuirass was. He was conscious of figures gathering around him.

"Here." Lennox gasped and rolled over. "Crivvens, that hurts."

Heinzerling saw immediately. The flashy dress cuirass armor that Lennox wore had taken the pistol ball high on the left side, where the piece curved back toward the shoulder-strap. It was cracked clear from collarbone to armpit, the crack running right through a long, gouged dent running away upward with a smear of gray lead in it. "Scheisse, du glücklicher Hundinsohn," he breathed.

"Bluidy cheap pot-metal rubbish," the Scotsman hissed. "Nae decent proof plate'd 'ae cracked so."

"Saint Thomas should have had such as you," came a voice. Both of them looked up. "To stand between him and his king's knights," the pope went on, smiling broadly.

Lennox went bright pink, seemed on the verge of either laughing or wailing protest—perhaps both—and clutched his chest again and groaned.

"My friend is a brave man, Your Holiness," said Heinzerling solemnly, for want of anything better to say.

"And a true and pious son of the Church, whom God has preserved. He has laid down his life, and kept it!" The pope spoke these last words loudly, to a ragged cheer from those nearby who had seen what Lennox had done.

Heinzerling could feel the next development looming up on him like an avalanche of embarrassment. He had brought this, this—Calvinist—it was too much.

Too much for Lennox as well, who was gasping with pain between the sobs of laughter. "Will"—gasp, wheeze—"ye tell yon"—sob, chortle—"canna e'en call 'im a papist"—gasp, wheeze—"since 'e's the pape himself"—sob, chortle—"or will I?"

Lennox subsided in incoherent shuddering moans of agony and hilarity.

For Heinzerling, it was just the agony. "Actually, Your Holiness . . ."

* * *

The sound of gunshots brought all the Marines outside the church to sudden alert.

"Saddle up," Lieutenant Trumble commanded. "No, wait! MacNish, you come with me. We'll check the side entrance." Billy was already mounting his horse. He pointed toward the main entrance to the church. "Sergeant Southworth, take the rest of the men in there and see what's happening. On foot!"

Southworth and his three Marines ran toward the entrance, pulling out their swords and bracing themselves for a confrontation with the two confused-looking Swiss guards standing there. When they got within ten feet, all four of them as well as the Swiss guards were swept away by a swarm of screaming people charging out of the church. They might as well have been six chips of wood trying to stop a tidal wave. Fortunately, they all managed to keep their feet so none of them got trampled.

Billy Trumble stared at the sight, for a moment. Then, rolling his eyes with exasperation—doesn't anything go right?—he and MacNish started trotting around the side of the church.

As they came around the corner, they saw a man racing out of the side door and heading toward an alley. Maybe five seconds later, Ron Stone burst through it also. The Stone kid spotted Trumble and came to a sudden halt. He looked back at the door, as if thinking to flee back inside.

Weeks of slowly building frustration and anger at the idiot hippie kids who'd hauled one Lieutenant Trumble all over Italy till his ass felt like it would never recover came to a boil. Billy forgot all about the man who'd run down the alley.

"Halt!" Billy shouted. "Ron Stone, you are under arrest!"

Under the circumstances, it was probably a silly thing to say—just for starters, he had no jurisdiction here whatsoever—but Billy couldn't think of anything better. Given that he was being a dumbass anyway, he pulled out his sword and waved it around. "Halt, I said! In the name of the law!"

The lieutenant was now within fifteen feet of the Stone kid. Ron squinted at him. "Trumble? Is that you?"

"Who the hell do you think it is, you—oh." It suddenly occured to Billy that wearing his dress uniform, complete with that fancy stupid-looking helmet with sidebars, Ron hadn't recognized him.

"Yeah, Stone, it's me."

Ron pointed a finger at the man who'd raced out of the church. Billy turned his head just in time to see the man disappear into the alley.

"Go after him! Get him!"

Billy turned back. "Nice try, Stone. And you're still under—"

"You jackass! That's Ducos. He just tried to kill the pope!"

Billy stared at him. With a look of total exasperation, Ron stood stiffly erect and raised his right hand.

"Look, I'm telling the truth. Scout's honor."

"That's the Vulcan live-long-and-prosper salute."

Ron stared at his hand. Then, started hopping up and down. "Who the hell cares? Billy, goddamit—do your duty!"

Billy looked at the alley entrance. Belatedly, he realized that the guy had been acting kind of suspiciously. And now that he thought about it, the man did seem to match the description he'd been given of Ducos.

He came to a decision, and slid the sword back into its scabbard. "All right, Stone, but if you're lying your ass is grass. Where's the guy headed, anyway? I don't want to lose him somewhere in there. These alleys can be a maze."

"Not that one. It just leads straight through to another square. There's two coaches waiting on the other side of it. You can't miss them."

Billy headed off, MacNish following.

* * *

Ron stared after him, trying to decide whether to follow. Then five Swiss guards piled out of the church and buried him under a mass tackle.

That's what I was afraid of. They're really pissed about what happened to Jesus.

* * *

When Frank came to, the first thing he saw was Gerry. He was kneeling next to Frank, his face scrunched up.

When Gerry saw that Frank was conscious again, he wiped his sleeve over his nose.

"You okay?"

Frank nodded. Gerry burst into tears.

"I didn't mean to kill him," he sobbed.

Frank struggled to a sitting position and folded Gerry into a hug. "Yeah, I know. It just happened."

"Why did he have to be so stupid?" Gerry whispered, clutching his older brother tightly. "I mean, he wasn't really a bad guy or anything. Why did he grab me? That's why the gun went off. I didn't plan to shoot him. I just wanted to stop him from trying to kill the pope."

For a moment, Frank felt a burst of sheer hatred such as he'd never felt before in his life. "It was Michel Ducos did it, Gerry, not you. He played us for fools—and no one worse than Marius, because the poor guy was half a fool to begin with."

Gerry pulled away from Frank far enough to wipe his nose again. "I'll get him for that."

"No, you won't. We all will. The Stone boys stick together."

* * *

Just as the Swiss guards manhandled Ron to his feet, he remembered something. He twisted his head and shouted as loudly as he could.

"Billy, watch out! There's a boobytrap waiting in—oh, damn."

The entrance to the alley was a cloud of smoke. Gerry had outdone himself.

A moment later, two horses surged back out of the alley, snorting fiercely. One of them had a rider wearing a Marine dress uniform. It was not Billy Trumble.

* * *

It took Billy a couple of minutes to recover from the fall. Then, another minute to crawl painfully out of the worst of the smoke. When he got into clear air, he realized that he'd crawled the wrong way.

"Doesn't anything go the way it's supposed to?" he cried out to an uncaring universe, then sprawled against the wall of the nearest building in a half-reclining, half-sitting position. His head hurt and he was still feeling dizzy.

A very good-looking girl came running up the alley toward him, her skirts flapping like flags in the wind. As she got close, Billy saw that it was Frank Stone's girlfriend, Giovanna.

When she reached him, Giovanna leaned over and screamed in his ear. "What did you do to my husband?"

Billy gaped at her. "When did you guys get married?"

Giovanna screeched pure fury. She reached down with both hands and, before Billy realized what she was doing, had yanked his sword out of the scabbard. Then, held it over his head.

"If you killed my husband, I will kill you!"

He stared up at her for a moment. "Guess not," he murmured. Then, burst into laughter that was just barely this side of sheer hysteria.

"You guess not what?! Answer me or I cut your head off!"

"Nothing goes the way it's supposed to. What do you think?"

Luckily for Billy, MacNish came stumbling down the alley, groping his way through the smoke. "Are you there, sair?"

Giovanna sprang toward him, hefting the sword like a baseball bat. Pretty decent grip, lousy stance, was Billy's assessment.

"What did you do to my husband?" she screamed at the Scot trooper.

MacNish stared down at her. "Nothin,' ma'am. Don't even know who yer husband is."

"Liar!" She took a magnificent swing. Home-run quality, Billy thought; ground rule double for sure. If it had hit MacNish, his head would have sailed over the next building.

As it happened, the blade didn't come within two feet of the Marine. But MacNish was a Scotsman and knew a bad bargain when he saw one. He didn't draw his own sword. Just turned on his heels and ran back down the alley.

Giovanna ran after him, swinging the sword every other step.

Billy lurched to his feet and followed. Laughing softly all the way down the alley.

When he got out of the alley and back into the street in front of the church, his laughter got a lot louder. Giovanna was there, still brandishing the sword, but now surrounded by perhaps a dozen Swiss guards. They were—in a very gingerly manner—trying to keep her at bay.

"Looks like pretty fair fight to me," he choked.

Then Frank Stone came out of the side door of the church. Giovanna dropped the sword and raced toward him. Wisely, the Swiss guards got out of her way.

* * *

"He told me you were killed! He told me you were killed!"

She flung herself into Frank's arms, sobbing. Frank held her tight. "He lied," he whispered. "That's what Michel Ducos does. He lies."

Giovanna pulled her head back, her eyes still wet but slitted. "He made his escape, then. He took the coaches and told me you were dead. Everyone was dead except him, he said. I will get him for this."

"Not on your own, you won't. Join the club."

* * *

Inside the church, Urban VIII was now surrounded by a phalanx of cardinals.

"We shall investigate this affair!" hissed one of them. "The truth will be revealed. The Holy Office—"

"Basta!" The pope raised his hand firmly. "I think I have had enough of the Holy Office, for a bit. Yes, yes, we must investigate, but . . ."

Urban's eyes moved across the crowd gathered just beyond the inner ring of cardinals, looking for a certain face. A young face in which he had come to have great deal of confidence lately.

He spotted the man and crooked a finger. When he came up—managing to do so, somehow, without quite elbowing any cardinal aside—the pope issued his instructions.

"Monsignor Mazarini. I wish you to undertake an investigation of this entire bizarre affair. Find out the truth, and then report to me. Alone."

"Yes, Your Holiness."

* * *

The pope spoke loudly enough for Mazzare and Jones to hear him, where they knelt beside Lennox. The Scot cavalryman was doing much better, now that Heinzerling had removed the cuirass. The Jesuit, who was something of jack-of-all-trades, included a certain degree of medical knowledge in his repertoire. He told Lennox he was pretty sure he'd suffered nothing worse than a couple of broken ribs.

"In short, less in the way of damage than I inflicted upon you myself, that time of our theological dispute."

"Ha!" snorted Lennox. "And I won that fight, too."

Heinzerling was on the verge of issuing a retort, when he heard the pope's informal proclamation. He twisted his head around.

"Ah. What is that handy American expression of yours?"

Mazzare and Jones considered. " 'The fix is in,' " suggested Jones.

"Yes. That one."

Chapter 51

In his private apartments, Urban VIII wore clothing that was far more comfortable than his formal robes. Considerably lighter, too, in the summertime. That was fortunate, he reflected—or he might well have broken his shoulders heaving them up under that weight of office.

"Youthful high spirits?" He managed to choke that much out before bursting into another round of laughter. The pope wondered if he might die from the strain of trying to remain reasonably pontifical when his boyish instincts were straining to slap a knee.

Possible, possible, indeed possible—seeing as God was clearly in a whimsical mood these past few years. First, the miracle of the Ring of Fire. Then, the miracle of a pope saved by a Calvinist. Third . . .

Why not? In private, Urban had studied a copy of one of the astronomy texts purloined from the Congden Library. Popes had died of apoplexy in the past. To have one die of sheer amusement in this day and age would be a fitting reminder by the God who created the improbable moons of Jupiter that men risked His irony when they mimicked His grandeur with mortal . . .

Call it pomposity, he decided. He even considered for a moment whether he should rescind his decree that cardinals be titled "Your Eminence" and be given diplomatic precedence over all but crowned monarchs.

It was not a long moment. Was there anything in the world as pompous as a secular prince? Do them good to be humbled a bit.

Urban VIII wiped the tears from his eyes. When he could look through them again, he saw that Monsignor Mazarini seemed to be enjoying this as well.

"So. 'Youthful high spirits.' Out of idle curiosity, Monsignor, I wonder what label you would apply to Alaric's sack of Rome? 'Gothic exuberance'?"

Mazarini smiled, but shook his head. "Oh, no. A most barbarous deed, that. Surely not equivalent to this." For a moment, the legate was unwontedly serious. "In truth, Your Holiness, the boys may not be precisely innocent. But I have interviewed them all at great length, these past few days, and I can assure you they are quite the innocents."

Urban did not doubt it himself, actually. With his own eyes, he had seen the youngest of them burst into tears after killing—with no intent to do so, Urban was quite certain—the simpleton who had made the first attempt on his life. And seen his older brother's attempt to comfort him. Neither, the impulse of an assassin. The pope did not think that even his dullest inquisitor would think so.

Hard to be sure, of course. There were some very dull men employed by the Holy Office.

Be that as it may, Urban had chosen another sort of man to investigate this matter. And was pleased enough at the result. "Basta," he said softly. "There is sufficient wickedness in the world that we do not have to invent it."

Mazarini's nod was more in the way of a bow. "My thoughts exactly, Your Holiness."

"Ha!" This time, the pope did slap his knee, since he felt himself under sufficient control to make it simply the gesture of a decisive man. "Monsignor, I don't doubt that was one of your thoughts. Among perhaps . . . a hundred?"

He moved on, not really sure he wanted to hear the answer. Mazarini was a bit frightening, in some respects. "Obviously you do not propose that explanation for the public. Please explain, then, how you do propose to handle the matter."

Mazarini explained. At length. To his surety, the pope counted at least thirty-eight distinct thoughts. And was just as sure he'd missed as many more.

A bit frightening, yes. On the other hand, so was the father-general of the Jesuits. Loyalty was the key. Vitelleschi's loyalties were simple, fixed by an oath; Mazarini's, more complex, and not yet fixed at all. But what mattered, in the end, was that both were men capable of great loyalties. For the moment, with Mazarini, the depth was what counted. The direction of the current could be ascertained—perhaps channeled; perhaps not—at a later time.

"Very well. We will do it as you propose. Is everyone assembled?"

"Yes, Your Holiness."

"A moment then—well, a bit more than that, I'm afraid—while I assume my robes and regalia. Await me with the others, Monsignor."

Mazarini bowed and left.

Urban spent more time than usual having himself pontificated, as he always privately thought of the lengthy process his servants went through to prepare him properly for public occasions. He needed that time, to be sure he had his amusement under control.

* * *

Heinzerling was having a very hard time himself, some time later, keeping that control. Mostly, because he was so vastly entertained by Mazarini's uncanny ability to utter the most preposterous statements with a perfectly straight face. Mazarini was the best card player Heinzerling had ever met.

"—clearly did not intend any misprision, whatever delusions they might have been under." Mazarini clasped his hands behind his back and rocked up on his toes. "They had no fixed plan of rescue, their preparations for flight were evidently hopeless even to the meanest wit—their means of escape left in the hands of a young girl, the betrothed of one of them and sister to two others, hardly a worthy hand in any desperate business—and they had taken almost no account of the fact that the Swiss guard was out in force and that Your Holiness disposes of sufficient cavalry to run them to ground within a day, if not mere hours."

"And the fact that I was shot at?"

"Entirely the work of a French agent, Your Holiness. A man named Michel Ducos, known to me as an agent of the comte d'Avaux. Although I hasten to add that the man was not operating within his orders. First, because I know Seigneur le Comte to be a pious man most unlikely to order Your Holiness harmed. Second, because the one confederate of his we captured—primarily due to the quick actions of Ron Stone, I might point out—has confessed that both he and Ducos were members of a secret organization of Protestant assassins. Ducos' plans were not known to any of the persons now present."

The last was said very firmly. So firmly, indeed, that not a one of the sceptical faces observing the proceedings was moved to speak. Perhaps, Heinzerling admitted, because they thought the sceptical expressions spoke well enough for themselves.

But Mazarini was unfazed, as throughout. "The proof of it was evident to any who witnessed the events." The monsignor waved in the direction of the Stone and Marcoli youngsters, standing to one side under the close watch of the Swiss guards. "I commend to Your Holiness the quick action of young Frank Stone, which undoubtedly prevented any real harm. Indeed, even before then, Signor Stone expressly drew the priming from the first weapon to fire at Your Holiness, little suspecting that he was thereby disarming an assassin. He simply wished to avoid any possible accident."

That drew a little round of choking noises—one of them coming from Heinzerling himself. Mazarini had neatly glided over the issue of why anyone had brought a pistol to the church which needed to be disarmed in the first place. But, again, no voice was raised in open opposition. None of the clerics in that room except Mazarini, Mazarre, and Heinzerling had ever seen an actual steamroller, but they understood the basic principle. They certainly understood the likely fate of anyone who thought to oppose it directly.

The pope nodded. "So it was this Ducos who was plotting against me?"

"Indeed, Your Holiness. He was last seen escaping by boat down the Tiber. I understand that fast horses have been dispatched to carry warning of him to any ship that might take him from Ostia, but I have no great hope of his capture. He is a cunning and resourceful devil, Your Holiness."

"Then there is no case to answer in their complicity in attempting to murder me?"

"None whatsoever."

"And the charge of attempting misprision of an Inquisition prisoner?" The pope had an eyebrow raised, and almost, to Heinzerling, seemed to be stifling a grin.

"I am ahead of Your Holiness," Mazarini said, with a most respectful nod. "I am given to understand that Dottor Galileo was never actually a prisoner, and furthermore today's proceedings were not, lawfully, those of the Holy Office?"

"Indeed, both matters are the case, yes." The pope's face was that of a superb card player himself.

Mazarini spread his hands wide. "Then there is no need for diplomatic upset, Your Holiness. No need at all! What we have here is a case of disrespectful behavior in church. Scandalous, it is true, but not calling for the condign punishments of a misprision or of an assassination. After all, these poor duped boys could hardly have known of the plottings of a skilled secret agent and assassin. And at considerable personal risk they aided in foiling him."

His Holiness frowned. "Doubtless there will be fines to pay?"

"Most condign fines, Your Holiness," Mazarini confirmed.

"And damages?"

"Damages. Some statuary was destroyed, and there are bullet holes, Your Holiness." Mazarini's moustaches twitched.

"Aye, an' near wan in ma ain hide," Lennox muttered from the seat he had been permitted to take on account of his injuries. He had his chest strapped up under his uniform tunic and was wearing a sling, and a bandage around his head. Rather more than his injuries merited, in Heinzerling's opinion, but it wasn't for him to speak out about how the miserable old Protestant cavalryman was hamming it up.

Heinzerling looked across at the audience for this particular play. A perfect picture: Hope of Survival, Fear of Ruin.

"Hmm. I think," said the pope, "in the interests of diplomatic peace and quiet we should simply leave it at that. However, the subject of damages remains open."

"If Your Holiness will indulge me," said Mazzare, speaking for the first time at this meeting, "a consular loan from the USE embassy will be available to the boys to pay the fines."

"Ah, most generous, Monsignor," said the pope. "I might have thought you would be more inclined to allow them to reap the fruits of their foolish behavior? Not, I might add, that the full story will go beyond these four walls."

There was a euphemism, thought Heinzerling. Whatever official story went out, the real version was probably already spreading as rumor, although the fanciful embroiderings would cloud the issue somewhat. Indeed, Cardinal Borja, the most ardent member of the Spanish party at Rome present at this meeting, looked like the story he was having to listen to tasted so bad that he wanted to leave and spit it out.

Mazzare heaved a sigh. "Your Holiness, I would be entirely inclined to leave them to just and deserved punishment"—here, to Heinzerling's glee, a little shudder ran through the little group of would-be commandos—"but there is the small matter that two of them are about to begin married life together. I should not like to see them begin it in debtors' jail while they await funds."

"A marriage? Splendid. Nothing better to bridle too-high spirits." The pope fairly beamed. "And that is of course a matter we can readily attend to. Cardinal Barberini?"

Three men said, "Yes, Your Holiness?"

"Ah. Young Antonio, I meant. See that the young lovers are married. We cannot have them tempted to fornication on top of all their other follies, can we?"

Cardinal Antonio Barberini the Younger frowned. "But, Your Holiness? The banns? And one of them is not Catholic."

The pope waved his hand. "We dispense with the banns. And, young lady?"

Giovanna Marcoli nodded. "Yes, Your Holiness?" Her voice was small and frightened-sounding, and Heinzerling could see a flutter in her skirts where her knees were trembling.

"Do you promise to raise any children of your union as Catholics? And never to stint in your efforts to convert this young man?"

Her eyes went big and round. She simply nodded.

"Well, then!" The pope turned to his nephew. "See to it by no later than tomorrow, Antonio."

The youngest of the cardinals Barberini nodded. "Yes, Your Holiness." And then a slight grin. "May we use the Sistine Chapel?"

"In the circumstances, I can hardly refuse." His uncle's grin was starting to creep through the card player's face.

"Can he do that?" Jones asked, clearly less sotto voce than he'd intended. A slight titter went around the room.

"He's the pope, Simon," Mazzare said gently. "Yes. He can do that."

"Ah."

"Your Holiness, both for myself and for the United States of Europe, I should like to thank you—oh." Mazzare had been brought to a halt by Frank crumpling to the floor in what looked like a dead faint.

Disdaining the halberds and sabers around her, Giovanna leapt to Frank's side, with a wordless cry of alarm.

"Felt the same way the night before my own nuptials, as it happens," Jones drawled. "And I wasn't facing the Sistine Chapel."

The fuss and confusion ended with Frank revived amid protestations that he was okay, really, I'm fine, and his being promptly shut up with a kiss from Giovanna that provoked a round of ironic cheers from the soldiers present and not a few of the priests. The Stones and Marcolis were ushered out of the room.

"Now," the pope said. "Monsignor Mazzare, I think you were about to offer protestations of a most commendable gratitude. I suggest, however, you await Our next command to you, for We have decided you are fit for a particular task We have in mind."

Heinzerling caught his breath. This would surely be it! A bishopric, at last—and rightly so. Had not the good Father Mazzare been doing the work of a bishop these three years' past? Far better—Heinzerling had good cause to know—than most of the—

The pope snapped his fingers and someone stepped forward with . . .

It was Heinzerling's turn to feel faint. For what was being brought forward, with all due ceremony, was a broad-brimmed red hat, adorned with long tassels to either side. Only one rank of churchman wore that kind of hat.

Somehow, he was aware that the pope was speaking to the man who had been his master these past two, nearly three years. A man who was to be his master in yet another sense from now on. He caught a few phrases. "Common father of all Catholics," was one of them. "Entirely separate from all secular jurisdictions," was another. "Recognition of the new shape of the politics of Christendom," was still a third.

The one that truly beggared belief, however, was the one that clearly left Mazzare staggering as well as it did Heinzerling and Jones. As well it should. A theological and political earthquake had just shaken Europe.

"Lawrence Mazzare, Cardinal-Protector of the United States of Europe."

Dead silence.

"Gus, can he do that?" Jones again. A beat. "No, don't tell me. He's the pope."

* * *

Urban enjoyed his little games. But, ever mindful of the need for mercy, he waved Mazzare forward, that he might lean over and speak to him privately.

"There was a trial, you see. A very real one, whose result—unlike Galileo's—was not predetermined."

Mazzare's face was very pale, but the pope was pleased to see that the man was still able to think clearly when under great stress. He was not surprised, of course. That had been part of the trial also.

"Mine."

Urban nodded. "Trial is perhaps not the right term. 'Test,' perhaps. Or . . . no, a trial, yes. May we think of it as an intellectual trial by combat?"

He spoke very softly now. "I needed to know something, Lawrence Mazzare. One thing, before all else. Had that Church of yours, in that other universe, become transformed into something I could no longer recognize at all? But, when the time came, you argued like a priest. Not a natural philosopher wearing a mask. In the end, that is all that matters. The rest is disputation. I will say I found your theological argument itself quite compelling. But—"

Here he smiled a bit slyly. "I have no doubt my horde of theologians will soon be at their disputation again."

Mazzare even managed a little chuckle. Indeed, from the hooded look in his eyes, Urban could see that he was already considering the future.

Splendid. The pope had enough cardinals who spent their time considering only the past.

"One thing, Your Holiness."

"Yes?"

"Might I request the services of Father Christopher Scheiner? The truth is, Your Holiness, we have books on astronomy in Grantville, and are creating a great university nearby at Jena—but we have no astronomers. And he is a superb one. In that other universe, quite unfairly, he would only be remembered as Galileo's accuser. I think it would be well to rectify that small injustice as well as the larger one."

Urban considered the idea, for a moment, liking it the more he thought about it. Another subtle but excellent gesture, in a world too dangerous for him to consider anything else. The pope, raising up Galileo's defender; the defender, then doing the same for his opponent.

Let the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs choke on it; Richelieu, perhaps, learn from it. Perhaps—who can tell?—even that half-barbarous heretic Swede.

Yes, splendid.

"Scheiner is a Jesuit, Father Mazzare, so I will need to speak to the father-general. But I foresee no difficulty."

He managed to say it without so much as cracking a smile.

Chapter 52

Tom and Madga Stone arrived in Rome that evening. When they were ushered into the room in the Vatican where their sons were being held in what amounted to house arrest, Stoner gazed upon them like an pigeon might gaze upon his ostrich offspring.

"Boys," he began. Closed his mouth. Opened it. Closed it again.

"Really weird, man. First time in my life, I'm at a complete loss for words."

Magda, of course, wasn't.

* * *

But even Magda was mollified, the next day, as she observed the wedding. True, she was Lutheran and disapproved in principle of Romish idolatry and pageantry. On the other hand, like most people in Thuringia, she'd seen enough of the endless changing of official faiths as a result of the principle of cuius regio, eius religio to have become more than a little cynical on the subject.

Most of all, she was fiercely ambitious for her husband and her family. So she thought it eminently suitable and proper that the oldest of her three stepsons should be married under the most famous ceiling in the world. Besides, who was to say? Perhaps that divine spark of life transmitted from the Creator to Adam might be reflected downward—just a bit of it, but enough—to impart a modicum of common sense into her boys.

If God could create a Ring of Fire, surely He could create a sensible son. Perhaps even—Madga had her doubts, though she'd readily admit the girl was gorgeous—a sensible daughter-in-law.

It was an age of miracles, after all.

* * *

Two days later, Antonio Marcoli hobbled his way into Rome, assisted by his cousin Massimo.

By then, the Stone family—along with the four Marcoli boys who were now their in-laws—had moved into a luxurious palazzo not far from the Pantheon. Reluctantly, Tom Stone had yielded to Magda's insistence that he stop playing the pauper and spend some of those vast sums that were beginning to pour into his coffers.

Being rich was still something Stoner was coming to terms with. A settlement made all the more difficult by the fact that he was the attorney arguing the case for the other side.

He'd hoped to assuage Magda by his immediate offer to pay all the fines levied on the boys himself, thereby removing the burden from the somewhat-strained purse of the USE embassy.

"That's pocket change!" Madga snapped. "We will not spend our visit to Rome living in a—what did you call it?"

"Youth hostel. Hey, look, it's the way I bummed across Europe back—"

"Just what we need!" She glared at her stepsons and new daughter-in-law. It was still an impressive glare, if not the solar incandescence of the day of her arrival. "I do not need to be reminded that youth is hostile."

"Hos-tel, dear. And the youth in them are really nice kids. Well, there's the occasional jock, but you don't run across too many of them on account of they usually can't find their way anywhere except to the mall, forget foreign travel. But—"

He shook his shaggy mane. " 'Pocket change'? Is that really true? I mean, I know you keep the books, but—"

Magda sniffed. Madga had a world-class sniff. She marched over to her purse and pulled out her wallet. "Books. Who needs books for this? Will they take scudi?"

Stoner sighed. "Innocence lost. I can remember those glorious days when I'd drive for months on a suspended license 'cause I couldn't afford to pay a traffic ticket."

The three Stone boys looked at each other. "Uh, Dad," said Ron. "Is that the same traffic ticket that got you tossed in jail when you got stopped for speeding again? 'Cause, if so, I can remember those glorious days when me and Frank—even Gerry, and he was only ten—had to bust our ass in order—"

"Details, son, details. It was the freedom that mattered."

"Jail is freedom?"

"Freedom of the soul. Who cares about the prison of the body? Besides—"

* * *

He got no further. Antonio Marcoli burst through the door. Somehow he managed it while hobbling on a crutch. Massimo came right behind him.

"Tell me it is not true, faithless daughter!"

Giovanna stared at him, mouth agape. "What's not true, Papa?"

Marcoli marched over to the table where she was sitting next to Frank. Somehow he managed to march while hobbling on a crutch.

"You got married! In the church! The Sistine Chapel, I am told! It is all over the city!"

He flung himself into an empty chair. Yes, somehow managing it while hobbling on a crutch.

Then, placed his head in a despairing hand. With his other hand, he pounded the crutch on the floor. "We are ruined, ruined!"

Giovanna closed her mouth. "You told me to get properly married. Made us promise! And we—ah—kept the promise."

"Well, yes. But that was before. Now we are ruined. Our political principles hopelessly compromised!"

All the Stones and Marcolis were now gaping at him.

"Uh. Before what, Messer Marcoli?" asked Frank.

Marcoli pointed the crutch at Massimo. "Before he explained to me that our political principles do not allow us to recognize the Church's authority in such matters. How can Church and State be separated if the Church—just another set of plunderers of the poor, that's all—is allowed the right to determine such matters?"

Giovanna was almost cross-eyed. "But . . . where else could I get married?"

She drew away from her father, sliding a firm arm around Frank's shoulder. "And he is my husband. So don't think you can tell me not to get married to him. I already did!"

From the look on Frank's face, Tom Stone understood that his son was about to blow up. Would have blown up already, in fact, had he not been basking in the sudden knowledge that Giovanna's ultimate loyalties had just undergone a sea-change.

On one level, of course, Stoner approved of his son's anger. If he didn't stand up to Marcoli he'd be hopeless. He approved even more of that instinctive motion of his new daughter-in-law. Still, he was a man of peace.

"Hey, folks, ease up. Let's all ease up here. Mister Marcoli—"

He rose from the table and leaned over, extending his hand. "We've never met. I'm Tom Stone, Frank's father. We're in-laws. Please to meetcha."

Out of reflex, Marcoli shook his hand. That done, Stoner pressed on with his mission of peace.

"Look, Mr. Marcoli, this is an old problem and one I had to solve, oh, years ago now."

Both Marcoli and Massimo perked up. "There is an American solution?" demanded Massimo.

How to answer that?

"Uh, yeah. Well. One of many. You understand—ah—freedom and liberty also means what you might call variety. So to speak."

"Please. Go on!"

"Right. Well, in our old commune we, ah, had a similar sort of problem. Our own principles clashing, you know, with the uptight notions—well, never mind. The point is, we founded our own church. Except it wasn't really a church. Certainly had no connection to the state. Heh. And whenever one of our couples wanted to get away from the usual—"

Best to skip over that. Communal sex would probably not play well with a man who could burst through a door on a crutch.

"Anyway, wanted to get married, let's say, we'd have our own ceremony."

Massimo pounded his fist softly on the table. "Yes," he said, almost hissing the word. "Of course! Hurl our defiance in the face of the oppressor."

"Uh, yeah. Sorta like that. In our case, it was more like smoke our defiance—"

"Dad!"

"Hey, Frank, take it easy, I'm just—never mind. Anyway, Mister Marcoli, with your approval, we could just do it again right now. Give Frank and your daughter a real wedding." He waved his hand. "They just did that other, in that Sistine Chapel place, to slide one over on the enemy."

He hoped they could also just slide over the issue of consummating the wedding. Seeing as how that had already happened. Many, many, many, many times, judging from the fact that no one had seen Frank and Giovanna outside of their bedroom for more than an hour at a stretch these past couple of days.

Marcoli eyed him. "Si? You can do this?"

"Oh, sure. I was the ordained minister. Still got my card." He began reaching for his wallet. "Universal Church of Life in . . . can't remember the rest of it, that's odd."

"Dad!"

"Ease up, willya? You get my age, your memory starts to go a little. Oh, well. Never mind the card. Just take my word for it, Mister Marcoli. I can marry the kids right here and now and we thumb our nose at the establishment. To do it full bore, of course, we'd need a hookah and some—"

"Dad!"

"Jeez, are you anal today, or what? Okay, forget the hookah. We're not people to get fixated on the trappings, are we?"

"Certainly not," said Massimo firmly. "Superb! The contradiction resolved."

"Yes!" agreed Marcoli, lunging to his feet. Somehow he managed it even without the crutch. A one-legged lunge. "Where do we stand?"

"Uh, well. You don't. Everybody sits in a circle. Cross-legged."

That got two very cross-eyed looks.

"Hey, relax. It won't take long. Since we're passing on the hookah. Most of it is just taken up by saying om."

Really cross-eyed looks.

"It's an acronym." Now he was getting cross-eyed looks from his kids. "I swear, it is. Stands for Omnipersonal Munificence."

"A superb slogan," proclaimed Massimo.

* * *

As everyone moved around to take their places, Frank took the occasion to murmur into his father's ear. "Smooth move, Dad. Thanks."

Tom Stone basked in filial approval. "Your old man's no dummy. Besides, this is a piece of cake. I made LSD in the sixties, remember?"

Epilogue:
July, 1634

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.

The mountain's rim

"There might be a scar, Michel, it's impossible to tell yet." Antoine Delerue finished cleaning off his hands. "Won't be a bad one, though, just a short hairline. Not enough to make your description obvious. It's the mark on your hand that'll be problem there."

Ducos scowled down at his right hand. The Buckley creature had ripped and torn it badly, leaving a large and distinctive scar. But, there was nothing to be done about that now. He rose and went to the port rail, Delerue following. The coast of Italy was now barely visible behind them.

Another of Ducos' Huguenot confederates came to join them. Guillaume Locquifier, that was. "They'll never catch us now."

Ducos nodded.

"Too bad about the pope. Most of the project succeeded quite well."

Ducos nodded.

"He's the Antichrist, so I suppose we should not be surprised to have failed the first time." Locquifier scowled. "Curse those American bastards. Do you want—"

Ducos waved his hand impatiently. "Don't be stupid, Guillaume. Do you propose to curse every soldier who stands against us? Divert ourselves at each instant in order to punish lackeys?"

Locquifier subsided. Seeing the sour look still on his face, Delerue shook his head. "Just forget it. If we should happen to encounter them again—not likely, where we're going—we might arrange something. Even then, only if it could be done easily and without distracting us from our great purpose."

Learning that a decision had been made, Locquifier's sullen thoughts of revenge were replaced by interest. Ducos and Delerue were the two recognized leaders of their group, although their roles were quite different. Ducos the man of action, the leader at the fore; Delerue, more in the way of the organizer and the strategist.

"You have decided. May I—?"

"No reason to keep it a secret now," said Ducos. "England."

Locquifier's eyes widened. He'd been expecting Holland. With the Spanish Catholic boot now so heavy on that land, recruitment would be easy. Leaving aside the Huguenots, of whom many had taken refuge in the United Provinces in happier days, the Dutch Counter-Remonstrants should be receptive also.

"You're not thinking clearly, Guillaume," said Delerue, reading his thoughts well enough. "In Holland, we'd spend most of our time in hiding, running from one shelter to the next. In England—" He chuckled, waving a hand toward the cabin at the stern of the little ship. "With the small fortune Michel took from d'Avaux—we only spent a modicum of it on this project—we will be well set up in that land of wretched money-counters. Almost as bad as Venetians, they are."

"True." Guillaume thought about it. "Still . . . although I suppose the Puritans will be receptive."

Ducos grunted. Delerue smiled. "Not the Puritans. English to the core, they are. This is a task of the nation, not simply the faith. Scotland, Guillaume, think in terms of the Scots. France's traditional allies in the islands. We will begin in England, set up with the merchants. But our eyes will remain on the north."

Locquifier made a face. "That will mean Edinburgh and the lowlands. The highlander savages are all papists. They say Edinburgh stinks."

Ducos' face seemed more hatchetlike than ever. "So? The world stinks. Our task, to cleanse it."

A path of gold

After Servien finished his report, Richelieu was silent for a very long time. Hands clasped behind his back, standing in his rich red robes of offices, staring out over the city of Paris through a window in his palace.

That was the cardinal's way of controlling his rage, Servien knew. Simply . . . wait, until he was sure the first surge of murderous fury had passed. Richelieu was the most self-disciplined man Servien had ever encountered. That was not the least of the reasons that the cardinal could gain and hold the loyalty of men such as Servien himself. The work they did for the cardinal was often dangerous, but at least they did not have to worry—as did other men, serving other princes—that they would be punished out of sheer anger. Anger which often—as in this case—resulted from the errors and failures of others.

Eventually the moment passed. Servien could tell from subtleties in the set of the cardinal's shoulders.

Richelieu swiveled his head and gave Servien a dark-eyed stare. Seeing the waiting expression on the face of his intendant, the cardinal snorted.

"Oh, tell me. Where is the fool now? Hiding on his estate?"

Servien nodded. "So my spies place him. In the wine cellar, at last report, working his way through its contents."

Richelieu snorted again. "As if I would not find him there." He took a deep breath. Then, gave his shoulders a little shake, as if to rid himself of the last residues of fury.

"Send d'Avaux a letter. I will sign it after it is drafted. First, tell him—use plain language here, Etienne, I see no reason to pamper the comte's tender sensibilities—that imbecile!—that he has done more damage to France than our worst enemies could have managed. You may be precise. Blackened our name with the Venetians. Even worse—much worse—given that wretched Barberini the diplomatic shelter he needed to carry through this . . . this abomination. 'Cardinal-Protector of the United States of Europe,' no less. A nation with no religion at all. To think that the pope himself would collapse on the matter of an established church!"

Servien nodded. He would enjoy writing that part of the letter. Seigneur le Comte d'Avaux had irritated Servien often enough in the past with his haughty ways.

"Second." The cardinal paused, breathing deeply, and again giving his shoulders that little shake. "Tell him—grudgingly, Servien, make sure the tone is proper; I want that miserable toad frightened out of his wits; if he dies of the terror, he would do me the favor—that we accept his explanation that the deeds were all committed by the rogue actions of his man Ducos. His man, Servien—he chose him and selected him. Rub his snout in it."

"Yes, Your Eminence. That should not be difficult."

"No, I imagine not. And finally, tell him that I do not accept his offer of resignation. He may do amends for his error by serving France in other ways. Ways which are more suitable for his talents."

The cardinal eyed Servien again. "Do you perhaps have a recommendation? Don't feign the innocent, Etienne. You have that little smirk on your face."

The intendant cleared his throat. "Well, Your Eminence, as it happens, just two weeks ago we received another letter from Brest. The fishermen have fallen to quarreling again."

Richelieu nodded. "Adjudicator between quarreling Breton fishermen. Delightful. And the weather in Bretagne is miserable in the winter. Delightful."

"Don't much care for the wine of the region, either, Your Eminence. Matter of my personal taste, of course."

"Everyone's taste, I think. Certainly that of a puffed-up comte who fancies himself a connoisseur. Delightful. See that it is done."

"Yes, Your Eminence." Servien hesitated. Unusually, he was quite at a loss to anticipate how Richelieu would handle the next matter. It could be . . . anything.

"And Mazarini, Your Eminence?"

"Ah, yes. Mazarini." Richelieu shook his head. To Servien's surprise, the gesture seemed an admiring one.

"What a brilliant coup. I do not believe any man in Europe could have done better."

"Your Eminence?"

Richelieu issued a little laugh. "What, Etienne? Were you expecting me to send out assassins?"

As a matter of fact, that had been Servien's guess as to the cardinal's most likely reaction.

"He—ah—would seem to have betrayed us, Your Eminence. There is no doubt at all that he was instrumental in concealing the complicity of the Americans in the affair." Servien felt himself growing a bit angry, now. "I do not believe for a moment that ridiculous 'finding' of his, that the sons of the USE's ambassador were simply attempting to foil a plot of which they had only learned at the last minute."

Richelieu's next laugh was more cheerful. "It is threadbare, is it not? Still, Servien, the same report also stipulated—quite firmly—that the actions of Ducos were those of a rogue, not an agent of France. A religious fanatic—and a Protestant, at that. Which, I will remind you, is all that kept the damage to France from being far worse than it was. If young Mazarini protected the Americans, he extended as much protection to us as he could, under the circumstances."

The cardinal was intent, now, very intent. Servien understood that this was a matter to which Richelieu had spent some time applying his formidable intellect. "What else could he have done, Etienne? Think. He had to single out Ducos as the only villain in the piece, to cauterize the damage. You think he should have tried to place the blame on those American youngsters? The oldest of them is but nineteen, and when the actual attempt was made—all the witnesses agreed to this—he and his brothers took great personal risks to protect the pope. To be sure, Mazarini could have exposed their earlier folly and recklessness. But folly and recklessness are not malevolence—and trust Italians before all other people to understand the difference." He barked a sarcastic little laugh. "Since they have practiced both reckless folly and malevolence for centuries. It is no accident, you know, that Italian is the language that produced the term commedia dell'arte as well as vendetta."

Servien's face was set stubbornly. "Still—"

"And the suggestion of treason is simply absurd. How can a man betray something to which he has never given his allegiance in the first place?"

That startled Servien. "I thought—"

Richelieu shook his head. "No, Servien. There was not and never will be a straightforward arrangement between me and Mazarini. I thought so myself, I admit, when I spoke to him in the spring of last year. But I see now that I grossly underestimated the man. He was playing for much higher stakes than I realized." The last sentence was spoken in a tone of pure and undiluted admiration. That respect which a master gives another, when he discovers himself outplayed.

Servien was now completely out of his depth, and knew it. "Ah . . ." He cleared his throat. "I do not see . . ."

"You do not see how there could be any greater stakes in the world than becoming the leader of France? In effect, if not in name." The cardinal shook his head. "Don't be silly, Etienne. That is simply a means to an end. I have never sought power for its own sake."

That was true enough. Richelieu was almost—Servien, with silent apologies, allowed himself the thought: satanically ambitious—but the ambition was not personal. To be sure, the cardinal enjoyed the privileges and comforts of his station, but those were never paramount.

"The purpose, Etienne, is France itself. And beyond that, what kind of France? Or, it would be better to say, what kind of hegemony over the world."

For a moment, the cardinal seemed to be suffused with an odd melancholy. "I imagine my memory in this universe, even more than in that other one, will be dark. They will remember Richelieu's France as the France of the sword and the torch. So be it. Let another one use the power I created for him to forge a lasting hegemony. Rome was perhaps created by its armies, but it did not rule half the world for so long simply because of them. Do not ever think so, Etienne. That is the way of the Hun, or the Mongol, who terrify the world for a few decades and then vanish. Rule—rule which lasts—is a thing of peace and prosperity; a court which draws because of its splendor and glory. A court which attracts. I will, in the fullness of time, yield my place to another if he can create a monarchy of the sun, where I could only create one of the wind."

His face closed down. Servien, from long experience, knew that the cardinal had opened himself—a rare occasion, that—perhaps further than he'd intended. There would certainly be no more words on the subject.

Simply orders, now. "Send a letter to Mazarini—I will sign it as soon as it is drafted—giving him my warm regards. Invite him back to Paris at his earliest convenience." Seeing the little trace of doubt on Servien's face, Richelieu smiled thinly. "Oh, Etienne—of course not! He will come, be sure of it. Mazarini is far too smart to detect a trap where none exists. Not a trap lined with blades, at any rate."

For some reason, the cardinal's smile widened. "Oh, yes. And be sure to mention, at the end of the letter, that the queen has been asking about him. She much enjoyed his company, it seems, during his last visit."

Servien began to leave. As he reached the door, however, Richelieu called him back.

"One other thing, Etienne."

"Yes, Your Eminence?"

"The assassins that we dispatched to the Germanies. Have them recalled."

"Certainly, Your Eminence."

Something in Servien's face must have indicated his puzzlement.

"I make errors, Etienne. I rarely make them twice. After these three years, I believe I have finally come to take the measure of my great opponent. Who is not, you understand, the Swede."

Servien nodded. None of those assassins had been sent to kill Gustavus Adolphus.

"He is much like Mazarini, I have now come to understand. Much like me, as well. A man who seeks hegemony on his own terms, to be sure. But understands what the word truly means."

"Yes, Your Eminence."

"Ha! That faintest tremor of doubt! You are such a subtle man, Etienne. I could not ask for a better." The cardinal shook his head. "Always remember, Etienne, the possibility that you might lose. And then, cap in hand, have to ask for terms. That being so, make sure you did not create a Hun where none existed before."

Servien found that thought . . . too distasteful to consider.

"Easy for you," Richelieu said harshly. "Not for me. Were I not prepared to swallow that bile, did the time come—and taste it beforehand—I should be unfit in the eyes of God for the position He has chosen to give me."

The cardinal turned back to the window. "The man is not a Hun, whatever else. Of that much, I am now certain. He does not seek to destroy France, simply to bend us to his will. There are rules, Etienne. Decreed not by men but by the cold logic of the contest. Decreed by God, if you will, since He chose to allow us this freedom. One rule, in a Hun war of the knife. Another, in the far greater contest of civilized hegemony. So call off the assassins. And make clear to them—let us not have another Ducos—that I am no petulant English king. If they disobey or think to play the helpful knights, the penalties will be severe."

Severe, when the cardinal gave the term that tone of voice, did not mean execution. It meant something that ended in the execution of whatever was left.

"Yes, Your Eminence."

A world of men

"Bottom line, Francisco. Down and dirty. I've got plenty of time to chew on the fine points later. Right now I've got some quick decisions to make."

Nasi hesitated, then nodded. He preferred himself to deliberate, when faced with profound issues. But Mike Stearns was a pugilist, not an adviser. A man whose deepest instincts emphasized speed above all else.

"The French have suffered a serious blow in Venice, of course."

"Yeah, sure—but who really cares? If the wind turns, the Venetians will blow back the other way."

"Not before we can consolidate our commercial—it looks, even now, possibly industrial—ties with the city. The best of all possible holds, since Madga and Sharon had the good sense or instincts to draw in as many Venetian partners as they could. La Serenissima is a city of merchants before all else, Michael. They will blow in the political wind, to be sure, but the only winds they worship are the trade winds."

"Point. I stand corrected. The matter with the pope is still far more important."

"Yes, I agree. In essence, Urban's decision to make Mazzare the cardinal-protector of the United States of Europe is two things. First, a subtle declaration that the Roman Catholic Church is henceforth neutral in what has been so far—as fraudulent as the claim may be—usually justified as a war of faith. No longer can Ferdinand and Maximilian—or Richelieu—claim that they are pursuing any other purpose but their own political aggrandizement."

Mike nodded. "The second?"

Nasi hesitated. "I am not, you understand—"

"Yes, yes, I know. You're a Jew, not a Christian. Not an expert on the bizarre intricacies of the Christian faith. Give me your best estimate."

"The pope is launching—very subtly, you understand; he's a Barberini, after all—what amounts to . . . Well. Not the Second Vatican Council. That's too extreme. But—"

Mike nodded. "He's begun to chart the course toward it. He's decided that Larry Mazzare is right, at least in broad outlines."

"Don't expect anything quickly, Michael," Nasi cautioned.

Mike grinned. "With the Jesuits backing him up? Of course not. It won't be quick. But it will be sure."

Mike rose from his desk and went to his favorite window. Where another man might clasp hands behind his back, Stearns chose to lean his hands on the windowsill. It was the mannerism of a man who liked to have his hands free. A pugilist's mannerism.

"Okay. We can chew on all the details later. The only thing we have to decide immediately is whether to accept Larry's resignation as ambassador. And who to appoint in his place."

"How could we—"

Mike waved a hand. "Fine, fine. Obviously, we'd have to accept it, no matter what. Larry's a priest, in the end, and it's a fact that the Catholic Church is in a shambles up here. There's no way I could prevail upon him not to come back and take up his new position. But there's still a difference between that and accepting his resignation gracefully. So make sure the message we send him oozes congratulations and goodwill, okay?"

"Yes. Certainly. And the matter of his successor?"

Mike stared out the window. Something in the set of his shoulders told Francisco that he'd decided to take the gamble.

Nasi was unsure himself, but would trust Mike's instincts on the matter. It was not so much a gamble, Francisco knew, as the reflexes of an experienced fighter seeing a little opening.

"I agree," he said firmly. "We should do it."

Mike turned his head. "I didn't propose anything."

"I know you too well. You want to appoint Sharon Nichols as the new ambassador."

This time, it was Mike who played devil's advocate. "She's young—not yet twenty-five—female, and black. I'm not sure how that last part will play out in Venice in this day and age, but I know the first two are strikes against her."

Nasi shrugged. "Young, yes—but I think that issue was settled well enough on the operating table. The same for her sex."

"Medicine is not politics."

Francisco laughed. "That—coming from you! Aren't you the one who once told me that political success is ninety percent a matter of confidence?"

Mike smiled. "Ninety-five percent, if I remember that conversation correctly. Of course, I've been known to exaggerate a lot for the sake of making an argument. Truth is . . . Probably not more than seventy percent. You do need to be right, in the end, not just think you are. But you'll never get there if you don't have the wind in your sails. And the only wind that ever really matters is your own."

He rapped the windowsill with his fingers. "Let's do it. Nothing else, the black part, matters. Yeah, sure, it's a small and symbolic thing, but symbols are also messages. And right now, I'm trying—so is John Chandler Simpson, bless him; there are times I really like that man—to do my level best to give those greedy Dutchmen as clear a signal as I can."

Nasi understood the point. In this day and age, the still-nascent Atlantic slave trade was largely dominated by the Dutch. Not entirely, by any means. The English presence was growing and the Catholic nations of Iberia had been active in it for some decades. But Francisco knew that it was the Dutch who concerned Mike immediately. The English were an open enemy and the situation with the Catholic nations was hopefully susceptible to other measures. The Catholic Church had always been far more ambivalent about slavery and the slave trade than the Protestants. In this, as in many things, "justification by faith alone" could serve as a convenient excuse for any barbarity.

The Dutch, on the other hand, were allies at the moment. Neither Francisco nor Mike expected that to last—indeed, it was for that very reason they had urged Bedmar to return to the Netherlands and smoothed his way. But whatever eventually transpired in the Low Countries would likely leave the issue a thorny one.

Mike Stearns had an abrupt way of handling thorny problems, when he saw no other option. He expressed it again, in his next words.

"Yeah, stubborn Dutchmen. Well, the greedy pigs better start getting unstubborn. Right quick." He turned away from the window, his face set in harsh planes. "In the universe I came from, something like six hundred thousand Americans killed each other to end slavery. Some lessons do not need to be repeated. Do those sorry Dutch merchants think we won't kill them, in this one?"

Francisco smiled. "Perhaps they are expecting gentler treatment at the hands of the admiral?"

That was good for half a minute or so of laughter. When it was over, Mike turned to the next point.

"On the Stone boys." He picked up one of the files and scanned it quickly. "Out of idle curiosity, which pencil-pusher in the State Department—God, I miss Ed Piazza—came up with the idea of recalling them from Venice? And ask him what miracle he wants from me next? Order back the tides? We couldn't keep those kids under control in Venice—and he wants me to haul them back across the Alps when they aren't willing? Ha! How far do you think they'd get before they disappeared out of the fingers of anybody I sent down there to put them under custody?"

"Basel?"

"If that far." Snorting, Mike tossed the file back on the desk. "I leave aside the fact that Frank Stone is legally an adult—so's Ron—and now has an Italian wife. And Gerry is a minor, which means he's a ward of his father. Exactly what law I've never heard of does Mr. Pencil-Pusher think I could invoke to take a kid away from his family? Just because we've nationalized some vital industries—and damn few, at that—does he think we've got the right to nationalize children? Or does Mr. Pencil-Pusher—Gawd, what a genyush statesman he is—think that we ought to recall Tom Stone? Right at the point where Stoner's finally making inroads into changing sanitary and medical practices on a major scale somewhere outside our own borders. Not to mention creating the beginnings of a serious medical supplies and pharmaceutical industry in Venice and Padua. Fricking idiot."

The State Department was not Francisco's domain, but he felt a mild urge to play devil's advocate himself. "I think he's concerned that the boys might continue their involvement with those Italian revolutionaries."

Mike scowled. "They had damn well better, or I'll strip their hides off myself." He took a deep breath. "Pencil-pushers. Give them a suit and a title and they immediately start thinking they're respectable. Leave it to a suit to think rambunctious kids who might embarrass you are worse than an epidemic of bubonic plague. Francisco, I am doing my level best to lead a revolution—all across Europe, too, not just here. What the hell does the puffed-up clown think this is all about, anyway? Before I'm done—assuming I survive—I intend to see this whole stinking world of kings and nobles lying in a pile of rubble."

He took another deep breath. "Yeah, sure, I'm not stupid about it. And I don't confuse ends with means. And I don't lump everybody under one simplistic label. Gustavus Adolphus is not the same as Ferdinand II. The pope is not the same as the Inquisition. So what? That's just tactics. Whether you use sugar or vinegar—or a sledgehammer, when you need to—the goal remains the same. It's called 'democracy,' and the last time I looked—"

He paused for a moment, to pick up the file and look at the name. "Christ, Mr. Pencil-Pusher is an up-timer, so he doesn't even have that excuse." He dropped the file back on the desk, wiping off his fingers. "The last time I looked, we don't have democracy anywhere in the world. Not even here in the USE, not really; just a good start at it."

It was at times like these that Don Francisco Nasi found his sense of irony stretched to the utmost. For, at bottom, he was not at all sure himself that he had much confidence in Mike Stearns' treasured democracy. Still, he followed the man. Did more than that, really—for Nasi was one of Stearns' closest associates.

Mike turned back to the window, once again placing his hands on the windowsill. Nasi took the opportunity to swivel his head and examine the huge painting at the rear of the large office.

It was truly laughable. Not for the first time, Nasi silently tipped his hat to the genius of the artist. He had to be genius. Only such a one could have possibly disguised a human hurricane under Roman armor and such a dimwitted little smile.

"Send a quiet message to Spartacus," Mike growled. "Tell him I want another private meeting. You understand."

Nasi nodded. Stearns was always careful to keep a certain public distance from the Committees of Correspondence. Which, in truth, was not simply a pretense. There were in fact differences—of emphasis; certainly of tactics—between him and the Committees. Still, below it all, the relationship was very close. And ultimately more trusting—on both sides—than almost any other of Mike's political alliances.

"You will send people down to Italy, then?"

"I won't," Mike grunted. "But they will. I'll let Spartacus pick 'em, of course. He knows his people, I don't—and the truth of it is that he's a better tactician than Gretchen, anyway."

"Ah. You want . . . ah, what you would call 'savvy types.' "

"Yeah. My first choice would be Red Sybolt, but he's tied up in Bohemia. Hasn't lost any of that fire in the belly, but he knows which end is up. That sort. I'm sure Spartacus knows someone similar."

When Mike swiveled his head this time, it looked purely like the movement of a predator. "Francisco, I will now tell you the ultimate rule of politics. You can teach tactics to people with heart. You cannot do the reverse. The Stone boys are okay in my book. So are those Marcolis, impractical as they might be. Just gotta be educated some, that's all."

The predator glare fell on the file. "Wouldn't trade a one of them for all the damn suits in the world."

Then, came a sly smile. "Actually . . . Yeah. Draft up a personal letter from me, will you? Address it to Frank Stone and his father-in-law and—what's the other guy's name?"

"Massimo. Massimo Marcoli."

"Yeah, him. A real friendly letter. Nothing specific. Just something to make clear Frank has my confidence and . . ."

"Something to boost their own confidence. Ah, Michael . . ."

Stearns waved his hand. "Oh, stop worrying. After the Galileo affair, even Marcoli will be thinking for a change. And now that Frank's his son-in-law, he'll have real status. Frank's a level-headed kid, all things said and done. They'll handle it well enough. With some help. But most of all—this above all—with confidence." He chuckled. "A Frenchman said it best, you know."

Nasi knew the quote himself, from the French revolutionary Danton. Mike Stearns had more or less adopted the slogan for his own. De l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace. The words could be translated various ways into English. "Audacity, more audacity, always audacity" was perhaps the most common.

Francisco tried to imagine the best way to translate it, with the Marcolis and the Stone boys in mind.

"Eek," was all he could think of.

"Don't chicken out on me now, Francisco," Mike said sternly.

"Eek."

Of a sudden came the sea

Unlike Sharon, Ruy Sanchez was an early riser. So, when she came into his room—or her room, depending on which way you looked at it—she wasn't surprised to see that he was nowhere in sight. She glanced at the door that led into what passed for a bathroom in even the fanciest palaces in Italy. Ruy might be in there. He was able to move around now, if not very far, and the very first thing he'd insisted upon as soon as he could do so was taking care of his own toilet necessities.

Sharon hadn't objected, needless to say. Any experienced nurse could handle such things with aplomb, but it was hardly something they looked forward to.

The thought made her smile. The irony involved, not the subject matter itself. Except for sex, Sharon and Ruy had experienced a level of physical intimacy over these past weeks that very few couples ever did, even those married for half a century. Ruy made jokes about it.

Of course, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz made jokes about everything. On his last visit before he'd left for the Netherlands, Cardinal Bedmar had warned Sharon that he would. If Sanchez found himself replacing Brutus in the maw of Satan on Alighieri's ninth level of hell, he would claim it was because even the stupid Devil had finally realized Catalan food tastes better than Italian.

The warning had been pointless. Sharon had figured that much out for herself some time before. It was one of the things about Sanchez she cherished.

She decided he wasn't in the toilet. She couldn't hear anything, and Ruy had a habit of singing in there. That was one of the things about the man she didn't cherish at all. Partly because he was a lousy singer; mostly, because of his selection of tunes. One of the few good things Sharon had gotten out of her relationship with that bum Leroy Hancock was an exposure to flamenco music. The real stuff, not the touristy junk. Only good blues in the world 'cept our own, he'd insisted, an opinion Sharon had come to share. If anything, she preferred it to American-style blues.

Alas. Flamenco as such hadn't really evolved yet, in this universe. But the Gypsy groundroots that would produce it were well in place, and well known to Ruy Sanchez. He claimed to be part Gypsy himself—a claim Sharon found a lot more plausible than the business about Casador and Ortiz—and thought he grasped the soul of the music.

Alas. The blues and Ruy Sanchez were terms that went together about as well as the Calvinists and His Holiness, the Pope. Ruy was the only man Sharon had ever known who could somehow manage to sing a song of lament as if it had been composed by John Philip Sousa.

Since Sanchez wasn't in the toilet, that left only one other possibility. Not even the Catalan would risk Sharon's displeasure to the extent of wandering away from his living quarters entirely. Yes, he was healing better than almost any other man of his age could have been expected to do from that type of injury; on the other hand—whether he liked to admit it or not, and he didn't—Ruy Sanchez was: a) human; b) no longer young; c) in fact—you always had to add this, dealing with Ruy—very far from young.

The balcony, then. Which was what she'd expected, anyway. Sharon headed for the door which led out onto it.

* * *

She paused for a moment, as she came out on the balcony, catching sight of the sea. Probing, as she did every morning when she first saw that once-hated body of water.

Hated, not because of anything about the Venetian lagoon's portion of the Adriatic Sea in particular, but simply because—names were human inventions; the sea itself was indifferent—it was the same body of water that, more than nine months before and half a thousand miles away, had swallowed Hans Richter. His body had never been found, devoured by the leviathan. Sharon had been denied even that comfort.

It . . . ached, still. A bit less than yesterday, perhaps. It was hard to tell, one day to the next day.

Not hard, though, half a year to the next. When they'd passed by Lake Constance on their winter's journey to Venice, Sharon had had to avert her eyes. Fresh water or not; frozen over or not—technically guiltless—the lake had earned her damnation. In those days, she'd barely been able to forgive creeks and streams.

She'd never used the balcony herself, after they'd arrived in Venice. Had barred the door leading to it; insisted that the drapes on the windows facing it never be opened. The servants had thought that odd, since the reason the room was considered one of the best in the palazzo was its magnificent view of the waters.

But, they'd obeyed. People usually did, when Sharon Nichols chose to be nurse firm about something.

Ruy Sanchez had been the one to break the command. The first day he'd been able to walk, he'd immediately gone to the door, unbarred and opened it. Sharon had begun to protest, half-angrily, but the Catalan had simply continued his work.

"I will respect your grief, woman," he'd said. That had cut Sharon's protest off in mid-sentence. How had he known? She'd never told anyone how she felt about the sea.

When he'd turned to look at her over his shoulder, she'd seen the understanding in his eyes. And remembered something her father had once told her: A witty man may not be a wise one, but he'll sure as shooting be a smart one.

"I will respect your grief," Sanchez repeated. "Even be glad for it, in the end. For you, because you need it; for me, because it tells me something I need to know as well. But I will not feed the monster."

That said, he'd finished his work, slipped through the door and vanished for an hour.

Sharon had not joined him that day. Not for a week, had she ventured onto the balcony herself. By then, she discovered, Sanchez had set himself up a table to hold his precious morning coffee—Turkish-style, of course; Ruy disdained anything weak—as well as a stool on which to prop his feet.

He'd also set two chairs. She was quite sure he'd had that done on the second day. Strange, how a man as impulsive as Sanchez could also at times be so patient. His was not a broad vein of patience, to be sure; but it ran very deep.

Perhaps that was the Andalusian side of his heritage. Sanchez was only part-Catalan, he'd finally admitted to her, although he considered himself such. But then, he'd immediately insisted, all true Catalans were only part-Catalan. How could it be otherwise, with such a mongrel nation? Any man tells you he's a pureblood Catalan, he's a Castilian trying to give himself airs.

His mother had come from Andalusia. That region of Spain which, if it had none of Catalonia's cosmopolitan flair and panache, had virtues of its own. Tenacity, above all. Over the centuries, the peasants of that harsh land had seen conquerors come and go—Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Moors, Berbers—the Castilians being only the latest. Andalusia endured and outlasted them all; wailing sorrow, only in its music.

It had taken her another week before she could bring herself to use that second chair; another week, to sit it in for longer than a few minutes; yet another, to remain for the entire hour that Ruy did, enjoying her own style of coffee; and still another, before she could finally gaze upon the sea.

Gaze upon it, now, like a human being. Not stare at it, dully hating and dumbfounded and despairing, like a mouse before a snake.

* * *

She did not know, and never would, the day when she finally forgave the sea. It simply happened, as of its own volition. She did not even realize it, until one morning she understood that she had.

She did not know, and never would, the day when her grief for Hans finally closed over. Became a healing scar, not a bleeding wound. It simply happened, as of its own volition. One morning, gazing from the balcony upon the sea, she realized that Hans had become a memory instead of a haunting ghost.

Treasured memory, to be sure; and still one that often brought a pang of sorrow. But that would never change, she knew, for the rest of her life. Ruy had told her that there were still times when he would stop in his tracks, remembering that first young wife who had died so many decades ago, paralyzed for just that moment. The same, for his second and third.

He found that a comfort, he'd told her. Proof, in the end, that there was such a thing as a soul.

Sharon thought he was right, even if she didn't share Ruy's eccentric theology. Her own religious beliefs, insofar as she retained them from her mother's adherence to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, tended to run along conventional lines. Ruy, on the other hand, was the closest thing Sharon could imagine to a Sufi mystic's version of Catholicism.

She knew a fair amount about Sufism, as it happened. Leroy Hancock had claimed to adhere to that variant of Islamic faith. But if the man had had much of Ruy's wit and bravura, he'd possessed not an ounce of the Catalan's integrity. Living proof that a smart man need not be wise. Mysticism, to such as Leroy Hancock, was a way to evade all responsibility. To such as Ruy Sanchez, a guide to it.

* * *

"Sit," he said to her, smiling. "Your coffee—if I may so misuse the word—will be suitably tepid for you by now."

As she sat, Sharon smiled back. It had become a running joke between them. The fiery Catalan; the cool American. Ruy claimed to like everything hot: his climate, his food, his coffee—above all, his women. A claim which was immediately followed by sour grumbling that in his old age he'd clearly gotten senile. Abandoning a lifelong devotion to passion because he'd become besotted by an American! He was a disgrace to Catalonia.

But even Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz had a hard time maintaining the grumble. When the time came, he'd have no complaint when it came to Sharon Nichols' passion. None at all. He knew it, and . . .

So did she.

* * *

Sharon did not know, and never would, the day when she found her answer to Ruy's question. She would not speak the answer until October 8, still some months away, for she had come to believe in the power of ritual. But the decision had already been made.

Had made itself, somehow. One morning, not long before, she'd gazed from the balcony onto the sea and realized that it had become settled in her mind. In that mysterious back of the mind, which was so much more reliable in such matters than the treacherous frontal lobes.

Set and firm. As firmly set as her loving memories of Hans, which could now become a support for her life instead of a barrier to it.

"It will be a good day," Ruy predicted.

"Yes," Sharon replied.

Afterword

1634: The Galileo Affair is the fourth volume to appear in the 1632 series, following 1632 and 1633 and the anthology of stories entitled Ring of Fire. There are a lot more books coming down the road. David Weber and I will be writing four more novels, the next of which—1634: The Baltic War—will conclude many of the story elements which were left unsettled at the end of 1633. Not all of them, though: the adventures of the diplomatic mission trapped in the Tower of London will be continued in a novel I will write called 1634: Escape from the Tower. And some of the political issues which emerge in The Baltic War won't be fully resolved until a novel I'm now working on with Virginia DeMarce comes out soon thereafter. That novel will most likely be titled 1634: The Austrian Princess, and it develops some lines of the overall story which Virginia began in her novelette "Biting Time," contained in Ring of Fire.

Nor will that be all the novels set in the year 1634. I'm also working on a novel which follows up the storyline I began in my short novel The Wallenstein Gambit, which is also contained in the Ring of Fire anthology. Mike Spehar, who wrote most of the flying sequences in 1633, is my co-author on that novel. (We don't have a title for it yet. Right now, Mike and I are just calling it "1634: Bohemia.")

All that, in one year?

Well . . . Yes. In terms of its narrative structure—as well as the way it's written—the 1632 series could just as easily be considered a shared universe as a series in the traditional sense of that term. A shared multi-verse, in fact, as I'll explain in a moment.

The basic premises of the setting and the story as a whole are established in 1632 and then expanded and elaborated in 1633. From there, the story branches in many directions. Branches—and constantly reconnects. Characters who play a major role in one novel will not necessarily appear onstage in another, although their actions will often have an indirect effect. Minor or secondary characters in one story will become major characters in their own right in another. Throughout, as the series continues, some characters will tend to remain constantly at the center of things, in one way or another—as Mike Stearns does in this book. And most of the characters, whether major or minor in any given novel or story, will tend to keep appearing and reappearing.

That initial "story explosion" will all happen more-or-less in the year 1634, which is the reason so many of the novels in the series have that date as part of the title. (Okay, one of the reasons. The other one is that it's a nifty marketing device.) Thereafter, the complexities will continue.

People have asked me many times now if I have any final end goal in mind with this series, and the answer is no. I try to let this story tell itself in the sense that I more-or-less approach each book as it comes up. I say "more-or-less" because, for obvious narrative reasons, any author has to give some thought to what's going to happen down the road. So, for instance, what'll happen in the book Virginia and I are working on is connected to what will happen in the books I'll be doing with Mike Spehar and Dave Weber.

But I try to keep that sort of predestination to a minimum, and I make no attempt to develop some overarching general plot outline for the series as a whole. As much as possible, I want to try to capture the often purely contingent aspect of real history—not to mention that this method (I think, anyway) tends to produce better stories because in the final analysis the key ingredient in making a decision is usually purely dramatic. I'd far rather adjust later developments to incorporate a really nice dramatic development in a novel I'm working on, than to truncate the drama for the sake of making the novel fit into a preconceived schema.

That's also the reason I like to work with so many co-authors in the series, either in the form of collaborative novels or by surrounding the novels with shorter stories in anthologies or the new online 1632 magazine I've created called the Grantville Gazette. (See below.) I find that keeps the series loosened up, because different writers will constantly bring in different ideas and angles than I would have thought up on my own. To give an example, except for Sharon Nichols and Lennox, none of the major characters in 1634: The Galileo Affair are ones who played any real role in 1632, except, to a very limited degree, Father Mazzare and Rev. Jones. Most of them, in fact, don't appear at all in that book—and few of them in 1633, and then in cameo roles.

The characters of Stoner and his sons and Stoner's wife, Madga, were first introduced into the series by Mercedes Lackey, in her story "To Dye For" in Ring of Fire. True, they first appeared in print in the novel 1633, simply because of the publication order of the books. But Dave Weber and I based the characters on Misty's portrait in her short story, which had already been written. Likewise, Billy Trumble and Conrad Ursinus were introduced into the series by Deann Allen and Mike Turner in "American Past Time," one of the many other stories in Ring of Fire. Mazarini and Heinzerling, by Andrew Dennis—and it was really Andrew's story "Between the Armies" which lays the basis for the important roles played by Father Mazzare and Monsignor Mazarini in this story.

Sharon Nichols is mine, so to speak. From the moment I decided to turn 1632 into a series, I planned on developing her into one of the central and major characters of the series, on a par with characters like Jeff Higgins and Gretchen Richter. But all the specific ways in which that eventually happened in this novel were shaped by the input of many other writers.

I like it that way. Partly, because I enjoy collaborative writing. But, mostly, because I think it helps keep the story lively and helps prevent the (always ever-present) danger of the series sliding into a formulaic rut. When I wrote 1632, over four years ago now, I did not intend for it to be the first book in a series. I planned and wrote it as a purely stand-alone novel. I hesitated for some time before changing my mind, after many people urged me to turn it into a series. The main reason I hesitated was because I've seen far too many good single novels turned into tedious series which simply recycle endlessly and pointlessly the ingredients of the founding novel. Eventually, I decided I could avoid that—and a large part of the reason was because of the narrative structure I decided to adopt. The great advantage to a shared universe, as is true with human interaction in general, is that it's very different from having a conversation with a mirror.

Earlier in this afterword, I mentioned the multi-verse aspect of the 1632 series, and I should take a little time to explain what I meant. My publisher, Jim Baen, pointed out to me some time ago that there was no inherent reason that only one Assiti Shard might have struck the Earth. From that initial observation, he and I began thinking through some other ways to expand the setting—both to the side and outward, so to speak. What has come out of that concretely, so far, are two other books which I will be writing:

One of them will be 1781, which posits the effect of a far larger and more complex Assiti Shard transposing both George Washington and Frederick the Great (along with their armies) into the chaotic and turbulent period of the Roman Empire usually known as the "third-century crisis."

You might think of that as the sideways expansion. The "outward" expansion is a novel which I am beginning with a new co-author, Sarah Hoyt. This novel, By Any Other Name, will take up the Assiti themselves and the initial clash which the human race has with them. Part of the novel is set in Elizabethan England, but most of it takes place on a strange setting which is no part of human history—indeed, exists in another universe altogether. By Any Other Name will at least begin to provide the overall framework and logic for the Assiti Shard multi-verse, of which the 1632 series is a subset, as well as—always the most important thing—being an enjoyable story in its own right.

A few words on the Grantville Gazette. As I mentioned in my afterword to 1633, the 1632 setting has spawned a very large and lively discussion group in Baen's Bar, the discussion area which is part of Baen Books' website. (www.baen.com, then go to "Baen's Bar" and the "1632 Tech Manual" conference.) Over time, a lot of fanfic started being written in the setting. Some of it is . . . awfully good. So, after discussing it with Jim Baen and getting his go-ahead, I tried the experiment of producing an online magazine which would incorporate the best of the fan fiction, with me serving as editor, as well as a number of factual articles which bear on the series. The first issue came out in October of 2003, and sold enough copies to make the magazine financially self-sustaining. Once that became clear, we decided to turn the initial experiment into an ongoing publication. The Grantville Gazette will have no regular schedule, but I expect to be able to produce at least two issues a year. The second issue is already out.

"Fan fiction" usually has a negative connotation to science fiction readers—"derivative, unimaginative, poorly-written dreck" being the gist of most complaints—but there is no intrinsic reason that needs to be true. Many established science fiction authors began their career writing fanfic, after all. The main problem with fanfic is usually that the author who originated the setting either doesn't have the time or the inclination to play the needed role in overseeing the process. I have the inclination, and I can find the time. The end result is a magazine with a lot of good stories, and one which I hope will serve a lot of new writers as a place they can develop their skills. Most important of all, to me, the Gazette is already proving to be yet another source of stimulation for the series.

If you're wondering where the Cavriani family who figure in this novel came from, you can find out by reading Virginia DeMarce's "The Rudolstadt Colloquy" in the first issue of the Gazette. The adventures of the various Cavrianis will appear in later stories in the series, be sure of it. Anyone interested in looking at the Gazette will find a brazen advertisement for it right after the afterword.

I should also mention that a role-playing game set in the 1632 universe is coming out in July 2004, published by Battlefield Press, Inc. Those interested should look for information on BP's web site: www.battlefieldpress.com.

Finally, as always, I need to thank a lot of people for their input into this novel. First—an overdue acknowledgment, because they were also a great help to me in writing The Wallenstein Gambit—my thanks to Suzann Denton-Pratt and Mitch Miller for guiding me through the manifold complexities of Judaism and Jewish history and culture. I'd also like to thank Marla Ainspan, Janice Gelb and Stan Brin for their assistance as well.

My long-standing "chem group" helped a lot, as always. I'm tempted not to name names, because I like to think of them as my equivalent of the mysterious Council of Ten which the Venetian Senate used to conduct so many delicate affairs. But . . . since they don't actually break any bones—just half-baked notions, usually mine—that would probably be churlish. So, another tip of my hat to Drew Clark, Rick Boatright, Bob Gottlieb, Laura Runkle and John Leggett.

My general thanks as well, in no particular order, to Judith Lasker, Cheryl and Rog Daetwyler, Virginia DeMarce, Mike Spehar, and Pete and Elizabeth Wilcox for reading the manuscript as Andrew and I wrote it and giving us their reactions and criticisms. Special thanks to Danita Ewing and Butch Clor for their advice on medical matters, and to Enrico Toro for his advice on swordplay.

Last but not least, I need to thank my friend and longtime co-author David Drake for looking at the manuscript and advising me on some of the key details concerning guns.

—Eric Flint
December, 2003