1635: The Eastern Front (14 page)

Which, he had no intention of doing. It would be better to say, didn't even consider.

And that, of course, was Mike's fourth relevant trait. His wife Becky had once said—not entirely admiringly—"Michael, you have the self-confidence of a bull."

Well . . . Yes. He did.

"And yourself, Christopher? I wouldn't have imagined an Englishman would ride all that well, either. Your island being so small and all."

Long chuckled. "We're lazy. Why walk when you can make a dumb beast do most of the work? And then, of course, I was in Spanish service for a time. Your proper hidalgo considers it a point of honor to spend most of his life in a saddle. It's an infectious attitude, I found."

About fifty yards to the rear, and as many to the south—they were following parallel roads—Captain Jeff Higgins and his own staff were observing their commanding general.

Jeff's staff was much smaller, of course. It consisted of his adjutant, Lieutenant Eric Krenz, who like Jeff himself was too young and inexperienced for the job. General Schuster had promised Jeff that he'd have experienced and capable company commanders—and so he did. Every one of the battalion's captains was up-to-snuff. So, naturally, following the surrealistic logic that Jeff had decided was inherent to the military mind, they'd put two neophytes in charge.

At least Krenz had been in a battle before. A real one, too, not the sort of firefights and commando raids that constituted the entirely of Jeff's experience. Eric had been part of the flying artillery unit that broke the French cavalry charge at the great battle of Ahrensbök.

"Why don't you ride a horse as well as Stearns does?" Krenz asked him, a sly smile on his face.

Jeff grunted. "Mike's a fricking athlete. Used to—voluntarily, mind you—slug it out with professional prizefighters. Won every fight, even. Me? I'm a fricking geek. Until the Ring of Fire planted me in this madhouse, my idea of physical exercise was rolling the dice in a Dungeons and Dragons game."

He didn't have to explain the reference. Eric Krenz was a natural-born geek himself, and had quickly acclimatized himself to the quirks of American custom. He and two other officers in the regiment, in fact, were planning to launch their own gaming company as soon as their terms of service expired. They intended to plunder Dungeons and Dragons lock, stock, and barrel. Why not? One of the legal principles that had been established by the parliament of the USE was that no copyrights, patents or trademarks for anything brought through the Ring of Fire were still valid except for ones held at the time by residents of Grantville who'd made the passage.

There were a few of those. Seven people were published authors; nothing fancy, just various articles in magazines or journals. Two people held patents for small inventions, Jere Haygood and Diana O'Connor. None of those did them any good, though. O'Connor's patent was for an esoteric aspect of business software which was irrelevant to anything in the here and now. Haygood's two patents were for minor gadgets that no one would probably have any use for until long after the patents expired. On the other hand, Haygood held several patents for devices he'd invented
since
the Ring of Fire—and the same law had established copyrights and patents for the here and now.

Those might be challenged. Haygood's new patents fell into the legal gray area that would afflict any up-time inventor. On the one hand, he had created the devices himself since the Ring of Fire. Nobody questioned that. On the other hand, since there had been nothing close to a complete record in Grantville of all patents, trademarks and copyrights granted by the United States of America, who could say? Maybe Haygood had just copied something that he remembered.

Jeff was pretty sure that the courts would rule in Jere's favor, though, if anyone did challenge him. German jurisprudence was every bit as inclined as the American to see possession as nine-tenths of the law. Unless someone could prove that Haygood had swiped his inventions from something already in existence up-time, his patents would stand.

Jeff was sure enough of that to have been severely tempted when Eric Krenz and his partners had offered to bring him into the business. But, after thinking it over, he'd declined.

The problem was twofold. The first, and lesser, problem was that there might be a conflict of interest involved if the commanding officer of a battalion went into business with some of his subordinates, even if the business wasn't launched until they'd all left the army.

Jeff wasn't sure of that. What he was sure of, however, was how Gretchen would react. His wife wasn't normally given to stuffiness. But he was pretty sure that the recognized central leader of the Committees of Correspondence would cast a cold eye on her husband hustling fantasy games.

Besides, they didn't need the money any longer.

Speaking of cold eyes being cast . . .

Jeff scrutinized Krenz's none-too-relaxed posture. "And you got a lot of nerve making fun of your battalion's commander's horsemanship, Lieutenant. Your own equestrian skills would fit right into a Three Stooges movie."

"What are the three stooges?"

"Ah! An aspect of American high culture you've missed, I see. Well, let me be the first to enlighten you. The Three Stooges were a legend, up-time. Three renowned sages, philosophers one and all, whose wisdom—"

"You're lying to me again, Captain Higgins, aren't you?"

* * *

More than a mile farther back in the march, and on yet a different road, Thorsten Engler turned to the man riding next to him and said: "How do you think Eric is getting along in his new post?"

Jason Linn grinned. He was the mechanical repairman who'd replaced Krenz in the flying artillery unit. "He'd have been all right if he'd stayed a grunt. But he went ahead and accepted the commission they offered him. He's an officer now. Officers ride horses. It's a given."

Linn wasn't all that much of a horseman himself, but the redheaded young Scotsman didn't have Krenz's fear of the beasts. And he didn't need any horsemanship beyond the basic skills. He'd be riding the lead near horse of a battery wagon, just as he was doing at the moment.

Thorsten, on the other hand, was riding a cavalry horse. That was expected of the commander of a volley gun company. Fortunately, he was quite a good horseman.

He'd damn well have to be, riding
this
horse. He'd been given the stallion as a gift just three days before the march began, by Princess Kristina. He didn't want to think how much the animal had cost. He was still getting used to the creature. This steed was about as far removed from the plow horses he'd grown up with as a Spanish fighting bull was from a placid steer.

Jason was a good repairman. He was a blacksmith's son and had gotten some further training in one of Grantville's machine shops after he arrived in the up-time town. He'd been all of twenty years old at the time and eager for adventure.

"Scotland's the most boring country on Earth," he insisted. As vigorously as you could ask for, despite having experienced exactly one and a half countries—Scotland and parts of the Germanies—not counting three days each spent in London and Hamburg.

Still, Thorsten missed Eric Krenz. And he certainly envied his friend's position in the march, way up in front with one of the leading infantry units. Where Engler's flying artillery company was positioned, they were almost choking. An army of twenty-some thousand men, many of them mounted, throws up a lot of dust. As it was, they were lucky they were ahead of the supply train.

"Think it'll rain?" asked Jason, his tone half-hoping and half-dreading.

Thorsten felt pretty much the same way about the prospect. On the one hand, rain would eliminate the dust. On the other hand, everything would become a soggy mess and if the rain went on long enough they'd be marching through mud.

"War sucks," he pronounced, using one of the American expressions beloved by every soldier in the army.

It wasn't until an hour later that it occurred to him that he was denouncing war because of the prospect of moderate discomfort. Not death; not mutilation; not madness brought on by horror. Just the possibility of being wet and muddy. As a farm boy, he'd taken getting wet and muddy as a matter of course—but would have been aghast at the carnage of a battlefield.

Thorsten wondered what had happened to that farm boy. Was he still there, beneath the Count of Narnia riding a warhorse given to him by a future empress and betrothed to a woman from a land of fable?

He hoped so.

Chapter 11

Magdeburg

After he entered the mansion, Ed Piazza took a moment to examine the huge vestibule. Then, he whistled softly.

"Wow. You guys have sure come up in the world."

Rebecca got a long-suffering look on her face. "Just once, I would enjoy hearing someone come up with a different remark, the first time they come here."

Piazza grinned. "You've got to admit, it's impressive. Especially for a simple country boy like me."

Rebecca's look got more long-suffering. " ‘Simple country boy,' " she mimicked. "I doubt you were ever that, Mr. Piazza, even as a toddler. I am firmly convinced you had mastered Machiavelli's
The Prince
by the age of nine. Judging from the evidence."

"Fourteen, actually—and I wouldn't say I ‘mastered' it. The truth is, I found it pretty boring."

"Why did you read it, then?"

"I was on my Italian ethnic identity phase at the time. I worked my way through a bunch of stuff. I started with Dante. I read the whole trilogy, too, not just the
Inferno.
Damn near turned me into a lapsed Catholic. Heaven seemed deadly dull. Then I read Boccaccio's
Decameron,
which I enjoyed a lot. Then I read Petrarch, which killed my interest in poetry for almost a decade. Then I plowed into Machiavelli. By then, though, I was pretty much going on stubborn determination and
The Prince
did me in. After that, I pursued the search for my cultural roots through the movies.
El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Marriage Italian Style, Arabesque, The Countess From Hong Kong,
stuff like that."

Rebecca frowned. "Except for the marriage film—and I suppose the one about the Roman Empire—what is their relevance to Italian heritage?"

Piazza grinned. "Sophia Loren. She's in all of them. I delved into quite a few Gina Lollobrigida classics too, although she was a bit before my time. Then I discovered Claudia Cardinale and Monica Vitti and my devotion to Italian culture became boundless. I even watched
Red Desert
three times, and that's some ethnic solidarity, let me tell you. God, that movie's dull. Except for Monica Vitti, of course."

"I think I will not pursue this matter any further. Lest my image of you as an urbane and genteel man of the world suffers terminal harm." Rebecca gestured toward a far door. "This way, please. The others are already here."

Ed could hear Constantin Ableidinger when he was still twenty feet away from the door—which was closed, and thick. The former schoolteacher who'd been the central leader of the Ram Rebellion and was now Bamberg's representative in the USE House of Commons was one of the loudest men Piazza had ever met. Ableidinger seemed to find it impossible to speak in any tone of voice softer than a fog horn.

"—he mad?" were the first two words Ed understood, followed by: "What would possess him to do such a thing?"

Melissa Mailey's much softer response was muffled until Rebecca began opening the door. Ed caught the rest of it:

"—a shame, it really is. Wilhelm always seemed much shrewder than that."

The discussion broke off as Piazza and Rebecca entered the room. The eight people already present turned to look at them. They were sitting at a meeting table made up of four separate tables arranged in a shallow "U" formation. The open end of the "U" was facing away from the door, allowing the participants to look out of a wall of windows which gave a view of Magdeburg's scenery.

Ed wondered why they'd bothered. There was a lot to be said for the capital city of the United States of Europe. It was certainly dynamic—and not just in terms of the booming industries that produced the smoke and soot that turned the sky gray except after a rainfall. Under Mary Simpson's leadership, Magdeburg was becoming the cultural center of the nation, as well. She and Otto Gericke were also pushing hard to have a major university founded in the city.

Scenic, though, Magdeburg was not. The view through the windows was mostly that of blocks of the functional but dull apartment buildings that housed most of the city's working class; with, in the distance, the ubiquitous smokestacks from Magdeburg's many factories, mills, forges and foundries. It was probably the ugliest urban landscape Piazza had ever seen, except the mills lining the Monongahela southeast of Pittsburgh when he'd been a teenager.

Then again, those same working class districts were what gave the Fourth of July Party a political hammerlock over the city and province of Magdeburg. So there was a certain logic to the seating arrangement.

"Where's Helene?" asked Charlotte Kienitz, one of the leaders of the Fourth of July Party from the province of Mecklenburg. She was referring to Helene Gundelfinger, the vice-president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia.

"She should be here by mid-afternoon. She had to sort something out with the abbess of Quedlinburg." Ed got a wry smile on his face. "Who's here visiting Mary Simpson and Veronica Richter, so Helene has to deal with them too."

Melissa, seated at the far end of the tables, barked a little laugh. "I swear, I've never seen anything that generates more wrangling over details than schools do. That's one thing the two worlds on either side of the Ring of Fire have in common."

There was an empty seat next to the mayor of Luebeck, Dieterich Matthesen. After removing a notepad and placing it on the desk, Ed set his briefcase on the floor, leaning it against one of the table legs. Then he pulled out the chair and sat down.

By the time he did so, Rebecca had resumed her own seat. "To bring Ed up to date on what everyone was discussing when he came in, we have received word from reliable sources that Wilhelm Wettin and his Crown Loyalists plan to impose the most sweeping possible variation of their citizenship program. What is sometimes colloquially referred to as Plan B."