“Tomorrow?”
she exclaimed.
Mackay shook his head. The expression combined regret, apology—and stubbornness.
“I must, Julie. I was in Jena when the king passed through Thuringia, so I was unable to report. I can delay no longer. Gustav Adolf has established a temporary headquarters in Würzburg. But I don’t know how long he’ll be there. He’s moving very fast, while the imperialists are still off balance. So I must be off—”
“Tomorrow!” she wailed.
If the horde of children who burst around the corner and swarmed past them some time later thought there was anything odd about two people embracing in public, they gave no sign of it.
Probably not. They saw a lot of that, these days.
Chapter 43
November was a whirlwind.
The first storm of winter, when it hit, seemed but a minor distraction. No one in Grantville or the surrounding area was worried about surviving the winter. Not any longer. Even with the influx of new prisoners-turned-immigrants from the battle at Jena, there was more than enough food and shelter.
“Shelter,” of course, was often crude. The area surrounding the power plant had become a small town in its own right. The power plant’s steam provided a ready source of heat, which was piped through a crazy quilt of hastily erected log cabins so closely packed together that they constituted a seventeenth-century version of a housing project. But, for all its primitive nature, the housing would keep people alive during the winter. And the crowded conditions provided another incentive—not that Germans of the time needed one—to quickly seek work which could provide the wherewithal to move into better quarters.
The problem, actually, was more a shortage of good housing than the wages to pay for it. Grantville had become a classic boom town. The coal mine was running full blast by now, using hordes of pick-and-shovel miners in place of the absent modern equipment. So were all the established industries, especially the machine shops. Even the school’s technical training center had become a production facility—and the students, most of whom were now German youngsters, learned their trades all the quicker for it.
New businesses and industries were springing up like mushrooms. Most of them were of a traditional nature. Construction, of course, occupied pride of place. But the Thuringen Gardens soon had competitors, and lots of them, even if it was still the largest tavern in town.
Food, in the end, turned out to be much less of a problem than Mike and his people had feared. In addition to the grain stocked up during the fall, two new sources of provender had turned up.
The first was trade. In the mysterious way that these things happen, coursing through the consciousness of a nation’s masses far below the notice of its political and military overlords, word had spread throughout Germany. There was a place . . .
A market for food, textiles, metal, minerals. Almost anything, it seemed. Paid for with hard currency—gold and silver—if you so desired. Or, if you were smarter, with wondrous new products. Fine metalwork; strange, silky garments; most of all, ingenious toys and dolls and devices made of some substance called “plastic.” Luxury goods! Grantville’s pharmacies and knicknack stores, oddly enough, proved to be the town’s biggest trade asset. In weeks, they unloaded half-useless toys and gadgets which had cluttered the shelves for months.
Some of the German traders—the smartest ones—moved their base of operations to Grantville. And found, soon enough, that investing in manufacture was even more profitable than trade. The way was led by Georg Kleinschmidt, the merchant who brought in the first shipment of nails and spikes. Seeing the massive amount of wood construction going up, he cheerfully abandoned trade and sank his new small fortune into building a nail factory. His partner was Keith Trumble, an American car dealer. The American, realizing that his former business was a lost cause, provided his offices and small showroom as the facilities. While his fellow car dealers moaned and groaned, and flocked—small flock—to Simpson’s campaign rallies, Trumble greeted the new reality with good cheer. Making nails was harder work, true; and dirtier. But at least he didn’t have to tell lies anymore, or dicker with his customers. There was a line at the door every morning.
The other source of food brought pure joy to West Virginians. Fall was deer hunting season. But in seventeenth-century Thuringia—
A
license?
What is that?
Limits?
None. Except, of course, that it is strictly forbidden to hunt on land owned by the aristocracy, which comprises most of the forests and all—
Fuck the aristocracy. They don’t like it, let ’em try to arrest us.
The game in the Thuringenwald was plentiful. And the deer were quite unaccustomed to rifles which could hit a target at several hundred yards.
Julie Sims alone brought in enough venison to feed hundreds. But that feat—in her eyes, at least—was eclipsed by her new boyfriend’s. The day after Alex returned from Würzburg, Julie took him hunting. She carried her beloved Remington .308, but Alex satisfied himself with a double-barreled shotgun loaded with slugs.
Julie scoffed at his choice of weapons. But Mackay was not fazed. He had no chance of equaling her marksmanship, anyway. And, truth to tell, he was not concerned with deer. Mackay, unlike Julie, was familiar with the forests of his time. He brought the shotgun along in case—
When the boar charged out of a thicket, Julie stood her ground. But she fumbled, trying to bring the long-range rifle to bear. No matter. Mackay dropped it at five yards—
bang bang—
cool as could be. Julie didn’t stop talking about it for weeks.
Her bragging precipitated the first duel in Grantville’s modern history. Her former boyfriend, Chip, still sulking and nursing his romantic wounds—well, injured pride; he had the amorous instincts of a bullfrog—took umbrage.
Fueled by too much beer on one particular evening, Chip saw fit to challenge Mackay on the floor of the Thuringen Gardens. The Scotsman, a gentleman even if he was not legitimately born, naturally accepted. He probably would have done so even if he hadn’t consumed more than his share of the Gardens’ excellent home brew.
The confusion began immediately. Chip, a football player raised on a twentieth-century American diet, was much larger than the little Scotsman. So, boldly, he advanced and felled Mackay with a fist.
Not even bothering to inquire as to the challenged party’s choice of weapons!
Mackay, outraged by the American’s uncivilized conduct, immediately made his choice of weapons. He sprang up from the floor (a punch in the face?—to a man who has faced a
dentist?
), drew his saber and began chasing Chip through the premises.
Progress was slow, both for pursuer and pursued. Chip, needless to say, scampered through the crowd as if he were scrambling for the goal line. Which took a lot of scrambling, since the crowd grew rapidly as word spread into the streets.
Fight! Fight!
Mackay, fortunately, did not use his saber to clear a path. Still polite, for all his inebriation and murderous purpose, he asked the avid onlookers to step aside. Finally—this took perhaps two minutes—he cornered Chip in the area of the Gardens given over to the pool tables.
Chip, of course, was now armed. He took a mighty swing at Mackay with a pool cue. Alas, he quickly discovered that a pool cue is a truly pitiful weapon to use against an experienced cavalryman—even on foot—armed with a saber. The pool cue was transformed into toothpicks in a matter of seconds.
The end seemed near.
Fortunately, one of Dan Frost’s deputies intervened.
Unfortunately
, the deputy was Fred Jordan who, it transpired, had imbibed perhaps too much of his Scottish friends’ attitudes (along with German beer, inasmuch as he had been off duty). So he took it upon himself to rule Mackay’s choice of weapons legal and legitimate and ordered the duel to continue—with the proviso, of course, that Chip be provided with a saber.
More confusion emerged. Chip did not possess a saber. A dozen Scots cavalrymen immediately offered the use of their own. Confusion was now rampant, propelled by Chip’s cries of outrage and indignation. The bold young man, it developed, also lacked the knowledge of a saber’s use.
Mackay—ever the gentleman—immediately switched his choice to pistols. Adding insult to injury, he offered to match his wheel lock against any modern sidearm of Chip’s selection. At any range the American chose.
By now, sobriety was beginning to arrive. By now, Alex was in a cold fury. By now, Chip was
not
. Young Chip, belatedly, was realizing that the braggadocio of a former high-school football team captain was no match for the serious intent of a professional soldier.
Wheel lock against a modern pistol? At any range? Given those two men, the outcome was a foregone conclusion.
“He’s trying to kill me!” wailed Chip.
Unkind words were muttered in response, here and there in the huge crowd which was now packing the Gardens. Many of them—again, insult piled onto injury—by the Americans in the crowd.
Good riddance
was a particular favorite. So were:
Pride goeth before a fall
and
Look before you leap.
By the time Dan Frost arrived, the betting was running in favor of the Scotsman. But Dan put a stop to the whole thing immediately. City ordinances, he explained, expressly forbade dueling.
Mackay, ever the law-abiding man, immediately proposed transferring the locale of the duel to the woods, beyond the city limits. The odds began running heavily in his favor.
But Mike arrived then, and made a general ruling. No dueling, period. Anywhere in American territory.
“As you say, my lord,” was Mackay’s response. Bowing stiffly, he stalked off, never casting a glance at his erstwhile opponent.
The opponent, for his part, spent the next several days in an attempt to extract honor (if not glory) from his own part in the affair. To no avail. Not even his closest friends on the former football team sided with him.
“Cut the bullshit,” said Kenny Washaw, the high school’s former tight end. “And grow up, while you’re at it. Or you’ll wind up flipping hamburgers the rest of your life.”
“What there is of it,” added the former left tackle. Steve Early, that was. Unkindly: “Which won’t be much, you keep picking fights with guys who carry sabers and spend hours in a dentist’s chair without anesthetic. I don’t care how little they are.”
Simpson, of course, tried to make an issue out of the “duel.”
Another example of the lawlessness brought on by the Stearns regime!
But it fell flat. No one had actually gotten hurt, after all, saving Mackay’s black eye. And, once again, Simpson misjudged his audience. Hill people have their own sense of justice—humorous, but grim for all that—which runs heavily toward bragging about the shrimp in the family tree who showed the local bully who was who and what was what.
Then, the memory of that little fracas was swept aside by the arrival of the Abrabanel representative from exotic and far-off Istanbul. Half the town turned out to greet him. Well, the American residents.
Some of them, of course, were there in an official capacity. But most of the crowd was, for the moment, utterly uninterested in general matters of high finance and foreign policy. One question—and one question only—was uppermost in their minds.
Grantville’s supermarkets had run out of coffee weeks ago. To the shock and horror of its American residents, it was discovered that in that day and age coffee was almost unknown. Could only be obtained, in fact, from one source.
Turkey
.
So, a somewhat bewildered Don Francisco Nasi found that his first item of business, upon his arrival, was negotiating the establishment of a coffee trade.
But he was not that bewildered. Francisco was younger than either of the other representatives of the Abrabanel family who had recently arrived. He had just turned twenty-six. Yet it soon became clear that he possessed in full measure the talents of his grandfather and the illustrious matriarch, Doña Gracia Mendes, who had created the fortune of their branch of the Abrabanels.
In the week following his arrival, in the course of almost nonstop negotiations with Mike and the committee, Francisco led the Abrabanel representatives with a firm hand. Perhaps because of his upbringing in Moslem Turkey, Francisco was much less taken aback than either Moses or Samuel at the undoubtedly outlandish character of the Americans and their new society.
“Who cares?” he demanded. The slim and handsome young man scanned the faces of the other Jews gathered in the Roths’ living room. The Roths themselves were absent. Politely, they had felt it best to let the Abrabanels discuss family matters in private.
Francisco gazed at Rebecca, for a moment. There was, perhaps, a faint shadow in his eyes. Even in far off Istanbul, they had heard of the beauty and intelligence of Dr. Balthazar’s daughter. Francisco had been enjoined by his family to seek a bride also, in this journey.
But, if there was a shadow, it was gone quickly enough. Francisco was a seasoned diplomat—a budding statesman, in truth, for all his tender years—not a lovesick shepherd. He had never found it difficult to look truth in the face. And the cold-blooded Machiavellian in him saw the other side of the matter. The Americans would soon be bound by ties of blood, as well as trade and statecraft. Francisco
believed
in ties of blood, as much as he believed in the sunrise. They had kept his family going for centuries.
“Face reality,” he commanded. “Where else, since the Almoravid dynasty ruled Sepharad, have we had such an offer?” He reached for his cup, and sipped the precious coffee he had brought with him.
