FREE STORIES 2012(65)

Larry looked at Thomas. “An officer from the garrison?”

North sipped, shrugged. “You know any other soldiers in town? But why wonder when we can just ask?”





***





The young officer was glad for the invitation to join them and introduced himself as Georg Prum, commander of the Protestant Garrison of Biberach.

Quinn raised an eyebrow. “Commander, you say?”

Prum smiled: he was a good-looking fellow, the kind that was always presumed to have “aristocratic blood” even if he was the lowest-born pauper’s bastard in a town. “The plague has a way of promoting us before our time, Major. Consider the youth of the town’s Rat.”

“I thought they were spared the plague.”

“Yes—thanks largely to your uptime methods of quarantine, as I understand it. But diphtheria struck, too, and is a much subtler infiltrator of towns. As is often the case, the old and the young had a particularly hard time of it. As did we.”

“And so you are the ranking officer remaining?”

“I am. And we lost our senior sergeant, as well. Not that there were many of us to begin with. From what our late commander, Captain Grieg, told me, General Horn deemed this area largely secure by the onset of winter last year and wanted all his Swedish troops back west where the primary action was. So although a garrison of fifty were withdrawn from Biberach, he only sent twenty-five of us as replacements for it. The plague and diphtheria cut us down to almost half that.”

Quinn shook his head sympathetically. Thomas took a meditative sip before commenting, “You know, we were contemplating coming out to visit the abbey .”

Prum pushed back one dark black wing of a trim moustache. “You’d be the first. And most welcome. Although if you do so, I doubt you’ll be very welcome back here, anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because you might pick up whatever stench was apparently thick upon us when we arrived.”

“I take it you were not met with open arms?”

“We were turned away at the gate. Seems our predecessors had not made themselves very welcome in the town: they were such ardent Lutherans that they made the joint government difficult to maintain in any practical sense of the word. And of course, we showed up sick and too weak to really debate the matter: the half of us who were healthy enough to move under our own power had our hands full supporting those who were not. So they sent us off to the abbey—probably to die. The abbess there had died not too long before; plague also. It cleared the abbey.”

“Well,” Larry offered, “at least you have plenty of room.”

“Not as much as you think. Toward the end, the nuns obviously had no way to bury their own dead. Half of the rooms still have one or more corpses in them. And I am not about to order my plague-panicked men to do anything other than close the doors, seal those buildings off, and let the rats have their way.”

“Sounds charming,” Thomas said with a barely-suppressed shudder. “We’ll be sure to visit your pestilential abode.”

“I’m sure you will,” Prum responded with admirable good humor.

Larry leaned forward. “Why haven’t you sent word back to Horn’s staff? Being forced to live in a plague-hole is simply unacceptable. Besides, you can’t carry out your orders from there. How would you even know if Biberach was being endangered?”

“We wouldn’t. And you are absolutely right: there’s little enough we could do from out there. We maintain a patrol between the Abbey and Ringschnaitt, but even that earns us wary looks. The town—well, particularly the Rat—wants us to keep to ourselves, so we do.”

“What brings you to town, then?”

“Man may not live by bread alone, but one has to have it, nonetheless.”

“Ah. Provisioning.”

“Just so. My men will fetch it tomorrow, but I must arrange for it today. Which requires a drink—often stiffer than this one—first: the local merchants are none too happy providing us with our daily needs in exchange for the promise of General Horn’s coin. Coin they’ve never seen.”

“Which is a violation of the revised conduct code of the USE,” murmured Larry.

“Yes. Well. I am not sure how much General Horn believes in the authority of the USE. He certainly does believe in the authority of King Gustav, however. Perhaps if you were to bring up the matter with His Majesty . . .” Prum trailed off with a rueful grin.

“Yes,” Quinn answered with a matching smile. “I’ll make it the first agenda item for our meeting next week. In the meantime, I don’t suppose you could shed any light on why the local Rat changed its mind on a business arrangement it made with Grantville about three months ago?”