Ring of Fire(48)

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—