Vince sighed. "True. But a regular siege would come out of the military budget. Not out of the road budget."
Forchheim, August, 1633
Colonel von Schletz decided to try one more sally. The largest of the summer. He gathered his men and led them out in an effort to break through the perimeter that the Swedes had set. Idly, he noted that every woman in Forchheim had apparently decided to do her laundry this morning.
With a final prayer for protection to Saints Barbara, Margaret, and Catherine, the mayor of Forchheim gave his orders. The gates closed behind the majority of the imperial garrison. And stayed closed, when the Swede's soldiers drove them back toward the city's walls. Held by men who had nothing left to lose. Men whose wives and daughters were on the parapets, pouring buckets of boiling water down on von Schletz's dragoons.
* * *
"I don't know," Walt Miller said to the mayor of Forchheim. "You've still got the river. And a fair bit of infrastructure. But what's done is done. The road is there and it's going to stay. The administration is going to stay put, too. I expect that a fair number of your people can find work in Eggolsheim-Neuses. The laws we've put into effect there establish open citizenship. All they have to do is register to vote."
Walt was feeling a little apologetic, to tell the truth.
"I'm afraid that your town has turned into a historical monument. On the bright side, though, in a couple of hundred years you'll probably start picking up some tourist trade. Tom O'Brien's on his way down to make sure that no imperial or Bavarian troops can ever fort up in the place again, but I'll ask him to leave you enough of the walls to look scenic here and there. That's about the best I can do."
Eggolsheim-Neuses, September, 1633
The company of riders who delivered the month's payroll also brought the news about what had happened to Willard Thornton and Johnnie F. in Bamberg.
Walt Miller barely knew Willard, but he liked Johnnie F. He didn't have anything against Willard, either—a nice enough guy, the few times he had ever talked to him at the Home Center, back in Grantville.
The riders also provided a synopsis of the generally prevailing opinion that the Bamberg officials had dared to try it, the fixed court and the flogging, because the Bamberg staff assigned to the Special Commission on the Establishment of Religious Freedom hadn't been spending much time on the project, so they thought they could get away with it.
"Damn," Walt said to himself. "Talk about blowing it."
Then he went out for the day's work. The formal ribbon-cutting for the opening of the Forchheim Bypass.
In the Night, All Hats Are Gray
Virginia DeMarce
Bamberg, January, 1633
"Hi, Janie, what's up?"
Stewart Hawker wandered into the back room of the land tenures office in what had once been the official residence of the prince-bishop of Bamberg. He would have thrown himself into a chair, except that there weren't any extras.
Janie Kacere smiled. "Repenting my sins. Not any recent ones. The ones I committed when I was twelve and thirteen that inspired my parents, even though they were far, far, from prosperous, to decide that I belonged in a girls' boarding school run by nuns until I graduated from high school. Nuns who thought everyone should take Latin."
She hopped off her stool, wondering where the down-timers had gotten the idea that a desk was a slanted board set on a pedestal. Uptime, they only showed up as dictionary stands in libraries and in the annual TV show about Scrooge and Tiny Tim.
"I don't really think that the School Sisters of Notre Dame were the model for the famous PNDR who haunt so many `back when I went to parochial school stories' for my generation, but they came close. Which means that I'm sitting here, freezing my feet and trying to figure out German land tenures instead of being back home in Grantville with central heating." She picked up the brick that had been under her feet, carried it over to the fireplace, grabbed a pair of tongs, and substituted a hot brick at the base of her stool.
Stew raised his eyebrows. "What's a PNDR? Plain old Presbyterian, here, Janie. Not one of the initiated."
She laughed. "Purple Nuns of Divine Retribution. An imaginary teaching order. Heroines of many a legendary saga of chalk and rulers. We firmly believed that having eyes installed in the backs of their heads was part of the ceremony in which they took final vows."
"Gotcha. Why are you repenting your sins?"
"Kleuckheim. Seventy-nine pieces of property divided among nine different owners. The law court belongs to Hochstift Bamberg, which means that we, now, have to adjudicate all the local squabbles or find some lawyer who will do it as one of our employees. But they pay taxes split between the collection office in Lichtenfels and a `canton' of imperial knights. At least, I think that's what the word means, but I thought that there were only cantons in Switzerland."