So Dornheim could not veto. It would come down to de Melon. To surrender now, while possibly most of the city's people could be saved by the uptimers' possibly legendary medicines. Or to open the gates after they were dead.
Plague was plague. A fact of life. De Melon was not anxious to open the gates. Not yet.
Kronach, September, 1633
Stewart Hawker came up himself, to tell Matt the news about how the Bamberg city council had ordered the flogging of Wilbur Thornton and Johnnie F. And the rest of it.
It wasn't Matt's fault. He had to be told that that. Vince Marcantonio agreed. Matt was having a hard time of it, watching people die inside Kronach. Cliff Priest hadn't given him the easiest job going, this year. How did the folks back in Grantville expect him to do the Special Commission on Religious Freedom work on top of it?
Well, he'd tried. Both of them had, in a way, working with the Catholics and Protestants up here in the north. But up here in the north wasn't Bamberg city, and nobody could be in two places at once.
Vince and Cliff needed Matt here.
"You know, Stew," Matt Trelli said. "I just wish that I could figure out the hat colors."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Like in westerns. The good guys always wore the white hats. The bad guys always wore the black hats. These guys . . ." He shook his head.
Stew nodded.
What really hurt was that in a lot of ways, the people forted up in Kronach were the kind that a West Virginian would want to admire. Even if they were subjects of a prince-bishop, they were at least commoners. Tradesmen and workers, mostly; that was how they made their livings. They'd had a shooting club for nearly two centuries, already, in the town. The citizens were armed. Those were good things. Grantvillers knew in their bones that they were good things.
And, in a lot of ways, their opponents were the kind of people a West Virginian would want to loathe. Noblemen. Petty rulers who extracted the last penny out of the peasants who were their subjects.
"I think," Matt said, finally "that maybe the right words are `tormented and afflicted.' For what they do to each other, I mean. The words are in a lot of hymns."
Who's Calling This Race?
Virginia DeMarce
April, 1633: Würzburg, Franconia
Anita Masaniello—who had kept her maiden name when she married and had some decidedly feminist views otherwise, as well—looked at the group gathered around the conference table. A Grantville girl in origin, she had worked in the Baltimore county public library system before the Ring of Fire; she and her family had been caught up in it because they were attending her parents' fortieth wedding anniversary party that Sunday afternoon. In Würzburg, she was in charge of figuring out the land tenure system.
Steve Salatto, her husband, was not a happy camper. "Is this religious freedom commission on top of us, under us, or flying somewhere out at a lateral? Just when we were, sort of, starting to figure out what we're doing."
Anita wasn't surprised at his grumpy tone. Her husband had been appointed "Chief N.U.S. Administrator for Franconia" in overall charge of the administration of Franconia, right after the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus had turned it over to the New United States in the fall of 1632. They had come to Würzburg scarcely a month later, that October, six months ago now. Despite being a bureaucrat by training and background, Steve wasn't much given to petty fussiness and turf wars. Still, no administrator likes to discover that he's been saddled with a "special commission" which stands outside of the clearly delineated chain of command.
"Lateral, I think," Scott Blackwell said. "But we'll end up having our feet held to the fire for whatever they do."
If Scott Blackwell had a family motto, Anita thought, it would have been: Cynicism is the best alternative. Several months as the chief N.U.S. military administrator in Franconia hadn't helped his mood.
"Who's coming?" That question came from David Petrini, the economic liaison. Most of the Franconian cities didn't have an economic liaison, but in so far as Grantville had been able to muster a cadre of high-powered administrators, it had blessed Würzburg with them.
Steve Salatto grimaced. "Well, we—Würzburg, that is—are being endowed with three would-be but not-yet-quite-hatched lawyers, a legal clerk and three security guys. Specifically, for the commission members: Reece Ellis, Paul Calagna, and Phil Longhi. With Jon Villareal as clerk. And Lowry Eckerlin, Jim Genucci, and Hugh McAndrew for security."
"Oh," Petrini said. "Joy."