The Ram Rebellion(132)

It sounded to Bellamy as if Meyfarth were doing his analysis as he was speaking. "So what do we expect?" he repeated.





"About October, everything ought to be inside from this year's harvest, and the fall plowing and sowing done. Threshing they can do gradually, indoors. From November through February, farmers gather wood and do chores, but the work is not so heavy. They can go to the village tavern. They will start reading all those newspapers and pamphlets, broadsides and handouts, that have been piling up all summer in a stack on the corner bench. Then they will start asking themselves the real question: `What does this mean for Unteroberbach? What does this mean for Obermittelfeld? What does this mean for Mittelunterberg?' That's when you will start to hear from them. Or, more likely, to see evidence of what they have decided among themselves, in each individual village. The majority will try to exclude those members of the Gemeinde or citizens of the town who disagree with them. You will see people, whole families perhaps, on the move."





Meyfarth smiled calmly at the commissioners. "After all, you uptimers have a saying that describes it perfectly."





"And what," Reece Ellis grumped, "is that?'





" `All politics is local.' And that, Mr. Bellamy, is why I have advised you not to set your elections on whether the Franconian territories will join the N.U.S. until next spring. Late spring, or early summer; between planting and haying. This is my advice. Do not hold them until each village has had time to think about all of this and about what it might mean for them. They can't know what it will mean. No man can predict the future with such certainty. But to think about what it might mean—that is possible. On this, the commissioners agree with me." Reece, Paul, and Phil nodded.





"The longer we wait to hold elections," Saunders Wendell complained, "the longer the pro-bishop and pro-Habsburg and anti-us, or anti-N.U.S, people have to get themselves organized."





"And the more they will pick, pick, pick. File a complaint here; submit a petition there; write a letter to the king of Sweden; yada, yada, yada." Scott Blackwell had minimal patience with the multiple avenues of political process.





Arnold had an eerie sense that this was just about the point, back when he had been reading the diplomatic correspondence, that he had decided to come down to Würzburg. "Look guys," he said, drawing a deep breath. This was going to be a long, long, meeting. . . .





A Nightmare Upon the Present


Virginia DeMarce





July, 1633: Near the Coburg border, Franconia




Constantin Ableidinger looked up from the table at which he was working. The breeze was welcome, but strong enough to disturb the various piles of paper on which he was working. He had pressed almost every heavy item in the room into service as a paperweight. A small pewter plate, a candlestick, a small telescope.





He had a housekeeper, too. She was glaring at him from behind his back. He could see her wavering reflection in the glass goblet of cold coffee that stood by his right hand. Undoubtedly, he had committed yet another infraction against her rigid housekeeping standards and she was planning to bring it to his attention. Respectfully, but without yielding.





If he had been paying her wages, she would not be here any more. However, the ram was paying her wages. The ram had determined, some months ago, that his time was too valuable for him to spend it pulling up the featherbed.





Or drinking in the Frankenwinheim tavern with Rudolph Vulpius.





Or planting cabbages in his garden.





His wife Sara had never complained that he was a slob. She had been agreeable and compliant, even when he walked in from the garden with his boots covered thickly in mud. Even on days when she had just swept the floor boards down with sand.





Of course, his late wife's pliancy had also led her to agree that he could bed her right there in the alley behind her father's bakery in Jena. Which had led to his expulsion from the law school.





And to his son, who was standing at the door in front of him. Who had, in this year and a half since the uptimers came to Franconia, stopped being a child. How had Matthias gotten to be fourteen? When would he have time to finish tutoring him so he could enter the university? Was that something else for which his own time was now "too valuable"?





What university should he attend?





"What is it, Matthias?" he asked aloud.





"It's Herr Schulte, again."





Ableidinger thought for the hundredth time that he had never properly appreciated Rudolph Vulpius. Heading a village council took a lot of work. That was obvious to anyone who had ever sat on a village council. But a teacher did not sit on the village council. He worked for it and for the consistory. For years, when he was teaching in Frankenwinheim, he had kept the council's records, so he knew as an observer how much business the council did. Still, he had never understood how much maneuvering it took, before each meeting, to bring the contentious parties in a controversy to the point that when they came before the council, they were either willing to reach a solution between themselves or accept whatever solution the council proposed with reasonably good grace. He had never realized how hard it was to recruit "volunteers" for each of the necessary offices, from fire bucket patrol to bridge and ford inspector to vermin warden.