The Ram Rebellion(153)

"What effect?" Anita asked.





"Well, farmers are farmers, pretty much everywhere. We didn't make the ones who hold leases directly from us significantly happier. That's because they never wanted to render the obligations of serfdom anyway, so they just think we've given them what they properly deserved, which isn't something they need to be grateful for. However, on the estates of other lords—which are not different great big plantations, remember; a lot of times, three or four lords have tenants living next door to one another in the same village—the farmers still have to pay up. Which they think is grossly unfair; they think that they are put upon and badly done by. The farmers on the estates we're administering don't love the boss. But the farmers on the other guys' estates are nursing a major grudge against the boss right now, by and large. That's a pretty big difference."





Johnnie F. leaned back, then forward again.





"To be very un-PC, the natives are restless. Personally, I'd recommend that we ought to take advantage of it. That's where we started this conversation, I think. But I'd be a bit more at ease if Scott or someone else would come out with me and take a look at things."





Chapter 4: "Last time, it was a work shoe"





Franconia, Late October, 1633




"What's with the sheep?" Scott Blackwell asked. The NUS's military administrator for Franconia was frowning down at the village below them. He and Johnnie F. Haun had paused their horses on the crest of a hill, just above a village somewhere out in the back of beyond. Scott had no idea where he was. In spite of his compass, he was utterly lost and quite sure that he would never be able to find his way out of this complex of hills and hollows by himself.





But he was sure he had been to this village before. There was a really odd church tower to confirm his memory. And there had not, last spring, been a huge banner with the head of a sheep on it blowing in the wind from a tall pole where the road ran into the central square.





Johnnie F. had been moving along with his usual complete sense of orientation. Now he looked over and said patiently, "It's a ram."





"What's the difference?" Scott asked.





"Look at the horns. It's male."





"It wasn't here when I went around the villages with you last spring." Scott was sure of that.





"None of them were."





"None of what?"





"The rams-head banners. From here on up toward the border, you'll see a lot of them."





Scott might not be able to tell a sheep from a ram, but, unlike Johnnie F., he could spot possible flash points that might require the attention of the military police from a very long distance indeed.





"Nobody reported on these?"





"Well, the guys on `hearts and minds' have noticed them. They've told me that they're all around. Not just here in Würzburg. Over in Bamberg, too. Actually, they're thicker over there. Not very many in Fulda. But they've showed up really gradually, and nobody's been making a fuss about them. They're just there, on the poles. Nobody's brought them up in conversation."





Scott sighed. "Do me a favor, will you? Try to find out why the sheep are up there on those poles."





As soon as he got back to Würzburg, Scott had a long talk with Saunders Wendell. This was one of those things that the UMWA needed to know about.





Würzburg, November, 1633




Johnnie F. brought back a broadside. He had collected it in a remote village at the utter backside of anywhere, up in the Fraenkischer Schweiz.





"Isn't that," Scott asked rather cautiously, "on the letterhead of the Grantville League of Women Voters?"





"It was that letterhead. Once upon a time. Now it is more." Meyfarth leaned over the table. "See, here at the top. There is your Grantville paper. The head of the ram and the slogan:





" `Better to be hung





For a sheep than for a lamb.'"





"That's your League of Women Voters motto. Then, here, the German version. It's pretty much the same:





" `Soll man mich denn erhaengen,

So für ein' Schaf', nicht für ein Lamm.'





"But," Meyfarth continued, "they have added two new lines:





" `Doch Du, brav' deutscher Bauer,

Wie ein Bock zerbrich den Damm.'





"That is, oh, let me think a minute-something like:





" `But you, sturdy German farmer,

Break down the dam like a ram.'





"This broadside then has a paragraph that explains it. About how these women challenged your government about horse manure in the streets and won. And that the son of the courageous ewe, the leader of the protest, is now the chief justice of the NUS Supreme Court."