The Ram Rebellion(164)

Willa did not agree that two babies dead of exposure counted as no casualties. The villagers appeared to take it in stride. Babies died every winter, Hatzfeld's men or not. Innocent babies went to the Lord Jesus in heaven; their lot henceforth was better than that of the families they left behind on earth. Each mother had given God another bud in her nosegay of children. Each mother had another baby angel to pray for her soul. They were quite confident of this, in spite of the fact that for a century, Protestant clergymen had been telling them that they did not need baby angels to pray for their souls. There were just some things about which Mother Knew Best.





"Since we're here anyway," Maydene asked, "should we take your oaths? It's not picnic weather, but we have beef jerky in the saddlebags."





The old man looked at his wife Kaethe. The totally toothless old woman, who looked like she could as well be his mother as his wife, opened a hidden compartment under the manger of the stall that opened into the cottage. She dragged out a heavy chest and opened it. She pulled out a ram's-head banner.





"Yes," the old man said. "You will take our oaths under the banner. Not just the oaths of the villagers who pay their rents to your government in Würzburg. The oaths of all of us in Frankenwinheim, no matter who our lord may be."





Maydene was not in a mood to argue the point. Whoever the old man's lord might have been, he'd been really delinquent in the "protect and shield" department.





"Okay," she said. "First of all, I hereby absolve everybody in this village from any oath he's ever taken to anybody who didn't send a troop of guards in to root Hatzfeld's men out of Dingolshausen. Second, let's get started. You first."





They took oaths. They ate jerky. Somebody threw another log into the fireplace. The old folks started telling stories about what Grandpa did in the Bundschuh. Somebody rolled in a keg of beer. It turned into a long night in Frankenwinheim.





"That pretty well sums it up," Scott said. "And, though I know you don't want me to do it, Steve, I'm going to have to quarter some troops in Gerolzhofen. Some of the mercenaries that Mike and Gustavus are sending down to us. I've been stepping lightly, but that town is just too loyal to the bishop of Würzburg. Just because he's a bishop, no matter who the bishop may be at the moment. It's a lot smaller than Bamberg, but it sure isn't any more of a bastion of liberal enlightenment."





"Where? I don't want them quartered on private citizens." Steve was definite.





"Put them in the Zehnthof." That was Meyfarth. "Nobody, not even the most loyal Catholic, enjoys paying the tithes, so they won't be all that protective about the tithe storage barn. There's room for a bunch of soldiers there and the officers can keep better control over them than if they are scattered out in different quarters. It's sort of off to one side and next to the walls. The inner walls. Quarter the officers in the residence that Bishop Echter built for his bailiffs. That's right next to it."





"Actually," Scott said, "I'm sort of glad that we sent the gals on that run. The Gerolzhofen city council apparently thought that it could defy three women. Sort of exposed them to the point where I can deal with them."





"We have had," Meyfarth said, "excellent press coverage of the incident."





"The `gals' did exceed their authority." Steve Salatto felt obliged to point that out. After Frankenwinheim, Maydene, Willa, and Estelle had cut quite a swath through their assigned section of Franconia. Accompanied by scores of villagers. Waving a ram's head banner. They had taken an extra week to get back to Volkach. They were, as Maydene pointed out after they got back to Würzburg, all three of them, members of the Grantville League of Women Voters. She claimed that they therefore had a perfect right to use the symbol.





"Ah," Meyfarth said. "For my part, I think it went well."





Scott asked, "What about the sheep? Are we going to have farmers marching out under ram's-head banners come spring? And, if so, what do we do about it?"





Johnnie F. said, "You're going to have them marching, I'm pretty sure. Not just here, but in Bamberg and maybe Fulda, too. Stewart Hawker and Orville Beattie agree with me on that." Stewart and Orville were headquartered in Würzburg, but Stewart spent most of his time in Bamberg; Orville was mostly in Fulda.





"People are already on the move," Johnnie F. continued. "Some of the villages are squeezing people out—where the majority are subjects of some lord, folks who weren't eligible to swear to us, the way the law is now. I don't know if the landlords are doing the pushing, or if the other villagers are doing the pushing because they're afraid of the landlords, but we're seeing people on the roads. Heading north into Thuringia, a lot of them, though this isn't the best time of the year to be crossing the Thuringian Forest, now that the snow is accumulating in earnest."