The Ram Rebellion(22)

Birdie sat through that little speech dumbfounded. Birdie had always figured that Friedrich was just a suck up. Thought he was too afraid of Junker to answer back. Birdie was amazed to realize that the guy actually believed that his proper place was as someone else's tenant. Birdie couldn't understand how anyone could actually feel that way.





Friedrich was trying to queer the whole deal for everyone because he was terrified of owning his own property. He almost managed it, too. Before the deal could go through an agreement must be reached. Agreement took a couple of extra days of negotiations and no one was especially happy with the result.





Friedrich was unhappy because he didn't want the mayor of the village as his landlord. And Birdie was unhappy because he was afraid he was going to be stuck as mayor and have to deal with the duckfucker on a regular basis.





Twenty-four loan applications, twenty-two of them using the land they wanted to buy as the collateral for the loan. All of them were from down-timers with no, or very little, credit history. Larkin Newhouse's application, the twenty-third, used the land in Sundremda plus his equity in the farm inside the Ring of Fire as collateral. The villagers of Sundremda wanted to buy their village and wanted the bank to loan them the money to do it. It was not unexpected. The twenty-fourth application was from the township of Sundremda, requesting funds to buy two public buildings and one farm.





September, 1632




Ernst Bachmeier leaned against the fence post and mused. The fall of 1632 had given him no answers as to whether wheat or flax was the better cash crop. He suspected that if they'd planted dandelions then dandelions would have sold amazingly well. The lousy weather had almost been compensated for by the addition of lime to the soil. The crops were good, very good, even though Birdie claimed they were only passable by uptime standards. There was something called an "industrial revolution" getting started in and around the Ring of Fire and labor was increasingly hard to come by. But, the goods! Oh, the goods that came out of Grantville. A bed with springs in it!





Ernst once again found himself looking over the land. The land that would be his someday, his alone. The land that he would pass down to his children, someday, hopefully in the far future. Ah, such a future.





Bacon


Eric Flint




"All right, I finished it," said Mike Stearns, the moment he strode into Melissa Mailey's office. Triumphantly, he dropped the Economic History of Europe onto her desk. The tome landed with a resounding thump.





Mike stooped and peered at the legs of the desk. "Pretty well built. I thought it might collapse."





"Well, now that you've finished that one, I'm sure—"





"Not a chance, Melissa!" He held up his hands and crossed his two forefingers, as if warding off a vampire. "Besides, I don't need to. Birdie Newhouse—bless him—has shown us the way. In practice, by getting his hands dirty, just like I predicted."





Melissa frowned, almost fiercely. "Mike, be serious! You can't solve the tangled land tenure relations of seventeenth-century Germany by simply buying the land. Even if everyone was willing to sell, we couldn't possibly afford it. King Midas couldn't afford it."





Mike shook his head. "I'm not talking about that. Tactics come, tactics go. What matters is what Birdie did, not how he did it. Birdie and Mary Lee both. They got in there and mixed it up with the people on the ground, and took it from there. That's what we need—only organized. Something like a cross between the OSS of World War II days, Willie Ray's grangers, and—and—I dunno. Maybe the Peace Corps. Whatever. We'll figure it out as we go."





Melissa laced her fingers together and stared at him.





"You're nuts," she proclaimed, after a few seconds. "On the other hand, it is a charming idea. Like the poet said, in beauty there is truth. You'd need the right people to carry it out, though—and not somebody like Harry Lefferts."





Mike chuckled. "Can't you just see Harry as an agrarian organizer?" His voice took on a slightly thicker hillbilly accent. "`Let's all get together, boys. Or I'll shoot you dead.'"





Melissa grimaced. "That's not really funny, Mike."





"Sure it is. But I agree, Harry's not the right type. You got any suggestions?"





Melissa's eyes narrowed, as they did when she was chewing on a problem.





"Well . . . There's somebody I think we could at least raise the idea with. Deborah Trout."





It was Mike's turn to frown. "Len's wife? She's always struck me as pretty straitlaced."





"Well, not her personally. She's in her fifties now, anyway. A bit long in the tooth to be gallivanting around the German countryside. But she's got someone in her office that I think she'd be willing—delighted, actually—to part company with."