Anse made a face. "Well, I'm damned if I feel like digging any bigger hole than we need to, in this frozen ground."
The big Swedish lieutenant smiled coldly. "Why bother?" He nodded toward the privy. "There is already a big hole dug under that. For such as these, a fitting resting place."
Anse smiled back, just as coldly. The idea was certainly tempting, but . . .
Leaving aside everything else, a poor charcoal-burner's privy in the rocky soil of the Thuringenwald probably wouldn't be big enough to hold all the corpses.
"No, we'll give them a grave."
Wili and Jochen took turns and soon had the shallow graves dug, while Anse and Ivarsson gathered some rocks to cover them. Once they realized that the bedrock was less than a foot below the surface, they ended up piling the rocks into cairns. A respectable one, near the house, over the old man's body; a make-shift one, a bit farther off, for the corpses of the bandits. Meanwhile, in a small clearing a quarter of a mile down the road, Gaylynn and Noelle set up the tents.
Once the old man's grave was ready, Anse went over to the campsite. "Gaylynn, do you want to bring the boys out to say goodbye to their grandfather?"
Somewhat dubiously, she looked at the tent where Noelle was keeping the children.
"Yes, I suppose we should. It might make the boys feel better."
Von Dantz, by then, had settled himself into another tent. Anse pulled back the flap and asked: "Would you happen to have a Bible, Captain?"
"Ja, a New Testament, but it is in German. Do you read German?"
It'd be in Fraktur script, too, the Gothic style, which Anse still had a lot of trouble with. "Not too well, no. But Wili does. Wili's a Catholic, but he'll be willing to say a few words to send any Christian home."
The captain looked a little surprised, but got his New Testament out of his pack.
Later, after the burial and a quick supper, Captain von Dantz approached Anse. "I think we should all stand watch tonight. Three on, three off. You, me and Private Schultz on the first watch and Sergeant Ivarsson, Rau and Frau Reardon on the second. Since the Murphy woman is unarmed and seems not very familiar with weapons, I see no point in including her. Besides, she is tending the children."
"Sounds good, Captain."
January 19, 1633
The night was quiet. Early the next morning as they were repacking the wagon, Anse asked, "Noelle, what do you think we should do with the boys? We can't leave them here."
"You should stop referring to them as `the boys,' for starters," she said, a little crossly. "You make them sound like luggage. They are Hans Felix Polheimer and Hans Ulrich Moser. They're first cousins. Hans Felix is the older. As to what we're going to do with them, we're taking them to Suhl. Obviously."
Anse couldn't help smiling at her frosty tone. He'd heard that Noelle Murphy didn't suffer fools gladly—and, admittedly, his question had been a little foolish.
"Load Hans and Hans on the wagon, then. We're almost ready to pull out. Von Dantz will have kittens if they're are any more delays."
"I'd say let him, except I'd pity the poor kittens."
That turned Anse's smile into a real grin.
When they arrived in Suhl, a little after noon, Anse was surprised by the size of the city. It was a lot smaller than he'd expected from Pat's letters. That must be caused by the wall crowding everyone inside, he thought.
Then he noticed the people themselves. Over the past year and a half, he'd gotten used to the mix of uptime and down-time clothing worn around Grantville, and—though to a lesser extent—in nearby Badenburg and Jena. Now, having crossed the Thuringenwald, he was in a strictly German city.
Not only was there no mix of clothing, but many of the people on the streets of Suhl were casting unfriendly looks at the party. Whatever was causing trouble in the countryside had spread to the city, apparently. Anse was getting a weird feeling of deja vu. This was all strange, but all too familiar.
Then it hit him. The last time he'd felt this way was almost forty years earlier. In Saigon, in 1969, just before the Tet Offensive.
There were no overt signs of hostility, however. That was presumably because of the tough-looking mercenaries who were guarding the city gates and, now and then, patrolling the streets in small squads. The Swedish garrison wasn't very big, true, but it was big enough to keep the peace in a town the size of Suhl. The problem was that the Swedish garrison shouldn't be patrolling in a N.U.S. state, in the first place. The city council should be keeping the peace with constables or militia.