The Tangled Web(145)

"Old home week, high school reunion    , and a beanfest, all in one. I haven't seen some of these Grantville guys who are with Horn for two or three years. Yeah, it's been nice to catch up. The local news columns in the Grantville paper tell me who's getting hatched, matched, and dispatched, but they don't usually say who was hitting on whose wife at someone else's wedding. Not unless it ends up in the 'Arrests' column."



"Those walls are fairly new, aren't they?" Jeffie asked.

Eberhard nodded. "They were built by the first Duke Ulrich close to a century ago, when people were just beginning to use the new designs. The old curtain walls were already irregular in shape. He rebuilt and added the bastions at the angles."

"What's the circumference?"

"About a mile. The ditching complicates things, of course. In some places, it's a good forty yards wide."

"Even so, once we get Horn's artillery up here," Hertling said, "we can make a fine mess." He was perched on a rock up on the Ottilienberg that overlooked the city.

"Ja. It's going to take a great deal of heaving and hauling, though. Damn," Hartke said, leaning over. "Look at the town. Something's on fire."

"Sure is," Hertling agreed. "Not good. Not on a windy day like this. Do you suppose anyone inside the walls has noticed?"

"If they had, they'd be running around like ants."

"They're starting to."



"By the bowels of Christ!"

"For shame, Gutzler. For shame to blaspheme so. If anyone hears you, the magistrate will fine you a stiff one." Barbara Mahlin shook her fist over her cart of well-picked-over second-hand clothing.

"My hat. Look at it blow. It's only for work—not worth much more than those rags you sell. Some damned Irishman took my good one right off my head last market day, though, so now it's the only one I have. I want it back." Gutzler went dashing down the side of the square.

"Sure looks stupid, doesn't he, bouncing along like that with his pot belly flopping?" Johann Leylins guffawed. Then, "Great God Almighty! What was that? It looked like Gutzler's been swallowed by a ball of hellfire blowing out of the cook shop doorway."

Inside the cook shop, a fourteen-year-old apprentice, his hair singed off, picked himself up from against the back wall and looked in horror at the torch that, less than a minute before, had been his master. For less than half a half minute, he froze in place, remembering. The gust of wind, causing a blow-back down the chimney, scattering coals and sparks at old Master Steiss, who had just been putting the poker to the green wood. He'd jumped back and tripped. He'd tripped over . . . that cauldron of hot lard where they had just finished cooking funnel cakes, and the lard had gone flooding into the fireplace.

If nothing else, the apprentice was agile on his feet. He dived over the closed bottom half of the double door, out into the alley, landed with a somersault, stood up, and screamed "Fire!" at the top of his lungs.

"Who's that yelling?" Hans Frinck called from next door.

"That no-good young Michael Haug who works in the cook shop."

"Somebody should teach that boy not to cry 'wolf.' "

"He's . . ." Frinck's wife Agnes poked her head out the door. "Fire!" she shrieked. "Fire on a windy day. Fire!"

Frinck ran for his buckets.

Young Haug was running down the street calling "Fire watch! Fire watch!"

Melchior Schiffer had the fire watch functioning in ten minutes. They drilled for this. Bregenzer at the well pump, with Leylins's younger son trading off with him. A chain of women to pass the filled buckets. He counted. Here came Greiners, dashing toward him from the square, calling that Minder would have to take Gutzler's place, because Gutzler was dead. Reisch. Kapffer. Ensslin. They went to work in a practiced rhythm.

"Schiffer." The apprentice was jumping up and down. "Schiffer!"

"Get out of our way, boy."

"Schiffer, I have to go back in."

"Nobody goes back into a burning building. Get out of our way. We have to wet down the ones on each side. More, in this wind."

"But, Schiffer—"

He found himself flat on his back in the street.

"What I was going to say, if you'd have let me," Michael Haug said, "was that Master Steiss had an open barrel of flour in there. From the funnel cakes."

Ensslin was picking himself up. Reisch never would again.

Hess and Hirschman rounded the corner and slid to a stop.

Barbara Mahlin ran, abandoning her cart of old clothes in the middle of the square.

"Wet the farther buildings," Schiffer yelled. "Haug, you're nimble. Get up on Kunkel's roof and look for sparks. Hirschmann, you go up too. We'll throw you the bucket rope and you can pulley up some water."