The Tangled Web(21)

Fulda, October, 1633

As Harlan Stull said to Fred Pence, being in Fulda was sort of like being the little ball out on the far end of a stick that was just barely plugged in to some kid's Tinker Toy construction. What with the abysmal radio reception, if it hadn't had a post office on the mail route from Frankfurt to Eisenach, it could have been on the Moon. They didn't learn about Wismar until two weeks after it had happened. They didn't learn that the CPE had turned into the United States of Europe with Mike Stearns as prime minister for a couple of weeks after that.

One thing they learned from a private courier who rode the route from Erfurt to Frankfurt regularly, two weeks before the letter from Grantville showed up, was that the guard on von Schlitz hadn't been heavy enough. A batch of riders, presumably from his personal guards and presumably led by his two oldest sons, had run down the wagon on a pretty deserted stretch of road, shot the two guards and the teamster, and taken him off it. He had disappeared. Gone to ground somewhere. He had kin all over the place.

The Fulda Barracks Regiment put up two memorial plaques. It had not occurred to the men to commemorate their fallen, but Derek had suggested it.

Nobody except their relatives told them anything about what was going on in Magdeburg. They had to read it in the newspaper. That was even how Wes found out that the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel had signed on to some grand railroad project. In the future tense, of course, but at some point people would be coming through to survey a railway route running through Hersfeld and then through Butzbach, down to Frankfurt am Main and then through to Mainz.

"Has Hesse-Darmstadt signed on?" Clara asked. "Butzbach belongs to an uncle of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, not to Kassel. They'll have to go through quite a bit of Hesse-Homburg before they even get to Butzbach. That belongs to another uncle of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt."

Wes didn't know. The paper hadn't said anything.

"The line is supposed to run twenty miles north and then twenty miles west of here, more or less," Harlan Stull grunted. "It shouldn't affect us at all."

"Once they actually build the thing," Roy Copenhaver pointed out, "it will open up new markets. Even for farmers this far away."

"Yeah, but that will be years. Why didn't they bring it down this way, and then to Frankfurt along the Kinzig River valley?"

"To do that, they would have to go through Schlitz and the Reichsritter wouldn't cooperate. He's Lutheran, so Oxenstierna didn't want to piss him off."

"I remember that stuff. Schlitz beer. One thing about up-time that no one will miss. Horse's piss."



In Grantville, during the first week in October, Ed Piazza, while digging through the latest stack of usually worthwhile memoranda churned out by Wes Jenkins, found the three paragraphs that specifically addressed the production of scurrilous propaganda pamphlets by means of inexpensive down-time manufactured duplicating machines, yanked the page to the top, and radioed the essential data to Francisco Nasi in Magdeburg.

Fulda, November 1633

"So," Wes Jenkins announced, "it is now official. We are the United States of Europe—the USE—rather than the CPE. Mike Stearns is prime minister of the new nation—it's going to have a British-style parliamentary system rather than being modeled on the up-time USA. Ed Piazza's the president of the NUS now, but it's only a state—province, rather—in the new country."

It took the rest of the staff meeting to digest this information.

"Hey, Orville," Wes said on the way out, "who the hell is Brillo?"

"You know, the cartoons. The stories. Contrary down-time ram. Some of them were published in the Grantville Times. Why?"

"Steve Salatto wants to know how he connects to the peasant revolt."

Fred Pence frowned. "What peasant revolt? I'm out in the precincts every week and I haven't heard anything about a peasant revolt."

"It hasn't happened yet," Orville said. "It may happen in Würzburg and Bamberg."

"I'll tell Steve that I never heard of the stupid ram." Wes paused. "Why are they having a peasant revolt?"

"I dunno."



Roy Copenhaver wandered into the "Hearts and Minds" office. "Orville?"

"Yeah?"

"Who's actually running these estates that the NUS confiscated from the Abbey of Fulda?"

"They aren't like plantations with overseers and things. Mostly, after we abolished the stuff connected with serfdom, we've just let the farmers get on with it. I guess the village councils are running them."

"Who's collecting the rents and taxes and stuff?"

"We're collecting the taxes, using the district administrators, the Amtmaenner. As for the rents and dues, the real estate stuff, ask Harlan or Andrea. That's their department. All I can tell you is that we haven't had any major complaints from the granges on my watch."