The Tangled Web(28)

"Bidder?"

"There's no authorized FTE for a lawyer in my department. I had Harlan put out a RFP for a contractor."

"Life is so full of interesting surprises."

"Etienne says that he needs either another lawyer or two more clerks to handle the work load. Or another lawyer and two more clerks."

Harlan was still adding sums. "Derek, where are you getting the rent for the school loft?"

"Ah. When we built the barracks, some dope put in an item for landscaping. It seemed sort of a pity to let it go to waste. And we've put some potted plants in the school room. Didn't spend any money on them—the moms just cobbled together some pots from scrap wood, filled them with dirt, and dug up a few bushes. I'm hoping it's enough to get us in under the wire if auditors show up."



"Are we ready to certify the results?"

"Yes," Fred Pence said.

"First, in regard to the question of incorporation into the State of Thuringia."

The statistics were tedious, but the question passed.

Eleven of the territories of imperial knights voted to join both the State of Thuringia and the new consolidated subordinate administrative polity (aka SAP, which made Arnold Bellamy very unhappy). Seven voted to join the State of Thuringia but be subordinate administrative polities of their own and keep calling themselves Reichsritterschaften. Schlitz voted "the hell with it and a pox on you and both your political parties." Each of the seven separate Reichsritterschaften only had a few hundred residents apiece, but that was the will of the people.

Even the dissenting vote in Schlitz was technically the will of the people, though Fred Pence suspected that Karl von Schlitz's two oldest sons had made it fairly plain to the people what their will had better be. That pair would have done well in Chicago under Capone, except that the Mafia probably didn't take Lutherans.

The citizens of the new consolidated SAP voted to distinguish their secular government from that of the Abbey of Fulda. The name of the new polity would be Buchenland (Latin version Buchonia). This gesture on the part of the majority, residents of the former Stift, to the minority, residents of Buchen Quarter, was widely recognized as generous.

In a subsidiary question, the citizens of the new polity voted to establish an Ausschuss or Conventus whose duty would be to design an emblem and coat of arms for the new county.

Applause followed the formal certification.

So did a petition from several imperial knights of the Buchen Quarter, led by Friedrich von der Tann, who alleged that the soldiers of the Fulda Barracks Regiment had, in the course of carrying out their electoral duties, committed attacks, plundering, unjustified arrests, libels and slanders upon the honor of citizens, persecutions, demeaning statements, alienation of assets, and a variety of other crimes and delicts.

Wes told him to give it to the lawyers.



The following day, Derek Utt broke the news that he would now be conducting military musters throughout Buchenland, to establish a county-wide militia.

The imperial knights whose Ritterschaften had voted themselves into it discovered that they would no longer have their own private militias.

The rest of the imperial knights said, "I told you so. Don't say that I didn't warn you. Big government. Mediatization."

Captain Wiegand said that the Fulda city militia would be happy to provide training to the new local units.

Von Buchenau refused to allow the muster on his estates, saying that the ballot had not contained any provisions about military musters. Derek, with Wes's backing, arrested him.

His lawyer sent a petition to parliament and the emperor of the United States of Europe, pointing out that he had been paying a tax of thirteen Thaler per month to support the Protestant cause, contingent upon the agreement of the envoys of the king of Sweden that they would recognize the immediacy of his territory. He protested that one aspect of being independent was that a ruler could have his own army.

The effort that the von Buchenau militia made to spring him out of jail made it pretty clear that the knightly troops really could use the training that Captain Wiegand had offered, not to mention demonstrating that their equipment was more than a little obsolete.

Wes let the von Buchenau militia out on parole, since they were, when not being militia, the farmers who leased land from the knight and spring planting season was coming up.

After von Buchenau agreed to sign an Urfehde, Wes let him out on parole, too.

Schweinsberg told him that this was a really bad idea, and would be interpreted as a sign of weakness rather than as a sign of a generous spirit.

Wes said that the guy was just a nuisance.

Clara Bachmeierin agreed with the abbot.

Salmuenster, Buchenland, March 1634

Joel Matowski looked at the residents of Salmuenster. Thirty-four families. According to the duplicate records that the local administrator had kept, there had been a couple of hundred houses in the town before the war started. He was here to take their oaths of allegiance to the new constitution and run a military muster while he was about it. Salmuenster was about as far from Fulda as you could get and still be a part of the Stift—well, part of Buchenland.