Harangues in the towns around Grantville.
Questions from Stearns and Nasi in Magdeburg.
Wackernagel, every now and then, bringing things in from Frankfurt am Main.
Nobody could quite put a finger on it.
Not until the fourth of March, when everything erupted. When someone, nobody knew who, shot Henry Dreeson and Enoch Wiley. In front of Grantville's synagogue. During an attack on it. Which the police weren't there to handle because of a demonstration against the Leahy Medical Center. A demonstration that turned violent.
Hanau, March 5, 1635
"The rumors of a pogrom in Grantville," the Hanauer rabbi said.
"I rode down as soon as it came in on the radio," David Kronberg said. "We have a good receiver at the post office now. Better, actually, than the SoTF administration's own. Sometimes they come down and listen to ours."
"How many?" the president of the congregation asked.
David knew what they meant. How many new martyrs to commemorate.
"Um, none. No deaths. Some minor injuries. Everyone will recover. The attackers never actually managed to break into the synagogue. Which is good, considering how many were gathered there for Purim."
"We heard there were many dead in Grantville yesterday."
"Yes. The casualty count was pretty high. But none of ours. Nobody knows how it connects together yet. At the hospital, several of the Grantville Polizei and many more of the attackers. None of ours were there at all. In front of the synagogue, yes, there was an attack against it. The mayor and the Calvinist minister came to calm the crowd. Somebody—no one knows who, yet, shot them. Another up-timer who attacked the attackers, riding a hog, was killed with an axe. A piano, one of the great harpsichords they have, fell on the minister's wife and broke her leg."
A question.
"No. I have no idea why she was there with a piano. None at all. It was the Christian sabbath. They say that people came pouring out of the churches. But not to attack. To defend. All the rest of the dead were the attackers."
"A hog? In front of the synagogue?"
"Not a pig. A Harley."
David realized that didn't help.
He tried again. "A motorcycle."
Still no resonance in Hanau.
"A horseless carriage with only two wheels. Like the ATVs they showed during Mayor Dreeson's tour, cut in half. If anyone among you bothered to go look."
He sighed. He shouldn't have said that.
"They ride astride them, as if they were horses."
Another question.
"No, I have no idea at all why they call them hogs. But they are machines, not swine." Of that, at least, David was certain.
"If they never broke into the synagogue, how come some of ours were injured?"
"They were the Hebraic Defense League members who came to fight off the attackers."
A lot of questions, all at once.
"A better question," someone said, might be, "what is the proper commemoration of gentile martyrs killed while opposing an attack on a synagogue?"
The Hanauer rabbi sighed. "I expect that will occupy many a discussion for a long time to come."
"On Purim," someone else added. "Who is our Mordechai? Our Esther?"
"If you mean the Hebraic Defense League," David answered, "I think it has about fifty members. Most of them Sephardim. Which, if you ask me, ought to give us something to think about. But no Esther, as far as I know."
"Rebecca Abrabanel," someone else said. "Even if she was not present, she is the new Esther."
The Hanauer rabbi sighed. He did not care for visionaries.
Grantville, mid-March 1635
"Wes," Preston Richards said. "I've got some bad news for Clara, I'm afraid."
"What now?"
"Well, we've been tracing the men who were killed in the demonstration out at the hospital on the fourth. It's pretty slow. But we did manage to figure out that most of the guys that Bryant Holloway brought in came through his fire department training contacts. So the fire watch wardens from towns around have each sent someone down to take a look in the morgue."
"And? Is it doing any good?"
"Fourteen identifications so far. But that leads me to the bad news. One of the corpses belongs to a boy—young man—named Dietrich Hamm, from Badenburg. Pretty well known as a malcontent. Not about anything in particular, most of the time. Just always unhappy about life in general. The kind of kid who carries a grudge against fate. But he was Clara's nephew. So—we'll need the names of next of kin, if you can give them to us. We can take it from there. Arrange for him to be sent back to his family. She doesn't have to do anything, considering that she's pregnant. And that you've got problems of your own with Bryant and Lenore."