Botvidsson nodded. "A highway for our God into northern Alsace." His mouth quirked. "A highway to the oil fields at Pechelbronn, which should be of great value, given what has happened at Wietze."
Brahe nodded, his manner a little abstracted. "Of great value to us, or at least something we need to keep out of the hands of the French. Do we need to talk to the count of Hanau-Lichtenberg?"
"Already done. He's willing to agree to the same terms as the Brunswickers have done in regard to the exploitation at Wietze."
Brahe nodded again, this time with satisfaction. "Remind me. What's the place called now?"
"Merkwiller. Or Merckweiler, if you prefer the German spelling."
"Are we getting any support from Fulda?" Stenbock asked.
Botvidsson shook his head. "Jenkins only has the one regiment there. He'll try to send a few 'observers' with us, for at least part of the campaign. Major Utt himself and a couple of the other up-timers, for a month or so. They're already on their way. I don't think we can reasonably ask or expect any more from him. It's not as if he doesn't have problems of his own."
The only additional question anyone asked was, "When?"
"Tomorrow," Brahe answered. "I have plans in place, of course."
Which he did. Of course. Envy might be a sin, but honest ambition and a desire to serve one's king well were not.
And an unexpected window of opportunity had opened up. He had planned for the contingency.
The other men scrambled out of the room. The next twenty-four hours would be very busy. Brahe smiled as he watched them go.
Envy was a sin. But perhaps one could reverse the king's estimate of one's abilities in comparison to those demonstrated by Lennart Torstensson, in which case envy would no longer be an immediate problem, there being no cause for it.
In the von Sickingen lands, near the Rhine Palatinate, May 1634
Jeffie Garand squirmed into a somewhat more comfortable position on a rock that had never been designed as a stool. Leaning over, he whispered to Eberhard, " 'Every dog has his day?' I can't believe that some down-timer said that."
"Montaigne did. General Brahe was just quoting him."
"Why do General Brahe and Major Utt sound like my high school history teacher?"
"They're trying to understand each other," Joel Matowski said. "Anyway, Major Utt's sister teaches English at the high school, so maybe he caught that teacherish attitude from her."
"Major Utt was a coach over in Fairmont before the Ring of Fire. He only got caught in the Ring because he was at the bait store with Allan Dailey that afternoon. Coaches shouldn't talk like Ms. Mailey."
"He'd graduated from college," Joel said. "I hadn't finished when the Ring hit, but it's true what they say—just going to college does something to you, in the way you think. Lots of coaches teach social studies to fill in their schedules. Mr. Samuels is the head of the social studies department now and he was the football coach before the Ring of Fire. Now hush."
Utt was looking at his toes, which were stretched out toward the campfire. "There was a shift in politics, at least in the English-speaking world, some time between the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution."
At a question from Lieutenant Duke Friedrich, he stopped to briefly define each of those and give its dates in the Other Time Line.
"Where was I? There was a shift from politics as a blood sport to politics as a gentleman's game. Most European monarchs stopped beheading their opponents—omitting the way the Hanoverians handled the Scottish Jacobites."
Another pause for explanations and definitions.
"Why? Hell, I'm not sure why. Maybe because of the shift of the major source of wealth, power, and influence from land, which is essentially static, to commerce, which is far more flexible and less limited, far more elastic and less static."
"What's elastic?" Ensign Duke Ulrich asked. He was ignored.
"Maybe, partly, possibly, it was also because the shift meant that other types of connection among people became more important and influential than that of family and hereditary succession. I can't give you an answer. I'm not sure that a meeting of the entire American Historical Association could have given you an answer."
"That conversation didn't exactly come to a conclusion," Eberhard said as he rolled himself up into his blanket.
"I expect it was meant to make us ask questions," Friedrich answered. "That's the sneaky thing about tutors. They're always trying to make a person think. Sometimes my mind gets absolutely exhausted just thinking about all the things they want me to think about."
"All we did today was walk," Ulrich complained the next evening.