“Arthur and Bev will take your two. Joel and Gigi will take the boys.”
Howard knew that, too. He just, well, somehow, knew things these days. Not things about the business, or whether Liz wanted him to pick up pork chops for dinner. For those, he still had to calculate an estimate or pick up the phone. Things he needed to know.
Chapter 6:
“I Shall Nonetheless Do This”
Franconia, December, 1633
“Where are we?” Maydene Utt asked. Maydene, the “large one” of the three up-time auditors provided to the Franconian administration by Arnold Bellamy, always had a tendency to take charge of things.
“Somewhere northeast of a town called Gerolzhofen. That was Gerolzhofen, about a mile and a half back. The town that we had to go around. At least, according to Johnnie F.’s map, it should have been. Locked up tighter than a drum behind its walls. ‘See us on your way back, after we’ve verified your credentials’.”
Willa Fodor, the second up-time member of the audit team, brushed the snowflakes off her eyelashes. Willa was navigating. The down-timer sergeant of the guards who had been sent out with them was very efficient in a lot of ways, but he had never learned to read an up-time map. Worse, he was from somewhere in Brunswick, so had no more idea about where he might be in rural Franconia than anyone else in the group.
They had had a professional guide until three days ago, but he had come down with what looked to Maydene like walking pneumonia and she had insisted on leaving him in a place called Volkach, where the group had reserved rooms at the inn for two weeks. They had seen a whole bunch of villages since Volkach. They stopped at the bigger ones, where the Amtmaenner or district officers were headquartered. Most of the places had been willing to provide a boy to lead them to the next town or village on their list. They had collected oaths of allegiance in Schwebheim and Grettstadt, Donnersdorf and Sulzheim, with no problems. But, for some reason, no one in Sulzheim had been willing to guide them to Gerolzhofen. And Gerolzhofen had been locked down. Nobody outside the walls. No people. No pigs. No chickens. Definitely no welcome for the NUS administrators.
“Where are we going?” Estelle McIntire, the third auditor, thought that was the more important question, given the way the flakes were starting to come down.
“Someplace called Dingolshausen. That’s the last stop on this route. Michelau is beyond it, but the people from Michelau and Neuhof came up to Donnersdorf and did their oath-taking there. Bless their beautiful hides. Then we double back not quite to Gerolzhofen and head south to someplace called Neuses am Sand and then someplace called Prichsenstadt. And from Prichsenstadt, we go back to Gerolzhofen and see if they’ll let us in. Charming place, according to Meyfarth. They burned more than two hundred fifty ‘witches’ about fifteen years ago. We’ve got to go back by way of Luelsfeld, again, though. Too many people had gone to market in Kitzingen the day we went through there. Then we go back to Volkach and from there we cross to Astheim and go home to Wuerzburg. The guys gave us an easy run, comparatively speaking. Chivalry and all that, I suppose.”
“We’ll let the army deal with Gerolzhofen.” Maydene’s voice was decisive. “The kind of behavior they are showing is Scott Blackwell’s problem, not ours.”
Willa rubbed her eyes again. “If Johnnie F.’s map is right, the left fork here has to be the one to Dingolshausen. We’re lucky that it’s cold enough that the snowflakes aren’t melting and making the ink run.” She shook them off the map.
“It’s just delightful that something is going right today,” Maydene said. “I am duly grateful.”
Willa kept on. “The right fork has to go to Neuses am Sand, so the worst thing that can happen is that we take the oaths out of order. We can fib about that, in a pinch. It’s a loose-leaf notebook. Let’s move somewhere. This snow is starting to come down really hard. We need to get inside.”
Maydene felt like the strap of her rifle was about to cut through the muscles of her right shoulder. Wrapping her reins around the saddle pommel, she reached up to transfer it over to the left. A sudden gust of wind blew a clear spot amidst the snowflakes, giving her about forty feet more vision than any of them had had for nearly an hour. The rifle came into her hand and she shot. In an instant, the three women were in the center of a circle formed by the guard company. Every hill along the roadside seemed to erupt men out of the snow.
Maydene’s shot was hurried. She missed her target, but hit the man next to him in the shoulder. He spun around, striking one of his mates with his own gun and tangling up another.
* * *
Watching, Gerhardt Jost was impressed. He wouldn’t have thought such a severe-looking middle-aged woman could react that quickly to an ambush. In fact, she’d reacted so well that the bishop’s mercenaries were startled. And she was already jacking another bullet into the chamber.
That meant the bishop’s men had lost the advantage of surprise. Already, the up-timers’ guards were starting to fire. So was one of other American women. The third had fallen off her horse, when the beast started from the gunfire, but Jost didn’t think she was badly injured.
None of the guards were shooting very accurately, true. But neither were the bishop’s mercenaries. It was enough for them to simply be firing at all.
An ambush had just become a small pitched battle.
“Now?” asked Rudolph Vulpius quietly. The old man seemed to be practically quivering with eagerness.
“Not quite,” answered Gerhardt. “Let the responsibility for the bloodshed be clear.”
He paused, while another loud and very ragged not-quite-volley was exchanged. And, once again, was impressed. The big American woman was still on her horse, and took down her target with her second shot. No accident, that one. The mercenary was smashed into the snow with a bullet square in his chest, that punched right through his breastplate.
“And we don’t want to seem that conveniently positioned,” he added.
Old Vulpius grunted, but didn’t argue the point. Jost waited for perhaps another ten seconds, watching the battle taking place below the ridge. After two of the up-timers’ guards had been shot down, he decided everything was well enough established.”
“Shoot!” he bellowed.
The villagers had been waiting, every bit as impatiently as their council head. An instant later, dozens of shots struck the bishop’s men, cutting through them like a scythe. At that range, even with mostly old muskets, the villagers were quite accurate. They didn’t have the skill of Jaegers, but they were no strangers to firearms.
It helped-a great deal-that Jost’s cold-blooded delay had allowed all of the bishop’s men to come out of hiding and expose themselves.
That first big volley fired, of course, the villagers were out of action for a time. Their weapons couldn’t be reloaded quickly.
Jost was not concerned. The volley had hammered the mercenaries so badly that they were now completely confused. But the up-timers’ guards were firing more accurately. And the big American woman, still stubbornly perched on her horse, took down another man. Jost took a moment to admire the horse.
The outcome was no longer in doubt at all.
One of the mercenaries tried to flee. Jost brought up his rifle and felled him. Then, smiling thinly, jacked another round into the chamber. He adored his American rifle, that had come to him through circuitous means.
Two more tried to flee. Jost killed them long before they could reach shelter.
By then, the villagers had reloaded. With more discipline that he’d expected, they waited for the command.
“Shoot!” he bellowed again.
A few seconds later, it was all over. A wounded mercenary staggered toward the safety of the woods, but Jost put a stop to that.
He rose to a crouch. “Best I vanish now,” he murmured to Vulpius. “I certainly don’t want to explain exactly how I came in possession of my rifle.”
The old man nodded. Big as he was, Jost vanished into the trees like a wraith.
* * *
“No,” the old man said. “They aren’t bandits.”
“Then what are they?” Maydene asked with exasperation. Their company had two dead guards, four injured guards, Estelle with a splint on her leg (she had fallen off her horse, but kept hold of her gun), two horses that had to be put down, and six horses that would have to be left behind. The villagers-this was Frankenwinheim, a little spot off the main road-said that they would be happy to nurse the horses back to health. Maydene wondered if they would also “forget” to bring them back to Wuerzburg until after spring planting, but that wasn’t her problem.
“Hatzfeld’s men, I think. The bishop. His brother is a general for the Austrians, you know. They don’t like it that their move to get a lot of Franconia on grants from Ferdinand II has been blocked. This bunch came in through the woods. Moved into Dingolshausen about a week ago. Don’t bother going the rest of the way. There’s nobody there to take an oath. So we moved everybody out of the village here, up into temporary shelter in the hills. The people in Gerolzhofen wouldn’t let us in. The last couple of years have been so bad that we couldn’t afford to pay for the right to take sanctuary inside the walls. This year’s harvest is decent enough, but we haven’t sold it yet, so we haven’t paid. Stinking, greedy, townsmen. We’ve been watching the road. If it hadn’t been for the snow, this wouldn’t have happened. We couldn’t see well enough to know that you were coming. My apologies, gracious lady.”
“No apologies necessary. What’s your name?”
“Rudolph Vulpius. I’m the head of our village council.” He indicated an old woman sitting on the other side of the room. “This is my wife, Kaethe.”
Maydene nodded to her. “How many?” she asked.
“How many what?”
“Hatzfeld’s men, I mean.”