“That’ll be the Freiherr and his family, trying to escape,” Blackwell said, calmly. “He’s got one kid, if I remember right. A boy, somewhere around eight years old.”
The soldiers in the lead were trying to cut their way through the mob at the gate. One of them fired a wheel-lock pistol. A farmer stumbled to the ground, spilling a weapon that looked like a scythe blade attached to a long pole.
A big man stepped out from behind a tree, to their right. A Jaeger, from his clothing. He was perhaps sixty yards from the battle raging at the front gate. His rifle came up-
Johnnie F. hissed. That was no-
Crack!
The soldier who’d fired the wheel-lock was swept from his saddle. “That’s an up-time gun,” Johnnie F. muttered.
“Sure is,” agreed Scott. He leaned over his saddle and spit on the ground. “Don’t think we’ll ask where he got it, neither.”
Easily, fluidly, the big Jaeger worked the bolt on the rifle and brought it back up to his shoulder.
The Freiherr had now broken away from the soldiers and was driving his horse toward the road.
Crack! Down he went. Within seconds, half a dozen farmers had surrounded his body and were hacking him into pieces with axes and those ungainly-looking scythe-weapons.
Johnnie F. heard a woman scream. Several of the ram’s people had seized the reins of the Freiherr’s wife’s horse and were dragging the mount to a halt. He saw another farmer stab her in the side with a long spear. The woman screamed again and slid off the saddle.
Johnnie F. saw that she’d had her son perched on the saddle in front of her. The boy landed on the ground along with her. But, scampering like mad, he evaded the axes and scythes that were already butchering his mother and made his escape under the horse’s belly. Once clear of the knot of farmers around his mother, he raced for the nearby woods.
Eight or nine years old, sure enough. His face was pale, his eyes wide, his mouth open in a soundless scream.
Johnnie F. saw the big Jaeger tracking the boy with the rifle.
“Oh, Jesus.”
Crack! Then, after jacking another round into the chamber, he fired again. His first shot had probably killed the boy already. The second one, striking the prone little body, was just to make sure.
“Ever read much about peasant rebellions?” asked Scott, almost idly.
Unable to speak, Johnnie just shook his head.
“Well, I did.” Blackwell pulled out a small notepad and gestured with it to the burning castle. “This is pretty much SOP. Burn down the nobleman’s castle-making damn sure to eliminate all the tax and other records-and kill him and his entire family. Women, children, babies and all. Don’t leave a single one of them alive, who can inherit. If somebody does, it’ll have to be a cousin. Somebody who doesn’t really know much about the area or the people in it.”
Johnnie F.’s stomach heaved, but he managed to fight it down.
Scott started writing in the notepad. “Okay, scratch Mitwitz,” he said. “I have a feeling this is going to make my job a lot easier. You watch, Johnnie. Once the word spreads, you’ll see most of the other Freiherren pulling in their horns. Right quick.”
He chuckled harshly. “Some of them’ll probably come racing into Wuerzburg and Bamberg, to put themselves and their families under our protection. Which we’ll be glad to give them, of course. But we won’t lift a finger to stop the farmers from torching their abandoned castles. As far as I’m concerned-speaking as a military man-the only good Schloss is a dead Schloss.”
Then, glancing over at Johnnie F., he shook his head. “Yeah, it’s ugly as all hell. On the other hand, when it’s over and done, I don’t expect the casualties to come to more than a few hundred people. You know how many people these stinking worthless knights and nobles massacred a century ago, when they put down the last big farmers’ rebellion?”
“Somewhere around a hundred thousand, people say.”
“Yeah. The number might be exaggerated, of course. But even it is, so what? Call it fifty thousand. That’s still a slaughter about two orders of magnitude greater than anything the ram will do.”
Blackwell’s tone of voice was cold. He pointed with the notepad to the small corpse in the distance. “Do you think the knights gave any more mercy to farmers’ kids? Dream on.”
Johnnie F. didn’t argue the matter. He agreed with Scott, in the abstract. He just didn’t, personally, have the stomach for it.
Looking away from the corpse, his eyes came to the boy’s killer. The big Jaeger had his up-time rifle slung back over his shoulder, and was returning Johnnie’s gaze with a level stare of his own.
It was not a threatening stare. But there was no give in it, at all. Not a trace of an apology in those eyes.
“Maybe this will end it, once and for all,” Johnnie F. said. Hoping.
“That’s what I figure. Let’s go. One Schloss down, and good riddance.”
Franconia, July, 1634
Freiherr Fuchs von Bimbach looked at his chancellor. Dr. Lenz hoped that he wasn’t about to kill the messenger.
“Intolerable,” Bimbach said. “The idea that this upstart ‘State of Thuringia-Franconia’ as it calls itself made no attempt whatsoever to protect the castle at Mitwitz is an outrage.”
Lenz cleared his throat. “The Freiherr there,” he felt obliged to say, “is allied with you. Is actively in arms against their administration.”
He was fudging the tenses, here. But given Bimbach’s furious mood, Dr. Lenz thought it would be unwise to dwell on the fact that the Freiherr at Mitwitz was no longer an ally and was certainly no longer actively in arms. The Freiherr was, in fact, a corpse. More precisely, several pieces of a corpse.
“Nonetheless,” Fuchs von Bimbach orated, “the castle itself is a symbol of duly constituted legal authority. Which, basically, they simply gave over to these peasant hordes. Made no effort at all to turn them away from it. It appears from this report that their so-called ‘military administrator’ actually observed the destruction. Took notes on it, even.”
He got up from his chair and paced around the table. “This is simply more than we can tolerate. There has to be a way to bring these up-timers to their heels. And the ram along with them, since they are tolerating its depredations. Openly tolerating them. Some way to bring down both at once, Lenz! Both at once!”
Chapter 14:
“Call Off The Ram, Or They Die”
Bamberg, late July, 1634
“Herr Meyfarth.” He looked up from the pedestal desk at which he was preparing the Sunday sermon.
“Herr Meyfarth.” The knock at his door was repeated; from the voice, it was his landlady.
“Yes, yes. I’m coming.” He tried to keep the impatience out of his voice. It was one of the worst things about him, he knew. When he was working, he hated to be interrupted. Yet the nature of the work of a parish pastor was that it was full of interruptions.
“Someone is here to speak with you.”
“Thank you,” he said absentmindedly. “I’m coming now.” He wiped his pen, but left the book open.
He did not recognize the men, but they appeared to know him. Scarcely surprising in itself; a pastor was naturally noticed when he went through the streets. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. What is it?”
“If you could come? A difficult birth.”
He did not recall that any of those women who had been attending his sermons was expecting a child right now. Possibly, always possibly, someone from one of the families who had fallen away under persecution and were ashamed to come back. In any case, an innocent child in need of baptism.