Grantville Gazette-Volume XIII Read online

  As the afternoon passed, Yossie told stories of the trip east. He said something of the group he'd traveled with, but he carefully avoided all mention of religion. What seemed to interest Thomas most were stories of the smithies and glassworks he'd seen in the Spessart and in the Thüringerwald.

  In turn, Thomas told of the Harz mountains south of his home in Thale. He said nothing of his encounters with the war, his departure from Thale or his more recent flight. He'd hinted that he had a family, but he never mentioned them. Instead, he focused on his old smithy and the peaceful years before the war had come to his home.

  By the end of the afternoon they were working in silence, and they remained silent on the bus ride home. It had been a long hard day doing very strange work. Yossie was content to sit quietly on the bus and passively watch as it followed the road into Grantville.

  When he said goodbye to Thomas, Yossie was startled to realize that, for the first time in his life, he was not an alien Jew among Germans. Despite the gulf that separated them, he and Thomas were as similar as brothers when compared to the Grantvillers. They were two strangers in a very strange land.

  When Moses had named his son Gershem, which means "a stranger there," he was describing his experience in the land of Midian. Yossie wondered if Midian could possibly have been as strange to Moses as Grantville was to him.

  16th of Sivan, 5391 ( June 16, 1631 )

  By Tuesday of the next week, they had stripped almost everything from the upper end of the conveyor. Where it had once gone somewhere beyond the wall of cliffs that bordered the Ring of Fire, it now ended above a small hollow. From there to the cliffs, it had been reduced to bare ironwork, and parts of that had already been cut up.

  Yossie spent the morning assigned to work with an American woman named Gayle. He had heard rumors that one of the American miners was a woman, but that didn't prepare him for the fact. From a distance, he might not have known that she was a woman until he heard her voice. She was dressed like a man, in blue twill trousers just like the men of Grantville wore, and her helmet was no different from a man's.

  Gayle was an electrician, which meant that she worked with the mysteries of electricity. Yossie already knew that the Americans burned electricity in their lights. Apparently, the conveyors had also burned electricity. For the entire morning, Yossie helped Gayle disassemble the electric wires for a device Gayle called a conveyor drive motor.

  Every day, Yossie had been assigned to one of the Americans for at least an hour, and sometimes much longer. Ron had explained that he wanted the Americans and Germans to work together so that they would learn from each other, and he wanted to let the Germans try their hands at many different jobs.

  Yossie could see the wisdom in the American plan. At the same time, he felt awkward being paired with a woman. In the world he knew, it was improper for a man to touch a woman who was not his close relative, and even taking something from her hand or handing something to her was improper.

  The right way for a man to give something to a woman was to set it down somewhere within her easy reach. He expected her to do the same when passing tools to him. Again and again, Yossie was frustrated. Either there was no place to set what he was trying to give Gayle, or she would try to pass things directly to him.

  Gayle seemed mildly amused by his awkwardness. Several times, she asked him what was wrong, making it clear that she knew that he was embarrassed. Unfortunately, Yossie's rudimentary English and Gayle's rudimentary German didn't allow for any useful explanation.

  * * *

  After their lunch break, Thomas Schmidt called Yossie over. "You said you'd done some smith work? Do you want to be my helper?"

  "What help do you need?"

  "Herr Koch wants a smithy. They have some marvelous tools here. They even have saws that can cut iron and torches that can melt it. Those will wear out, though, and they say that they can't be replaced. If I can make tools to cut iron, I can replace them."

  Yossie followed Thomas past the towering iron structure that stood over the entrance to the mine. The Grantvillers called it the pit head. A low building next to it housed some kind of machine that made a constant low rumble.

  The building beyond the pit head had doors along one wall that were wide enough to drive a wagon through. Thomas walked around the end of the building to a newly built shed where a mixed group men were at work.

  "Here is our new forge," Thomas said, gesturing expansively. "It isn't much yet, but we will see what we can do."

  The smithy was roofed with the rippled metal that was used for so many buildings at the mine. A half-built chimney stood over a hearth that filled half of the open side of the shed. On the opposite side, there was a door into the larger building.

  "None of that is ready yet." Thomas said. "Come in here. This is the mine workshop. They have a bench and wonderful tools we can try using to make the tools we want."

  "What are we trying to make," Yossie asked. Rows of shelves filled one side of the room, and several strange iron machines stood on the floor.

  Thomas went to a bench along the back wall of the workshop. "Here is the problem," he said, picking up a brightly polished piece of silver. It was bent into a broad U shape, with a dull metal ribbon stretched across the opening and a black handle on one side. "This is one of their metal cutting saws. See how fine the teeth are? It is like a file cut into a slice the thickness of a ribbon."

  Thomas began to saw a rusty iron bar, and then paused after only a few strokes. "The trouble is," he said, "these saw blades are not made to be sharpened. They have hundreds of them, but when they are gone, they will have no way to do this kind of cutting. Here, finish this for me. Be careful with this beautiful saw."

  Yossie took the saw and set gingerly to work. The iron bar was as big around as his thumb and rusty, with an odd pattern of lumps along it. The saw teeth cut into the metal bar quickly once Yossie learned to bear down properly.

  "What are we making?" Yossie asked, after he'd cut halfway through.

  "Chisels," Thomas said. "They have some simple chisels, but to cut up the conveyor segments, we need bull-nosed cutting chisels. I think the Americans doubt I can cut wrought iron pieces that big. While we wait for the forge to be ready, we can do some work using these American tools."

  After Yossie had cut a foot-long chunk from the bar, Thomas showed him how to reposition the bar in the bench vise so Yossie could start a second cut. While Yossie sawed, Thomas set to work grinding the first piece to shape.

  "Stop," Thomas said, after Yossie had cut most of the way through a second piece. "Save the saw. You can break the bar now, just bend it back and forth." Then he smiled. "Did I tell you, my wife and I have moved into a house? We have said goodbye to the grounds of the Grantville fair."

  "What kind of house?" Yossie asked, after he'd broken the bar. Thomas had said "we" when speaking of his flight, but he'd never said a thing about his family.

  "It is not a whole house, just a room. The couple that live there had three children, but two were left behind by the Ring of Fire, so now we have the room those children lived in."

  The conversation ended while Thomas went back to grinding, but continued when Yossie finished cutting off the next piece. "How well do you communicate with your new landlord?" he asked.

  "Not well. They have a little phrase book, but most of the phrases are very strange." Thomas chuckled. "It's as if the book was printed for use by the ignorant sons of wealthy noblemen."

  "What do you mean?"

  "There are so many phrases for dealing with servants. It is all very polite and the servants are doing jobs I do not fully understand. How to tell your coach driver to stop, how to ask your servant for more food, how to tell a porter where to put your baggage. Still, the little book is useful. Here, let me show you how to use this grindstone."

  Yossie was fascinated by the grindstone. A touch of a little silver toggle on the machine would start or stop it. The stone was tiny compared to every grindstone he had
ever seen. When it was running, it spun incredibly fast, and when he touched his work-piece to the turning stone, the stream of sparks was as intense as a flame. He immediately began to think about how such a machine might be applied to type cutting.

  Thomas set to work with the saw while he let Yossie try to duplicate the chisels he'd ground. The most time consuming part of the job involved grinding the front third of each chisel to taper down to half of its original diameter. With that done, the final job was to grind a blunt triangular tip.

  "How is this?" Yossie asked, handing Thomas the result.

  "Not bad for a first effort, but the tip should be off center. The short edge sits in the groove you are cutting."

  It took two more tries before Thomas approved the result. "Good. After we case harden it and temper it, it should cut well. This iron the Americans call rebar seems to be very good stuff, but we will learn the truth when we put it to the fire."

  Yossie understood case hardening and tempering. He'd helped harden and temper many type punches in the print shop in Hanau. Those punches had been tiny compared to the chisels he and Thomas were making, but like the chisels, they were made made to cut metal.

  "Why are we making so many chisels?"

  "You only need one chisel if you have a grindstone to sharpen it every time it gets dull, but when you are up in the hills trying to cut one of those conveyors, will you take this grindstone with you? A bundle of spare chisels is what you want." Thomas paused. "How are you getting on with your landlord?"

  "It is easier now that two of my group have left." Yossie said.

  "They found another house?"

  "No, the two merchants I came with decided to buy a load of stuff these Americans don't value. Now, they're on a trip selling it so they can buy livestock to bring back."

  "Where will they find any buyers? These Americans have wonders, but who today has money to buy? And where will they find livestock? The foragers have stripped the Saale valley."

  "Things are better to the west," Yossie said. "They went over the hills to Hildburghausen, we met a merchant there on our trip east. If there is no stock to be had there, they may have to travel as far as Neustadt. There is a big cattle market there."

  "I wish them luck in their venture," Thomas said. "This town has too many unused pastures. The open land around this mine could probably support a good herd."

  "That was our thought exactly," Yossie said. "There's idle land above Deborah, too. They say it's an old mine pit that was filled in, but it has a good fence around it."

  Shortly after they went back to work, they were interrupted by one of the Americans stepping into the shop.

  "Tom, come," he said, and then gestured to Yossie. "You too."

  "What's going on?" Thomas asked.

  "Who knows?" someone said. "They didn't say."

  After they'd stood in the crowd for a minute, Thomas picked up the thread of their interrupted conversation. "So how are you getting on with your landlord?"

  "One of my companions knows some Latin, and so does our landlord's wife." Yossie hesitated. Paulette Adducci had explained that the reason she knew some Latin was because she was Catholic. The explanation didn't make much sense to Yossie, but he suspected that Thomas might be as bothered by the Adducci's Catholicism as by his own Judaism. "She has been trying to teach English to my sister and the other women who are with us."

  Someone in the crowd interrupted them. "Someone's coming!"

  There was a murmur of voices as they tried to make out who was there. Thomas complained that his eyesight wasn't what it had been, while Yossie couldn't see over the crowd. Two or three men on horseback became three and then two Scots mercenaries and an American as they got closer.

  As the horsemen rode up to the crowd, Ron Koch came out of the office. "Men," he began. "You know that we have something of value. Here at the mine, we have tons of iron, and in town we have other things. You also know about the war, about the armies that are loose in the land. We need to worry about how to defend ourselves against anyone who might try to take what we have."

  "The man is right," Thomas muttered. "If the Imperials find this place, they will strip it bare."

  Yossie nodded, mildly annoyed that he had missed some of what Ron was saying. ". . . so I will let him speak." Ron finished, turning to one of the Scots.

  "Who of you has before fired a gun?" the man asked.

  Thomas raised his hand, as did several others. Yossie had never held a gun, but neither had most of the others.

  "These Americans guns, they are strange, but they are wonderful," the Scot continued. "We have here one you can try. We can use it for practice so we waste not powder nor shot.

  "This last week, we saw a few small attacks on the north and east of Grantville. They were stragglers and foragers and we beat them. So long as small bands are all we see, Grantville is safe.

  "The trouble is, some of them get away. If they speak to their officers about Grantville, we may face a tercio. That would be two or three thousand men, half with guns. These Americans, they think they can win against such a force. Perhaps they can. It seems that every American man has at least one gun."

  Yossie nodded. His elderly landlord Randolph Adducci had at least two guns that he was aware of.

  "To be sure we win, we need to prepare. If the raiders come here to the mine, you will have to defend. If a tercio comes, every man must be ready to help. So try this toy gun. Learn how it works."

  The American stopped the Scotsman and said something to him. While he waited, Yossie recalled the text he had studied the night before with Rabbi Yakov. Yossie had complained that the opening chapters of the Torah portion for the week were some of the dullest in the whole Bible. The old rabbi's response was to point out the passage giving instructions for blowing the signal trumpets.

  "When an enemy comes into your land and you rise to war against him, sound a stuttering call on the trumpets," Yakov had translated. "You say that Parshas Behaaloscha begins with dull commandments to the Levites, but think. From this one dull mitzvah, we can infer that we are obliged to organize for self defense." Now, it seemed that they were doing exactly that.

  For the remainder of the afternoon, they took turns trying to shoot holes in a paper target. When it was his turn, Thomas insisted on learning how the toy gun worked. It didn't use powder, so there was no smoke or flame when a shot was fired. "Ah!" Thomas exclaimed, after the Scotsman had explained that the gun used air. "It is like shooting a cork out of a bellows!"

  "Aye," the Scotsman said. "But the balls, they are tiny."

  Yossie held back while Germans took their turns with the American gun. He understood his obligation to aid in defending the community, but he had no desire to violate the Christian law that Jews were forbidden to bear arms.

  The American eventually noticed that Yossie was hanging back and pointed at him. "You, come," he said, gesturing with one hand while he held the gun in the other. "Shoot."

  As Yossie nervously stepped forward to take the gun, one of the Scots looked at him sharply, and then turned to the American as if he was about to say something. Yossie was certain that the man had recognized that he was a Jew, but at the last moment, a baffled expression came over the Scotsman's face and he said nothing.

  Yossie's attempts to use the gun were no more successful than those of the Germans, but having never touched a gun before, his failure didn't bother him

  27th of Sivan, 5391 ( June 27, 1631 )

  Yossie's second full week at the mine went quickly, but it was filled with anxiety. His traveling companions Yitzach ben Zvi and Moische ben Avram had left town nearly two weeks ago. Every day of the past week, he had come home hoping for their return.

  Yossie's anxiety had been increased by the rumors he heard. Stories of troop movements to the north seemed to grow more urgent with each passing day. A week ago, there had been a few families a day arriving at the refugee center at the Grantville Fairground. Now, Yossie had heard that there were tens of fam
ilies a day. Now, there were stories of an army approaching from the north.

  Friday afternoon, the bus passed two groups of refugees in town. It was easy to see that they were new arrivals. Each group had an American guide, and they looked as disoriented as Yossie had been only a few weeks earlier.

  When the bus left the center of town to follow Buffalo Creek toward Deborah, Yossie saw what he took to be another refugee group ahead. As refugees went, they looked well off. One man was on horseback and they had a two-horse wagon and some livestock. After a moment, Yossie recognized Yitzach and Moische.

  "Stop the bus!" he yelled, grabbing his lunch pail. He leapt out as soon as the driver opened the door.