Ring of Fire III Read online

  She had the absolutely irrational thought that Duke Bernhard was taller than she. How unusual. How...irrelevant. She squelched the thought firmly and returned her attention to making social conversation with the local worthies.

  * * *

  Five days later, the negotiations came to a satisfactory conclusion in the form of a preliminary prenuptial settlement. The details remained to be worked out, of course. Still, it would be a match firmly based on substantial mutual advantages, not to mention a shared appreciation of the value of real estate.

  True, Bernhard was Lutheran, while Claudia was Catholic. Still, as she pointed out, the Vienna Habsburgs could scarcely complain, considering that they had been approaching the point of offering Cecelia Renata as an option. Given the religious situation in the lands they would be governing—in a real sense, the disparity of cult might even be counted as an advantage. As for the children, they would simply follow the normal arrangement—the girls would be baptized in her faith and the boys in his. That made no problems for Tyrol—Claudia’s children by Leopold were the heirs there.

  * * *

  “Your Grace,” Matt Trelli said. “Marcie and I really think that it would be a good idea for you to leave us—well, me, at least—here in Swabia. From what Tony Adducci says, the main thrust of the plague will come here in the southwest, not in Tyrol. We just—well, after Kronach and everything, I just feel like I need to be part of the prevention team that the Swiss and Duke Bernhard are putting together.”

  The regent looked at him. “You work for me and you will return in accordance with your employment contract. You signed it voluntarily.”

  Matt backed out of the room.

  De Melon hurried after him. “Don’t do anything rash. She intends to place you as the head organizer of the plague fighters in Tyrol. This is something I have heard. It is not unimportant there. Given the heavy, constant, overland commercial traffic, it will be a challenge to maintain the quarantine without damaging the economy.”

  “Matt, listen to me,” Marcie said that evening. “Okay, I get it. She didn’t explain her reasons. That’s sort of how people who were born to run things work. They don’t know that they have to explain. Actually, they don’t have to explain. They might get more cooperation if they did, but—honestly, Matt. They’re just not up-timers. You can’t expect a down-time aristocrat to run her bailiwick the same way Steve Salatto managed things in Bamberg. Anyway—think of it as sort of like being in the army. You couldn’t have backed out of that, either, just because you didn’t like some order Cliff Priest gave you.”

  Chapter Five

  Besançon, late February 1635

  The air was crisp. The sky was blue. The Doubs river wended its twisty way below the city. Bernhard looked down from the site of his future, still incomplete citadel. It was here, above the imperial city itself, which was now his capital city—his—not inside the medieval walls, that he would assume his new title. His residence was in the Palais Granvelle below. He had requisitioned it. It was a gorgeous palace, much better than anything the Wettins had owned in Weimar. The Granvelle family had gone bankrupt long since, in any case.

  Most of his garrison officers were quartered across the river, in the Quartier Battant, below the Griffon bastion, in the Champagney mansion, which Nicholas Perrot de Granvelle had built for his widowed mother as her dower seat. Fleetingly, he thought about the latest projected cost estimates that Faulhaber had provided for his new citadel and wondered if constructing the luxurious mansions had contributed to the Granvelle bankruptcy.

  Besançon was not just defensible. It was beautiful. Residing here would be a pleasure. There were worse reasons for choosing the site of a national capital.

  Bernhard glanced around, thoroughly enjoying the pageantry. Even a general could take a day off, now and then.

  * * *

  “Grand Duke of the County of Burgundy?” Kanoffski said to Poyntz. “Now, that’s a truly gemlike combination of words.”

  “Why not, if it makes him happy? I understand that he set a lot of genealogists to work. It appears that he is legitimately descended from someone named Jean de Nevers who was count of this region a couple of hundred years ago.”

  “Ultimately,” Kanoffski answered, “we all descend from Adam. How many other people now alive descend from this Jean de Nevers?”

  “Dozens, if not hundreds. What difference does it make? None of the rest of them have a garrison in Besançon.”

  “None of them are marrying a Tuscan grand duchess, either. Grand Duchess and Regent of the County of Tyrol. What odds will you give me that he picked it because he wanted to bring a title at least equal to hers into this marriage?”

  “I’m putting my money on saying he picked it because it’s more grandiose than his brothers’ titles. A thousand USE dollars, if we can find some actual written evidence of what went into his decision, one way or the other, of course.”

  * * *

  “The time has come,” Bernhard said that evening. “Considering that one of my brothers is now the prime-minister elect of the USE and another is still Gustavus’ regent in the Upper Palatinate, it seems a propitious moment to see if I can pry an apology out of the old goat and get him to recognize my title and my conquests.”

  “Apology? From the emperor?”

  “I hear rumors that he apologized to John Hepburn, nearly two years ago. Shrewd move. The encyclopedias say that in the other world, Hepburn was so insulted by what Gustavus said about his Catholic faith that he switched over to the French also. In this world, though, he’s garrisoning Ulm for the USE. If Hepburn can get an apology, then so can I.”

  Kanoffski wrote “apology” on the list he was making.

  “If I am to concentrate on the challenges coming at me here in the southwest for the time being, which I think that I must, I need a, a modus vivendi with the USE.” Bernhard raised a bushy, nearly black eyebrow. “Not that I intend to let Gustavus guess that I need it. The whole matter must be presented as if I were doing him a favor.”

  Kanoffski nodded and wrote modus vivendi on his list.

  “I want de Melon present when we’re working out our offer, since Claudia left him behind to work out the details of our own agreement. I want that finalized—signed, sealed, and delivered—before I show my hand to Magdeburg.

  “Then, I think, we need to talk to Sattler again. See if you can get him down here.”

  Schwarzach, March 1635

  “I can’t see that the assassinations in Grantville will have any direct impact on our concerns,” Bernhard said. “The up-timers I hired were very upset about the deaths, though. They requested permission to hold a memorial service. The chancellor radioed me for approval. I told him to go ahead, and make it a good one. Claudia’s up-time hires are all Catholic—not just Trelli and Abruzzo, whom she brought to Schwarzach, but all the rest—so they did a requiem mass in Bolzen with Urban VIII’s dispensation, but none of mine are Catholics. Still, I have to say that the Papists know how to put on a good show, so I got her to radio to the ‘Cardinal Protector’ in Magdeburg and obtain permission for the chancellor to roust them out in Besançon. The city got into the spirit of things. They produced chants, a procession, cloth of gold vestments, and waving banners for those two old Presbyterians.”

  Poyntz snorted.

  Moscherosch nodded. “Excellent publicity.”

  “Next.”

  “Brahe, and the SoTF forces from Fulda, are chasing through the Province of Upper Rhine, in pursuit of Butler, Devereux, Geraldin, McDonnell, and their dragoons. Ferdinand of Bavaria, the archbishop of Cologne, ran out of funds to pay them. Duke Maximilian has hired them for Bavaria, to replace Werth and von Mercy. They have to get across Swabia to reach Bavaria.”

  The bushy eyebrow went up higher than usual. “So?”

  “Horn has suggested coordination. He doesn’t want to see them reach Max. Neither, I presume, do we.”

  “We don’t. Send Raudegen to Horn, with powers of attorney to
act on my behalf. Make sure that the powers-that-be in Magdeburg are aware that sweetness and light are overcoming the powers of darkness in this matter.”

  Von Rosen smirked.

  * * *

  “Tyrol insists that the Vorarlberg and other Habsburg possessions of Vorderösterreich are not negotiable. Additionally, at Grand Duke Bernhard’s death, if he and Claudia de Medici do not leave mutual heirs of their bodies, male or female, the Sundgau and Breisgau, now in possession of the County of Burgundy, will revert to her sons by the late Leopold von Habsburg, archduke of Austria and count of Tyrol.”

  De Melon’s voice was calm, but insistent.

  “Agreed.”

  De Melon looked surprised.

  Bernhard shrugged his shoulders. “What’s the point of trying to hold on to the lands I have gained if I don’t leave children? Wilhelm’s a commoner now. He has three healthy sons and Eleonore is pregnant again, but he has declared that even though she has chosen to keep her birth title, their children will take his rank and be commoners also. Little Wettins. The up-time encyclopedia says that Albrecht’s marriage in the other world remained childless; he went ahead and married Dorothea in spite of that. Ernst will inherit much of Saxe-Altenburg’s property when he marries little Elisabeth Sofie. If they go overboard and have eighteen offspring in this world, as they did in the other, I can only say that they will deserve to have to find a way support that many children themselves.”

  “What about a sweetener?” de Melon suggested. “Throw in the agreement of both parties that if the two of you leave no surviving children, aside from what reverts to Tyrol and will thus be an integral part of a USE state anyway, the County of Burgundy as a single entity will become a USE province.”

  Bernhard raised that eyebrow.

  De Melon spread his hands wide. “Hey, it was just a suggestion.”

  “It’s a damned good one,” Kanoffski said. “Carrots with your sticks, Bernhard. We’ll all be dead by the time it might happen. Offer Gustavus some carrots.”

  Magdeburg, late March 1635

  “Modus vivendi,” Mike Stearns marveled. “Four months ago, who’d’a thunk it?”

  Wilhelm Wettin just shook his head. “Not I.”

  “It’s a genuine offer,” Sattler said. “I sat in on almost all of the discussions, as did de Melon. Including their reiteration of the point about carrots.”

  Frank Jackson snorted. “Right now, Gustavus is simply slavering at the thought of carrot stew.”

  “Is there any point,” Hermann of Hesse-Rotenburg asked, “in mentioning to the emperor just how remote the possibility is that the County of Burgundy would ever revert to the USE? Claudia de Medici has an established reputation for fecundity. Bernhard’s parents produced eleven sons.”

  Sattler shook his head. “Not, I think, when the emperor’s succession is entirely dependent upon one rather small girl, with no prospect for more heirs.”

  “So.” Mike looked at Wettin. “Your brother, your call. You’re the incoming prime minister. Rebecca insists that I say this. If you absolutely can’t live with this proposal that Bernhard has made, for whatever punctilious points of honor that seem to be so important down-time, tell me now.”

  Wettin put his hand flat on the table. “Follow it up.”

  “All right, then. Sattler, you and de Melon go back to get this finalized. Stop by Bolzen and get the Tyrol proposal finalized, too. TEA has put the Monster at your disposal. Not as an act of charity, I regret to say. I hope the budget office is really into heavy short-term investment for the prospect of long-term solid gains.”

  Bolzen, March 1635

  “If We do not even try for more,” the regent said, “then We certainly will not receive it. We have not observed that the USE is in the practice of distributing bonuses or free gifts. Moreover, if one perceives the matter properly, it could almost be said that We deserve this.”

  Even Dr. Bienner looked skeptical.

  The regent persisted. She was nothing if not tenacious.

  “There is no precedent for this in the organization of the USE provinces,” Sattler protested.

  “Make one.”

  “There is no provision for this in the USE constitution.”

  “Amend it.”

  “I am far from certain that Prime Minister Stearns will, under any circumstances, consent to the admission of a state which has a hereditary governor’s office, settled on your children and the heirs of their bodies, independently of whether or not titles of nobility should at some future date be abolished.”

  “Who runs the USE? The prime minister or the emperor?”

  Sattler didn’t feel like pushing the point just then. He was fully aware that in the view of Gustavus Adolphus, his desk was the one that held the sign that proclaimed “The buck stops here.” He was equally aware that Stearns was not fully with that program.

  He was tired of starting to think in up-time terms and phrases.

  Overall, he would find it a relief when Wettin took office in June.

  * * *

  “The threat of a plague epidemic has weakened the governments of many of the smaller entities along Swabia’s border with Bavaria. We fear that Duke Maximilian might come creeping in. We have already extended Tyrol’s protection to Irsee, to Ottobeuren, to Füssen, to Mindelheim, to Roggenburg. We would have been happy to do the same for the prince-bishopric of Augsburg, but Margrave Georg Friedrich of Baden forestalled Us by doing the same first.”

  Claudia paused, a dissatisfied expression on her face. She hadn’t thought that the old man was still capable of carrying out a preemptive strike.

  “Having thus sheltered them from foreign dangers, We feel it is only reasonable that they be incorporated into the new ‘state’ of Tyrol rather than into the Province of Swabia that was proposed in June 1634 at the Congress of Copenhagen.”

  Philipp Sattler, on behalf of the USE, somehow did not see the matter the same way. He particularly did not see it the same way when she offered to extend Tyrol’s “benevolent protection” to his home town of Kempten.

  Sometimes, even Claudia de Medici did not get everything she wanted.

  “God be thanked,” Matt Trelli said to Marcie in the privacy of their rooms. “I didn’t go to all those little abbeys and manors and things to snitch them up for Tyrol. She told me that I was going to organize the local authorities to be in a better position to cope if plague passed the quarantine lines. I don’t want to go down in history as a lackey of the imperialist forces. The damned woman’s a shark.”

  Eventually, however, Sattler completed the commission with which he had left Magdeburg. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Tyrol and Burgundy, both. He had even managed to sneak a few protective provisions into the document establishing a new Tyrolese regency council for Claudia’s sons.

  “So far, so good,” he said to de Melon as he packed his briefcase for the return to Magdeburg. “But if you ask me, she’ll be back. This won’t be the end of it. Not tomorrow and not next year, but that woman could play the starring role in some story, perhaps one of these ‘movies,’ that Herr Piazza was telling me about. “The Tomato That Ate Cleveland,” I believe was the title. I am not certain why Herr Piazza refers to the regent of Tyrol as a tomato.”

  Epilogue

  Some Months Later

  Rebecca and Amalie Elisabeth contemplated the newest map of the area that would have become a nice neat USE Province of Swabia if real life had not intervened.

  “It looks like knotted fringe,” Amalie said. “Down at the bottom of the map, all the way from the Rhine to the Bavarian border, like a table runner hanging over the edge.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “No. I think it’s more like up-time macramé. I saw some in Donna Bates’ house—the woman whose daughter has married Prince Vladimir—back the first year or so after the Ring of Fire, when I was living in Grantville. The maker starts with a lot of strings fastened to a dowel or rod. She brings them down and knots them, over and over, to make a pretty de
sign.”

  She shook her head again. “Poor Michael.”

  Upward Mobility

  Charles E. Gannon

  June 1634

  “We are almost at the border of Grantville, Herr Miro.”

  Estuban Miro tried to nod an acknowledgement, but the motion was lost amidst the greater swayings and jouncings imparted by the wagon’s passage across yet another set of muddy ruts. Miro had heard of the wonderful roads in and around Grantville, of their many improvements, but this was not one of those major thoroughfares. Political unrest in Franconia had peaked in the past few months, prompting the regional teamsters to give it a wide berth. Ultimately, that had meant a final approach on this narrow, twisting pike that pushed into Grantville out of Hersfeld, well to the west.

  Despite the presumed safety of the route, the driver had been slightly more alert the last few miles. Just south of the light forest that hemmed in this modest lane, the road from troubled Suhl wound its way north into Grantville. Indeed, according to the driver, even along this pike, recent reports of—

  There were sudden, sharp noises in the brush. Cracking branches and the unmistakable rustling of rapid, even violent motion. Miro’s hand went to his dagger, a move which prompted the driver to scrabble for the rude ox prod cum cudgel that he kept at his side.

  As Miro tracked the approaching noise, he noticed a small glade just beyond the treeline to the east. This was an excellent ambush point for bandits, particularly since the slight dogleg in this stretch of the road hid it from both its east and west continuations.

  The low brush seemed to burst outward at them; Miro drew his dagger, went into a crouch—and froze. A small, wooly ram—a merino?—leaped out into the roadway. Right behind it—generating a much larger explosion of sundered underbrush—was an equally immature ram of much less prepossessing appearance. The horns of both animals were small and ineffectual, but evidently spring had awakened their nascent rutting aggression. Or at least it had so affected the pursuer, who made up for his lack of comeliness with an inversely proportionate allotment of spunk. Charging stoutly, he routed the other ruminant eastward. Then, with what seemed a singularly defiant—and self-satisfied—glance at the wagon and its occupants, the unbecoming ramlet trotted further westward along the road.