Ring of Fire

  "What are you doing?" hissed Dieter.

  "Tryin' to call home. I just hope Ellie's on the board, not your bit of talent."

  Spark spark spark—spark . . . spark . . . spark—spark spark spark . . .

  The battery died sometime after dawn. It had been a long night, and Len had no idea if the line to Grantville was intact. Or if anyone would hear it in between the sound of the switches.

  * * *

  The wagon train trundled forward toward the graf's ambush. From the slit window of their prison Len and Dieter watched, horrified and helpless. Oxen don't move fast. To Len, these seemed to be moving glacially. Sixteen heavy wagons especially built for transporting Torstensson's new gun barrels. Guns that could spell the difference in the war, neatly under canvas covers. And there didn't even seem to be any outriders. At the moment the up-grade was the image of tranquility. It was going to be murder. And the aftermath, if those guns got to the other side . . . would mean that the artillery advantage that the Swedish forces had enjoyed would be over for a while. Men, money and materiel still weighed on the side of Emperor Ferdinand.

  Len couldn't handle the waiting. The guards might come and beat him up but the hell with it. He yelled. So did Dieter, adding his bull-like young voice to Len's.

  No one came in. But the sound wasn't carrying to the wagons.

  Len saw the smoke-puff at the forest edge before hearing the gunshot. Saw the cuirassiers begin to charge out of the forest. Closed his eyes. He could hear the pop of pistols.

  The thin bright sound of trumpets made him open his eyes again. The pop of cuirassiers' pistols was replaced by the heavy, solid massed sound of shotguns. Lots of them. Looking at the wagons now, Len saw that the canvas—if it had ever been canvas—was ripped. Firing in massed volley from behind the rampart of cannon-barrels, the Grantville militia was tearing the Austrian cuirassiers apart. There was a red head in among those on the lead wagon. And riding down the hill from the direction of Saalfeld were the bonnets of Mackay's Scots.

  Len grinned at Dieter's bloody face. The young man grinned back. Len hoped Lilli wouldn't mind a couple of missing teeth. The two settled back to watch the Austrian raiders being shredded.

  * * *

  Len massaged his wrists, his mind in some turmoil. Ellie had not only left her switch-room but had actually kissed him. Well, that was when she and Dougal had kicked in the door to the caravan. Now, she stood and shook her head at the smashed ruins of the AT&L Mark One. Awkwardly, he patted her shoulder. "We can make more."

  She shook her head. "Maybe one day. But you came up with the real answer, Len. We've been over-engineering. We thought coming down to a Bell-type instrument was stepping down. Sure, it was a long way down from electret microphones and transistors. But it wasn't far enough. Any one of the machine shops can knock together a Morse-key in a couple of minutes. We need to go back to the telegraph. We can have the telegraph covering towns from here to the Baltic in six months."

  Len sighed. "I guess the internet is a way off, huh? But I suppose you could be right."

  Dougal nodded. "Aye. That she is. We were talking about it this morning. Look, you Americans expect to talk to people immediately. The rest o' the world—we're glad if we can send a message within three weeks. This telegraph will do a grand job."

  "And once we've got the lines, well, then the step to telephones is a much smaller one, Len."

  "Yeah. I guess. So did you figure out it was Morse code I was sending?"

  She scowled at him. "You made that damned noise in my exchange for nearly ten hours. And I couldn't even tell you shut up. Three shorts, three longs, three shorts. Over and over again. Why didn't you tell us what was going on?"

  Len shrugged. "That's all the Morse I know. Besides, my hands were tied behind my back."

  Ellie smiled. It was a slightly nasty smile. "Bet you can't say that in a year's time. You'll even dream in Morse."

  Len shrugged. "If that's what it takes to make AT&L fly . . . I will." He pointed to the rout below. "So how did you organize this? I mean the militia I can see, Mackay's troopers back from Saalfeld."

  Dougal rubbed his butt. "There were horses before telephones, Len. And I've got a mort of an investment tied up in you. I couldnae let that go tae waste now, could I? It's going to cost you, mind. I have nae been in the saddle for months, and I'm damned sore."

  Ellie shook her head at the third partner. "Lawrie, you're a fraud. Len, he led the scouting party, rode back to Grantville and then rode cross country to Saalfeld to find Mackay. He's been through about six horses, and been in the saddle just about nonstop since last night."

  "Aye, but she was the one who got yon Stearns and his wife tae come up and listen to the tappin', to get it into his head where you were and why we needed tae scout it." Dougal grinned. "It wouldnae have been worth his life not to come up to the mine. Ye ken we've got some good out of this. Mike Stearns saw the value o' the idea no more than five minutes after Becky. We've got backing for the telegraph."

  Ellie put an arm over Len's shoulder. "You're something of a hero, Len Tanner. Everyone in town is already talking about this." She pointed across at the hastily set up aid station. "Dieter is telling the militia nurse quite a tale by the looks of it. Story is going to grow, boy. You're going to be a popular fellow. Not bad for a man who didn't have a friend in Grantville three months ago." She looked at him quizzically but with an unusual tenderness. "And all it cost you is a black eye and maybe a couple of ribs. And blistered fingers."

  Len blew through his moustache. "The truth is, Ellie, I did it to save my own skin, as much as anything."

  Dougal grinned. "What they dinnae ken their hearts won't grieve over."

  "And you, Len, are going to keep your mouth shut and let the lying Scots company spokesman do the talking," said Ellie firmly.

  Len looked speculatively at Ellie. She'd kept that arm over his shoulder. "You wouldn't like to repeat that kiss, would you?"

  Ellie actually blushed. "Not with that damn moustache, Tanner."

  Len put a reflexive hand to it. Sighed. "Hey, Doogs . . . ya said that knife of yours was sharp enough to shave with. Lend it to me, will you?"

  Between the Armies

  Andrew Dennis

  1

  It was a bright cold January afternoon in Avignon. An unassuming, long-haired, round-faced man in a clerical soutane sat at a desk in a high chamber of the Palais du Pape. He had the window open, for the cool breeze. Outside, the winter sun cast a light like crisp white wine on the Dom des Rochers and glittered on the Loire.

  Monsignor Giulio Mazarini, Canon of St. John Lateran, Secretary to the Legate of Avignon—the Legate, Cardinal Barberini, was in Rome to the minor inconvenience of Mazarini's career—had found a quiet spot to look over the latest intelligences. He did not need to—he was between achievements, becalmed. The canonship was a sinecure he had held for some time, and his real work was diplomacy.

  He had done, false modesty aside, good work for His Holiness and his Spanish allies—better to say, masters—in the Mantuan matter, even if others had sniffed at the self-aggrandizing behavior of a junior diplomat not thirty years old. Let them. If that battle had not been stopped before it began, the treaty negotiations would have become impossible, and even the botched peace that French mission to the Emperor had secured would have failed.

  He had even risen from negotiating with Richelieu with credit: shaken hands with the man and come away with all his fingers. In truth, Mazarini had a high professional and personal estimate of His Eminence. Despite Mazarini's best efforts, the cardinal had taken the Pignerol valley as his price to keep French troops out of Mantua. A lesser man would not have had that much to show from bargaining with Mazarini. He had even found Richelieu pleasant and affable.

  Mazarini had been rewarded for his work and now sought to anticipate his patron's next command. Hence his present diversion with the reports from the rest of Europe. Since the Swedish successes of the previous autumn, the main source of
political and diplomatic information in Germany, the Society of Jesus and its devotion to regular reporting, had dwindled.

  But not dried up. Information still came out. The reverses of the Catholic League made for intriguing reading—Tilly defeated, the Swedes looting Bavaria. Add to that the appearance of this new polity, claiming to be from the future, among the multifarious Germanies. Even Mazarini could hardly find that news dull, whatever its credibility. From the future, indeed. There was certainly no shortage of lunatics in the Germanies—it seemed the Bohemian disease was a contagion.

  Then, the latest from Caussin at Paris. The despatch of Servien—Chretien, not the Marquis de Sable by that name whom Mazarini had known in Mantua—to Vienna and Brussels by way of Thuringia, that was all too credible. A moment's thought to order the implications in his mind, and—

  He opened the door to his chamber and bellowed down the stairwell. "Heinzerling! Get me a map of the Palatinate—no, maps of the whole Rhine. And get your fat German backside up here!" He shouted in French, the language the two had best in common other than Latin.

  Shortly, from the stairwell, came Heinzerling's heavy footsteps. Although little worse than most parish priests, he was below the standards Jesuits expected even of an army chaplain. Either the Society of Jesus had some deeper use for him in mind or had simply ignored his raucous behavior and not dismissed him from the Society.

  The latter was more likely. The last five years' frenetic re-Catholicization of the Germanies had seen the barrel scraped for priests.

  Even so, nowhere was desperate enough to put Heinzerling in charge of a parish. Heinzerling had had to join the chaplaincy of Tilly's army. He had left that post carrying messages three months before and not been in any hurry to go back. For the time being Mazarini had appropriated him as aide-de-camp.

  A disaster as a priest, he was one of life's better sergeants. Mazarini had learned the use of the breed as a cavalry captain in the Valtelline War. That Heinzerling was fluent in a dozen languages was certainly no disadvantage.

  "Put that foul thing out and come here," said Mazarini, when Heinzerling shouldered the door aside and rolled in with a bundle of maps under his arm and his ever-present pipe clenched between his teeth, a habit he had picked up from English mercenaries in the Imperial army. "What do you know of Mainz?"

  "I was born near there, why?"

  "If you wanted to cut the Spanish Road from there, how would you do it?"

  Unlike most soldiers, Heinzerling had some grasp of strategy. "Up the Mosel, or there're probably a couple of routes across country. More expensive, but quicker than besieging every damned fort from Koblenz to Trier."

  "You think the Swede will do that?" Mazarini stared at the map, trying to squeeze more information out of it by sheer pressure of staring.

  "If Wallenstein lets him, ja."

  "So the Spanish have to—" Mazarini let it trail off. The implications for the Spanish if they lost their road up the middle of Europe were obvious from a single glance at the map.

  "Ja, and they—why are we discussing this?"

  "Don't tell me you don't read these reports before I do." Mazarini grinned to take some of the sting from his words. He had a simple arrangement with Heinzerling with regard to his duties to the Society: he could send reports to Satan himself provided he was an efficient aide. Besides, Mazarini had himself only narrowly avoided being talked into the Society which had educated him.

  "Well, this Thuringia business, with Richelieu's man, is that it?"

  "Exactly. We'll make an intriguer of you yet. Here, roll that out." The map showed the Germanies in more detail than he needed, and he had to hunt about a bit for the points he wanted. Mazarini stabbed his thumb, finally, at Leipzig. "Here, this is where the Swede knocked Tilly back on his heels."

  "More, mein' ich. Tilly's not just knocked back, the old teufel is finished. Spent. I was there."

  "Fine, whatever. But now the Swede is here." Mazarini drew his thumb south a little and west to the Rhine. "Mainz. Where, as you observe, he's right for an attack on the Spanish Road in the spring."

  "Where he's right to get kicked off before a year is out if he does. Tilly's gone, fucked, but Wallenstein's not going to be so easy. The Swede's been running himself ragged for three years all over the Germanies. Before that, Prussia. Wallenstein's going to come roaring up the Donau, unbuttoning his britches as he goes to be ready to fuck the Swede."

  "Quite. Now, in all this," Mazarini said, "why is Richelieu sending this other Servien to Thuringia, and not to Mainz? Mainz is the logical place if he wants to subsidize the Swede."

  "These newcomers, it seems to me. They are definitely supporting the Swede?"

  "Now you're getting it. They've got a regiment of the Swede's horse on hand, which I think counts for more than this nonsense about where they're from."

  "You believe he'll take the opportunity?"

  "Yes. Or, he will if Louis lets him. He will have the Swede supported on the Rhine, enough to hold off Wallenstein and still get a force up the Mosel. Spain will throw everything they have into saving their precious road. And this time there will be no way to stop it all with a convenient knife in the right set of ribs."

  "They could—" Heinzerling paused. "No, you're right. No one the Spaniards can knife to stop the armies marching. It will all get a lot worse, nicht wahr?"

  "A lot worse. Especially if Richelieu gets Spain mired in Germany and makes mischief elsewhere." Mazarini scowled at the map, as if willing Gustavus Adolphus away from the Spanish Road. That road had been instituted in days when the English were resolute in their heresy, rather than kissing Spanish diplomatic ass and leaving their shipping alone, inasmuch as a nation of inveterate pirates could bring themselves to do that.

  The road was the land route from Spanish-held Genoa to Flanders, a hard road and an expensive one. Poner un pica en Flandes, they said, for anything difficult and expensive to just short of impossible.

  "Don't know why Spain doesn't just abandon the Road. They haven't used it in ten years," said Heinzerling.

  "That hasn't stopped them fighting for it. You forget, I was in the Valtelline for the last bloodletting. And the Mantuan business, for which that fathead de Nevers and his alleged inheritance was no more than a pretext. We kept that from a worse fight only by the Grace of God." Mazarini made a face. "Worse fight. Hah! Plague and fever and nearly three years of butchery." He trailed off, remembering some of the things he had had to ride past in cavalier finery. He had stuck resolutely to his clerical dress after that.

  Heinzerling prodded, seeing his boss about to grow maudlin. "So what do we do?"

  "Try to stop my good work being undone by Spaniard hotheads, that's what we do." Mazarini scratched his chin, although he had already thought it through. "We have to get into this before worse happens. Go, start packing, my German friend, you're going to be taking a trip home soon."

  Heinzerling left and Mazarini turned his mind's eye to Thuringia and the problem of making contacts in this Grantville. Anywhere else, and the notables would be known to someone. A discreet question or two and the Church's formidable network of gossips would see that the information got to him.

  So, instead, to first principles: if you want to know something about a parish, ask the priest. He began to rummage through the reports. The one that named the church in Grantville was among the earliest—the doctrinal lay of the land had been the first priority of the spies, given what it usually told about a local ruler in the Holy Roman Empire.

  When Mazarini saw the name that church had borne when the town first appeared, he gaped for a moment. When he saw the spies' comment that it was clearly a heretic establishment as there was no such saint, he positively bellowed with laughter, slapping the desk in his mirth.

  Heinzerling put his head back around the door as Mazarini was recovering, some minutes later. "Ein problem?" he asked.

  "No, quite the reverse. I think there is more to the story about Thuringia than I was prepared to cred
it. You remember who we had in here last week? Who you had to 'escort' out of the Palais?"

  "That arschloch down from Paris?"

  "The very same." Mazarini turned the report around on his desk. "Here, look here."

  Heinzerling looked down at the paper, his lips moving a moment. When he looked up, he was grinning. "Ja. Definitely from a far and strange time. Of course there is no such saint, he isn't dead. Yet. More is the pity."

  "Oh, it makes too much sense not to be true." Mazarini choked while his belly shook again with laughter. "Saint Vincent de Paul. Oh, he should be, he should be. What do the French say of their priests? The shortest way to hell?"

  "Is to be ordained a priest, ja."

  "Quite so, and de Paul is trying to teach them their letters and to stay out of the whorehouses. The patience of a saint!"

  Heinzerling's grin widened. "Would you mind that I tell him?" He was fighting to control his face, trying to reconcile the expostulating little man he had marched out of the Palais by the scruff of his soutane with the image of a plaster saint. With his name on the front of a church, yet.

  Mazarini choked again, and then roared with another burst of laughter. "No," he said when he recovered, "In the name of God and all his Angels and Saints, including Saint Fucking Vincent, no. The wretched mendicant will simply increase his demands to match his new status. No, Heinzerling, you're going to Thuringia. And I want reports on everything, you hear me? Everything."

  2

  Six months before, two newlyweds had walked out of Saint Vincent's, Grantville, after the novelty of a Methodist wedding service conducted in a Catholic church.

  "Just got to change, then I'm ready when you are, Larry." The Reverend Simon Jones came back into the church from waving off the happy couple. "I intend to scandalize my flock by buying a beer for a romish idolater."

  That was assuming Jones' congregation hadn't completely accustomed themselves to their pastor keeping company with a Roman priest, or that they were upset by his having borrowed St. Vincent's in order to have room for the guests at the wedding.