Eric Flint: 1634: The Ram Rebellion

Von Bimbach went over to a nearby table and spread open the packet. Emma could now see that it contain paper and writing material.

“You will compose a letter to your authorities,” von Bimbach stated. “To abuse the term. Both of you. And you will sign it.”

“I will not!” Emma hissed. Meyfarth shook his head.

Von Bimbach gave them a long, heavy stare. “Yes, you will.”

By now, Emma’s fear has been replaced by sheer outrage. “I will not! Go ahead and torture me, if you want to. I still won’t!”

The Freiherr ’s sneer was something out of a lousy movie, too. “Not you, witch. For my negotiations-unfortunately-I shall probably need you and the so-called pastor intact. Still, you will the compose the letter.”

He swiveled his head to the soldier again. “Bring in the old woman.”

* * *

“You promised me they wouldn’t hurt her!” Judith Neideckerin shrieked at Noelle, half-rising from the chair in her chambers.

Noelle couldn’t meet her eyes, yet. All she could do was stare out of the window.

Another shriek. “Let’s kill him! Now!”

“We can’t ,” Noelle hissed.

“You have a gun! An up-time gun! Don’t lie to me, I know you have it!”

That was finally enough to break Noelle’s paralysis. She spun around and faced Judith squarely.

“Yes, I do.” She reached into the pocket of her heavy skirt and drew out the Browning automatic. “Here it is. I’ve got it loaded, too. But does it look like a magic wand to you? It’s got less than ten rounds. And they’re not very powerful. What we call a .32 caliber.”

Hissing, again: “A so-called ‘lady’s gun,’ that Dan Frost thought I could handle better. As slender as I am. Damn him!”

She stuffed the pistol back into the pocket. “But it doesn’t matter, Judith. Even if I had a .44 Magnum-and assuming I could handle the great thing-it wouldn’t matter. The soldiers are on alert, all over the Schloss.”

“The staff-”

Noelle shook her head. “Not now. Not yet. They’re not ready to take on the Freiherr ’s mercenaries, all by themselves. And if they did, they’d probably be beaten down, anyway. Except for the blacksmith and his apprentices-maybe some of the stable hands-they’re mostly just clerks and servants.”

Judith slumped back into her chair and lowered her head into her hands. Then, started sobbing.

Noelle went over and placed an arm around her shoulder. “I don’t think he’s planning to kill your mother.”

“He’s hurting her,” came the words between the sobs. Then, Judith lowered her hands and stared at the floor through tear-filled eyes.

“For the first time-ever-I wish the swine had sired a child on me. So I could strangle it.”

Noelle tightened the arm. “No, Judith. You wouldn’t.”

After a while, she added: “Just wait. There’ll be a time. Soon, I think.”

* * *

The torturer and his assistant had the old woman strapped into the contrivance that had reminded Emma at first of a very primitive dentist’s chair. Except now she could see that it was more like the equipment that hospitals used for women in labor. The pastor’s landlady was secured to the wooden base of the horrible thing with a heavy leather belt across her waist. Her hands were immobilized by other straps and her feet had been locked into stirrups.

Her legs were half-spread and bent upward, removing any support. The torturer pushed back the woman’s skirt, exposing her left shin.

“Now.”

His beefy assistant raised the iron bar in his hands and brought it down. The sound of the breaking bone was quite audible all through the chamber.

“I’ll write it! I’ll write it!” Emma shouted, her voice so loud it almost drowned the old woman’s cry of pain.

Von Bimbach looked at the pastor. Meyfarth swallowed.

“The other leg,” the Freiherr commanded.

The torturer and his assistant had already moved to the opposite side of the apparatus. Again, the torturer shoved aside the skirt; again, the iron bar came down.

“I’ll write it,” said Meyfarth. His voice sounded like a croak. Emma could barely hear the words, beneath the screams.

Chapter 15:

“The ram has taken Halsgericht now”

Bamberg, early September, 1634

“This has to be,” Anita Masaniello said, “one of the slimiest letters I have ever read.”

“Ah,” Constantin Ableidinger answered, “it was written, of course, by Dr. Lenz. ‘Pestilenz.’ Who delivered it in person.”

“At least, apparently, Emma and Meyfarth are alive. And still in fairly good shape, if we can rely on their notes. But I simply cannot believe the sheer idiocy of this.”

“The Freiherr believes, of course, that the location of his Schloss, well within the borders of Bayreuth, immunizes him from all serious danger.”

Anita, since coming up to Bamberg the previous month to take charge of connecting the dots between the Thorntons, Meyfarth, the Neidecker woman who had been his landlady, the Freiherr , the printer’s widow who was the ewe-though not bearing any actual resemblance to the logo of Ewegenia-and who was still, following the city council elections, locked into a battle with the local guild on the topic of forced marriage of said daughter to a candidate of its choice, and anything else she could put through her analytical techniques, had gotten pretty good at parsing Ableidinger’s conversation.

“Believes?”

“Margrave Christian has accepted oaths of allegiance from many of the farmers and townsmen who were previously considered to be the subjects of the lesser nobility within his territories.”

“Nice way to put it.” She shifted uncomfortably. The theory had been that last month, already, she would be on her way back to Grantville to have the baby at Leahy Medical Center with an up-time doctor doing the honors for the Salatto blessed event. Then Ableidinger showed up in Wuerzburg. Plus a sudden SOS from the Fulda people that drew off a half dozen of the Wuerzburg staff.

She looked down at her stomach. If they didn’t make progress about getting Emma and Meyfarth back pretty soon, she was going to have the baby in the Bamberg headquarters of the Franconian administration. Probably behind her desk; then pick herself up like a pioneer woman and go back to negotiating. Von Bimbach was demanding that they barbecue the ram. Not just Brillo. He wanted to fill Franconia with roast mutton.

“So he wants to parley.”

“The Freiherr says that he is willing to return them unharmed. On reasonable terms. Reasonable from his perspective. And parley only under the conditions that he set.”

Anita picked up the letter again. By one corner, carefully, between thumb and forefinger. “Why me? Why not you, Vince?

The question was reasonable enough. Vince Marcantonio was the Franconian administration’s head in Bamberg. He should have been prestigious enough for any Freiherr to meet with.

Vince Marcantonio looked a little abashed. “Previous intemperate statements about what I would do to the certain parts of the man’s anatomy if I ever caught him, I’m afraid. Wade Jackson said worse. We were more than a little pissed that he plucked them out right from under our noses. And a reporter overheard us.”

“Curses. I suppose that Cliff Priest can’t possibly get back here, and then up to Bayreuth, by the deadline this guy has set?”

“Not a prayer.”

“Okay, go back to Lenz. Say that I’ll go up and talk to the Freiherr . Not in his Schloss. No way am I going inside the man’s walls, not if I could bring the whole USE army with me, which I can’t. Outside. In a field. With a big enough batch of troops along to make a difference. Tom O’Brien and his pick of the crop. As many as von Bimbach will let him bring.”