Eric Flint: 1634: The Ram Rebellion

Ableidinger shivered. The female of the species. Martha Kronacher, who now seemed to consider Pastor Meyfarth to be her property. Ableidinger smiled to himself; Meyfarth had not noticed yet. His own deceased wife. Every man would do well to remember that his wife was one of them. Judith Neideckerin. Judith with the head of Holofernes.

The medic, Matewski was his name, put die Neideckerin on the table; Anita Masaniello sat down again.

The captain of the Freiherr ’s mercenaries, still running towards the castle, caught his spur in one of the hummocks of sheep-gnawed grass, stumbled, fell on his face.

Ableidinger laughed, a booming laugh heard all across the field. Tensions dropped a notch. Except for Dr. Lenz, who jerked up from his chair. He had been sitting, frozen, through it all. Two of the margrave’s troops grasped his arms, held him down.

Anita stood up.

“What should we do with him?” one of the troopers asked her. “Hand him over to you up-timers?”

“Not,” Ableidinger said, moving out from the knot of officials. “Not quite yet. There is something that I need to do. Or want to do.” He stood there, as if thinking.

Anita sat back down.

Ableidinger beckoned. “Bring him here.”

The margrave’s men handed the lawyer over to two Jaeger who were wearing the ram badge on their armbands. One of them was Gerhardt Jost.

* * *

Tom O’Brien, in charge of the USE/SoTF troops on the field, held his breath.

Ableidinger laughed again. It didn’t seem to make Lenz feel any better.

Ableidinger’s voice. That booming voice, everyone could hear it. “Ladies and gentlemen!”

O’Brien let his breath out.

“I shouldn’t do this, I suppose. But then, I am not a gentleman, anymore than Brillo is a gentleman. Am I?”

The onlookers roared their approval from the edges of the field.

“I present to you! The man who chaired the commission that expelled me from the law school at the University of Jena. Because I had married my late wife rather than leaving her to have our son by herself.” Ableidinger put his arm around a boy who had run to him from among the spectators.

Another roar.

“I have wanted to do this ever since.” Ableidinger walked up to Lenz, paused an arm’s length away, reached out, and twisted his nose. Very hard. It started to bleed.

The crowd loved it.

The voice again. “I probably shouldn’t do this, bad for my dignity and prestige you know, and not suitable to a leader. But I’ve wanted to do it for so long. And I’m a scroungy down-time ram you know, no aristocrat.”

Ableidinger turned around, dropped his pants, and mooned Lenz. Including an audible fart.

“All right. Now they can have him. Due process and all that. Give him to the proper authorities.”

The crowd went wild.

Tom O’Brien’s shoulders sagged a little with relief. Too soon. Anita was saying something.

“Matewski, if you’re about finished with Frau Neidecker’s legs? Could you scour off the table? This isn’t going to take very long, I think. It’s my third. And no way am I going inside that castle.”

Chapter 16:

“Now You’re Scaring Me To Death”

Wuerzburg, September, 1634

Steve Salatto would have liked to hang them all from the nearest tree. Friends as well as foes. However, he had Anita back safe; baby Diana, too. She had fuzzy hair.

The commander of the regiment that Gustavus Adolphus had sent down to Franconia had offered to blast von Bimbach’s castle into rubble and eradicate the whole family. Steve had thanked him kindly, but said that it wouldn’t be necessary.

It wasn’t. Margrave Christian had already taken care of the “blasting into rubble” bit and had escheated the Freiherr ’s Bayreuth estates to himself. The Freiherr ’s relatives had run off to Saxony. As for the lands in Bamberg, Steve told Cliff Priest just to occupy the administration building-it wasn’t a fortified castle-and told Vince Marcantonio to escheat the estates to the SoTF and have Stewart Hawker and his folks arrange some equitable lease arrangements for von Bimbach’s tenants and submit them for approval.

“As for the final disposition of the individuals involved, leave it up to the courts.” It hurt to say it, when he would have liked to squash the Freiherr like a cockroach, but he managed.

Scott Blackwell had some difficulty in getting the mercenary commander to swallow those orders. But he managed, too.

* * *

Ed Piazza and Arnold Bellamy looked at Steve’s final-or, if not final, at least most recent-report on Franconia.

“’Sorry about all the publicity’!” Ed exploded. “ Sorry about it? It’s some of the best we’ve had all year!”

“Professional civil servants don’t see things quite the same way you do,” Arnold said apologetically. “They’re temperamentally inclined to work behind the scenes. And it was his wife who had a baby in the presence of a couple of thousand spectators. I can understand how he feels. I would have been very embarrassed if Natalie had ever done such a thing.”

He pointed to the rest of the papers on Ed’s desk. “You’ll find a draft of our proposal to congress enclosed. In brief, our recommendation is that the SoTF congress just scoop up all of the little Reichsritterschaften and petty lordships in Franconia and incorporate them. Not confiscate the property from the owners, mind you; just end their jurisdictional authority over their so-called subjects who are now our citizens. The people in general voted for incorporation. If you want to, I suppose, we could do an individual referendum in each of them, but I don’t think it’s necessary.”

Ed looked up. “Will the congress go for that? Especially the House of Lords?”

Arnold nodded. “I think so. Most of the lower house of the congress consists of commoners who have been angry at these petty lordships for centuries. And the larger rulers in the House of Lords, the counts and such, have been annoyed by them for just as long. It’s one of the few topics on which the commoners and upper nobility are in harmonious agreement. Both of them think that the quasi-independent lower nobility are big pests and a plague on the landscape. It goes right back to the days when the Swabian League went on a campaign to wipe out as many of the robber barons as it could lay hands on. That’s more than a century ago. Plus, it also fits well into the national project of abolishing internal tolls and tariffs. I think it will be safe to present it. Especially if you go on to the next item.”

Ed read on.

“If the SoTF congress agrees to this, just incorporating them as we propose without any further fuss and feathers, then Margrave Christian of Bayreuth, upon behalf of himself and his nephews, will petition for admission into the State of Thuringia-Franconia on the same terms as the other of its counties and with a seat for each of the principalities in the SoTF House of Lords. The only special point he will be making is that he wants the approval of congress to do unto the Reichsritter and petty lords who have enclaves within his and his nephews’ territories just what we are proposing to do unto them in Wuerzburg, Bamberg, and Fulda.”

Ed frowned. “Does the margrave actually mean this?”

“I think so. Informally, apparently, he has already taken oaths of allegiance from a lot of their subjects. Backed up by the ram. Given the geography of Franconia, he’ll be a lot stronger if he can manage that. He’ll have us as a buffer between him and Gustavus Adolphus when the crowd of the dispossessed start spewing petitions and lawsuits like a volcano. For that matter, he will have our military to back up his if they go into revolt. Not that that’s very likely, given what happened to Mitwitz and von Bimbach. Apparently, he’s willing to accept being, for all practical purposes, a constitutional monarch within Bayreuth County, Thuringia-Franconia, as a reasonable trade-off.”