by S. M. Stirling & Virginia DeMarce
Exodus 16:2 “. . . and the Israelites grumbled . . .”
Magdeburg Province
October, 1636
Karl Rohrbacher paid the innkeeper and hoisted his Raanz, his rucksack, onto his back, giving thanks that it was currently autumn and he was on his way back home rather than the previous spring, when he had been on his way out of Oberweissbach with a full load of the medicaments and balms that the villagers spent the winter months distilling from Kräuter.
It was cool outside, but not raining; there wasn’t much mud under his feet, and the leaves on the trees round about had a yellowed, tattered look. Woodsmoke blew on the wind, along with the infinitely familiar scents of horse and ox, hay, sheep, goats, and dirty wool on human backs.
The pack didn’t used to weigh so much. Or, at least, it hadn’t seemed to weigh so much. Peddling, with what amounted to a wood-framed miniature apothecary shop full of glass jars and vials on your back, was a young man’s game. It had been a long time since the apprenticeship that had taken him away from the village to Arnstadt, to Rudolstadt, to the courts where the various countesses of Schwarzburg wrote their books about medicine. He was fortunate to be strong and healthy, but that did not change the truth that he was a short two years away from the half-century mark, with two sons and a son-in-law who already followed the roads.
This could possibly be his last season, judging by the way his feet felt, and his lower back.
Oberweissbach now had a distribution center for the Olitäten, the oils, what the up-timers called “herbal pharmaceuticals,” in Saalfeld, where they packaged them and shipped them out by the railroad. The up-timers had introduced many new medicaments, but fortunately did not insist that the old ones should be discarded as useless. Reichard Hartmann had even become a partner with two of them, Ron Stone and Bill Hudson.
The distribution center was why the pack was not as light as it would have been by October when he was on the road ten years ago. Four times, this season, kegs full of refills had been waiting for him at post offices in pre-arranged towns. Some apothecaries were ordering direct now, from the catalog. Many others, though, still wanted the reassurance of a familiar face so they could be sure that the items they were buying were genuine Oberweissbach products rather than fakes, or remedies that might have been adulterated along the way.
Still, peddling was a young man’s game. A seductive siren voice kept speaking to him about a job in the distribution center. Not his last season. More likely, there would be one more. Next year, perhaps, his third son could join him on this route. The year after that . . .
* * *
He looked over at the student who had been sharing the road with him since Wismar.
“Desiderius Krempe,” the boy had said with a disarming smile. “Not for Erasmus; we are good Lutherans, albeit my father is something of a humanist. But because it signifies ‘desired’ in Latin. My father is a Latin School teacher, and I am the first boy after five daughters.”
Karl wasn’t sure why Desiderius had attached himself, other than that the young man wanted to hear as much about up-timers (at least, about up-timers who were not in the Navy) as Karl could tell him before he matriculated at Jena for a specialty in international law.
“Hugo Grotius,” Desiderius had said in a portentous tone of voice, as if he expected Karl to have heard of the man. “He’s not an up-timer, of course, but I expect that I will be dealing with their academic personnel on a daily basis at Jena. There is an up-time professor named Herr Okey Rush whose field is also in the area of politics, although by no means duplicating Professor Grotius. Principles of Modern Public Administration, his course is titled. Taught in English. Contrary to my father’s complaints, the time I have spent talking to sailors in taverns during the past two years was not a waste. However, as I doubt that a person could understand all Germans by observing only those who are in the navy at Wismar, it appears to me to be prudent . . .”
For which reason, Desiderius had followed Karl’s meandering route from one town with a sales contact to another town with a sales contact rather than doing the sensible thing and getting on a barge to go straight up the river.
Karl clapped his hat on his head and took up his stick.
“Let’s go, boy; time to put Tangermünde behind us and set our feet on the Jerichow Road.”
* * *
“There’s a song. The up-time people who call themselves Pentecostals broadcast it on their radio show,” Karl said.
Talking did make time on the road pass a little faster. Karl liked to leave most of it to Desiderius, who was more than willing, but it wasn’t fair to leave it all to him. It added seasoning to the reaped fields and plowland and autumnal trees.
“When I heard it, I made no connection, because they don’t sound a thing alike. Jerichow ahead of us and the Jericho from the Bible as the up-timers say it. You’ll have to learn to make the sound, you know, if you want to be considered fluent in English or even in Amideutsch, because some of their words have carried over. There’s nothing like that j in German. Nothing at all. I can’t really teach you, because I’m not sure I make it properly myself. It’s terrible what the up-timers do to a poor, innocent, consonant named yot.”
Karl sang:
On the Jericho Road there’s room for just two.
He was correct in his assessment. “Jericho” came out as “Cherico.”
He tried again. The result was “Sherico.”
He shook his head. “It didn’t make any sense to me, really—the idea that there were only two people at Jericho. There were many, many, Israelites at the siege of Jericho. The radio program played a song about that, too. What’s more, Jesus was not there, for he hadn’t been born yet, and I am sure that the up-timers know that. The pastor who spoke over the radio appeared to be quite learned. But, what with being a peddler and all, I liked these lines.”
On the Jericho Road, your heart He will bless.
“Except, as I said, Jesus was not on the road to Jericho. He went to Emmaus, but there were two disciples that time. He went to Galilee. He went to Nazareth. He went to Jerusalem and . . .”
“Bartimaeus,” Desiderius said. “Not the siege of Jericho in the Old Testament. Gospel of Mark. The healing of the blind man. Jesus was going to Jericho, according to Luke. Or, maybe, leaving Jericho, according to Mark. It depends on which of the Gospels you read. Matthew wrote that there were two blind men.”
“Oh.” Karl blinked. “Yes, there was a mention of that man. Bartimaeus. Second verse of the song, if I recall correctly. Maybe the third verse, depending on how many repeats of the refrain you count.”
“Technically,” Desiderius said, “it should be ‘bar Timaeus.’ The blind man was the son of someone named Timaeus. Who, properly speaking, should have been a Greek . . . a Gentile . . . not a Jew at all. You can tell from the name.”
He thought a moment. “Nor, even in that case, was it only two people. Jesus’ disciples were there, certainly, for they told Bartimaeus to be silent and stop calling out. And what is a Pentecostal?”
Karl rearranged his pack on his shoulders and concentrated on setting one foot in front of the other.
“Jerichow has nothing to do with the Biblical Jericho, you know . . . ‘Yerikov’ rather than ‘Cherico.’ “
“Ja,” Karl agreed. “Like so many of the up-timers want to call the university where you’re headed ‘Chenna’ when Jena is ‘Yayna.’ It’s very odd of them. You have to watch out for those things if you visit Grantville.”
“Jerichow is an old Slavic name.” Desiderius continued in his pedantry undeterred.
The lad was born to be a scholar, Karl thought, keeping his staff ready to prod at a pig lying by the roadside. You could never tell with pigs. Their temperaments were almost as variable as people’s.
“There were many Slavic settlements here on the east side of the Elbe River. Those who study languages believe that it basically means a village by the side of a river, one important enough that a local warlord had built a fortification. Probably a pagan warlord who was trying to keep out German missionaries. Have you been through since the Swedish and Imperial armies destroyed so much of the old monastery church the year before the Ring of Fire happened? Has there been much rebuilding? Have the Brandenburg officials been interfering because part of the monastery was reserved for the Elector back when the Reformation was introduced, even though Gustavus Adolphus placed it in the new Magdeburg Province?”
Desiderius jabbered and chattered. In a way, it was like listening to the roadside birds—though not as entertaining as the high wedges of geese and storks, heading south now.
Karl, with determination, kept walking. After Jerichow, it would be only thirty miles to Magdeburg. Then the train that would take him home, or at least close to home. The train on which he could rest his aching feet. He would get off at Saalfeld, check in at the distribution center, return his few items of unsold inventory, and then walk only eleven more miles to Oberweissbach.
Looked at from the proper perspective, he was almost home already.
“Nothing the armies did to Jerichow was half as bad as the great fire in Tangermünde,” he said. “That was the year before the war started. Almost the entire town burned to the ground.” He grunted. “Well, maybe two-thirds of the town burned down. The up-timers have a poem about that, too. Not about Tangermünde or about the arson that happened there. Just that, ‘the female of the species is more deadly than the male,’ ” he said in careful imitation of the up-timer who had recited it one evening. “Margarete Minde was pretty furious that the court denied her inheritance rights. It didn’t get the town hall, but did destroy St. Stephen’s Church. The organ there now is brand new—well, only a dozen or so years old. Worth listening to, if you come back this way.”
“Witchcraft?” the boy said curiously.
Karl shook his head. “Nein. Not everything bad happens because of witchcraft. Grete Minde was an angry daughter from the imprudent second marriage of a town patrician. She married a good-for-nothing and had a greedy uncle who was cronies with the entire city council and everyone on the banc of judges. Nobody thought she needed witchcraft to get her revenge; just flint and tinder on a windy night. But that’s neither here nor there. For Jerichow, it will depend on how fast they can get enough bricks, of course.”
“Bricks?”
“To rebuild and repair the damage. In Tangermünde, most of the rebuilt houses are wattle and daub. The up-timers make bricks faster than we used to, but a lot more places want bricks in a hurry, so it doesn’t help much if you’re a small city of a couple thousand people, and you need a lot of bricks. So far, there are not enough bricks. At least, not enough at a reasonable price. It’s a nice little city with a charter, but it wasn’t ever rich. A few shoemakers, a few carpenters and cabinetmakers, some weavers, enough bakers to supply the population with bread, mills to grind the flour for the bakers. One of the up-timers at the Exchange—you’ll need to visit that when you go to Grantville—said that almost all these small cities ‘survive by taking in one another’s laundry.’ A couple of brewers, but most of the women brew at home. No ‘industry.’ No mining. No big merchants. Nothing much to export. I don’t know that there’s much hope for them.”
“Could they make their own bricks?” Desiderius asked.
“Maybe.”
“If they could, they could rebuild. And have something to export that other people will pay for.”
“It’s like the song. Bricks are a heavy load. Too heavy to export by land, even if the roads were better. There’s a trade route that runs to Berlin by way of Genthin. Otherwise, the road goes to Magdeburg and from there to Leipzig by way of Gommern and Leitzkau and Zerbst. Magdeburg’s sucking all the riches of the province into the city. Jerichow isn’t close enough to be part of the way Magdeburg’s growing, not the way that Burg is. Did Burg get included in the hinterland assigned to the imperial city? I’m not sure how large it is. My point is—what does Otto Gericke care about Jerichow? What does the Magdeburg city council care about Jerichow? It’s out in the province rather than tied to the city. The governor of Magdeburg Province doesn’t seem to do a lot—not the way the state government does in Thuringia-Franconia. Matthias Strigel is supported by the Committees of Correspondence, but even the newspapers hardly ever mention him. He’s sort of overshadowed—a whole lot overshadowed—both by having the emperor in Magdeburg and by the city itself, given that Otto Gericke is both the mayor and the city’s delegate to the House of Lords.”
“If there was a canal to the Elbe, though . . .” Desiderius mused.
There was a hamlet off to their left, under the slope of a hill, with woodsmoke misting from its chimneys. A man was walking in a plowed, harrowed field between there and the road, with a bag of seed over one shoulder. A dog that probably belonged to the sower ran barking after them until Karl shied a clod of earth at it, whereupon it ran back towards the field, then swerved after a rabbit.
The boy grew enthusiastic: “It could run along that old dry arm of the Elbe that the river left behind when it shifted course. The province must be collecting taxes. What are they using them for? Jerichow’s not that far from where the Elbe flows now. Once a person got bricks to the Elbe, they could go almost anywhere by water. Is there any reason, now that it’s in Magdeburg Province, that Jerichow has to limit itself to just the town? If the city council could ally somehow with the region around it . . . Has the province changed the laws to allow for regional consortiums or cooperatives?”
Karl raised an eyebrow. “How should I know?”
“Law student, here,” Desiderius said in his own defense. “Future law student, at least. You said there are shoemakers. Do they use leather from animals that peasants in the region raise? They must. Is there enough leather available to make one of the new shoe factories practical? Or could there be, if there was a market for it?”
Karl raised the other eyebrow.
“I spent a lot of time studying the navy in Wismar,” Desiderius said a little defensively. “The navy buys a lot of stuff. It has to come from somewhere. And get to Wismar somehow. I suppose . . .”
He looked at Karl speculatively. “How many of the up-timers do you actually know? Ones who know about investments and such.”
“Not many.” Karl shifted his backpack. “There’s Reichard Hartmann from my village, though. He is acquainted with . . .quite a few up-timers. But what business of ours are the problems of Jerichow over here in Magdeburg Province? Except for the apothecary we’re about to visit, everyone in the town is a complete stranger to me.”
“I’ve never even met him. But it doesn’t seem to me like a good idea to let what seems to have been a perfectly adequate, useful, little city just molder because a couple of armies ran over it a few years ago.”
* * *
Hans Ganzer, the apothecary in Jerichow, was more than a little dubious about the suggestions Desiderius was spouting as he bustled about shelving Karl’s vials or packing them in storage chests.
“What can it hurt to ask for help?” Desiderius asked. “The town may not get it, but if the city council doesn’t ask, it certainly won’t get it. Even the Bible says that they should ask!”
“Jericho is in the Bible, boy; not Jerichow!”
“It’s . . . Well, I guess you could call it a statement of general principle.”
Karl Rohrbacher had both eyebrows as high as they would go.
They were expressive eyebrows, too. Thick. Bushy. Curly.
“Matthew 7:7-8.”
The eyebrows did not come down.
” ‘Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asks will receive; and he that seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it shall be opened.’ “
“I believe,” Ganzer said, “that the passage applies to divine answers to one’s prayers. Not to requests for subsidies from taxes, which probably fall more into the category of things that are Caesar’s problem.”
“The Caesars, the Roman emperors, built a lot of public works. Who is your local delegate to the provincial legislature? Surely, you have one by now. Have him present your needs directly to Matthias Strigel. Everyone knows that Magdeburg Province is a stronghold for the Fourth of July Party.”
“The province as a whole, yes. It votes strongly FoJP. A town such as Burg, within the direct influence of the city, yes. Out here in Jerichow, not so much. I would say that we are not so quick to seize upon innovations, whereas Strigel is CoC all the way. For all practical purposes, the whole province is being governed by the Committees of Correspondence, with the hearty backing of Strigel and the Magdeburg group.”
“So your delegate is a Crown Loyalist? Not the best option right now, given what went on in Berlin, but . . .”
“Our delegate . . . isn’t.”
“What?”
“Our delegate isn’t, at all. He doesn’t exist. We couldn’t find anyone to run in this last election. Nobody in this town can afford to leave his shop and be running back and forth to meetings of the provincial legislature. It’s not as if delegates to the legislature get paid.”
Ganzer grimaced and looked around the bare little shop.
“It’s a thorough nuisance having the national capital down south there, and Magdeburg as its own and separate imperial city, in addition to that. The best a man—well, a person, since the law now lets a woman run, like that Abrabanel woman did—can come up with is a standing agreement with an innkeeper or livery stable for fixed rates when it’s in session. Stendal or Tangermünde would have made more sense. Picking one of them would have caused a lot of arguments, though. Havelberg keeps insisting that it has prerogatives. If you ask me, though, all those northern towns in the province are subject to too many claims from Brandenburg—if we had been given a choice and picked one of them, we could have awoken one morning and found our provincial capital in a different province—if somebody at the highest levels should decide that it would be good for Brandenburg to have more FoJP voters, even FoJP voters on the conservative end of the party rather than the CoC extremists, for example. There are few enough people north of the Havel that Strigel might decide he could spare them.”
“Surely they wouldn’t . . .” Karl began. “Not so soon after the Congress of Copenhagen rearranged everything.”
“They carved Württemberg right out of the middle of Swabia when it suited them,” Desiderius pointed out.
“But they didn’t then go and put the capital of Swabia in Stuttgart, in the middle of Württemberg.”
Desiderius sat up straight. “Is there a copy of the new provincial law code somewhere in this town?”
“Georg Huff would have one, I suppose. Over at the city hall. He agreed that the council could vote him in as mayor when old Werner Mangelsdorf fell over and died in mid-term. Why?”
“I need to check a provision. Let’s go.”
“Georg won’t be there, or probably not. He’s only there in the mornings on Tuesday and Thursday. The man has a business to run, after all.”
“Is anybody there?”
“Not sure. The city clerk, perhaps. And why would anybody let you look at it, even if anybody is there?”
“Like I said, I need to check a provision.”
Contrary to Ganzer’s expectations, Georg was not only there, but let Desiderius page through his copy of the law code of Magdeburg Province. It was not, as yet, a very substantial volume.
“That’s what they did. They just carved out a small portion of the new imperial city of Magdeburg and made it a—”
He cleared his throat and spoke in formal tones:
” ‘Distinct territory under full ownership, exclusive dominion, and sovereign authority and jurisdiction of the province of Magdeburg.’ “
Karl frowned. “Wasn’t it . . . not very smart of them to set up a situation where, if in some future decade it happens that the province and city are not of the same party, the province that is the city could arrest and imprison the legislature and the governor of the province that the city was carved from? Or confiscate all of the province’s files? The cadasters and tax assessments? Hold them for ransom until the provincial governor agreed to vote their way?”
Ganzer looked over Desiderius’s shoulder. “Does it say exactly where in Magdeburg—in the imperial city, that is—this ‘distinct territory’ that is our provincial capital is located?”
“Not here. There must be information about that somewhere. Werner Mangelsdorf would have known where they met in 1634, if he hadn’t dropped dead, but that was two years ago. It may be somewhere else by now.”
“Was it in the newspapers?”
“Not that I ever saw. There was an article the other day about temporary quarters and permanent quarters for Governor Strigel and his staff, but nothing in the way of a map.” Georg shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not even sure exactly what the borders of the expanded city of Magdeburg are. I was there, once. I’m pretty sure there’s no room for the province to have offices in the Altstadt, given how much stuff the emperor has built there. Maybe in one of the new suburbs.”
Ganzer sighed. “I sure hope they didn’t put the offices south of the old city. There’s only a tiny little tail end of Magdeburg Province south of the city. More than half of it is north of here—north of Jerichow and Tangermünde. Come to think of it, Stendal wouldn’t have made a bad provincial capital at all, being a bit to our northwest. It’s about in the center, as close as anyone would be likely to get.”
“Wonder why they didn’t put it in Stendal, then?” That was Karl Rohrbacher.
The mayor grimaced. “The capital of Magdeburg Province is probably located in the city of Greater Magdeburg because for his own reasons our exalted emperor, Gustavus Adolphus, wanted it there. Those reasons were most probably that it would make it easier for him to exert his influence over the city government and the provincial government and the national government, all without leaving his office in the new imperial palace. And the up-timers with much on their plate didn’t notice the problem, if any of them ever gave us a thought at all, while Matthias Strigel figured it was all to the good for him to be down where most of the population and just about all of its industry are, the better to politick with the rest of the high-ups in the FoJP from other provinces and collude with—whomever he’s colluding with. He might have become the prime minister last summer, you know, if the Fourth of July people hadn’t chosen the up-timer Piazza instead.”
The four men meditated briefly on the unreliability of politicians. The best one could say was that their fits and starts caused fluctuations in the steady stream of one’s progress toward any reasonable goal.
“Psalm 146,” Ganzer said lugubriously. ” ‘Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.’ “
“Or even worse, they stay alive and do something that means our plans come to nothing.” Karl bent over his pack and checked on exactly what was left.
“I suppose they’re real,” Georg said. “Up-timers. Not just legends or fairy tales. It’s not as if I’ve ever seen one for myself.”
Karl turned around. “Real enough. I’ve seen plenty of them. A person does, down in Thuringia-Franconia.”
“They’re real,” Desiderius agreed. “You can find quite a few in Wismar, too. I’ve studied them.”
“As far as ‘real’ goes,” Ganzer continued, ignoring that digression, “any one of the cities you mention would make a decent meeting place, if they had just settled on one of them instead of Magdeburg. Most of them have city halls that are large enough for the legislature to meet. Even if they don’t, all of them have huge old churches that are certainly large enough to be used as meeting places for the legislature, separation of church and state or no separation of church and state.”
“In the meantime,” he added, “if our town of Jerichow ever needs to send a delegation to the provincial government, where will our delegates find it? Did that wonderful bit of ‘exclusive property’ come with proper office buildings? Or are Strigel and company still camping out in inns and rented quarters? Or, since Strigel is the leader of the FoJP, is the party paying his bills instead of the province? If they are providing his bed and board, where are the provincial government’s files? The ledgers? Are they kept wherever the delegates go when the legislature meets? What building? In the city itself? Surely not in the Altstadt?”
“Now, the question about whether they’ve already built headquarters is something I can answer.” Georg rooted through some piles of paper. “This came in a week or so ago, in the same mail delivery as that newspaper article you mentioned about temporary quarters and permanent quarters. The answer is that they haven’t. They’re just planning to.”
He waved an illustrated broadside with ground plans and drawings of a building that looked rather like an enlarged version of the Tangermünde city hall at the others.
“I can pretty well promise you that the northern three-quarters of Magdeburg Province will not be made happy by the prospect of seeing their tax money drained to construct a set of fancy new buildings in our ‘political capital’ exclave within newly prosperous Magdeburg City, while most of the province, except right along the Elbe, isn’t recovering very well.”
Desiderius took the broadside. “There–it says ‘west of the Altstadt, on a main route into the central city, near the main railroad line.’ It doesn’t give an address, though.”
Ganzer nodded. “People especially won’t be happy about the ‘within prosperous Magdeburg City’ part of it, given that the Magdeburg officials could let our money be spent on building those nice new offices in such a desirable location and then take them over for themselves. Or the FoJP could get Gericke to apply eminent domain, then buy them cheap, and have a nice party headquarters. One that we up here paid for building. What’s to prevent them? Not some empty words on a piece of paper saying that a nice, big, square block in Greater Magdeburg belongs to the Province.”
“The emperor?” Karl suggested tentatively.
“What does he care? If it would give him a political advantage at the moment it was happening, he’d just wink. After all, he was right here in Jerichow, himself, in person, when his army did so much damage five years ago.”
Desiderius looked out through the partly opened window that allowed a little badly needed fresh air into the fug of the city hall. He saw . . .
“What’s wrong with Jerichow?”
“What do you mean?”
“As a provincial capital? It’s almost as close to the center of Magdeburg Province as Stendal or Tangermünde, and that’s a huge old church if ever I saw one. A huge old church that they’d have to repair if the provincial legislature was meeting in it. If they didn’t, the delegates would be subject to perpetual leaks dripping on the backs of their necks, which they probably wouldn’t want at all. So the tax money from the rest of the province could be applied to fixing your local problem.” He winked. “Not somebody else’s.”
“Have I ever heard a sentence more tangled up than that one?” Karl asked, parsing it like a butcher using a cleaver on a freshly slaughtered cow.
“You know what I meant. If you want to get their attention, though . . . If you want to get this town rebuilt, somehow you have to get the provincial government’s attention.” Desiderius grinned. “Start a petition drive to relocate the provincial capital. There must be some kind of reason . . . reasonably plausible reason, that is. Get a delegation from Jerichow together and send it down to Magdeburg to beard your governor. Even if Jerichow didn’t elect a representative to the provincial legislature, the other towns up here in the northern part of the province must have. Who’s the delegate from Stendal? Who are the delegates from Wittstock? Perleberg? Gardelegen? Kyritze? If they’ve attended legislative sessions down in Magdeburg, they must know how to find where the offices are now, because they’re probably not in an empty city block where the buildings haven’t been built yet. Someone in this town must know where the legislature meets.”
“Really,” Karl said, “the next thing you need to do is call a special election and choose your own delegate. Surely there’s someone . . .”
Georg stroked a hand through his neatly trimmed reddish beard. “Barnabas Kannenberg might agree.”
Ganzer nodded. “He’s getting ready to turn the smithy over to his son Henning because of his bad shoulder.”
“What ointments and liniments has he been using?” Karl asked with professional interest. “Perhaps I could recommend . . .”
* * *
“The only thing we’ve really seen of the CoCs,” Barnabas Kannenberg said, “was when their units marched north to Mecklenburg during Krystalnacht. We mostly saw them from inside the town, where most of the people had locked themselves in their houses and were praying that the locusts would go around us rather than coming in.”
“That’s not really fair,” his son protested. “They maintained good discipline, overall. Not much confiscation of supplies. Hardly any looting.”
“True,” Georg Huff said. “None of them came in to root out our anti-Semites.”
“When their organizers were here that one time—before the election in 1634, the only time any of them came—they may have called us ‘locals’ and made it clear they didn’t see any potential here, but they do keep lists. They probably noticed then that we didn’t have any Semites to be anti, so to speak.”
Henning Kannenberg grinned. “Or any witches, either. The peasants have plenty of superstitious practices, out in the countryside, that are designed to keep witchcraft away, but as I told one of those fellows, the customs clearly work, because there really isn’t any witchcraft around.”
His father frowned. “The pastor would rebuke you for such irreverence.”
“It’s not as if he hasn’t rebuked me plenty of times before.”
“What kind of practices?” Karl asked with interest.
“Well. They strew a newborn calf with salt and dill to keep curses away from it. They use a lot of dill, generally, in their barns and stalls. After they muck out a stall, they throw dill powder into it three times, backwards, against witchcraft. There’s a lot of doing things backwards, such as a farmer making sure when he’s bought a new ox, to back it into the stall the first time he puts it in the barn, putting the shoes on a new horse on the hoofs backwards, just long enough to lead him to his new home but cause the witches to think the animal has gone away instead of coming there. We get quite a bit of that in the smithy, we do. It’s a bit of an art not to damage the hooves when a man mounts those shoes backwards. To keep birds from eating newly planted peas, the person doing the planting puts three peas in his mouth, or her mouth, and holds them there until the planting is done, then spits them out into the last hole.”
Desiderius, a child of the city, blinked and said . . .
“Oh.”
Karl smiled to himself as the local went on.
“The pastors let it go, by and large,” Georg said. “These things are not Christian, but they do no harm.”
Karl nodded. As a distiller and seller of Olitäten, he couldn’t think of any significant damage that a person could wreak with powdered dill.
“The Dorfschulzen are peasants themselves; they do the same things. Most of the teachers in the village schools don’t try for much more than reading and counting.”
Georg Huff shook his head. “Occasionally, around and about, some woman kills her husband or brother and someone mutters about ‘witchcraft,’ but it almost always turns out to have been poison. There was a case in Perleberg a while back. A pact with the devil can’t be good for her soul, but it doesn’t seem to do anybody else much harm unless it’s backed up.”
He looked meaningfully at Karl’s portable array of apothecary supplies.
Barnabas moved the shoulder that Karl was poulticing. “Ah, that heat feels good. There were some witches in Wittstock, I believe, with an investigation. That was back in my grandfather’s day. But that’s neither here nor there. We were talking about the CoCs. I’ve never heard that witches have an opinion about the Committees of Correspondence, so it doesn’t apply.”
Henning laughed. “The CoCs have an opinion about witches. That they don’t exist.”
He stood up and refilled his mug. “More broth?”
Nobody else wanted more broth.
He leaned against the doorjamb. “I’ve seen Matthias Strigel. Not to talk to, of course, but I’ve seen him. I was down in Magdeburg the day when Princess Kristina and the young Dane flew in. They rode from the airport into the city with Strigel on one side and the mayor of Hamburg—Gericke’s equivalent there—on the other. He’s a big man. Those of us standing along the road could scarcely get a glimpse of the princess.”
Desiderius gave Henning a considering look. If the blacksmith thought a man was big, then the man must be quite large indeed. “Know anything about him beyond that?”
“He’s a southerner, of course. From somewhere down around Barby, I think I heard. Decent education, but not your Latin school or university. Apprenticeship, with paid schooling in practical business matters and modern languages. Not sure exactly what his trade was, but he traveled around quite a bit—someone mentioned that he’d been as far as Prague, back in the early days of the war. He does have military experience. Augsburg, Nürnberg. The Netherlands for a while, perhaps. Danzig, I heard, even Königsberg. The work he did might have had something to do with the machines that process metal wire, or the mills that power them.”
“Henning doesn’t advertise it,” Ganzer said, “but he’s the closest you’re going to find to a permanent local CoC contact. Not that he was one of those who marched out to Mecklenburg.”
“A man has to get along with his neighbors, as long as they’re mostly minding their own business.”
Rohrbacher decided to get the conversation back where it was supposed to be.
“If Jerichow elects a delegate and sends him to Magdeburg, could you tell him where to find the provincial government?”
“Not right now. It’s moved around quite a bit. Rental quarters. Every time a person goes to Magdeburg, they’ve built something new, and things have rearranged themselves. But if you do call a special election and my father does get elected as delegate, I could probably figure out someone he could find once he got to Magdeburg who might know how things stand at the moment. If he’s an official delegate, somebody would pretty much have to agree to talk to him.”
“Somebody?”
“Some clerk, most likely. The important politicians tend to be out of the office when unimportant people show up.” He sighed. “Anyone from Jerichow is pretty much going to be unimportant by definition. People are pretty thin on the ground, up here in the north—not to mention that since they’ve been subjects of the margraves, electors, of Brandenburg for generations, a lot of them are a bit confused by having been moved into Magdeburg Province by the emperor a couple of years ago and still talk about themselves as Brandenburgers.”
“The politicians wouldn’t necessarily ignore your delegate.” Desiderius picked up the illustrated broadside. “Not if he showed up with a very large petition, from the councils of all the northern towns, properly notarized signatures and such, requesting that the provincial capital be moved away from Magdeburg before the legislature wastes their money on putting up fancy new buildings there.”
Karl gave the poultice on Barnabas’ shoulder a final pat. “Now have your wife repeat this three times a week.” He turned around. “You may stay here and compile a petition if you like, but it’s October and the weather’s getting chancey. I’m going to finish up my business with Ganzer here and head for Magdeburg by way of Genthin and Burg, then it’s home for the winter.”
Desiderius sighed. “My father will kill me if I don’t get to Jena pretty soon. He wanted me to go straight up the river.”
“While you’re drawing up the petition,” Karl said, “don’t forget the bricks. Or the canal.”
“What?”
“A couple of other ideas that our young friend here had as we were walking along the Jerichow Road.” He explained.
“Don’t worry.” Henning and Georg grinned at one another. “You two go on about your business. We can handle this.”
On the Jericho Road you will answer His call.
* * *
