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 Fussen, 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 macrame. 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 design.”
She shook her head again. “Poor Michael.”
Upward Mobility
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
