Grantville Gazette 45

Ein Feste Burg, Episode Six

While our friends in Eisenach have “wonderful nights,” and the deconstruction of the Wartburg still goes on in the spring of the year 1634, we need to rewind to the summer of 1632 and meet some other people who will eventually become involved in the project, too.

The following story is inspired by the novel El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha written by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, published in the year 1605, and one of the biggest bestsellers in Europe in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

Y asi, sin dar parte a persona alguna de su intencion, y sin que nadie le viese, una manana, antes del dia, que era uno de los calurosos del mes de julio, se armo de todas sus armas, subio sobre Rocinante.

Vnd ohne vorwissen einiges Menschen / ohn entdeckung seines Vorhabens / auch da? jhn niemand sahe oder seiner gewahr wurde / waffnete er sich eines Morgens vor der Sonnen Auffgang an einem der hitzigsten Tage des Hewmonats mit seiner gantzen Rustung / stieg auff seinen Rossubrall.

So, without giving notice of his intention to anyone, and without anybody seeing him, one morning before the dawning of the day (which was one of the hottest of the month of July) he donned his suit of armour, mounted Rocinante.

Grantville, New United States

July 1632

Marshall Ambler left his home before dawn. Dressed in a duster and an old Stetson, he saddled the horse Ruben Nasi had bought for him, and led it out of the stable. The leftovers from a job in the 80s, an old theodolite and a ranging pole, were firmly attached to his saddle, along with some clothes and all the achievements of civilization not available down-time. When they reached the street, Marshall mounted his steed and steered it along Buffalo Creek.

By the time the sun rose, he was already past the Ring and on the road to Rudolstadt. There he would meet his prospective assistant Melchior Nehring, Secretarius at the court of Duke Johann Ernst of Saxe-Eisenach, who in turn was, according to Ruben, his new employer.

Although Marshall had made use of the months since Ruben had contacted him to practice riding, he was sure that he would have to take a longer rest in Rudolstadt. Ten miles for the first ride would certainly be enough for his posterior.

For me there's no impossible,

I order, bind, forbid, set free

Grantville

Two months earlier

As on most evenings Marshall Ambler, teacher at Grantville Tech Center, was sitting on a bench in the Thuringen Gardens, boasting about his model railroad and the Germans around him hung on his every word. In the last year, he had started the tradition to demonstrate his railroad table only to the three best students after each class test, and so the word had spread among the down-timers about the great honor.

While he was rattling on about the differences of the gear transmissions of German and American diesel engines, he noticed a strange face. It looked like a Spaniard, or one of these Ottoman Jews who had the Grantville money business under their control.

Later the man approached. "Good evening, Mr. Ambler," he said in nearly accent-free English. "My name is Ruben Nasi, and I have a business proposal for you."

Marshall noticed that the man didn't try to shake hands with him. Most of his health problems only showed up when he was near fellow Americans or in one of the modern houses of Grantville, but some habits die hard. Marshall still avoided shaking anybody's hand, and if this man knew that, he perhaps knew still more about him.

"Okay, let's hear it," he said.

"Not here. What about taking a walk together?"

A secret proposal! Sounds like another Grantville spy. But for whom?

Aloud he said, "Why not? It’s private enough in my apartment. Want to see my railroad?"

"That's exactly the point," the Jew answered.

Marshall squinted at him. "Oh, no! I won't sell it. Never!"

Nasi lifted his hands defensively. "Sorry, that wasn't my intention. Please accept my apology. I was referring to your expertise, not to your property. But I would really like to see that marvel."

Marshall could see the Jew's eyes examine the locks and grilles of his basement apartment. And the man even didn't hide it.

"I can see you have invested much in your safety. It seems you are a cautious man."

Marshall shrugged. "Sure. Is that good or bad?"

"Oh, it speaks very much in your favor. We need a cautious man. And, if I may speak frankly, one who likes us 'down-timers' more than he's fond of the Americans."

The Jew looked in Marshall's eyes with a questioning look on his face.

"Get on with it!" Marshall now started to wonder where this was going.

"We want to build a railroad."

Marshall's eyes widened. "Now, that's interesting. And who's 'we'?"

"Hmmm. 'We' are people who have money and estates. I heard that is the first precondition to building a railroad."

Uh-huh. A bunch of German nobles! They've found a new hobbyhorse.

Aloud Marshall said: "But that's not enough. You'll need steel, a whole lot of steel. And there isn't much of it in this world at the moment."

"At the moment, this is true," Nasi confirmed. "But that will change. Everything will change, and we don't want to be left behind.

"I've read books on railroad companies, and it seems they always needed years between the decision and turning the first sod. And we don't even have a company. Only a vision." He pointed to Marshall's model railroad. "A vision of trains."

"Well, that's a model railroad. I never worked on the real thing. You understand the difference?" But something nagged at him.

"Haven't you seen The Flight of the Phoenix? I have," Nasi said.

Oh yeah, I'm the German model plane builder, and you're the Americans to get out of the desert with a real plane.

"Sure, but that's the movies, not real life."

The Jew grinned. "Do you doubt your own expertise? In the Gardens it sounded otherwise."

Marshall didn't hesitate a second. "No! On paper I know everything."

Nasi shrugged. "You don't actually need to build a train now. We want you to investigate on the possibilities. We need someone who knows about it. And not only from the books. You're an engineer; you know what is important and what isn't."

Marshall frowned. "And if I accept, hypothetically, what do you think, I should do? Where do 'we' want to build this railroad?"

"Do you know the Via Regia, the High Road?"

Marshall's frown deepened. "From Frankfurt to Leipzig? Through the Vogelsberg and the Rhon? Two hundred miles for a start? You're kidding."

"And what about the Thuringian part of it? At the moment we are not interested in Saxony or Hesse."

"Hmmm." Marshall went to his bed and seized a large folder from under it. He opened it and revealed a stack of maps. He had bought any railroad map of the world he could get. Starting with England, Germany was second.

"This is the Thuringia Railroad in the old timeline." He pointed to the cities. "From the Werra via Eisenach, Gotha, Erfurt, Weimar, Apolda, Naumburg to Wei?enfels. It's rather flat, not a single large river. Towns like a bead chain. It's a good place to start."

"And we didn't even know if it's good or bad." Nasi beamed. "And we don't have such a map. Each city you mentioned is a day's walk for an ox team, and how long with the train?"

Marshall shrugged again. "Twenty miles? Forty minutes with the Adler, that was the first locomotive in Germany. At the time of the Ring of Fire it would have taken about ten minutes."

"So the gain is larger if we build the first railroad, than all they managed afterwards. Reducing the complete east-west trip through Thuringia to three hours instead of five days. That's wonderful."

"But we still haven't enough steel. We can't build it now." Marshall straightened. "But you're right. We can start it."

"See?" Ruben smiled. "Now you said 'we' yourself. It seems that railroads have this influence on men. Deal?"

Marshall extended his hand. Ruben's smile widened when he took it.

"Deal."

Happy the age, happy the time, in which shall be made known my deeds of fame.

Rudolstadt, County of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt

July 1632

When Marshall approached Rudolstadt on the gravel road, he could see Schloss Heidecksburg sitting on a little hill on his left. It was by far the largest building in the little town. And he could see that the owner obviously felt it was not large enough. A scaffold on its left side showed clearly that the current count intended to enlarge it farther.

Another way to spend excess money.

He turned right and shortly after reached the inn "Zum Adler," easily recognizable by the iron eagles on poles over the roof. Here Melchior was supposed to wait for him.

"Willkommen in Rudolstadt, Sorr."

Marshall scrutinized the young, glasses-wearing, portly German while he noticed Melchior scrutinizing him, the tall, gaunt-featured, almost-fifty American.

The American had no problem understanding the German greeting. Marshall had lived in Nuremberg in the late 1960s, working for the U.S. Army and teaching the German civilian employees engineering and safety guidelines. He knew that "Sorr" was meant to be "sir."

"So you're my 'tour guide' for the next few months, Melchior?"

"Yess, Sorr. It will be an honor to serve you and show you every nice corner of three duchies and a Catholic bishopric under Swedish occupation."

This was a description of a less than hundred miles' journey. In West Virginia, they could have stayed in the state for more than twice the distance, and West Virginia only ranked forty-first by size among the U.S. states.

In fact, the whole of Thuringia was smaller than even Hawaii, but at the moment consisted of about twenty different principalities in more than thirty separate areas. Two Reichsstadte-free Imperial cities-several parts that belonged to Hessians or Saxons, tiny pieces belonging to the Brandenburgers or God-knows-who. And of course, any of that could change any day.

So crossing only four borders on this journey was a rather small number.

Marshall stopped his thoughts from straying too far away and concentrated on the current point.

"Do you have the supplies I wanted?"

"Oh, yess, Sorr. Fresh food, soap for washing, thick woolen blankets for the nights and a tent. And the maps-" He wanted to fetch them from his bag, but Marshall stopped him.

"Not here, not now. I think we should take advantage of the good weather and ride at least one more hour. We ought to reach Kahla before noon, and along the Saale we won't need maps."

Marshall was not completely happy about staying in the saddle for another hour, but they were still too near Grantville, and a visitor might recognize him on his confidential mission. So he decided to keep moving.

Gasthaus zum Stadttor, Kahla, Duchy of Saxe-Altenburg

"Yess, Sorr, Count Tilly stayed in this inn last year on his way to Breitenfeld," Melchior loudly commented on the paintings on the walls of the inn. "We Germans are not much concerned if he's friend or enemy. In fact, that may change from one day to another. Martin Luther also slept here in 1524, and Emperor Charles the Fifth when he wasn't emperor yet."

Marshall looked around. The inn was built-according to a sign on the outside-in 1491, and had apparently not been cleaned since then. But that was something he had to live in tonight and live with in the future. He could have stayed in Grantville, but had decided otherwise.

"So you can now show me those maps you have. There apparently hasn't been an American in here yet."

The "maps" were obviously not meant to show the exact distances, but only all the villages that existed in the different principalities. When he compared them to his much less detailed version, he could see that even the angles between the towns didn't fit his map.

"This 'cartographer' was more of an artist than a surveyor," he commented.

"Oh, these are only the overview maps. We can get more exact ones in any of the Amter."

Yes, the district administrations should know exactly how many taxes to collect from which village.

"Who cares? It will be an adventure, anyway."

"Adventure?" Melchior said doubtfully. "I hope not. This area is not like your Wilder Westen. The towns in Thuringia have been here since the eighth century, when Karl Martell, grandfather of Karl der Gro?e-that's the man you Americans call Charlemagne-fought against the barbarian Saxons and founded many towns here."

Melchior shook his head. "No, since the Imperials have gone, this is a really boring part of Germany. Farmers, craftsmen, and shepherds; students and professors in the big towns, that's all you'll find here."

"Okay, so we won't stir them up. Do you think we can reach Jena today? My butt's not as sore as I thought."

Weimar, Duchy of Saxe-Weimar

September 1632

Durchlauchtigster Hochgeborener Herzog, Furst und Herr.

O Serene, Highborn Duke, Prince and Lord,

To Your Highness most humbly I allow myself to report that the news of a Spanish attack against Eisenach have reached Weimar, and the citizens are shocked, because one year of peace has induced a little economic recovery here like in most of the Thuringian principalities, and so the people thought themselves safe from the terribilites of the war, but now they are talking about forming a militia to secure at least the gates of the city, which in my humble opinion is completely futile.

But most of all I humbly want to inform and instruct Y.H., that we luckily and with God's protection reached Weimar after having successfully exploriret ways for the prospective iron path from Jena and Naumburg to this place.

In Jena we started in the park at the Saale the citizens call "The Paradise", for Mr. Ambler had detectiret this name in his books as the name of the railroad station in Jena, and we found that here are few problems to build at least a small "through station," for the line between Rudolstadt and Naumburg. The station, where goods can be loaded and unloaded, the so-called "switching yard," has to be built somewhere else.

And since the way from this park into the directio of Weimar is completely blocked by the city center of Jena-including the Collegium Jenense-he thought that the citizens might be much more pleased when the branching of the lines would happen south of their town, so another train station at the Erfurter Stra?e which leads to Weimar might be appropriate.

After having stayed in Jena for two weeks we pr?cediret to Naumburg, and explored a way from there via Apolda to Weimar, which we reached in late August. I include the exact path Mr. Ambler thinks suitable with this letter to Y.H. Also a path from Jena to Weimar is includiret.

Tomorrow we will start anew along the road to Erfurt to the west. I will write my next letter when we have reached Erfurt.

ActumWeimar, Sonntag den 12. / 2. 7bris 1632

Your submissive and humble servant,

Melchior Nehring, Secretarius

Between Monchenholzhausen and Bu?leben,

Near Erfurt, Archbishopric of Mainz

September 1632

Day was dawning when Marshall and Melchior left the inn and continued their journey.

Don Quixote had not gone far, when out of a thicket on his right there seemed to come feeble cries as of someone in distress, and wheeling, he turned Rocinante in the direction whence the cries seemed to proceed. He had gone but a few paces into the wood, when he saw a mare tied to an oak, and tied to another, and stripped from the waist upwards, a youth of about fifteen years of age, from whom the cries came. Nor were they without cause, for a lusty farmer was flogging him with a belt and following up every blow with scoldings and commands, repeating, "Your mouth shut and your eyes open!" while the youth made answer, "I won't do it again, master mine; by God's passion I won't do it again."

Marshall knew that corporal punishment was custom in the seventeenth century, but his twentieth-century attitude to morality forced him to intervene. Carefully, he told himself.

"Guten Morgen, mein Herr," he said with the little sound of arrogance he had acquired in the last two months to sustain the image of a "noble on his grand tour."

The farmer saw him, then saw the "servant" who followed him, and seemed to decide to treat him as a noble.

"Guten Morgen, Hochwohlgeboren," he answered and bowed.

"May I ask, dear man, what has enraged you so much?"

"This-" the farmer groped for words.

"— young man," Marshall helped him smiling.

"Ah, yes. This boy. I have been so gracious to him and his sister when they arrived nearly naked last year. I fed them and dressed them, and how have they thanked me? Run away, first his sister, and now this ungrateful wretch."

"I told you," the boy's voice came from behind. "She has not run away. She was abducted. By a bandit. And I want to free her."

"What a romantic adventure," Marshall said. He could nearly feel Melchior flinching behind him.

"Don't believe him, mein Herr. He's a liar," the farmer interjected.

"Why don't you let him go, when he wants to?" Marshall asked. "He will surely try again."

The farmer frowned. "He owes me money. For the shoes and the clothes. And when he tries again, I will have him thrown into the Schuldturm."

"Perhaps there is another way," Marshall said, and noticed that Melchior grimaced. "We need a stable hand, and perhaps I can assume his debts. Of how much do we speak?"

"Twenty Thaler, mein Herr."

"That's too much," the boy interjected. "We have worked for a whole year, and haven't been paid at all."

"Is he right?" Marshall asked sharply.

"Oh, hmmm, sorry. I forgot. But he still owes me two Thaler."

Marshall frowned. "I'm rather sure, that for a debt of two Thaler, no judge would throw him into debtor's prison.

"But you know what? I'll pay these two Thaler, and since you seem to be a reasonable man, I'm sure you'll want to do business with us. We need to buy food, and a mule or donkey, so the boy won't slow us down."

Beyond a doubt, Sancho, we must have already reached the second region of the air, where the hail and snow are generated; the thunder, the lightning, and the thunderbolts are engendered in the third region.

Waidbauerhof, Bu?leben, near Erfurt

The same afternoon

Marshall sat down on a bench with young Andreas Becker. It seemed that the boy and der Waidbauer, the woad farmer, were on rather good terms, once the debt was paid.

"So tell me, Andreas, what's this about 'arriving nearly naked'?"

"I think I'll have to start a little earlier, sir. When the Swedes came into Erfurt after the battle of Breitenfeld-"

"That was last September?" Marshall interrupted.

"Yes, sir. September 30th-or 20th by the Protestants' calendar-they entered the city. My papa was very furious when he heard that. He was a member of the city council and had always been against paying so much money to the Imperials to leave Erfurt in peace.

"But now he feared that the Lutheran 'Wettin Johanns' as he called them would use the opportunity to seize Erfurt from His Excellence the High Reverence in spite of the peace treaty of 1530.

"So he left home to 'stop these crazy barbarians' he said. And he never returned." The boy's voice got muffled by his tears.

People who had noticed the event called it an appalling accident. Jakob Becker had really tried to stop the Swedes.

He was so furious; he stepped in the way of Wilhelm of Saxe-Weimar's horse, who had led the marching in to the city hall to accept the mayor's surrender. He called the Wettin dukes in particular, and all Protestants and Swedes at large many names that the witnesses didn't want to repeat. Wilhelm only shook his head, Becker was shoved aside and the Swedes moved on.

But he was still shouting, and suddenly one of the cavalry horses shied, kicked out and hit him exactly in the chest. The people said he was dead before he fell to earth. A Swedish medic even tried to help him with no success.

"When our neighbors, who had been witnesses, came to our home on the bridge-"

"Bridge?" Marshall interrupted the boy.

"He's referring to the Kramerbrucke-the merchants' bridge, sir," Melchior answered with his tour-guide voice. "It was built three hundred years ago with houses on both sides of the street, but it existed as a market place two centuries earlier."

"And we had our own house," this was the first time the boy showed some eagerness. "Mama worked as seamstress downstairs, and we all slept upstairs. And we even had-how do you Americans call it? — a water closet."

"Ja," Melchior commented. "A hole in the floor, where the shit can drop directly into the Gera. And what about the winter?" He shuddered. The boy laughed.

"Okay," Marshall sent an approving gaze to Melchior, but then turned back to Andreas. "Then what happened?"

The boy took a deep breath. "When they came and told what had happened, Mama panicked. She said we should flee to her relatives in Techstedt or Pechstedt-I had never heard of them and I could not exactly understand the name of the village. And we had to run now.

"She took Maria by her hand and left the house. I had to run after them. We left the city and walked over the fields. Mama didn't want to use a road.

"After an hour or so a thunderstorm was coming up. Black clouds towered higher and higher and then it started pouring water. The soil turned into mud, but still we walked on and on.

"And then we reached the Linderbach. I didn't know that the creek was called that name then. And I wouldn't have recognized it, had we been there before. It was a black and raging current. No bridge; no chance to cross."

The boy stopped, apparently overwhelmed from the pictures in his memory. Then his voice got completely flat.

"But Mama tried. She slipped. She fell. Her head hit a boulder, and then she disappeared in the water. Maria wanted to run after her, and I could barely hold her. Then I took her in my arms; and we cowered down and cried together until the rainstorm ended.

"And then we walked on. We had lost our shoes in the mud. We had torn our clothes. When we reached the farm, we collapsed in the yard." Andreas' voice was choking.

Then he straightened. "Der Waidbauer was very nice to us. But he told us that he had nothing himself and he could not feed two more mouths easily.

"He didn't know either Techstedt or Pechstedt, and there are two villages called Bechstedt, and there is Eichstedt, and I even don't know the name of Mama's relatives. So if we wanted to stay with him, we both had to work for food and lodging and the shoes and clothes he bought for us.

"He asked for Mama downstream, but on that day the Linderbach not only killed her, but also made the bridge on the road to Weimar collapse. People thought her body had probably been washed all the way down into the Unstrut.

"So we settled down here. I worked in the stable and on the fields, and Maria sewed and mended and embroidered. Until the day the outlaws appeared."

"'Outlaws'?" Marshall asked quizzically. "You mean like 'Robin Hood and his Merry Men,' that kind of outlaws? And you called this 'a boring part of Germany,' Melchior."

Melchior shrugged. "Shit happens, sir. Former Imperial mercenaries, perhaps."

"No, Herr Nehring," the boy said. "They are real bandits, criminals. At least their chief. He visited my father once, some years ago. At that time his name was Wilhelm Schontal."

Papa had told him that the man was a Catholic from Hanau, and was wanted for murder there, for killing a Calvinist tax collector.

He swore on the Bible that it had been in self-defense, and that there was a conspiracy going on against pious Catholics. So the auxiliary bishop of Erfurt granted him asylum.

That lasted until the day when the Kanonikus of St. Mary's was found dead and some very nice pieces of the church treasury had disappeared along with Wilhelm. And nobody heard of him afterwards.

"But this spring the farmers talk about a Catholic 'Robin Hood,' who robs the wealthy Lutheran merchants on the High Road to Leipzig, and gives their money to the poor. Exactly as told in the old ballads."

"Ha!" shouted Marshall. "You're joking."

"No, sir. They don't make presents, but they pay generously for food and other supplies they buy from the farmers. And their captain uses the name Guillaume de Beauvallee."

Melchior's lips moved, when he repeated the name. "That's 'Wilhelm Schontal' translated into French!"

"Yes, Herr Nehring. That's what I thought, too. And I told the woad farmer about what that man had done in Erfurt. But he didn't believe me.

"And last week the outlaws appeared here."

Andreas had managed to hide in the stable when they turned up, but Maria unsuspectingly left the farmhouse, and froze when she saw the captain of this troop. She had been only nine years old when Schontal had visited Jakob Becker and his family in his house. But she obviously remembered that short, sturdy man with his enormous black mustachio, who had frightened her the first time she had seen him.

The next day Maria was missing. Andreas was sure that Schontal had something to do with it, but he couldn't convince the woad farmer. The farmer was adamant that Maria certainly had run away to find her mother.

"So I had no choice, I had to find her. But my search for her ended soon afterwards in the thicket, where the woad farmer found me."

A field near Erfurt

Some days later

"Guten Morgen, meine Herren," Melchior greeted the peasants who were harvesting flax in a field.

Not being accustomed to be addressed so courteously, the men stopped working, straightened and examined the scenario before them: A chubby young man with glasses on a mule, a tall, haggard, oddly-dressed man behind him on a large horse, and the obviously young stable hand on another mule holding the reins of a third mule.

"I am the guide for my master, Mister Marshall of Ambler, Lord of America, on his grand tour through Europe. He has heard that a distinguished buccaneer by name of Guillaume de Beauvallee has made his camp somewhere around here, and he-" At this point Melchior showed a grimace of resignation and disgust, "-wants to make his acquaintance.

"Are you, o honorable rural workers, by any chance able to fulfill his desire, and tell us the location of this encampment? An appropriate gratification will be awarded."

The men looked at each other, obviously trying to make a sense from this flood of pretentious words. Then one after another, each shook his head.

Marshall and Melchior had carefully devised this scene to reveal the hideout of Schontal and his gang. Melchior had declared that he was not completely convinced that these bandits had indeed abducted Maria. Marshall, however, had convinced him that he would not give up until he knew the facts.

Either nobody knew, or nobody dared to tell.

****

Shortly after the three continued on their way, Marshall heard a shout from behind. One of the peasants they passed was running after them. They stopped and turned.

"I know it," the man gasped. "How much?"

He obviously didn't want to share his knowledge and the reward with the other men.

"One Groschen," Melchior said.

"One Thaler," the man replied.

"Melchior," the arrogant voice of Marshall came from behind. "Don't bargain. But we'll return, if the information turns out to be wrong."

"Yess, mein Lord," Melchior answered and looked questioningly in the man's eyes.

"Mein Lord," the man echoed. "I will not betray you, I don't dare to."

The old windmill near the road between Bechstedt and Isseroda was the bandits' hideout. The Imperials had killed its owner two years before, and since then apparently nobody had dared to reopen the mill because the old miller’s ghost still dwelled there.

Yeah, a haunted mill, Marshall thought, always a good pretext to keep the superstitious natives at distance.

Schontal and his gang had taken possession of the mill, and used it as their headquarters. It was far enough from the High Road to be hidden from view, but near enough to start their raids from here.

When Melchior heard this, he uttered the mysterious words "So we will have to fight the windmills, too."

Marshall looked at him, and decided not to pursue the odd comment, except to say: "We will possibly fight at the windmill, but by then we better have a good plan to emerge unscathed."

Either I am mistaken, or this is going to be the most famous adventure that has ever been seen.

Windmill at the road from Bechstedt to Isseroda

Near Weimar, New United States, CPE

Next morning

Maria Becker left the windmill where the Hessian murderer and his cronies kept their supplies. With all the power of her twelve-year-old muscles, she dragged a sack of flour down the ramp. The thugs wanted bread for breakfast, so she had to start the dough now.

Suddenly she saw a man on a horse. A tall, haggard man, wearing a strange kind of suit. He had something like a lance in his right hand, and a hat with a big brim on his head. The bandits had apparently noticed him, too. Schontal had already gotten up and now went to meet the strange man, holding a pistol casually in his hand.

Marshall slowly approached the windmill on his horse. The bandits were sitting at a campfire, where something was cooking in a pot. Their horses were tied to some stakes in a meadow nearby.

Most of their guns could be seen strapped to their saddles some yards away, but some of the men nevertheless had wheel lock pistols and sabers lying close at hand.

When they noticed Marshall, they grabbed their weapons. A short, sturdy man with an enormous black mustachio and a pistol in his hand rose and took several steps forward.

Noticing that Marshall was obviously unarmed apart from the ranging pole he had removed from its sheath and now was holding upright like a lance, he started to smile. It was a sneering, arrogant grin.

He bowed deeply before Marshall. "Guillaume de Beauvallee, a votre service," he said, but the following words gave away his thick Hessian dialect. "Whom do I have the honor to meet on this wonderful morning?"

"I'm Marshall Ambler, and I've come-" He pointed to the young girl, who had just left the windmill, and who hauled a large sack. "-to retrieve your captive."

"Oh, yes." The bandit's grin was now only sardonic. "You, and which army?" He waved about with his pistol. His cronies laughed joyfully.

"Mr. Bill Bo-valley, I don't need an army, as long as I have my magical instruments with me." He lowered the ranging pole; its point was still several yards away from Schontal, but now pointing to his forehead. "So please drop all your guns and make your way back into whatever rat-hole you have crawled out of."

"Oh, so you are one of these mythical 'Americains.'" He lifted his pistol and carefully aimed at Marshall's upper body. "But do you know what I think? I think-"

Nobody would ever learn what thoughts really crossed his mind at that moment. A muffled crack split the quietness of the morning, and a red flower bloomed on Schontal's forehead.

The fact that the back of his head blew away at the same time added to the absurdity of the event. Marshall could still see a kind of puzzlement in his eyes, when Schontal slowly fell on his back. The same puzzlement now showed on the faces of his cronies.

Marshall changed the aim of his pole to the next of the bandits, who had not yet brought his pistol to the ready. "Do I have to repeat this lesson or will you drop your weapons and run?"

Suddenly the expressions on the bandits' face changed from puzzlement to horror. All of them dropped their pistols and sabers and began to flee.

Melchior rose from behind the little mound where he had hidden before sunrise. It was only fifty yards from Marshall's actual position, and though Melchior had practiced with the up-time hunting rifle only for a week, he had developed a very good aim, at least at short distances.

He held the gun still, ready to react if one of the bandits changed his mind and returned. But they still were running as if pursued by a dragon.

When they had disappeared behind the next grove, Marshall whistled, and Andreas appeared with the mules. As soon as the boy saw his sister, he jumped off his mount and ran to hug her. The girl was still stunned by the bloody dreadful event, which had happened before her eyes. But when her brother reached her, she managed a little smile.

"Come on," Marshall said. "We don't know how long they need to regain composure and return here. So let's gather their belongings and then make like a tree and leave."

Then, smiling at the girl he said, "Maria, do you think you can ride a mule? Or do you want to ride with me?"

Ask a girl whether she wants to ride on a horse, in Ancient Egypt, Rome, Germany or West Virginia, and the reply is always the same.

Maria extended both arms, and Marshall lifted her on his horse's back before his saddle.

Melchior and Andreas gathered the horses and saddles of the bandits, and all together started to Weimar.

Weimar

Some days later

When all the bureaucratic formalities had been completed, and the children sent to Grantville with a representative of the duke of Saxe-Eisenach, Marshall and Melchior again started into the direction of Erfurt.

"Perhaps," Marshall said thoughtfully, "we'll find more adventures in this 'boring' county of yours."

"El ingenioso hidalgo," Melchior muttered.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Oh, never, surely, was there knight

So served by hand of dame,

As served was he, Don Quixote hight,

When from his town he came;

With maidens waiting on himself,

Princesses on his hack

Grantville, New United States

April 1633

The Orient Express came into Penn Station and stopped at platform seven, just when the Hiawatha, hauled by a streamlined class A, was departing from platform ten. The passengers would have been very unhappy for not catching the connecting train south, but fortunately all this happened only on Marshall Ambler's large model railroad.

The dignitaries from the Thuringian towns stood around Marshall with gaping mouths. They had heard that the up-timer was about to give a "presentation on rail operations," but this was not in the least what they had expected, if they had expected anything.

But certainly they hadn't expected the giant table with many trains moving simultaneously, starting and stopping as if by magic. Steam trains steaming, passenger coaches lit, signals changing colors.

"And this," Hieronymus Bruckner, the Ratsmeister of Erfurt cleared his throat. "And all this is a picture of up-time reality?"

"All things considered, yes," Marshall answered. "Much compressed in space and time, of course. Model trains try to show everything on the available space, what normally happens hundreds of miles apart. And I have locomotives from eras that are over one hundred years apart."

"Can I," Andreas Cotta, the Burgermeister of Eisenach, interjected, "see one of these 'locomotives' close up?"

"Of course." Marshall pushed some buttons, and all trains came to a halt. He seized the streamlined Hudson that had drawn the Twentieth Century Limited and handed it to Cotta.

The man carefully took it in one hand. "It's not hot."

"Yes, all the 'steam' engines are driven by electric power on the model railroad."

"But," Cotta wondered, "They were steaming."

Marshall laughed. "That's a simple trick. They burn drops of oil to produce some smoke. When you wait for ten minutes, they'll all stop smoking but still move."

Cotta pointed at the large drivers of the steam locomotive and then to one of the tiny figures on the platform. "Are these wheels really as big as a man?"

"Yes, but often they are much smaller. Usually the larger the wheel, the faster the steam locomotive can go, roughly."

"And you want to build such a thing in real?" Johannes Evander, the mayor of Weimar, asked from behind.

"No, not in the next ten or twenty years. Locomotives that big weren't built in the old timeline before the 1880s. That's over fifty years after the first train ran.

"Here," he took the much smaller model of a Climax from a branch line. "This is roughly what I have in mind." The geared engine had two trucks with two axles each, and the wheels were much smaller than the Hudson's.

"What you can't see here are gears under the original engine distributing the power evenly onto all eight wheels. This type of locomotive runs smoother on bad track and doesn't strain the tracks as much as a normal 'rod' engine. It could even run on wooden tracks with special wheels."

"And what are these colored engines?" Bruckner tried to come forward. "They have no chimneys."

"We had three different types of engines up-time." Marshall took a large red V200. "This is a German Diesel engine. It ran on oil like the APCs you all know.

"And this,"-this was a green Swiss Be 6/8-"has the nickname 'crocodile,' and was originally driven by electric power like all the model trains here. Do you see the rods on the top? They take the electric power from wires above where it can't hurt people."

"And why," Andreas Gompracht, Oberster Ratsmeister of Gotha, wondered, "don't you build electric trains? Electric power is much cheaper than coal."

"We'll do it, just not now." Marshall pointed to the electrified track, where the crocodile had run before. "The wire and the poles supporting it must be made of lots of copper and steel, and steel is our scarcest resource in the moment. Moreover, each of the smaller locomotives needs about twenty tons-four hundred Zentner-of steel. The bigger ones up to a hundred tons. It's simply not yet available.

"They'll need an enormous amount of electric power, so we will have to build larger power plants before we can start to electrify the lines. So, we'll have to stay with steam for now."

Higgins Hotel, Grantville

The next day

The Conference Hall in the Higgins Hotel was bursting at its seams. Not only with the delegations of the Thuringian towns, which the new railroad line was supposed to connect, but also delegates from many other villages had appeared.

The Ernestine dukes had a small entourage each; and that meant at least twenty more people. Even some envoys of the Catholic Church from Erfurt had shown up, although all of the archbishop's properties in that county had been dispossessed by the Swedish king.

Marshall had never encountered so many people in such a small location before. The plan had been to reduce this run by meeting far away in Grantville, but the need to announce it publicly had spread the news widely.

Okay, I've put up with worse things.

Melchior appeared in the small side room. He had checked the big names on the list. "They are all here. And 'all' means-"

"Yes, I can see it. At least one man from every farm along the prospective route."

"Yes, and from even farther away. But the invited guests are all here. We should begin now." His face showed a little impatience.

"Oh yes. Cross your fingers!"

Melchior frowned. "Why should I? There are no witches here; at least I hope not."

"What do you Germans do to wish someone luck?"

Melchior folded his thumbs and closed his fingers around. "Press the thumbs."

"Okay, do it. I'll need it."

****

Marshall marched to the speaker's desk, and tapped on the mike several times. Partly to check its function, and partly to silence down the audience.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he started in English by custom. Then switched to German. "Meine. Herren." He corrected himself as he saw that the room was solely filled with men. "My name is Marshall Ambler and, on behalf of the shareholders, I want to inform you all of what we have planned since last summer."

He turned and nodded to Melchior. The young man pulled at a rope, and a curtain opened before the back wall.

Now everyone could see a large map of central Thuringia. A black line connected Jena with Weimar, Erfurt, Gotha, and Eisenach; finally ending at the Werra.

In large letters, the title "Jena-Eisenach Eisenbahngesellschaft" stretched over the whole map. Below this title, the map showed the coat of arms of the five towns and the three Ernestine duchies-now states of the NUS.

"This is our target: We will build a railroad along this line. The towns and people whose coats of arms are shown here have signed the company contract today. All of them bring estates or cash into the company, and there will be a bond to raise at least another ten million dollars from everyone who is willing to invest into the future of Thuringia."

Millions of questions and answers later Marshall threw himself onto the couch in his apartment. The shareholders and prospective investors were still discussing what they had learned during the buffet at the hotel, but he had excused himself. The air had been getting too bad for his allergies.

The itching reminded him how everything had begun. In the early 1970s after returning from Nuremberg where he had worked for the U.S. Army he had started teaching engineering and drafting in Fairmont. There he met the newly divorced Janice O'Keefe, who shortly afterwards became Janice Ambler, and then he moved to Grantville.

They wanted to have children, but it didn't work. And since Janice had two already from her first marriage with Dennis Haygood, she blamed Marshall.

Oh, not openly, but he could see how she more and more kept a distance from him, and more and more dived into her work. With the deterioration of their marriage, began the deterioration of his health.

First came headaches. He had examinations but they couldn't find a cause. Then his skin began to itch at different places. He had more examinations, and allergy tests, with again no results.

When he started coughing every time he entered the school building, he decided to quit his job in Fairmont and teach in Grantville's new tech center.

The next step down came when he noticed that the itching and coughing and the headaches all got worse whenever he met Janice.

Okay, he thought, let's visit a couch doctor. Perhaps all his woes were psychosomatic, derived from an emotional problem.

Some thousands of bucks later, he noticed that nothing got better. One of the other doctors had spoken about "Multiple chemical sensitivity." That meant a kind of super-allergy against everything, but nobody else believed that this disease even existed.

Whether this was true or not, it could only get better when he tried to avoid all possible sources of chemicals. This included scents and bleaches in clothing detergent, tobacco smoke, perfumes, and so on.

In short, Grantville and his wife. He asked Janice to stop smoking, and she did it. He asked her to stop using perfumes, and she did it. He asked her to stop using scented detergent, and Janice exploded.

"You hypochondriac, you idiot, you- Do you think the whole world turns around you? Can't you even consider another person beside yourself? Best you hide in a cave and let the entrance collapse."

Since he also could not prevent cars from driving through the town, he quit his job in the Tech Center, moved into the basement of their house, which already contained his model railroad, installed an air washer and airtight seals at the doors. Fortunately, he had a part-time job writing a regular column for the Industrial Engineer, and there were enough mail-order companies to keep him alive.

The doorbell rang. At first, Marshall didn't want to get up, but then decided otherwise. Only few of the people at the hotel knew where he lived. It was not probable that one of them would appear now.

When he opened the door, Janice was standing there, an embarrassed expression on her face that he hadn't seen for several years.

"Yeah, what do you want?" he asked.

"To talk with you. Can I come in?"

With a big gesture, he invited her. She hadn't been in his apartment since-was that in 1995? Three hundred sixty-two years from now. A long time.

She sat down in an armchair. He sat down on his couch again.

"So what?" he demanded.

"I saw you at the hotel. Not directly, but on tape."

"And?"

"You looked well. You look well. And you looked happy. It seems you've found something."

Marshall smiled. "Thanks. Finally, I've found something worth living for and working for. Is that, what you came to say?"

"Marshall, I know we got on poorly the last few years, and we both know that we are both to blame for it."

Then she saw him frowning. "Okay, I admit, I'm to blame for a big part of it. I buried myself too deep in my work, after you buried yourself in your apartment-or your sickness buried you-be that as it may.

"But you should have looked yourself in the face in these years. Even now when you opened the door, you scowled at me. I simply ran out of steam." She laughed ironically when she used that figure of speech in front of the big model railroad.

"And what is your point?"

"My point is that I am happy when you are. Really. You were never happy during the last ten years, and me either, every time I saw you. I'm not saying anything about getting together again; that train has definitely left the station."

Now both laughed.

Janice had to have the last word. "I wanted to tell you that from my point of view, you're on the right track."

Marshall laughed, rose, and extended a hand. "Truce?"

Janice rose too, and looked astonished at his hand. "Since when are you shaking hands again?" Then she smiled, took his hand and pumped. "But yes, truce!

"And now tell me about your Don Quixote adventure, your fight against the windmills, and the kids you saved from these bandits, and adopted afterwards."

Marshall grinned. "I had no idea how that would go around.

"I wouldn't call them exactly 'adopted,' and there isn't really that much to tell. I visited them yesterday; they live with a German family and go to school. Since I was constantly traveling, I haven't seen them all that much.

"Now that may change. I'm in charge of the R amp;D facilities of the railroad company in Jena now, so I can come over on weekends."

GrantvilleTechCenter

Next morning

"Yes I know," Marshall admitted. "I should have stayed longer."

Ambrose Salerno scowled at him while nodding.

"Hey," Marshall continued. "It was end of school year when I left. I finished everything I had promised. And in the meantime so many down-timers have arrived here able to substitute for me. You have the real living William Oughtred here. You don't need me to teach the children the usage of slipsticks.

"You know that I didn't feel well. My asthma was getting worse, so please don't scowl on me. Now what about my proposal?"

Ambrose Salerno's furrows got deeper. "The whole senior class, you want to employ them?"

"For one thing, it's not me; it's the railroad company employing them. And for another thing, of course only those who want to work for a railroad company in Jena. But we need as many surveyors, civil engineers, machinists and so on as we can get; people with ideas and people who are not infected with up-timer attitudes."

"Ha!" Ambrose shouted, "As if your attitudes are any different."

"And that's exactly the point. If you, and I, and the West Virginian steam-heads start to build a railroad, we all know too well what can be done, and what can't be done. We know much too much of the history.

"If I had started the railroad company, I would never have thought about founding a virtually government-owned company. I would have tried to raise the funds with private investors. What would we have now? Perhaps a hundred lawsuits of people who don't want to give us the right of way.

"This is not the Wild West," he said, smiling at the memory of his own Wild West adventure. "It's a more or less civilized area. We can't send the cavalry to kill the Indians; the people out there have more cavalry than we do."

Marshall took a deep breath. "And the same with the technical aspects. At the moment, your youngsters know enough of what can be done, and nothing of what we think can't be done. That's the whole point. So perhaps one of them experiments and finds a way to propel our engines with air and dung; there's lots of both in this place and time.

"I wouldn't try that, would you? Do you know how many good ideas in the last centuries were simply forgotten, because they had as much cheap steel and oil as they needed?”

Marshal took another deep breath. Then a mournful expression appeared on his face. "Do you know how many great men live out there who are too young to have their life's work even begun and now will never do, because we Americans can simply tell them? Do you know that Vauban would have been born next month? The greatest technical author of the seventeenth century; what would he have written now?"

"Okay, okay." Ambrose lifted his hands. "You have a point there. I have no objection. We'll make a trip to your 'Lokschuppen' in Jena next month, and you can show them what you've got there."

Author's notes:

Quotes from the English translation of Don Quixote by John Ormsby (1829–1895), who did the notable task to translate the original of Don Quixote once and for all into English.

The first German translation was done in 1621 but not published before 1648. The subtitle of this issue says: Buy me and read me, if you regret, eat me or I'll pay you.

If I remember right, there was nowhere stated in the six million words of the 1632verse how fragmented Thuringia was. Apart from the four Wettin duchies (and Saxe-Altenburg alone consisted of seven separated parts), the two Schwarzburg counties and Gleichen, most were not even mentioned. The two Reu? families with a total of four different Herrschaften for example are partially in the grid, but never used. Big parts of "Thuringia" still belong to Saxony, or to several other distant owners.

The only map I found showing and naming all the different parts can be found here. You may count and prove my numbers stated in the story wrong.

Yes, the sentences Melchior uses in his letter are unnecessarily long and complicated, and yes, he uses Latin words unexpectedly, and yes, he announces his sovereign with an abbreviation (Y.H. = Your Highness). This is exactly the style the Germans of this time wrote their letters.

The Kramerbrucke in Erfurt was first built as a wooden bridge (first mentioned in 1117) which was already used as a market. Then it repeatedly burned down and was rebuilt. Finally in 1325 they rebuilt it from stone; they also built two churches, one at each end of the bridge. After another fire in 1472 houses were built on the bridge.

Neither of the two Bechstedts mentioned is the one near the Ring of Fire; they are both near Erfurt. The one with the historical Bockwindmuhle (open trestle post mill) is called Bechstedtstra? today.

Each farm in Germany had a name, normally arising from its original purpose. So the Waidbauerhof (woad farm) was once called after its primary product Farberwaid (this produced the natural indigo used for blue jeans) and afterwards every owner of this farm automatically gets the name 'der Waidbauer.' A potential son will be 'dem Waidbauer sein Hans' and afterwards possibly have the official name 'Hans Waidbauer' registered, regardless of whether the farm still produces woad or not.

"Bill Bo" is originally the main character of a German TV-show from 1968. It's the story (played by puppets on strings) of a robber chief in the Thirty Years' War, who wants to capture a castle with his gang.

The daughter of the duke dresses as a boy to enter the gang and spy on the bandits.

Bill Bo has his homepage here.

If you're interested in railroads and specifically in model railroads, there are two places in Germany you definitely should visit:

The first one is the DB Museum in Nuremberg, near the main station. It is the oldest train museum of the world, opened in 1899. The model railroad was opened in 1960, and that's the place where Marshall Ambler fell in love with model trains, when he lived in Nuremberg.

The second one is the Miniatur-Wunderland in Hamburg, the largest model railroad of the world with one room dedicated to American railroads.

To be continued.

Art Director's Note: Thanks to Rainer for providing the interior art for this story.