"Economically," Roy Copenhaver pointed out, "it would be a good thing if it did. Open up markets and the like. If they're running it through Hersfeld, that's still twenty miles of bad road from most of the farms in Buchenland."

"What do you need from us?" Wes asked.

"If all of you, at least as many as can be spared off other jobs, could start spending more time in the field, backing up our efforts, it would be a real help." This time the bright expression on Orville's face was more genuine.

Buchenland, June 1634 "Damn it Derek." Wes Jenkins was yelling again. "Your cursed Fulda Barracks Regiment is more trouble than it's worth."

"They are just trying to demonstrate their loyalty to the government."

"Threatening to defect to Hans von Hutten on the grounds that he will let them shoot peasants is not a really outstanding declaration of loyalty. In fact it sounds more like mutiny to me."

"They feel that by not suppressing the revolt, they are failing in their duty."

"They are just itching because they haven't shot or plundered anybody for a year and a half. Especially plundered."

"Garrison duty is always difficult."

"Well, make it plain to them that they can't shoot any of the farmers or citizens of Buchenland unless I give them permission. Peasant revolt or no peasant revolt. And tell them that there is no way that I'm going to turn them over to von Hutten sohe can shoot our citizens. Or Wuerzburg's citizens, for that matter. Lock them in the barracks, if you have to."

"Set their wives to guard them," Clara Bachmeierin suggested.

Wes stared at her.

"They have houses now, in Barracktown. Cabins with wood floors, a lot of them. Some even have fireplaces with stone chimneys and hearths. Windows with shutters and oiled paper. Doors with latches.

A school for their children. Sergeant Hartke's oldest boy turned out to be so smart that Andrea's lawyer gave him money to go to the Latin school that the Jesuits run here in town. He would rather send the boy to a Calvinist school, but there isn't any. Hardly any of them want to go back to tramping around after a regiment on the march."

Wes looked at Derek, raising his eyebrows.

"I can try it. I really don't want to use Wiegand's Fulda militia to guard them, unless I absolutely have to.

If this blows over, they'll need to work together again."

"You really mean that?" Deveroux looked at Karl von Schlitz with disbelief. "They are not holed up behind Fulda's walls, huddling together in the administration building?"

The imperial knight was looking a little pale, having spent quite a lot of time recently living in a rather small pantry off the main kitchen of his great-uncle's long-ago mistress' miniature castle.

"My sons assure me that it is true. Because of the unrest, the administrators, almost all of them, and the abbot as well, are riding the length and breadth of this newly invented Buchenland, trying to make the peasants happy." "Why should peasants be happy?" Robert Geraldin asked with honest bewilderment.

Dennis MacDonald glared at him. "They shouldn't, of course. Their suffering in this life will be compensated in the next, like the beggar outside of the rich man's house."

"That," Deveroux said, "is beside the point. Do you have any way of getting their itineraries?"

"Yes. Fritz and Oswald can get them for you."

"Well, glory and hallelujah!"

"Not to mention," one of the von Schlitz sons said, "that they are very lightly guarded, if at all, only by members of the Fulda city militia, because their regiment tried to mutiny."

Deveroux jerked his head up.

"You mean this?"

The son-Friedrich, it was, Fritz von Schlitz-howled with laughter. "Because they won't let the soldiers shoot the peasants, would you believe it? So you will have a peasant revolt to blame any 'accidents' on and the Thuringian troops who pour into Fulda to avenge their administrators after you are long gone will be shooting their own innocent 'citizens.'"

Felix Gruyard smirked.

Walter Butler shook his head. It was enough to make a man believe in divine providence.

Bonn, Archdiocese of Cologne, July 1634 "The archbishop is not receiving callers this morning."

"But," the reporter said cheerfully, "I would like to obtain his comments upon the news that the pope has elevated the priest from Grantville to the dignity of cardinal of the Holy Roman Church and appointed him as cardinal-protector of the United States of Europe."

"Trust me," the doorman said, "you don't want to hear his comments."

"Oh," the reporter said, "but I do. Not to mention that I have a duty to my readers. What are the archbishop's comments?"

"No comment." The servant slammed the door.

Franz von Hatzfeldt looked rather anxiously at Johann Adolf von Hoheneck. "Is this appointment of a cardinal-protector for the USE something we should be taking into consideration in regard to Fulda?"

"There's nothing that we can do about it. It's too late to call the Irishmen and Gruyard back. We don'tknow exactly where they are. We have no way to communicate with them. And, in any case, we aren't paying them."

Schlitz, July 1634 "So I went into the town to get some news," Gruyard muttered. "I got it, didn't I? We can't sit walled up on top of this stupid hill forever. It isn't as if there's anyone in Fulda who might recognize me."

"It just goes to show," Karl von Schlitz orated, "that the demonic up-timers are in league with the Roman anti-Christ."

"Come down off it," Geraldin said. "Who do you think that you linked up with when you sent those feelers out to Hoheneck? Martin Luther?"

The two sons howled with laughter.

Gruyard smiled.

Walter Butler didn't think it was that funny.

Fulda, July 1634 "What do you suppose this means," Johann Bernhard von Schweinsberg asked. "Will Gustavus Adolphus allow the archbishop of Mainz to come back to his see? How does it affect the status of the Mainz possessions around Erfurt that voted themselves into the State of Thuringia-Franconia? Will there be a new appointment to the see of Bamberg? How will it change the status of the bishop of Wuerzburg?

Does it mean that Thuringia-Franconia will be granted its own bishop. If so . . . that would be wonderful."

"Why?" Harlan Stull asked.

"Well, there would be someone who could ordain priests. And confirm children. None of that has been done in theStift for three years. Unless the suffragan down in Wuerzburg has done confirmations in some of the southern parishes that the diocese claims are under its jurisdiction."

"Why don't you ask him?"

"If I asked him, he could interpret it that I was asking him for favors. He could perhaps even interpret it to mean that I was tacitly acknowledging that the abbey of Fulda is under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Wuerzburg."

"Look," Harlan said. "You don't have the property any more. All you've got are a bunch of parishes with people in them. How about cutting out the turf wars?"

Schweinsberg looked at him wearily.

"Herr Stull, I have come to like and respect all of you. But in the course of the history of the church,Grantville has been a factor for only a short, a very short, time. The abbey of Fulda has been here for eight hundred years. I hope that it will still be here in another eight hundred years, if the last judgment does not intervene. I cannot and will not unilaterally renounce its rights."

"The truth is, Schweinsberg," Wes Jenkins said, "that I quite honestly don't have the vaguest idea what this will really mean. I'll write to Ed Piazza. And I'll set up an appointment for you to meet with Henry Dreeson before he goes home. Once he gets here, that is."

"I took a bunch of newspapers out to the barracks," Derek Utt said. "It should give them something to talk about besides peasant revolts. Distract their minds, sort of. I'm having them practice their new anthem, too. Mary Kathryn's grandma picked it out. The kid teaching school in Sergeant Hartke's loft translated it into German poetry for me and he is assigning the parts. Biehr, his name is."

Dubious Saints Fulda, August 1634 Andrea was feeling increasingly frazzled. She was the senior civilian administrator in Fulda. Someone else should have been back a couple of days ago. They couldn't all have been delayed. Or if they were, at least one of them should have sent in a message. Pushing her bangs out of her face, she started out into the hall.

The land claims lawyer was just coming in, followed by his relatives, the school teacher and the speech writer. And by the little artist who lived in St. Severi church and painted murals.

Andrea stopped and looked. They had an amazing resemblance to one another when they were lined up like that. All four of them, Etienne Baril, his nephew, the teacher, and the artist. No one could ever seem to remember their names. Maybe it was deliberate.Last night I met upon the stair, a little man who wasn't there , she thought to herself. These Calvinist refugees survived as a kind of professional migrant labor force, from France to Antwerp to Frankfurt, from Lucca to Geneva to Hamburg, from Scotland to Nuernburg to Hungary, making themselves inconspicuous as they worked away to make the bottom line come out even in the cracks and crannies of administrative back rooms all over the continent. Survival by invisibility.

"What is it?" she asked.

The lawyer nodded to the end of the line. "Paul says . . ."

The little artist spoke up. "Felix Gruyard is in town. Or was. I saw him. He came to services at Saint Severi. I don't go out in the congregation, of course. I watch from the sacristy, so he did not see me."

"Who is Felix Gruyard?" Andrea frowned. Something, right on the edge of her memory. Something to do with that obscene pamphlet. A Lorrainer.

The little artist lifted up his loose tunic. The school teacher pointed to his legs.

"He is the archbishop of Cologne's torturer," the speech writer said. "He is very good at what he does." The artist dropped his tunic. He held out his hands and arms, unscarred. "He is very careful in his work.

The archbishop still wanted me to be able to paint, you see. Even though I am a Calvinist."

Buchenland, August 1634 "That went pretty smoothly," Geraldin said. They had the abbot of Fulda neatly trussed up and loaded on a small hay cart. Pretty fair hay, too.

"What about the other one?" MacDonald asked.

"Leave him down there. He's not going to be moving. Get back to where you were supposed to meet the boss. Shots attract attention and you don't want blood all over your clothes if you pass other people between here and there. I'm on my way."

MacDonald shrugged and headed back to meet Butler and Deveroux at von Berlepsch's.

Wes Jenkins had finally dealt with the way he couldn't help worrying about Clara Bachmeierin whenever she was out in the field by assigning her to ride with him while they tried to pacify the farmers. That way, he figured, he would only have to worry about her when it was absolutely necessary. That would help him keep his mind on other things, such as the importance of believing that railroad surveyors are your friends.

Most of the farmers had a lot of trouble grasping even the basics of that idea. So did Wes, for that matter. He'd read a book once about some of those early railroad barons, back in American history. He expected that his spiel wasn't as convincing as it might have been.

There were getting to be a lot of Brillo pamphlets and poems and songs around. Clara thought they were funny. Wes didn't think they were particularly funny. Oh, a couple of them were cute enough, but not anything that you could compare to Peanuts. Peanuts had always been his favorite comic strip. Once, Reverend Jones, Mary Ellen, that was, had taken the adult Sunday school class through a book called The Gospel According to Peanuts . That had been pretty good. He wondered if Clara would like it.

About that time, someone jumped into the pony cart and hit him from behind, rather hard. The horse reared. Men started yelling. They pulled him out of the cart. Three of them were on him, tying up various pieces of his body to other pieces.

"Leave his legs free," someone said. "We have to move them." Two men sat on him, one on each leg.

Clara was yelling, too, until someone shoved a rag in her mouth.

A man behind him was trying to get a blindfold on his eyes. He kept tossing his head up and down. He kept thinking that von Schlitz's sons had tried to blame the attack on the wagon going to Grantville on bandits. If so, it had been the only batch of bandits on that road in the last year and a half. Like this one.

This was a perfectly safe road. He wiggled his head away from the blindfold again. Thatwas von Schlitz's son. The older one. Fritz. "Hold still," someone said. "Hold still or I cut her."

Wes looked up. A couple of men were holding Clara's arms. Another man was holding a wicked-looking knife right against her cheek, smiling sweetly.

He let them put the blindfold on.

It was hard to tell how long it took to get where they were going. The path, if he could trust the feel of the horse under him, had more curves than the climb to Pike's Peak.

He'd gone to Pike's Peak with Lena and the girls, once. They had tried to hit all of the important national parks on family vacations. He wondered what Lena was doing now.Whatever it is, Lena, God bless you . He said goodbye to his wife.

Nobody was talking except the man who had smiled as he held the knife against Clara's cheek. He seemed to find it entertaining to describe the things he planned to do to them if they did not answer the questions they would be asked.

The sound behind them was probably a door closing. Wes thought that it made a depressingly solid sound. A well-built door, probably. Reinforced panels and a good latch. Where was planned obsolescence when you really needed it?

"They pulled out my gag," Clara was saying, "If you come over here and sit on the floor so that your head is about the height of my hands, I will try to untie your blindfold. That is the best place to start, I think. He put on yours before he put on mine. It is just rough hempcloth, so the knot can't be too tight.

He didn't bother to dampen it."

Wes felt his way across toward Clara's voice and slid down.

"I'm really sorry about this, Ms. Bachmeierin," he started out. "I would have given anything to avoid exposing you to this mishandling."

"I'm sure," Clara mumbled under her breath as her fingers fished around for the ends of the knot. "There, it's coming," she said aloud. She kept pulling.

"It's called theterratio verborum ," she said suddenly. "Terrorizing with words. That's what he was doing. Describing each instrument and its effect. It's the first stage of judicial torture. He's probably a professional, not having fun, just saving some time by talking while we rode."

Wes stood up and blinked his eyes clear. "It's not a dungeon," he said. "Stone floor and walls, but the window is at the regular height. It's after dark, but it's lighter out than it is in here and I can see the outline.

It's barred."