1636： The Saxon Uprising ARC - By Eric Flint Page 0,43
no question that their arrival in the Ring of Fire is what broke everything open. But you just can’t trust them not to flinch and turn aside when the time comes to settle accounts. They’re like a farm boy who gets upset by the sight of blood trying to butcher a hog. They’ll make a bloody, bungled mess of it.”
There was enough truth to his viewpoint to make it hard to argue with. All the more so, because in the four and a half years since the Ring of Fire the Americans had mostly been able to sidestep the problem.
In the first year and a half, to be sure, they’d had to fight off enemies who came right at them—at the Battle of the Crapper, at Jena, at Eisenach and the Wartburg, and the Croat raid on Grantville itself. But those had been simple and straight-forward military clashes, with no political subtleties and complexities involved.
Thereafter, Mike Stearns had always been able to reach a compromise with the king of Sweden that kept the situation reasonably stable. But that was no longer true, and the new situation was completely unlike anything they’d faced before. Either here in the seventeenth century, or in their own world before the Ring of Fire.
How would they react, without Mike Stearns to lead them?
No one really knew.
Rebecca was surprised, therefore, when Constantin Ableidinger spoke up. Unusually for him, he’d been silent thus far in the meeting.
“I’m with Rebecca on this, Gunther.” He matched Achterhof’s hard look with one of his own.
“And stop glaring at me. It’s not my fault you insist on being stupid today. It’s not Rebecca’s fault, either.”
He spent a moment giving everyone at the table that same hard look.
“What is wrong with you people? This is not complicated. If we are seen to be responsible for the coming civil war, then we’ve probably lost it before it even starts.” He jabbed a finger at Matthias Strigel. “You! You need to get out of Magdeburg sometime and travel around the country. You live in a hothouse here. Most of you do.”
Now he jabbed the finger at the Mecklenburger, Charlotte Kienitz. “You too! Spend all your time when you’re not here jabbering with your fellow revolutionaries in the taverns in Schwerin.”
Charlotte didn’t like alcohol, as it happened. But it was true enough that she habituated the capital of Mecklenburg’s radical gathering places whenever she went back home.
Ableidinger now swiveled his finger around the table, as if he were a gunner bringing a cannon to bear.
“That’s the whole trouble!” he boomed. “You spend too much time talking to people who already agree with you and not enough time—no time at all, in the case of some of you!—listening to people out there”—now the finger jabbed at the windows—“who don’t see things the way you do.”
Looked at from one angle, there was something preposterous about Constantin Ableidinger lecturing other people on talking too much and not listening enough. But Rebecca was not about to chide him for it, under the circumstances.
The Franconian leader stood up and went to one of the windows that faced to the west. “This is what will happen if you act too soon.” He stared through the glass for a moment. “First, you give Wettin a lever to force the Hessians to support him—where, if we let him launch the attack, the landgravine will have the excuse she so clearly wants to keep Hesse-Kassel neutral.”
He half-turned, to bestow something very close to a sneer on Achterhof. “You do understand, I hope, why we want Hesse-Kassel to remain neutral, Gunther? We have no chance at all of overthrowing the landgravine—if you don’t believe me, ask her.”
He pointed to Liesel Hahn, a member of Parliament from Hesse-Kassel. Hahn had been looking distinctly unhappy so far in the meeting. Now she nodded her head several times.
“The truth is, she’s pretty popular,” she said. “Even more than her husband Wilhelm was.”
Achterhof looked like he was about to say something, but Constantin drive over him. The Franconian could out-boom just about anybody.
“The last thing we need is to have one of the most powerful provincial armies in the nation fighting on the side of Oxenstierna and Wettin. But it’s not just Hesse-Kassel that’s at stake! Some of the other western provinces are unsteady, and could go either way.”
He stepped away from the window and held up his thumb. “Start with Brunswick, which borders on Magdeburg province. Lucky for us, Brunswick’s ruler is off in Poland with Torstensson, besieging