1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [1]
That was hardly surprising. There had only been three and a half thousand Americans to begin with, right after the Ring of Fire had transported their town of Grantville through time back into the seventeenth century. By now, five hundred or so of those had died. Some of the deaths had been casualties of war, and others had resulted from epidemics. For the most part, though, the deaths had been a simple product of human realities. The population of Grantville had been disproportionately elderly, and many of those old people had relied on up-time medicines to stay alive. Most of those medicines had vanished after the Ring of Fire. Now perched in the middle of what the up-timers called the Thirty Years' War, the death rate among those of them who were elderly or sickly had been severe. From the standpoint of the seventeenth century, they'd been living on borrowed time.
The number of Europeans, or even Germans and Bohemians, who had actual relations with the Americans was comparatively minuscule. True, up-time technology was spreading much more widely and rapidly than the up-timers themselves. But, for most people, that technology was still on a level with Kresse's flashlight: one or two minor gadgets. Even an up-time rifle was nothing more than a temporarily handy gadget, in the long run, except insofar as it could be at least partially duplicated.
For all of their partiality toward the up-timers, there were some things about the Americans that irritated Kresse and his people. What they'd heard of them, rather. Except for Anna Piesel, none of them had ever met an American in person, and Anna's contact had been brief and incidental. She'd literally bumped into the man as he came out of a tavern she was entering in Saalfeld. He'd said "Excuse me," in heavily accented Amideutsch, and gone on his way.
The great gift the up-timers had given rebels throughout the Germanies—indeed, throughout Europe—was simply being living proof that rebellion against the established order was not only possible and justified but even, you might say, ordained by history. The biggest irritant was that the Americans seemed to assume, blithely, ignorantly, and arrogantly, that they needed to bring the word of revolution to the benighted and backward Germans. That was a bit absurd as well as aggravating, given that the Germanies had had more in the way of rebellions and revolts over the past two centuries than the Americans had ever experienced. Just to name one example, their leader Georg Kresse was the descendant of one of the leaders of the Peasant War a century ago.
Nor were those two Kresses unusual. Another relative—Hans Kresse, one of Georg's cousins—had been one of the leaders in the town of Mehla when they drove out the soldiers who'd been occupying it.
It was a minor irritant, however—and there was always the possibility that the attitudes of the Americans had become distorted in the process of being passed on. Here in the mountains of the Vogtland, in southwestern Saxony, Kresse and his rebels had been isolated from the developments that had swept over Thuringia and the northerly Germanies after the Ring of Fire. To add to the problems, the enemy against whom they were fighting, the elector of Saxony, John George, had been officially an ally of the Americans and the Swedes. True, the alliance hadn't been a very friendly one, even before John George betrayed Gustav Adolf at the start of the Ostend War. Still, it had apparently been enough for the up-timers to keep a distance from Saxon rebels.
Happily, that situation was now ending. Emperor Gustav Adolf's long-expected invasion of Saxony and Brandenburg was imminent, and that would transform the entire situation. Kresse and his people had hopes that, thereafter, the more admirable qualities of the up-timers would come to the fore.
But that remained to be seen. In the meantime, Georg Kresse had business to attend to. He turned to Kuefer. "Summon