—1—
To: Grantville Emergency Committee.
From: John Sterling, Edgar Frost and Francis Kidwell.
Date: May 30, 1631? fifth day after the disaster.
Re: Road options around Schwarza Falls.
Yesterday, May twenty-ninth, the fourth day after the disaster, we went up Buffalo Creek to the power plant to look into how to build a road connection over the border into the lands to what is now the southwest. You asked us to tell you everything, even if we weren't certain it was important, so pardon us if we ramble a bit.
The report from the power plant is correct. There's a real castle up there looking down on us. Don't imagine a fairy-tale castle. This is a deadly serious looking fortress. There's also a bit of a village there, or at least half of one. The village and the castle are both named Schwarzburg. We need to make friends with whoever runs the place, because they're guarding our southwest flank very nicely. And, if their cannon are even mediocre, I doubt there's much we could do to stop them from wiping out the power plant.
As you come around the bend in Buffalo Creek, about a mile out from Grantville, what you see is a wall of black rock, streaked with red, green and brown. This castle sits on a hill dead center on top of it, right above the power plant. The cliff has a mirror polish on it that reflects the sky when you get close enough. We guess that from the bottom of the Buffalo Creek valley up to the floor of the valley above, it must be three hundred feet. Our ridge tops are about four hundred feet above the valley floor, but the hills of the land we've been plunked into are much higher. We guess about twice as high, which means eight hundred feet up from the valley floor. The German hills aren't as chopped up as ours. They seem a bit rounder, but the valley walls are steep enough.
There's a stream in the valley we cut into. They call it the Schwarza, and where it flows over the cut edge, there's quite a waterfall. We'll call it Schwarza Falls. It's hard to guess how high it is, because it's pounding down on what was a steep slope and washing quite a bit of that slope downhill. We figure it's a clear fall of at least fifteen feet, but then it tumbles down at least two hundred feet before it flows into what used to be Spring Branch.
If it hadn't been for the fact that the Schwarza valley is offset a bit from Buffalo Creek valley, there'd be no hope of getting a road up that cliff. As things stand, though, the Schwarza had a loop to the northeast that got lopped off by the disaster. (We're starting to call it the "Ring of Fire," by the way, since that seems a pretty good description of the disaster—"RoF" for short.) The ridge to the north of Buffalo Creek just manages to come up to that part of the Schwarza's stream bed. Also, just southwest of Schwarza Falls, there's a little knob on our side that just goes up to the level of the rooftops of some houses nearby. It's all that's left of the ridge that divided Spring Branch from Buffalo Creek.
One thing is real clear. That little village at the top of the falls is in big trouble. Half the place is gone. Calling it a village may be too generous; it was a cluster of houses and barns built beside a bridge across the Schwarza. In a few places, the ground collapsed as far back as thirty feet from the edge, taking houses and barns if they happened to be there. There's quite a mound of muck and rubble along the face of the cliff below those places. There's one barn, though, that's standing right on the edge and hasn't moved an inch.
The cut-off chunk of the Schwarza northeast of the castle must have dumped its entire contents and a good part of its riverbed over the cliff in one great gush. There's a flow of debris from there down along what used to be Spring Branch Creek. It looks like what was left of Spring Branch Road inside the ring of fire was pretty well buried or washed out within a few minutes on Sunday. The culvert over Spring Branch Creek on the main road looks like it survived that first gush, but it was never intended to take the flow of the Schwarza river, so the road is acting like a dam. The water was over the road when we got there. It's a few inches deep and running fast, but the road is pretty flat so the overflow is spread over quite a distance. It's eating at the road, and we think it'll wash it out unless we dig up the culvert and put in a proper bridge.
We waded across and took a hike up what's left of the ridge that divided Buffalo Creek from Spring Branch. It's the steep but direct route into what's left of the lower Schwarzburg village. They were watching us the whole time, and there's no doubt that they were as nervous about us as we were about them. By the time we got up the hill, a guy named Franz was there to meet us, with two others who stayed back a bit and whose names we didn't get. Franz seemed to be an officer in the guard of the castle. As near as we could make out, his boss is the graf of Schwarzburg and a town named Rudolstadt.
Franz turned out to be a decent fellow and pretty quick witted, but he had some big pistols in his belt and a sword. We were careful not to put our hands anywhere near our holsters those first few minutes. We'd better send someone official to Schwarzburg quickly, someone who knows German!
We read Franz the message you wrote for us in German about wanting to open the road connections across the border of the "ring." After we gave him the letters you gave us, we tried to have a conversation. I wish we knew more German, but the stuff you gave us helped a lot. With lots of mistakes, hand gestures and an occasional picture on a notepad, we managed to get by.
He told us that the Ring of Fire destroyed the road from Schwarzburg to Rudolstadt where, as near as we could make out, his boss lives most of the time. It also destroyed the road to the town of Saalfeld. As a result, it seems that we're in agreement about trying to open up a road connection.
The bridge across the Schwarza at Schwarzburg is right at the lip of the falls. It's in serious danger of collapse because of all the dirt that's been washed away from the foundations. If the bridge goes, the farmhouses that are left on the southeast side of the Schwarza will be cut off, so they're already working on a temporary wooden bridge upstream from the old one. Timber is one thing they have plenty of. The roads here are mostly grass and packed dirt, with cobblestones only where erosion is likely to be a problem.
Northeast from the falls about two hundred yards, the road is almost cut off with half of it slumped away. It looks like it was right on the riverbank there, at the southeast end of the loop of river that the Ring of Fire sliced off. Beyond that, to the northwest, the road is in good shape, with stone retaining walls in places as it takes a long switchback up the slope to the castle gate.
We didn't go into the castle, but we did go up to the square by the gate where there's a bit of an upper village. The castle sits along the crest of a knife-edge ridge with the Schwarza river wrapped around the west, south and east sides. You couldn't ask for a better defensive position, but it's not all that big. The castle must be a quarter mile long but the ridge isn't very wide anywhere.
Franz, the officer, must have been thinking about the problem of getting a road down from Schwarzburg, because he took us to the jumping off point where a new road could connect. He pointed out the route he thought would work before we left to walk down that way. We agree with him, so we'll describe that route and forget the others.
Be aware, we're not engineers, just three guys who've had plenty of experience building and maintaining roads. We're confident that we can do this job, and do it well, but under the laws of West Virginia, we aren't really qualified. It would be nice if there was a civil engineer to help with this project.
The road would turn north just east of the old Spring Branch road and traverse up the east side of the Spring Branch valley. This would almost follow the power company right of way once the power line gets on the same side of the creek. Then, the road would turn broadly around the head of the valley to meet the northwest end of the abandoned riverbed of the Schwarza. The climb up out of the riverbed would be short, and we'd meet the road up from the lower village about a quarter mile northwest of the waterfall.
We figure this would be about four thousand feet of road climbing three hundred feet, so the grade should be under eight percent. On the walk down, we flagged the path we followed while using a pocket clinometer to try to keep our path at seven percent. That brought us out a bit on the high side, but those flags should make charting the path back up pretty straightforward.
We figure that a crew with a medium dozer and a couple of chainsaws could carve a temporary one-lane road up to Schwarzburg along the Spring Branch route in about a day. That's about two hours at half a mile an hour for the first pass of the dozer to cut the roadbed, or about two hours, and then three more passes to shape the crown at a mile an hour, make that three hours. That's five hours of an eight hour day, but it's fair to budget the whole day to allow for the unexpected. There's some decent timber along the way we ought to try to salvage while we're at it.
There's so little watershed above our proposed route that a temporary road like that could last a few years, we think. But with another day of work to put in about five culverts, we could make a road there that would last. We think at least two of the old culverts along Spring Branch Road can be recovered with a winch and some digging, so someone should inventory culverts we can salvage from elsewhere.
With three days work and several truckloads of crushed rock, we could make the new road meet county standards for unimproved roads, which is something none of the roads we saw up on top manage to do. Two days of this would be to widen the road to two lanes, and one day would be to put down the rock and grade it nicely. If we put in the culverts soon enough, the road widening can wait until the traffic demands it.
We noticed that the power plant has a Caterpillar D6. They use it for pushing coal around. We asked about it at the front gate, and the guard there phoned the plant manager, Bill Porter. The upshot is, the power plant is willing to loan the dozer to the county for a day's work. They think that anything we can do to get the folks in that castle on our side would definitely be a good idea.
Finally, you asked us to say something about defending our new borders. If the folks who run Schwarza castle fail to block invaders, or if they decide to attack us, we could defend this end of the valley from the ridge northeast of Spring Branch. That would let us look down on our new road from about two hundred yards and we'd look across at the steeper slope down from the lower village from a distance of about four hundred yards. The castle would have an altitude advantage on us, but the ridge would offer cover and we could dig bunkers into the ridge top. You might want to put a jeep trail up to there from the valley behind the ridge.
The other defensive position would be on the ridge top across Buffalo Creek southeast of the power plant. This would look straight down our new road from a range of six to twelve hundred yards. Again, a bunker would be handy, but the castle hasn't got a good shot at this position because the chopped off hillside southeast of the castle is in the way. The big threat here is from snipers sitting right on the edge of that hillside, but the ground slopes down steeply to that cliff edge, enough so they wouldn't be able to hide behind the terrain. It looks steep enough that they'd have to worry about sliding right over the edge if they slipped.
John Sterling has the most military experience of any of us. He says he'd put mostly snipers on the ridge above Spring Branch, along with a few mortars or RPG launchers, and he'd put the light artillery on the south. Do we have any weapons heavier than hunting rifles? All in all, we agree that we'd much rather defend Grantville from Schwarzburg Castle. Seen from Schwarzburg, it looks like the cliffs do a good job of blocking all access to Grantville for over a mile in either direction, perhaps more. The castle is the strong point that covers both paths into the valley.
Franz told us that there were people in some of those houses that went over the edge. We had trouble communicating about this, but I get the feeling there might be ten bodies somewhere at the bottom of the cliff. We said that he was welcome to send people down to try to find the bodies, and we said that we would try to get people to help.
—2—
To be delivered to Ludwig Guenther, Graf of Schwarzburg Rudolstadt, or in his absence, to the head of the guard at Rudolstadt:
Your humble servant, Franz Saalfelder, officer of the guard at Schloss Schwarzburg, begs to report again on the strange events of these last few days.
I do not know that you received my first report of the events of Sunday, the fifteenth day of May, but the scout sent from Rudolstadt on that day arrived here on Tuesday, having worked his way to Schwarzburg along a very difficult route. God willing, he will have completed his circuit and returned to Rudolstadt by now with even more to report.
Sunday, the fifteenth day of May, at around noon, the very earth seemed to shake with the roar of thunder. The guards on the east-facing battlements were blinded for a moment by a wall of light that seemed brighter than the sun but as brief as a lightning flash. Fortunately, your humble servant was not looking that way at the moment, but the roar was horrible even indoors.
What devilment it was I cannot say. At first, I was sure that the very pits of Hell had opened, for all of the land to the north and east of Schwarzburg had disappeared. Where the valley of the Schwarza and the road to Rudolstadt had been, there was nothing but a pit, hundreds of feet deep, with a strange country on the bottom. Half of the houses and barns beside the Schwarza were gone in an instant, and some of the flat land beside the river fell over the edge shortly after, taking another house and two barns.
We cannot say for certain how many people were lost when the pit opened, but it cannot have been less than ten. It is fortunate that it was a Sunday and many had yet to leave the castle where they had attended chapel services that morning. Those who hurried home to fix their Sunday dinners were the victims, while the lazy who stayed to talk were saved. Fortunately, most of the refugees fleeing the mercenaries who have lately been a plague on the Saale valley have been moving on up the Schwarza into the well protected villages beyond Schwarzburg. Some of the survivors from the lower village want to go down into the pit to look for bodies so that they can have a proper burial. We can see wreckage of some of the houses that slid over the edge of the pit just after the pit opened. There may be bodies among the wreckage.
The scout you sent followed the north and west rim of the pit on his travels from Rudolstadt to Schwarzburg. He tells me that it is not entirely a pit because in some places the mountains of the strange new land within overtop our valleys. Of more import, the pit appears to be a near perfect circle, several miles in size, reaching from the edge of the valley of the Saale all the way to Schwarzburg. God willing, you will have heard his report by the time I write this.
Our chaplain cannot say whether this strange occurrence is the work of the Devil or not. His advice appears as sound as it is trite, to hope for the best while preparing for the worst. We have posted guards to report on what is within. Day and night, I have been called to the battlements or to the very edge of the pit to witness the strangest of events.
The land within the pit is occupied. There are houses of strange construction there. The strangest is a great brick building not far from the edge below Schwarzburg. At first, I thought the building was a fortress, for it is great enough to be one. Now, I believe it to be some kind of mill or forge, for they have a great pile of what looks like charcoal outside the building, and there are great smokestacks, although there is now no great amount of smoke. Immediately after the blast and blinding flash that created the pit, this fortress or mill was emitting a loud roar of noise that went on and on, loud enough to block out all else, and horrible. Great clouds of white smoke or steam rose from the mill and ceased when the noise ceased. Since then, it has been quiet, except for an occasional puff of steam and an occasional strange noise.
There are roads within the pit that look finer than any road I have ever seen. They are wide enough everywhere for two wagons to pass, smooth and well drained, with broad ditches to each side to carry away the rainwater. What is most terrifying is that they have wagons that appear to move as if by magic, sometimes faster than a horse can gallop and with nothing to pull them along. Watching from the castle and from the edge of the pit, we can see that the people within are not pleased. To them, they are within a great stone wall with few escapes, and we have seen groups of them looking up and pointing in our direction from the great mill. Their roads once went beyond the walls of the pit, perhaps. There are lines of strange towers leading away from the great mill to the north and south that support ropes made of wire. Where the Schwarza pours over the wall into the pit, it has created a new river that is flowing over one of their roads and will soon destroy it. The same new river also threatens to topple one of the strange towers.
There are two places near Schwarzburg where the hills within the pit come up to the level of the ground outside. One is just south of the bridge across the Schwarza below the castle, and one is to the northwest where the road used to turn east along the north bank of the Schwarza. We sent scouts into the pit that way with orders to stay hidden and to leave no sign of their passage. They report that there is a town several miles into the land where two valleys meet and that there are also smaller villages. There are even churches, or at least buildings that look like churches, with steeples surmounted by the symbol of the cross. This gives our chaplain some comfort.
The scouts reported many strange things. They have found twisted wire fences that must be many miles long, with sharp barbs of cut wire twisted onto the fence wire. The quality of the wire was very good, but in many places, they report that it was rusted, as if nobody ever took the time to care for it. All of the houses they spied out were very strange, constructed more of sawn wood or brick than of stone and plaster, and well painted. At night, many of the houses are lit up like daylight, with lights brighter than hundreds of candles. Even barns that are old and run-down have too many windows glazed with large panes of the most perfect glass anyone has ever seen. The towns, and even some houses outside the towns, have hellishly bright lanterns mounted on poles overhead so that people can move about at night just as freely as they do in the daylight.
Today, Thursday the nineteenth of May, three men from within the pit came up the hill. We met them at the bridge over the Schwarza, and I must report now what we learned in talking with them, or in trying to talk, for it was difficult.
These men were dressed most outlandishly. Even from the castle, even when they had not yet begun to climb, that much was evident. Each man wore a yellow helmet and an orange vest; the orange color was unnaturally bright. As they came closer, it was apparent that they wore blue pantaloons, cut very close and exceedingly well made but well worn and with the color faded. Under their orange vests, they wore well cut shirts, and each man wore a belt from which hung several things. All three men wore what must have been pistols, very small ones, but arms, nonetheless.
After we tried to talk, one of the men let me try on his helmet. It was very light compared to what I expected, not metal, but something much lighter and yet harder than leather. The helmet did not rest on the head, but was supported away from the head on a clever network of straps. I feel that a blow to the helmet would not be felt directly, not with those straps in place.
They also saw that I was curious about the implements on their belts. One of them showed me a most remarkable knife. It was small enough to fit into the palm of my hand, but it could be unfolded to reveal a knife blade, a file, a pair of pincers, and several other kinds of picks and implements, perhaps ten in all. Not only the blades, but the handle itself had the look of the finest silver, and yet it was as hard as the finest steel.
They speak English, it seems, and a little French, very little. Unfortunately, we have no English speakers in our garrison. They came prepared knowing that we spoke German, with a message written in German that they read to us and with a remarkable letter that they gave to us, which we include with this message. There are many things we would have spoken of if we had been better able to communicate.
Their message confirmed that the town in the middle of the pit is called Grantville. My spies had reported signs within that said "Welcome to Grantville" on the roads outside the town, so this was not entirely new to me. I remain puzzled why an unprotected town would post signs saying welcome, if indeed that is what the signs say.
At first I thought the name Grantville sounded French, but their message explained that they are from a land called West Virginia in the United States of America, that they came from hundreds of years in the future, and that they have no idea how or why they are here. The message also confirmed my guess that their appearance in the pit has caused a crisis. They say they are governed by the Grantville Emergency Committee, clearly not a proper government and certainly not the government of this West Virginia or United States.
Their strange clothing and tools certainly suggest that they are not from our world, but their letter is dated Wednesday the twenty eighth of May, 1631. From this, I gather that they are using the Catholic calendar of Pope Gregory and that they have already communicated with someone on the outside of the pit.
The men's names were John Sterling, Edgar Frost and Francis Kidwell. They printed their names in Roman letters on a piece of paper that they gave to me and that I enclose with this message. Each of the men had a small book of blank sheets of paper cleverly bound with a spiral piece of wire, and each man had a pen of some strange kind that did not need an inkpot. They used them freely, drawing pictures when they did not know the words.
These men were well educated, able to read fluently even when they were reading German, a language they obviously spoke very poorly. I am being generous; they spoke almost no proper German but only some words. All three were also able to write quickly and well. This is why it took me a while to understand that they were not military men, nor were they ambassadors. Rather, they saw themselves as simple laborers, charged with but one job, that of finding the best way to build a road from the bottom of the pit up to the road at Schwarzburg. Of course, that is what their message said, but appearances can deceive and then deceive again.
I asked these men about the dead who had fallen into the pit, and this was a difficult question, both because of the language and because, I think, it was outside their authority. They said that we were welcome to send a burial party into the pit to recover the bodies, and they said that they would try to send help. I believe that they were sincerely troubled by the deaths.
Without being able to ask your leave, but knowing how important it would be to reestablish the road from Schwartzburg to Rudolstadt, we gave them permission to survey a route for connecting our roads to theirs. They will certainly not be using any new road without our leave, because Schwarzburg castle is perfectly placed to guard any road they can build. Their message did say that the road would be open to us, and that we would be welcome to use it to travel through Grantville to reach places to the north and east.
We had already been discussing the problem of a road into the pit among the guards, since we are worried about how to get food supplies up to Schwarzburg. The farmland in the Schwarza valley cannot feed the normal population of the valley, and even though most of the refugees have brought several weeks of provisions, we will face problems if we cannot reopen the roads. Bringing food in over the hills from Hildburghausen could double the cost of cartage, and it would be even more expensive to pay for cartage around the pit from Rudolstadt.
I hope I have not abused your trust! I showed these men the path into the pit that we thought would work. In showing this, I was careful to walk ahead to assure that there were no footprints visible, since our spies had crossed into the pit very near the point where I took them.
I watched the men walk back down into the pit, and I was surprised to see that they took a longer path, swinging broadly around the little valley that comes up from the pit to meet our land. They seem intent on building a road much longer than the road I would have thought of, but at a far more gentle slope. One of them had a hand-held instrument of some kind that he would occasionally use to look backward or forward along the path they were marking, while another of them would occasionally tie a strip of orange ribbon to a tree or sapling to mark the path.
I humbly beg your forgiveness if I have erred in carrying out my duties in these trying times. I will send a horseman with this letter Friday morning, with instructions to travel quickly around the pit to the north, then east to the Schaalbach road into Rudolstadt. Your scout assures me that this route should be safe, although it comes close to the pit at Rottenbach and even closer in parts of the Schaalbach valley. Until we learn that passage through Grantville is truly safe, I believe this is the best route available.
Your humble and devoted servant, Franz Saalfelder.
—3—
To: Grantville Emergency Committee.
From: Mark O'Reilly.
Date: Saturday May 31, 1631.
Re: Visit to Schwarzburg.
At the town meeting, you asked everyone with military experience to notify the emergency committee, and you asked everyone who knew German to notify the committee. I put in my name for both, but I never imagined that Rebecca Abrabanel would come visiting on Friday afternoon to test my German and then send me out immediately on a job. I feel that I'm in way over my head, but I guess we all are.
Ms. Abrabanel showed me a memo that some guys from the road department had just written. She asked me to read it, and then she asked me what I thought we should do. I told her we ought to send someone who knows German, someone who this officer of the guard named Franz could relate to as an equal, so that we can cut a deal with him. Then I understood it was me and I tried to back out.
Ms. Abrabanel explained that I was the best she could find on short notice. The job needed someone who spoke German, even bad German like mine. It had to be someone who had military training, and my Guard training would do. You don't send a general to make a field agreement with a captain, you send another captain, and you back him up with a couple of privates, and in this case, with a burial detail to help the Germans.
So this morning, I went up to the power plant with Pete McDougal and Ron Koch, who have mine safety experience, and Brick Bozarth and Miles Drahuta, who have UMWA training in mine rescue. We took the equipment McDougal and Koch recommended, and we ended up using most of it. We worked all day, and I'm tired. But Ms. Abrabanel said she wanted this report as soon as possible, so I'm trying to get it down on paper before I quit for the night. Thank God for computers. I wonder how long they'll last.
We found a small crew of Germans working through some wreckage at the bottom of the new Schwarza Falls. Conditions were very unsafe because the falls are cutting into the ground very quickly at the base. The Schwarzburg castle chaplain was there, Pastor Hermann Decker. I did my best to explain that we were there to help and asked what we could do.
There was one problem. These people don't usually speak the High German I learned in school. They have a regional dialect, so between that and my rusty German there were many places where we stumbled. It was a good thing I had my old English-German dictionary along, because there were lots of words that gave me trouble. Even Ron's native twentieth-century German wasn't much help.
They had already taken out four bodies. They were concentrating on the areas where wreckage showed among the rocks, sand and gravel that had come over the edge after the Ring of Fire.
The horrible thing was, if we'd known to rush out there last Sunday, right after the Ring of Fire, we'd have probably saved some lives. Some of what went over the edge fell hundreds of feet, but other stuff flowed down the slope after only a short drop. We didn't know, of course, but all of us would rather have saved people's lives than just dig up the dead.
McDougal and Koch insisted that the first thing we needed to do was to make the workplace safe, so they improvised a bridge across the foot of the falls using fallen trees and set up safety ropes. I was left to try to explain to the pastor that we were going to use a chainsaw to trim the fallen trees and that it might upset the Germans at first because it was both noisy and strange. Once the bridge was up, Ron went back to work on opening the mine, so we were without him for most of the day.
The Germans were very impressed with the chainsaw, but the simple come-along we used to winch the tree trunks together side by side was just as novel. The come-along and chainsaw helped quite a bit with digging through the building remains that had fallen over the cliff. Those houses were half-timbered, with mortise and tenon joining. Most of the joints snapped, but the timbers were very heavy and some parts of the framework that fell almost flat held together. Being able to quickly cut them apart and pull the pieces away was a real help. By noon, we recovered three more bodies. In the afternoon we recovered two more. If there are more bodies, they are likely to be deeply buried.
Some of the Germans doing the digging obviously knew the victims, because when they found bodies, they knew their names. Some of them broke down pretty badly, and Pastor Decker had his work cut out comforting them.
There were observers on the cliff top overhead all the time. We saw them when we arrived in the morning, and made a point of waving to them in a friendly way before we went to meet with their work party below. They watched us pull together the temporary bridge. In midmorning, just before eleven, a delegation came down, a dozen or so. Most of them were there to join in the work, but there was also an officer and two guards.
The officer's name is Franz Saalfelder, and he's the same guy our first crew met with last Thursday. I think his last name isn't really a family name, but that it really means he's from the town of Saalfeld, the town just to our east. He's a captain of the house guard in the service of Graf Ludwig Guenther. Graf means count, and he's the ruler of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. I suppose you could say that Grantville is now in the county of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt.
One interesting thing I found is that the people in Schwarzburg all seem to refer to the Ring of Fire as "the pit." They saw the flash and heard the boom, same as we did, but to them, it was like a great pit opened up and there we were at the bottom. As near as I can figure out, the captain had the following subjects on his mind:
First, he is really worried about resupply. The Ring of Fire cut his primary supply line, and getting food in over the hills is going to be very expensive. Down in the Saale Valley they grow grain and vegetables, but up here in the hills the farming they do is mostly livestock. The economy is largely forestry and mining. I'm guessing that the Schwarza valley has always been a food importer.
Second, he is worried about refugees. We aren't the only ones worried about those raiders in the farmland to the north and east. They've driven people from their homes, and some of those have come up the Schwarza valley to the area protected by the castle. The resupply problem would be serious without the refugees, but with them, everything is worse.
And, of course, he's worried about us. I told him that we were worried about him too, since he has the high ground, but that I thought we were better off cooperating. I told him about the skirmishes we've had with the raiders, and said that we would do everything we could do to make sure that they never got through Grantville to him.
That led him to ask about our weapons. He said his scouts had been all the way around the Ring of Fire, or the pit, depending on whose words you use, and that they had heard stories about some of our skirmishes. All I had was a pistol, and I'm no great shot. I gave him a demonstration, then pulled the clip from my gun and let him handle it. He seemed fascinated by the idea of putting the bullet, powder and primer all together in one cartridge and also by the complexity of the pistol mechanism.
The captain was curious about what the power plant was, and I had no good way to explain that. He had already guessed that it was some kind of mill or forge. I told him that it was a mill, but that I didn't know how to explain what it was that we make there. All I could do is give him a name for it. So, now it is an Electrischemühle. I explained that when he sees bright lights at night, those lights burn the electricity they make there.
One thing the captain let slip may be of importance. The graf is away north, fighting the Catholic armies and trying to keep the Swedes out of his lands, despite the fact that they are officially on his side. So the captain is almost on his own. There is a garrison at Rudolstadt, and he's managed to reestablish communications with them.
I explained to him that the road crew would get to work Monday with his permission, to build a road up to Schwarzburg. Then I explained that it might alarm the Germans because we would use machines.
I only went up to the castle when we took up bodies. Even then, I wanted to make sure we got the body bags back, so I didn't see that much. Yes, they have cannon, but how many I can't say. I saw only one, from a distance. It was tarnished to a brown shade that looked like brass or bronze and it had a barrel perhaps four feet long and a foot around at the breach. I couldn't see the muzzle or any cannon balls, so I don't know the caliber. It didn't seem right to be nosing into things like that, what with the job of getting the body out of the body bag and into a burial shroud.
I don't know if anyone in Grantville has thought through what's going to happen between us and the churches of this land. I remember studying in Sunday School about the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and how hard it was for the Church to come to grips with religious diversity.
Pastor Decker didn't get to this subject right away, but you could tell from the way he asked it that the answers we gave would be important. He asked what religion we were in Grantville, after he'd noted that he understood that we were using the Gregorian calendar, which he thinks of as the Catholic calendar.
I explained that I was Catholic and so is Miles Drahuta, and then I had to ask around. Ron Koch turned out to be Lutheran, Brick Bozarth was Church of Christ, which I had to explain was another Protestant denomination, and Pete McDougal added to the confusion by saying that his wife was Catholic but that he was more of a non-practicing Presbyterian than anything.
The pastor wondered if the fact that more of us were Catholic than any other religion was the reason that Grantville used the Gregorian calendar. I explained that the whole world switched to that calendar long before I was born, not because of religion, but because it worked better than the old one.
The pastor was very confused by the fact that we could work and live together not caring that our neighbors or coworkers had different religions. It took me a while to figure out how to answer him, but I think my answer was good. I told him that we have only to look back on the Thirty Years' War and all the other wars of religion to see how failure to tolerate religious difference can ruin entire nations.
He asked how could I, a Catholic, justify helping to properly bury Lutherans, when my church had declared that they were certain to burn in Hell. I asked him how could I, as a Christian, refuse to help properly bury another human, as all of us are made in God's image.
He needed to probe the limits of our toleration, asking if we would accept Anabaptists or Mennonites, to which I said that we would welcome them. He asked about Muscovites too, and it took me a bit to figure out that he meant Russian Orthodox. I told him that I thought that we had several Orthodox Christian families in town. Then he asked about Jews. I said that there was a Jewish family that had been in Grantville for many years, the Roths, and that the Abrabanel family had just arrived in town from Holland and already Rebecca Abrabanel is part of our government. He asked if I would tolerate the Jews if they came in numbers enough to build a synagogue, and I said of course. Then he asked about Turks, and I said that I didn't know if there were any Muslims in town but again, if they were there, they could build a mosque.
I think some of our clergy are going to have to get together with the German clergy and have some very long talks.
—4—
To be delivered to Martin Mühler at the Maegdleinschule, Eisfeld:
Written on this twenty-third day of May, in the year of our Lord 1631, or the second day of June in the Catholic calendar of Pope Gregory. I will explain in a moment why I mention this other date.
Martin, thank you for replying so promptly to my last letter. I wrote that letter in a state of great alarm. At the time I wrote it, I knew nothing about what had happened but what I could see with my own eyes. Now, Martin, I have actually been down in the pit and I have spoken with those who are within.
So much has happened since I last wrote. Captain Saalfelder of the castle guard has sent good men to scout around the place we at first thought might be the very pit of Hell, and even into the pit. We have found a roundabout way to get messages safely to and from Rudolstadt.
Thursday, we had visitors from within the pit, and although they spoke mostly English and had almost no German, they had a letter written to the captain in excellent German. It was a most remarkable letter, claiming to be from the Grantville Emergency Committee and asking us for permission to build a road up the wall of the pit. The captain showed me the letter, and it was remarkable even to look at. The paper was the most perfect, and it was printed, not written, using a humanist style of type. The signature was even more remarkable—it was signed by a woman, Rebecca Abrabanel. Is that name not Jewish? Also, the letter was dated using the Catholic calendar!
As I wrote before, several houses fell into the pit when it opened. It has fallen on us to give a proper burial to those who fell in those first horrible moments that Sunday noon. Our visitors said that we were welcome to come down to try to find the bodies, and they said they would try to get us help. Friday morning, one brave man, the farmer Johann Schwarz went down. His wife was one of those lost. He came back, reporting that there were bodies. More important, he came back unharmed, so Friday afternoon, six of us went down.
More of us went back Saturday. Not too long after we had started, we were joined by five men from this strange new town of Grantville. Even the names of the men were strange, Mark O'Reilly said the name was Irish, Pete McDougal has a name befitting one of the Scots mercenaries this accursed war has brought to our land, and the names Brick Bozarth and Miles Drahuta I cannot place at all. All of them were from this country called West Virginia, which is in a kingdom called the United States of America which is, indeed, in America across the ocean.
Everything about these men was remarkable. Their clothing, their tools, what they did first, how they worked, but at times, it was as if they were working miracles. This man Mark O'Reilly said that all of the others had been trained in rescue work because they were miners by trade. All of them had helmets and vests that were bright colors, so that if any of them needed to be rescued, they could be found easily.
The first thing they did was a great puzzle. Instead of joining immediately in the search they began to string ropes. Safety ropes, Mr. O'Reilly called them. Then they built a bridge across the foot of the great new waterfall the Schwarza has made where it falls into the pit. Mark explained that he did not want more people to die or be injured in searching for the dead. Indeed, these ropes and the bridge they built were a great help.
Their tools were amazing. The most fearsome was a saw. It sounds so simple to call it just a saw, because it had an engine on it that roared most unpleasantly. Although it was small enough to hold easily with two hands, it could cut through a tree as big around as a man in only minutes.
They had two of these saws and also a machine that was so simple that I believe one of our smithies could easily build one. They call it a come-along because it makes things come along. The machine had a lever, a ratchet, and a windlass drum, with cable and hooks, so that one man could lift a ton if he worked patiently with the lever and ratchet. The rope was made of steel wire, but that was the only new idea in this machine.
Their shovels were more finely forged than any shovel I have seen, but they were just shovels. By the end of the day, they had helped us recover five more bodies. Three of those would have taken days to get out without the saw and the come-along.
These men claimed special training in what they call rescue and recovery work, and they had with them two items that were horrible proof of that. They called them body bags. These were made of the finest oiled canvas, with a remarkable sliding fastener to hold each closed, and with many handles very finely sewn to the sides all around. These bags were good for only one thing, and that was for carrying the dead out of difficult places.
While I am talking about strange tools, I should say something about the engine that is even now being used to build the promised road up from the bottom of the pit to Schwarzburg. It is yellow, and the size of a small hut. For most of last week, it has sat beside a great pile of charcoal near a huge mill building not far below us, doing nothing. On Friday, though, a man came out of the mill building and climbed onto this engine, and it seemed to come to life with a rumble like distant thunder. It pushes things around. It has a great blade, like a broad shovel on the front, and it pushes with the power of many oxen. That first time we saw it used, it was put to use shaping that pile of charcoal.
Today, as I watch, there are just five men working slowly up the side of one of the mountains within the pit. They are using their marvelous saws to cut the trees in the path of the road they are building. Sometimes they use the come-along to pull the fallen trees where they want them. One of the men is working the great engine I mentioned. With this machine alone, he is doing the work of fifty or one hundred men cutting a road into the side of the mountain. I believe he will complete this road by noon, yet it must be almost a mile in length.
But, let me say more about my conversation with Mark O'Reilly. Although his German was not good, he had with him a remarkable little book, a dictionary. Part of it contained English words and their German equivalents, and part contained German words and their English equivalents, all organized by the alphabet. There was one problem with this book. His dictionary contained German as it will be spoken more than three centuries in the future. With his bad German and this dictionary, however, we spoke of some of the most remarkable things.
One curious thing came out. I have been speaking of the pit, because from Schwarzburg, it appears that Grantville lies at the bottom of a great pit that has opened up in our lands. The people from Grantville refer to what has befallen them in different terms. They call it the Ring of Fire because, for a fleeting moment when their town was inexplicably transported to our doorstep, they were surrounded by a strange circle of fire.
They have no understanding at all of how this happened. Whatever devilment there is behind what happened, whatever God's purpose may be in this, it is no clearer to them than it is to us. They may have wondrous tools, and they do indeed appear to come from our future, but they are afraid of the same things we are., They fear not having enough food to eat, and fear that the war that is sweeping south after the fall of Magdeburg will consume them.
The people of Grantville know of the war that plagues our lands. They call it the Thirty Years' War, because, from the point of view of their future, it lasted thirty years. Mark O'Reilly says that this war murdered one third of the population of Germany. Yes, murder is the word he used. He said that, from this and other wars of religion, the Church of his day, not just the church of the popes, but also the many Protestant churches have learned that they must tolerate each other even when they disagree deeply about doctrine.
This is the most remarkable thing of all. In this town of Grantville, there are many Protestant churches and also a Catholic church. He said that the different churches disagree on many matters of theology, but that they have been there for many years, and living in peace despite these differences. All of them have used the Catholic calendar for many years, not because of any Catholic victory, but because they have agreed that Pope Gregory's calendar is more rational than the old calendar.
Among the men from Grantville working with us, Mark O'Reilly and one other were Catholic, one was Lutheran, one was Presbyterian, which I take to be a kind of Calvinist, and one from some Protestant group called the Church of Christ. Strangely, the Presbyterian said he had a Catholic wife, but even more remarkable than this was the fact that Mark O'Reilly did not know the religions of most of the men he was working with. He had to ask, and he only thought to do so in response to my questions.
I learned that there are indeed Jews in town. One Jewish family is headed by a goldsmith who has been a respected merchant in town for many years. This Rebecca Abrabanel who signed the letter we saw last week is indeed Jewish, but she and her father are from our world, from Amsterdam. You may measure the warmth of their welcome by the fact that she seems to have taken a very high seat on this emergency committee they have established to rule their town. Mark O'Reilly did say, though, that he thought the head of this emergency committee, a man named Michael Stearns, was some kind of Protestant.
Again, note my words. He thought. It seems that he has never inquired about this matter. I am not talking about a man who lacks curiosity or judgment. This man was most curious, deeply concerned about the safety of his men and of the men from Schwarzburg, and very interested to learn what I had to say. Despite this curiosity, despite being well educated, despite the fact that he had a sharp wit, he had never inquired. I can only conclude that we will find this Grantville to be very different from any place we have ever imagined.
Mark O'Reilly said that he was no scholar of religion, but he knew far more of the Bible than the Catholic laymen I have met. When I questioned how Grantville's religions could be so tolerant, he quoted a document with which I am unfamiliar, saying that all men are made equal, but then he showed how this follows from the book of Genesis, since we are all descended from Adam and Adam himself was created in God's image. The logic of this argument is very compelling. If indeed every man is an image of God himself, not in the idolatrous sense but because that is indeed how God made us, then indeed, it would be disrespectful of God himself for us to treat each other with anything less than respect, even when we may disagree deeply.
Martin, as a brother in Christ, as my roommate of many years when we studied together in seminary, I beg your help in trying to digest what has happened here.
I write as your most humble and troubled friend, Hermann Decker.