As Yossie walked down the road Thursday morning, he was struck by an unlikely fact. His surroundings no longer shocked him. When he'd arrived in Grantville, the well-painted houses made of sawn planks had seemed very alien. Now, only a week later, he was living in such a house in the outlying village of Deborah. Then, the sight of the yellow buses taking children to the huge school down the valley would have frightened him. Now, he had ridden such a bus once, and he was about to ride one again.
The marvels that Grantville had somehow brought from the distant future were overwhelming, but after a week, Yossie was starting to see more. The future world from which Grantville had come may have had its wonders, but it had not always been kind to Grantville.
In the world Yossie knew, he could blame abandoned houses and recent ruins on the war that had now lasted for more than a decade. As he passed the remains of abandoned buildings that divided upper Deborah from lower Deborah, he wondered what had happened in Grantville's world to cause such damage.
When he came to the main road through lower Deborah, Yossie put aside his questions. Two men were standing on the corner where he'd been told to wait for the bus. They were wearing the closely cut trousers of faded blue twill that many Grantvillers favored, but his eyes were on their helmets. They were not like the military helmets he knew, and their colors were both bright and strange.
The day before, Yossie had gone to a meeting in Grantville for refugees who wanted work. Most of the Grantvillers with jobs to offer needed the help of translators to address their German-speaking audience. The man who spoke for Grantville's coal mine had been an exception, speaking fluent but oddly accented German.
Yossie had heard several times about the mine, but he had never seriously considered working there until that meeting. The man who'd spoken wasn't a very good salesman, although he did try. He spoke about how important the mine was to Grantville, and about the value of the coal rock they would mine. That was not what moved Yossie. The first thing that impressed him was the man's apparent enthusiasm for working in the mine, while the second was his plain-spoken honesty about the dangers of the work.
Yossie was also curious about the man's strange position at the mine. He'd said that he wasn't the owner or foreman or overseer, but just a mine safety engineer. The term was strange, and after he'd explained it, the idea was even stranger. Yossie had never imagined that a nobleman or company would hire someone just to prevent others from hurting themselves.
The bus interrupted Yossie's thoughts as it rumbled into view. After it stopped, he hesitated briefly, watching the Grantvillers get on. The smell and noise were still strange, but if the Grantvillers could ride, he could too.
The bus was another example of Grantville's odd mixture of wealth and disrepair. Yossie couldn't even begin to estimate the value of the machine, but he was sure that it was immense. Why, then, had nobody made an effort to repair some of the torn seats?
The bus stopped several times on its way through Grantville, picking up more men at each stop. The Grantvillers rode together at the front talking and laughing. It seemed that they all knew each other. The Germans riding in back were quieter. For many, this was their first ride on such a vehicle. They were all refugees as well, strangers in Grantville and mostly strangers to each other.
At a stop in central Grantville, a man sat down beside Yossie. "I'm Thomas Schmidt," he said said as the bus lurched onward. "Who are you? I saw you talking to Herr Koch yesterday."
"Joseph Hanauer," Yossie answered, puzzled by the man's accent. It was not the Thuringian accent he was growing used to, nor any accent he had heard in the lands to the west.
A month ago, he would not have expected a Christian stranger to sit by him. Now, Yossie understood that his status as a Jew was invisible to the man. Yossie was not trying to hide it. His clothing proclaimed that he was a Jew, but the Germans of the Thüringerwald didn't seem to understand what would have been obvious to those of the lands to the west.
"Who is Herr Koch? Do you mean the man from the mine?" Yossie asked.
"Yes," Thomas said. "Herr Koch said this mine needed a smith, and I am the son of the son of a smith. If it can be made of iron, I can make it. Do you have a trade?"
Yossie started to tell about the print shop in Hanau. The bus turned onto a well-graded gravel road that followed the curve of a side valley while he talked. Yossie had just started to explain that he hadn't been an apprentice but merely a common laborer when the view out the window drove thoughts of Hanau from his mind.
A line of alien structures came into sight. Two round gray towers dominated the curving row of buildings that followed the valley floor. The complex was almost half a mile long, and each building was linked to the next by a long sloping tube. The towers looked like they might be made of very fine stonework, but the other parts were a mystery. Were the rust stains on some buildings evidence that they were made entirely of iron?
The valley ended abruptly in a high black cliff not far beyond the strange structures. Yossie knew those cliffs, but neither he nor anyone else understood them. They marked the border between the familiar German lands and the strange land of Grantville that had somehow come from almost four centuries in the future.
One of the Grantvillers riding at the front of the bus stood up, holding the seats at each side for support as he addressed them, in English. "Welcome to Murphy's Run Mine, folks."
The bus went past many of the mine buildings and through a gate in the woven wire fence that paralleled the road. They passed a strange framework with great wheels on top and then came to a stop.
Yossie recognized the man waiting for them despite the helmet he was wearing. It was the man Thomas Schmidt had called Herr Koch.
"Good morning, Guten morgen," he said, after they had gotten off of the bus. "I am Ron Koch," he said, and then he repeated himself in strangely accented but fluent German. "Our job today is to take this thing apart." He waved at a long line of machinery that ran up the side of the valley.
After giving more detail about the day's work, he announced that each of the Grantvillers would begin the day by supervising one or two of the new men. Then he began calling out names and handing out slips of paper. Yossie's slip of paper said "Joseph Hanauer arbeit mit Bob Eckerlin." Yossie was briefly puzzled by the printing. It was blurry, almost as if a layer of inked cloth had been set between the type and the paper as it was printed.
After a bit of confusion, Yossie found Bob Eckerlin. Each of them had pronounced the name of the other so badly that Yossie wasn't sure of their pairing until he'd seen Bob's sheet of paper. Bob's paper was printed in the same odd way as his own, but it said much more, and all in English.
For the next few hours, Yossie did his best to do as Bob directed. Bob began by showing Yossie how to wear a helmet like those worn by the Grantvillers. The hard hat, as it was known, had a complex web of straps which had to be adjusted to make it fit his head. It was lighter than he expected and surprisingly comfortable, but it was some time before he got used to wearing it instead of his own felt hat.
Yossie and Bob had the task of removing things called rollers from the long framework that led up the hill away from a strange structure in the valley. There seemed to be hundreds of these rollers, and Yossie could easily see how their arrangement had allowed something to slide along the structure with almost no resistance. Each roller was held in place by screws that worked exactly the same way as the great screw of a printing press. All of them were iron, though, and perfectly identical.
Bob Eckerlin knew almost no German, except a few stock phrases, but he knew enough to teach Yossie the names of things. They were using wrenches to remove bolts from the rollers that were part of the conveyor, and then putting the smaller parts in a cleverly made metal bucket.
Unfortunately, Bob's sparse German was insufficient to explain what it was that this conveyor had once done. Above them, the conveyor disappeared over the curve of the ridge, in the direction of the ring of black cliffs that marked what some Grantvillers called the Ring of Fire. Only a week ago Yossie had looked down those cliffs to see Grantville for the first time.
Working up on the side of the valley, they had a good view. The conveyor rose from the base of a metal building and what looked like another conveyor ran from there up to the top of a round gray tower. More conveyors linked that tower to a black building, and there were towers and conveyors beyond that.
Other crews were at work along the conveyor. Some were removing the arched roof over the rollers. Others were doing more mysterious things. A teamster with a freight wagon made regular trips along the conveyor taking loads of salvaged material down the hill.
Yossie enjoyed the view of the thick forests covering the hills but he wondered why the cleared land in the valley and along the conveyor looked so poorly tended. Much of the land looked like it had been roughly plowed and then abandoned to grow weeds and scrub.
Around midmorning, Ron Koch called a break. "Does anyone have questions?" he asked.
Many of the men were drinking water from strange conical paper cups, but Yossie ignored the offer of a drink. He was suspicious of the water and he was puzzled about the kosher status of the cup. A tin cup would have posed no problem, but paper cups were a novelty and he doubted that the glue holding them together was made from kosher hide.
"What was this thing?" someone asked, pointing to the spidery structure of the conveyor.
"A conveyor belt," Ron Koch said. "It was used to move waste from the coal washing plant to the waste pond. The pond was just outside the Ring of Fire, so we need a new place to put our waste.
"There was a sheet like a wide belt that rode on these rollers. The belt carried the waste. We removed the belt already. We can use it down at the mine when other belts break. We need to get all the iron here, that is your job."
"Do we get to keep these helmets?" someone called out.
"Yes, so long as you work for the mine. If you quit your job, you must return them."
"I thought we were going to mine coal," someone else said.
"We will, "Ron said. "And soon, I hope. First, though, we need to get the mine ready. For that, we need to make some things from the iron we get here."
"But where is this coal?" another man asked. It was Thomas Schmidt, the man Yossie had spoken with on the bus.
"The Pittsburgh coal is about four hundred feet below you," Ron answered. "There are other layers, but that is the big one."
"When we came here this morning, you called this place the mine," another man said. "I'm a miner, and I still see no mine. Where is the hole in the ground?"
"All the buildings down there are part of the mine," Ron said. "See those towers with great wheels on their tops? Those are the headframes, the hoists built over the holes. The west one is for lifting people in and out, the east one is for lifting coal. The big towers are silos for storing coal. The building between them is for washing the coal."
After the break, Bob Eckerlin left them, and Yossie was paired with Thomas Schmidt. "So Joseph," Thomas said, as they worked at opposite ends of a roller. "You said you came from some town near Frankfort. Was it a Protestant town?"
Yossie knew he was being asked his religion, but he wanted to avoid that question, so he answered literally. "Hanau is just up the river Main from Frankfort. That land is all borders, with Catholics to the south, Lutherans to the north, and Calvinists to the east. All of them come together in Hanau, and we have a colony of Walloon Calvinists too."
"Before I came to Grantville, I would have thought that was crazy," Thomas said. "Now, I am not so sure."
"Grantvillers are a shock," Yossie said. "I have never met anyone like them."
"Where I come from, we were all Lutherans," Thomas grumbled.
"Where is that?" Yossie asked, before putting his weight into loosening the next bolt.
"North of here, on the edge of the Harz mountains, a town called Thale." Thomas grunted as he started the bolt turning on his end. "It was too close to Magdeburg so we came south when foragers began stripping the countryside all around. I thank God that we left when we did."
He paused, with a pained look on his face. "Just a few weeks ago we had to run again. A band of stragglers came and burned the village outside Jena where we were staying, may they be eternally cursed. We didn't run far enough the first time."
Thomas and Yossie lifted the roller free and set it on the edge of the walkway, and then Thomas spoke again. "Why did you leave Hanau with the war so far away from you?"
"The man I worked for died, may his memory be a blessing," Yossie answered. He didn't want to talk about himself, so he changed the subject as they began work on the next roller. "Thomas, you said that you were a smith. I know a little bit about smithing. How did they make this thing?"
Thomas looked baffled. "I have no idea. There are no hammer marks on the ironwork, and all these bolts and rollers seem perfectly identical."
That topic occupied them for a good part of the day as they worked their way up the conveyor. Yossie wasn't bothered by the identical bolts because of his experience with printing type, but he had to explain to Thomas how type is cast so that all the copies of each letter are perfectly identical.
In turn, Thomas had to explain why the ironwork bothered him so much. "This is all wrought iron, it must be," he said, banging his wrench against one of the bars of the conveyor framework. "Nothing else would ring like that. If it is wrought iron, it was hammered to shape, but there are no hammer marks."
He paused to run his fingers over one of the joints in the structure. "These two bars look like they were joined by melting. I could join lead bars that way, but these are iron. Nothing I know would make enough heat to do that, but most of the joints in this thing are made this way. It is as if welding was easier than riveting."
When they stopped work for the midday meal, the divide between Germans and Grantvillers was apparent in a new way. The Germans had all been told to bring food. They had, in bundles or in baskets. In contrast, all of the Grantvillers seemed to have metal boxes or pails to hold their food. Many of them had metal bottles of some evil smelling black drink that smoked as if it was hot, even after being left all morning.
Yossie's bundle held a hard chunk of the sausage he had helped make less than a month ago in Kissingen, a small loaf of home-baked bread, and a bottle of watered wine. Some of the Germans had less, few had anything more elaborate.
Yossie considered the bread he was eating to be something of a miracle. The house they were living in had a very strange kitchen, with an even stranger oven. They had not even understood that it was an oven until the old lady who owned the house showed them how it worked, and then Yitzach ben Zvi had filled the whole house with smoke when he lit a fire in it to make it kosher.
After he'd eaten, Yossie left the group to say the grace after meals. He walked well away before he pulled his bentscher out of his pocket. He didn't want anyone to see the Hebrew text of the slim little prayerbook or to hear him chanting the long prayer in that tongue. Grantville was supposed to be indifferent to the fact that he was a Jew, but Yossie wasn't ready to test that indifference, much less the tolerance of his German coworkers.
That afternoon, there seemed to be no end to the job of removing rollers. Yossie and Thomas were getting better at it, but the number of rollers to be removed was immense. Guessing the total number was an interesting challenge. The conveyor had a set of three rollers every few feet, and if it ran all of the way to the cliffs of the Ring of Fire without a change of direction, they agreed that there must be well over a thousand rollers to remove.
As the afternoon passed, Yossie told stories of the trip east. He said something of the group he'd traveled with, but he carefully avoided all mention of religion. What seemed to interest Thomas most were stories of the smithies and glassworks he'd seen in the Spessart and in the Thüringerwald.
In turn, Thomas told of the Harz mountains south of his home in Thale. He said nothing of his encounters with the war, his departure from Thale or his more recent flight. He'd hinted that he had a family, but he never mentioned them. Instead, he focused on his old smithy and the peaceful years before the war had come to his home.
By the end of the afternoon they were working in silence, and they remained silent on the bus ride home. It had been a long hard day doing very strange work. Yossie was content to sit quietly on the bus and passively watch as it followed the road into Grantville.
When he said goodbye to Thomas, Yossie was startled to realize that, for the first time in his life, he was not an alien Jew among Germans. Despite the gulf that separated them, he and Thomas were as similar as brothers when compared to the Grantvillers. They were two strangers in a very strange land.
When Moses had named his son Gershem, which means "a stranger there," he was describing his experience in the land of Midian. Yossie wondered if Midian could possibly have been as strange to Moses as Grantville was to him.
By Tuesday of the next week, they had stripped almost everything from the upper end of the conveyor. Where it had once gone somewhere beyond the wall of cliffs that bordered the Ring of Fire, it now ended above a small hollow. From there to the cliffs, it had been reduced to bare ironwork, and parts of that had already been cut up.
Yossie spent the morning assigned to work with an American woman named Gayle. He had heard rumors that one of the American miners was a woman, but that didn't prepare him for the fact. From a distance, he might not have known that she was a woman until he heard her voice. She was dressed like a man, in blue twill trousers just like the men of Grantville wore, and her helmet was no different from a man's.
Gayle was an electrician, which meant that she worked with the mysteries of electricity. Yossie already knew that the Americans burned electricity in their lights. Apparently, the conveyors had also burned electricity. For the entire morning, Yossie helped Gayle disassemble the electric wires for a device Gayle called a conveyor drive motor.
Every day, Yossie had been assigned to one of the Americans for at least an hour, and sometimes much longer. Ron had explained that he wanted the Americans and Germans to work together so that they would learn from each other, and he wanted to let the Germans try their hands at many different jobs.
Yossie could see the wisdom in the American plan. At the same time, he felt awkward being paired with a woman. In the world he knew, it was improper for a man to touch a woman who was not his close relative, and even taking something from her hand or handing something to her was improper.
The right way for a man to give something to a woman was to set it down somewhere within her easy reach. He expected her to do the same when passing tools to him. Again and again, Yossie was frustrated. Either there was no place to set what he was trying to give Gayle, or she would try to pass things directly to him.
Gayle seemed mildly amused by his awkwardness. Several times, she asked him what was wrong, making it clear that she knew that he was embarrassed. Unfortunately, Yossie's rudimentary English and Gayle's rudimentary German didn't allow for any useful explanation.
After their lunch break, Thomas Schmidt called Yossie over. "You said you'd done some smith work? Do you want to be my helper?"
"What help do you need?"
"Herr Koch wants a smithy. They have some marvelous tools here. They even have saws that can cut iron and torches that can melt it. Those will wear out, though, and they say that they can't be replaced. If I can make tools to cut iron, I can replace them."
Yossie followed Thomas past the towering iron structure that stood over the entrance to the mine. The Grantvillers called it the pit head. A low building next to it housed some kind of machine that made a constant low rumble.
The building beyond the pit head had doors along one wall that were wide enough to drive a wagon through. Thomas walked around the end of the building to a newly built shed where a mixed group men were at work.
"Here is our new forge," Thomas said, gesturing expansively. "It isn't much yet, but we will see what we can do."
The smithy was roofed with the rippled metal that was used for so many buildings at the mine. A half-built chimney stood over a hearth that filled half of the open side of the shed. On the opposite side, there was a door into the larger building.
"None of that is ready yet." Thomas said. "Come in here. This is the mine workshop. They have a bench and wonderful tools we can try using to make the tools we want."
"What are we trying to make," Yossie asked. Rows of shelves filled one side of the room, and several strange iron machines stood on the floor.
Thomas went to a bench along the back wall of the workshop. "Here is the problem," he said, picking up a brightly polished piece of silver. It was bent into a broad U shape, with a dull metal ribbon stretched across the opening and a black handle on one side. "This is one of their metal cutting saws. See how fine the teeth are? It is like a file cut into a slice the thickness of a ribbon."
Thomas began to saw a rusty iron bar, and then paused after only a few strokes. "The trouble is," he said, "these saw blades are not made to be sharpened. They have hundreds of them, but when they are gone, they will have no way to do this kind of cutting. Here, finish this for me. Be careful with this beautiful saw."
Yossie took the saw and set gingerly to work. The iron bar was as big around as his thumb and rusty, with an odd pattern of lumps along it. The saw teeth cut into the metal bar quickly once Yossie learned to bear down properly.
"What are we making?" Yossie asked, after he'd cut halfway through.
"Chisels," Thomas said. "They have some simple chisels, but to cut up the conveyor segments, we need bull-nosed cutting chisels. I think the Americans doubt I can cut wrought iron pieces that big. While we wait for the forge to be ready, we can do some work using these American tools."
After Yossie had cut a foot-long chunk from the bar, Thomas showed him how to reposition the bar in the bench vise so Yossie could start a second cut. While Yossie sawed, Thomas set to work grinding the first piece to shape.
"Stop," Thomas said, after Yossie had cut most of the way through a second piece. "Save the saw. You can break the bar now, just bend it back and forth." Then he smiled. "Did I tell you, my wife and I have moved into a house? We have said goodbye to the grounds of the Grantville fair."
"What kind of house?" Yossie asked, after he'd broken the bar. Thomas had said "we" when speaking of his flight, but he'd never said a thing about his family.
"It is not a whole house, just a room. The couple that live there had three children, but two were left behind by the Ring of Fire, so now we have the room those children lived in."
The conversation ended while Thomas went back to grinding, but continued when Yossie finished cutting off the next piece. "How well do you communicate with your new landlord?" he asked.
"Not well. They have a little phrase book, but most of the phrases are very strange." Thomas chuckled. "It's as if the book was printed for use by the ignorant sons of wealthy noblemen."
"What do you mean?"
"There are so many phrases for dealing with servants. It is all very polite and the servants are doing jobs I do not fully understand. How to tell your coach driver to stop, how to ask your servant for more food, how to tell a porter where to put your baggage. Still, the little book is useful. Here, let me show you how to use this grindstone."
Yossie was fascinated by the grindstone. A touch of a little silver toggle on the machine would start or stop it. The stone was tiny compared to every grindstone he had ever seen. When it was running, it spun incredibly fast, and when he touched his work-piece to the turning stone, the stream of sparks was as intense as a flame. He immediately began to think about how such a machine might be applied to type cutting.
Thomas set to work with the saw while he let Yossie try to duplicate the chisels he'd ground. The most time consuming part of the job involved grinding the front third of each chisel to taper down to half of its original diameter. With that done, the final job was to grind a blunt triangular tip.
"How is this?" Yossie asked, handing Thomas the result.
"Not bad for a first effort, but the tip should be off center. The short edge sits in the groove you are cutting."
It took two more tries before Thomas approved the result. "Good. After we case harden it and temper it, it should cut well. This iron the Americans call rebar seems to be very good stuff, but we will learn the truth when we put it to the fire."
Yossie understood case hardening and tempering. He'd helped harden and temper many type punches in the print shop in Hanau. Those punches had been tiny compared to the chisels he and Thomas were making, but like the chisels, they were made made to cut metal.
"Why are we making so many chisels?"
"You only need one chisel if you have a grindstone to sharpen it every time it gets dull, but when you are up in the hills trying to cut one of those conveyors, will you take this grindstone with you? A bundle of spare chisels is what you want." Thomas paused. "How are you getting on with your landlord?"
"It is easier now that two of my group have left." Yossie said.
"They found another house?"
"No, the two merchants I came with decided to buy a load of stuff these Americans don't value. Now, they're on a trip selling it so they can buy livestock to bring back."
"Where will they find any buyers? These Americans have wonders, but who today has money to buy? And where will they find livestock? The foragers have stripped the Saale valley."
"Things are better to the west," Yossie said. "They went over the hills to Hildburghausen, we met a merchant there on our trip east. If there is no stock to be had there, they may have to travel as far as Neustadt. There is a big cattle market there."
"I wish them luck in their venture," Thomas said. "This town has too many unused pastures. The open land around this mine could probably support a good herd."
"That was our thought exactly," Yossie said. "There's idle land above Deborah, too. They say it's an old mine pit that was filled in, but it has a good fence around it."
Shortly after they went back to work, they were interrupted by one of the Americans stepping into the shop.
"Tom, come," he said, and then gestured to Yossie. "You too."
"What's going on?" Thomas asked.
"Who knows?" someone said. "They didn't say."
After they'd stood in the crowd for a minute, Thomas picked up the thread of their interrupted conversation. "So how are you getting on with your landlord?"
"One of my companions knows some Latin, and so does our landlord's wife." Yossie hesitated. Paulette Adducci had explained that the reason she knew some Latin was because she was Catholic. The explanation didn't make much sense to Yossie, but he suspected that Thomas might be as bothered by the Adducci's Catholicism as by his own Judaism. "She has been trying to teach English to my sister and the other women who are with us."
Someone in the crowd interrupted them. "Someone's coming!"
There was a murmur of voices as they tried to make out who was there. Thomas complained that his eyesight wasn't what it had been, while Yossie couldn't see over the crowd. Two or three men on horseback became three and then two Scots mercenaries and an American as they got closer.
As the horsemen rode up to the crowd, Ron Koch came out of the office. "Men," he began. "You know that we have something of value. Here at the mine, we have tons of iron, and in town we have other things. You also know about the war, about the armies that are loose in the land. We need to worry about how to defend ourselves against anyone who might try to take what we have."
"The man is right," Thomas muttered. "If the Imperials find this place, they will strip it bare."
Yossie nodded, mildly annoyed that he had missed some of what Ron was saying. ". . . so I will let him speak." Ron finished, turning to one of the Scots.
"Who of you has before fired a gun?" the man asked.
Thomas raised his hand, as did several others. Yossie had never held a gun, but neither had most of the others.
"These Americans guns, they are strange, but they are wonderful," the Scot continued. "We have here one you can try. We can use it for practice so we waste not powder nor shot.
"This last week, we saw a few small attacks on the north and east of Grantville. They were stragglers and foragers and we beat them. So long as small bands are all we see, Grantville is safe.
"The trouble is, some of them get away. If they speak to their officers about Grantville, we may face a tercio. That would be two or three thousand men, half with guns. These Americans, they think they can win against such a force. Perhaps they can. It seems that every American man has at least one gun."
Yossie nodded. His elderly landlord Randolph Adducci had at least two guns that he was aware of.
"To be sure we win, we need to prepare. If the raiders come here to the mine, you will have to defend. If a tercio comes, every man must be ready to help. So try this toy gun. Learn how it works."
The American stopped the Scotsman and said something to him. While he waited, Yossie recalled the text he had studied the night before with Rabbi Yakov. Yossie had complained that the opening chapters of the Torah portion for the week were some of the dullest in the whole Bible. The old rabbi's response was to point out the passage giving instructions for blowing the signal trumpets.
"When an enemy comes into your land and you rise to war against him, sound a stuttering call on the trumpets," Yakov had translated. "You say that Parshas Behaaloscha begins with dull commandments to the Levites, but think. From this one dull mitzvah, we can infer that we are obliged to organize for self defense." Now, it seemed that they were doing exactly that.
For the remainder of the afternoon, they took turns trying to shoot holes in a paper target. When it was his turn, Thomas insisted on learning how the toy gun worked. It didn't use powder, so there was no smoke or flame when a shot was fired. "Ah!" Thomas exclaimed, after the Scotsman had explained that the gun used air. "It is like shooting a cork out of a bellows!"
"Aye," the Scotsman said. "But the balls, they are tiny."
Yossie held back while Germans took their turns with the American gun. He understood his obligation to aid in defending the community, but he had no desire to violate the Christian law that Jews were forbidden to bear arms.
The American eventually noticed that Yossie was hanging back and pointed at him. "You, come," he said, gesturing with one hand while he held the gun in the other. "Shoot."
As Yossie nervously stepped forward to take the gun, one of the Scots looked at him sharply, and then turned to the American as if he was about to say something. Yossie was certain that the man had recognized that he was a Jew, but at the last moment, a baffled expression came over the Scotsman's face and he said nothing.
Yossie's attempts to use the gun were no more successful than those of the Germans, but having never touched a gun before, his failure didn't bother him
Yossie's second full week at the mine went quickly, but it was filled with anxiety. His traveling companions Yitzach ben Zvi and Moische ben Avram had left town nearly two weeks ago. Every day of the past week, he had come home hoping for their return.
Yossie's anxiety had been increased by the rumors he heard. Stories of troop movements to the north seemed to grow more urgent with each passing day. A week ago, there had been a few families a day arriving at the refugee center at the Grantville Fairground. Now, Yossie had heard that there were tens of families a day. Now, there were stories of an army approaching from the north.
Friday afternoon, the bus passed two groups of refugees in town. It was easy to see that they were new arrivals. Each group had an American guide, and they looked as disoriented as Yossie had been only a few weeks earlier.
When the bus left the center of town to follow Buffalo Creek toward Deborah, Yossie saw what he took to be another refugee group ahead. As refugees went, they looked well off. One man was on horseback and they had a two-horse wagon and some livestock. After a moment, Yossie recognized Yitzach and Moische.
"Stop the bus!" he yelled, grabbing his lunch pail. He leapt out as soon as the driver opened the door.
"Yossie!" Yitzach called, as Yossie ran back toward his friends.
"I expected you on Tuesday, what took you so long?"
"It's partly my fault," Yitzach said. "I wanted to visit Kissingen."
"We were worried. There are rumors of an army coming."
"I know," Yitzach said. "Herr Gutkind of Hildburghausen told us of force coming south in the Ilm valley. Do you think Grantville can stand against a tercio?"
"The Americans seem confident." Yossie turned to walk beside the wagon. "To be sure they will win they want everyone to learn to shoot a gun. We do some shooting practice at the mine every day."
"So now you are becoming a soldier?" Moische arched his eyebrows.
Yossie laughed. "Hardly. Most of our practice shooting is with toy guns, they call them bee-bee guns, and they shoot a ball the size of a grain of wheat. Tell me about your trip!"
"Taking glassware from Grantville was a wonderful idea," Yitzach said. "But wait until my wife can hear as well. Right now, I'd better round up our cattle."
"Only four?" Yossie asked as Yitzach rode away.
"We sold the others to Herr Mobley," Moische said. "Now that there are only two cows, Yitzach can be a lazy herdsman. Climb up, the wagon is light."
"I see four animals."
"The calves will follow their mothers," Moische said. "We had three more cows with calves, but we lost a calf on the road." He paused. "Reb Yitz is right, though. I want my wife to hear our tales. Tell me about Grantville."
"I am working at the mine, apprenticed to a Saxon smith."
"Apprenticed?" Moische said. "Since when is a Jew an apprentice, and to a Saxon, no less? And aren't you a little old for an apprenticeship?"
"He doesn't know I'm a Jew, and I don't think the miner's guild cares."
"The miners guild? Since when have guilds permitted Jews?"
"The UMWA is a very strange guild, but yes, I am a member now."
For the next few minutes, Yossie talked about his work at the mine smithy. After they had turned off the main road onto Deborah, Moische changed the subject.
"Reb Guildsman Yosef," he said, only half mockingly, "please tell me how my wife is doing."
"She is well," Yossie said. "Frau Adducci is working hard to teach the women English, and she seems eager to learn German."
"How is Herr Adducci?"
Yossie frowned. It had been obvious that Randolph Adducci and his wife were not in full agreement about taking in a refugee group. She seemed convinced that she was doing God's will, and that the three empty bedrooms that her children had once occupied were there for the needs of the homeless. Her husband, on the other hand, had acted quite unhappy about the strangers who had moved into his house.
"Randolph Adducci is still cross much of the time," Yossie said. "but things are better. I think he was unhappy before the Ring of Fire. He is old, and it seems that he is ill. He complains that his feet hurt."
"He is sick?" Moische asked.
"It was only when we started eating with the Adduccis that we found out. Frau Adducci can eat anything, but Herr Adducci must avoid all honey and sweet fruits, and he must have a set amount of bread or flour in every meal."
"You are eating with the Adduccis?"
"Yes. Frau Adducci liked the smell of Chava's cooking, and so they began to work together in the big kitchen. Chava is happy not to be confined to the small kitchen that the Adduccis call the bar."
"But how does she manage to keep things kosher?"
"She's very strict about kashrus, so she boiled all of the Adducci cooking pots and silverware, and she only uses your crockery at the table. Chava says that Frau Adducci keeps a very clean kitchen. She doesn't know that we keep kosher. I think she sees the care Chava takes as just a foreign kind of cleanliness. To her, it is just one more strange difference between the American world and our world.
"I think it was eating together that helped Herr Adducci. I don't think he'll ever learn German, but he gave me this lunch pail."
"What is it?" Moische asked.
"It is for carrying my noon meal to the mine. Herr Adducci was a miner back when the mine here in Deborah was still open."
When they reached the Adducci house, they had time for only the briefest of greetings. Their first priority was to take the horses and cattle to pasture. They'd gotten permission to use a fenced field above the upper village for their goats before they moved to Deborah. The sloping field had once been an open mine pit, or so they'd been told, but nothing visible to Yossie and his friends hinted at that history.
Moische's wife Frumah was outside looking over the wagon when they got back from the pasture. "What are the barrels?" she asked.
"Wine from Kissingen," Moische said, pointing to one barrel, "and grain," he added, pointing to the others. "We came east with a full load, but we sold the rest in town, along with three cows and two calves."
"You went all the way to Kissingen?" Frumah asked. "Was that prudent?"
"We thought so at the time," Moische said. "On the way home, we thought we might have made a mistake. The rumors of war seem to be chasing us. Where are the others?"
"In the kitchen. Shabbos is coming and you men had best get ready."
"And what of Rav Yakov?"
"He is teaching at the Grantville cheder, what they call the elementary school. He teaches German to some of the Americans. He is only supposed to work there for two hours after the noon meal every day, but they have a library. He should be here soon." Frumah paused. "Enough talk. You men put things away and get ready."
By sunset, the wagon had been unloaded and parked in the vacant half of the Adducci garage. Everyone had bathed and changed into their good clothes, and the men had convened for their prayers.
Worship was difficult in the Adducci household. They didn't want the Adduccis to know that they were Jews, so they said their prayers in the bedroom that Moische and Frumah were using.
The crucifixes in every room of the Adducci household posed a second problem. Plain Christian crosses were bad enough, but these had statues of the Christian God on them, and it was impossible to see them as anything less than a blatant violation of the commandment forbidding graven images. They covered the crucifixes when they could, but they were careful to leave them exposed whenever the Adduccis might see them.
There were ten people around the dinner table that night, Paulette and Randolph Adducci, Rabbi Yakov, Yitzach Kissinger, his wife Chava and daughter Gitele, Moische Frankfurter and his wife Frumah, and Yossie and his sister Basiya.
Eating with the Adduccis was awkward, and the fact that it was a Sabbath dinner made it doubly so. They couldn't chant Kiddush properly over the wine to start their Sabbath dinner. That would reveal who they were. At every meal, the Adduccis added to their discomfort by saying a prayer in the name of the the Christian God before they ate.
Language at the table was another problem. When Randolph Adducci had difficulty understanding what they said, he would complain that he couldn't follow their jabber.
"How was your trip?" Paulette asked.
"Wir, we go," Yitzach started. "Montag, to Schleüsingen we go by Schwarza way. Zweitag to Meiningen."
"Speak English," Randolph insisted.
Paulette sighed. "Dear, if you would just try. Isaac said they went on the Schwarza road to Schleüsingen a week ago Monday, and then to Meiningen on Tuesday."
"Where is this Slushing place?" Randolph asked.
"Dear," Paulette said. "it is a town west of here. Am I right, Moses?"
"Ya, und Meiningen is more west."
It took several more rounds to learn that the travelers had reached Neustadt on Wednesday. On Thursday, Yitzach had taken the wagon onward to Kissingen. Meanwhile Moische stayed in Neustadt finding a good price for the glassware they'd brought from Grantville.
"In Neustadt, I hear of Soldaten," Moische said. "So, wir, we go here on south way, Königshofen und Hildburghausen. In Hildburghausen, I hear Soldaten make one tercio. They coming south."
"What's a terci?" Randolph asked.
"A tercio. Three Tausend Soldaten," Yakov answered. "One Tausend with guns. Two Tausend with Speissen."
"With what?" Paulette asked?
"A Speisse. A Pfahl mit a spitze," Yakov answered, pantomiming a two handed thrust with a pike.
"Spears," Randolph said. "They'd protect the muskets while they reload. Where is this tercio thing?"
"In north, coming south," Moische answered. "Zwei Tage, a Woche."
"Two days or a week!" Paulette said, looking worried. "Can Grantville handle that many?"
"Probably," Randolph said. "Our guns are a damn sight better than anything these krauts have, and the emergency committee is on the ball."
As the Adduccis began speaking to each other, their English was too fast for Yossie to follow.
"People are going to get hurt," Paulette said. "You heard what happened to Dan Frost and Harry Lefferts."
"Damn, I wish I could do something." Randolph said. "If my damned feet didn't hurt so."
Paulette frowned. "Calm down, Randolph."
"Calm down?" he said, turning red. "There's a God damned army coming this way!" He paused, frowning. "Paulette, you phone Tony and Bernadette after dinner, see what they know about this."
Yitzach leaned toward Yossie. "What are they saying?" he asked, in a low tone.
Yossie had no answer, and as the Adduccis' discussion continued, he understood less and less of what they said.
After he'd eaten, Yossie and Moische went out to say the grace after meals under the porch light. Bentsching privately to himself drove questions of the approaching army from his mind, but it intensified another burden. Chanting the Birkas quietly after the noon meal at the mine had not bothered him, but the Sabbath Grace was different. From the opening words of Psalm 126 to the closing prayer for peace, Yossie ached to chant the long prayer with his companions around the table.
"So," Moische said, after they had pocketed their bentschers. "We will soon see what these Americans can do. You seem less worried about our news than our hosts. Why?"
"I told you about the shooting practice at the mine. I have seen the Americans shoot. Bang, bang, bang, with no pause to reload, and every shot hits the center of the target. That was with a gun that the Americans said was a toy. How did you lose a calf?"
"We gave it to a refugee family."
"You just gave it away?"
"I was young, now I am old," Moische said, quoting part of the prayer they had just said.
Nothing more needed to be said. Yossie knew the Hebrew by heart. ". . . and I have never looked on one who is just and forsaken and let his children go begging for bread."
After a pause, Moische continued in a wry tone. "Besides, they might have robbed us if we hadn't given them the calf."
"Moses!" Paulette called, from inside. "Telephone."
Yossie followed his companion inside, curious. He'd seen a telephone used several times, but he'd never used one himself. Moische looked awkward as he took the strange instrument from Paulette, and for the next several minutes he listened and then spoke, telling again the stories he'd heard on the road.
After he handed the telephone back to Paulette, he looked dazed. "That was odd."
"Who did you talk to?" Frumah asked.
"That woman Bernadette, Paulette's daughter. And someone else, an American. They wanted to hear what we had heard about the soldiers."
"Did they tell you anything?"
"Yes. They already know they will face a tercio. They think it will attack Badenburg soon. That is on the road from the Ilm valley to Grantville. She said that we should not worry. They have been expecting something like this to happen, and they have been preparing for it."
Most of the week following the battle at Badenburg was uneventful. Yossie's work at the mine continued uninterrupted. Yitzach and Moische did set off on another mercantile trip west. After the success of their first trip, Moische had decided to send a letter to his cousin Shlomo in Frankfort, inviting him to join them.
The news of the victory and of the huge number of prisoners was certainly interesting. Every evening, Yossie and Yakov shared what they had learned at the mine and at the elementary school, but the news had little direct effect on their lives.
Monday, a week after the battle, Yossie got on the bus expecting things to continue as they had. Thomas was happy to see him and began talking about the celebration the town had after the battle.
Thomas was still talking as they got off of the bus. "Michael Stearns, the President of the UMWA was in command at the battle of Badenburg, and he had the place of honor in the procession. What I do not understand is why the Jewess they call Becky was also there. The Americans cheered her as if she was as much of a hero as Herr Stearns."
Yossie knew of Grantville's court Jews, members of the famous Abrabanel family. He'd heard Americans speaking of Rebecca Abrabanel, and he was curious to hear what Thomas might have to say about her.
Several mine officials were waiting for them as the bus emptied, so Yossie had no chance to probe Thomas's feelings about Jews. Yossie had begun to recognize some of the officials. Quentin Underwood was there, along with Ken Hobbs, representing the Miner's Guild. Ron Koch's German was by far the best, so as usual, he was their spokesman.
"Men," he said, as the empty bus pulled away. "You know we defeated an army a week ago, and we took hundreds of prisoners. We released most of them. I talked to some of them, to see if they could work at the mine. As soon as the bus gets back, we will welcome them.
"You remember your first days here. Now, you are the ones with experience. To these new workers, you are going to be seen as Americans. Be warned, though. All of them were soldiers, and all of them suffered a terrible defeat a week ago. They are tough, but some of them are still stunned by what happened.
"Many of our new workers are Catholics, and most of you are Protestants. We want you to remember one thing. Our law, our official policy and the rules of the United Mine Workers of America all agree. We do not draw lines between men based on the color of a man's skin, based on his religion, or based on the land of his origin. In our eyes, all men are equal, Catholics, Protestants or Jews. I want you to remember this."
Yossie's first job every morning was to fire up the forge. The coal they were burning was difficult to light, so Yossie began by lighting a wood fire on the hearth and then he gradually built it up with coal.
Thomas had mixed feelings about the forge the Americans had built. He loved the electric blower that did away with the need for a bellows, but he disliked the coal fire and the sulfur smell it gave off. But even Thomas had to admit that once it was burning properly, the coal fire was good enough to use.
Yossie had built a perfect pile of burning coal perched over the air jet from the blower when two strangers arrived at the forge.
"Thomas Schmidt? Joseph Hanauer?" the older of the two asked, speaking with a backwoods Bavarian accent. "They said we was to work with you."
"And you are?"
"Karl, and this is Fritz."
"Are you smiths?" Thomas asked.
"Till a week ago, we were soldiers," Karl said. "I'd a pike, Fritz a musket."
Thomas glared at them. "What help can you offer here?"
"I was a farrier's apprentice before the army, I've shod plenty of horses since."
"That's something," Thomas said, grudgingly. "And what about you?" he asked turning to the other man.
"Fritz can fix anything," Karl said. "I seen him take apart a wheel lock pistol and put it right."
"Can he speak for himself?"
Fritz nodded. "I speak," he said, slowly and precisely. "And I can't fix everything. These Grantvillers have stuff I can't figure out."
"What's wrong with him?" Thomas asked.
"Bit his tongue in battle," Karl said, with a bit of a grin. "Day ago, 'twas big as a sausage."
"Let's get to work," Thomas said. "Fritz, you tend the fire, try to keep a good mound of coal burning. Add new coal as soon as we take the work off the fire to start hammering, and keep the coal mounded over the air flow so that it is burning hot and clean by the time we finish hammering. Karl, can you follow hammer signals?"
Karl looked baffled, so Thomas had to explain how he would use his small hammer to direct the forging, and then he and Yossie demonstrated. Thomas, as the master smith, held the piece they were forging on the anvil while Yossie swung the long-handled sledge hammer. Thomas used a small hammer to direct each blow of the sledge, tapping the work to show where and how to strike it.
"What are we making?" Karl asked, after he'd taken a turn at the sledge.
"Tongs," Thomas said. "They want twenty pairs for lifting iron rails." He finished mounding the coals around the iron on the hearth and then picked up a finished pair of tongs. "Joseph, help me."
Yossie took one handle while Thomas took the other and then used them to lift a yard-long chunk of rail. "The Americans say this weighs a hundred pounds. The rails they want to move are more than ten times as long."
"So much iron?" Karl asked.
"Yes, and it's not just iron, it's fine steel," Thomas said, going back to the fire and poking at the coals. "There is an iron road to the electricity mill, and they want to connect it with this mine.
"Yossie, Karl," he said, pulling the glowing iron bar from the fire. "Now we will try something. Both of you take hammers, and each of you strike in turn. The work will go much faster."
Yossie had only learned to follow Thomas's hammer signals the week before and Karl was a complete newcomer. They made many mistakes, but by noon, they'd forged another pair of tongs. When the three of them did manage to work together smoothly, it seemed that the rain of hammer blows on hot iron was almost musical.
Yossie had experienced something similar during long press runs in the print shop in Hanau. When the printer, the pressman and the ink boy got into perfect rhythm, the work became like a dance. When that happened, they seemed to get far more done without working any harder than usual.
As they ate their noon meal, Yossie noticed that Fritz was eating very slowly and with extreme care. "You must have really hurt yourself," Yossie said.
Fritz nodded. "I was in the front ranks," he said, carefully.
"Everyone round him was shot down," Karl added.
"Man beside me exploded," Fritz went on. "Bit my tongue to stop scream." He shook his head ruefully. "American guns are horrible. Don't know why I'm alive."
Thomas had been silent, but now he spoke, in a low angry voice. "Were you at Magdeburg?"
"Yes," Fritz said, looking glum.
"The American guns were worse than what you did in Magdeburg? At least the Americans had the mercy to stop shooting when you were defeated."
"I wasn't there when the city fell," Karl said. "I was out foraging."
"And did you show any mercy to the villagers whose food you took?"
A tense silence fell over the group while they finished their meals. The two Bavarians sat apart from Yossie and Thomas, and several times. it seemed that Thomas was about to say something more to them.
When Yossie finished saying the grace after meals, he wanted to take a few minutes at the forge to work on a project of his own. He had a broken knife blade in his pocket, good steel, and he wanted to re-forge it into a punch. He'd helped cut type in Hanau, and in his spare time, he was slowly working on cutting his own Hebrew alphabet, a project that had begun when he'd complained about the letter shin in the Hanau type face.
When he got to the forge, he found Thomas stirring the coals with his back to the two Bavarians, pointedly ignoring them.
"So," Thomas said, turning abruptly. The look on his face was grim. "After Magdeburg, where did you go?"
"South to Halberstadt," Karl said, "We stuck it to the Jews there, then followed Father Tilly to Eisleben."
Yossie froze.
"Thale?" Thomas said. "Did you go through Thale?"
"I don't remember the names of the places we visited. Why do you care?"
"Because I come from Thale," Thomas barked. "I lived my whole life there, my smithy was there, until your accursed army drove me out."
Yossie hardly heard a word after the words "we stuck it to the Jews." Karl had said it in passing, as if it had hardly been important. Yossie knew Jews from Halberstadt. Two families had arrived in Hanau's Jewish quarter a decade earlier, bringing stories of mob violence to rival the horrors Yossie had survived as a small child in Frankfurt.
Yossie wanted to confront the Bavarian, but for a Jew to confront a Christian was to invite disaster. Just the day before, Yossie and Rabbi Yakov had spoken at length about whether it was time to tell people that they were Jews. The Americans of Grantville were proud that they didn't ask about a man's religion. Yossie and his companions hadn't set out to live like Spanish Marranos, hiding their Jewishness in fear of the Christian world. That is what they were becoming, and they didn't like it.
They were fairly certain that it was safe to tell the Adduccis that they were Jews. Shortly before the two Bavarians had arrived, Yossie had even begun to think that it might be safe to tell Thomas. Now though, the arrival of the Bavarians made it clear that there was no safety.
While Yossie's recovered his composure, Thomas was losing his.
"Why d'you care 'bout this place, this Magdala?" Karl asked.
"Because I was there!" Thomas choked out. "For a month, I thought I'd found a new home on the road between Jena and Weimar, and then your damned foragers burned me out."
"I was just a pikeman!" Karl said. "Not a general."
Thomas grabbed Karl by the throat and shoved him hard against the chimney of the forge. "It was pikemen like you that killed my daughter!"
"Stop," Yossie shouted. "Karl didn't kill your daughter."
"No," Thomas said, slowly loosening his grip. As he let go and backed away, he looked almost as beaten as Karl.
Yossie found that he was shaking. As he offered a hand to Karl, he wondered what had come over him. From childhood, he'd been taught not to interfere in disputes between Christians, and he was fairly certain that Karl would be among the last to come to the aid of a Jew.
"We didn't go east of Weimar," Fritz said, in Karl's defense. "We were in Erfurt, then south to Ilmenau and Badenburg."
Thomas' anger at the Bavarians was a shock. Yossie had known that Thomas was avoiding talking about his family, but he had always seemed to be a very calm man.
"Come on, folks. We have tongs to make," Thomas said, with a sigh. "Work is easier than yelling at each other."
Shortly after they set to work, Bob Eckerlin stopped outside the forge to watch them. He stepped inside when they put the iron back in the fire to reheat. "Thomas, Joe, I need you to make something."
"Was?" Thomas asked.
"Can you come take a look?"
Thomas looked at the iron in the fire and then at Yossie. He hesitated for a moment, and then handed him the small hammer. "Joseph, see what you can do."
As Thomas walked away with Bob, Yossie realized that he'd just been promoted. He wasn't entirely sure he was ready to direct the work of the two Bavarians, but he had to try.
He took hold of the cold end of the bar they'd only begun to forge and pulled it from the fire, setting the hot end on the anvil and tapping it with the small hammer. They'd begun work beating the handle to shape, but it was still far from the long graceful taper that was their goal.
Even with the heavy leather glove he wore on his left hand, each hammer blow sent a shock up his arm. Only when he held the work-piece at exactly the right angle against the anvil was it bearable. The iron cooled quickly. After five blows of the heavy sledge, it was already time to put the work-piece back in the fire.
"How long you been with these foreigners, these Grantvillers?" Karl asked.
"I came here," he said, and then paused while using a piece of rebar to mound the burning coals over the iron. "It was a month ago, just before Pentecost," he finally said, remembering the conversation with Pastor Green that Sabbath afternoon.
"What d'you make of these Grantvillers? Do you believe their story about the Ring of Fire?"
"I have no reason to doubt it," Yossie said. "The first rumors I heard called it the pit of Hell, but that's because I came from the south-west." He pointed out the open side of the smithy toward the dark cliff of the ring wall. "To the folks living up there, one moment there was a high hill here, and then bang, they were looking down at Grantville."
"You believe that story, that it just happened with a bang?"
"I was on a hill outside Kissingen that Sunday afternoon. That's a town three or four days west of here. I saw something." He paused. He'd never told anyone this story. "It was a flash to the east, as bright as the sun, and as brief as a lightning bolt, but perfectly round, the size of an Imperial thaler sitting on the horizon. The iron is hot, let's get to work."
Thomas came back into the smithy as they were finishing forging the taper of the handle. He watched them until they finished hammering, and then took the cold end of the bar from Yossie and inspected their work.
"Not bad," he said. "Start forging the handle on another bar while I make what they need."
"What do they need?" Yossie asked.
"This broke," Thomas said, holding out two pieces of iron. "It was a brace for part of the coal-washing machine, and it broke because there was only one where there should have been two."
As Thomas went into the shop building to look for an iron bar, Fritz picked up a piece of coal from the bin beside the hearth. "They wash this?" he asked puzzled.
"That building is all for coal washing," Yossie said, pointing to a large building that seemed to be made entirely of rippled metal. "I don't understand how coal can be washed, but they are having some trouble making those machines work."
When Thomas came out of the shop building, Yossie, Karl and Fritz were hard at work. As soon as Yossie put his work-piece in the fire, Thomas took over the anvil, and for some time after that, Yossie and Thomas alternated at the anvil while Karl swung the hammer for both of them.
When they finally took a break, Yossie spoke. "Thomas. You never told me about your daughter." The question on his mind was an innocent one, but by the end of the day, he would regret speaking.
To be continued in Volume 14