Grantville Gazette IX by Eric Flint & Walt Boyes & Joy Ward

Author:Eric Flint & Walt Boyes & Joy Ward [Flint, Eric & Boyes, Walt & Ward, Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Collections & Anthologies, Alternative History, Time Travel
ISBN: 9781982125455
Google: GXf_zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2021-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

Good German Axes

Tim Roesch

Wittenförden

November 1635

Kunigunde stood in the quiet dim coolness of her mother’s house near the very center of Wittenförden, a small, secluded village where she knew she was not welcome.

The house, before, during, and after her mother, had been slowly expanded so that the loft was now more of a shelf, and the central hearth was large enough to heat the interior without the addition of farm animals.

Good, strong German trees had been felled by good German axes, some of which her papa had made from good German ore, to hold up the well-made roof. What had been an exterior meeting area with an awning rather than a roof was now an interior room with a long, heavy table that had seen much, carried much, and been scarred, burned, and gouged by much.

Those who experienced it called it a section of castle wall laid upon its side.

The door was a good, strong German door held together by strong German hinges with a lock that held the door tight to the frame. For all its inherent value and strength and thickness it could not prevent the silence from coming inside.

“Papa?” she asked quietly. She did not expect her father to hear her. Not yet.

If there was anything in the house that was her mother it was the hearth Kunigunde had her back firmly turned to; more of an oven and a stove than a mere fireplace. In the winter it could heat a house three times the size of this one and make meals for ten times the number of people who commonly ate at the table that was also behind her.

The hearth was a clever combination of brick and cast iron with a clever collection of tools; each one made to the sort of exacting specifications her papa was well known for from Schwerin to as close to Berlin as anything from her papa dare come.

Even Danzig knew of her papa’s specifications.

Once a year, sometimes twice, a wagon came and took away tools and pieces of carefully crafted metal to places in Poland that might not know her papa’s name but knew her papa’s work well.

Wittenförden might not be well known or easily locatable but it was well thought of.

Like her mother…

“Papa?”

In the end it was the silence that made her open the door, forced her out into the very late morning, almost midday. There should be loud, raucous noise, and there was not.

“Papa?” She was louder this time.

From sunrise to sunset her papa’s forge, his smithy, was never silent, and he was the loudest thing or person there. Wittenförden rang with his blows upon red-hot metal. Not now.

A wagon had come and there had been voices and the rumble of unloading. There had been horse sounds and wood sounds and the sounds of footsteps but no sound of the forge. No sound of her papa.

When her papa awoke and found the apprentices gone for the holiday in Schwerin he had not bellowed, so she had hunkered down in her mother’s kitchen awaiting the inevitable, which never came.

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