Free Grantville Gazette - Volume V by Eric Flint Page A

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.

     

    II. Relations with the Castle

    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