Durre gestured exuberantly.
"So that's where we are. Still no proper congregation with elders and presbyters in the city or its outlying villages; no minister of our own. And," he smiled, "a refreshing four-hour trip to church. Isn't it nice that it's spring?"
"Herr Durre," Keith asked rather cautiously, a while later. "Did you say that the boss guy who authorizes these church services is away from home?"
"Yes."
"It looks to me like there's a bunch of bully-boys in the road who think that going to a Calvinist church is the wrong idea."
Durre looked. "Oh," he said. "That has to be Georg Seyfried Koler von Neunhof. Or his men, to be more precise. It's not likely that he's with them. He's a Lutheran, and the co-possessor of patronage rights over the churches in Beerbach and Neunhof. That means, he thinks that he ought to have the right to appoint a clergyman of his choice rather than the Geuders' appointing a clergyman of their choice. He would not dare to try this if Frau Sabina were still alive."
"Do they normally duke these things out on the public roads?" Keith asked.
"There's no duke involved here," Durre said. "What's important jurisdictionally is that these are imperial knights, directly subject to the emperor, with no intervening authority. That's why the landlord of something that looks like an estate of a few hundred acres with a small village on it can exercise the cuius regio principle."
"Jurisdictionally," Leopold Cavriani added, "they are independent of Grantville's administrators in Franconia. Because the knights are mostly Protestant, this region near Nurnberg was not included in the king of Sweden's assignment of authority, any more than Nurnberg itself or Ansbach and Bayreuth were."
Lambert Felser, who had garnered his English vocabulary on the floor of Ollie Reardon's machine shop rather than from literary works or books on political theory, intervened with an explanation of the alternative meaning of "duke." Once he had managed to convey the essential meaning of "duke it out," Durre averred that they did indeed "duke it out" on the roads and in the streets. Unless, of course, they had resorted to lawsuits. Normally, however, people employed both methods.
To Keith's relief, the party had paused during this discussion rather than proceeding onward toward the manor house. He noticed that the riders securing the road had already pulled a couple of wagons containing families to the side, barring them from going any farther.
However, the riders-armed riders-were now coming toward them. Durre started to move forward slowly. Like everyone else, Keith felt obliged to follow.
Except, apparently, the Cavriani kid. Rather than moving along the track-it could scarcely be dignified with the name of a road, being two ruts with grass growing between them-he kept sidling his horse a little towards the right, while holding the reins in his left hand. Not much, with any step.
Marc didn't like the idea of the families in the wagons being here. Not when two bunches of men, one that had all of them with guns and the other of which had several of them with guns, were looking at one another belligerently. As the group with Durre advanced, Marc managed to move a few feet to the side of the road. With his right hand, which Koler's oncoming men could not see because it was hanging down at his side, obscured by his body and the saddle, he made urgent scooping motions, as if he were dipping water. One of the drivers got the idea. With the guards away from the boundary stone, it was time to leave for church. What were a few more hoofbeats when a dozen mounted men were riding toward another dozen or so mounted men? The two wagons started to creep slowly forward. Slowly, at least, until they were past the border and onto the Geuder land; then their pace became quite brisk. Not to say expeditious. From the back of one, a boy turned around and waved.
Marc started side-stepping back towards the rest of the group, carefully not looking toward the departing wagons. He didn't keep a horse of his own, of course. There was no need to, in Nurnberg. This was a rental; an elderly gelding of no particular distinction who now demonstrated that he didn't like sidling to the left. He tossed his head; snorted; turned his head; tossed his head again. Marc started to control him; then realized that something could be gained from this. He assumed the nervous expression of a city man who put very little trust in even the best of horses. He also slipped his feet almost out of the stirrups, loosened his grip on the reins, and gave the stupid beast a sharp pinch with his right hand.
He landed hard. Koler's men guffawed. Rubbing his seat dramatically, Marc gestured for permission to go catch his horse. The lead rider, noting that the young idiot from Nurnberg wasn't carrying anything more threatening than a dirk, waved him on.
The horse, now that nobody was asking him to side-step to the left was just standing there, looking dumb. He was that kind of horse. Marc remounted and requested that he step to the left again. The horse demurred. Marc and the horse fussed at one another.
By this time, everyone was laughing. Except, of course, Jacob Durre and Leopold Cavriani, both of whom were just smiling with considerable satisfaction, since they knew perfectly well that the money that Marc's father had laid out for expensive riding-masters had not gone to waste. By this time, the wagons were out of sight, around a bend in the road. Marc made a demonstration of getting the nag under control and moved back toward the rest of the group by turning him around to the right and ceremoniously riding him all the way around the back of the others, wearing a chagrined expression as he did it.
Inwardly, he was much relieved that he had gotten away with it. At eighteen, he still had in some ways the mind set of the younger Marc who had gotten his growth spurt considerably later than many of his contemporaries. From thirteen to sixteen, he had found himself obliged to outwit the school bullies rather than outfight them. Oh, he had read stories, just like anyone else, in which the smaller man won the fight. The problem with those stories was that somehow, always, most conveniently, the larger man was a slow, awkward, clumsy, poorly trained oaf, while the smaller man was deft, quick, and much more skilled.
How convenient this arrangement must be for the authors! In the real world of the armsmaster's studio in which he had learned to fight, he had learned by way of the scientific method that if one man was four inches taller and twenty pounds heavier, while both were more or less equally skilled, the smaller guy would get whomped nine times out of ten. And, based on his observations of the sad example of his classmate Franco Neri, if the smaller guy was the one of the pair who was awkward and slow, he would get whomped ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
Overall, therefore, Marc's preferred response to oncoming batches of muscle was still to evade them, if possible. He had no illusions. He had received the amount of training in personal arms that any young middle-class merchant would receive-which meant, basically, that he owned, and knew how to use, a sword and pistol as well as the dirk that he usually carried, and could probably take care of the average mugger. That was what the armsmaster had been hired to teach the students at his school, so that was what he taught them. Purveyors of copper wire and undyed fustian were rarely called upon to display more martial skill than that, nor would they have the time to maintain a higher level if they did learn it. Effective swordsmanship took a lot of continuous practice.