Ishida listened carefully, his face a stony mask. He then nodded once, looked straight at at Blom and said in passable Dutch, “Thank you, sir. I shall come with you.” Then he turned to the crowd of Japanese gathered on the deck and proclaimed, “Men of Nihonmachi, I say that we follow this man to Europe. I believe all he has told us, and I believe this is our chance to leave this terrible place forever.” Ishida’s voice rose, taking on the cadence talented leaders have used to spur on their people since language began. “Ever since that accursed night when we fled Ayutthaya I have felt a great destiny awaits us, that we have been biding our time until our next move appears. Now I say it has arrived, thanks to our great friend, Blom! I have heard the wisdom in his words and am absoluely certain that Grantville, this town from the future, is where we may at last achieve the greatness that awaits us! Let us sail, let us sail yet again to a faraway land and meet our destiny without fear, we, the courageous men of Nihonmachi! What say you?”
As one, all leapt to their feet and cheered at the top of their lungs:
“Grantville! Grantville! Grantville!”
Do It Once and Do It Again
Wietze Oil Field, August 1635
“Hannsi, I’m telling you, you’re sitting on a gold mine,” Hermann said.
“And I’m telling you, you’re crazy,” Hanns replied.
“No, I’m not.”
Hanns was dressed no better than, if as well as, a prosperous farmer. Hermann was dressed in a color-fast, light mud-brown-what the Confederates called butternut and others called khaki-long-sleeve, button-down, collared shirt, like the up-timers wore. A local seamstress was selling them as fast as her sewing machine could turn them out. The oil workers wanted to look the part and that is what they decided the part should look like. The two men sat drinking at a table in the Wild Cat Bar and Grill, which had just changed its name to reflect the mood and vocabulary of their up-timer customers, and they had just expanded to better serve the Wietze oil field community. The owner overheard a conversation once. Once was enough.
“This place needs more tables.”
“Yeah, but where else, close by, can you go?”
“Well that’s true enough for now. But, I’ll tell you this, if he doesn’t add on it won’t be true for long.”
The oil worker waved a hand at the south wall, beyond which the oil works lay. “Hannsi, you’ve seen what they’re doing out there.”
“So? What has that got to do with me?”
“Look, you’re the one who owns grandfather’s rights,” Hermann said.
“Just what are you going on about?” Hanns asked.
Hanns and Hermann both were thoroughly familiar with their grandfather’s “rights” and all of the circumstances that surrounded them. They were fully aware of the fact that downward mobility was much more readily available to the nobility than upward mobility was to the commoner. Not that grandfather had been all that high to begin with. At this point in time there wasn’t a whole lot left.
Three villages’ worth of land was leased out for ninety-nine years or three generations, whichever came first. But grandfather had mortgaged the rents. His second child, a daughter, was, to use an up-time expression, drop dead gorgeous. He spent money he should have put elsewhere to send her to the court of Henry Julius of Brunswick, duke of the principalities of Wolfenbuttel, Gottingen and Calenberg, where she could be seen. The investment paid off. She married well above her station to a widower. Before the investment could be capitalized the daughter died in childbirth.
The third child, also a daughter, was even prettier than her sister. Having done it once, Grandfather knew he could do it again, so he mortgaged the rents to send her to court, where she caught the eye of a young visiting Hochadel. She claimed he was a prince. Before the fairy tale could unfold the graf was thrown from his horse and broke his neck. It happened on the day she told him she was with child. Home she came in disgrace with an unacknowledged, unsupported bastard in her belly.
When the manor house caught fire, grandfather died rescuing something that he valued as much as life itself. To say that the first child, a son, rebuilt the manor house is misleading. He tried, but the replacement was a pale reflection of what the old house had been. The son, Hanns’ father, supported a wife and four children, of whom only Hanns and one sister survived, along with his sister and her whelp, in what might graciously be called genteel poverty. The manor, along with a lot of hunting, barely kept them fed. Anything of value went for cash, as cash was needed from time to time, while the family waited for the leases to lapse so the sold rents would revert. The right to a tithe of the grain the villagers sent to be ground in the mill on manor lands helped feed the family, after a miller was paid, of course. The wood lots were watched very closely to see to it that only those who had a right to cut wood did so and then only in the allotment that fell to them, and the tenants knew better than to even think about hunting the game. The right to hunt belonged to the landlords, and the family in the manor spent a great deal of time watching every right like a hawk, in order to collect every last half-copper coin they had coming.
There was no going to court for Hanns. There was no going to a university either. His education ended with what he learned at the local grammar school in the nearest village. A tutor for even one season was out of the question. Hermann received the same scant education his cousin did. In better times Hermann might have gotten a better education and made a life as an officer in the military. In better times, without an education, he might have raised a mercenary unit and made his way in the world. But outfitting a company took money. In better times he might have joined someone else’s outfit as an under-officer but equipment took money. In better times he could have scrounged old equipment out of the attic and gone off as a mercenary but what survived the fire was long gone for cash.
“The axle grease seep.” Hermann said in response to his cousin’s question.
“Hermann, there isn’t that much of it. Besides, the village has the right to harvest anything that comes up. You know that every bit as well as well as I do.”
Hermann smiled a smile that forced his ears further apart. “Exactly!”
“What do you mean by that?” Hanns asked.
“They can harvest what seeps to the surface. The family still owns anything deeper than a plough can turn.”
“So?”
“Oil, Hannsi, it is all about the oil. The family is sitting on a gold mine and you own it.”
“Oil?”
“That’s right! Oil! We will sink a well over the grease seep.”
“Hermann, the village is not going to let us drill a well and pump out oil without making a fuss.”
“Hannsi? How are they going to stop us? We own the land. We own what is on it and what is under it. The tenants hold a lease. They have leave to farm the land and build in the village. Someone else owns the rents. But the family still owns the land,” Hermann smiled. He knew there was something a bit odd about the terms of the Lehen the family held.
When their ancestor was given the fief ages ago, in return for his knightly service at arms, he thought there might be something worth mining on the land. So he asked for and got the right to mine. The family figured the Herzog gave it to him because the then “His Grace, the duke” knew there was nothing there. They owned the mineral rights free and clear in the face of any custom to the contrary and they could prove it. Hermann’s grandfather staggered out of the burning manor house with his arms wrapped around an iron-bound chest to die a slow painful death from horrible burns. The chest held the family papers. Some were so old the parchment was brittle. “I told you, you’re sitting on a gold mine.”