Chapter 7
Frank Stone had every nerve, every fragment of concentration on the ball, the wide-open goal, Klaus off his goal-line and with the evening sun in his eyes—
—and so he never saw Aidan pounding in from his left to slide in for the ball in a spray of turf and distinctly seventeenth-century English.
Frank’s cry of alarm was part scream, part roar, part a word that would have gotten him a real old-fashioned look from Magda. His new German stepmom had learned about some parts of modern English with surprising speed.
He kept his feet, just barely. The ball went out of play in a low, curving loop, just as the whistle blew for full time. “Damn,” said Frank. And, with more feeling, “Damn!”
Away on the other side of the eighteen-yard box, Heinrich jogged to a halt. His expression said it all. Had Frank managed to cross the ball, Klaus’ sloppy goalkeeping had left the net wide open for the winner to go in: as it was, the game had finished three-all. Freda, back at the other end of the pitch, wasn’t much better than Klaus—she got focused on the main attack and a good cross or diagonal through ball could easily leave her off her line and the net wide open for a sneaky striker to score.
Part of the problem, Frank decided, as he heaved air back into his lungs, was that most of the sports-minded Germans seemed to have taken up baseball. That just plain wasn’t fair. True, the up-timers had fixed on baseball as a strong reminder of home. On the other hand, they had been dropped back in time into the nation that had produced Beckenbauer and Klinsman and . . .
Frank decided wishing soccer was more popular wasn’t going to get him to the showers any quicker. He staggered over to where Aidan was flat on his back in the penalty box, and leaned down to help him up.
Aidan was just about everything Frank wasn’t. Frank was an up-time American, raised on a hippie commune dedicated to peace, egalitarianism and really, really good weed. Aidan Southworth was a seventeenth-century Catholic English mercenary, formerly of the Spanish army in Flanders. He’d been taken prisoner at the Wartburg the year before, when the Spanish troops had surrendered after the fortress was bombarded with napalm. Thereafter, he’d elected to stay in Grantville and was now back at school to “get his letters.” Aidan had decided to try to make a military career in the armed forces of the CPE, in the Grantville regiments of which literacy was a requirement to advance beyond the rank of private soldier.
Aidan had said he knew no other trade and wanted to learn none for the time being. Soldiering was what he knew and he’d stick with it until he had a little put by. Privately, Frank wondered if Aidan knew what he was letting himself in for. From Aidan’s accounts of drinking, fornicating and fighting his way across Europe since going to war alongside his father as a twelve-year-old drummer boy, he was likely to find life in the CPE’s increasingly professional armed forces a mite boring.
“Th’art quick, Frank,” said Aidan, as he got to his feet, “but not quick enough, eh?”
Aidan’s English had been all but incomprehensible when he’d first arrived at school. He’d been from Lancashire, where apparently the English were mostly still Catholic, and had never bothered to learn the more comprehensible speech of the south of England, and simply got by in Spanish and Dutch instead. He’d picked up American English fairly quickly, though.
“Aidan, I’m quick enough not to get cropped by a dirty fouling English bastard like you.”
Aidan laughed. “That’d be dirty, fouling, literate English bastard, thank ye kindly.”
“Cool!” Frank grinned. “You passed, then?”
Aidan grinned back. “That I did. I learned on’t this day, and shall have my ticket for it directly.”
“Great!” Frank realized his own feelings were a bit mixed on the subject. On the one hand, he’d rather looked forward to a spell in the army—he’d been just that bit too young for the fighting the year before. On the other hand, reforms had just been announced to the effect that the army was going all-volunteer and more professional. Frank Jackson’s take on military punctilio—which was largely that it was horse manure that he couldn’t be bothered with—was going out of the window. There were already uniforms and drill starting to appear around town, and the U.S. Marine Horse were looking decidedly smart lately.