Then, to add to the general confusion, he shouted: “Hilfe! Polizei!”
Loudly.
* * *
Somehow, “Papist spies” had become “Imperial spies.” The cry was spreading through the crowd, rapidly mutating into, “Imperial assassins! There are assassins here!”
The Tuebingen students, however, kept the original focus: “Work righteousness! Popery!” They threw themselves into the melee, swinging canvas tote bags that, by now, were weighted down not only with the Concordia Triglotta but with two treatises by C.F.W. Walther and any other miscellaneous books and merchandise they had bought in the marketplace. The Wittenberg students regarded this as an omen: they followed.
The two counts and the “personal observers” from the other principalities all had military experience. So did most of their invited guests. Who were, of course, wearing their dress swords. Which they drew, coming to the assistance of law and order by following the path that the police had blazed through the crowd and yelling for the spectators to get out of their way.
Most of the august and dignified theologians had participated in at least one riot during their student days. Additionally, they felt a certain responsibility for their current students who appeared to be, given the number of academic gowns being worn by those involved in the fracas, right in the middle of things. They plunged through the crowd after the swordsmen.
All in all, it took Count Ludwig Guenther’s steward quite a while to get the procession re-formed. Dinner was delayed by three hours.
* * *
“Well, Mike, that’s the way things ended up.” Ed was finishing his debriefing. “The colloquy was about the dangers that orthodox Lutherans perceive coming at them from creeping Calvinism. That’s what this ‘crypto-Calvinism’ is, when you get right down to it—Calvinist ideas sneaking into Lutheranism. The riot—well, it wasn’t. So don’t haul Erika and the others who are in Jena to train their police over the coals. We’d warned them, German and American alike, to be on the alert for anti-Calvinist slogans that might precede an outbreak of violence. There just wasn’t any logical reason for them to have their ears open for, ‘No Popery.’ Not even though it’s a good, all-purpose call to an urban riot in most Protestant cities in the here and now. If anything did break out that evening, we expected it to be aimed at someone in the procession, so they were all sort of looking that way, over toward the far side, where they could hear the trumpets. It was just a perfectly ordinary riot, as far as anyone can tell. Conspiracy theories to the contrary.”
“Give me the body count again.” Mike sighed.
“Not as bad as it might have been. All things considered. Quite a few bruises and broken bones, but those heal. The bad thing is that most of them are little kids who just got trampled. It would have been worse in a closed area, but that market square is pretty open, with lots of exits. My boys got Benny off the scene and behind one of the buildings. He was a bit shaken up, but not hurt. The fiddle’s okay. Minnie has a concussion—we think she got that from a cobblestone. At best, she’ll have a scar from her hairline down into her left eyebrow. At worst, she may lose that left eye—Doc Adams says that it’s too soon to tell. Those things make mean weapons—it sort of makes you realize why city fathers in this day and age aren’t fully convinced of the merits of street paving.”
“Tell me,” said Mike, “just how Minnie became a citizen of Grantville. As far as I know, she’d never set foot in this town.”
“Oh, that.” Ed looked a little abashed. “I didn’t think of it myself, I’m sorry to say. It was a great idea, though.”
“What idea?”
“Benny adopted her. Right there in the alley. Things had quieted down a bit, but the ‘Thief! Thief!’ guy was standing over her and the Jena police were going to arrest her and send her back to Saxony to be tried. Cavriani suggested it—he thinks fast. He asked whether, since Americans had so many other Roman laws, like public offices with terms, they also had the Roman ability to do adoptions that put the adopted child on the same footing as a natural one. Carol Koch looked at him and said, ‘Sure.’ He’s a notary—apparently it comes in handy for a guy who does a lot of procurement. He wrote out the papers then and there. Then the boys witnessed it.”