"Todtnau, boy," the old man said. "This village is called Todtnau. We belong to the archdukes of Austria, here. For a long time. Since the time of the grandfather of my father's grandfather. That's as far back as I know. There was a big battle, people say, and after that we were Austrian. Not that a lot of people wouldn't like to turn Swiss." He gave an impudent, if toothless, grin. "Wouldn't mind it myself."
Their talk wandered off onto the topic of iron ore. It was around, the old man said.
"You ought to talk to the smith. He never buys a pig of iron. He works it out of the ground himself, just on the forge. Slower, he says, but cheaper, too. What else does he have to do when he doesn't have any customers?"
The two of them wandered away from the road, in the direction of the smithy. The smith, the old man said, was his niece's husband.
Susanna was getting impatient. She would have liked to talk to the old woman, but she could not understand her accent at all. The people spoke Swabian German around here. Schwabisch. It was almost a language in itself. She wandered to the side of the house. She was looking at the herb garden when she heard the hoofbeats. She sank down behind the trellises, peeking through.
Apparently the Bavarian captain could not understand the old woman, either. He raised his quirt in a threatening manner. She called into the house; a middle-aged woman came out. She repeated the old woman's answers. Susanna could understand her words.
The two men rode on. Susanna got up and came around to the front of the cottage where the two women were still standing.
"Thank you," she said. "I am very grateful. I do not know why you lied for us, but thank you very much."
"She did not lie," the younger woman said. "She has not seen the young man pass through the village, because he has not passed through. He has gone to the smithy with my husband's father. She has not seen a boy with him, because you are a girl. The man knows that you're a girl. You must have heard him say so later on. But when he asked the question, he asked my mother-in-law if she had seen a boy with the curly-haired man. She has told the precise and exact truth because it is never good when someone on horseback is looking for someone on foot. Especially not when he carries a whip and raises it against old women. We in this village are among those who go through life on foot. Would you like some fresh cheese? We have perry to drink, also."
"At least," Marc said, "we are behind them."
"This may not help," the old man said. "He will be asking in every village. In Gschwend; that comes next. Then in Schoenau, which is about five miles from here. In Zell. If they all say that they have not seen you, he may turn around and retrace his steps. Then there you will be, perhaps meeting him on the road. The road through this valley is not so wide that you can easily go to the side of it and hide yourselves."
"We have to get to Basel," Marc said.
"Not today," the younger woman answered. "Spend the night here. My husband has gone south, to find out where the soldiers are. You should wait until he comes back."
Marc looked at Susanna, who was sitting at the rough table, blinking rather slowly. She had not known that she should cut the perry with a lot of water. She was not used to it. Even though there would still be a couple of hours of daylight, maybe they had better stay. Then the word "soldiers" struck him.
"Soldiers?"
"Yes. There are soldiers between here and Basel. My husband has gone to the Amtmann to find out which ones. If they are friends, that is, if they are in the Austrian service, perhaps things will not go too hard with us. Mostly, they will just take things that they need, as soldiers do. But if they are French or Swedes, the villages along the road will need to move as much as possible up into the hills, because they will burn and kill as well as steal."
The old man frowned. "It is bad having soldiers come in the fall. It is worst when they come after harvest. In the fall they can steal everything after we have done all the work, leaving us to starve through the winter while they feast on our chickens and cabbages."
Someone knocked on the door. It was the smith and a younger man whom Marc did not recognize.
The younger woman put her arm around Susanna's shoulders and laid her down on a bench next to the fireplace. Then she put her mother-in-law to bed.
The four men started talking about iron and soldiers; soldiers and iron. The younger woman came back and sat with them at the table.
Her husband had been quite a way to the south. Soldiers, he said. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar was occupying all the Austrian territories in the Breisgau, or that was the story. Most people had not decided whether or not it was true that he had abandoned the French, but it was quite true that he was here.
There wasn't anything that they could do about the soldiers tonight. The man and wife went to bed. Marc and the smith sat up late, talking about iron. There was some iron here at Todtnau, the smith said, but not a lot. There was far more a few miles to the south, at Hausen.
Susanna winced. Her head hurt when she woke up and the sunlight seemed miserably bright. The old woman laughed, gave her a big drink of water and a piece of dry rye bread, told her to keep walking, and advised her not to drink any more perry. "You being such an innocent little thing and all that, which I was not sure of when you first came here wearing those trousers and a boy's shirt."
The smith came with them as they walked south from Todtnau to Hausen. He and Marc talked about iron as they walked, and talked even more about iron after they got there. The smith had trained in Lorrach, a little piece of territory that belonged to the margraves of Baden in between the Austrian lands. The Baden Amtmann there knew that there was iron in these hills; he had sent reports to the margraves. The Amtmann believed in iron. Gold, he said, was pretty and all that, but mankind could not live without iron. Everybody needed iron. If there were mines here, iron would bring wealth to the valley. Even to the farmers, who had a hard time wresting a living from these rocks. Miners would need vegetables. The high pastures supported cattle; miners would need meat and cheese. The forests would provide charcoal.
"Everyone else thought that he was a dreamer," the smith said. "Everyone else said that no one would invest the capital that it would take to bring mines to the valley during these decades of war. Certainly not the exiled margrave, who has served the king of Sweden for more than a decade now. Probably not his son in Basel, either. He has no money; it takes money to open mines."
At Hausen, they left Susanna with a cousin of the smith's first wife and went up into the hills. After the noon meal, the Bavarian captain came into the village from the south, asking questions.
The people of Hausen, Susanna found, were tellers of truth, very like those in Todtnau. The only strange young man any of them had seen, they said earnestly, had come this morning with the smith from another village to see about some iron. In any case, they continued, they did not have time to worry about strange young men, because they had received notice that Duke Bernhard's soldiers were moving through the land not far to the south. That would mean that villages would be burned, the terraces for the grape vines destroyed, the fields trampled. And disease, certainly disease. Disease followed a soldier as if it were his twin brother.
The Bavarian captain raised his quirt.
"You can hit me," the woman who was speaking to him said. "But you cannot make it otherwise."