Grantville Gazette - Volume V by Eric Flint Page A

was there to meet us, with two others who stayed back a bit and whose names we didn't get. Franz seemed to be an officer in the guard of the castle. As near as we could make out, his boss is the graf of Schwarzburg and a town named Rudolstadt.

    Franz turned out to be a decent fellow and pretty quick witted, but he had some big pistols in his belt and a sword. We were careful not to put our hands anywhere near our holsters those first few minutes. We'd better send someone official to Schwarzburg quickly, someone who knows German!

    We read Franz the message you wrote for us in German about wanting to open the road connections across the border of the "ring." After we gave him the letters you gave us, we tried to have a conversation. I wish we knew more German, but the stuff you gave us helped a lot. With lots of mistakes, hand gestures and an occasional picture on a notepad, we managed to get by.

    He told us that the Ring of Fire destroyed the road from Schwarzburg to Rudolstadt where, as near as we could make out, his boss lives most of the time. It also destroyed the road to the town of Saalfeld. As a result, it seems that we're in agreement about trying to open up a road connection.

    The bridge across the Schwarza at Schwarzburg is right at the lip of the falls. It's in serious danger of collapse because of all the dirt that's been washed away from the foundations. If the bridge goes, the farmhouses that are left on the southeast side of the Schwarza will be cut off, so they're already working on a temporary wooden bridge upstream from the old one. Timber is one thing they have plenty of. The roads here are mostly grass and packed dirt, with cobblestones only where erosion is likely to be a problem.

    Northeast from the falls about two hundred yards, the road is almost cut off with half of it slumped away. It looks like it was right on the riverbank there, at the southeast end of the loop of river that the Ring of Fire sliced off. Beyond that, to the northwest, the road is in good shape, with stone retaining walls in places as it takes a long switchback up the slope to the castle gate.

    We didn't go into the castle, but we did go up to the square by the gate where there's a bit of an upper village. The castle sits along the crest of a knife-edge ridge with the Schwarza river wrapped around the west, south and east sides. You couldn't ask for a better defensive position, but it's not all that big. The castle must be a quarter mile long but the ridge isn't very wide anywhere.

     

    II. Road Proposals

    Franz, the officer, must have been thinking about the problem of getting a road down from Schwarzburg, because he took us to the jumping off point where a new road could connect. He pointed out the route he thought would work before we left to walk down that way. We agree with him, so we'll describe that route and forget the others.

    Be aware, we're not engineers, just three guys who've had plenty of experience building and maintaining roads. We're confident that we can do this job, and do it well, but under the laws of West Virginia, we aren't really qualified. It would be nice if there was a civil engineer to help with this project.

    The road would turn north just east of the old Spring Branch road and traverse up the east side of the Spring Branch valley. This would almost follow the power company right of way once the power line gets on the same side of the creek. Then, the road would turn broadly around the head of the valley to meet the northwest end of the abandoned riverbed of the Schwarza. The climb up out of the riverbed would be short, and we'd meet the road up from the lower village about a quarter mile northwest of the waterfall.

    We figure this would be about four thousand feet of road climbing three hundred feet, so the grade should be under eight percent. On the walk down, we flagged the path we followed while using a pocket clinometer to try to keep our path at seven percent. That brought us out a bit on