1637 The Polish Maelstrom

by Eric Flint

  She was asleep within two minutes of lying down. Pawel and Tekla, nestled on either side of her, had fallen asleep within two seconds.

  * * *

  The next morning, Jozef set out to find the radio operator who’d sent the message warning him that Grand Hetman Koniecpolski had been murdered. That was Czesław Kaczka—or, at least, that was who Jozef thought was most likely to have sent it.

  It might not have been, though. The last Jozef had known, Koniecpolski had had four radio operators all told. That might have changed, since his information was quite dated by now. But assuming the Grand Hetman had still had just the four, and assuming none of the personnel had changed, Jozef could eliminate one of them immediately.

  Lucas Wojciechowski, that was. A sniveling, slovenly toad of a man whom Jozef wouldn’t trust any farther than he could throw the fat swine. The only reason his uncle had given Wojciechowski the prestigious position of radio operator had been the man’s family connections and the fact that, admittedly, he was capable with technical matters.

  If Jozef approached him, only two things would happen: Wojciechowski would know nothing and he’d immediately rush to the authorities to report that Jozef Wojtowicz was back in town and asking suspicious questions. With his hand outstretched for a bribe.

  The first of those outcomes mattered to Jozef more than the second. He wasn’t planning to keep his presence in Poznań a secret anyway. What was there to be secretive about? Between his bastard origin and the nature of his work, few people knew of his connection to Koniecpolski in the first place. And those few who did know wouldn’t think it suspicious that he’d returned to Poznań to pay his respects to his uncle’s memory. Jozef was planning to do that in any event, once he found out where the grand hetman was buried.

  That left Caspar Kowalczyk and Janko Nowak as the other two possibilities.

  Nowak was unlikely, though. Jozef didn’t distrust him, it was just that the man was…odd. The Americans had a term for a mental condition that, when it had been explained to Jozef during his stay in Grantville, immediately made him think of Janko Nowak. “Asperger’s syndrome,” they called it.

  Jozef didn’t know if Nowak had that condition or not. He had a wide streak of skepticism about American theories, especially when they involved what they called “psychology”—another theoretical concept he was skeptical of. Why couldn’t a man just be what he was? Why look any deeper than the sturdy term “odd fellow?”

  Whether Nowak’s mind could best be described with one syllable or five, there was no chance he would have become suspicious of a man’s death due to what appeared to be natural causes. His thinking just didn’t work that way.

  So. Kaczka or Kowalczyk? Which one had sent him the radio message?

  It would be a bit risky to seek them out where they worked—whose location Jozef probably didn’t know anyway. The radio operations were likely to have been moved since he was last in Poznań. He could find out, easily enough, but that would add another layer of risk. A thin layer, granted, but all such layers were to be avoided.

  There was no reason to take the risk when he knew for sure where he could find all three of the men at one time or another—that depended on what shift they worked—almost every day of the week.

  He reached the entrance—down a flight of stairs to an outside cellar door—and went into Felix’s Tavern.

  * * *

  Czesław Kaczka and Caspar Kowalczyk were both there. As it turned out, Kowalczyk was the one who’d actually sent the message.

  “We knew something was wrong right away,” Caspar explained, over a mug of beer. He jerked his head in the direction of the man sitting to his left. “Me and Czesław talked about it—”

  “Right here,” said Kaczka, rapping the table surface with his knuckles. “Right in these very seats.”

  “—the day after the grand hetman died. We both agreed it couldn’t have been what the lying chirurgeon claimed to be spoiled food. You know what your uncle was like. That man could have eaten the most rotten food in the world and all it would have done was give him the shits. Tough, he was.”

  That analysis probably wouldn’t have been accepted by up-time doctors, but they thought too much. It made perfect sense to Jozef. To describe Stanisław Koniecpolski as “tough” was like describing gristle as “chewy.”

  “Lots of men are suspicious,” said Kowalczyk. “There was almost an outright revolt among some of the hussars. Would have been, I think, if they’d been able to figure out who was responsible.”

  Which ones? wondered Jozef. He’d have to look into that later.

  “How about the two of you?” he asked. “Are you ready to revolt?”

  Caspar and Czesław looked at each other. Then Caspar shrugged. “Sure, but against who, Jozef? I know the grand hetman was poisoned, but I don’t know who did it.”

  “Yes you do—and you know it.”

  “Name him,” challenged Kaczka.

  “It’s not a ‘him,’ it’s a ‘them,’” said Jozef. “You both know just as well as I do that a cabal of grand magnates must have ordered it done. They wouldn’t have done it themselves, of course, but men like that know men who know where to find assassins—and they certainly have enough money to pay for it.”

  Kowalczyk frowned. “That was my suspicion also—still is. But what I can’t figure out is why they would do it. The grand hetman was a law-abiding man. He posed no threat to them.”

  Kaczka was always the quicker-thinking of the two men. He slapped the table—not in anger, but in the way a man emphasizes an idea that has just come to him. “No, that’s it, Caspar. They would have wanted the grand hetman killed because he was law-abiding—and they plan not to be. That’s why they needed to get him out of the way.”

  Again, Kaczka and Kowalczyk exchanged glances. Then, looked at Jozef.

  “This is leading up to something,” said Kowalczyk. “Come out with it, Jozef.”

  He made a quick decision. He hadn’t intended to go any further this first day than collect information. But his instincts—say better, his extensive experience as a spy and secret agent—led him to believe that the two other men at the table were ready for what he had to propose.

  “Have you ever heard of the Galician Democratic Assembly?”

  “No,” said Caspar.

  Czesław nodded. “They’re the rebels in Lviv, aren’t they? Someone told me they declared themselves a konfederacja recently. But that’s all I know, and I wasn’t sure if it was true anyway.” He shrugged. “You know how wild rumors spread. And Galicia’s far away.”

  In for a penny, in for a pound, as the up-timers would say. The saying didn’t make any sense, but the spirit of it was clear. Once again, Jozef made a note to himself to find out why Americans compared a coin to a unit of weight. Because a penny was such a light coin? Maybe Christin would know.

  “Galicia’s far away, but Kraków isn’t,” he said.

  Caspar and Czesław both frowned at him. “It’s not close, either.”

  “Must be…” Caspar waved his hand in a vague gesture. “What? Five hundred miles?”

  He used a Polish term for the distance, but Jozef automatically translated that into the distance measurement used in the USE, as best he could. By now, he was more accustomed to the up-timers’ rigorous system than he was to the archaic and imprecise Polish way of calculating such things.

  “More like three hundred miles,” he said.

  “What’s a—?”

  “A mile is how they measure big distances in the USE, Caspar. I use it because it’s more accurate than the way we do it.”

  Again, the two men frowned in unison. “And how do you know—”

  “It’s time for the two of you to hear my story. A lot’s happened since I saw you last.”

  * * *

  It took him quite a while before he was done. Long enough that he was starting to worry that his companions had drunk enough beer to get fuzzy-headed.

  In fact, Caspar and Czesław
were pretty fuzzy-headed by then. On the other hand, liquor often lent courage—and once a man made a pronouncement, he was loath to retract it even after he sobered up. (Women, in Jozef’s experience, were more astute about such things.)

  “Here’s to the revolution,” Caspar proclaimed, raising his freshly filled mug of beer. Fortunately, the tavern was noisy and he didn’t say it in a loud voice. So if anyone noticed the three men clanging their mugs together, they would have simply taken it for everyday good cheer.

  The mug-clanking was followed by the traditional swigs. Then Caspar set his mug down on the table with a thump and said: “There’s someone you need to meet. As it happens, he should be here any time, since his shift is almost over.”

  “That’s stupid, calling it a ‘shift,’” said Czesław. “He’s still a prisoner, you know.”

  “A technicality, that’s all. How long has he been here? More than a year, isn’t it?”

  “He’ll have a guard. Probably two,” cautioned Kowalczyk.

  “And so what? If it’s Androsz and Woitek or Zygmunt and Malosz, they drink by themselves.” Czesław took another slug of beer. Then, shrugged. “If it’s Kuźmin and his brother, that’d be a problem. But we’ll just have to wait until tomorrow.”

  * * *

  The guards who accompanied the mysterious prisoner into the tavern turned out to be the harmless pair of Zygmunt and Malosz, who, just as Caspar had predicted, went off to sit by themselves at a table in a corner. The table was much too far away, in the din of the tavern, for the guards to hear anything being said at Jozef’s table unless everyone started shouting.

  Before the prisoner had even taken his seat, Jozef knew he was an up-timer. He couldn’t have explained why he knew that, exactly. But he was very perceptive about such things, as you’d expect a spy to be, and unlike most down-timers he’d spent a lot of time around Americans.

  He waited until the man sat down before saying: “You’re an up-timer.” It was a statement, not a question.

  The man stared at him. The expression on his face combined defensiveness with belligerence.

  “What’s it to you?” he demanded. “And who the hell are you, anyway?”

  The up-timer was a young man. Jozef estimated that he was in his mid-twenties, although you had to be careful about judging age with Americans. Most people who met Christin thought she was five to ten years younger than she actually was.

  “Think of me as a friend,” he said. “A friend in need, yes—but I think you need some friends also.”

  The up-timer looked quickly at Caspar and Nowak. “What’s this about? And I repeat—who is this guy, anyway?”

  Jozef began to explain.

  * * *

  By the time he finished, the young American still had a combined expression on his face, but the combination had changed. There was doubt and suspicion in his face—but there was also hope.

  “My wife gave birth, just a short while after I got captured,” he said. “His name’s Mark, like mine. Not Mark, Jr., just Mark. My wife told me in her first letter she did that because she thought I was dead. He’d be a year old by now. I’ve never laid eyes on him, not once. Don’t even have a picture of him. If Stephanie tried to include one in any of the letters she sent me—and there were only three that got through, the last one almost three months ago—the damn Poles swiped it.”

  Caspar looked offended, although it was obviously a pose. “Us? You accuse us of being thieves? You should rather look to those dirty Germans squatting in their trenches outside the city walls. The letters have to go through them first, you know, before they come to us. One of the dirty pigs probably stole the letter to burn it, giving him a little heat while he shivers out there.”

  That was wishful thinking, for the most part. By now, almost fourteen months after the siege of Poznań had begun, the USE troops had fairly good quarters. Very good ones, by siege standards. The trenches were now just defensive positions. No one actually slept in them. Few of them even slept in tents, anymore. Jozef knew that General Torstensson had had wood-walled bunkers made for his soldiers, with solid roofs. Say what you would about the damn Swedes, they knew how to wage war.

  The up-timer, whose name was Mark Ellis—Mark Johnson Ellis, to be exact—ignored Caspar’s badinage. The hope in his face was fading, and the suspicion swelling stronger.

  “How do I know any of what you’re saying is true?” he demanded. “How do these guys”—he jerked his head, indicating the two Polish radio operators at the table—“know either, for that matter? You could be… I don’t know. Somebody’s spy. A provocateur.”

  Kowalczyk started to object but Jozef interrupted him. “No, Caspar, it’s a fair question. Which I can answer—but not until tomorrow. We meet the same time here? Yes?”

  The two radio operators and the American looked back and forth at each other. Then, Ellis shrugged. “Yeah, sure, as long as the damn Poles don’t decide to mess around with my schedule—which they do, from time to time.”

  “Stop whining,” jeered Caspar. “The last time that happened was…what? Four months ago?”

  “Still.” Ellis looked a bit sullen.

  Jozef finished his mug and rose to his feet. “Tomorrow, then. There is someone you need to meet.”

  Chapter 17

  Bytom

  Upper Silesia

  Now under Bohemian control

  By the time the motley army got to Bytom, Gretchen was feeling profoundly disoriented. Prince Ulrik of Denmark, the future consort of the USE’s future empress Katrina, was officially in command. In that respect, it was “Ulrik’s army.” Politically speaking, on the other hand, there was no question in anyone’s mind—including Ulrik’s—that she was the central figure involved.

  That was partly because of her longstanding reputation as one of the leaders of the revolutionary movement, partly because she was also—yes, it was incongruous, as she’d be the first to say—the Chancellor of Saxony and Lady Protector of Silesia. But perhaps most of all, in this enterprise, it was because of something that Gretchen herself considered ridiculous. Somehow, some way—did people have no common sense at all?—she’d become this political movement’s version of Joan of Arc.

  That was especially true of the German population of Silesia, which dominated the bigger towns and cities in the area. But the Poles in the countryside had become infected also. Why? So far as she could tell it was because her (admittedly vigorous) decrees supporting the rights of the Polish farmers against the overbearing German town councils and guilds had spread her reputation widely. This was still an era when religious and quasi-religious notions usually influenced people more than nascent nationalist sentiment or ethnic identity.

  She recognized the phenomenon. It was the same dynamic that led so many Germans to think of Mike Stearns as the “Prince of Germany,” and never mind that he was born across an ocean in another universe in a nation that didn’t even exist in the one they lived in. Abstractly, she could even appreciate the political value that her newly acquired persona imparted to the revolutionary cause.

  It was still ridiculous. She’d even been forced to wear her armor again! All the leaders of the expedition had been united on that issue.

  At least they hadn’t made her wear the helmet. In fact, they’d all agreed that it was essential she not wear it so that her face and—most of all—her apparently now famous long blonde hair was visible to everyone who witnessed the army’s passage.

  But that was not what she found disorienting. Truth be told—although she’d deny it vehemently—Gretchen was temperamentally very well suited to the role of a militant and semi-mythological champion.

  No, what disoriented her was that people could say the army was Ulrik’s and the great cause was hers, but no one had any doubt at all who was really running the show.

  The man they called the Dungeon Master.

  Otherwise known as her husband.

  Who was this man? She felt she barely knew him any longer. What had happe
ned to the shy, awkward and self-effacing young man she’d met on a battlefield near Badenburg less than six years earlier? Barely more than a boy, he’d been then. But that had also been what drew her to him so powerfully. She’d had enough—more than enough; she despised the breed—of loud and domineering males. Brutes, by and large, and some of them were outright monsters.

  Jeff had been none of those things. Hesitant in his manner, yes; but he’d also been more decisive than any man she’d ever met. She knew it was his gentleness and his caring nature that had led him to propose marriage to her the evening of the day they met, not lust or possessiveness.

  Where was that man now? Had he gone away?

  She’d known for years that her husband didn’t lack courage, physical as well as moral. If there’d been any doubt of that—and she didn’t think she’d ever had any—Jeff had settled the question during the siege of Amsterdam when he’d led an attack by a small boat armed only with a spar torpedo against a Spanish warship. She knew he’d proven it again on several battlefields since then.

  But what she was seeing now wasn’t courage, although a reputation for courage was obviously a prerequisite. What she’d been seeing since the army left Breslau was a young man—Jeff was only twenty-five, two years younger than she—who seemed to have the poise and self-confidence of Frederick Barbarossa, the legendary Holy Roman Emperor of the Middle Ages.

  There was nothing flamboyant about that poise; not at all. If there was an opposite word for flamboyant—Gretchen wasn’t sure; unassuming, maybe?—Jeff would personify it, just as much when he commanded an army as when he tended one of their children.

  But this lack of presumption had nothing in common with diffidence or timidity. He issued orders almost instantly and with great certainty. That kept his subordinates relaxed and confident. She had no trouble understanding how valuable that would be on a battlefield.

  Battlefields which, she now realized—for the first time, really—that her husband had passed through and emerged from, each time with added strength and stature. The Hangman Regiment which formed the core of the Silesian army had absolute confidence in him. So did Eric Krenz’s men, who now considered themselves Hangmen as well—yes, that was the term they invariably used to identify themselves.