by Eric Flint
“So what does that leave to be decided?” he asked his companions. “Now that we’ve all agreed that we must retake Kraków before we can do anything else.”
“It’s not a matter of ‘must,’” said Prince Stanisław Lubomirski. “Those idiots in Kraków have just given us a great opportunity.” He drained what was left in his wine glass, set it down and issued a harsh little laugh. “Quite without realizing it, of course. But what can you expect from peasants?”
Mikołaj Potocki, who was sitting directly opposite Lubomirski, was tempted to point out that the official leader of the so-called “Democratic Assembly,” Krzysztof Opalinski, was hardly what anyone in his right mind would call a “peasant.” In terms of social status, if not wealth, the Opalinski family was more highly regarded in the Commonwealth than was Lubomirski’s own.
But he said nothing. He and Lubomirski had disliked each other since the Battle of Chocim in 1621, in which both men had participated in the struggle against the Turks. The PLC’s commander, Grand Lithuanian Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, died in the middle of the battle and was succeeded in command by Lubomirski. Potocki had disagreed with Lubomirski’s subsequent orders, but then-Prince Władysław (now the king of Poland, Władysław IV) had also been at the battle and had favored Lubomirski.
Their mutual dislike had continued unchanged ever since. Potocki disliked Lubomirski because the man was a jackass; Lubomirski disliked Potocki for exactly the same reason—Lubomirski was a jackass.
Given their current situation, however, Potocki was doing his best to avoid having any open clashes with him.
He glanced at Prince Władysław Zasławski, saw that the youngster was watching him, and gave a little nod. As they’d discussed in advance; Zasławski now spoke up. Up until now, he’d kept silent at the meeting, as befitted a man still only twenty years of age.
“That leaves the matter of which of us will be in command of the army—armies—we send to Kraków.”
Potocki immediately followed that by saying: “I propose that Janusz be given the position.”
The voivode of Kiev, Janusz Łohojski, gazed at him from under lowered brows. The look combined appreciation with suspicion—but the suspicion was merely latent. Łohojski was a suspicious man by nature. Of course, that trait was shared by almost all of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’s great magnates. A magnate who wasn’t suspicious of his fellows usually saw a decline in his family’s fortunes before too long.
“You are sure of this, Mikołaj?” he asked. “You are the more obvious choice. The word is that the king plans to make you a Field Crown Hetman soon.”
Potocki nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard the rumor and I suspect it may well be true. But that’s all the more reason for you to command our armies in this present endeavor. If I get made Field Crown Hetman, the king may well assign me to some other duty—and I could hardly refuse.”
As he’d instructed him to do in advance, Prince Zasławski now said: “Perhaps…” The pause was done splendidly; a young man hesitant to give advice to his elders. “Perhaps we could suggest to the king that our campaign be given official approval.”
Lubomirski threw up his hands. “Augh—no. Not that, above all else!” But it wasn’t said harshly, and Lubomirski gave his fellow if considerably junior prince a look that combined appreciation for the youngster’s spirit with the sagacity of age. “You still need to learn this, Władysław—and learn it in the marrow of your bones. You never want to ask the king—the Sejm, neither—for their approval for something you intend to do. Let that become a precedent, and ‘asking’ will become something expected of you.”
“He’s quite right,” said Wiśniowiecki, picking up the now full glass of wine that his servant had provided him just a few seconds after he’d demanded it. The same servant was now standing attentively a short distance away, as he had been before; staring at a distant wall and apparently oblivious to the conversation taking place at the table.
After taking a drink, Wiśniowiecki lowered the glass but didn’t place it back on the table. “No, we should continue as we have all along.” Again, he issued a harsh little laugh. “It’s not as if that whoremonger is going to be paying much attention anyway!”
He used the glass to point at the voivode of Kiev. “By all means, let us have Janusz Łohojski as our bold commander.”
* * *
The servant was not quite oblivious to the conversation, but he was no longer paying a great deal of attention because it had veered off into a discussion of the latest gossip concerning the king’s latest favored woman. Leaving aside the salacious details, the subject was fairly boring. And it was of no use at all to the servant in his current effort to improve his fortunes.
Instead, he was spending most of his time wondering how his cousin Janek was faring. He should have reached Poznań by now. Several days ago, in fact, unless he’d encountered difficulties.
Poznań
Poznań Voivodeship
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
Janek had encountered no difficulties beyond minor ones in his journey to Poznań, as it happened. But he was now ruefully remembering a wise old saw his grandmother had favored: Beware of what you wish for.
He’d wished to find persons in Poznań who would be willing to pay him and his cousin Andrzej Kucharski for the information Andrzej had discovered thanks to his position as a personal servant for Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki.
He had found them. What he hadn’t considered in advance was that the type of people who would be willing to pay for such information were likely to be scary people.
Very scary people. Especially one of them.
* * *
“How do we know he’s telling the truth?” demanded Wojtek Burzyński. He gave the small man sitting on a stool in the corner of the room a glance that was not quite hostile but came very close. The fellow seemed to shrink a little more under the scrutiny—and he was already doing a pretty fair imitation of a mouse in a room full of cats.
Jozef Wojtowicz considered yawning, but decided that would be a little extravagant. “We don’t know whether he’s telling the truth—but here’s what I do know, Wojtek, from long experience. In my trade, you never know whether someone is telling you the truth or not; at least, not from the inside out.”
“And what does that mean?” Burzyński’s tone was surly, but that wasn’t unusual. He was a surly man more often than not. “‘Inside out.’”
“It means you never know what’s going on in another person’s mind, as you can usually assume you know when dealing with friends and family. What you have to do instead is match what you’re being told against whatever else you know.”
He wasn’t going to give Burzyński any time to think up a response. Of the hussars gathered in the room, Burzyński was not only the least intelligent and the least pleasant, but also the least important. He was szlachta, as all of them were, but not from a prominent or important family.
Jozef leaned forward on his own stool and swept his gaze across the other six men gathered in the room. “So let’s ask ourselves what those other things are, that we know. The first thing we know is that everything he says matches what we already think is true. The second thing we know is that the conspirators he named—I’m referring to Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki and ‘Bearpaw’ Potocki—make perfect sense. We’d already included them in our own list of possible suspects.”
Again, he swept the room with his gaze. “Does anyone disagree with me so far?”
“No,” said Mieczysław Czarny. “What you say makes sense. But I’d still like more.”
Jozef nodded. “That brings us to the third thing we know—or I do, at any rate.” He now gave the man named Janek his own not-quite-hostile scrutiny. “That’s this—if it turns out he’s lying to us, I’ll track him down and kill him.”
He said that in a calm, level down of voice. There was neither heat nor direct menace in it. He would have used exactly the same tone of voice to announce that if he spi
lled some beer from an overfilled mug he’d just wipe it up.
Janek seemed to shrivel up even more. He hadn’t lifted his own gaze from what seemed to be a fixation on the floor for at least five minutes.
Burzyński now had a scowl on his face, but that didn’t mean much of anything. He often had a scowl on his face. Jozef thought that was because he found the world a confusing place and reacted by being belligerent.
“How do you know that you’d be able to find him?” he demanded. “It’s not that easy—”
“Wojtek, enough,” interrupted Mieczysław Czarny. Burzyński instantly fell silent. Czarny was a hussar who came from a very prominent szlachta family. More importantly, he was a natural leader in a dominant mold—what up-timers called an “alpha male.”
Jozef had always found the term rather amusing. He understood what the Americans meant by it. What he also understood was that, if need be, a man like himself could eat an alpha male for breakfast—to use another American idiom.
But alpha males had their uses, so he let Czarny close the deal—using still another up-timer expression.
“I have confidence in Jozef,” Mieczysław announced. “I always knew”—he glanced at one of the men standing against the opposite wall—“so did Leszek over there—that Wojtowicz was one of Koniecpolski’s top spies. Does anyone here think the grand hetman would have made him such if he didn’t trust his loyalty and judgment?”
It was Czarny’s turn to sweep the room with a hard gaze. “Anyone?”
The question was answered with silence. Czarny grunted, leaned back—in a large and comfortable chair, in his case, which Jozef had offered him the moment he came into the room—and planted his hands on his knees. “It is settled then. We will join Jozef in his plan to take the APC, break out of Poznań, and fight with the konfederacja in Kraków.”
* * *
As the hussars began filing out of the room, Jozef gave Janek another meaningful glance. Not you, little man. You stay here. We still have things to talk about.
Once he and Janek were alone, Jozef rose from his stool, went into the suite’s tiny kitchen—more like a pantry, since there were no means to cook anything—and came back out with a bottle of wine and a cup.
One cup, which he filled for himself.
“Do not think I was boasting,” he said, in that same tone of voice. Calm, level—as certain as the tides. “I will not only find you, I will find that cousin of yours. It won’t be hard. The only way he could have passed on to you the information you’ve given us was if he was a personal servant of either Wiśniowiecki or Potocki. I know you came here from Warsaw—that wasn’t hard to find out; not for a man like me—and that means your cousin is almost certainly one of the prince’s servants. Potocki has no residence in the capital.”
Without taking his eyes off the little man, Jozef drank from his cup. “But I have no ill will. Quite the contrary—so long as you and your cousin continue to serve as my spy in the prince’s camp, you will be in my good graces. You will also be the recipient of more of my money.”
He took another drink of wine, and then smiled. “You will find me quite a generous paymaster, too.”
Finally, Janek lifted his eyes. “How will we stay in touch?”
Jozef’s smile widened. Happily, Gretchen Richter had had several of the devices to spare.
“It is time for you to learn about a wondrous American invention. It is called a ‘radio.’”
* * *
After Janek left, Christin came out of the bedroom.
“You heard all of it?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, heading into the kitchen. She came out with a cup for herself. “I have good hearing and that hole you drilled in the wall works just fine.”
She sat down next to him and held out her cup. As he filled it with the wine bottle, she said: “I didn’t understand all that much of it, though. My Polish still isn’t good for anything except buying food and asking for directions. As long as they’re both simple. Loaf of bread or where is a tavern, I can handle. Fried trout with potatoes and carrots or directions to anything more than two blocks away, not so much.”
She drained about a third of the cup. “There was one thing that was really clear, though.”
“And that was?”
She smiled. “You’re a pretty scary son of a bitch. Good thing for you I’ve always been partial to bad boys. That’s why you wanted me to listen, isn’t it? Even though you knew I wouldn’t understand most of it.”
He frowned. Jozef was discovering that having a woman as smart as himself was disconcerting as well as exhilarating. There were times he pined for his paramours of old. A bit younger than him and a lot dumber.
Not often, though. “You think I wanted you to learn I was ‘scary’?”
“No, of course not. I already knew that and you already knew I did. No, you wanted me to listen in because you’re hoping I’ll get interested enough in what you do to want to become your partner. Mister and Missus—using the term loosely—Superspy.”
“Well…”
“Go ahead. Deny it.”
Exhilarating. “I can’t. You’re right. Which brings up something I’ve been thinking about. There’s something you could do—if you’re willing—that I think would enhance our prospects.”
“Explain.”
* * *
By the time he was done, Christin had finished her cup of wine and was starting on another.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You want me to wear a suit of armor. Just like a hussar.”
“Not quite. We’ll have to have one made for you specially, and it doesn’t need to be as heavy. You also don’t need a helmet. In fact, we don’t want you to wear one. The whole point of this is for people to see your face and recognize you as a woman. Just like they do with Gretchen.”
“Gretchen has long blonde hair. She’s famous for it.” Christin reached back and gave her own hair a little flip. “My hair’s dark—it’s almost black. That’s because my ancestry’s mostly Lebanese. And it’s nowhere near as long as hers. Doesn’t reach much past my shoulders.”
“That’s irrelevant,” said Jozef, shaking his head. “Legends always have lots of variants. All we need is a beautiful, fearless woman in armor.”
She grinned at him. “That’s one of the things I really like about you. Most men would think I was flattered by being called ‘beautiful.’ You know better.”
“Oh, yes. ‘Fearless’ is what makes you strut about.”
“All right, I’ll do it. But there are three conditions. First, I get a sword. Not as big as one of those hussar choppers, but still a real sword. I’ve always wanted a sword.” She used a hand to wave off objections. “Don’t worry, I’m not crazy. I don’t plan to actually use it if it comes to fighting. For that, I’ve got my Ruger.”
“Not a problem. What else?”
“A lance. I want a lance.”
“Not a problem—as long as you’re willing to fly a banner from it that’s Polish.” He made his own dismissive hand gesture. “Polishy, at least.”
“I’m okay with a red-and-white banner. Just not with the coat of arms.”
“Agreed. What else.”
“I really really really really want hussar wings.”
Jozef didn’t have to spend more than a moment thinking about it. The wings were usually attached to saddles, not backs, so weight shouldn’t be a problem.
“Agreed.”
She drained her cup and set it down. “I remember how cool I thought it was when Buster gave me my first leather jacket. This is even cooler.”
Exhilarating. Definitely exhilarating.
Disconcerting too, granted. But Jozef was willing to trade the one for the other.
Chapter 27
Pressburg, capital of Royal Hungary
Lukasz lowered the pair of binoculars he’d been given by Gretchen Richter before they departed Breslau and handed them to Jakub Zaborowsky. “So far as I can tell, our informants were correc
t. It looks as though Pressburg is still in Austrian hands.”
As he raised the binoculars to his eyes, Jakub smiled thinly. “Best you don’t say that to anyone in Pressburg—or anyone in these regions. You’ll get a half-hour lecture on the manifold and crucial distinctions between stalwart Hungarians and feckless Austrians.”
Opalinski chuckled. “And here I thought we Poles were the world’s fussiest distinction-makers.”
“Compared to Hungarians? We’re rank amateurs.” Zaborowsky scanned the city on the left bank of the Danube for a couple of minutes. Then, lowered the binoculars. “You’re right, I think. At this distance, I can’t make out the insignia on those red swallow-tailed banners, but the color and the very fact that they’re banners is enough.”
“That’s what I thought also. The Ottomans use tughs instead. And I’ve never seen one colored red.” The tugh was a horsetail standard which the Ottomans derived from the Mongols.
“Let me see,” said Denise insistently.
There was no reason to argue with the girl—and if he refused, an argument was certain—so Jakub handed the binoculars to her.
“We’ll have to go around the city,” he said, musingly. “There’s no way a Hungarian garrison would let us pass through to the Ottoman lines. The question is…”
“Where are the Ottoman lines?” Lukasz finished for him.
“They’re over there,” said Denise. Without removing the binoculars from her eyes, she pointed to the confluence of the Danube and the Morava rivers. That was at a distance Lukasz estimated to be eight miles away. The only reason they could see the confluence at all was because they were standing on a hillside north of the city. But at that distance, all Lukasz himself could see was the confluence itself.
Denise had better vision than he did, though. The girl’s eyesight was better than that of most people.
Still, they couldn’t afford any mistakes at this juncture of their expedition. “Are you sure?” he asked.
Denise sniffed. “Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.” She handed him the binoculars. “See for yourself, O mighty hussar.”
