1637 The Polish Maelstrom

by Eric Flint

  His initial assessment had been quite positive. Colonel Higgins, the commanding officer of the USE’s forces, was obviously competent. So was the military commander of the Bohemians, General von Mercy. Perhaps even more important was the quality of the political leadership that had gathered in Kraków. Gretchen Richter had already established her stature in his eyes, which sometimes bordered on awe. Prince Ulrik inspired a quiet confidence and so did Morris Roth.

  From there…

  Things went downhill. Over the course of the next day, Lukasz became familiar with the disparate elements that made up so much of the “army of liberation”—the Silesian militias, both German and Polish, and the volunteers who made up the infantry of the absurdly named “Grand Army of the Sunrise.” A large percentage of those were Jewish, of all things. Any Pole was familiar with Jews, of course. But that very familiarity made it hard for him to imagine Jews as soldiers. Theirs was simply not a culture with any martial traditions. Unless you went back to the Biblical era, but that was a very long time ago.

  Still, the biggest problem he saw was political. As a military force, the alliance assembling in Kraków had quite a bit of promise. Higgins’ overlarge regiment provided an iron core. They called themselves the “Hangmen,” which Lukasz found a bit grotesque. But the steely confidence that lay beneath the word was obvious.

  The Bohemian cavalry was quite different. They were professional soldiers with little if any of the strong political convictions of the Hangman Regiment. But they were definitely professionals at their trade and seemed to be good ones. Almost all of them were veterans.

  The remaining forces were much shakier, but they were clearly not hopeless. If nothing else, the Silesian militiamen and the Jewish volunteers in the Bohemian infantry had a morale that was anxious but determined. The gentiles in the Bohemian infantry…not so much. But they could be whipped into shape—literally, if need be.

  No, the real problem was political. With the exception of a few hundred Polish militiamen, it would be hard to make a clear distinction between the “army of liberation” and a foreign army of occupation. Germans and Czechs, everywhere you looked.

  So far, they’d gotten away with it, by the shrewd way they’d always placed his brother Krzysztof in the foreground, and made sure to display the Polish militias from Silesia at every opportunity. But that wasn’t enough; not nearly enough.

  Happily, the army from Galicia had arrived yesterday, late in the afternoon. It was a small army: perhaps two thousand Poles, with another five hundred Cossacks, most of whom were also Polish. Still, provided his brother remained in the forefront, Lukasz thought it was enough to give the rebellion a fundamentally Polish rather than foreign “feel” to it.

  And that was all they needed for the moment, in his estimation. If—this was a very big “if,” of course—they could inflict a defeat on the oncoming magnates’ army, the victory would be enough to rally a large number of Poles—Lithuanians, too, if not as many—to the revolutionary cause. The cause which he himself had come to champion since the murder of Grand Hetman Koniecpolski.

  Alas, he’d been away too long. He’d forgotten—half-forgotten, at least—just how infuriating the Polish “feel” could be.

  Why in the name of all that was holy did his fellow Poles have to be more devoted to their overweening self-importance than they were to the very God they claimed to be the source of that Polish greatness?

  He’d spent the whole evening and a good portion of the night with the Galician army.

  “Army.” What a joke.

  By dawn, his assessment of the situation was that the “army of liberation” might as well be called “the madhouse.”

  It was now two hours later. The Galicians had entered Poland’s most prestigious city and taken their rightful place in Poland’s most famous public square.

  “The madhouse,” indeed.

  A shouted chant was started up by a small group of szlachta cavalrymen milling around nearby. The heart of it—the chant was only semi-coherent—seemed to be a celebration of the famous liberum veto, which Lukasz and his friend Jozef considered to be the quintessential essence of Polish idiocy.

  His restraint finally broke. No, shattered.

  “You fucking idiots—!”

  * * *

  Judy Wendell was lying on a bed looking out of the window of a bedroom on one of the upper floors of the Cloth Hall. In her case, not her own bedroom. The same night the rescue mission had arrived in Kraków, she’d made a decision she’d been pondering ever since they left Vienna.

  Two days had gone by since then, and she’d tentatively decided that her decision had been the right one. Only tentatively, true, but Judy was not the sort of person who rushed to judgment. The fact that it had only taken her a day and half to reach the state of “tentatively the right thing to do” was impressive. She thought so, anyway—and she was not someone who got easily impressed.

  “Dear God, he has a loud voice,” she said, gazing down at the figure of Lukasz Opalinski. The hussar looked bigger than ever, sitting on his magnificent warhorse and bellowing angrily at the men around him. He wasn’t waving his saber at them, but it was obvious even at this distance that he had to restrain himself from doing so.

  “He’s normally pretty soft-spoken,” she said.

  Jakub Zaborowsky levered himself up on an elbow so he could look into the square himself. His cheek came to rest against Judy’s and his hand began a slow and gentle caress of her back.

  Her thoroughly unclothed back. She shivered a little. That was pleasure, not fear, with excitement starting to come back to life as well. Judy had always suspected that sex was not what it was cracked up to be. Over the past forty-eight hours, she’d discovered she was wrong.

  “I’ve been studying him for weeks now,” said Jakub softly. “And I’ve come to a conclusion. The trick now is figuring out how to make it come to pass.”

  “What conclusion?” asked Judy. “Come what to pass?”

  Still maintaining the caress, Jakub nodded toward Lukasz, down in the square. “If things go as I plan to have them go, you’re looking at the future king of Poland.”

  Judy’s eyes got wide. Then, wider still.

  “You have got to be kidding. He’s not related to the Vasa dynasty.”

  “Or any other royal dynasty,” Jakub agreed. “Except distantly, at any rate. In some nations, that would be important, but not in Poland. Not all of my countrymen’s customs are as idiotic as the liberum veto. We also have a tradition of electing our kings—and even after they are chosen, they are very far from the so-called ‘absolute’ rulers whom the French yearn for and the Russians worship.”

  He levered himself up a bit higher, so that he could put his arm around Judy. He was now caressing her shoulder instead of her back. “You can’t be a commoner, of course, or a scruffy szlachta like myself. But the Opalinski family is as highly ranked as those of any magnate in the Commonwealth, without the drawback of being obscenely wealthy. They’re admired by most of the nobility without being detested by most commoners. Any commoners, so far as I know.”

  Up-time, Judy had had little interest in politics. She’d just been a small-town high school girl from a moderately prosperous family. As the years had gone by since the Ring of Fire, however, she’d found herself learning politics from sheer necessity. She was now very wealthy, to begin with—a state of affairs that always made it hard to avoid politics. And she’d also become a close friend—probably the best friend, in fact—of an Austrian archduchess who belonged to Europe’s most prominent and powerful royal dynasty.

  So, she pondered the problem. “Why Lukasz, though? Why not his brother Krzysztof? He’s the older brother, after all.”

  Jakub shook his head. “Primogeniture doesn’t matter. What does matter is temperament—and Krzysztof’s is all wrong. For a king, I mean. He’s…how should I put it? I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, because I like and admire Krzysztof. But he’s…eccentric, let’s say. Often, ve
ry impractical.”

  “You think other Poles would find him too… Is unmonarchy a word?”

  “It is now, since you used it. And, yes, that is the problem. Lukasz, though…”

  Jakub grimaced a little. “I don’t entirely approve, but Lukasz has all the attributes of the ideal Polish king. He’s fiercely courageous, and by all accounts ferocious in battle—always a trait Poles slobber over, especially the szlachta. He’s straightforward and honest. He’s intelligent but without that devious edge that makes people wary of his friend Jozef.”

  “And you, Jakub.” Judy’s brow creased, not in disapproval but simply as a way of expressing firm conviction. Don’t bullshit me, buddy. “You’ve got some pretty sharp edges yourself—and you want to talk about devious? You? Who is even as we speak plotting to overturn not only the established order but the next establishment before it even gets started.”

  His grin had a sharp edge to it. “I will not deny any of that—but I am not proposing myself as a king. That would be truly absurd.”

  Judy had been thinking ahead. “You haven’t raised this idea with Krzysztof and Red Sybolt, have you?”

  “No. Not yet—although I will have to, before much longer.”

  Judy winced. “I don’t know about Krzysztof, but Red will have conniptions. A shit fit, as we Americans would put it.”

  “Shit fit…” Jakub rolled the expression on his tongue for a moment. “That’s rather nice, actually. But in this instance it’s quite inadequate. Red will not have ‘conniptions,’ he will erupt with fury. At the very least, he’ll accuse me of betraying our cause.”

  Judy gave him a sidelong look. “Well…aren’t you? At least, in a way. I thought you believed in a democratic form of government yourself.”

  “I do. If I had my preference, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth would eliminate the monarchy altogether and replace it with a republican structure. I’d prefer a parliamentary one, but I wouldn’t object strongly to a presidential system.”

  “So why are you now in favor of replacing that Vasa bum on the throne with Lukasz?”

  “The problem with the way Red looks at the PLC is that he fixates too much on the political issues. Those are certainly important, but they are not primary.”

  Up until now, Jakub’s expression had been relaxed, pleasant—even cheerful. Now, his face hardened.

  “The fundamental illness of the Commonwealth isn’t political, it’s social and economic. It’s the damned szlachta.” The word came out in a hiss. “Especially the great magnates. So long as they dominate Poland and Lithuania—not to mention the Ruthenian lands—so long as they even exist—they are a cancer in my nation’s body. They are killing my country. They must be excised. Removed. Obliterated; not as people, of course, but as a class. Do that, and all the other issues become soluble. Without doing it, none are.”

  He let his arm fall away from her and sat up straight. “This is what Red Sybolt simply doesn’t understand. I don’t fault him for it. He comes from your country, one that never had a powerful hereditary aristocracy. So he thinks of the magnates as Polish equivalents to your American tyke— What’s the word?”

  “Tycoons. In our neck of the woods, we called them the coal barons.”

  “Yes, them. But they were simply powerful because of their wealth. Whatever social pretensions they might have had were just that—mere pretensions. In Poland—Lithuania, too—that is not true. The szlachta believe in their special status. They cherish it. And that belief—that delusion—poisons everything.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out. “It won’t be easy. It certainly won’t be simple. But I am convinced it can be done. And I have come to believe that the best way to start, at least, is to use an elected and pretty decent king as the sword to start cutting down the aristocracy.”

  His face relaxed again. He even smiled. “That’s what the Jagiellon dynasty did, you know? If they had stayed in power, Poland and Lithuania would have had the chance to evolve along democratic lines. You do understand that is what your Michael Stearns has been scheming and plotting for ever since the Ring of Fire, don’t you? He must have decided very early on that striking directly for a democratic republic would be too risky, and certainly too bloody and destructive. I think he was right. I’ve read a great deal of your up-time history, Judy. We are still in the early seventeenth century, not the late eighteenth—certainly not the nineteenth.”

  In point of fact, Judy had never once considered what Mike Stearns might have been thinking in strategic terms. Now that Jakub raised it, though…

  She shivered again. “You’re a little scary, Jakub.” Again, though, there was more pleasure and excitement in the shiver than fear.

  He gazed at her for a few seconds. “Will you help me?” he asked abruptly.

  A bit to her surprise—but only a bit, after the months she’d spent in the cellars—she found herself nodding.

  “Yeah, I will. What do you want me to do, though?”

  “I believe you have become close to the archduchess. Cecilia Renata.”

  “Yes, I have. So?”

  “So, if we can get Lukasz elected king—we’ll start with King of Lesser Poland, I think—there is nothing that would increase his political stature as greatly and as quickly as if he married the Habsburg archduchess of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.”

  She stared at him. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  He said nothing. Just continued to gaze at her. Both of them were sitting up in the bed now. Both of them thoroughly unclothed.

  She shivered again. “Come here,” she said.

  * * *

  Sometime later, Judy levered herself up on an elbow and looked down at Jakub. “Okay, in for a penny, in for a pound.”

  He looked at her, frowning a little. “And that peculiar expression means…?”

  “I’ll explain it later. I’ve been wary of men since I was twelve. First, because I was too good-looking.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “I guess so. That’s one of the things I like about Denise—neither one of us cares about that crap. But since the Ring of Fire, I’ve been wary for another reason.”

  “Which is…?”

  It was her turn to take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “That was one of the things that got me interested in you. Never once—not one time—have you asked me how well-off I am.”

  “You’re an American,” Jakub said. “I assumed you were well-off. Most Americans are. But that didn’t matter to me.” A quick, rather savage grin came to his face. “If I cared much for money I’d hardly have dedicated my life to overthrowing a king, a Sejm and an entire class of scoundrels.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Okay. Like I said, in for a penny, in for a pound. I remember Ms. Mailey once telling us in a social studies class that one of the big problems any social movement has—especially the really radical ones—is raising funds.”

  He barked a little laugh. “To say the least! More than once in our travels, Red and I—Krzysztof too—had to share a single loaf of bread. That was our meal for the day.”

  She smiled down at him. The smile was full of nuance.

  “Well, your lucky day just got luckier.”

  Chapter 37

  Linz airfield

  Linz, provisional capital of Austria-Hungary

  “Talk about ‘just in the nick of time,’” Julie muttered, as the strange airplane landed on Linz’s airstrip. The aircraft came to a stop and then began taxiing toward the hangar near to which she and her husband were standing.

  As the plane approached, the pilot steered it directly toward the hangar, bringing the front of the fuselage into view. The artwork on the nose cone was…

  “Oh, gimme a break,” Julie said. “Next time I see Denise, she’s getting an earful.”

  Alex Mackay’s expression was…judicious. As was usually the case when men contemplated a certain type of artwork while standing next to their wives.

  He cleared his throat. “I
believe that portrait of her—what did he call it? ‘Steady Girl,’ I think—was her betrothed’s idea, not hers.”

  The curled-lip expression that adorned Julie’s face would have made a splendid portrait itself. “Right. Now you’re going to tell me that Denise raised bloody hell about it, put down her foot and demanded that the not-quite-pornographic image be immediately removed. Being, as it was, an affront to herself and all of womankind.”

  “Well…”

  “Right.” Julie gave her husband a sideways look. “Fair warning, buster. You ever paint a portrait of me looking like that—”

  “I’m a cavalryman, not a pilot!” Alex protested.

  “So you’d have it painted on your horse’s ass. What an improvement.”

  “I assure you, dearest—”

  “Never mind,” she said, waving his protest down. “Just like I said, ‘fair warning.’”

  The plane was now close; close enough that Julie could make out the features of the pilot, who was sitting in the upper of the plane’s two cockpits.

  “And speaking of a horse’s ass,” she said, “here’s one of Grantville’s finest.”

  Alex gave her a sideways look. “You know that pilot?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. He’s Dustin Acton. I went to high school with him. I was the head cheerleader and he was the head asshole. I knew he was in the Air Force but I didn’t realize he’d become a pilot. Last I heard he was on the ground crew. Jesse Wood must have had an off day when he signed him up for flight school.”

  Alex’s expression was now somewhere between amused and surprised. As a rule, Julie was charitable in her assessment of people. He’d rarely heard her express this caustic an opinion.

  “Is he really that bad?”

  “Yup. Even my ex-boyfriend Chip thought he was an egotistical jackass—and Chip was no slouch in the ego department himself, as you may recall.”

  “Yes, I remember him.” But there was no heat in his voice. Alex’s contretemps, as the French would call it, with Chip Jenkins had taken place years before. In any event, he’d come out ahead.