by Eric Flint
Lukasz sighed, gave the plane circling overhead an angry glance, and turned away to follow the grand hetman.
Less than a mile away, Lieutenant General Lennart Torstensson lowered his eyeglasses. The up-time binoculars had been given to him by Mike Stearns after the Magdeburg Crisis which followed the battle of Wismar. Stearns had given no specific reason for the gift, but Lennart was sure it was in appreciation for his restraint during that episode. Had he followed the advice of most of his subordinates—and just about every nobleman residing in the city at the time—there’d have been a bloodbath; which, in turn, would have precipitated a far greater political crisis. Instead, he’d kept his troops in their barracks and let Stearns and his associates settle things down with almost no violence at all.
That same conduct on his part had gotten him a far greater gift than a pair of binoculars from his monarch. Gustav Adolf had valued Lennart for his military abilities for some time already. But it wasn’t until he saw how Torstensson handled the Magdeburg Crisis that the Swedish king gave him his full political confidence. Lennart’s greatest military triumph had been the battle of Ahrensbök, but he never would have been leading the army that won that great victory if he hadn’t already shown Gustav Adolf he could be trusted with a fully independent command.
Still, modest though they might be in some terms, he treasured the binoculars. Not so much for the ability to see so well at a distance, but because in some indefinable way they made it easier for Torstensson to accept what he saw and make decisions based on it. A down-time eyeglass left things…murkier.
As murky as the orders he kept getting from Prime Minister Wettin, which he suspected were really coming from the chancellor of Sweden. As he slid the binoculars into their case, Torstensson’s jaw tightened. The respect and admiration he had long felt for Axel Oxenstierna was slipping away from him; as each week passed, more and more rapidly—and even more rapidly, his respect for Wilhelm Wettin.
He could accept Oxenstierna’s near-fanatical devotion to aristocratic interests, and could accept Wettin’s pre-occupation with political tactics at the expense of strategic vision. Grudgingly, but he could accept them.
What he could not accept was their willingness to use his soldiers as pawns in their game; their willingness to throw away lives—a great number of lives—purely for the sake of advancing their factional interests. That was what was draining away his respect, and stoking his growing anger.
“No,” he said, speaking aloud but only to himself. His nearest aide was standing ten feet away, not close enough to hear the softly growled word.
He was not going to order a mass assault on Poznan’s walls. Those defenses might not be up to the standards of a completed star fort, bristling with a full complement of bastions and ravelins and hornworks and crownworks, but neither were they—to use terms from Wettin’s last radio message—“hopelessly antiquated” and “medieval.”
Even if they had been, such an assault would still be a bloody, bloody business. Stanislaw Koniecpolski was in personal command of Poznan’s defending army and he had at least ten thousand hussars at his disposal. Polish hussars might be primarily known for their prowess as heavy cavalry, but they were tough bastards under any circumstances and in any situation.
As it was, a direct mass assault would be futile as well as bloody. It would take months before Torstensson’s artillery had done enough damage to Poznan’s defenses to make any such assault feasible in realistic military terms.
Wettin might or might not know that himself. He had some military experience, though nothing like the experience of his younger brother Bernhard, who was an accomplished general in his own right.
As was Oxenstierna, who most certainly did know the price Torstensson’s army would pay for such an assault. Knew—and wanted the assault for that very reason. Oxenstierna was afraid of the USE’s army, because he couldn’t trust its soldiers to obey orders when he launched the counter-revolution he was so obviously preparing. So, he’d sent Stearns and his Third Division down to Bohemia and was keeping Torstensson and the other two divisions in Poland.
The orders were officially coming from Wettin, of course, since Oxenstierna had no legal authority over Lennart’s forces. He was Sweden’s chancellor, not the USE’s. But Torstensson was quite sure that Oxenstierna’s was the driving will in Berlin.
To hell with them. Lennart was fond of that up-time expression, even if some Lutheran pastors thought it perilously close to outright blasphemy. Wettin and Oxenstierna could send as many scolding messages as they wanted. They couldn’t force him to do their bidding unless they relieved him from command—and that would be far too risky.
What if he refused? Indeed, what if he led his army back into the Germanies and went knocking on Berlin’s gates?
Who would stop him? Torstensson’s two divisions were as numerous as the Swedish mercenary forces the chancellor had at his disposal in Berlin, better trained, and far better equipped. They were veterans, too, and their morale would be splendid if Torstensson led them against Oxenstierna and Wettin.
As it happened, Lennart had no intention of doing any such thing. Until the situation with Gustav Adolf became clarified, he would remain strictly within legal bounds. But Oxenstierna couldn’t be sure of that.
Even if he were, what then? The discipline that held the First and Second Division in check was shaky already. If the chancellor removed Torstensson and replaced him with a new commander, there was a very real chance—a likelihood, in fact, in Lennart’s own estimation—that the army would mutiny and march on Berlin anyway.
True, they’d be easier to defeat if their leadership was informal and hastily assembled, than if they still had Torstensson in command. But not that much easier. At the very least, they’d bleed Oxenstierna’s forces badly—right at the moment he needed them most to deal with an increasingly restive populace.
No. Oxenstierna and Wettin would growl and scold and complain—possibly even shriek with fury, from time to time—but they wouldn’t do any more than that. Torstensson’s men would stay in the trenches. They’d suffer badly anyway, as soldiers always did in winter sieges. But there wouldn’t be the butcher’s bill that a mass assault would produce.
He glanced at the sun, which was nearing the horizon. Nothing more to be done this day. There wouldn’t be much to do, beyond routine, for many days to come.
Later that night, after supper, Torstensson retired to his quarters in the tavern of a village he’d seized not far from Poznan. Before going to bed, he lit a lantern and began resumed reading the book that had arrived from Amsterdam earlier that week.
Political Methods and the Laws of Nations, by Alessandro Scaglia. The book was one of a very limited edition, intended only for private circulation. Lennart had received it as a gift from the author himself, with a hand-written flowery dedication and signature on the frontispiece.
He was a little more than halfway through, and found the book quite absorbing.
PART II
December 1635
Unequal laws unto a savage race
Chapter 10
Prague, capital of Bohemia
After he entered the huge salon that served Morris and Judith Roth for what Americans left back up-time would have called a living room on steroids, Mike Stearns spent half a minute or so examining the room. No casual inspection, either—this was a careful scrutiny that lingered on nothing but didn’t miss any significant detail.
By the time he was finished, his hosts had seated themselves on a luxurious divan located toward the center of the room and the servants had withdrawn at Judith’s signal, giving them some privacy.
Morris had a pained expression on his face. “Go ahead. Make the wisecracks about the nouveau riche so we can be done with it.”
Mike took a last few seconds to finish his examination and then took a seat on an armchair across from his hosts.
“Actually, I was going to compliment you on your judgment,” he said. “God help me for my sins
, but I’ve become an expert on gauging ostentation, the proper degree thereof. I’d say”—he raised his hand and made a circular motion with his forefinger—“you’ve hit this just about right. Splendid enough to cement your position with the city’s Jewish population and satisfy any gentile grandee who happens to pop over that you’re a man to be taken seriously, but not so immodest as to stir up the animosity of those same gentiles.”
Morris grunted. “The second reason’s less important than the first. The only gentile grandee who pops over here on a regular basis is Pappenheim.”
Judith winced. “Puh-leese don’t use that expression in front of him, either one of you. The man has a sense of humor—pretty good one, in fact, if you allow for the rough edges—but it only extends so far, when it comes to himself. General Gottfried Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim does not ‘pop over.’ He visits, with grace and style.”
Morris and Mike both smiled. Then Morris added: “The point being, Pappenheim’s the only important gentile figure in Bohemia who’s ever been over here and most of what’s in these public rooms is stuff that means nothing to him.”
He pointed to a series of etchings on one of the walls. Morris and Judith were the subjects of three of them, two separately and one as a couple. Mike didn’t recognize any of the other people portrayed, but from subtleties of their costume he thought they were probably other prominent figures in Prague’s very large Jewish community.
“Those are all by Václav Hollar,” Morris said. “He was born and raised here, but then moved to Cologne. Judith sweet-talked him into coming back with the offer of a number of commissions.”
Mike shook his head. “Never heard of him.”
“He became well enough known that there’s a brief mention of him in my records,” Judith said. She was referring to the files on her computer. Before the Ring of Fire, Judith’s interest in her family’s genealogy had led her to compile quite a bit of information from the internet on Prague’s Jewish community during the seventeenth century. Her ancestors had come from here. One of them, in fact, had been the famous rabbi known as the Maharal, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, whom legend said invented the golem.
“But that happened years from now in our old timeline,” Judith went on, “after he moved to England. In the here and now, he’s too young to be famous. Which is a good part of the reason I wanted him. You’re right that it can be a bit dangerous—might be more than a bit, under some circumstances—for Jews to be too ostentatious.”
Morris shrugged. “What I was getting at, though, was that we could have commissioned Rubens or Rembrandt to do those portraits and Pappenheim wouldn’t have known the difference.”
“Rubens and Rembrandt wouldn’t have come anyway,” said Judith, “but if they had you can be sure that Wallenstein would have known about it—and he does know who they are.”
“Speaking of Wallenstein…” Mike’s expression had no humor left in it. “He doesn’t look good. At all.”
Mike had just come from a meeting with Wallenstein. This had been a private meeting, unlike the formal and well-attended affair that had been held a week earlier when the Third Division arrived in the city.
In the intervening week, Mike had been busy seeing to the needs of his soldiers. They’d set up a temporary camp just south of the horse market that would eventually become Wenceslaus Square in another universe. Still, he hadn’t been that busy. He had an excellent staff and most of the work was routine. So he’d expected to be summoned to Wallenstein’s palace within a day or two after the division’s arrival and had been a little surprised by the long delay.
He’d assumed the delay was just petty maneuvering by the king of Bohemia; the same sort of let-him-cool-his-heels-in-the-anteroom silliness that was such a frequent part of office politics up-time. But when Mike had finally been ushered into Wallenstein’s presence, he’d realized the more likely cause was the king’s health. To use one of his mother’s expressions, Wallenstein looked like death warmed over. They’d met in his bedroom, because the king could barely manage to sit up. His American nurse Edith Wild had him propped up on pillows in his bed and fussed over him the whole time Mike was there except for the quarter of an hour Wallenstein had shooed her away so he could discuss the most delicate matters with his visitor in private.
Those delicate matters had involved Mike’s somewhat eccentric logistical requests and proposals. “Eccentric” being the discreet way of describing the creation of a string of supply depots that made very little sense for an army that was planning to take up positions near the southern Czech city of České Budějovice in order to bolster Bohemia’s position against Austria. Whatever might be the state of his physical health, there was clearly nothing wrong with Wallenstein’s brain. Before his self-elevation to the throne of Bohemia, the man had been one of the premier military contractors of Europe. He understood perfectly well that what Mike was setting up was the necessary supply chain in case he had to leave Bohemia in a hurry in order to take his army back into Saxony.
It hadn’t taken the king long to make clear that he had no objection. Obviously, Wallenstein understood that the main reason Mike and his Third Division had been sent to Bohemia was to get him out of the USE for political reasons, not to satisfy Wallenstein’s request for military support.
“Meaning no offense, Michael,” the king had rasped, “but I don’t need foot soldiers—nor did I ask for them. What I could use, and did ask for, was air support so I could keep an eye on Austrian troop movements.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his bed. “Which I didn’t get, even though I’ve built two of the best airfields in Europe—one right here in Prague, the other in České Budějovice. And now I don’t have the use of the Jew’s plane either, since his idiot pilot crashed the thing in Dresden. Your man Nasi tells me it’ll be months before the plane is repaired and able to fly again.”
Mike saw no point in arguing the matter of whether or not Francisco Nasi was “his man.” In some ways, that description was still accurate, he supposed. His former spymaster was now operating his own independent business as what amounted to a contract espionage agency, but he’d made clear to Mike that he would be glad to provide him whatever assistance he could. Given that Francisco was now residing in Prague himself, Mike had every intention of taking him up on the offer. He’d already met with him twice, in fact, since he arrived the week before.
“I may be able to assist you there,” he said. “I’m having an airfield built in Děčín”—he used the Czech pronunciation for Tetschen—“to provide air support for Colonel Higgins and his regiment, in the event Holk launches a surprise attack.”
Both he and Wallenstein maintained completely straight faces. Perhaps Mike rushed the next sentence just a little bit.
“But I see no reason that whatever plane Colonel Wood can free up from the air force to come down here can’t also overfly the Austrian lines.”
Wallenstein had been satisfied with that, and no further mention was made of Mike’s convoluted logistics. The king had wrung the little bell next to his bed and Edith had practically rushed back into the room. She’d become quite devoted to the man, by all accounts—which included gunning down the assassins who’d tried to murder Wallenstein shortly before he seized power, in addition to tending to his medical needs.
“Edith thinks he’s dying, Mike,” said Judith. “Wallenstein just won’t listen to her medical advice.”
“God-damned astrologers were bad enough,” Morris growled. “Now he’s got these new Kirlian aura screwballs whispering in his ear.”
Mike cocked his head quizzically. “Which screwballs? I can’t keep track of all these seventeenth century superstitions.”
“I’m afraid this one’s our doing, Mike,” said Judith. “It’s based on Kirlian photography, which was developed up-time. Nobody in Grantville ever took seriously the idea that Kirlian images showed a person’s life force—the ‘aura,’ to use the lingo. Unfortunately, Doctor Gribbleflotz stumbled across some references t
o it in one of the Grantville libraries and…”
“The rest was a foregone conclusion,” said Morris.
Herr Doctor Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz—a great-grandson of Paracelsus, as he never tired of reminding people—was an alchemist who had an uncanny knack for reinterpreting up-time science in a down-time framework, and making a bundle of money in the process. He’d made his first fortune with baking soda, which he renamed Sal Aer Fixus. A little later he’d made aspirin, which he dyed blue on the grounds that blue was the color of serenity. Much to Tom Stone’s disgust, Doctor Gribbleflotz’s brand had outsold the straight-forward stuff produced by Stone’s pharmaceutical works. Eventually, when his father got distracted by something else, Ron Stone quietly ordered the chemists to start dying their own aspirin blue as well. Sales picked up right away.
“Don’t tell me,” Mike chuckled.
“Yep,” said Morris. “Before you could say ‘hogwash,’ Gribbleflotz had half the nobility in the Germanies and Bohemia hooked on the notion, seems like. He charges a small fortune to show someone his so-called ‘aura,’ and then…well…”
He drifted into an uncomfortable silence. His wife gave him a glance and smiled. “What Morris isn’t telling you is that we’re making quite a bit of money from the side-effects.”
“How so?”
Morris made a face. “Somehow or other—I didn’t do it, I swear I didn’t, and neither did Tom Stone—people got the idea that once someone knew their Kirlian aura they needed to complement it with the proper costume and jewelry. So all of a sudden there’s a booming demand for exotic dyes and exotic gem-cuts. Tom’s dye works supplies most of the former and my jewelry makers provide most of the latter.”
