1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  Although they looked at the matter from the top down instead of the bottom up, as Minnie did, the two Austrian royals were just as cold-bloodedly practical as she was.

  Or…

  Had been, at any rate. To his surprise and his sister’s outright shock, Leopold had developed a genuine attachment to Minnie, never mind her low birth, orphan status, and glass eye. He’d never used the word “love,” but he had declared that after they were rescued he’d insist his brother keep him as a bishop so he couldn’t marry anyone and could maintain his liaison with Minnie.

  She had also developed an attachment to him—but thought his plan to remain a bishop was foolish sentimentalism. There was no reason he couldn’t get married to someone of suitable lineage and maintain his relationship with her. As had been royal custom from time immemorial.

  After allowing the silence to last just long enough to restore propriety, Judy rose to her feet and beckoned to Minnie.

  “Come on, girl, let’s go. I’m pretty sure it’s time for our weekly radio message.”

  Minnie rose from her pleasant snuggle. “I think it’s probably still too early, but maybe you’re right. It might even be later than we think. It’s too bad you brought one of those clever up-time battery watches instead of an old-fashioned manual wind-up one.”

  Judy raised her arm and glanced down at the watch on her wrist. “Yeah, I just wear it out of habit, these days. The battery died almost a year ago.”

  Leopold brought forth a large pocket watch. An impressive one, too—it had jewels embedded it. “I have one!” he pronounced. “Just wound it not two hours ago.”

  Minnie and Judy made no effort to consult the archduke’s watch. “And when was the last time you calibrated it?” asked Judy.

  Leopold made a face. “Well… It was before we had to come down to the cellars. How am I supposed to calibrate it here, with no way to gauge the sun properly and no functioning up-time watch to check it against?”

  “What I thought,” said Judy. “And what time does it claim to be now?”

  Leopold studied the dial. “Two and a quarter hours past noon. Or maybe midnight.”

  “Or maybe any time of the day and night,” said Minnie. “Leopold, you know perfectly well that watch loses at least ten minutes every day—and we’ve been here—I keep a record, you know—for exactly—”

  “Don’t say it! Don’t say it!” exclaimed Judy and Cecilia Renata simultaneously.

  * * *

  The time turned out to be just about what Judy had figured. At this time of year, sunset came around six in the evening. The sun was clearly below the horizon, although they couldn’t see it directly through the narrow window in the tower that rose above the cellars. But it was still twilight.

  “We should probably wait till it gets a little darker,” Judy whispered.

  Minnie nodded her agreement. They’d have to extend their antenna out of the window in order to send or receive a signal. At this time of day, it was unlikely that anyone would observe the antenna, but it wasn’t impossible. Once darkness fell, no one would spot it.

  So, they waited another half hour. Two floors below them, Leopold and his sister watched in case someone came into this detached wing of the palace. Which was just as unlikely, since it was only being used these days for storage—and not storage of anything fancy or expensive. The wall opposite the entrance to the tower that the two young Habsburgs were watching from was covered with suspended saddles. Used, worn saddles. Just barely functional enough not to get pitched.

  “Okay,” Judy said, when she judged the time was right.

  Slowly, carefully, Minnie extended the antenna. She did so mostly because the antenna wasn’t all that sturdy and they couldn’t afford to take the risk of damaging it.

  Finally, she was done. Judy moved back into the narrow staircase leading down to the cellar and lit the candle she’d brought with her. Then, carefully shielding it with her hand so no significant amount of light would escape through the narrow window, she brought it close enough to enable Minnie to operate the radio.

  Minnie found the right frequency and began the transmission. It was well-established protocol that the hideaways in the cellars would always initiate radio contact, since they could only come out of hiding on infrequent occasions while the USE Army’s operators could maintain their watch twenty-fours a day, every day of the year.

  Even using manually transmitted Morse code, she was done soon. The message had been short and simple:

  LISTENING STOP

  About fifteen minutes later, the answer came back:

  CHEER UP STOP RESCUE MISSION IS BEING PLANNED STOP MESSAGE ENDS STOP

  Minnie began drawing the antenna back in. “That’s exactly what they said last time,” Judy complained. “Word for word.”

  Minnie made no reply. There was nothing to say other than so yet another week of monotony awaits us. Yippee.

  Chapter 6

  Brno, capital of the Margraviate of Moravia

  Kingdom of Bohemia

  “I still say it would have been smarter to just buy some of the new rifles Struve-Reardon is making.” His brow creased with disapproval, Paul Santee gazed down at the rifle on the table before them. “This thing is just a copy of a Sharps, like the French Cardinal. A crude one, to boot. Hell, they’ve had it for two years already. In time of war, you know, the pace of gun development—”

  “Rises rapidly,” said Morris Roth. “Yes, Paul, I know. You’ve said it about two thousand times already. But what’s involved here is a political issue, not a practical one. I’d have preferred it myself if we’d taken the same money we shoveled into SZB’s coffers and just bought the SR-1s from Struve-Reardon. But the problem is the ‘S’ in SZB. That stand for státní which, since you still don’t speak or read Czech very well—I’m not criticizing, you haven’t been here all that long—means ‘state.’ As in Státní zbrojovka v Brno, ‘State Armament Works of Brno.’ Guess who has the controlling interest in the company?”

  “Wallenstein,” said Paul sourly. “AKA King Venceslas V Adalbertus of Bohemia. Is the man really that greedy?”

  Morris shook his head. “Actually, I doubt if Wallenstein made much if any money on the ZB-1636. His motives aren’t pecuniary. They’re political. First, he wants the prestige of Bohemia’s having its own major gun manufacturer. Secondly and more importantly, he thinks that his kingdom’s having its own armaments works will be important in the long run. I have to say I think he’s probably right about that.”

  The third man standing in the small show room of the SZB’s armaments plant drew a pistol from a holster and held it up for display. “Besides, Mr. Santee, if you’d been devoting your efforts to designing a new rifle you wouldn’t have had the time or money to develop this marvelous weapon.”

  General Franz von Mercy gazed at the pistol admiringly. “The infantry will do well enough with the ZB-1636, as clumsy—no, what’s that word you Americans use? Clanky?”

  “Clunky,” Morris provided.

  “Yes, that one. As clunky as it may be. It’s the cavalry that truly needs the more advanced weaponry.”

  Morris was amused to see the new expression on Santee’s face. Despite the man’s determination to be morose, Paul couldn’t help but enjoy von Mercy’s praise. The weapon the general was holding up was also being made by the State Armament Works of Brno, but unlike the rifle the pistol had been designed by Santee himself. He’d modeled it on a little-known Italian pistol made in the early twentieth century, the Pedersoli Howdah. To modern-day Americans, the gun looked like a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun with a pistol grip. Like a shotgun, the weapon had an unlocking lever which allowed the barrels to be tilted down so the gunhandler could reload by simply sliding in the premade cartridges. Santee had designed the pistol so that it could fire paper cartridges, since that was the most common ammunition, but could be converted to brass cartridges whenever those were finally being made in sufficient quantity.

  The original Pedersoli
Howdah had been chambered either for a .45 caliber round or a .410-bore shotgun shell. Santee had chosen to design his model for a .58 caliber round. He’d made the barrels a bit longer also—twelve inches to the original ten and a quarter. It was a heavy pistol, by up-time standards, but down-timers accustomed to the wheel-locks of the day found it to be less weighty than they were accustomed to.

  Every cavalryman who had been issued one of the pistols adored it. The official designation for the gun was the ZB-2, but the soldiers themselves called it the Santee. So far only five hundred cavalrymen had been provided with ZB-2s, partly because the pistols were time-consuming to make but mostly because every cavalryman wanted at least six of them—two holstered at the waist, two in boot holsters, and two more in saddle holsters. This wasn’t a capricious demand on their part. Reloading such weapons in the middle of a cavalry charge was effectively impossible, so cavalrymen of the era typically carried multiple pistols.

  But Morris figured he still had a few weeks before he had to order his army into action. By then, the entire cavalry should be equipped with the new pistols. The reason he’d decided to devote most of their resources to developing pistols instead of rifles was simple. His little army had only four thousand men—which to his way of thinking made it all the more absurd that Wallenstein insisted on calling it the Grand Army of the Sunrise. Fully half of them were cavalry, and they were by far the most experienced half of his army. The core of them were the professional soldiers von Mercy had brought with him when he entered Bohemia’s service, and most of the ones who had joined later were also veterans.

  The infantry, on the other hand…

  Six hundred of them were Jews, for starters. Having any Jewish soldiers was unheard of in Europe of the seventeenth century. Openly self-identified ones, at any rate. It was not uncommon to have Jews serving in naval forces, but they kept their religious affiliation to themselves. These soldiers, on the other hand, had been recruited mostly from Prague, which was hundreds of miles inland.

  Add to that the fact that the official commander of the Grand Army of the Sunrise was a Jew, which was widely known. Morris wasn’t just “a” Jew, either. A lot of people in Bohemia, gentile and Jewish alike, called him the Prince of the Jews because of the leading role he’d played three years earlier in driving the mercenary army of General Holk out of Prague at the now famous Battle of the Bridge.

  None of the gentile soldiers in the Grand Army of the Sunrise objected openly to serving with Jews, whatever prejudices or anxieties they might mutter among themselves. Still, it was not something that instilled confidence in the army’s infantry—even among the Jewish soldiers, who were well aware that they weren’t veterans.

  There were about half as many Bohemian Brethren in the army as there were Jews. Three hundred and eight, to be exact. Most of them actually were veterans, having also fought Holk when he invaded Prague. But their religious views seemed outlandish enough to the other Christian soldiers that their status as veterans was largely irrelevant. It didn’t help that many of the more orthodox soldiers confused the trinitarian Bohemian Brethren with the unitarian Polish Brethren—the Socinians, as they were often called, after their founder Faustus Socinus. Who knew what men who denied the Trinity would do when they came under fire? Run? Vanish in smoke?

  So, almost half of the infantry was made up of heretics (or possible heretics, to the more broad-minded of their comrades). And not very many in the other half were veterans. Some were idealistic youngsters motivated by excitement at what they sensed to be a new age in Bohemia, but most of them were the same type of men who’d volunteered to serve in mercenary armies since ancient times: paupers, adventurers, criminals hiding from the law, and men hiding from their wives’ families. Until they’d had some real fighting under their belts, not the sort of fellows any sensible man put much confidence in.

  As soon as von Mercy had arrived in Brno, Morris had put him in overall command of the army. Despite his formal status as the “commander” of the Grand Army of the Sunrise, Morris had no illusions that he was any kind of general. His military experience up-time as a draftee had consisted of a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam. Officially, he was a “Vietnam war veteran” but the truth was he’d never seen any combat at all while he’d been there because he’d been a supply clerk at the big army base at Long Binh.

  “Life is weird,” Morris muttered.

  Linz, provisional capital of Austria-Hungary

  “So how far is it?” Mike Stearns asked Jeff Higgins. “I’ve been completely preoccupied planning our own—well, never mind; need to know and all that. I didn’t think to look into it myself.”

  “You mean from here to Breslau?” Jeff asked. “About three hundred and fifty miles, I figure. A fair amount of it’s even on decent roads, at least by seventeenth-century standards of ‘decent roads.’ I figure we ought to make it in three weeks, thereabouts. Moving a regiment’s nowhere near as complicated as moving a whole division.”

  Mike’s Third Division had actually become rather famous in military circles for its ability to move quickly. Some people had even been known to refer to the Third as “foot cavalry,” a term Mike himself considered a particularly idiotic oxymoron. Nothing put him in a foul mood as quickly as the headaches of getting ten thousand or more men to move in one direction fast enough not to be outrun by a tortoise.

  Jeff eyed him sideways. “That’s assuming, mind you, that we don’t have to forage.”

  Mike shook his head. “You won’t have to worry about that. I’ve been in touch with Wallenstein and he assures me that he’ll have provisions ready for you all the way through Bohemia. After that…”

  Jeff grinned. “After that, I’ll be in Silesia and I’ve been in touch with the Lady Protector and she assures me that she’ll have provisions ready by the time we get there.”

  The young colonel seemed to turn a little pink. Mike suppressed a grin of his own. He wouldn’t be surprised if the Lady Protector of Silesia had appended Including me to one of her radio messages. Gretchen could be…forward.

  Mike slapped Jeff on the shoulder. In the years since the Ring of Fire, those shoulders had become quite solid, in the meaty way that a man running toward fat puts on muscle. Between his belly, which had slimmed down some but had never vanished since Jeff had been a child, and the glasses on his nose, and the sometimes distracted expression on his face, Jeff still had more than a passing resemblance to a geek. But nobody in the Third Division thought of him that way, especially not the men under his command in the Hangman Regiment.

  The “DM” they called him. That was because of the calm, unflappable and seemingly all-knowing way he issued orders under fire. The reputation wasn’t diminished at all when a stranger or newcomer asked what the initials stood for.

  The Dungeon Master. Let them make of that what they would.

  “Good luck, Jeff,” Mike said quietly.

  “Same to you, Mike.”

  Ottoman siege lines southeast of Linz

  About three miles from the confluence of the Danube and Traun rivers

  “They’re certain?” demanded Murad IV. “Just one regiment?”

  “Yes, My Sultan,” said Süleyman. “Those are good men, too; not ones to confuse a kâfir regiment with a division.”

  The young sultan nodded. He had confidence in Süleyman. The man commanded the army’s akinji, irregular light cavalry who also served as scouts and spies.

  “One regiment…” Murad mused. “And a big one, they say?”

  “Yes, My Sultan. Bigger than the usual.” He ventured to add his own opinion, which Murad would tolerate if he wasn’t in a bad mood. “I believe it to be the one the kâfirs call ‘the Hangman.’”

  Murad stroked his beard. It was a full beard but one he kept fairly short. Long, uncut beards were fine for religious leaders, displaying their piety. But a warrior with a long beard was just a fool. “I think you are right. Which means two things, since the Hangman is reputed to be their fiercest infantry.
First, the USE’s emperor is confident he can hold Linz, with winter coming upon us too soon for our sappers to undermine their defenses.”

  Süleyman nodded. They were well into autumn now, and the defenses of Linz were still too strong to be overwhelmed by sheer force. If Murad waited too long before ordering the army to retreat back to Vienna, where they could winter over safely, he ran the risk of suffering the same disaster that had befallen Suleiman the Magnificent when he tried to seize Vienna the century before. Winter had come early that year, and his army had been caught in the heavy snowfalls. Many of his soldiers died in the retreat and the Ottoman army had to leave much of their baggage train and their artillery behind.

  “And the other reason, My Sultan?”

  Murad smiled. It was a thin smile, with a hint of savagery in it. “It also means that one kâfir ruler plans to attack another—or add to the attack, I should say. That regiment is headed toward Poland; probably the district they call Silesia, where they already have forces. Between those reinforced units and the large army they have besieging Poznań, they will have the Poles in a vise.”

  “Do you think they can conquer Poland?”

  “No,” said the sultan, shaking his head. “They are not strong enough for that, not when they have to devote so much of their army to facing us here in Austria. But they can make the Poles sweat heavily”—here his smile became a grin, and one that was obviously savage—“and a heavily sweating kâfir is a more reasonable kâfir, when—”

  He broke off there. Murad trusted Süleyman, but there was no point in telling him things he had no need to know.

  When my agents arrive in Warsaw, and explore the possibilities for a hidden alliance. Perhaps with King Władisław, but more likely with ambitious magnates. Which Poland produces like they produce wheat.

  “Go now,” he said. “I have no further need for you today.”