1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  “As long as you don’t let anyone look into your mouth,” said Gretchen. The teeth of up-timers differed from those of down-timers in several respects. One of them was the number of fillings they had. Up-timers typically had a lot, especially if they were Christin’s age, where down-timers usually had none.

  But that was something that could be kept hidden, well enough. And if Christin were captured and her mouth subjected to that sort of inspection, she was probably doomed anyway.

  “All right,” she said. “I have no objection.” In truth, she was rather inclined to support the proposal. Gretchen thought Christin George was a good influence on Jozef. Maybe he’d be smarter than most men and listen to his woman.

  Still looking very irked, Denise resumed her seat. “Okay,” she said—as if she were the suspicious mother barely agreeing to her daughter’s proposed outing.

  Again, Gretchen waited to see if anyone had anything further to say.

  Apparently not. “All right, we’re adjourned. Jozef, you and Christin stay. We need to discuss how we will stay in touch.”

  “Radio.”

  “Obviously. But what code do we use? That one you used was good but we have to assume it’s been compromised. And I’d be happier anyway with—”

  Christin rose and headed for the door. “This is going to get technical, I can tell. Make my brain hurt. Jozef, I’ll see you at home.”

  * * *

  Christin didn’t actually have any problem with “tech stuff.” The real reason she’d left the room was waiting for her in the corridor outside.

  “Okay, Denise. Spit it out.”

  Her daughter had had enough time to be reasoned with. Christin had figured she would be. She knew Denise better than anybody, even Minnie. The girl got excited easily but she also settled down quickly.

  Denise’s frown was now one of puzzlement rather than disapproval. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this, Mom. Do you really have the hots for Jozef that much?”

  “I’m getting pretty damn fond of him, as a matter of fact. But no, that’s not why I’m doing it.” She waved her hand briefly. “Well, some of it’s him. Mostly, though, I’m doing it for Buster.”

  Her daughter’s frown was now joined by wide eyes. “Huh? How does Dad figure into this?”

  “What killed him, Denise?”

  “Those stinking anti-Semites. You know that.”

  Christin shook her head. “I didn’t ask ‘who.’ I asked ‘what.’” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll tell you what killed him. The seventeenth century killed him. And all the centuries that went before it, except maybe the one when Christ was around. What killed him was a world where people think they can kill anybody they hate and they hate almost everybody who isn’t like them. And there are no governments that’ll stop them—hell, most of the governments put their stamp of approval on it.”

  She paused, and placed her hands on her hips. “Isn’t that why you started working for Francisco Nasi? Sure, I know some of it was the excitement of what you’re doing. But I know you, Denise. You don’t approve of this crap anymore than I do and you figure Francisco’s working to end it.”

  “Well. Yeah.”

  Christin nodded. “Your dad was a patriot. Most people didn’t think of Buster that way, because he didn’t talk about it much and he never had any use for people who waved the flag all the time. He thought they were mostly phonies. But he approved of the country we had. The United States of America, I mean. He didn’t think it was perfect—not even close—but he figured it was way better than most of what the human race had come up with before. After the Ring of Fire, he supported what Mike Stearns was doing right from the start because Mike was trying his best to recreate that country here.”

  She waved her hand again, more expansively. “Not exactly the same, of course. But close enough so everyone can have a life of their own and vicious bastards like the ones who killed Buster don’t dare raise their heads.”

  Her eyes had gotten a little teary, so she paused to wipe them with the back of her hand.

  “Anyway, honey, that’s why I’m doing it. I’m in favor of what these Polish people are trying to do, and I’m going to help. If Buster were still here, I think he’d approve.” A grin appeared, which was very much like the one Denise got so often. If the world don’t like it, the world can jump in a lake. “Well, he wouldn’t approve of me screwing Jozef, of course. But since he’s gone, that’s neither here nor there.”

  It took a few seconds, but eventually Denise’s frown was gone. She linked arms with Christin and the two of them started walking down the hall toward the stairs that would take them out to the square.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you too, honey. We’ve got some Polish ancestry, you know. That’s maybe a little of why I’m doing it also.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, I’ve never been big on tracing family trees and Buster cared even less. But, yeah, my mother told me about it once. Turns out her grandfather came over here—there, I mean, back in the USA—from somewhere around Warsaw. Mom thought I’d be interested because he stuck out like a sore thumb—the only Pole at family reunions that were otherwise totally Lebanese. That was sometime in the last century, toward the end. The nineteenth century, I mean.” She smiled. “Think of it as two hundred and fifty years from now.”

  “Mom, that’s ridiculous. The past is the past and the future is the future. Stop mixing them up.”

  “Says the girl whose boyfriend was born almost four hundred years before she was.”

  “Mom, that’s sick. Eddie’s only twenty-four.”

  They reached the stairs and started down, still arm in arm.

  “What was his name?” Denise asked. “Your great-grandpa’s, I mean.”

  “His last name was Smolarek. I think I’m pronouncing that right, but I’ll check with Jozef. I’m not sure about his first name. It was a long time ago when my mother told me about him and, like I said, I’m not real big on family trees. Boguslaw, something like that. Boleslaw, maybe?”

  “You don’t know our own ancestor’s name?”

  “Hey, smarty-pants. You didn’t even know he existed until I just told you.”

  “Not my fault. You didn’t tell me until just now. But I bet I would have remembered his first name.”

  They’d reached the ground floor and headed for the exit to the square. Still arm in arm.

  “Well, sure. You’ve still got a youngster’s memory,” said Christin. “You’re only seventeen.”

  “Eighteen! Nineteen next month!”

  “Your math really sucks, though.”

  Part Three

  December 1636

  There comes the dark dragon flying,

  In his wings he carries corpses

  “The Seeress’s Prophecy,” The Poetic Edda

  Chapter 13

  Breslau (Wrocław), capital of Lower Silesia

  Gretchen stared out the window of the town hall at the market square below. She’d been drawn to the window by the sounds of a large group of horsemen. She was puzzled since, so far as she knew, Lovrenc Bravnicar and his Slovene cavalrymen were still out on patrol and weren’t expected to return for several more days.

  Her eyes were drawn to the stone pillory to the southeast, where people convicted of crimes were subjected to public flogging. Probably because she was tempted to order the commander of the troops below, who was just now dismounting, to be dragged over there and whipped for—for—

  However many times a Lady Protector could have her own husband flogged. There might not be any limit at all. The legal authority of a Lady Protector was…vast.

  Accompanied by a wordless squawk made up of equal parts glee, anticipation and fury, Gretchen raced out of her headquarters office. Within seconds she was pounding down the stairs, two steps at a time. Some part of the brain reveled in the fact that she could do so again. She’d given birth to her new son recently.

  She reached t
he entrance just as Jeff came through. He was a big man, but she almost knocked him over from the force of her embrace.

  “Why didn’t you—” She broke off for a kiss. A long and fierce one.

  “—tell me you were coming this soon?”

  Jeff was trying to breathe. The impact of Gretchen’s hurtling form had knocked the air out of him, and she’d been hugging him too tightly for his lungs to work properly. Not that he was inclined to complain.

  “Op—ratio—nal. Curity,” he managed to get out.

  “Security!” she scoffed. “Who would be listening to a radio message?”

  She knew the question was stupid the minute she asked it.

  “Poles, for sure,” came the answer. “By now, probably the Turks too. Those people are no slouches.”

  Still holding her in his arms, he looked around the square. “I only brought this detachment with me. But within a week—two, at the outside—Ulrik will be here with the rest of the regiment. All told, a little under twelve hundred men. And around four hundred horses.”

  She smiled. “You rode all the way, I take it. Have you finally made peace with the creatures?”

  “Horses are brutes. Always will be. I don’t trust them any farther than I can throw them.” He heaved his shoulders in what would have been a shrug if he weren’t still holding her tightly. “But it beat the alternative, which would have been to walk the whole way from Ostrava.”

  Finally, their mutual clasp relaxed a little and she pulled away from him. An inch or so. “Ostrava? Why take that route? I would have thought you’d go through Saxony.”

  “Most of the army will. But Wallenstein finished the train route from Prague to Ostrava—just three weeks before we got there. I wanted to get here ahead—well, Ulrik talked me into it—so I could get billets ready for the troops.”

  He looked around again. “Have you got room for them in Breslau? If need be, they can camp outside the city, but I’d rather have them in better quarters.”

  “Yes, of course. It might be a hard winter.”

  She could feel Jeff tense up a bit. Anyone other than she wouldn’t have noticed it, but she knew her husband very well by now. They’d been together more than five years.

  “What is it?” she asked. Not what is wrong? because she could tell the difference between Jeff being concerned by something and being worried about it. He was a thoughtful man, but not one much given to anxiety.

  He didn’t answer immediately. Just pursed his lips.

  “If you tell me again that operational security is involved…” Gretchen pulled back her head and jerked it in the direction of the pillory. “I have immense and arbitrary powers here, you know.”

  Jeff grinned. “Hell hath no fury like a Lady Protector told she doesn’t have a need to know.”

  Finally, he broke off their clasp and took her by the arm, heading toward the entrance of the town hall. “It’s a secret but you have to be in on it anyway. Let’s wait till later, though. Right now, I want to see Larry. He’s okay, right?”

  Gretchen shook her head. “Up-timers! The way you worry about babies is ridiculous. We down-timers don’t, even though we have—had—much more reason to be.”

  That wasn’t really fair on her part, and she knew it. When it came to children, Gretchen had the fatalism of people born in an era of fifty percent child mortality. Her brother Hans had survived until adulthood, before being killed in combat. And her sister Annalise was alive and well. But by the time she was fourteen, Gretchen had seen a younger sister die at the age of four and a baby brother who’d never made it through his first year of life.

  As a mother herself, though, she had never had to live through the experience of watching one of her children die. The death rate for small children had started dropping as soon as American medicine and—even more importantly—sanitation practices had started taking hold. Her first child had been only one year old when she and her family were taken in by the newly arrived Americans of Grantville. Since then, she and her children had been shielded by the medical knowledge of the up-timers.

  * * *

  “I told you he was well,” she said a few minutes later, watching Jeff cradle his son. Lawrence Higgins, he was, but they’d call him “Larry.” They’d named him after Jeff’s best friend Larry Wild, who’d been killed in the Battle of Wismar three years earlier.

  “I didn’t doubt you, love,” Jeff said softly. “For my money, you’re the best mother in the world.”

  He looked around Gretchen’s quarters—his quarters too, now, at least until the regiment had to move out. The quarters were…

  Odd.

  “Who used to live here?”

  “Nobody, exactly,” was her reply. “The town’s notables used it as a place to put up visiting dignitaries. There weren’t many, of course, and they usually didn’t stay long. If they were Polish or Lithuanian, they’d want to stay in Kraków, not here.”

  That explained the fancy four-poster bed and even fancier armoire and the really fancy freestanding copper bathtub in one of the corners—and the absence of anything else except Larry’s crib, which was obviously a later addition and much more cheaply made.

  He grimaced. “There’s no way I’m going to fit in that bathtub. I’m surprised you can.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve never tried. Leaving aside whether I’d fit or not—and I certainly wouldn’t fit comfortably—it would be too much work to haul hot water up from the kitchens on the ground floor.” She nodded down at Larry. “I use it for him, not myself. I just use one of the showers I had built in a room next to the kitchens.”

  Jeff set Larry down in his crib. “We can have a bookcase made for you,” said Gretchen. “I’m always amazed at how many books you insist on traveling with.”

  Jeff chuckled. Gretchen was a printer’s daughter, so she was not only literate but well read, at least by the standards of her time. But Jeff was an up-time geek who’d been devouring books since he first learned to read. There was just no comparison between the way each of them looked at the necessity of bringing books along when you traveled.

  For Gretchen that meant one or two books. None at all, if she wasn’t going to be gone long. Jeff measured his necessary reading material when he left home in terms of chests and crates.

  “There’s no point,” he said. “I won’t be staying that long.”

  She frowned. “Why not? Surely you’re not planning to march your regiment about in the countryside in midwinter.”

  “No, of course not. But that brings us to the Secret Plan.”

  She could practically hear the capital letters. She took a deep breath, but suppressed the sigh that would normally have followed. “Let me hear it, then.”

  * * *

  By the time he finished, Gretchen was at the window, staring down into the market square below.

  “You can’t possibly hold Kraków with just the Hangman Regiment,” she said. “I’m not sure you could take the city in the first place, even as poorly guarded as it is now. By the accounts we’ve collected, at any rate. The garrison is not big, and its soldiers are hardly what you’d call an elite unit. Still, it’s a fortified city and by the time you could get there at the earliest…”

  She paused, doing some quick calculations. By now, after the sieges of Amsterdam and Dresden and the seizure of Silesia, Gretchen was quite well versed in military affairs. “The soonest you could invest Kraków would be toward the end of next month, husband—and that places you in full winter.”

  “December winter,” Jeff said. “Not January or February. And the march isn’t really that big of a risk, Gretchen. If the weather’s really rough, we just won’t do it. But December’s not usually too bad and the distances involved aren’t bad either. It’s a little less than one hundred and twenty miles from here to Bytom, as near as I can figure it. The Hangman Regiment can make that in a week. And we’ve still got all of our winter gear from the assault on Dresden.”

  That much made sense. It was true tha
t the Hangman—all the regiments in the Third Division—had a reputation for marching quickly. And Bytom was within that part of Silesia which the Bohemians had seized. According to Bravnicar, there was even a small Bohemian garrison there. The Hangman wouldn’t have to fight to take the town and if winter did then close in on them, Jeff and his men could shelter in Bytom. The residents would hate it, of course, having to billet troops in their own homes—especially since it was not a big town. But the population was mostly German, not Polish, so there wouldn’t be any armed resistance.

  “All right,” she said. “Go on.”

  “From Bytom, it’s only sixty miles to Kraków. Unless the weather is bad, the Hangman can make it there in two days.”

  “That’s awfully fast, even for a forced march. There is almost bound to be snow on the ground by them.”

  Jeff shrugged. “You might be surprised at how much ground the Hangman can cover, when we push it. Don’t forget that moving one regiment is a lot easier than moving an entire division. But, fine, figure on a three-day march—if you insist, make it four days. By seventeenth-century standards, that’s blitzkrieg, Gretchen.”

  Lightning war. It was a German phrase, so Gretchen understood the literal meaning. And unlike most people of her time, she’d read enough up-time history to understand the reference.

  “I will give you all that. I will also allow that you can probably seize Kraków. But… Jeffrey, if you take Kraków—Kraków; it’s still officially Poland’s capital, you know—you will surely bring down one of the Commonwealth’s major armies on your head. A coalition of the great magnates, at least, if not the royal army. You can’t possibly withstand that! Not once spring comes. So you will just have to retreat back to Silesia. What is the point of it all?”

  Jeff now grinned, to her surprise. What was her idiot husband doing, grinning like that? Had he gone mad?

  “On our own, no. But the Hangman won’t be fighting on our own. To begin with, we’ll have the forces you’ve assembled here in Lower Silesia along with us. That adds another—what? Two thousand men?”