1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  Lannie’s first relapse came in less than two weeks. But Bob had been reading up on alcoholism some more, so he dug in his heels when Kay demanded that he fire Yost as the last chance agreement stipulated.

  Relapses are inevitable. All the studies say so. They’re just part of the treatment. The way I figure it, Lannie hasn’t forfeited his job under the last chance agreement as long as he keeps attending the meetings.

  There was a reason almost everyone in Grantville liked Bob Kelly, even his competitor Hal Smith. Almost no one liked his wife, though.

  Chapter 15

  Breslau (Wrocław), capital of Lower Silesia

  In the end, they decided to take the children with them. Pawel would ride behind Christin; Tekla would ride in front of Jozef. Basically, it was the same seating arrangement—perhaps saddle arrangement would be a better term—that Jozef had adopted when he first encountered Pawel and Tekla and rescued them from their destroyed village. Except that now Jozef had Christin to assume half the burden instead of his carrying both children on one saddle.

  He wasn’t any happier at the arrangement, though. He’d have much rather left Pawel and his sister in the relative comfort and safety of Breslau. Christin had found a good family who were willing to take the children in until their adoptive parents could return.

  Whenever that might be. Possibly never. Jozef and Christin were going to be riding into harm’s way, after all. Leaving aside whatever perils and challenges they would face in Poznań, first they had to get there—across more than one hundred miles of open country in December. So far, the winter had been comparatively mild, but as far as Jozef was concerned the operative term in that phrase was so far. It would take them at least a week to get to Poznań. In a week, the weather could take all sorts of unfortunate turns.

  To make things worse, while the territory they’d be passing through couldn’t exactly be called “war torn,” it had certainly been chewed by the war. The sites of two of the Third Division’s major battles, Świebodzin and Zielona Góra, were only seventy-five miles west of where they’d be passing. Świebodzin had been the site of the atrocities committed by some units of the Third Division which had sent Mike Stearns into such a rage that he’d had two dozen of the guilty soldiers executed. Zielona Góra had only been taken after the Third Division effectively destroyed the whole town.

  Depopulated it, too. Not by killing its inhabitants but simply by forcing them to flee, just as the residents of Świebodzin had fled in terror.

  Similar events had transpired throughout that part of Poland, and almost all the inhabitants had fled to the east—that is to say, into the territory that Jozef and Christin and two young children would now be passing through. More than a year had gone by, but the area would still be unsettled—“unsettled” being the euphemism used by government officials to refer to areas which were either lawless or where law had been only partially restored.

  But the decision hadn’t been made by the adults involved. The decision had been made by the two children, who’d raised such an unholy ruckus at the prospect of being separated from Jozef and Christin that they finally capitulated and agreed to take Pawel and Tekla with them.

  “Look at it this way,” Christin had said. “If nothing else, they’ll make our cover story sound better. Who’d suspect a man and a woman with two young children in tow to be nefarious characters?”

  Unfortunately for his peace of mind, she’d said that as they were loading up their horses for the journey. Jozef had only to turn his head fifteen degrees to see the very lethal-looking and very up-time-looking rifle that Christin had insisted on bringing with her. It was nestled in a saddle holster that she’d had specially made for the weapon by one of the town’s leatherworkers.

  A Ruger Mini-14, she called it. In the Poland of the year 1636, she might as well have called it a Buck Rogers ray gun. The minute any down-timer got a good look at it they’d know something was badly amiss. Christin was either an American in disguise or—if her German was good enough to pass, which it might be—someone who had way more money than could be explained. An up-time weapon like that would have cost a fortune.

  But she insisted on bringing it.

  “Relax, will you?” she’d said, adding the indignity of patting him on the cheek. “Whenever we get to a town, I’ll put it away in the baggage. It’s only three feet long and doesn’t weigh more than maybe six pounds. It’s easy enough to hide.”

  “What if someone out in the country spots it?”

  “‘Someone out in the country.’ Give me a break. Who are we most likely to run into ‘out in the country’ besides a pack of robbers? Wannabe robbers, it’d be better to say. I’m a good shot with that thing and I’ve got thirty-round magazines.”

  American women could be unnerving sometimes, for all that they so often seemed like delicate creatures compared to their down-time counterparts. Jozef had then fallen back on the chancy tactic of arguing on ordnance grounds.

  “Seems like an awfully small caliber.”

  “Yup,” she said, nodding. “It’s a .223—otherwise known as a 5.56 millimeter. But it’s got a muzzle velocity right around one thousand meters a second. I don’t care how big a highwayman is—hell, I don’t care if he’s a hussar in full armor—the bastard’s going down. If the first shot doesn’t do it, I can fire three rounds a second.”

  Again, she gave him that disrespectful pat on the cheek—which wasn’t improved by her next words: “My husband taught me how to shoot.”

  * * *

  It was a bright, clear day when they rode out of Breslau, heading north. Cold, yes, but it was the sort of cold that was bracing rather than bitter.

  The children were in a delighted mood. “This is going to be so much fun!” Pawel predicted, with all the enthusiasm of a six-year-old boy setting off on what he regarded as an adventure.

  His sister didn’t say anything. Tekla didn’t know her exact age or even her birthday, but she was somewhere around four years old. Her eyes were big as she gazed at everything around her. She was warm and comfortable, riding just in front of her adoptive father and nestled inside his big furry coat. The world was a wondrous place. She paid no attention at all to her brother’s chatter.

  Brno, capital of the Margraviate of Moravia

  Kingdom of Bohemia

  To Morris Roth, it just looked like chaos. But he was sitting on a horse next to Franz von Mercy, and the general in overall command of the army seemed satisfied.

  Well enough, at any rate. He wasn’t exactly what you’d call happy.

  Why can’t you keep your men in order, Nottheffer?

  Von Mercy had the sort of voice that Morris thought would be quite handy in the noise of a battlefield. Being not more than six feet away from him, though, it got a little hard on the ears.

  Von Mercy must have sensed Roth’s unease and confusion. “It’s going well, General Roth, I assure you.” Waving his hand at the column of men marching past them, he added: “The start of a march always looks like this, especially with an army made up of elements that aren’t familiar with each other.”

  March. From what Morris could remember of his days in the U.S. Army, what was happening here on the outskirts of Brno was hardly what he’d have called a “march.” It reminded him more of demolition derby, using horses and wagons instead of cars.

  But he allowed that his memory might be playing tricks on him. Almost all of his experience with marching had come during basic training, in the tightly circumscribed and highly disciplined environment of Fort Ord, the big army base near Monterey, California.

  Big at the time, anyway. He’d learned long afterward that the army had closed most of Fort Ord in the mid-90s. That had produced the sort of reaction someone often gets when they discover that a place remembered vividly but not fondly no longer exists. An odd combination of good riddance to bad rubbish and nostalgia.

  Morris tried to remember if he’d marched anywhere once he got to Vietnam. Not that he could recall. So maybe
his memories of the well-ordered manner in which the up-time U.S army went from Point A to Point B was so much hogwash. Maybe things had been just as chaotic as this seemed to be.

  If he recalled correctly, the up-time military would have referred to this as an “evolution.” If so, apparently they were still in the age of Homo erectus.

  Where did you learn the difference between right and left, Betzinger? Hanging upside down in a cave with bats?

  What Morris did remember clearly and vividly was his surprise at hearing von Mercy and his other top officers project that it would take the Grand Army of the Sunrise—God, what a silly title!—ten days to reach Ostrava. And that was assuming good weather.

  Ten days? To go just a little over one hundred miles?

  Assuming you only marched for eight hours each day, that was an average speed of less than a mile and a half per hour. An old lady using a walker could move that fast!

  Well…not for eight hours, no. And certainly not if she also had to carry a backpack weighing sixty pounds or more.

  Still. It had seemed kind of ridiculous to him.

  Now, watching the “evolution” happening before his eyes, Morris was beginning to wonder if von Mercy hadn’t been wildly optimistic.

  Assuming the Grand Army of the Sunrise could make it to Ostrava on schedule, and assuming the Silesians could live up to their end of the deal, they’d then have to march to Bytom. That was another seventy miles. Almost two weeks, all told, even assuming the weather didn’t turn sour and they had to wait in Ostrava for it to clear up.

  What worried him even more was what would happen when—if, rather; whether it happened or not mostly depended on the Silesians—they launched the attack on Kraków.

  Kraków was sixty miles from Bytom. When von Mercy first explained the plan to Morris, after he’d talked to the Silesians over the radio, Morris had thought the notion of launching an assault on Kraków from Bytom seemed quite reasonable.

  Sixty miles. In blitzkrieg days, they could get there in a few hours.

  Abstractly, Morris had known that blitzkrieg was three centuries away. But his reptilian hindbrain still thought in twentieth-century terms when it came to warfare. Only now, watching the sluggish way a seventeenth-century army actually moved, did it finally register on him that the “assault” on Kraków was going to require at least two days and probably three—maybe even four—before the Grand Army of the Sunrise even got to Kraków.

  God, what a silly title. It’d have been better to call it the Grand Army of Perpetual Dawn, as slowly as the sun comes up in Here-and-Now Military Time.

  Three or four days to get from Bytom to Kraków—possibly five. Even the most sluggish garrison in the world could come alert in that period of time and get their defenses ready.

  But von Mercy and his officers didn’t seem very concerned about that. Hopefully, they understood something that Morris didn’t.

  Which…they might. As he’d told Wallenstein time and time again, Morris was not—not not not—a general, whatever title they gave him. So maybe Wallenstein also understood something he didn’t.

  It was possible. The man who was now king of Bohemia did have an impressive military record, which suggested he was canny and knowledgeable about such things.

  On the other hand, he’d also insisted on calling Morris’ army the Grand Army of the Sunrise, which indicated he was a loon.

  “I assure you, General Roth, it’s going quite well,” von Mercy repeated.

  But all Morris could think of was the line by Groucho Marx: Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

  Breslau (Wrocław), capital of Lower Silesia

  The departure of the diplomatic mission to Vienna was a more elaborate affair than Jozef and Christin’s leave-taking. For one thing, there were a lot more people involved.

  Riding in the carriage were Lukasz Opalinski, the supposed ambassador; Noelle Stull, the supposed wife; Denise Beasley, the supposed concubine; and Jakub Zaborowsky, the supposed chief adviser to the supposed ambassador.

  Although he was assigned to the carriage, Jakub didn’t plan to ride in it very often until they had almost reached Vienna. No fool, he. Riding on a horse would be a lot less bone-rattling than riding in a carriage on the roads they’d be traveling.

  Neither Lukasz nor the two women were at all happy at the arrangement, since all of them were familiar with what the seventeenth century called “roads.” But, unlike Jakub, it had been decided that they needed to maintain the pretense throughout the entire journey. It was possible—not likely, but possible—that the Ottomans would have spies watching them before they got very far.

  The carriage would also have two men driving it. As rough as the roads would be in places, the teamsters would need to spell each other.

  Riding in the escort was a detachment of Slovene cavalry, twelve men in all. They were commanded by one of Lovrenc Bravnicar’s lieutenants, a fellow by the name of Cvetko Horvat.

  But the main reason the mission didn’t set out at the same time as Jozef and Christin left for Poznań was the carriage itself. Here, problems had emerged.

  First, there was no suitable carriage anywhere in the city. Few carriages existed at all, because most inhabitants of the city very sensibly chose to ride in litters carried by two horses rather than having their teeth rattled by hard wheels passing over harder cobblestones. Just as with blitzkrieg, “shock absorbers” and “suspension systems” lived mostly in the imagination.

  Of the few carriages that did exist, none of them had been designed for long journeys over country roads, nor were they big enough for the purpose they would be used for.

  So, back to the drawing board. A large and sturdy wagon would have to be used. Such vehicles did exist in Breslau—quite a few of them, if you included the farms in the surrounding countryside. The problem with them, however, was that they had clearly been designed for the purpose of hauling foodstuffs and other such lowly items.

  What sort of “ambassadorial mission” to the Ottoman court would arrive in Vienna riding a farm wagon? At best, they’d be met with coarse jokes about cabbages and sent packing by the city’s guards.

  So, the vehicle had to be…not disguised, exactly, since there was really no way to disguise such a crude and simple vehicle. But it did have to be dressed up and decorated. A cabin had to be constructed and fixed to the wagon bed. Then, suitably painted. Then, suitably furnished.

  And, last but not least, the cabin’s design had to be much more intricate than it appeared to be, because four people were going to have to be smuggled out in it. So, cabinet makers had to be employed as well as carpenters.

  The final delay—this cost them a full day, because the girl’s mother had already left the city and was not there to squelch her—was caused by Denise.

  Up until the last stretch before their departure, Denise had been disgruntled by her assigned role in the mission. Concubine. Courtesan. Mistress. Pick whatever fancy name you wanted, you were still talking about a whore.

  But Denise was not given to pouting for all that long. She’d been making silk purses out of sow’s ears since she was old enough to wheedle, which she learned to do as soon as she could talk. So, a few days before the mission was to set out, she charged all over Breslau looking for a seamstress who had the skills (and background, which was trickier to find) to design and make Denise some suitable garments for a Polish nobleman’s concubine.

  Her “whore outfits,” she called them cheerily.

  She got them made, too. Just not quite in time.

  They might have forced her to leave without the costumes, but Lukasz intervened on her behalf. “It’s not a bad idea, actually. She’s right that it will make her disguise more credible.”

  * * *

  Jakub Zaborowsky, on the other hand, knew Lukasz was misreading the situation. Jakub had more experience dealing with Muslims than Lukasz did. Not from encounters with Ottoman Turks, of which he’d had few, but from encounters with Crimean Tatars, of which he
’d had a fair number.

  Yes, the Ottomans wouldn’t be surprised that a Polish nobleman brought a beautiful concubine with him on such a mission. But they’d be astonished—and immediately suspicious—if he allowed any other men to see her. As a wife, Noelle would be able to move about on occasion so long as she was suitably clothed and veiled. But a concubine would not.

  Without realizing what she was doing, Denise had consigned herself to rigid sequestration for the entire journey; what some Muslims (and Hindus, he’d heard) called purdah.

  But he said nothing. First, because the net effect would be exactly what Lukasz foresaw: Her costume would indeed make her guise very believable. But it would do so upside down, you might say—or inside out. Denise would have to be kept completely out of sight so that their hosts would think that a beautiful young woman was inside the carriage. And if by chance (or by foul design by some enterprising young lad) she was actually viewed, her appearance would add credibility and luster to the charade.

  Mostly, though, he said nothing because Jakub was an Orthodox Christian and none too devout about it. It was going to be a rough trip, especially when he had to ride inside the carriage. He had no objection at all to being pleasantly distracted along the way by Denise’s appearance.

  He’d have to keep her from realizing it, though. The girl was fierce.

  Ottoman siege lines southeast of Linz

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

  Murad began the withdrawal after the third snowfall. As with the first two, not much snow fell. But those had melted within a short time and this one looked to be staying for the winter. He’d only kept his men in the siege lines this long because he judged that if he retreated to Vienna too soon the army’s morale would suffer.

  It was a slow and careful withdrawal, since he had to keep his troops in position to repel any sortie the enemy might attempt.