1635: The Eastern Front Read online

  Either way, especially as they were in a panic over the oncoming and relentless pursuit, Kuefer had figured the deserters would try to rush the barricade and simply drive over the presumed handful of men guarding it.

  So it proved. At the last moment, one of the deserters spotted the mouth of cannon barrel hidden behind some branches, and tried to call out a warning.

  But by then it was too late. "Fire!" Wilhelm shouted. The saker belched a double load of canister. At that point-blank range—the nearest deserter was less than ten feet away—the canister slaughtered every man in its path. It didn't spread very far, but Kuefer didn't care. The noise and the carnage would be enough to stun the now-completely-disorganized crowd of deserters. And as soon as he shouted the command to fire, all of the militiamen behind the abattis fired a volley. That took down another dozen men. By now, almost half of the band of deserters had been killed or wounded.

  Such horrendous casualties would have routed even a disciplined unit of good soldiers. This rabble immediately tried to flee back up the road. Several of them dropped their weapons along the way.

  Three of them tried to scramble up the slope to find safety in the forest beyond. But militiamen had been waiting in the woods also, and gunned them down as soon as they reached the crest.

  Then, before the last of the Holk deserters had disappeared around the bend, Kuefer could hear more guns firing. Kresse had arrived, obviously.

  It was almost comical, in its own way. Now the deserters came racing back. The cannon wasn't reloaded yet, but many of the militiamen had been able to reload their rifles. They started firing again. Not in a volley, but it hardly mattered.

  By the time Kresse's men appeared, there weren't more than five deserters left alive and uninjured. You couldn't say "left standing," though, because all five of them were lying on the ground, trying to pretend they were dead.

  Wilhelm shook his head. Fat lot of good that would do them.

  If it had been left to Kuefer himself, he'd have simply had the men shot right then and there, along with any wounded deserters. But perhaps that was the reason Georg Kresse was in command, rather than him.

  Unlike Wilhelm, Georg had taken into account the problem of disposing of the bodies. You simply couldn't leave that many corpses lying around, in an area with as many villages as the Upper Vogtland. Leaving aside the problem of the children—some would be terrified and upset at seeing the bodies; still worse, others would be thrilled and begin mutilating them—there was the ever-present danger of disease.

  Digging a grave for that many bodies was a lot of work, though. Hard work. Kresse was a popular commander of irregular soldiers not only because he kept their casualties to a minimum but because he kept their labor to a minimum also.

  So, he let the wounded live, and had them dragged off to the side of the road. He provided them with no medical care, though. If they died, they died—and, indeed, several did in the time it took the five survivors to dig a mass grave some thirty yards into the woods. Wilhelm knew that the only reason Georg was keeping the wounded alive at all was to give the toiling grave-diggers the hope that they might be allowed to live.

  Digging the grave took almost the whole day. By the time all the bodies were hauled to it and dumped in, it was late afternoon. That work was done by the deserters also, of course. Kresse's men and the militiamen spent a pleasant day lounging in the shade and watching.

  By sundown, it was all done, except for shoveling the dirt back over the corpses. Unfortunately, that last bit of work would have to be done by Kresse's people and the militiamen.

  At Kresse's command, the five survivors were hauled to the edge of the grave. Two of them began shouting protests, but only one made any attempt to resist. He was immediately clubbed senseless and fell into the grave. The other four were shoved roughly to their knees.

  "All right," said Kresse. "Shoot them."

  Three of the four bodies fell into the grave on their own. The last one was sent in with a rough boot.

  Kresse pointed to the one still-living Holk soldier, the one who'd been beaten unconscious. "Him too."

  "Bury him alive!" shouted one of the militiamen. That was old Selig Hirsch, the local tanner. Kuefer didn't blame him. One of his sons had been murdered by soldiers a few years back, along with two of the son's children.

  But Kresse shook his head. "We're not savages. Shoot him, I said."

  Wilhelm had been expecting that order also, and did the shooting himself. Georg Kresse was as harsh a man as ever lived in these mountains. But only his enemies claimed he was cruel. None of his irregulars would have used that term, not would any of the farmers and townsmen in the Upper Vogtland. He was simply, and fortunately, what the times had produced.

  By the time they returned to the mine, Kresse had come to a decision. The first person he spoke to was the woman with whom he shared a small cell in the mine constructed from old timbers. That was Anna Piesel, his betrothed.

  "Anna, I want you to go to Magdeburg." He hooked a thumb at Kuefer. "I'll send Wilhelm and some other men as an escort until you're into Thuringia. After that, you should be safe enough. Take Friedrich and Hannelore, also. They could both use some rest in a tavern, and they're old enough to pass as your parents."

  He smiled, seeing Piesel's little glare. She was a good woman, but a bit vain about her looks. "I said, ‘old enough.' I didn't claim there was any resemblance." Friedrich was downright ugly, and the best you could say for Hannelore's appearance was "dumpy."

  "Why do you want me to go to Magdeburg? That'll take weeks, Georg!"

  "At least six, I'm figuring. Quite possibly more. But we're not going to be doing much here during that time. It'd be idiotic for us to launch any major attacks, when the Swedes and the USE army are going to be spending those same weeks pounding the Saxon army into a pulp. I figure we may as well just sit and wait. The real struggle will come then, not now. What sort of Saxony will emerge, once the elector's driven out? You know the Swedes, Anna. Gustav Adolf will set up the same sort of military administration he's used in other conquered provinces. That is not what we want. We want a republic in Saxony, nothing less."

  Kuefer spoke up. "But, Georg . . . ​the Americans . . ."

  "What about them? Be realistic, Wilhelm. Even if they're inclined themselves toward a republic, it's not an issue over which they'd risk a rupture with Gustav Adolf." Kresse shook his head. " ‘Prince of Germany,' the damn fools call Stearns. But I notice that's never stopped him from making compromises with royalty and nobility every time he turns around."

  "That's not fair, Georg," Piesel said mildly.

  "Maybe not. But I'm still not relying on the good graces of the up-timers. No, we need to get the Committees of Correspondence involved. And that's why I'm sending you to Magdeburg. I want Richter, Anna. Tell her we want her to come to Dresden after the elector's gone."

  Anna's eyes got a little wider. "Gretchen Richter herself? Do you think she'd really come?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. But if nothing else, we'll test her reputation. We'll see if she's as inclined toward half-measures as the Americans are."

  Part One

  June 1635

  The fever of the world

  Chapter 1

  Magdeburg, central Germany

  Capital of the United States of Europe

  After they'd completed the grand tour—Michael's phrase; and a disturbingly appropriate one—of their new home, and had returned to the entrance foyer, Rebecca looked around. Her gaze was simultaneously uncertain, dubious, apprehensive, wary, skittish . . .

  She tried to avoid the term "covetous." Not . . . ​entirely successfully. Compared to the modest working-class house owned by the Stearns family in Grantville, much less the cramped apartments Rebecca and Michael had been occupying since they moved to Magdeburg, this house was both immense and luxurious. In truth, it was more in the way of a mansion than a house, if not a manor as such. The building was immediately adjacent to its neighbors and had
almost no yard; what the up-timers called a townhouse. But by the inner city standards of Magdeburg it was as close to a mansion as you could get, short of an outright palace.

  The very foyer she was standing in exemplified her mixed feelings. The "foyer" in Mike's house in Grantville had been a simple entry vestibule, just large enough to provide the house with a heat trap in winter and space to hang some coats. The foyer in this house bore a closer resemblance to the hall of an auditorium. You could hold a fairly large party in this space.

  Andrew Short came into the foyer from a side door that led to the rooms in the back of the house. "Splendid field of fire," he announced, giving the area a sweeping gaze that had none of Rebecca's doubts and anxieties. He was actually rubbing his hands!

  "There's no way in except through that door"—he jabbed a forefinger at the main entrance—"and the service entrance in the rear. And anyone who tries to come through here, we'll slaughter the bastards. Assuming they get in at all."

  Rebecca studied the entrance in question. For all its ornate decorations, the "door" looked like it belonged in a castle. It was a double door, huge, made of solid oak further braced with iron, and seemed to have enough in the way of locks and latches to sink a rowboat—not to mention the heavy crossbar resting nearby that could be added in a pinch. The "service entrance" in the back was similar in design and construction, if smaller and completely utilitarian.

  There were no other entrances on the ground floor of the mansion. Rebecca had been struck by that: not so much as a single window. Not even a barred one, or an old-style arrow slit. Anyone attempting to assault the house would either have to smash down the heavy doors, blow a hole in the thick stonework of the walls, or scale the second floor using ladders. And those windows were barred. True, the bars were tastefully designed. They were also thick and too closely spaced for a human body to pass through.

  For all practical purposes, their new home was an urban fortress. That was hardly surprising, since it had been planned and built with that purpose in mind. Michael Stearns had known for more than a year that he'd eventually be leaving Magdeburg for long stretches of time, and he was bound and determined to keep his wife and children as well protected as possible in his absence. By now, more than four years after the Ring of Fire, he had lots of enemies. Many of them were bitter and some of them were prone to violence.

  Rebecca had plenty of enemies herself, for that matter. If she wasn't as prominent as her husband in the political affairs of the new United States of Europe, she wasn't that far behind him, either—and had the added distinction of being a Jewess.

  Andrew spoke again, now jabbing his finger at the ceiling. "And look there! Murder holes! Ha! They'll be surprised to run into that, should the bastards made the attempt."

  He didn't specify the names or even the nature of "the bastards." For someone like Andrew Short, it hardly mattered. He and his small clan had transferred their allegiance from the king of England to the person many people called the prince of Germany. Princes had enemies, it was a given; and such enemies were bastards. Also a given.

  Rebecca stared up at the ceiling. Murder holes. She knew what they were, abstractly, but such devices were something she associated with medieval castles. Here, in a modern town house built as much as possible along up-time lines . . .

  Finally, she spotted them. They were cleverly disguised as further decorations in a heavily decorated ceiling. Wood inlays, to a casual observer. But she had no doubt the wood inlays were slats that could be easily slid aside, exposing any attackers below to fire from above.

  She shook her head and looked away. The headshake was simply rueful, not a gesture of denial or criticism. She knew all too well the risks she and her husband—and their children—were taking and had been taking for years. If any reminder were needed, the mayor of Grantville and one of the town's ministers had been assassinated just three months earlier. By fanatic reactionary anti-Semites, it was presumed—exactly the sort of people who hated Rebecca with a passion and had been writing and spreading vicious propaganda about her for at least two years now.

  True, the savage response of the Committees of Correspondence to those murders had resulted in the effective destruction of organized anti-Semitism in the Germanies. For a time, at least. But that made it perhaps even more likely that a fanatic or small group of fanatics might seek vengeance by assassinating the most famous Jew in the United States of Europe. Who was now Rebecca herself, without any doubt, much to her surprise.

  Her dark thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of her daughter Sepharad, who barreled into the foyer from another of the side doors. "Barreled," at least, insofar as the term could be applied to a toddler still some months shy of her third birthday.

  Sepharad also had dark deeds on her mind. "Mommy! Mommy! Barry's messing in the cupboards like he shouldn't!"

  Rebecca made a face. Not at the reported crime itself—two-and-a-half-year-old boys were given to rummaging in nooks and crannies; girls too, at that age—but at the name.

  Barry. Rebecca detested that nickname and refused to use it herself.

  The child's real name was Baruch. Baruch de Spinoza, originally. He'd been orphaned in the siege of Amsterdam and then adopted by Rebecca and Michael.

  Yes, that Spinoza. The Spinoza. Still some years short of his future as a great philosopher, of course. But Rebecca had high hopes. Surely his current investigations were a harbinger of things to come.

  Alas, hers was an uphill struggle against doughty antagonists. On this subject, even her husband and daughter were ranked among Rebecca's enemies.

  Barry, when it should be Baruch. And Rebecca knew full well that Michael was conspiring with Jeff Higgins to have the innocent boy fitted with a Harley-Davidson jacket and a Cat cap as soon as possible. They'd take him fishing, too, and teach him to ride a motorcycle. They'd already sworn they would.

  Before Rebecca could intervene, though, Jenny Hayes appeared in the foyer, holding the selfsame philosopher/young miscreant in her arms. Judging from the smile on the teenager's face, whatever Baruch might have encountered in his adventures had been harmless enough.

  "You shouldn't be spreading alarms, Sepharad," Hayes chided the girl. "Baruch couldn't have come to no grief. T'aren't nothing in those cupboards yet anyway, since we've just started unpacking."

  Rebecca returned the smile. She considered the addition of the very large Short-Hayes family to their household a great and unmitigated good.

  This, for several reasons. Some of them were obvious. The men were former Yeoman Warders in the Tower of London and would provide the household with the finest security force you could ask for. The women were generally pleasant and invariably hard-working, and would be a great help in managing such a huge establishment. The children were numerous, ranged widely in age, and would make good companions and playmates for her own children.

  Best of all, though, was that the family's unquestioned matriarch was Patricia Hayes, and Patricia was of the old school. Whatever the mistress of the house wanted, she got—and Patricia had figured out very quickly that Rebecca's attitude when it came to nicknames was quite unlike her husband's.

  And who cared what the husband thought? Michael Stearns was now a general in the army, about to go gallivanting off to some foreign war. The mistress of the house mattered. He didn't.

  So, it would be "Baruch," not "Barry." "Sepharad," not the grotesque "Sephie" favored by most up-timers including—

  Michael came into the foyer, followed by Anthony Leebrick and Patrick Welch. He looked down at his daughter and smiled.

  "And what are you carrying on about, Sephie?"

  Her husband.

  Later that morning, Michael made his farewells. By then, their younger daughter Kathleen was energetically crawling about the foyer and doing her own investigations. So, she participated in the leave-taking ceremonies along with her mother and siblings. Whether or not the nine-month-old infant understood the nature of the occasion was perhaps doubtful.
Although, the way she clutched her father's shoulders when he picked her up for a good-bye kiss would seem to indicate some apprehension on her part at his coming absence.

  But maybe she just found the epaulets fascinating. They were the one feature of the uniform of an officer in the USE army that was unabashedly flamboyant. These were not the subdued shoulder straps of the up-time American military, but the sort of golden-tasseled insignia that were used by Napoleonic-era armies. On the otherwise rather subdued field-gray uniform, they quite stood out.

  Eventually, Kathleen released her grip and Michael handed her back to her current nursemaid, Mary Hayes. He then gave Rebecca a final kiss—nothing perfunctory, either, she made sure of that—and off he went, with his two new staff officers trailing in his wake.

  Some part of Rebecca wondered if she would ever see her husband again, but she squelched that quickly enough.

  He's a general, she told herself firmly. Ignoring, just as firmly, her knowledge that in the seventeenth century army generals often led from the front and were quite apt to be killed in battle.

  Rebecca spent some time thereafter restlessly moving about the house, doing her own investigations. She spent a fair amount of that time in the several toilets and bathrooms scattered through the huge dwelling, testing their various devices and taking what comfort she could from them.

  Which was considerable, actually. Newly designed and built, the house had modern plumbing. Rebecca had grown up with seventeenth-century sanitation facilities, and was certainly capable of managing with such. She'd been doing so again for the past two years, after all. But her stay in Grantville had spoiled her in that regard.

  Fortunately, it had done the same thing for every down-timer who passed through the up-time American town. By now, there was a flourishing new industry in central Europe and the Low Countries producing the wherewithal for modern plumbing. The same industries were beginning to appear in France, Italy and Poland, if not yet in Spain and England.