1636: The Ottoman Onslaught Read online

  Noelle looked from Ilona to Janos. “Would you like something? A glass of wine?”

  “No. Well. I suppose… Yes. I would.”

  Noelle had never seen him like this. She turned to Ilona and said, “Bring us two glasses of wine, please. I’ll have one also.”

  She didn’t understand what was causing Janos to be so unsettled, but she figured if she had a glass of wine with him that might help settle his nerves. She drank little in the way of alcoholic beverages, although she’d found her consumption rising as time passed. In this as in so many ways, the seventeenth century’s standards were different from the ones she’d been accustomed to in the world of her birth.

  Janos remained silent until Ilona returned with the glasses of wine. “Are you going to want another glass later?” she asked him.

  Again, he seemed indecisive. “I don’t… Ah. I am not sure.”

  Fascinating. But there was no reason to keep Ilona up. The poor girl seemed tired.

  “Go back to bed, Ilona,” she said. “I know where the wine is, if we need more later.”

  The servant seemed a bit scandalized by the notion that her mistress could pour herself a glass of wine. But she said nothing; simply curtsied and left.

  Noelle turned back to Janos. By then, he’d already drained half the glass—which was also quite unlike him. Drugeth, like almost all noblemen Noelle had encountered since the Ring of Fire, drank a lot of wine in the course of a day. But he stretched it out, so that he never seemed tipsy. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him guzzle half a glass like that.

  Fascinating. What was on his mind?

  She went straight to the point. “Something is bothering you, Janos. What is it?”

  “Ah…” He drained the rest of the glass in one swallow.

  “Would you care for some more wine?”

  He raised the empty glass and stared at it for a moment. He seemed a bit startled that it was already empty.

  “Ah, no.” He set it down on the side table next to his chair. That motion, at least, was decisive. “The reason I came here tonight is because tomorrow we will fly back to Vienna.”

  She nodded. Janos had finished his negotiations with Wallenstein that afternoon. Nothing further could be settled until he spoke with Ferdinand to get the emperor’s approval to the terms he and the king of Bohemia had finally thrashed out. Eddie had flown the plane into Prague that same afternoon and would be ready to fly back out as soon as Janos and Noelle arrived at the airfield.

  “Once we get to Vienna,” Janos continued, “we will be staying in the Hofburg and as I’m sure you remember, it is rather crowded.”

  “To say the least,” she said, smiling. The type of buildings that up-time Americans thought of as “palaces,” like Versailles, generally dated from a much later period. There was a travel guide to Vienna in Grantville’s public library that Noelle had looked at before coming to Austria, and the “Hofburg” it depicted—much less the later and still more elaborate palace called Schönbrunn—was a far cry from what existed in the year 1636. Like most palaces in this time period, the Hofburg was a ramshackle structure parts of which dated back to the thirteenth century.

  As lavish as the furnishings might be, the Austrian royal palace was overflowing with people, between the royal family and live-in courtiers and a horde of servants. It had a population density that reminded Noelle of some of the poorer trailer parks she’d seen in West Virginia. Kids everywhere; dogs everywhere; people idling on every stair stoop.

  It finally dawned on her what Janos was skittering around, like the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof. She felt her own face getting warm.

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re worried we, ah, won’t have any privacy.”

  Janos smiled crookedly. “I can’t say I’m ‘worried’ about it, exactly. It is an absolute given that we will have no privacy.”

  His expression became solemn. “One of the things I will try to persuade the emperor to do is to remove the royal family to Linz. They should not be there when the Ottoman army arrives. Once the siege begins, it may prove impossible—it will certainly be difficult—to get them to safety. And you should go with them.”

  She started to protest but he held up his hand in a sharp gesture. “Please, Noelle! There is nothing you can do in a siege, and a great deal you can do elsewhere.”

  “Will you be staying?”

  “That will be up to the emperor. I suspect he’ll have other assignments for me, though, since he has Baudissin and other officers to lead the garrison. Once the royal family leaves the city, morale is likely to suffer, but the remedy for that is to have one of the younger family members volunteer to stay behind. That would be Leopold. Possibly Cecilia Renata as well.”

  The logic was cold-blooded, but she understood it. The two oldest of Ferdinand II’s four children were the current emperor Ferdinand III and his sister Maria Anna, now married to Fernando, the King in the Netherlands. Ferdinand III had already sired a son and a daughter, and Maria Anna was reported to be pregnant. Even if that pregnancy did not come to term, Maria Anna was safely ensconced in Brussels, half a continent away from the oncoming Ottoman army.

  That left the two youngest siblings, Leopold and Cecilia Renata, as something in the way of supernumeraries so far as preserving the dynasty was concerned. Having one of them stay in the capital during the siege would help the morale of the defending forces.

  She brought her mind back to the subject at hand. There was no way that her marriage to Janos could be moved forward. No date had even been set yet, since the looming siege would make the sort of huge semi-official—more like three-quarters-official—ceremony impossible to organize.

  Noelle had been taken aback when she realized what Janos and Emperor Ferdinand had in mind for the wedding. She still found it surreal that anyone was deluded enough to think that one Noelle Stull, née Murphy, was a suitable subject for the sort of weddings she’d never seen except on television.

  Abstractly, she understood the logic here as well. Janos Drugeth was one of Austria-Hungary’s most prominent noblemen and known to be one of the emperor’s closest friends and confidants. Any marriage in which he was one of the participants was bound to be a major quasi-state affair, if for no other reason than to satisfy the always-tender sensibilities of the Hungarian aristocracy. The fact that he was marrying an American added a certain frisson to the business. There was still a wide range of opinions on the part of Europe’s aristocracy on the subject of exactly where Americans should be placed in the established social hierarchy. A number of Austrians had settled on the formula of referring to all Americans by the appellation “von Up-time”—an expression which Noelle thought was ridiculous and which she knew both Mike Stearns and Ed Piazza actively detested.

  But whatever their attitude might be, one thing was clear: Americans were all celebrities. Back in the day, some people had fawned over Zsa Zsa Gabor, some people had found her ridiculous or even contemptible, and most hadn’t cared very much one way or the other. But everyone had heard of her.

  Of course, there were celebrities, and then there were celebrities. Some were movie stars known the world over; others were minor figures known only in a particular locale. So it was with Americans also, here in the seventeenth century. Nobody thought of the local American souse of a handyman as the prince of anything. But the fact that he was American was still a matter of note.

  The changed reality had snuck up on Noelle, but she was now a lot closer to such people as Mike Stearns or Ed Piazza or Melissa Mailey in the pantheon of American Legendary Figures, Large and Small, than she’d been a year ago. She wasn’t very happy with the change, either. But…

  Her thoughts were skittering away again.

  When in doubt, Noelle usually found refuge in bluntness.

  “I’m a virgin,” she said abruptly. She could have added the qualification technically speaking but saw no point in detailing the complex behavioral permutations of her relationship with a former boyfriend who’d
never come through the Ring of Fire so he couldn’t gainsay her anyway. The way she figured it, appendages other than The One didn’t count.

  Janos’ face was stiff. “I did not ask,” he said.

  “Yes, I noticed. And I appreciated it. But since it looks as if my, ah, maidenly status is about to change, I figured you ought to know that I’m likely to fumble around the business. Some.”

  That broke his wooden expression. “I am not concerned about that in the least!”

  “Okay, then.” She rose to her feet and extended her hand. “Follow me.”

  He came to his feet and took her hand. Then, hesitated. “I do not—are you concerned about—how to put it?”

  “Getting pregnant? It’s not likely, tonight. But it doesn’t matter because I hold to our church’s teachings on the subject of birth control. If I get pregnant, so be it.”

  He was still hesitant. “I may not—it’s possible—that I will not survive this war.”

  “I understand that. In which case I might wind up with a so-called illegitimate child on my hands, even though I think coupling the words ‘illegitimate’ and ‘child’ is grotesque.”

  She grinned, then. “Quit stalling, buddy. You started this, I didn’t—but the girl is willing.”

  She didn’t expand that to willing as all hell because that might be blasphemy. In the seventeenth century, you never knew.

  * * *

  Prague’s airfield—you call hardly call it an “airport”—was located just beyond the walls of the “New Town,” the section of the city known in Czech as Nové Město. To get to it you had to pass through the Horse Gate, so named because the area adjacent to it within the walls was the Horse Market. The Horse Market would eventually be renamed Wenceslas Square, assuming the history of this universe remained faithful to the nomenclature of another.

  Which… it might or might not. In the Americans’ universe, the name change hadn’t taken place until the revolution of 1848. But in this universe, it might never happen at all or it could happen at any moment. The city’s Jews were now often referring to the Jewish quarter as the “Josefov,” in honor of the emperor Joseph II in another universe who would emancipate Prague’s Jews in his Toleration Edict of 1781. Given that in this universe the city’s Jews had already been emancipated a quarter of a millennium earlier by King Albrecht II (aka Wallenstein), that renaming seemed impolitic as well as absurd.

  But, such was the nature of terminological upheavals produced by cosmic catastrophes. As had been said more than once, the Ring of Fire had a lot to answer for.

  Eddie Junker had the Steady Girl fueled and ready to go shortly after sunrise, because Noelle had told him the day before that she and Janos wanted to get to Vienna as early in the day as possible. So he was disgruntled—he’d risen an hour and a half before dawn—that they didn’t show up until late in the morning. By his very excellent watch, 10:06 AM, to be precise.

  Seeing the way they held on to each other as they neared, which he coupled with their slow progress, constant nuzzling and generally vacuous expressions, he made certain deductions and came to certain conclusions.

  He was still ticked off. Getting up at 3:30 in the morning was a wretched business and those responsible needed a really good excuse to justify their own failure to match the schedule. A major earthquake, an outbreak of plague, the apocalypse, something of that nature. Getting laid just didn’t cut the mustard, even if Noelle had waited a preposterous amount of time to take care of the business.

  “Are we finally ready to go?” he demanded, once they had reached the plane.

  There was no answer. They were back to nuzzling again.

  “This is getting ridiculous,” said Eddie.

  Chapter 26

  Vienna, capital of Austria-Hungary

  The young woman on the stage finished the piece she was playing with a flourish, both vocally and with the fiddle itself. The audience in the reception chamber burst into applause.

  Some of the applause was tentative, tepid, even tremulous. The audience was mostly made up of Austrian and Hungarian nobility, who were not accustomed to this sort of music. Some of them were dubious that it qualified as “music” at all. But since the performer was closely associated with Americans, even if she was not American herself, they extended her the benefit of the doubt.

  Others, though, had no doubts at all. No sooner had Minnie Hugelmair finished her rendition of “The Wabash Cannonball” than Denise Beasley and Judy Wendell both jumped to their feet and started whooping and hollering to go along with their hand-clapping.

  The audience stared at them for a second or two, unsure whether this unseemly display should be the cause of further applause or disapproving silence. But that issue was settled a moment later, when Archduke Leopold rose to his feet and joined the clapping—thought not the hollering and whooping—followed almost immediately by his sister, Archduchess Cecilia Renata. It took the assembled audience, most of whom were well-trained courtiers, no time at all to mimic their betters.

  Minnie did a bow coupled with a curtsy of sorts—something of a truncated one, since she had both hands engaged with the fiddle and the bow—grinning in a manner that was just as unseemly as the music itself. Those who knew her well, which now included Judy as well as Denise, understood that the grin was largely derisive. Minnie Hugelmair had no illusions at all concerning her position in the eyes of Austria-Hungary’s aristocracy—and didn’t care in the least.

  When her eyes—eye, rather—met those of Leopold, the grin transmuted into something a lot more friendly. She hadn’t decided yet what sort of relationship she might wind up having with the youngest of the Austro-Hungarian empire’s four royal siblings, but of one thing she was now certain. Unlike most of the people feigning applause in the room, Leopold’s applause was genuine. And unlike most of the people in the room, Leopold understood that she was an actual person.

  Not very well, to be sure. He had been born and raised in a manner that made such an understanding difficult. But she was willing to give him credit for trying. He was having a definite influence on his sister, too.

  All four of the siblings were close to each other, from what Minnie and her friends had been able to ascertain. That was probably due in part to the fact they were close in age. Ferdinand, now the emperor, had been born in July of 1608. The other three had all been born in the month of January—of the year 1610, in the case of Maria Anna; 1611, in the case of Cecilia Renata, and 1614 in the case of Leopold Wilhelm. Less than a six year spread, all told.

  The fact that Leopold was favorably inclined toward Minnie had made Cecilia Renata less skeptical of the ragamuffin and her friends than she would have been otherwise. That lowered guard, in turn, had led her to become better acquainted with Judy Wendell. Up until then, Cecilia Renata had very mixed feelings about the beautiful young American. On the one hand, she’d been just as outraged as any other proper aristocrat at Judy’s astonishingly rude treatment of her brother Leopold Wilhelm when the archduke had made physical advances on her. On the other hand…

  He was also her younger brother and who knew better than his closest sibling—especially a sister!—just how richly deserved that rebuke had been. True, Judy shouldn’t have kneed him in the testicles. That was very crude. But she was a commoner, so what could you expect? Cecilia Renata could remember plenty of occasions in her childhood when she’d been sorely tempted to do the same.

  Well… perhaps not knee him in the testicles. But hit him on the head? Oh, surely. Punch him in the nose? Yes, that too.

  Once Cecilia Renata became better acquainted with Judy Wendell, she found herself becoming friends with the girl. She was a few years older than the American—twenty-four years of age as opposed to Judy Wendell’s eighteen years. But Judy had a dry, sardonic wit that Cecilia Renata enjoyed and which resonated with her own detached and acerbic view of most of the people around her. Being a member of the royal family who lacked much in the way of direct power but had a great deal of indirect i
nfluence had made Cecilia Renata skeptical of most people’s motives. When they fawned on her they usually wanted something.

  Judy Wendell never fawned on Cecilia Renata—nor on anyone else, so far as she could determine. The young American knew she was gorgeous and accepted that in the same spirit she accepted the sky being blue and water being wet. It was just a fact—an enjoyable one, in this case—but nothing she took credit for herself, any more than she’d take credit for the color of the sky or the wetness of water.

  Cecilia Renata knew that she herself was not beautiful. She didn’t think she was ugly, certainly, and everyone agreed that she had very lovely red hair. But she also shared her brother Leopold’s long, bony nose, even if she didn’t have as pronounced a lower lip as most Habsburgs. And, like Leopold, she was on the tall and gangly side.

  When you were royalty, however, appearance didn’t matter very much. Someone would marry you even if you looked like a troll. But that too, in its own way, strengthened Cecilia Renata’s sometimes mordant outlook. Trust nothing anyone says to you, especially about yourself, unless you know them very well.

  She was becoming more and more inclined toward getting to know Judy Wendell very well.

  * * *

  At the reception, following the performance, most of the gathered nobility fell back into comfortable habits and ignored Minnie Hugelmair completely. This suited her just fine because there weren’t that many people there whom she had any desire to talk to anyway.

  She started with Denise, as she usually did. “You should leave with Eddie,” she told her, in a tone that made the statement an outright command.

  Which, naturally, made Denise bridle. The girl did not react well to instruction, especially coming from someone who was no farther up Denise’s mental pecking order than her best friend. Anybody except a jerk heard what her best friend had to say, but that didn’t mean you had to listen to her.

  “Why?” she demanded immediately. “Are you planning to leave?”