1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  “And you’ll send them to help defend Linz?”

  “Yes,” said the emperor, smiling genially. “Given that I’m diverting so many forces against that bastard Władysław”—that came with genuine venom—“it behooves me to bolster our forces facing the Ottomans as well. That will add around fifteen thousand men to the lines at Linz.”

  He held up an admonishing finger. “And I’m going to insist that King Christian send most of those twenty thousand troops he’s got lolling about in Copenhagen down to Linz as well. He’s slacked off long enough.”

  Thorsten felt as if a noose was being slowly tightened around his neck. “Which leaves…”

  “Lower Silesia! Which is now completely undefended, seeing as how that firebrand Richter chose to take all her troops to seize Kraków. Ha! I’ll say this much. She’s a bold woman.”

  The emperor’s implied criticism of Richter had as much sincerity as the proverbial crocodile’s tears.

  Thorsten considered, and then rejected, raising the fact that the original plan had been to send units of the SoTF’s National Guard to defend Lower Silesia. Clearly, that idea had been plowed under by Gustav Adolf’s swelling ambitions toward Poland.

  “Which leaves you!” the emperor boomed cheerfully. “I have it on good authority—that would be my own judgment, which is the best authority of all—that you’ve done a good enough job of recruiting and training our three new divisions—”

  “Your Majesty, we don’t even have one division recruited yet.”

  “Don’t quibble with me. You’ve set up the needed structure to continue the work under someone else. One of your many talents is that you have an eye for good subordinates. Don’t deny it!”

  Thorsten didn’t because…well, he couldn’t. That was one of his talents.

  “So!” continued Gustav Adolf. “I hereby promote you to brigadier and order you to select the best of the two brigades you’ve already trained—”

  Started to train, Thorsten thought glumly, but he didn’t say it out loud. That would be pointless, given the emperor’s current ebullience.

  “—and take it to Breslau. Where better to complete their training?”

  For the first time since the session had started, Caroline spoke up. “Your Majesty, Thorsten still hasn’t fully recovered from his injuries.”

  Yet again, Gustav Adolf waved his hand. Dismissively, this time. “He’s recovered well enough. I doubt very much if he’ll be looking at any combat for at least six months. Ha! Not with Richter stirring things up the way she is in Kraków. Besides, I want you to go with him.”

  Now, Kristina spoke up. “Papa! If Caroline’s going, then I want to go too!”

  The emperor’s genial smile was now bestowed on his daughter. “Why, yes. I think that’s a splendid idea. Get the people of Lower Silesia accustomed to their future empress. As Americans would say, the cherry on top of the cake.”

  Part Five

  February 1637

  The sun turns black, earth sinks into the sea,

  The bright stars vanish from the sky

  “The Seeress’s Prophecy,” The Poetic Edda

  Chapter 25

  Linz, provisional capital of Austria-Hungary

  “I’m a traitor,” pronounced Melissa Mailey. Slowly, she lowered herself onto one of the armchairs in the apartment she and James Nichols shared in the provisional royal palace in Linz.

  So-called “palace,” it might be better to say. The edifice had once been Linz’s town hall, which Emperor Ferdinand III had sequestered for royal use as soon as he arrived in Linz. He’d now had experience with up-time plumbing. The town hall had had no such plumbing, but it could be installed readily enough—and more easily than it could in the official royal palace in Linz. That was a large castle that dated back to medieval times, although it had been renovated and expanded a few decades earlier during the reign of Emperor Rudolf II.

  The castle had become the government center, but the royal family resided in the former town hall, which had now been renamed the “imperial palace.” Normally, commoners such as Melissa and James would not have been quartered there. But since James doubled as the doctor for Austria-Hungary’s royal family as well as Gustav Adolf, and Melissa had become a close companion—a term she herself detested, under the circumstances—of Empress Mariana, they had been given some chambers in the palace.

  “I know it in the marrow of my now creaking bones,” Melissa continued, after coming to rest in the chair. “Traitor, turncoat, renegade, betrayer, quisling—you name it and the term could be branded on my forehead like they branded the ‘A’ on that adulteress in What’s-his-name’s The Scarlet Letter.”

  “It was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and the letter A was actually just sewn onto her dress. She wasn’t branded with it.”

  Melissa glared at him. “And since when did you become a connoisseur of American literature? Mister I’m-just-a-ruffian-from-Chicago’s-ghetto and never mind the MD after my name.”

  James smiled. “What do you think? They made me read it in high school. God, I hated that book. Probably why I remember it so well.” He studied her for a moment and then said: “Why don’t you just face it, Melissa? You like the woman, that’s all.”

  “She’s a fucking empress, James. Got serfs and everything. Well, sorta-serfs.”

  “She was born into that station; she didn’t choose it.”

  “So what? You think she wouldn’t have chosen it, if given the option of being an empress or a peasant?” Melissa grimaced. “She’d have probably done better to have chosen the other way, though. Her life would have been a lot harder but it might have lasted longer. I looked her up in the records. Did you know she died in childbirth at the age of forty?”

  The grimace got darker. “And then her husband’s second wife also died in childbirth—at the age of seventeen. Seventeen, James! I swear, getting pregnant if you’re in the upper crust almost amounts to a death sentence, in this benighted century.”

  “Pretty much all centuries up until the nineteen thirties,” James agreed. “I hate to admit it, but that was often the fault of doctors—which rich women could afford and poor ones couldn’t. Human childbirth is inherently more dangerous than it is for other mammals”—he reached up and rapped a forefinger on his skull—“because our heads are so big. But at least a poor woman’s midwife wasn’t likely to compound the problem, which doctors usually did.”

  “You forgot to mention that all doctors in this day and age—that didn’t change until the twentieth century either—were male, and all the women who died were not.”

  James smiled again. “Come on, Melissa. You’re not in a bad mood today because of rampant male chauvinism—which, I’ll admit, does ramp around a lot in the seventeenth century.”

  “‘Ramp’ is not a verb.”

  “Ever the schoolmarm. To get back to the subject, what’s really bugging you is that you’ve made Mariana probably the most popular empress in Austrian history.” He clucked his tongue. “And that comes right on the heels of your buddy Mary Simpson making Mariana’s sister-in-law Maria Anna—what is it with the Habsburgs fixation on names, anyway?—the most popular queen in the history of the dynasty. The ‘Wheelbarrow Queen,’ they call her. That’s because—”

  “Mrs. Admiral Simpson is not my buddy!” Melissa interjected. Then, sourly: “And I know why they call her the ‘Wheelbarrow Queen,’ thank you. As if one good deed makes up for centuries of royal exploitation and oppression of millions of commoners.”

  James rose from the couch and headed for the tiny kitchen. “I’m making tea. You want some? It’s real tea, by the way. I got it yesterday. If you ask me what it cost, I’ll invoke the Fifth Amendment.”

  “Yes. Thank you. I don’t need to ask you what it cost because thanks to our coddling of their imperial majesties we’re rolling in dough. Like I said: traitor, turncoat, renegade, betrayer, quisling—and now we can add overpaid lackey to the list. For God’s sake, James! All I’m doing is shephe
rding a damn empress who doesn’t know squat about medicine to visit wounded and sick soldiers. For this she gets showered with praise and I get showered with silver? It’s disgusting.”

  Having started the water heating, James came back into the room. “Boy, you really are in a bad mood. Melissa, the reason you’re doing all that is because it helps the war effort—which it does; don’t deny it—and whatever gripes you have with Austria-Hungary’s royalty aren’t a tenth of what you’d have if we lived under Sultan Murad’s rule.”

  He resumed his seat on the couch. “Of course, your complaints would be short-lived, since the standard Ottoman remedy for displeasing the authorities is to have you garroted and tossed into the Sea of Marmara.”

  Melissa went back to glaring at him.

  * * *

  Gustav Adolf climbed out of the Magdeburg’s gondola. Then, stretched. He’d crammed himself into the armored turret and stayed there for at least five minutes, giving it a careful inspection despite the fact that it had been designed for a woman about half his size.

  “Fortunately, I do not suffer from—what’s your American term for it? Clusterphobia?”

  “Claustrophobia,” said Julie Sims. “‘Phobia’ means ‘fear of,’ and I don’t know exactly what the ‘claustro’ part of it translates into English, but the whole word means ‘fear of tight places.’ ‘Clusterphobia’ would be fear of clusters. I guess.”

  Done with his stretching, the emperor of the USE looked down on her. His gaze combined respect, curiosity, and some genuine concern.

  “Can you do it, Julie? You know what you will most likely be facing.”

  Julie shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Unless the Ottomans have suddenly lost their usual skill at war, the sultan will be having all his airships refitted for the sole and single purpose of killing me.” She grinned. “I wonder if ‘Juliephobia’ is a valid medical term. It’d be nifty it if was.”

  The grin went away. “To answer your question, though—yes, I can do it. Yes, I know the risk. But it’s nothing that my husband hasn’t faced already a dozen times on a battlefield. I can’t very well natter at him for getting a swelled head if I’m not willing to walk in his shoes.”

  “If that is all that concerns you, I can issue an imperial decree forbidding all officers in my service from bragging to their wives.” He shook his head, with a doleful expression. “I probably couldn’t enforce it, though.”

  Julie’s grin came back. “No kidding.”

  The two of them climbed down the scaffolding that provided access to the gondola and began walking away from the enormous airship. The Magdeburg had flown in that morning from its hangar on the large lake in Bavaria known as the Chiemsee, about a hundred miles to the west. After Murad withdrew his forces to Vienna, it had become safe to station the huge airship there. Given the weather in winter, the Magdeburg was far better protected by its hangar on the Chiemsee than it would be just tethered to a mast in Linz.

  The weather was mild today, at least by February standards, just as the meteorologists had predicted it would be. There were times when Gustav Adolf thought that was the greatest of all the American skills—to be able to foretell the weather in advance, if only by a day or two. Their predictions were sometimes wrong, given what the up-timers themselves complained were their limited resources. But they were certainly more reliable than such traditional measures as gauging the ache in a joint.

  “How soon do you expect the Turks to resume the siege?” Julie asked.

  “Hard to say, with certainty. But given Murad’s proven boldness, I expect him to be willing to take more risks than another sultan might. A cautious commander wouldn’t order his troops out of good billets into the hardships of trenches and camps until he was sure winter had passed. Which, in this part of Europe, wouldn’t be until late April.”

  “That far into spring?”

  The emperor smiled. “We are in the Little Ice Age, as you up-timers tell us continually. Even now, snowfalls aren’t common in April, but they have been known to happen, especially in the first half of the month. Given Murad’s temperament, though…”

  Gustav Adolf stroked his beard for a moment. “He will come at us again in the middle of March. I’m quite sure of it.”

  He stopped, placed a hand on Julie’s shoulder, and squeezed it gently. Over the years, since their initially rocky introduction, the emperor and the young American woman had developed a peculiar relationship. There was something paternal about it, although the difference in age was too slight and the difference in status was too great for that to be a very accurate term. Julie Sims—as he still thought of her; Julie Mackay, as she insisted she now was—sometimes reminded Gustav Adolf of a distant cousin with whom he’d become personally close. That provided an ease between them, which had allowed genuine affection to develop despite the fact that Julie was one of the very few people who never hesitated to criticize the emperor to his face.

  Despite the fact? Perhaps because of it, he sometimes thought.

  “I will repeat, Julie. You do not have to take this risk. You are not a soldier in my service, you know.”

  She started to shrug again but left off the gesture. Shrugging with that meaty hand on her shoulder was easier said than done. Julie was athletic but she wasn’t a weightlifter. “No, technically I’m on the books as a ‘military contractor.’ But it doesn’t matter. At bottom, what I really am is a patriot. The United States of Europe isn’t perfect—not by a long shot—but it’s way better than any alternative.”

  His hand on her shoulder came down, to be replaced by her hand tucked into his elbow.

  They resumed walking toward the city. “And as emperors go, you’re not perfect, either”—she grinned up at him—“not by a long shot. But I figure you’re way better than any alternative.”

  He really was very fond of the girl. Although, in the darkest recesses of his soul, he sometimes envied the sultan’s way with garrotes.

  * * *

  “She is still agitated over the issue?” Rebecca asked.

  James nodded. “’Fraid so. You know Melissa. That woman can fret over anything that calls her radical credentials into question.”

  “Ha!” Smiling, Rebecca shook her head. “Perhaps we should make her the secretary of state. That way she—not me!—could listen to the complaints about her made by a few dozen dukes and royal councilors. Who have no doubt at all concerning her radical credentials.”

  James handed her a teacup and resumed his seat. “Seriously? Do you really get complaints like that?”

  Rebecca took a sip of her tea. It was quite hot still, but she liked it that way. Michael had once joked, after seeing one of the many anti-Semitic woodcuts depicting her as a devil, that the only evidence supporting the accusation was that Rebecca did indeed seem impervious to heat.

  On the other hand, she also liked to sleep in the nude—for which she’d never once heard her husband make fun of her.

  “Oh, yes.” She set the cup down on the small side table next to her chair. “Fairly often, in fact. James, I do not think you nor Melissa herself understand the way she is viewed across Europe. Her public status, you might call it. Her age and her reputation for scholarship—never forget that an American high school teacher, in terms of real learning, is easily a match for most university professors in this day—place her outside of the usual conceptions of radicals and malcontents. Those are generally viewed as being crude and lowly folk, which no one thinks is true of Melissa. So, over time, she has developed a somewhat…call it a mystical aura about her. A combination of the Delphic Oracle, Cassandra, and any one of the Greek furies—or a Norse seeress, in the Scandinavian countries.”

  “You can’t be serious. Melissa? Just yesterday she predicted snow. As usual—she’s practically a human barometer in reverse—it turned out to be the clearest and warmest day we’ve had all week.”

  Rebecca smiled and took another sip of tea. “James, which part of ‘mystical aura’ did you not understand? Her participation—i
t would be more accurate to say ‘partnership’—with Mariana in tending to wounded soldiers is viewed nowhere as Melissa’s submission to royalty. Quite the opposite, in fact. Apparently, she can even bend empresses to her will. Remember, this comes not so very long after she forced Cardinal Richelieu to agree to terms settling the war with the Ostend League very much against France’s favor.”

  James rolled his eyes. “That wasn’t because of her, that was because Torstensson crushed the French army at Ahrensbök.”

  “As I am sure Melissa would be the first to say as well. It does not matter, James.” She set down the cup, which was now half-empty. “I have had no fewer than three ruling princes inform me that under no circumstances will Melissa Mailey be allowed into their presence.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “When have you ever known me to joke about matters of state?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Chapter 26

  Wiśniowiecki town house

  Warsaw, Poland

  Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki beckoned the servant with a wave of his hand, without bothering to look at the man. The gesture was both imperious and impatient. The first, because of his status; the second, because of his nature. In point of fact, this particular servant was always attentive to his duty and was there almost instantly. But it did him no good because Wiśniowiecki didn’t distinguish between his servants, any more than he would distinguish between different plates in his vast collection of dinnerware. He didn’t know which servant was which, and didn’t care because he was always impatient with all of them.

  The prince would have been a great deal less uncaring if he’d known that this particular servant was very alert because he was keenly listening to the conversation, just as he had with every one of Wiśniowiecki’s discussions with any of the men now visiting him.

  “More wine for everyone,” he commanded, gesturing to the men sitting with him at the table. It was a large dining table, although it was being used at the moment for a meeting rather than a meal.