1636: The Ottoman Onslaught Page 33

  Wettin shrugged. “Yes, and so what? We’re already at war with Poland. The emperor certainly won’t object if we take a chunk out of Poland, especially since the population is so heavily German and Lutheran.”

  He gave the two Poles a glance that was more dismissive than apologetic. “Meaning no offense to anyone here.”

  Jozef tried to look suitably annoyed at the obvious slight. A bit hard, that, when he was also trying to suppress a grin. This was going to work!

  “I’m for it,” said Bravnicar. “Fighting Holk in Lower Silesia is the perfect exercise for forging our provincial army.”

  Jozef could see from her changed expression that that argument was having an impact on Richter as well. Provinces in the USE were allowed to have their own military forces, which were under the authority of the provincial chiefs of state. He suspected that Gustav Adolf wasn’t all that pleased with the arrangement, but given the disorganized nature of the Germanies over the past many centuries it would have been impossible to get provincial leaders to agree to form the United States of Europe out of the Confederated Principalities that had preceded it if Gustav Adolf hadn’t been willing to accept that provision.

  That created a problem for the newly-minted province of Saxony, however. The closest remnant to a provincial army that still existed was the rump force that the mercenary general Hans Georg von Arnim had left behind in Leipzig when he marched the rest of his army to Poland to join Torstensson’s two divisions besieging Poznań.

  Nobody in Dresden—not Richter, not Wettin, and certainly not the Vogtlanders—trusted those mercenary troops. Granted, they’d been well-behaved and the city of Leipzig was glad enough to have them. But nobody thought they’d be much use if Saxony ever had to fight a serious enemy.

  A new provincial army—that was what was needed. But it would have to be assembled out of disparate bits and pieces. Vogtlander militias, Bravnicar’s cavalrymen, the units under Eric Krenz’s command that Mike Stearns had left in Dresden.

  Jozef hadn’t really thought about it, but he now realized that the Slovene cavalry officer was quite right. Fighting an army like Holk’s, which was barely distinguishable from a small horde of Tatars or Cossacks—with the vices of both and the virtues of neither—would make an ideal military exercise.

  He glanced at Lukasz and saw that his friend was getting excited himself by the idea. He was a hussar, of course. You expected them to salivate at the prospect of fighting, like mastiffs.

  “All right,” said Richter. “We’ll do it. Ernst, you should lead the expedition.”

  Wettin shook his head. “No, you should.”

  That was the only time since he’d met the woman that Jozef had ever seen Gretchen Richter taken aback by anything.

  “Me? But…” She looked quite lost. “I’m a woman.”

  “So was Joan of Arc,” replied Wettin. “If you lead the expedition, then what we have is a righteous crusade against wicked invaders of the sacred soil of Saxony. If I lead it”—he shrugged—“we just have a scheme by one branch of the Vasa dynasty to despoil another branch. Which do you think will play better in the nation?”

  She stared at him. “That is… very cunning.”

  The little nobleman smiled, slyly. “Of course, it’s also possible I’m scheming to have you eventually burned at the stake. Which is what happened to Joan of Arc in the end, you may recall.”

  She kept staring at him, for a few more seconds. Then she smiled back, just as slyly.

  “I’ll take my chances,” she said.

  Chapter 33

  Prague, capital of Bohemia

  Eddie Junker had been apprehensive, when he returned to Prague, that he’d find his girlfriend Denise unhappy. Denise had such a sanguine outlook on life that she was normally in a good mood. It was almost as if she dared the universe to try tampering with her disposition so she could smack the big bastard around and set it straight.

  But that same disposition meant that she didn’t handle tedium well. And, unfortunately, Denise tended to define study as boriiiiiing. The girl was quite intelligent, but she relied overmuch on that native ability.

  Eddie had known, when he brought Denise back to Prague, that her employer Francisco Nasi had come to the conclusion that Denise would be of limited use to him so long as her formal education remained as scanty as it was.

  Granted, Nasi defined “scanty” idiosyncratically. Most Europeans of the day—and all Americans—considered a degree (or “diploma,” in the up-time lexicon) from the world-famous Grantville high school to be very prestigious. Not, perhaps, equal to a degree from a university in some respects—but in many others, actually superior. Anyone with any sense, for instance, would have far rather gotten medical care and advice from someone who’d graduated from Grantville High and then went on to study medicine in the program jointly run by the SoTF Tech and the University of Jena, than from someone who had an officially more advanced degree in medicine from a down-time university.

  True, true, the down-time doctor could explain to his patients in several languages including Greek and Latin exactly what was wrong with them, where the graduate of Grantville High probably spoke only English or German and Amideutsch. So, had you survived, you could have enjoyed reading your death certificate in one of the languages of learning, written in a very fine hand, instead of being still alive but holding in your hand nothing but a scrawled and almost illegible note discharging you from a hospital.

  But those issues were of little concern to Francisco Nasi. What he needed were agents who were well-versed in the political complexities of Europe and its immediate neighbors—first and foremost, the Ottoman Empire. That meant learning a number of languages; immersing oneself in the minutia of court intrigue in the many courts of the continent, recognizing and understanding the details of military organization and ordnance, the list was quite long.

  It did include training in the use of codes and cyphers as well as all the other little tricks of a spy’s work known as tradecraft, which brightened Denise’s spirits considerably. The more so when she turned out to have a genuine knack for it.

  “I’m not surprised,” was her mother’s not-altogether-admiring comment when Denise bragged about her proficiency at tradecraft. “You were always good at getting away with stuff. Drove me and your dad crazy, sometimes.”

  At no point, however, not even when she looked at the list of languages she was going to have to learn, did Denise become melancholy. That was because Nasi had realized long since that having Denise back living with her mother was his recipe for success. His invitation and backing for Christin George’s move to Prague had not been disinterested.

  So, after Janos Drugeth and Noelle Stull disembarked from the airplane and he’d seen to it that the craft was being properly maintained and refueled in the airstrip’s new hangar, Eddie made his way to the address Denise had provided him in a radio dispatch. He found himself before a rather large and attractive house across the river in a very nice section of the Mala Strana. He’d just started up the stairs leading to the entrance when the door opened and Denise emerged. The enthusiasm of her greeting could not have been improved on.

  Denise’s mother appeared in the doorway, smiling.

  “Welcome home, Eddie,” she said. He realized then that he had just stepped into a new stage of his life.

  Hoorn, province of Holland

  The Netherlands

  As they followed Maarten Kortenaer while he guided them on a tour of the airship, Rita Simpson had to remind herself periodically not to issue “oohs” and “aahs” as the Dutch engineer pointed out features of the vessel. It was unlikely at this late date that he’d report the appreciative noises back to the heads of the consortium and they’d crank up the price of the lease in response, but… you never knew. No one had ever accused Dutch businessmen of being slow to look for a profit anywhere they could find it.

  It was hard, though. The usual problem for an up-timer when a down-timer proudly displayed some product o
f their craftsmanship was the opposite—making properly flattering remarks in response to something that was a poor cousin to one or another up-time device.

  Just recently, for instance, Kortenaer had proudly shown her the new aqualator the consortium had acquired to help the engineers with their calculations. On one level, the water computer was impressive simply because of the intricacy of the design. Or, more precisely, because it was so clumsy compared to what she still thought of (inappropriately, she was told) as a “real computer” that you could actually see the complexity of the design. In comparison, an up-time motherboard didn’t look like much of anything to a lay person except a jumble of incomprehensible electronic components.

  Still, she knew how much more slowly fluidics worked compared to the electronic calculations any up-time computer could handle—or, for that matter, the trusty Texas Instruments pocket calculator she’d brought on this trip to double-check the figures anyone offered her. Nice people, the Dutch; very polite. But when you were dealing with Dutch businessmen you really wanted to double-check everything, just so they knew you were doing it and were therefore not tempted to engage in chicanery. She thought of it as her contribution to keeping people from eternal damnation, even though she was pretty sure the Dutch considered swindling no more than a venal sin. Not really perilous to the soul like blasphemy or working on the Sabbath.

  True, there were exceptions to the rule, and some of them could be spectacularly exceptional. She and Bonnie Weaver and Heinz Böcler had been given the chance to visit Rembrandt—yes, that one: the Rembrandt who’d had paintings displayed in dozens of major museums in the universe Rita had come from. She’d even seen some of them personally, when she’d gone on a three-day school trip to Washington, D.C. They’d visited the National Gallery, which had several of Rembrandt’s paintings. The only one she remembered was The Apostle Batholomew. She’d been struck by the way Rembrandt depicted him wearing what she assumed was contemporary clothing instead of whatever people wore in the Near East two thousand years ago.

  In the here and now, Rembrandt was still shy of thirty years old. And, like so many artists whose work had survived in the up-time books—Rubens had been effectively paralyzed as an artist for quite some time because of it—he was simultaneously gratified and exasperated. What does an artist who would be famous do when he wouldn’t be famous yet—but was famous, now, simply because he would be in another universe?

  And, worst of all, could actually see images of paintings he hadn’t done yet. In many cases, hadn’t even thought of yet. What does he do? Create those same paintings over again?

  A few did, in fact. Agnes O'Malley had picked up a book on the Italian artist Guido Reni in a museum she’d visited on the West Coast shortly before the Ring of Fire. Apparently she’d been taken by some of the images, especially the cover image of Bacchus and Ariadne.

  Agnes had died early in 1634, being in her late seventies by then, and her daughter Aggie had donated the book to the Grantville library. By pure happenstance, Reni himself had come to Grantville a short time later while the book was still on display as a newly-acquired item. When the library refused to sell it to him, Reni had spent days at one of the tables there copying sketches of his own work he hadn’t done yet, which included what was probably his best-known painting—best-known in another universe, not his own—titled St. Michael Archangel.

  Rita had been told by her husband that Reni had been holed up in his studio in Bologna since he’d left Grantville, doing what amounted to duplicates of his own work. What Tom had found particularly amusing about the man’s peculiar obsession was that he’d done St. Michael Archangel originally in order to gain favor with the Barberini family—one of whose members was now Pope Urban VIII—by giving the figure of the devil trampled underfoot by St. Michael the face of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pamphili, a prominent member of a family hostile to the Barberinis.

  Unfortunately for Reni, Urban VIII was now on the run after Borja’s coup d’etat in Rome the previous year—and the Pamphili family were long-time partisans of the Spanish faction in the Vatican which now held power.

  “He’d better hope Borja never finds out about that painting he’s trying to duplicate,” Tom has said, chuckling a little. “Or he’s toast.”

  Most artists, however, were of Rubens’ mind on the subject. They went out of their way not to duplicate work they’d done—would have done, however you wanted to say it; grammar got pretzelized by the Ring of Fire—but sought out different subjects.

  Rembrandt had gotten intrigued by the betrothal of Bonnie and Heinz, especially the juxtaposition between the up-time Baptist—a creed that was just beginning to emerge down-time—and the Lutheran born in this era. Perhaps that was because Rembrandt himself had come from a mixed family, his father being a member of the Dutch Reformed Church and his mother a Roman Catholic.

  Whatever his reasons, Rembrandt had insisted that the couple had to pose for him whenever they were in Amsterdam. And then, as he neared completion of the work, he’d come up to Hoorn for the final stages.

  “Talk about weird,” had been Bonnie’s assessment of the situation. “I can absolutely guarantee you, Rita, that if anyone had asked me to predict my future back in April of 2000, just before the Ring of Fire, ‘being someday in a portrait by Rembrandt’ would not have made the list anywhere. Not even the millionth entry.”

  The airship they were touring was another exception to the rule. There was simply nothing like this up-time. There hadn’t been since the great era of the ocean-crossing zeppelins in the 1930s, which was brought to an end by the Hindenburg disaster in 1937. No aircraft except jumbo jets in Rita’s time had had the space on board that this Dutch zeppelin did—and it was modestly sized compared to something like the Hindenburg. That 1930s era airship had been eight hundred feet long, with a diameter of one hundred and thirty-five feet; the corresponding dimensions of the airship Rita was touring were half that—four hundred and fifty feet long; fifty feet in diameter—and the envelope volume was far smaller.

  It was still huge, compared to any up-time airliner Rita had ever flown in. Forget cramped seats in coach! The thought was almost gleeful. This airship had an actual dining room. A small one, granted. But there were still tables with comfortable chairs around them—and best of all, what would be a spectacular view once the zeppelin was in the air, since there was an entire bank of windows along one side of the chamber.

  True, the windows themselves were a bit weird. Making large flat panes of glass was difficult for seventeenth century technology, so the window panes of the airship were of the type common in the era: a crosshatch of small diamond-shaped panes, each of which was only a few inches across.

  Who cared? When the time came—very soon, now—for them to take command of the airship, they’d be just about the only people in Europe traveling to a war zone in style.

  * * *

  When the tour was over, Kortenaer asked the question whose answer Rita and Bonnie and Heinz had been wrestling with for days.

  “Have you decided what to call her?” he asked. “We still have time to paint the name on the envelope.”

  The obvious solution would have been to title her the Gustav II Adolf. You could never go wrong in this day and age flattering monarchy. But Rita and Bonnie had bridled at the idea, and while Heinz favored it—ever the practical junior official whose father was a Lutheran pastor—he wasn’t prepared to fight over the issue.

  They’d then spent a day plowing through Greek and Latin mythology, adopting and discarding one name after another: Mercury, Daedalus—Icarus was a non-starter, of course—Pegasus and Phoenix. For a while, Rita had championed Dragon, for no particularly good reason except she was getting cranky. Probably for the same reason, Bonnie had spent an hour or two plumping for Thunderbird.

  Finally, Heinz had saved the day by applying the tried and tested principles of the junior bureaucrat: find the established rule; failing that, invent one.

  “I think all airship
s in the service of the USE military should be named after cities. So we should name this one the Magdeburg.”

  “The Dresden,” Rita and Bonnie countered simultaneously.

  “Are you actively trying to pick a fight with the emperor?” Heinz complained.

  He… had a point.

  “Okay, fine,” said Bonnie. “The Magdeburg it is.”

  * * *

  “The Magdeburg,” Rita announced.

  The Dutch engineer nodded. “And would you like that spelled out in Fraktur?”

  “Yes,” said Heinz.

  “No way,” said Rita and Bonnie.

  Wallenstein’s Palace

  Prague, capital of Bohemia

  “That leaves simply the matter of Royal Hungary,” Janos concluded, setting down the papers he’d been occasionally consulting as he summarized the provisions of the treaty.

  “I repeat my offer, Janos,” said Wallenstein. The three-way negotiations between Austria-Hungary, the USE and Bohemia had gone on long enough that they’d gotten to be on first name terms by now. At least, Drugeth and Wallenstein had. Janos still wouldn’t have dreamed of calling Gustav II Adolf anything but “Your Majesty.”

  Drugeth nodded. “And I appreciate it, Albrecht. But I still feel it would produce a very difficult situation for me to be simultaneously owing allegiance to you as well as the emperor of Austria-Hungary. And there’s no other way I could retain my lands in Royal Hungary after the transfer to Bohemia. So I must decline.”

  Lying propped up on his bed, Wallenstein studied him for a moment longer. Then, gave his head a wry little shake. “That sort of loyalty is rare. I hope your monarch appreciates it.”