1636: The Ottoman Onslaught Read online

  “My husband asked me to extend his respects. Your command of Bavaria’s forces was superbly adroit in the recent battle. He also asked me to extend his appreciation for your consideration in handling the USE’s dead and wounded soldiers.”

  Neither of those statements was a lie, after all, leaving aside the slight fib involved in saying Michael has asked her to make them. He’d done no such thing. On the other hand, if she’d asked him, he would have, so as fibs went it was a pretty minor one.

  Piccolomini nodded his head, a bit ponderously. “Please thank him for the kind sentiments, and return my own respects.”

  There was a slight pursing of the Italian general’s lips when he said that. Rebecca suspected that Piccolomini was fibbing a lot more than she had. If he’d been able to express himself with complete honesty, he’d probably have said something like: Tell your husband he’s one lucky bastard and next time he pulls a reckless stunt like that he’ll surely get a thrashing at the hands of a real professional general like me.

  But Piccolomini’s record in the history books as an accomplished diplomat in his own right—not to mention Machiavellian schemer—clearly had some substance to it. So, he said none of that.

  Rebecca was guessing, but she was fairly certain that Piccolomini had his own interests in this parley. If so, it would be best to entwine those into the talks right from the start.

  “I must begin by making clear that Emperor Gustav Adolf believes firmly that any settlement with Bavaria must include a settlement of your own status and situation as well as that of your troops.”

  Piccolomini nodded his head again—a quick, short nod, this time, not a slow and ponderous one.

  “Yes, I agree. What does he have in mind?”

  So, she’d been right. A good place to start. A superb one, in fact, given what she could offer.

  “You and all your men will be guaranteed safe passage out of the city. You may keep your personal property, including horses and weapons. Field artillery, also, if they belong to you or your officers rather than Bavaria.”

  Piccolomini made a face. The expression was a complex one, though. There was clearly satisfaction—even pleasure—at the generous terms. But also, apparently, he felt some trepidations. Or reservations, at least.

  “Not all of my soldiers will want to leave, Frau Abrabanel. Most of them are foreign mercenaries—Italians, mainly—but a fair number are resident in Bavaria. Some were born here, others have settled and made attachments. Wives, children, that sort of thing.”

  Rebecca considered the matter, for a moment. She had been given no precise guidelines on how to handle the issue.

  “How many of your men do you think would want to stay?”

  “At least three thousand. More likely to be close to four thousand.”

  “But no more than that?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.” He got a thin, cold smile on his face. “There’s been a fair amount of desertion since the siege began, especially of soldiers who’ve been in Bavarian service for five years or more.”

  Translation: Any Bavarian soldier whose service went back to the slaughter at Magdeburg is scared of what will happen to him if he falls into the hand of the USE army. As well he should be.

  That seemed to make for a good point of departure.

  “Let me propose the following, then. Any soldier in your army who wishes to remain behind in Bavaria may do so—provided he can provide documentation that his service in the duke’s army goes back only three years or less.”

  “That will exclude most of the officers,” said Piccolomini. But he was simply making a statement of fact, not registering a protest.

  Rebecca shrugged. “Those are the terms. It will take a week or so to organize the transition of authority, so those officers who are forced to leave will have a bit of time to resolve their affairs.”

  “Not enough time to resolve them very satisfactorily,” said Piccolomini. “Most of them have families and some of them have businesses they will need to sell.”

  But, again, it was an observation, not a protest.

  “The massacre at Magdeburg casts a long shadow, General.” Rebecca’s tone of voice was even colder than Piccolomini’s smile had been. “I have very little sympathy for them—and I can assure you that the soldiers of the USE army and the National Guard of the State of Thuringia-Franconia will have none at all. You know as well as I do that regardless of what orders may be given them by their commanders, at least some of the soldiers will take personal vengeance on anyone they suspect was a participant in the sack of Magdeburg.”

  Piccolomini just nodded in response. Clearly, he had no intention of resisting the provision, which was hardly surprising. The larger the army that Piccolomini could march out of Munich, the better would be his prospects for future employment.

  He’d go to Italy, almost surely. Most of his men came from Italy, and the job situation for a mercenary commander was better there at the moment that anywhere else in the continent.

  Well… Anywhere else that would be safe for Piccolomini. If he fell into the hands of Wallenstein, he was a dead man.

  “Let us now discuss the disposition of Duke Maximilian,” said Rebecca. “Our terms are as follows…”

  Freising, Bavaria

  "Encode and send the following to Prime Minister Piazza,

  please.” Rebecca laid down a note in front of the radio operator.

  SETTLEMENT MADE STOP MAX TO GO INTO EXILE IN ITALY STOP WILL LEAVE MUNICH IN SEVEN DAYS STOP PICCOLOMINI AND MOST OF HIS SOLDIERS TO ESCORT HIM STOP ALBRECHT TO ENTER THE CITY THE NEXT DAY STOP WHAT YOU WANT ME TO DO STOP

  She settled down with a book. Piazza would be responding soon.

  His response came almost immediately:

  GO TO DRESDEN STOP WHAT IS GRETCHEN DOING STOP

  Rebecca stared at the decrypted note.

  What is Gretchen doing?

  Rebecca had no idea what he was talking about. The last news she’d gotten was that Saxony’s Fourth of July Party—with Gretchen Richter now as its recognized leader—had won at least sixty percent of the vote and was now in control of the province.

  Ah, well. Rebecca had a superb governess and staff looking after her children and she’d never visited Dresden. It would be almost like a vacation.

  With Gretchen Richter. Doing something.

  Not exactly a relaxing one, of course. More like a danger sport sort of vacation.

  Chapter 45

  Hoorn, province of Holland

  The Netherlands

  Maarten Kortenaer stared at Rita Simpson. The Dutch engineer’s eyes weren’t actually bugging out, but they were certainly doing a good imitation of it.

  “But… That’s not possible!” he protested. “All the histories—those are yours, you know”—his tone became accusatory—“say that the Ottomans failed to seize Vienna—again—when they tried in…”

  His eyes became slightly unfocused, as a person’s will when they are scouring their memory.

  “1684, I believe.”

  “1683, actually,” Rita responded. “In a different universe.” She had to struggle a little not to snarl the words.

  Kortenaer looked back down at the radio message she’d handed him. “You are sure about this?”

  “Of course I’m sure about it!” Again, she had to fight down an outright snarl. D’you think I’d fake something like this as a joke, you fucking—?

  She took a deep breath. “I assure you the radio message we received”—she pointed at the note in Kortenaer’s hand—“is quite legitimate. And, as you can see, was sent by Emperor Gustav Adolf himself.”

  She was pretty sure that was pushing it. Unless she missed her guess, the message had actually been sent by her sister-in-law, Rebecca Abrabanel. The radio operator had told her the message came from Munich, not Magdeburg. But Becky would have cleared it with Gustav Adolf, so it wasn’t more than a technical fib.

  Before Kortenaer could say anything further, the door to his office open
ed and one of the officers of the consortium came into the room. Rita had met the man a couple of times but she wasn’t quite sure what his name was. His given name was something like “Hubert”—maybe Hubrecht—and his last name started with an “O” but that was all she could remember.

  He, too, was holding a radio message in his hand. He placed it in front of Kortenaer. “This one is from King Fernando himself,” he said, “so there’s no doubt about it.”

  He spoke in German rather than Dutch, perhaps as a matter of courtesy to Rita. Her Dutch was lousy but her German was quite good by now—allowing for the fact that “German” was an umbrella term for a jillion dialects, some of which were not mutually comprehensible except in writing. That was a good part of the reason Amideutsch had spread so rapidly. It tended to serve as a lingua franca.

  Kortenaer read the message, puffed out his cheeks, and raised his hands in a gesture that suggested helplessness.

  “Very well,” he said. “We’ll have to make do as best we can.” He gave Rita a stern look. “You understand that we will have to leave behind all of the armaments we discussed.”

  Rita nodded. She wasn’t perturbed by his statement because she’d always been skeptical that the rockets the Dutch planned to fire from racks slung beneath the gondola would work anyway. They were so pre-occupied with making sure the rockets couldn’t ignite the airship itself when they were launched and would fly reasonably straight that they completely ignored the itty-bitty problem that they had no guidance mechanism whatsoever. Rita thought the chances of the rockets hitting another airship ranged from dismal to non-existent.

  Besides, if she was correctly interpreting a separate message that her brother had sent to her—she hadn’t shown this one to the Dutch—then Mike had a different weapon system in mind entirely: Why else would he have instructed her to stop in Freising and pick up one Julie Mackay, née Sims?

  Kortenaer was still looking stern and gloomy. “No rockets, not even any bombs.”

  Rita wasn’t concerned about the lack of bombs, either. By now, the methods and materials needed to make bombs designed to be dropped from airships were readily available in the USE. But one thought did occur to her.

  “What about the armor we talked about?” she asked.

  She almost laughed, seeing the war of expressions on the Dutch engineer’s face. Clearly, his aggrieved perfectionist’s soul wanted to tell her—sternly and gloomily—that the armor as well would have to be left behind given the unseemly haste with which his customer wanted his product delivered. But whatever his personal inclinations might be, Kortenaer was an honest man. So, after a momentary hesitation, he nodded his head.

  “Yes, we can bring it with us. We will have to install it on the flight itself, but we should have enough time for that. The armor is not, after all, particularly complicated.”

  That was putting it mildly. The “armor” was simply sheets of thin steel—more precisely, a few sheets made by welding together a number of smaller pieces. The manufacture of sheet steel in large dimensions was still in its infancy in the Netherlands. The stuff wouldn’t keep a bullet fired by a large-caliber up-time rifle from penetrating, but it should be pretty effective against ground fire from down-time muskets, even rifled muskets.

  “We’re set, then,” she said. “How soon can we lift off?”

  She wasn’t sure if lift off was the right way to put it. Aeronautics was also in its infancy in this brave new world of hers, but already the people involved in the new industry were becoming just as fussy and anal-retentive as sailors were when it came to proper terminology.

  No, no, no! That’s not a “floor!” It’s called a “deck!” And never mind that both things served exactly the same purpose. You stood on them. Thazzit.

  From the slight wince on Kortenaer’s face, she suspected that she had in fact used the wrong words. But all he said was: “Tomorrow morning.”

  A field outside Vienna

  Moshe Mizrahi wanted to look away, but didn’t dare. From the standpoint of Jews and Christians, Murad IV was a great improvement over previous sultans, but he was still a sultan. Despite his reputation, from what Moshe had seen Murad was not cruel for the sake of cruelty, nor did he seem to take any personal pleasure in the punishments he meted out. But the sultan was still utterly ruthless and never hesitated to make an example of someone if he thought that would stimulate others to greater effort and tenacity.

  On the positive side, Murad also never hesitated to hand out rewards and promotions, either, if the sultan felt that someone had conducted himself well. Moshe’s presence here at the execution field was a testament to that.

  Yesterday, Murad had promoted him to the rank of kolağası in what the sultan called the Gureba-i hava. The name of his air force was supposed to be an honor, with its similarity to the Gureba-i yemin and Gureba-i yesar—two of the alti bölük cavalry units—but Moshe wondered if the sultan was not also making a joke about the preponderance of Jews in its ranks. After all, the root of Gureba was garib, and certainly the Muslims considered him and his fellows to be garibs—strangers. Nevertheless, his promotion made Moshe one of the three immediate subordinates of the Gureba-i hava’s commander, a Muslim Albanian binbaşı named Şemsi Ahmed, and the only Jew of that rank.

  A high honor, indeed, but it came with a price. Moshe’s airship, the Chaldiran, was the vessel Murad had designated as the execution platform for the surviving members of the crew of the Esztergom. The logic was simple, brutal—and very like Murad. The crew of the Chaldiran, with Moshe Mizrahi in charge after the death in battle of the airship’s Muslim commander, had recovered from their casualties and gone on to fulfill their mission. The crew of the Esztergom, on the other hand, despite suffering lighter casualties—only the commander had been killed—had fled the field of battle without inflicting any harm at all on the enemy.

  So, the crew of the Esztergom would be thrown out of the Chaldiran, in full view of the entire complement of the new air force. Over a field close enough to the walls of Vienna that plenty of other Ottoman soldiers would be witnesses as well.

  At least Murad had not insisted that Moshe and his engineer, Mordechai Pesach, had to carry out the execution themselves. Three burly janissaries would be the ones who muscled the surviving members of the Esztergom’s crew over the side of the gondola. Those condemned men were all fellow Jews, so Moshe was profoundly thankful for that small mercy.

  If mercy it was, at all. Sultan Murad had probably made that decision at least in part to avert the possible risk that a pair of Jews might be tempted to save three other Jews by simply flying away and deserting to the Austrians. The risk was admittedly slight, since all of them had family in the homes that the sultan had provided for the Jews of the air force—homes that were guarded by janissaries within the confines of the walled compound established for the air force. The Esztergom’s crew had returned, after all, despite the near-certainty of punishment. But the sultan took no chances.

  Moshe did his best to ignore the pleas and screams of the first member of the Esztergom’s doomed crew, as he was lifted and forced over the side. The man struggled fiercely after his hands and feet were unbound. Sultan Murad had ordered the restraints removed before the men were jettisoned, probably because he thought the sight of a man plummeting to his death while thrashing and flailing would be more effective than the sight of one falling like a sack of meal. But against three janissaries each of whom was larger and stronger, the man’s efforts were futile. In less than ten seconds, he was plunging to the ground one hundred kulaçs below.

  The second crew member was untied and hauled to the side of the gondola. He made no effort to fight back, nor did the one who followed. Neither would Moshe himself, if he’d been in their position. All they had left now was the dignity of their final moments, before their bodies were turned into broken, mangled bloody paste.

  Throughout, Moshe watched what happened. He wanted to look away, but there was a fourth janissary on board. The bostanji başi
—the commander of the sultan's gardeners, who harvested heads as well as flowers for the sultan—was in charge of the execution, but he’d spent most of his time watching Moshe. The sultan would want to know if his newly-promoted Jewish kolağası was tough enough to carry out his duty.

  Would Murad order Moshe similarly executed, if he looked away? Probably… not. But with this young and energetic sultan, it never paid to take such risks.

  Finally, it was over.

  The bostanji başi stepped over to Moshe and slapped his shoulder lightly. “Back to base.” He smiled. Thinly, but it was a definite smile. “The sultan will be pleased by my report.”

  * * *

  After returning to their base and seeing to it that his airship was properly moored to its mast—the huge hangars the sultan had ordered erected would not be finished for some time yet—Moshe turned to his commander. Şemsi Ahmed had been there to oversee the process.

  “What was done to the families of the Esztergom’s crew?” Moshe asked. It was a dangerous question to ask, but he felt compelled to do so.

  After giving him a hard look, Şemsi Ahmed replied. “The Sultan did not order the men cast out of the air force when he ordered them cast out of your balloon. Their deaths were during the campaign, so the orders I sent were that the families were to be treated as if their men had died on campaign. They had to leave the houses they had been given, of course, but they received the death benefit.”

  Moshe was startled. What Ahmed had done could conceivably mean his own execution if the sultan found out and took it poorly. If so, the argument that he was simply following procedures would give Ahmed the same protection against the executioner’s sword as holding up the paper on which the rules had been written would when the blow descended.

  Yet, looked at from a different angle, Ahmed’s action had been very shrewd. He had just cemented the personal loyalty of his airship crews, the great majority of whom were Jews.