Authors: Eric Flint
1632 (9 page)
Mention of Wallenstein brought silence. The great Bohemian general had retired to his estates, since the emperor dismissed him at the demand of Austria’s nobility. The Catholic lords of the Holy Roman Empire despised the man, as much for his low birth as his great wealth and power. But Wallenstein was still there, lurking, ready to be called forth again.
Gustav’s face grew ruddy, but his response was very calm. “You are quite wrong, my friend Axel. I have always had a master, in war as in peace. His name is Jesus Christ.” The piety in that statement was deep, simple—and doubted by no one who heard. “Wallenstein? Only he knows his master.”
Torstensson looked down between his feet. “I can guess,” he muttered softly. The officers standing on either side chuckled.
Gustav turned back to Hesse-Kassel. “William, your forces are much stronger than Saxe-Weimar’s, and you should have months to prepare your defenses. So I think you will be able to hold Tilly at bay.”
There was a small commotion at the tent’s entrance. A squad of soldiers was bringing in new chairs.
The king glanced at them, smiling. “Actually, I think those may be unneeded. I don’t believe there’s much more to discuss. Not today, at least.”
Gustav looked past the incoming soldiers, to the plains of central Germany. His jaws tightened. “For the moment, William of Hesse-Kassel, the best assistance I can give you is to put some steel into the spines of certain Protestant rulers. We will start with the Prince of Brandenburg.”
“Steel in his spine?” demanded Torstensson. “
George William?”
He sneered. “Impossible!”
Gustav’s smile was a thin spreading of lips across still-clenched teeth. “Nonsense,” he growled. “He
is
my brother-in-law, after all. He will see reason. Especially after I give him a simple choice. ’Steel in your spine—
or steel up your ass.’
”
The tent rocked with laughter. Gustav’s thin smile became a shark’s grin. He turned his head to Torstensson. “Prepare for the march, Lennart. I want your cannons staring at Berlin as soon as possible.”
The officers in the tent took that as the signal to leave. Hesse-Kassel and the brothers Saxe-Weimar lingered behind, for a moment. The first, simply to shake the king’s hand. The others, to present themselves for their new duty. Gustav sent them scurrying after Torstensson.
Soon enough, only Oxenstierna was left in the tent. Gustav waited until everyone was gone before speaking.
“There has been no word from Mackay?”
Oxenstierna shook his head. The King scowled.
“I
need
that Dutch money, Axel. As of now, our finances depend almost entirely on the French.
Cardinal Richelieu.
” His heavy face grew sour. “I trust that three-faced papist
as much as I’d trust Satan himself.”
Axel shrugged. He tried to make his smile reassuring. Not with any great success, despite his skill as a diplomat.
“The French—Richelieu—have their own pressing reasons to support us, Gustav. They may be Catholics, but they’re a lot more worried about Habsburg dynastic ambitions than they are about reestablishing the pope’s authority in northern Germany.”
The king was not mollified. “I know that!” he snapped. “And so? What Richelieu wants is a long, protracted, destructive war in the Holy Roman Empire. Let half of the Germans die in the business—let them all die! Richelieu does not want us to
win
, Axel—far from it! He simply wants us to bleed the Austrian Habsburgs. And the Spanish Habsburgs, for that matter.” He scowled ferociously. “Swedish cannon fodder, working for a French paymaster who doles out the funds like a miser.”
He slammed a heavy fist into a heavy palm. “I
must
have more money! I can’t get it from Richelieu, and we’ve already drained the Swedish treasury. That leaves only Holland. They’re rich, the Dutch, and they have their own reasons for wanting the Habsburgs broken.”
It was Oxenstierna’s lean and aristocratic face which grew heavy now. “The Dutch
Republic
,” he muttered sourly.
The king glanced at his friend, and chuckled. “Oh, Axel! Ever the nobleman!”
Oxenstierna stiffened, a bit, under the gibe. The Oxenstiernas were one of the greatest families of the Swedish nobility, and Axel, for all his suppleness of mind, was firmly wedded to aristocratic principles. Ironically, the only man in Sweden who stood above him, according to that same principle, was considerably more skeptical as to its virtues. Gustav II Adolf, King of Sweden, had spent years fighting the Polish aristocracy before he matched swords with their German counterparts. The experience had left him with a certain savage contempt for “nobility.” The Poles were valiant in battle, but utterly bestial toward their serfs. The Germans, with some exceptions, lacked even that Polish virtue. Most of them, throughout the long war, had enjoyed the comforts of their palaces and castles while mercenaries did the actual fighting. Paid for, naturally, by taxes extorted from an impoverished, disease-ridden, and half-starved peasantry.
But there was no point in resuming an old dispute with Axel. Gustav had enough problems to deal with, for the moment.
“If Mackay hasn’t reported, that means the Dutch courier hasn’t reached him yet,” he mused. “What could have happened?”
Axel snorted. “Happened? To a courier trying to make it across Germany after thirteen years of war?”
Gustav shook his head impatiently. “The Dutch will have sent a Jew,” he pointed out. “They’ll have provided him with letters of safe-conduct. And Ferdinand has made his own decrees concerning the treatment of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire. He doesn’t want them frightened off, while he needs their money.”
Oxenstierna shrugged. “Even so, a thousand things could have happened. Tilly’s men are rampaging through the area already. They don’t work for the emperor. Not directly, at least. What do those mercenaries care about Ferdinand’s decrees, if a band of them catch a courier and his treasure? Much less Dutch letters of safe-conduct.”
The king scowled, but he did not argue the point. He knew Axel was most likely right. Germany was a witches’ sabbath today. Any crime was not only possible, or probable—it had already happened, times beyond counting.
Gustav sighed. He laced thick fingers together, inverted his hands, and cracked the knuckles. “I worry sometimes, Axel. I worry.” He turned his head, fixing blue eyes on brown. “I worship a merciful God. Why would He permit such a catastrophe as this war? I fear we have committed terrible sins, to bring such punishment. And when I look about me, at the state of the kingdoms and the principalities, I think I can even name the sin. Pride, Axel. Overweening, unrestrained arrogance. Nobility purely of the flesh, not the spirit.”
Oxenstierna did not try to respond. In truth, he did not want to. Axel Oxenstierna, chancellor of Sweden, was eleven years older than his king. Older—and often, he thought, wiser. But that same wisdom had long ago led the man to certain firm conclusions.
The first of those conclusions was that Gustav II Adolf was, quite probably, the greatest monarch ever produced by the people of Scandinavia.
The other, was that he was almost certainly their greatest soul.
So, where the chancellor might have argued with the king, the man would not argue with that soul. Oxenstierna simply bowed his head. “As you say, my lord,” was his only reply.
Gustav acknowledged the fealty with his own nod. “And now, my friend,” he said softly, “I need to be alone for a time.” Regal power was fading from his face. Anguish was returning to take its place.
“It was not your fault, Gustav,”
hissed Oxenstierna.
“There was nothing you could do.”
But the king was not listening. He was deaf to all reason and argument, now.
Still, Axel tried: “
Nothing!
Your promise to the people of Magdeburg was made in good faith, Gustav. It was our so-called ’allies’ who were at fault. George William of Brandenburg wouldn’t support you, and John George of Saxony barred the way. How could you—?”
He fell silent. Hopeless. The human reality which the warrior king had put aside, for a time, was flooding into the man himself.
The huge, powerful figure standing in the center of the tent seemed to break in half. An instant later, Gustav Adolf was on his knees, head bent, hands clasped in prayer. His knuckles were white, the hands themselves atremble.
The chancellor sighed, and turned away. The king of Sweden was gone, for a time. For many hours, Axel knew. Many hours, spent praying for the souls of Magdeburg. Oxenstierna did not doubt that if his friend Gustav knew the names of the tens of thousands who had been slaughtered in that demon place, that he would have commended each and every one of them to the keeping of his Lord. Remembering, all the while, the letters they had sent to him, begging for deliverance. Deliverance he had not been able to bring in time.
Many hours.
I would damn you myself. But there is no need. A greater one than I—much greater—is bringing you something far worse than a mere curse.
A new breed has come into the world, lords of Germany.
Tremble. Tremble!
Chapter 7
The high school’s gymnasium was designed to hold 1,500 people. Looking around, Mike estimated that twice that number were packed into the place. Almost the entire population of the Grantville area was present, with the exception of a handful of men at the power plant and perhaps two dozen members of Mike’s mine workers.
The disaster—what everyone had taken to calling the Ring of Fire—had occurred three days ago. Since then the UMWA had become, willy-nilly, the area’s impromptu defense force. There was no other body of armed and well-organized men available to patrol the area. Grantville’s police force consisted of only five officers, including its chief. Even if Dan Frost had not been wounded, he couldn’t possibly have handled the problem of overall defense. Grantville’s police force was more than busy enough as it was, maintaining order in the town itself.
There had been no major problems with the townsfolk themselves, beyond an initial run of panic buying which the town’s mayor brought to a halt by a quick and decisive order to close all the stores. The police department was patrolling the town, to make sure the order was obeyed, but there had been no significant opposition. Privately, everyone admitted that the mayor’s decision had been sensible.
The real problem—which was developing very rapidly—was the influx of refugees who were beginning to creep into Grantville’s outskirts. It appeared that the entire countryside was being ravaged by undisciplined mercenary soldiers. So far, none of the soldiers themselves had come near the town, but Mike’s men were alertly watching for any sign of trouble.
Mike was standing on the floor of the gym, next to one of the tiers of seats near the entrance. Frank Jackson, along with a small group of other miners, were clustered about him. To his immediate right, perched on the edge of the lowest tier of seats, sat Rebecca Abrabanel. The Jewish refugee was still in a bit of a daze, confused by the strange people—and stranger technology—around her.
Perhaps fortunately, Rebecca had been too preoccupied with her father’s medical condition to panic at the bizarre experiences she was undergoing. Most of the other refugees were still cowering in the woods surrounding the town, fleeing from any attempt to coax them out of hiding. But Mike suspected that the woman’s steadiness was innate. While Rebecca had all the earmarks of a sheltered intellectual, that did not automatically translate into cringing helplessness. He chuckled ruefully, remembering their conversation in the library. He had barely understood a word, once she plunged into philosophy. But he had not sneered—not then, not now. Mike decided he could use some of that philosophical serenity himself.
Still, Rebecca was hardly blasé about her situation. Mike watched as, for the tenth time in as many minutes, Rebecca self-consciously smoothed her long, pleated skirt, tugged at her bodice, touched the full cap which covered her hair. He found it mildly amusing that she had adjusted well enough to her circumstances to be concerned about her appearance.
The person sitting next to Rebecca, a small gray-haired woman in her sixties, reached out and gave the refugee’s hand a little squeeze of reassurance. Rebecca responded with a quick, nervous smile.
Mike’s amusement vanished. Understanding Rebecca’s fears concerning her Judaism—if not the reasons for it—he had asked Morris and Judith Roth to take Rebecca and her father into their house. The town’s only Jewish couple had readily agreed. Balthazar Abrabanel had been there ever since. He had survived his heart attack, but both James Nichols and Jeff Adams, Grantville’s resident doctor, had agreed that he needed plenty of bed rest. Balthazar had barely survived the experience as it was.
The next day, when Mike dropped by for a quick visit, Rebecca seemed calm and almost relaxed. But Judith had told him, privately, that the Abrabanel woman had burst into a flood of tears when she spotted the menorah perched on the Roths’ mantel. She had spent the next half hour collapsed on a couch, clutching Judith like a drowning kitten.
Mike glanced again at Rebecca. The woman was listening intently to what the town’s mayor was saying. He was relieved to see that her expression was simply calm. Intent, curious. Wondering, at what she was hearing. But without a trace of panic.
Mike scanned the sea of faces in the gymnasium.
Truth is, she’s doing way better than half the people here.
The thought was whimsical, in its origin. But the accompanying flush of fierce, half-possessive pride alerted Mike to a truth he had been avoiding. His feelings for the Abrabanel woman had obviously taken on a life of their own. The image of runaway horses came to his mind, bolting out of a broken corral.
Good move, Stearns.
As if you didn’t have enough trouble!
The runaway horses paid as much attention to his admonition as they would have to a field mouse. Since the first moment he saw her, the exotic beauty of the woman drew him like a magnet. Some men might have been put off by the obvious intelligence in Rebecca’s dark eyes, and the hint of sly humor in her full lips.
Mike sighed.
Not me.
With difficulty, he forced himself to look away and concentrate on the mayor’s concluding remarks.
“So that’s about it, folks,” Henry Dreeson was saying. The mayor nodded toward a small group of people sitting on chairs near the podium. “You heard what Ed Piazza and his teachers told us. Somehow—nobody knows how—we’ve been planted somewhere in Germany almost four hundred years ago. With no way to get back.”
A man stood up on one of the lower tiers. “Are we sure about that, Henry? The ’getting back’ part, I mean? Maybe whatever happened could—you know, happen again. The other way.”
The mayor gave a glance of appeal to one of the teachers sitting next to the principal. Greg Ferrara rose and stepped up to the microphone. The high school’s science teacher was a tall, slender man in his mid-thirties. His speech patterns, like his stride and mannerisms, were quick and abrupt—and self-confident.
Greg was shaking his head before he even reached the podium’s microphone. “I don’t think there’s the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell.” He gripped the sides of the podium and leaned forward, giving emphasis to his next words. “Whatever happened was almost certainly some kind of natural catastrophe. If you ask me, we’re incredibly lucky we survived the experience. Nobody suffered any serious injuries, and the property damage was minimal.”
Greg glanced at the fluorescent lighting on the ceiling of the gym. A fleeting smile crossed his face. “The power plant’s even back on-line, so we’ve got all the conveniences of home. For a while, at least.” The smile vanished. “But we’re still in the position of a trailer park hit by a tornado. What do you think the chances are of another tornado coming by—
and setting everything back the way it was
?” Greg took a deep breath. “Personally, I’d have to say the chance is astronomically minute. Let’s hope so. Another Ring of Fire would probably destroy us completely.”
The crowd jammed into the gymnasium was silent. Greg took another deep breath, and concluded with simple, forceful words. “Face it, folks. We’re here to stay.”
A moment later, he had resumed his seat. The mayor took his place back at the microphone. “Well, that’s about it, people. As far as that goes. What we’ve got to do now is plan for the future. The town council has been meeting pretty much nonstop for the past three days, and we’ve come up with a proposal we want to put before everybody.” He paused for emphasis, just as the teacher had done. “We’ll have to
vote
on it. This is way beyond the council’s authority. So every registered voter here—”
The mayor stumbled to a halt. “Well, I suppose
everybody
here, registered or not.” The sour look on his face caused laughter to ripple through the gym. For as many years as anyone in Grantville could remember, Henry Dreeson had been admonishing people to register to vote.
The mayor plowed on. “We need to figure out a proper structure to govern ourselves by. We can’t just stick with a mayor and a town council. So what we want to propose is that we elect an emergency committee to draw up a plan—kind of a constitutional convention. The same committee should oversee things in the interim. And we need to elect somebody as the committee’s chairman. He—or she—can make whatever immediate decisions are needed.”
Someone in the crowd shouted out the mayor’s own name. Dreeson shook his head vehemently. “Not me! The town council raised that idea already, and I turned ’em down. I’m sixty-six years old, folks. I’m a small-town mayor, that’s it.” The elderly man at the podium stood a little straighter. “Been pretty good at it, if I say so myself, and I’ll be glad to stay on in that capacity. But there’s no way I’m the right man to—” He waved his hand. The gesture was neither feeble, nor hopeless. But it conveyed the sense of impending catastrophe nonetheless.
A motion at the edge of the crowd drew Mike’s attention. John Simpson, his sister’s new father-in-law, was stepping forward to the microphone. The well-dressed man moved with the same self-confidence with which he had addressed numerous stockholders’ meetings. He did not push the mayor aside so much as he forced him to yield the microphone by sheer authoritativeness.
“I agree with Mayor Dreeson,” he said forcefully. “We are in an emergency. That calls for emergency management.”
Another, less self-confident, man would have cleared his throat before proceeding. Not John Chandler Simpson. “I propose myself as the chairman of the emergency committee. I realize that I’m not well-known to most of you. But since I’m certain that I am better qualified than anyone here, I have no choice but to put myself forward for the position. I’ve been the chief executive officer of a major corporation for many years now. And before that I was an officer in the United States Navy. Served in the Pentagon.”
Next to him, Mike heard Frank Jackson mutter: “Gee, what a self-sacrificing gesture.”
Mike repressed his own snort of derision.
Yeah, like Napoleon volunteering to take the throne. For the good of the nation, of course.
Quickly, he scanned the faces in the crowd. Mike could detect some signs of resentment at a stranger’s instant readiness to take command. But not much. In truth, Simpson’s decisiveness was obviously hitting a responsive chord. People floating in the water after a shipwreck are not inclined to question the origin of a lifeboat. Or the quality of its captain, as long as the man seems to know what he’s doing and has a loud voice.
He brought his attention back to Simpson. “—first thing is to seal off the town,” Simpson was saying. “Our resources are going to be stretched tight as it is.
Very tight.
We’re going to have to cut back on everything, people. Down to the bone. We certainly aren’t going to have anything to spare for the refugees who seem to be flooding the area.”
Mike saw Simpson cast a quick glance toward him and his little cluster of coal miners. Simpson’s face was tight with disapproval. Over the past three days, Mike and his coal miners had made no effort to drive away the small army of refugees who were beginning to fill the surrounding woods. Once he was satisfied that a new group was unarmed, Mike had tried to coax them out of hiding. With no success, so far, except for one family which had taken shelter in the town’s outlying Methodist church.
“I say it again,” Simpson drove on. “
We must seal the border.
There’s a tremendous danger of disease, if nothing else.” Simpson pointed an accusing finger at the south wall of the gymnasium. The banners hanging there, proudly announcing North Central High School’s statewide football championships—1980, 1981, and again in l997—seemed to be surrogates for his damnation. “Those
people
—” He paused. The pause, as much as the tone, indicated Simpson’s questioning of the term “people.” “Those creatures are
plague-carriers
. They’ll strip us of everything we own, like locusts. It will be a toss-up, whether we all die of starvation or disease. So—”
Mike found himself marching toward the podium. He felt a little light-headed, as he always had climbing into the ring. Old habit forced him to ignore the sensation, drive it out, bring his mind into focus.
The light-headed sensation was not nervousness so much as sheer nervous energy.
And anger
, he realized. That too he drove aside. This was no time to lose his temper. The effort of doing so brought home to him just how deeply furious he was. Simpson’s last few sentences had scraped his soul raw.
First thing we do, we put the lawyers and the suits in charge. Then we hang all the poor white trash.
As he approached the podium, he caught sight of James Nichols standing next to his daughter.
Oh, yeah. String up the niggers too, while we’re at it.
The image of a beautiful face came to him.
And fry the kikes, of course.
He was at the podium. He forced Simpson away from the microphone with his own equivalent of assertive self-confidence. And if Mike’s aura carried less of authority, and more of sheer dominance, so much the better.
“I agree with the town council’s proposal,” he said forcefully. Then, even more forcefully: “And I completely
disagree
with the spirit of the last speaker’s remarks.”
Mike gave Simpson a glance, lingering on it long enough to make the gesture public. “We haven’t even got started, and already this guy is talking about
downsizing
.”
The gymnasium was rocked with a sudden, explosive burst of laughter. Humor at Mike’s jest was underlain by anger. The crowd was made up, in its big majority, of working class people who had their own opinion of “downsizing.” An opinion which, unlike the term itself, was rarely spoken in euphemisms.
Mike seized the moment and drove on. “The worst thing we could do is try to circle the wagons. It’s impossible, anyway. By now, there are probably as many people hiding in the woods around us as there are in the town. Women and children, well over half of them.”
He gritted his teeth, speaking the next words through clenched jaws. “If you expect mine workers to start massacring unarmed civilians—
you’d damn well better think again.
”
He heard Darryl’s voice, somewhere in the crowd. “Tell ’em, Mike!” Then, next to him, Harry Lefferts: “Shoot the CEO!”
