1634: The Baltic War (assiti chards)

by Eric Flint

  The big workshop the king had had built for Baldur Norddahl was on the southernmost of the three islands in the lake that Frederiksborg Castle was built upon. It was located almost adjacent to the two round towers erected by the castle's original founder, Ulrik's grandfather Frederik II. Giving those familiar sights a mere glance, the prince headed for the S-bridge that would take him to the middle island.

  He took a shortcut through the royal stables. That was quicker, warmer-and he liked horses even more than he did snow. As he passed through, he exchanged greetings with the stablehands he encountered, but did not, as he usually would, take the time to chat with them. He was preoccupied today, lost in thoughts that were dark and foreboding.

  Once across the S-bridge and onto the middle island, Ulrik stopped in the square to gaze at the Neptune Fountain.

  There'd been snowball fights also, of course, many of them in this very square. Lots of those. Ulrik liked to fancy that he first learned military tactics in those melees.

  Melees they'd been, too. One of the advantages of being a boy prince-perhaps simply one of the realities, advantageous or not-was that you always had a coterie of other boys around you. Sons of courtiers or sons of stablehands, either way or both. At that age, people did not make the fine distinctions they would grow into as time passed. That was one of the things about his childhood that Ulrik found himself missing a great deal, especially after he visited Grantville and came to realize how very differently the up-timers calculated rank and station in life.

  Sadly, the main lesson Ulrik had learned from those mass snowball fights was that the surest of all military tactics was simply to outnumber the foe. "Sadly," because his illustrious father, for all his erratic but undoubted brilliance, seemed to be unable or unwilling to accept that reality and everything that flowed from it.

  Slowly, ignoring the snowfall that was covering his hat and the shoulders of his heavy coat, Ulrik walked most of the way around the Neptune Fountain in the middle of the square, examining, as he passed, the edifices around him.

  His father had ordered this castle built, transforming Frederik II's rather modest hunting manor into one of the great royal palaces of Europe. No idle boast, that, either. Ulrik had traveled enough to have seen many of them. Christian IV had had Frederiksborg designed in the Dutch Renaissance style, with its copper-covered roofs and spires, sweeping gables, sandstone decorations. The end result, completed in 1615, was quite magnificent.

  Having completed his round of the fountain, the prince continued to the north, to the island that held the royal palace and his own quarters.

  Easy to forget, when you lived in such a palace, that the kingdom which had been wealthy enough to afford it was still a small kingdom. Easy to forget, when you woke up every morning in a bedroom as magnificent as that of any monarch in Europe, that great bedrooms and halls and gardens and fountains did not translate into great armies and navies.

  Easy to forget, staring up at ceilings as splendid as any in the world, that they were still ceilings and not endless open skies. Easy to forget the most important lesson that Ulrik thought any king or prince had to learn down to the marrow of his bones.

  For all beings except the Almighty, there were limits. No matter who you were, there were limits. And you had to develop as keen an eye for them-as acute a taste, if you would-as you did for good architecture and fine paintings and music. Or you would soon enough find that you had lost everything within those limits. A great deal, at least.

  Ulrik himself had always been good at seeing limits. Perhaps that was because he was an average-sized man, in all respects, where his father was not at all. Christian IV was tall, immense in girth, and possessed a capacity for procreation that was only exceeded by his imagination and his capacity for drink. Had he not possessed a reasonably kind disposition-certainly by royal standards-he would have been a veritable ogre.

  This war was madness. Ulrik's father had been well-nigh insane to believe that by allying himself with the two of the three great Catholic powers in Europe he could somehow displace the Swede as the preeminent monarch in the Protestant lands. Even that wretched King Charles of England had been thinking more clearly. Richelieu and the Spaniards would use Denmark like a man squeezes all the juice out of an orange, and then cast the husk aside. And it would be that husk-not France, not Spain, certainly not England-upon which the full fury of the Germans fell.

  And it was their fury that Ulrik feared, not that of the Swedes. Sweden was not so big a kingdom itself, when all was said and done. Larger in size but smaller in population than Denmark. It was that reality that always grated on his father. Why Sweden, and not Denmark?

  They were all idiots. In the end, Ulrik thought, Gustav Adolf as much as Christian IV. Unable to see that the role played by Sweden and Denmark over the past century or two was solely due to the fact that the Germanies had been disunited and, to make the blessing of Scandinavia complete, ruled by as sorry a lot of squabbling and incompetent princes as you could ask for.

  Ulrik was now passing over the second bridge, and into a crosswind. He shivered, from the sudden cold.

  So he tried to tell himself, knowing that was an excuse. With these thoughts running through his head, he would have shivered on the warmest day of summer.

  He could remember shivering exactly so, in fact, on a warm summer day in Magdeburg.

  Grantville had been exhilarating. Magdeburg had been…

  Terrifying. All the energy and ingenuity brought by the up-timers through the Ring of Fire, that Ulrik had seen in Grantville also. But Grantville was a place of limits. Tightly circumscribed, first, by its surrounding hills; even more, circumscribed as well by the customs and traditions of its inhabitants.

  By and large, Ulrik had discovered that he liked most of the Americans. Not all, of course. But they were a decent and unassuming folk, for all their mechanical wizardry.

  Magdeburg seemed limitless. A new city arising like a phoenix from the ashes and ruins that Tilly and his butchers had left behind, on a vast and open plain. But now, with that same American ingenuity coupled to a people who outnumbered all other people in Europe and had a great rage coiled within their souls.

  And who could blame them-when, for fifteen years, every other land of Europe had used theirs for a battlefield? Taking advantage of Germany's disunity and the fecklessness of its princes to turn Europe's center into a wasteland. Destroying their towns and cities and villages, slaughtering their men, ravishing their women, starving their children and old folk.

  And for what? So this prince over here could claim a bit more land than he had before, and that king over there could add a new title to a list that was already preposterously long.

  Well, it was over, whether or not those bickering kings and princes were able or willing to recognize it. The Germanies had become Germany-call it whatever you will-and it had produced a prince like no other before him. And this one cared not in the least for the trappings of royalty. He cared only for the substance of the power those titles claimed to embody-and did so, to make it worse for the princes with the fancy titles, on behalf of the commoners who had suffered the most from the war.

  Ulrik had met him, twice. Very briefly, on both occasions. He certainly couldn't claim to know him, but he didn't need to. He'd spent considerable time in Magdeburg just walking through the new industrial districts, drinking in the taverns of the men who worked there, and idling many hours in the Freedom Arches which dotted most of the city. And, everywhere he went in that most plebeian of all great cities in Europe, hearing over and over the term Prince of Germany. The prince who would, they all seemed as certain as the tides, lead them to victory come winter's end.

  The phrase was a shell, depicting a man. The confidence and determination that his people poured into that term, no shell at all. Any monarch or chancellor in Europe who believed so was either blind or mad or both.

  The Swedish king, to give him credit, had held off the alliance Richelieu formed to destroy him. The a
lliance Ulrik's father had been fool enough to join. Whatever delusions Christian IV might still have, buttressed by the flattery of a pack of worthless courtiers, Ulrik had spoken to enough Danish officers to know that no one seriously expected to be able to take Luebeck this winter.

  By summer, they'd say. But that summer would never arrive, because spring would come before it. The spring of the year of our lord 1634, when the fury of Germany finally fell upon its torturers. Ulrik could only hope-and he'd do what he could for the purpose-that Denmark itself might survive that storm.

  He'd reached the northern island, and the royal palace. By now, his mood was far darker than the leaden skies.

  So…

  He was finally able to laugh, a bit. So he'd do what he'd found himself doing quite often, these past three months.

  Go visit an American, what else?

  Eddie Cantrell stared up at the canopy over his bed, feeling like an idiot.

  Four times over, to make everything perfect.

  To start with the smallest idiocy, what was a country boy from a small town in West Virginia doing in a bed-no, a whole bedroom-that he didn't think the fanciest up-time hotel in the world could boast?

  Just look at it, fer chrissake.

  Okay, the bed was a bed. Big, sure, but not actually as big as a king-size bed you could have bought up-time for a few hundred dollars. In that small respect, at least, there was still a trace of sanity in the world.

  From there, all reason fled. The bed coverings would have cost a small fortune, and God only knows what you'd have had to pay for the four-poster bed frame and the canopy hanging from it. The thing was a no-fooling fricking tapestry. Eddie was dead certain that its like back up-time could be found only in museums.

  His eyes dropped from the canopy to scan the bedroom. Of course, why not?-since the whole damn room belonged in a museum. There wasn't a square inch of the ceiling that wasn't decorated; not a square foot of the walls that didn't have a painting or some sort of art work on it. Any of which, Eddie was just as certain, museum curators and art thieves back up-time would have drooled over. Nor was there a square yard of the floor-a beautiful parquet floor, naturally, that would have probably bankrupted your average American millionaire back home-that didn't have a piece of furniture on it, or statuary, or just huge vases, any one of which would probably have bankrupted your average up-time multimillionaire.

  Eddie's eyes went to the big window across the room from the bed. Not to mention, of course, that if he hauled his sorry ass out of bed and hobbled over to the window, he'd be looking out at a vista that these crazy Danish royals chose to call "gardens" but didn't look like any gardens Eddie had ever seen. Sure as hell not the vegetable gardens his mother or any of their neighbors had had. Even leaving aside the fact that they were bigger than several football fields put together.

  And that was only the smallest of the idiocies.

  Move on to the next. What was a proper West Virginia country boy doing in bed in the first place, now that it was afternoon? Lolling about like that crazy French writer he'd read about once, who not only spent half his life in bed but wrote books-famous books, even-about a man who spent most of his life in bed.

  Eddie didn't even have the excuse of being bored. How could he be bored, when he was a captive of a medieval king who had dungeons to spare and torturers on his payroll?

  Fine. "Early Modern Era" king, if that'd make the scholars happy.

  Swell. What that meant in the real world, as far as Eddie was concerned, was that he was in transition from brutal illiterate kings whose powers were actually limited in practice to the Brave New World of absolute monarchies, whose torturers and executioners were literate so they could stay up on the latest innovations. Thank you very much.

  No, he was just in a funk. The sort of funk that might be respectable enough somewhere in Greenwich Village or the lower east side of Manhattan, but any solid hillbilly would sneer at. Go fix the suspension on your car or something, you dummy.

  And why was he in a funk? Oh, let's move on to Idiocy Number Three.

  Secret Agent Man. James Bond, 007. Mike Stearns had entrusted him with the task, in captivity, of ferreting out the secrets of the enemy and foiling their plans with fiendishly clever countermoves. Like fucking Houdini.

  Right. That made Mike Stearns an even bigger idiot than Eddie, sure, but Stearns wasn't sleeping three floors over a dungeon.

  Well, maybe he was, actually-given that Gustav Adolf had insisted on having his architects draw up the plans for Hans Richter Palace and oversee its construction. The Good Old Swedes, in this day and age, weren't exactly what you'd call good ole boys. A lot closer to their troll roots, still, than they were to Ingrid Bergman.

  But so what? They were Mike's dungeons, whose tongs and pincers and God knows what else he didn't have to worry about.

  Well. At least not until he lost the election. After that-this day and age being what it was-who could say?

  Big deal. The election Mike had to worry about was at least a year away. Eddie could lose his election any time that damn drunken Danish king who kept him up half the nights till the wee hours drinking along with him chose to punch his ticket.

  Did I mention I have absolute power? No? Well, not to worry-here's the proof of it. Lads, take this fellow downstairs and pluck off another part of his body.

  Eddie heard the door opening. All thought of the Three Lesser Idiocies were swept from his mind. The Great One had arrived.

  "Still in bed! Eddie, you should be ashamed of yourself! And don't pretend you have a hangover because my father let you go long before the carousing was over last night. I know, Ulrik told me. Oh, he's here, too."

  Eddie sat up to look. Sure enough, the youngest of the king's three sons in the royal line was coming in right behind.

  Perfect. The outrigger, so to speak, to the Greatest of All Idiocies.

  On the other hand-they had bestsellers in this day and age, too, he'd discovered-maybe if Eddie survived it all he could write a book and become rich and famous. Okay, rich and the laughingstock of an entire continent, but what the hell.

  The Life of a Secret Agent. No, that'd be fudging. The Secrets of a Secret Agent; or, How to Turn 007 Into a Seven Percent Solution.

  Chapter One. Get captured in a naval battle. Make sure you lose a foot while you're at it.

  Chapter Two. Get some moron of a president to make you his secret agent while in captivity.

  Chapter Three. Ingratiate yourself to an alcoholic enemy king by drinking as much as you possibly can in his company, when you don't like liquor to begin with and the stuff scares you to death because your dad was a souse.

  Chapter Four. Feed him a pack of silly lies and just hope that he's not sober enough to catch you at it.

  Chapter Five. Make friends with his son the prince.

  Chapter Six. Fall in love with his daughter the princess. Fine. The "king's daughter"-as if that's going to make any difference when they figure it out, seeing as how James Bondaged.07 was clever enough to pick a girl who's jail-bait back up-time and dungeon-bait in this one, so it wouldn't matter if she was a butcher's daughter.

  Chapter Seven…

  But Eddie flinched from that still-unwritten one. He couldn't only hope the red-hot tongs would cauterize the wound at the same time they rendered him unconscious from agony, when they removed the offending body part in question. Sometimes he found himself wondering if, in this day and age, they made wooden peg-dicks to match wooden peg legs.

  The scariest thing was, they probably did.

  "Why are you staring at me like that?" Anne Cathrine demanded. "You'd think I was a ghost or something."

  Ulrik pulled up a chair next to the bed, blithely ignoring the cost of the chair or whatever damage it might do to the floor. Eddie was afraid to sit in most of the furniture, himself, and whenever he couldn't walk barefoot on the floor he practically tiptoed.

  Of course, Ulrik could confidently expect to inherit the dungeons and the tongs a
nd the what-not. He had a chance of it, at least. Danes still had the custom that the nobility got to elect the king, choosing from whoever was eligible in the royal family. They'd already elected the oldest prince Christian as the successor, but if he died before his father did, Ulrik might still wind up on the throne even though he was the youngest of the three princes. Even if he didn't, he'd surely come out of it with a dungeon or two, along with a reasonable share of the torturers and tongs and pincers and what-not.

  "It can't be you, Sister," said Ulrik cheerfully. "Look! He's giving me the same stare."

  Anne Cathrine planted her hands on her hips. Very shapely hips. She was fully past puberty now, but still had a completely teenage female figure. Fifteen going on Eddie-if-you-ever-lay-a-finger-on-her-your-ass-is-grass.

  Fortunately, he'd managed-so far-to avoid that one and only idiocy. But unless Admiral Simpson steamed into the Oresund with an icebreaker before the winter was over, Eddie wasn't sure how long he could hold out.

  The problem was that Anne Cathrine wasn't exuding any of the well-known signals from Eddie's past that informed him in no uncertain terms that this girl ain't interested, buddy, so forget it. If she had, his course would have been easy. Miserable, sure, and pining away with unrequited love-but he was used to that. His high school experience had been four almost solid years of pining away after girls whose titles might as well have been You-Gotta-Be-Kidding or In-Your-Dreams, Buster.

  What he wasn't used to was a princess-fine, "king's daughter"-who planted those same very shapely hips on the bed right next to him, leaned over, spilling her gorgeous red-gold hair, took his cheeks in her hands and gave them a little shake. "Stop looking at me like that, I tell you."

  Ulrik laughed. "Sister, you're being forward. If I tell Father, he'll scold you."

  "No, he won't," she said serenely.

  "Yes, Princess," Eddie said, not serenely at all.

  That got him another cheek-shaking. "How many times must I tell you! 'King's daughter.' Not 'princess.' My mother's marriage to my father was morganatic." She twitched her head toward her half-brother. "Ulrik is a prince because he is in the royal line. I am not. Just a 'king's daughter.' "