1635: The Eastern Front

by Eric Flint

  Chapter 14

  Magdeburg

  Gazing out of his office window overlooking the Elbe, Francisco Nasi had the same thought that most people did when they studied that scenery.

  What a blighted mess.

  In days past—well, you had to go back at least a year—the Elbe itself had been fairly attractive, even if the factories and mills and foundries that lined it in this area were not. But that was no longer true. The river had become rather badly polluted.

  According to up-time values of "polluted," at any rate. For someone reared in the seventeenth century, the river might be dirty and ugly but at least it was no longer dangerous. Magdeburg's extensive water and sewer systems saw to that, along with the ferocious patrols maintained constantly by the city's Committee of Correspondence. Whatever other noxious substances might be in that river, human waste was no longer one of them.

  Nobody in their right mind would willingly drink from that river. Even after being filtered in the water treatment plants, the Elbe's waters near Magdeburg still tasted pretty foul. If you did drink from it, though, the worst you'd probably suffer was just a bad taste in your mouth, maybe a touch of nausea. But you wouldn't contract dysentery or typhoid fever—as you very well might if you drank the river waters near many towns and cities in Europe.

  For that, if nothing else, Francisco's allegiance to the Americans would have been firm. They had their faults, certainly. For someone of Nasi's sophistication and cosmopolitan inclinations, parochialism was perhaps the worst. But wherever the influence of the up-timers went, children lived. Not all, but many more than would have otherwise.

  His allegiance to one up-timer in particular was more than firm. By now, it was as solid as granite. That was his former employer, Michael Stearns, whom he'd served for two years as what amounted to his chief of espionage.

  Francisco wondered how Mike was faring now. He'd be on the eve of his first battle. Well, not exactly his first battle, but certainly his first battlefield.

  He'd do very well, he thought. It was almost impossible to imagine Mike Stearns not doing very well at anything he tried.

  But there was no longer anything Francisco could do for the man. Not directly, at least. So, hearing the knock on the door, he turned away from the window and brought his mind to bear on a current problem.

  "Come in, Eddie." He'd been expecting Junker's arrival, but Francisco would have known who his visitor was just by the way he knocked. For whatever quirky reason—the man was given to whimsy—Eddie Junker had adopted the habit several months earlier of rapping on a door according to a little up-time jingle: Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits.

  It was incredibly annoying. Fortunately for Eddie, his employer had studied Maimonides and come away convinced that the great sage's criticism of anthropomorphism could be applied to dealing with petty irritations as well. True, no rabbi he'd encountered agreed with his interpretation of the Guide For the Perplexed. So much the worse for them.

  Junker came in, moving more lightly that you'd expect for a man as stocky as he was. His hand closing the door was light, too. Nasi could barely hear the latch click.

  Proving once again the value of a correct interpretation of Maimonides. Coupled to the aggravating knock was a generally splendid young man.

  "Sit."

  While Eddie did so, Francisco turned the map that had been lying on his desk so that it faced Junker. That done, he pointed to the place that filled most of the map. He'd been told by people familiar with the city that it was quite a good representation of Dresden.

  "Can you land here, if need be? Or anywhere near the city?"

  Eddie glanced at the legend. "Dresden, huh? It's a pretty fair likeness."

  Nasi's eyebrows raised. "You've been there, then. I hadn't known that."

  "Oh, half a dozen times at least. Twice—no, three times—on business for my father. And we have relatives in the city, so I visited them on several occasions also."

  He pursed his lips and frowned, studying the map. "As to whether I could land the plane . . ."

  Nasi waited patiently. There was no point trying to hurry Eddie. For such a young man, he was quite deliberative in the way he approached problems. On the positive side, he didn't make many mistakes, either, and no dumb ones.

  Finally, Junker leaned back in the chair. "I just don't know, Don Francisco. I . . . ​think I probably could. The terrain's flat. As long as you stay away from the Elbe, and it hasn't rained heavily, the ground should be solid enough. But I really wouldn't want to land on a field that hadn't been prepared. Any sort of sizeable rock—"

  Nasi waved his hand. "Yes, of course. We'd have to see to that first."

  He sat down in his own chair and studied the map pensively.

  After a few seconds, Eddie cleared his throat. "If you don't mind my asking—"

  Francisco had found that in his line of work one of the worst mistakes you could make was to fetishize security, especially with your immediate subordinates. Not only did it handicap them in their work, but they also invariably resented it. If they were smart, at least, and Nasi had no use for dimwitted assistants.

  There were times, of course, when complete secrecy was imperative. But this was not one of them.

  "I've been approached by Gretchen Richter. She wanted to know if I could fly someone into Dresden—and if I would be willing to do so."

  "The someone being . . ."

  "Herself, I imagine. I know that she's been approached by people from that rebellion in the Vogtland. They wanted her to come to Dresden. She refused, at least for the moment, but will send some CoC representatives."

  Eddie pursed his lips again. "How solid is that information?"

  "As solid as possible, since I got it from Richter herself."

  "Really? I'm a little surprised she was that forthcoming."

  "She's shrewd. She figures I'd most likely find out about it anyway, if not all the details. This way she maximizes the chances that I'd agree, since I wouldn't be wondering what her motives were."

  Eddie stared out the window for a moment. "So you're thinking that she's laying the basis for a later arrival. In case . . ."

  "In case Dresden explodes. Yes. You'll need to take that into account when you investigate the possibilities of landing a plane in the area. There may be hostilities underway."

  "Ah, marvelous. What I always wanted. Landing under fire while on a desperate mission."

  Nasi smiled. "If it would make you happier, you could take Denise with you. On the exploratory trip, I mean. Not the possible later desperate mission under fire. I wouldn't care to answer to her mother for that."

  Eddie winced. "Me neither."

  Denise Beasley's mother was a formidable woman. On the other hand, Christin George did not try to rein in her daughter, either—which, given Denise's nature, would have been well-nigh impossible anyway.

  Denise and Eddie were more-or-less betrothed now. Not in a manner that down-time Germans would have recognized as legally binding, true. What Denise herself called "going steady." But, perhaps oddly in such a willful girl, Francisco thought she was quite devoted to Junker.

  Eddie was back to staring out the window. "We'd have to be gone for at least a month. I'd need to get a chaperone, for that long a trip. Christin is easygoing, but no mother of a seventeen-year-old girl is that easygoing." He mused for a few more seconds. "Denise will insist that Minnie come with us, of course. Which I don't mind, except Christin will never agree that Minnie Hugelmair constitutes what any sane person would call a ‘chaperone.' "

  Nasi nodded judiciously. "That would indeed be madness."

  Silence fell upon the room again. After perhaps a minute, Nasi chuckled. "The solution is obvious, I think."

  Eddie winced. "She'll kill me."

  "Oh, nonsense. I've always found Noelle Stull to be quite the adventuress."

  "For God's sake, don't tell her that. Besides, she's all the way down in Bamberg now. And she'd have to get permission from her office, and a
s overworked as they are—

  Francisco shook his head. "Actually, she's been in Grantville for the past week or so, packing her belongings. That's because she's got a new job and a new employer." He cleared his throat. "Who is me. So I foresee no problems."

  Junker stared at him, then whistled softly. "I really never thought she'd accept your offer."

  "Prague is closer to Vienna."

  Eddie chuckled again. "Given that the fellow of her interest is a Hungarian officer in the service of the Austrians, and the Austrians are officially at war with the king of Bohemia, I'm not quite sure how relocating to Prague really puts Noelle any closer to Janos Drugeth. And who knows where he is these days, anyway?"

  Francisco got a smug look at his face. "As it happens, I do."

  Györ, Hungary, near the Ottoman border

  Janos Drugeth felt an urge to wrap a cloak around himself, even though the temperature atop the bastion was quite warm. As you'd expect on a sunny day in July. He didn't have a cloak with him anyway.

  That was just a reflex, from the considerable time he'd spent in his life in one of these Balkan fortresses. The fortifications were of the so-called trace italienne design. Medieval perpendicular stone walls, circular or square in design, had been unable to withstand gunpowder artillery. They'd been replaced by fortresses that were generally star-shaped, with triangular bastions that gave the defenders a good field of fire at any enemy getting close to the wall. Later designs—not applied to this particular fortress—added features like ravelins, hornworks and crownworks.

  The walls were quite different, too. They sloped rather than being perpendicular. The construction materials used were earth and brick, whenever possible, rather than stone. In every particular, they were designed to absorb artillery fire rather than shed it. Each cannon ball digging into the walls simply became another piece of the structure.

  All well and good. But come winter, these new-style fortresses seemed every bit as frigid as their medieval predecessors.

  Below him, the Rába River meandered through the town of Györ. The view was pleasant, as was usually the case in the Balkans. Janos had often wondered what God's purpose might be, to couple such a lovely region with so much in the way of strife and misery. Of course, he imagined a Frenchman or an Englishman or a Spaniard—certainly a German—could have recited at least as long a litany of woes as any inhabitant of the Balkans.

  Not long ago, Noelle Stull had sent Janos a book of essays written by a famous American writer of the past. The author called himself Mark Twain. That was apparently not his real name, though, which Janos found a bit odd. To be sure, many Europeans of this age and ages past wrote under pseudonyms. But the up-timers insisted they'd had no inquisition in their nation. Why, then, the need for pseudonyms? But perhaps he was missing something.

  Among the essays, most of which had been shockingly irreligious, had been one titled "The Damned Human Race." Try as he might, Drugeth had found it difficult to quarrel with Twain's thesis. He'd seen too much cruelty and brutality in his life, some of which—the brutality if not, he hoped, the cruelty—he'd inflicted himself.

  He wondered still why Noelle had sent him the book. She was herself a devout Catholic and could not possibly have agreed with Twain's viewpoint, especially that displayed in his Letters From the Earth. Had Twain been alive today, that text alone might have gotten him burned at the stake in some countries and in serious trouble with the authorities in most others.

  Well . . . ​maybe not. In fact, almost certainly not. The manner in which heresy was handled—even the way it was looked upon—had been undergoing a rapid change in Europe since the Ring of Fire. Today, it would be highly unlikely that any nation, even Spain, would actually execute an American for heresy.

  Americans themselves would attribute that reluctance to fear of their military capabilities. Which, to be sure, was real enough. But the source of the unease was deeper, something which few Americans really understood themselves. Most of them considered themselves Christians and many of those considered themselves very devout. But with very few exceptions, not even the most religious up-timers really had the same outlook as most people born and bred in the seventeenth century.

  The up-timers were, at bottom, a profoundly secular folk. To them, the Ring of Fire had been some sort of cosmic mystery. The more religious would add that God's hand was clearly at work—but they would say the same about almost anything. If they became ill and recuperated, they saw God's hand at work. If their favored sports team won a game, for that matter, they saw God's hand at work.

  But there would be no miracle involved. Just God's mysterious ways.

  People in the seventeenth century, on the other hand, believed in miracles. And they believed just as firmly—or had, until the Ring of Fire—that the age of miracles was over, and had been over for sixteen hundred years. Every theologian had told them so—and it didn't matter if they were Catholic or Lutheran or Calvinist. On that subject, there had been no real dispute.

  True, there were still miracles of a sort. The Catholic church to which Janos himself belonged required evidence of a miracle before it would canonize someone who had not been a martyr. But the sort of miracles one expected to be associated with such "Venerables," as they were called, were modest in scale compared to the miracles that had happened in ancient days. Typically, it would be found that a person was gravely ill, with a disease for which there was no cure or remedy; prayers were then sent to the Venerable, by the victim or by relatives; the afflicted one was cured, spontaneously and completely; for which doctors had no explanation due to natural causes.

  Well and good. Janos did not doubt the reality of such miracles. But they were hardly on the order of the parting of the Red Sea or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Such things had been absent from the earth for over a millennium and a half.

  Until the Ring of Fire.

  The issue had agonized theologians for years now. There was simply no getting around it. Thousands upon thousands of people—Janos himself was one of them—had gone to Grantville and seen the miracle with their own eyes.

  Nor was it just the appearance of a mysterious town of peculiar folk with near-magical mechanical powers. That might possibly have been explained away. But you couldn't explain away the land itself.

  There were great cliffs there, nine hundred feet tall—three times the height of the famed White Cliffs of Dover—and completely unnatural in their design. Absolutely sheer, absolutely flat, and with nothing in the way of a scree slope at their base.

  More than four years had passed since the Ring of Fire and those cliffs had begun to wear down. But Janos had spoken to eyewitnesses—and there were many of them; Thuringia was a well-populated area—who swore that on the day it happened, those cliffs had gleamed and shone like mirrors. They were simply stone and earth, like any other cliffs, but on the day of the Ring of Fire they had been cut by a blade sharper than any razor. A blade huge enough to cut a perfect circle six miles in diameter,

  A blade that no one in his right mind could believe had been wielded by anyone but the Almighty.

  So, no American would be burned at the stake. Not even in Spain. As harsh as they might be, not even the inquisitors of the Spanish crown would be willing to take such a risk. Whatever His purpose might have been, God had brought these people here. Executing them for heresy seemed rather perilous.

  Theologians all over Europe—as well as political leaders, of course—were still arguing over the meaning of the Ring of Fire. A few even held to the belief that Satan had caused the Ring of Fire. Not in Rome, though, and certainly not in Spain. The Manichean heresy involved was obvious and both the Holy and the Spanish Inquisition were quite willing to subject such persons to auto-da-fé.

  Most opponents of the up-timers had settled on some version of Cardinal Richelieu's thesis: that God had certainly created the Ring of Fire, but had done so as a subtle caution to princes and peoples. By showing them a world of the future which had clearly no
t been created by demons, he was warning mankind of the folly of subverting the natural political order.

  Janos' own emperor, Ferdinand III, inclined to that belief. Janos himself had done so, once. Now . . . ​He was no longer sure.

  And that, he thought, was the reason Noelle had sent him the Twain book. Not because she agreed with Twain, but as a gentle reminder to Drugeth that God's ways were subtle and mysterious. So how likely was it that an inquisitor—much less a political leader with obvious vested interests and biases—could determine the truth?

  Not very, he'd come to conclude.

  His musings were interrupted by the sound of boots clattering up the stone stairs behind him. From the pattern of the sound, he knew who was coming. Ágoston Mészáros, one of the four junior officers who had accompanied him on this expedition. Mészáros was the most junior of the group, which meant that he invariably got the assignment of carrying messages.

  Just as well. Ágoston was a stout fellow, but not someone you wanted to assign tasks which required much in the way of thinking.

  As soon as the young officer came onto the bastion, he extended a slender dispatch. "Just arrived, sir."

  Janos broke the seal. The contents of the dispatch were brief. He read it through, and then read it through again.

  So. Johann Schmid could not come himself. Janos was not surprised. Schmid served most of the Catholic countries as their informal ambassador to the Turks. He was believed to have the best intelligence network of any European in the Ottoman Empire. Schmid had been a slave of the Turks for twenty years, eventually serving them in the position of dragoman. He had contacts inside and outside of the Ottoman government, and at multiple levels of Turkish society.

  Drugeth had met him twice, and wasn't sorry he wouldn't be meeting him again. Schmid was a thoroughly unpleasant man. Potentially dangerous, too. It was believed that he'd tried to poison the diplomat Bratutti, probably in collusion with the Venetians, for no more sublime reason than professional rivalry.