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    The cuffing was not severe. Ludwig was in a good mood, insofar as that innocent expression can be applied to a troll in human guise. His gaiety, of course, was at Hans’ expense.

 

    “A real battle for you, chicklet!” roared Ludwig. “Some of our boys got bloodied down south a ways, so we’re going to sack Badenburg to teach these Protestant fucks a lesson.” The grin in the big man’s bearded face was jeering. “No more lazing about in the lap of luxury. You’ll be blooded before tomorrow’s over. Or
bloody ruin
yourself!”

 

    The veteran mercenaries standing nearby echoed Ludwig’s guffaws. The laughter was good-natured, for the most part. But Diego the Spaniard’s humor, as always, was sadistic.

 

    “A gutted mess you’ll be,” he predicted. The sneer on his face became a leer. Diego grabbed his crotch. “Annalise’s looking better by the day!” he chortled.

 

    Hans felt a spike of rage run down his spine. He detested the Spaniard as he did no other man in Ludwig’s band. More, even, than Ludwig himself. Ludwig was a brute, a beast, an ogre. Diego was something far worse. It was no accident that the Spaniard was always the man chosen by Ludwig whenever torture was to be done.

 

    Yet Hans said nothing. He averted his eyes. He was terrified of Diego. The sallow-faced Spaniard was not a big man. Nothing compared to Ludwig. But he was as savage as a weasel, and just as deadly.

 

    Hans braced himself for further ridicule. Fortunately, a small knot of horsemen came cantering up, diverting everyone’s attention. The captain “in command” of Ludwig’s band had arrived to give the orders.

 

    Hans didn’t even know the captain’s name. It was meaningless. Hans took his orders from Ludwig. He only gave the captain and his three companions a glance.

 

    But then, seeing the priest in the group, Hans’ glance became a stare. Apparently, there was to be a sermon along with commands. The priest would almost certainly be a Jesuit, attached to the Papal Inquisition. He would exhort the troops to fight in the name of holiness.

 

    Hans’ guess was confirmed by Diego’s muttered words of scorn. The Spaniard was contemptuous of the Jesuits and the pope’s Inquisition.
Weak-livered punks,
he called them. Diego liked to boast about the Spanish Dominicans and their Holy Office of the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition answered to the crown of Spain, not the Vatican. They did as they pleased, and damn the pope’s Italian lawyering.
Just burn the filthy heretics. They’re all Jews and Jew-lovers anyway, the ones who aren’t outright Moors.

 

    “Limpieza,” the Spanish called it. Pure blood, to be protected from taint. That mattered as much to them—more, in truth—than the pope’s concerns over religious dogma.

 

    The captain finished his brief exchange of words with Ludwig. The priest urged his horse to the fore.

 

    A sermon, sure enough.

 

    Hans tried to block the sermon from his mind. He did not even look at the Jesuit, lest his eyes betray him. He simply stared at the ground, hands clasped as if in prayer.

 

    The priest was speaking of the need to safeguard the Catholic faith from heresy.

 

    Hans could not help hearing the words. His thoughts seethed with fury.

 

    
Liar.
We were Catholics ourselves. Our whole town was Catholic.

 

    The priest was advocating the true faith.

 

    
We were kneeling in prayer when your “Catholic” mercenaries came into my father’s shop.

 

    Denouncing the Protestants.

 

    
The Protestants murdered my grandfather, and took away my mother. But it was your good Catholic Ludwig who drove a sword into my father’s belly when he held up the rosary.

 

    Denouncing sin, now.

 

    
And what was it, priest, when your soldiers sired a bastard on my sister? Was it hers, tied hand and foot to my father’s bed?

 

    The rest, he managed not to hear. Hans’ thoughts moved far away. Bleak and hopeless. Utterly despairing thoughts, as only those of an eighteen-year-old young man can be.

 

    Hans knew the truth. Satan’s rebellion, stymied for so long, had finally triumphed. It was no longer God who sat on the heavenly throne. The Beast had replaced Him. It was the serpent’s minions, not the Lord’s, who wore the vestments of the clergy. All clergy, of all creeds. The creeds themselves were meaningless. Satan’s joke, nothing more. The Lord of Flies was amusing himself, tormenting the land and its folk.

 

    The sermon was done. Hans, had he still retained Gretchen’s vestige of faith, would have thanked God. But there was no God to be thanked, any longer. There was nothing.

 

    He managed, barely, to pull himself back from that brink. Suicide was at the bottom of that plunge. Hans had been tempted, often enough. But—

 

    He flared his nostrils, and took in a deep breath. Still staring at the ground, still with his hands clasped before him.

 

    The hands were not clasped in prayer, for all the strength with which he squeezed the fingers. Hans Richter was simply reminding himself that all was not lost. He still had something. Something to call his own, and something to give what he could.

 

    
Family. That I have. That I will protect, as best I can. Whatever else.
Chapter 16

    “How many, d’you think?” asked Mackay.
    Andrew Lennox squinted nearsightedly. Then, remembering his new gift from the Americans, he took out the spectacles and put them on. It took him not more than five seconds, scanning the field, to pronounce judgment.
    “Two thousand. Divided two an’ one. Maybe e’en less. Tilly is more conservative than Gustav Adolf, an’ this’ll be one o’ ’is poorer an’ weaker units. They’ve got nae artillery ’t’all.”
    Mackay nodded. “About my estimate.”
    Next to him, Mike cocked his head. “By two and one—?”
    “Pikemen to arquebusiers,” replied Mackay. The Scots officer pointed to the tightly packed mass of men slowly approaching their own forces. “See the formation? That’s your typical Spanish-style
tercio
. All the Habsburg armies use it in battle, although the imperials prefer a higher proportion of arquebus than the Spaniards. Impressive, isn’t it?”
    Mike studied the advancing army. He had no difficulty agreeing with the word.
Impressive
, it most certainly was. The imperial army reminded him of a gigantic mastodon, bearing down with gleaming tusks.
    
And they’re just about to become as extinct.
    Tilly’s mercenaries were packed into a rectangle approximately fifty files wide and forty ranks deep, covering not more than fifty yards of front. The men in the ranks were spaced every three feet, and the files were drawn up even closer. The formation was so tight that, even across the clear and level ground of what had once been plowed farmland, they could only move deliberately. Mike knew, from what Mackay and Lennox had told him, that if Tilly himself and his entire army had been here, the oncoming tercio would have been one of sixteen or seventeen such units. They would have been arrayed side by side, like a human glacier. Slow as a glacier, and just as unstoppable.
    The pikemen formed the heart of the formation. Their great fifteen-foot spears, held erect, glistened even in the light of an overcast day. The five hundred arquebusiers were arrayed on either flank. The arquebusiers’ principal duty was to fend off pistol-wielding cavalry and match volleys with enemy gunmen. But, as had been true for a century and more, it would be the press and charge of pike which would decide the day.
    Such, at least, was the accepted theory and practice of the time. Frank Jackson, standing on Mike’s left, echoed his own mental opinion. “Talk about candidates for extinction. One cluster bomb would take out the whole bunch.”
    “We don’t have a cluster bomb,” pointed out Mike mildly.
    Frank snorted. “Neither did the NVA. But I’ll tell you right now those tough little bastards in their black pajamas would have loved these guys. Mincemeat, coming up. Complete with
nuoc mam
.”
    Mike grimaced at the image. Frank had brought home a Vietnamese wife from the war. In the decades since, Diane Jackson—she had Americanized her name—had blended in extremely well. But she still insisted on cooking at least one meal a month with that godawful Vietnamese fish sauce.
    “Nuoc mam,”
Frank repeated. Under other circumstances, the obvious relish in his voice would have been odd. Much as he doted on his wife, Frank was no fonder of the fish sauce than any other native-born American.
    Mackay, listening, understood the essence if not the precise meaning of Frank’s words. “You are
that
confident?” The Scotsman pointed to the oncoming enemy. “They outnumber us two to one.” He glanced to the left, where Ernst Hoffman’s ragtag Protestant mercenaries were drawn up. About five hundred of them, more or less. Their formation was so irregular and undisciplined that an exact count was impossible. “That’s counting that sorry lot, who’ll break in a minute.”
    Mike shrugged. “I’m not relying on Hoffman’s goons at all. I just insisted they be here in order to get them out of the town.”
    He cocked his head around. The little American/Scots/Protestant army was drawn up less than half a mile north of Badenburg. Unusually, for a town its size—the population was less than six thousand—Badenburg was walled. Those walls, as much as anything else, had determined Mike’s political tactics over the past two weeks. Hoffman had been reluctant, to put it mildly, to risk bringing his mercenaries into the open field. But Mike had insisted, and Mackay had sweetened the pot with a portion of the king of Sweden’s money.
    When he turned his head back, he found that the young Scots officer was giving him a very peculiar look. Well . . . Not so peculiar, perhaps. Mackay still hadn’t quite gotten over his shock, once he realized the full extent of Mike’s intentions. Defeating Tilly’s mercenaries was only the first part of those plans.
Liberating
Badenburg, Mike had explained, required dealing with the Protestant mercenaries as well. Decisively and, if necessary, ruthlessly. Even Lennox, for all his grisly experience, had been impressed by Mike’s cold-bloodedness.
    “Yes, Mackay, I
am
that confident.” Mike’s eyes ranged up and down his own battle line. The UMWA members, reinforced by high-school seniors, were lying prone behind a log parapet. There were, by exact count, 289 Americans in that line. All of them were wearing hunting camouflage, and all of them were armed with high-power rifles.
    Mackay had been skeptical, but he had agreed to let the Americans form up at the center. His cavalry, evenly divided, was marshaled on the flanks. Every one of those Scotsmen had been at least as skeptical as Mackay, once they understood what Mike had planned for them.
    
Pursuit?
Cough, cough.
Doesn’t that, ahem, presuppose that you’ve already defeated the enemy?
    Mike smiled thinly. A half hour from now, he didn’t think the Scots would be skeptical any longer. His eyes moved to the enemy, now less than two hundred yards away. The tercio
was marching across the open field almost as slowly as a turtle.
    “If I wanted to, Mackay,” Mike said softly, “I could end this battle right now. Your arquebuses can’t hit anything much beyond fifty yards, even in a volley, and they take a minute to reload. I know you think our tactics are only suitable for skirmishers, but you’ve never seen breech-loading rifles in action. With our accuracy and rate of fire, we could have half that army dead before they could get in range.”
    Mike pointed to a small group of coal miners crouched in a rifle pit. The rifle pit was positioned on the left flank of the American line. “I want to do more than just win this battle. I want to terrify them completely—and Hoffman’s goons with them. So we’ll wait, for a bit, until the hammer falls.”
    Mackay stared at the men in the rifle pit. They were making last-minute adjustments to the weapon in the center. The adjustments were quite unnecessary, in all truth. But those middle-aged men were nervous. Their Vietnam days were many years behind them. It had been a long time since any of them fired an M-60.
    Out of the corner of his mouth, Mike whispered to Frank: “I
still
can’t believe you stole the damn thing.”
    Jackson was unabashed. “What the hell? I figured the Army owed me.” He shrugged. “Hey, I was a piker. I knew one guy who smuggled a howitzer back from Nam.”
    Mike chuckled. Frank had shown him the machine gun less than three weeks ago. He had been a bit shame-faced, at the time, leading Mike and Dan Frost into the woods behind his house where he had buried it, years before, along with three boxes of ammunition.
    “For Christ’s sake, Jackson,” Dan growled, after Frank hauled the carefully wrapped device out of its hiding place. “That thing is so goddam illegal I ought to put up most wanted posters all over town.” The police chief rubbed his left arm, still in a sling. “Good thing for you I’m officially on the sick list.”
    Yes,
then
, Frank had been embarrassed. “It’s not like I was some goofy survivalist or anything,” he’d tried to explain. “Just— Oh, hell. I was a kid. It seemed more like a prank at the time than anything else.”
    But that was then, and today was now, and Mike was glad to have the M-60. Delighted, if the truth be told.
    Tilly’s mercenaries were a hundred and fifty yards away, now. They were dividing their forces. The bulk of the formation continued to advance straight toward the Americans in front of Badenburg. But five hundred of them, approximately, were moving toward Hoffman’s men. The Protestant mercenaries, skittish as kittens, had insisted on forming up some distance to the left. Right alongside the road leading back into Badenburg and the safety of its walls.
    Mike took a last glance up and down the line. He turned his head, looking over his left shoulder to a small knoll some thirty yards behind. Standing on the top of the knoll, Greg Ferrara made a quick gesture. Thumbs up.
    Mike looked away. He hoped the confidence of the science-teacher-become-artillery-officer was justified. Ferrara and his precocious students had designed and built the rockets themselves. Whether they would work, in an actual battle, remained to be seen.
    Frank, apparently, shared Mike’s doubts. “I just hope the damn things don’t hit
us
,” he muttered.
    “They won’t,” came a voice from behind them. For all its youthful timbre, the words were spoken with great assurance.
    Mike smiled, but didn’t turn around.
    
Ah, yes. D’Artagnan, and the Three Musketeers.
    The voice belonged to Jeff Higgins. Jeff was one of Ferrara’s “whiz kids.” Although he and his three best friends had played a big role in designing the rockets, they had a different assignment in this battle. Larry Wild, Jimmy Andersen and Eddie Cantrell probably had as much talent for science as Jeff himself. They
certainly
shared the same enthusiasm for off-road motorcycling. Mike had decided to use them for couriers today. Their dirt bikes would be perfect for the task.
    Mike didn’t really think he would need four couriers, but the boys were well-nigh inseparable. That had been true even before the Ring of Fire. Since the disaster, they had clung together ferociously.
    Mike sighed, thinking about their situation. By and large, Grantville’s families had come through the Ring of Fire relatively unscathed. Fortunately, the disaster had happened on a Sunday, when almost all the families were at home. Even the coal miners who had come into town for Rita’s wedding had, with few exceptions, brought their wives and children.
    Still—there were some heart-breaking exceptions. Bill Porter, the power-plant manager, had lost his whole family. He had been at the power plant, but his wife and children didn’t live in Grantville. They had stayed behind, wherever “behind” was. A few others faced the same situation. Like Bill, most of them tried to bury their grief in hard work, consoling themselves as best they could with the knowledge—the hope, at least—that their families were still alive and well. Wherever—
whenever—
they were.
    But there was no situation as bad as that of these boys. Jeff and Larry Wild were the only ones who lived in Grantville. They lived right next to each other, in two of the double-trailers in the trailer park next to the fairgrounds. Jimmy Anderson and Eddie Cantrell, who lived in Barrackville, had been visiting them. Jeff and Larry’s families had all been gone for the day. The four teenagers had been taking advantage of the situation to enjoy an uninterrupted and adult-free game of
Dungeons and Dragons.
    None of them except Jeff had reached the age of eighteen. And now, orphans in all that mattered, they were adrift in a world more vicious than any fantasy adventure.