1635: The Eastern Front (19 page)

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 not 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.

Instead, according to the dispatch, Janos would be meeting with one of Schmid's agents. The name was not given, of course, any more than Schmid had put his own name on the missive. No one spied on the Turks casually, unless he wanted to find a strangler's cord around his neck.

If Janos was lucky, the agent would be the Ragusan physician, Doctor Grassi. The man had probably as extensive a knowledge of Ottoman affairs as Schmid himself and was far more pleasant to deal with.

Janos read through the dispatch a third time. No names were specified when it came to location, either. But from subtle hints, he was quite sure that Osijek was the place the agent would meet him.

That was within Ottoman territory, but Janos had expected as much. In some ways, he would have preferred to meet in Belgrade. There'd be many more Ottoman soldiers there, but the city was also huge—with one hundred thousand inhabitants, it was the largest city in the Turkish empire except Istanbul itself—and had a polyglot population. Serbs, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Ragusans from Dubrovnik, traders from everywhere. Drugeth would be able to blend in easily. He could probably even do so as a Hungarian merchant.

Still, Osijek would do well enough. It was much smaller than Belgrade, but it was a trade center in its own right. Six roads led into the town. And it was close enough to Hungary that Hungarians were probably more common there than in Belgrade.

"Should we prepare to leave, sir?" asked Ágoston.

Janos shook his head. "No, you'll all be staying here. I'll be leaving tomorrow morning. I should be back within a week or two."

He'd have to go alone. A party of several Hungarians would stand out in Osijek. Besides, none of his subordinates had much experience as anything other than cavalry officers. He doubted any of them could pass themselves off as humble merchants. Mészáros would be hopeless.

Part Three

August 1635

These steep and lofty cliffs

Chapter 15

The Saxon plain, between Merseburg and Lützen

"Lützen's back there," said Eric Krenz. "We've bypassed it already." He turned in his saddle and pointed to the west, almost behind them.

Jeff turned to look. The road they'd been following from Merseburg had continued southward. The army had now turned east. Most of the units, including Jeff's 12th Infantry Battalion, were now marching through fields. Fortunately, cavalry units had already gone ahead of them and partially cleared the way.

Partially cleared the way.
That was a euphemistic way of saying that horsemen had already trampled flat most of the local farmers' crops so it was a bit easier for the infantry. Jeff no longer had any trouble understanding why farmers generally detested soldiers, even their own. If this had still been Thuringian territory, the commanders would have given chits to the local authorities, which they could theoretically redeem to get repaid for at least some of the damages. In the State of Thuringia-Franconia, if not all of the USE's provinces, they probably would have gotten something too.

But they wouldn't here. This was Saxon territory, and Torstensson wasn't making any pretense that he'd repay anyone for damages. Looking on the brighter side, he'd also made clear to his soldiers that he wouldn't tolerate any atrocities either.

So be it. War was what it was. Jeff had gotten pretty inured to such things by now. He figured Sherman probably hadn't repaid any Georgia farmers either, during his march to the sea.

When he turned around to face in the direction they were travelling, he had to squint a little. The sun had risen far enough above the horizon to be uncomfortable to look toward.

Eric had turned back too. "Gustav Adolf died very close to here, you know."

Jeff Higgins sniffed. "Last I heard, Gustav Adolf was alive and well and leading his army toward Berlin."

"In that other world, I meant. Your world."

"Not my world any longer."

Krenz looked at him sidewise for a moment. "Do you miss it?"

"I miss my family, sure. I'm the only one who came through the Ring of Fire, you know. But other than that . . ." He shrugged. "I can't say I regret it. I would never have met Gretchen, for one thing. For another . . ."

He paused to check on his horse. The beast seemed placid enough, but you could never be sure what sort of bizarre notions might cross its little mind. Or was it "his" little mind? Jeff wasn't sure of the protocol when it came to geldings.

Geldings weren't really considered suitable war horses by cavalrymen and other such dashing fellows of the time. A
true
warrior would insist on riding a stallion into battle. But as far as Jeff was concerned, that was just more seventeenth-century silliness. Stallions were temperamental and Jeff figured he'd have better things to worry about on a battlefield than a hyperactive half-ton animal.

Krenz wouldn't make fun of him, of course, since he was riding a gelding himself.

"For another . . ." Eric prompted him.

"It's a little hard to explain. Even leaving Gretchen aside, I feel . . . I don't know. More alive, I guess. Like what I do here makes a real difference where in the world I left behind it probably never would have."

Krenz chewed his lower lip for a while, thinking about it. "I suppose I understand. But I have to say the thought of being insignificant but alive and healthy seems quite a bit superior than the state of being oh-so-very-important and oh-so-very-dead. If you ask me, Achilles was an idiot."

Jeff chuckled. "Oh, if that's what's bothering you! No, no, you've got it all backwards. You think the world I came from was
safe
?"

He clucked his tongue. "I guess you never heard of thermo-nuclear weapons. There were tens of thousands of those lovely things floating around. Any one of them could have turned the biggest city in the world—that world, forget this one—into a pile of slag."

Ghastly details followed.

"—also had biological and chemical weapons. Take sarin gas, for instance—"

Eric listened intently.

"—course, there probably wasn't any designed weapon as nasty as the Ebola virus. That came out of Central Africa, but I always figured it'd get loose some day. After that . . ." He made a face. "It's a viral hemorrhagic fever. That means—"

Graphic and gruesome details followed. Jeff moved on to other ills of the twentieth century.

"—overpopulation. Oh, yeah, I figured someday even Fairmont would have skyscrapers and you'd be lucky to get five hundred square feet to—

"—additives in
everything.
I mean, you had no idea what you were really eating. And it was even worse in the fast food joints where—"

He reserved particular venom for what had been his own
bête noire,
automated phone systems.

"—always changed their menus. Call the next day and the lying bastards would insist the menu had changed again. There were stories of people dying of thirst and ruptured bladders trying to figure how to actually talk to anybody. And the one phrase you
never
heard those fucking computer voices say was ‘call volumes are unusually low so we'll connect you to your party immediately.' Oh, hell no. Call volumes were
always
high. It was like grading on a bell curve where everybody flunks."

By the time he was done, Krenz was looking downright chipper.

From atop the closest thing his scouts could find to a hill—it was really just a hillock, a slight rise in the landscape—Hans Georg von Arnim studied the surroundings. And, just as Eric Krenz had done, mused on the fact that in another universe the king of Sweden had died in battle not far from this very place.