Ring of Fire III(43)

Von Schnetter took the eyeglass and slid it back into the case he kept attached to his saddle. He had the same slight smile also.

“No, I haven’t. And as I’m sure you’re figured out by now, I have no intention of attacking them. That American major—and it’s him, for a certainty; did you see the size of the bastard?—has shown himself to be altogether too competent for my taste. Any attack we launched with no cavalry to work at their flanks would be a bloodbath. We’d probably win, in the end, because we outnumber them three-to-one. But that’s more of a butcher’s bill than I’m willing to pay with good troops who’ve been left in the lurch by swine and...”

He let the end of the sentence trail off. The “swine,” of course, referred to von Troiberz. Von Haslang was quite sure that if his colonel had completed the thought, the “and” would have been followed by a very unfavorable reference to General von Lintelo.

He had gotten a good look at the commander of the enemy force. Just now, and also the day before when he and von Schnetter had studied their opponent making camp from another rise in the landscape. The colonel’s eyepiece was superb. He’d only been able to afford it because he came from a wealthy family.

It was conceivable, of course, that the Danube Regiment had two officers as huge as the one they’d been looking at. But it was not likely. The Simpson fellow was rather famous, all across the Germanies. So was his admiral father, but in the case of the son the fame came entirely from his physique, not his accomplishments. That would begin to change, of course, as a result of his exploits over the past few days.

It was said that the young American major had engaged in an up-time sport that required immense men. “Feetball,” it was called, if von Haslang remembered right. He was not clear with regard to the details of the game. His image of it, had he laid it before an up-timer, would have resulted in smiles, perhaps even laughter. Von Haslang’s conception of “feetball” bore a much closer resemblance to mass sumo wrestling than the actual American sport.

But the details were irrelevant. Von Haslang would hate to confront that man in a physical clash, armed with anything but a gun. And now that he’d experienced three days of maneuvering against him, he’d want to fire the gun at a distance.

He and von Schnetter went back to looking at the distant enemy fieldworks.

“Make camp for the night, sir?” von Haslang asked, figuring that the moment for informality had passed.

“Yes, please see to it, Captain. We’ll not be launching any attacks.”

* * *

Colonel Johann von Troiberz was planning no attacks of his own that night, either. Not even an attack on the virtue of the woman sharing his bed, since that virtue had fallen many years earlier. Not to him, but to a different officer.

He thought he was the second Bavarian officer for whom she’d become a concubine. In actual fact, he was the fifth, but the woman in question had never seen any need to enlighten the colonel on the matter. Men were always bothered by such details.

After von Troiberz fell asleep, Ursula Gerisch stared at the ceiling. It was the sort of ceiling that she’d become familiar with, since she’d cast her lot with von Troiberz.

The ceiling belonged to one of the rooms in the sort of inn you ran across in large German villages. “Large,” in this instance, was a term partly defined by the mere fact that the village had an inn, that was more than just a front room in a villager’s house that provided drink and food purely for the locals.

Needless to say, the room was neither large nor well-furnished. It was certainly not luxurious. There was a bed—not large; not comfortable—and a nightstand, one chair, and a chamber pot.

The chamber pot had not been washed lately. So much was obvious.

She tried to remember how she’d wound up in this state of affairs. She was still well short of thirty years old. She couldn’t even claim the excuse of desperately poor origins. Her father had been a tanner in a small town in Swabia—a trade that paid rather well, although you had to put up with the terrible stench.

It had begun with excitement, she recalled. Soldiers passing through town, a handsome young lieutenant. Ursula herself, bored. And she truly hated the stink of the tannery.

To this day, she liked to imagine that first liaison would have worked out well in the end. But the unfortunate young lieutenant had been serving under Ernst von Mansfeld at the disastrous battle of the Dessau Bridge, where the Protestants were crushed by Wallenstein. He’d vanished in the course of that battle. Presumably killed, but you never really knew. He might have just run off and decided to keep running. Whatever had happened, she’d never seen him again.