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 alliance 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 a football field.
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?