The Eastern Front(34)

Jason Linn grinned. He was the mechanical repairman who'd replaced Krenz in the flying artillery unit. "He'd have been all right if he'd stayed a grunt. But he went ahead and accepted the commission they offered him. He's an officer now. Officers ride horses. It's a given."

Linn wasn't all that much of a horseman himself, but the redheaded young Scotsman didn't have Krenz's fear of the beasts. And he didn't need any horsemanship beyond the basic skills. He'd be riding the lead near horse of a battery wagon, just as he was doing at the moment.

Thorsten, on the other hand, was riding a cavalry horse. That was expected of the commander of a volley gun company. Fortunately, he was quite a good horseman.

He'd damn well have to be, riding this horse. He'd been given the stallion as a gift just three days before the march began, by Princess Kristina. He didn't want to think how much the animal had cost. He was still getting used to the creature. This steed was about as far removed from the plow horses he'd grown up with as a Spanish fighting bull was from a placid steer.

Jason was a good repairman. He was a blacksmith's son and had gotten some further training in one of Grantville's machine shops after he arrived in the up-time town. He'd been all of twenty years old at the time and eager for adventure.

"Scotland's the most boring country on Earth," he insisted. As vigorously as you could ask for, despite having experienced exactly one and a half countries—Scotland and parts of the Germanies—not counting three days each spent in London and Hamburg.

Still, Thorsten missed Eric Krenz. And he certainly envied his friend's position in the march, way up in front with one of the leading infantry units. Where Engler's flying artillery company was positioned, they were almost choking. An army of twenty-some thousand men, many of them mounted, throws up a lot of dust. As it was, they were lucky they were ahead of the supply train.

"Think it'll rain?" asked Jason, his tone half-hoping and half-dreading.

Thorsten felt pretty much the same way about the prospect. On the one hand, rain would eliminate the dust. On the other hand, everything would become a soggy mess and if the rain went on long enough they'd be marching through mud.

"War sucks," he pronounced, using one of the American expressions beloved by every soldier in the army.



It wasn't until an hour later that it occurred to him that he was denouncing war because of the prospect of moderate discomfort. Not death; not mutilation; not madness brought on by horror. Just the possibility of being wet and muddy. As a farm boy, he'd taken getting wet and muddy as a matter of course—but would have been aghast at the carnage of a battlefield.

Thorsten wondered what had happened to that farm boy. Was he still there, beneath the Count of Narnia riding a warhorse given to him by a future empress and betrothed to a woman from a land of fable?

He hoped so.





Chapter 11


Magdeburg

After he entered the mansion, Ed Piazza took a moment to examine the huge vestibule. Then, he whistled softly.

"Wow. You guys have sure come up in the world."

Rebecca got a long-suffering look on her face. "Just once, I would enjoy hearing someone come up with a different remark, the first time they come here."

Piazza grinned. "You've got to admit, it's impressive. Especially for a simple country boy like me."

Rebecca's look got more long-suffering. " ‘Simple country boy,' " she mimicked. "I doubt you were ever that, Mr. Piazza, even as a toddler. I am firmly convinced you had mastered Machiavelli's The Prince by the age of nine. Judging from the evidence."

"Fourteen, actually—and I wouldn't say I ‘mastered' it. The truth is, I found it pretty boring."

"Why did you read it, then?"

"I was on my Italian ethnic identity phase at the time. I worked my way through a bunch of stuff. I started with Dante. I read the whole trilogy, too, not just the Inferno. Damn near turned me into a lapsed Catholic. Heaven seemed deadly dull. Then I read Boccaccio's Decameron, which I enjoyed a lot. Then I read Petrarch, which killed my interest in poetry for almost a decade. Then I plowed into Machiavelli. By then, though, I was pretty much going on stubborn determination and The Prince did me in. After that, I pursued the search for my cultural roots through the movies. El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Marriage Italian Style, Arabesque, The Countess From Hong Kong, stuff like that."

Rebecca frowned. "Except for the marriage film—and I suppose the one about the Roman Empire—what is their relevance to Italian heritage?"

Piazza grinned. "Sophia Loren. She's in all of them. I delved into quite a few Gina Lollobrigida classics too, although she was a bit before my time. Then I discovered Claudia Cardinale and Monica Vitti and my devotion to Italian culture became boundless. I even watched Red Desert three times, and that's some ethnic solidarity, let me tell you. God, that movie's dull. Except for Monica Vitti, of course."