The servant returned, with a bottle and two goblets. After he poured the wine and retreated, Koniecpolski raised his goblet.
"Once again, my precious nephew has done right by us. A toast! Here's to drenching rain and blinding fog and the Swedish bastard's downfall."
Chapter 23
Dresden
Dresden was chaos. The cavalrymen escorting the ambulance wagons to the army hospital were making no more headway than an old woman pushing a cart.
So it seemed to Eric Krenz, anyway. He stuck his head out of the rear flap of the covered wagon and tried to look forward. But that was impossible, between the stupid design of the wagon—what idiot thought it was a good idea to turn a nice open wagon into a heat trap?—and the relative immobility produced by his healing wound.
Disgusted, he flopped back onto the bench. "What we need are some Finns." He made chopping motions, as if wielding an ax. "Haakaa päälle! Haakaa päälle! That'd clear the way for us, see if it wouldn't."
"Shut up." A Pomeranian corporal whose name Eric couldn't remember said that through clenched teeth. "You're giving me a headache."
Judging from his condition, Eric didn't think the fellow would be suffering much longer. But perhaps that was just wishful thinking. The corporal had been groaning and moaning most of the way here, when he wasn't snarling at everyone else if they moaned and groaned.
Well, it should be over soon. A nice army hospital, friendly nurses, what could be better?
He must have said it out loud. The soldier slumped next to him, a young lieutenant whose name Eric had also forgotten, raised his head. "You've been to one?"
"Well. No. Never seen one, in fact. But the stories all agree. Especially about the friendly nurses. What's your name again?"
"Nagel. Friedrich Nagel."
"Eric Krenz. A pleasure." They shook hands.
"It's a pigsty," was Nagel's summary. He nodded toward the one and only nurse visible in the huge . . . whatever the room was. Judging by the sour smell and the dank walls, probably one of the adjoining castle's less frequently used storerooms.
"As for that nurse," the lieutenant continued, "let us pray that she never comes near us. Lest she become friendly."
Eric wasn't entirely sure the nurse was a "she" to begin with. The distance was great enough that it was difficult to tell.
The Pomeranian corporal started moaning and groaning again.
"And to think our lives will end here," mused Nagel. "Such is ignominy."
"Do you think we could get something to eat?"
"Must you dredge up my worst fears?"
They got nothing to eat that night beyond a half-loaf of bread. The same nurse came through two hours later, followed by two orderlies carrying baskets full of bread. At each pair of cots, the nurse would take out a loaf, rip it into halves, and hand them to the wounded soldiers, then, without saying a word, move on.
The orderlies were female. Mediocre versions of the gender, to say the least. But definitely female.
Eric still wasn't sure about the nurse.
An hour later, the same trio passed down the line of cots in the great vaulted room again. This time, the orderlies were carrying buckets of water, from which the nurse would fill what looked like an old soup ladle—best not to think about the precise nature of the soup—and place it to the mouth of each soldier. The one poor fool who tried to hold the ladle bowl in his own hand to keep it from spilling got the ladle snatched away and his ear boxed.
Clearly, this was not a nurse to be trifled with.
For the selfsame reason, Krenz refrained from pointing out to the trio of medical geniuses that it would have made more sense to give them water first, and food later. That being every human body's definite priority.
But he kept his silence, swallowed what he could from the ladle—from the taste, he thought it had probably once been a Mongol ladle, used to serve kumiss or whatever the heathens called that horrid fermented milk they drank—and let the nurse and her companions pass on.
He still hadn't determined her gender. "We need a name for it," he whispered to Nagel.
"Leviathan comes to mind," he whispered back. "Though I'd favor Moloch, myself."
"Moloch it is, then."
Things did not improve in the morning. Moloch was absent, thankfully, but the nurse who replaced the creature was little improvement. True, she was female. Unfortunately, of the elderly rather than youthful disposition; and, far worse—Eric had a very good-natured grandmother, after all—she subscribed to that school of thought which held that in old age a woman should cultivate the virtues of haggery and witchery. Had there been milk, she would have turned it sour.