The Saxon Uprising(129)

“You still seem hesitant, Jozef,” she was saying. “I do not understand why.”

He raised his hands in a gesture of frustration, as if he’d been about to raise them high in despair but then managed to control himself.

“You just don’t understand.” He blew out a breath. “Yes, I have pretty much all of the separate skills of a hussar. To start with, I’m an excellent horseman. Better than a lot of hussars, actually. Then, I am quite good with a sword—a cavalry saber, at least. Not so much with a side sword and not at all with a rapier or a schiavona because those are—”

He waved his hand irritably. Richter’s face creased into a thin smile. “Because those are silly things useless in a battle. Good only for duels. And you’re not a duelist.”

He cleared his throat. “No, I’m not.” A fairly good assassin, though, and I’m handy with any sort of dagger…

Seemed like an unwise thing to add, under the circumstances. “Contra-indicated” was the up-time term, according to Ted Szklenski, who was addicted to the damn things.

“I’m also a fair hand with a lance. Either the big ones favored by hussars or the lighter styles preferred by Tatars.”

“What about guns?”

A fairly good assassin, like I said. No, didn’t say. Any sane assassin would rather shoot a man in the back than stab him. Which I can do with just about any kind of pistol ever made. Wheel-lock, new style flintlock, any sort of up-time revolver or pistol—I can handle any of them.

Also seemed contra-indicated.

“Fair enough. Especially with pistols. Cavalrymen—that’s how I was trained—don’t have much use for any other sort of firearms.”

She nodded. “So what’s the problem, then?”

“I can do all the separate parts of being a hussar, but it’s not the same thing as actually being one. Gretchen, that takes practice. Riding a horse well is one thing and using a saber well is one thing. Doing them both at the same time—especially while people are shooting at you and trying to stab you—is another thing altogether.”

Again, he made that up-raised hands gesture. More with resignation this time than frustration. “Look, I was a bastard. I got the training but I never really got accepted. So I turned my hand to other things.”

“What things? Now that I think about it, you’ve never made clear how you made a living.”

“Various…things. Most of them involved running errands for the Koniecpolskis.”

Including running their spy network. Also contra-indicated.

“Some of those errands weren’t all that respectable,” he added. Covering up political misdeeds with merely criminal or immoral ones was a time-honored tactic for secret agents.

Richter cocked her head. “Somehow I have a hard time picturing you as a pimp.”

He tightened his jaws. Damn the woman. She was even a Catholic, at least in her upbringing. Why couldn’t the Spanish Inquisition have recruited her and gotten her out of his hair?

Because they didn’t recruit women, was one obvious answer. They didn’t recruit revolutionaries either, was another. Rather the opposite, actually.

Richter straightened up from the table. “All right, I’ll let it go. That’s not really any of my business. Here’s what it comes down to, Jozef.”

She nodded toward Eric Krenz. The lieutenant wasn’t actually “in command” of the city’s garrison. He was more like the first among equals of the dozen or so lieutenants from the regular USE army who acted as a command staff. Command college might almost be a better way of putting it. Nonetheless, whenever Gretchen needed to consult an individual officer, it was usually Krenz. That might partly be due to his relationship with Richter’s close associate Tata, of course. But Wojtowicz allowed that the man did seem competent in his own right.

“Eric tells me that we may need to make a sortie at some point. It’s now clear that Banér is going to challenge Stearns in the field. He’s starting to pull his mercenaries out of the trenches.”

Jozef felt alarmed. “Now? Gretchen, Banér is almost certain to be expecting a sortie while he carries out such an evolution.”

Richter’s expression became a little sarcastic. “No real military skills? Yet you seem very familiar with all this.”

Jozef flushed a little. “Fine!” he snapped, “You can’t spend any time at all with Koniecpolskis without picking up a lot. Those people talk tactics over breakfast, starting at the age of four. My point remains—this is not a time to be talking about making a sortie. Banér will be ready for it.”