The Saxon Uprising(34)

Erik placed a hand on the king’s shoulder. The thick muscle was still there, at least. Physically, his cousin had largely recovered from his injuries at the battle of Lake Bledno. If only his mind…

He gave his head a little shake. No point in dwelling on that.

A particularly loud roar from the distant assembly hall penetrated the room. Ljungberg glanced in that direction and scowled slightly.

“Assholes,” he muttered.

That was the first indication Hand had ever gotten that the king’s new bodyguard wasn’t entirely pleased with the new dispensation. Ljungberg was normally as taciturn as a doorpost.

He decided to risk pursuing the matter. “Your loyalty is entirely to the king, I take it?”

The bodyguard gave him a look from under lowered brows. “The Vasas always sided with the common folk,” Ljungberg said. He nodded toward Gustav Adolf. “Him too, even if he did give the chancellor and his people most of what they wanted.”

Gustav Adolf’s father had died when he was only seventeen—too young, legally, to inherit the throne without a regent. Axel Oxenstierna, the leader of Sweden’s noblemen, had supported Gustav Adolf’s ascension to the throne in exchange for concessions that restored much of the nobility’s power taken away by the new king’s grandfather, who had founded the Vasa dynasty.

“So they did,”¨said Hand. “And will again, if my cousin recovers.”

For a moment, the two men stared at each other. Then Ljungberg looked away. “I’m the king’s man. No other.”

“And I as well,” said Erik.

A good day’s work, he thought. Best to leave things as they were, though, rather than rushing matters. Nothing could be done anyway unless Gustav Adolf regained his senses.

Linz, Austria

Janos Drugeth finished re-reading the letter from Noelle Stull.

He was not a happy man. Rather, his feelings were mixed. The very evident warmth of the letter pleased him greatly, of course. But what had possessed the woman to go to Dresden?

True, this was the same woman who had once emptied her pistol by firing into the Danube, in a moment of pique. But even for Noelle, this was incredibly rash.

Janos was not privy to most of the details, of course. But one of his duties was to monitor Austria’s espionage network and he received regular reports from his spymasters. So he knew that the Swedish general Johan Banér was marching into Saxony and would soon be at the gates of Dresden—and that Gretchen Richter had taken up residence in the city.

Given Richter’s nature—still more, given Banér’s—the result was a foregone conclusion. Dresden was about to become a city under siege, and if Banér broke into the city there would most likely be a bloodbath. The Swedish general wasn’t as purely brutish as Heinrich Holk, but he came fairly close. And, unlike Holk, Banér was a very competent commander.

Janos was no stranger to sieges, from either side of the walls. He didn’t think there was much chance that amateur hotheads like Richter could hold Dresden against the likes of Banér and his mercenaries.

True, the woman had managed the defenses of Amsterdam quite well, by all accounts. But Janos was sure that a large factor involved had been the Cardinal-Infante’s unwillingness to risk destroying Amsterdam and thereby losing its resources and skilled workers. Banér would have no such compunctions at Dresden.

What was Noelle thinking?

He sighed, and put aside the letter. There was another letter in the batch that had just arrived, and this one came from his monarch. By rights, he should have read it first. But he’d been in the privacy of his own chambers in the army’s headquarters at Linz, so his personal concerns had momentarily overridden his duty.

When he unsealed the letter, he discovered nothing but a short message:

Come to Vienna at once. The Turks have taken Baghdad.





Ferdinand





Drugeth rose and strode to the door, moving so quickly that a servant barely opened the door in time. “My horse!” he bellowed.

Noelle would have to wait. For the first time in his life, Janos Drugeth found himself in the preposterous position of hoping that a notorious malcontent like Richter was indeed a capable military commander. Such was the strange world produced by the Ring of Fire.

Bamberg, capital of the State of Thuringia-Franconia

Ed Piazza still hadn’t gotten used to down-time desks. The blasted things were tiny—what he thought of as a lady’s writing desk, not the reasonably-sized pieces of furniture that a man could use to get some work done. For about the hundredth time since he’d moved to Bamberg—no, make that the thousandth time—he found himself wishing he still had the desk from his study in Grantville.