And now he had the imprimatur of Şeyh-ül-Islâm Zekeriyyâ-zâde Yahyâ Efendi on his decision to have the new weapons operated by zimmis. The janissary and sipahi officers in the headquarters had all heard the acolyte say so—and explain that the ruling was to protect the souls of his Muslim soldiers. A good and just sultan could have no higher responsibility.
“You are dismissed,” he said to the acolyte.
After he was gone, Murad climbed the stairs to the second floor of the factory. There was a large window that provided a good view of Vienna.
He spent a few minutes looking at the city. Not planning anything, just gazing and pondering a question whose answer had not yet come to him.
What would he rename Vienna, after he’d taken it?
Chapter 32
Jaroszówka, Lower Silesia
Northwest of Legnica (Liegnitz)
“I wish I had my armor and my lance,” said Lukasz Opalinski, peering over the hedge.
“Why not wish for your saddle wings while you’re at it?” said Jozef. He was crouched beside Lukasz, studying the village of Jaroszówka—what was left of it, which wasn’t much. The raiders had set fire to most of the buildings. “It’s sad, to see a mighty hussar brought so low.”
Lukasz’s only response was a dignified sniff. “Just try to keep up with me. Do you see any more?”
Wojtowicz shook his head. “There’s just the five of them. Might be one or two more, but they’d be too drunk to stand, much less ride.”
“Let’s go, then.” Still crouched over, Lukasz moved toward the horses, which they’d left behind them in a meadow. The hedge was atop a slight rise which kept the meadow out of sight of the village.
They hadn’t bothered to tether their mounts. They were both well-trained warhorses.
They walked the horses out of the meadow toward a small grove of trees. They’d be able to stay out of sight of the small party of soldiers in the village until they launched their attack. The distance from the grove to the village was less than a hundred yards. Their mounts were coursers, who could have covered that distance in seven or eight seconds even if Lukasz and Jozef had both been wearing heavy hussar armor. Wearing only buff coats, they’d probably reach their target in no more than six seconds.
Six seconds is a long time for a trained and alert soldier to react to danger. But the small detachment from Holk’s army in Jaroszówka was anything but alert, however well-trained they might or might not be. At least one of them was visibly drunk. He was struggling to get onto his horse while his companions made jokes and jeered at him.
After they reached the grove, they saddled up and took a moment to reorient themselves. They could see the village again from here, through the trees. The soldier who’d been trying to get on his horse had apparently fallen in the process and one of his mates was getting off his own horse to help him. The other three were still laughing. One of them had a jug of something—not likely to be water—which he brought to his lips.
“Now,” said Lukasz. An instant later he had his courser charging out of the grove.
Jozef followed, making no effort to catch up with his friend. He was content to remain a few yards behind. Wojtowicz had a great deal in the way of martial skills, as he’d demonstrated on several occasions over the past year. But he wasn’t in Lukasz’s class on a battlefield.
Besides, his friend was new to the fury that Jozef had been experiencing since he first went into Silesia from Dresden. It would do him good to unleash it.
Lukasz hadn’t drawn either one of his pistols from their saddle holsters. He was clearly planning to start with his saber—and probably end with it also.
Jozef, being a proper sort of spy and assassin, had no such romantic inclinations. He’d had one of his Blumroder .58 caliber pistols in his hand before they’d left the grove.
It was almost comical, the way Holk’s men gaped at them as they approached. The one who’d been dismounting to help his comrade was so startled that he fell off his horse and landed on the man he’d been planning to assist. Both of them went down in a heap, their horses skittering away.
The one with the jug wasted several seconds looking around trying to find a place to set down the jug without breaking it—no easy task when you’re perched in a saddle high off the ground. By the time he finally accepted reality, dropped the jug and reached for one of his pistols, Lukasz was twenty yards away and would reach him in less than two seconds.
The mercenary fumbled the pistol trying to pull it out of the saddle holster. The gun slipped out of his hand and fell to the ground. But Opalinski’s attention was entirely on the man’s two more alert companions. Both of them had pistols in hand by the time he arrived—but they were prevented from using them by the befuddled jug-dropper. What the man should have done was just gotten out of their way. Instead Lukasz drove his courser right toward the man’s own warhorse, causing it to rear and impede the line of sight of the others.
Both men fired their pistols anyway. One bullet went flying off somewhere unknown. The other one struck the rearing horse. It was just a graze, nothing serious, but it frightened the already startled horse. It threw its rider right out of the saddle and raced off.
Lukasz reached his first target. The soldier was wearing bits and pieces of cheap-looking plate armor, whose main components were a cuirass and spaulders. Lukasz swung his saber. Up, over, down, like a flash of lightning. The blade passed just below the edge of the right spaulder and cut the man’s arm off about three inches above the elbow. The blade still had enough power to pass through the arm completely and hammer the cuirass. It didn’t penetrate that armor but the blow drove the man out of the saddle. Between the horrible blood loss and the impact when he struck the ground he was no longer conscious.
Before he’d even left the saddle, Lukasz had slashed at the other soldier. That man brought up his heavy wheel-lock pistol in an instinctive effort to shield himself, but the hussar was skilled as well as very strong. His blade didn’t strike the pistol but the hand holding it, which it cut in half just below the line of knuckles. The pistol was sent flying. The soldier gaped at what was left of his hand, which was the thumb and perhaps two-thirds of the palm.
He didn’t gape long. Lukasz brought his horse back around and another swing of the saber slashed through the man’s neck, opening the right carotid and almost severing the spine. He fell to the ground, mortally wounded and losing consciousness rapidly.
Two seconds earlier, Jozef had come within five feet of the tangled cluster of two men on the ground. Oddly, the one who was almost back on his feet was the drunken one. Jozef shot him in the top of the head. The heavy bullet drove the man right back down onto the one who’d tried to help him and knocked him flat again.
Since he was momentarily obscured, Jozef shifted his aim and trotted his horse over to the man who’d fumbled with the jug. He was still lying where his mount had pitched him before running off. The wind had apparently been knocked out of him, because all he did as Jozef drew near was stare at him with bulging eyes while his mouth gasped for air.
Jozef leaned down from the saddle to get a better aim and shot the man in the throat. When he straightened and looked over to Lukasz, he saw that his friend had dismounted and was now striding over to the last conscious survivor. That poor soul, whose entire contribution to the melee had been trying to help his drunken companion and getting knocked down by him for his efforts, had just heaved the fellow’s corpse off and gotten up on one knee when Lukasz arrived.
Opalinski was extraordinarily strong. That saber strike decapitated the man and sent the head flying at least five yards away.
“That’s all of them, I think,” said Lukasz. He glanced around quickly. Then, moved over to check the first man he’d struck down. The fellow was unconscious and it was obvious from the blood pumping out of his severed arm that he’d soon be dead. But Lukasz ended the process by a quick, accurate stab of the saber tip which opened the soldier’s neck as well.
When he straightened up, his face was paler than usual. That was the residue of controlled rage, Jozef knew, not horror at the deaths he’d caused. In the mood Lukasz was in after days traveling through the ravaged countryside of Lower Silesia, he had no more compassion for any of Holk’s men than he would have had for wolf spiders.
Less, actually. Opalinski wouldn’t have gone out of his way just to destroy some spiders.
* * *
They didn’t spend much time investigating Jaroszówka, once they’d made sure there weren’t any survivors.
As usual, when Holk’s soldiers passed through a village, they’d killed everyone who’d been foolish enough to stay—or too infirm, in the case of the old couple whose corpses Jozef found. The only other corpse they discovered, in one of the huts that had only partially burned, was that of an infant who’d been bundled up and stuffed under a cot. From the looks of the gaunt body, the child had died of natural causes not long before the raid. Starvation, most likely. Her kin would have buried her but they’d had to escape the village too soon. So, they’d tucked her out of sight, hoping they might be able to return and bury her properly later.
Jozef and Lukasz spent the rest of the day digging graves for the old couple and the child and burying them. Since they didn’t know any of their names, they just erected three crosses and carved “unknown” on them. Then, after staring down at the little girl's cross for a few seconds, Lukasz had added another carving on the vertical piece.
Murdered by Heinrich Holk, was what it read. Her family wouldn’t have been starving if his men hadn’t plundered the area.
* * *
They spent the night just outside the village, preferring their tent to sleeping in the wreckage. After they awoke and had breakfast, Lukasz spoke his first words since carving the girl’s cross.
“I’m sick of this. We have to do something, Jozef. Almost all the people those swine are killing, raping and plundering are Poles. They don’t go into the big German towns.”
Idly, Jozef poked at their little fire with a stick. “There is a solution. But you won’t like it.”
Opalinski’s jaws tightened. He’d obviously figured out already what Jozef was talking about.
“She won’t kill anyone who doesn’t need killing,” the hussar said. “And since Lower Silesia is already being ruled by Germans—Holk’s pigs in the countryside and the towns are already mostly German—I’d rather have our Saxons doing it. I can’t say I trust them, exactly, but…”
Jozef finished the thought for him. “They can’t be any worse than what the king and the Sejm have done.”
Lukasz sighed, and ran fingers through his blond hair. “I used to think my older brother Krzysztof was a stupid hothead. I’m not so sure, any longer.” He let a few more seconds go by and then added softly: “I’ve always hoped that the Grand Hetman would eventually take a stand. But I’ve given up by now.”
Jozef left off poking with the stick and tossed it into the fire. “My uncle is fixed in his ways and his habits, Lukasz. He’s great on a battlefield, but for this—” He made a vague gesture with his hand. “He’s simply no use. I hate to say it, but it’s the truth. We’re on our own.”
There was silence again, for several minutes. Then Jozef got a quirky little smile on his face.
“We’ll have to lie to her. Which is not easy. Are you up for it?”
Lukasz got a fair imitation of the same smile on his face. “What do you mean, ‘we’? You’re the master spy. I’m just the thick-headed hussar. So you do all the lying and I’ll just glare and look furious. Which I know I can manage because I am furious.”
Magdeburg, capital of the United States of Europe
Rebecca had transformed one of the chambers in her town house into what she called the war room. That was the chamber where she and her aides had plotted and schemed and planned and organized the election campaign. With the elections now having started, she intended to continue with the same effort except more tightly focused. All that now needed to be done was captured in a banner hanging high on one of the walls:
GET OUT THE VOTE
It was a rather small chamber, given the importance of what happened in it. She’d deliberately chosen it for that reason, after the experience of a few days trying to run the campaign out of the big salon that the Fourth of July Party used for its leadership meetings.
Meetings were fine and splendid things. In their proper place. Rebecca had been sorely tempted to hang a banner in that room, however, this one saying:
TOO MANY COOKS SPOIL THE BROTH
But that would be impolitic. So, she’d simply created a war room too small and cramped to satisfy anyone except diehard plotters, schemers, planners and organizers. And let the declaimers and the pontificators enjoy themselves in the big salon.
One of her aides came into the room. More precisely, squeezed her way through the partially-open door which was blocked from further inward progress by the back of a chair of another aide squeezed up against a table tabulating the most recent reports from Mecklenburg and Pomerania.
Rebecca glanced up from her own tabulations. As usual, she was perched on a stool in the corner which had the one—very narrow—window in the room. She preferred being by the window because of the light that came through it, not the view. All the window looked out on was an alley.
“Yes, Catharina?”
The young woman—the aides were mostly young women—minced her way over, trying to avoid all the reports piled up in stacks on the floor. Then, extended her hand to give Rebecca a note. “It’s the latest news from Werner.”
That would be from Werner von Dalberg, the FoJ Party’s candidate for governor of the Upper Palatinate. Unlike some of the MPs, Werner was a skilled organizer in his own right.
Rebecca read it quickly. It was terse, as von Dalberg’s prose always was.
Still looking up. Good turnout in Amberg. Excellent in Regensburg. Will be complaints about Ingolstadt.
That last was a given. Most of the inhabitants of Ingolstadt since its liberation were soldiers, and most of them in the SoTF’s National Guard. They’d have cast absentee ballots for their home province but a good number of them would also vote in the Oberpfalz. Quite improperly, but their attitude would be we did the fighting so we ought to be able to vote in the city we liberated too.
She and Werner had made sure that signs had been posted at all polling stations informing voters that if they were a resident of another province they couldn’t vote in the Upper Palatinate as well. But that was just for the public record, since no one was going to waste their time telling armed soldiers that they couldn’t vote if they wanted to.
In the end, if the Crown Loyalists filed a formal complaint, Rebecca was sure the courts would rule that all votes in Ingolstadt had to be invalidated and a new vote taken. But they probably wouldn’t even bother to file a complaint. From the signs, the FoJP’s victory in the Oberpfalz was going to be by such a large margin that the votes in Ingolstadt didn’t matter anyway.
Rebecca adored elections. It was too bad they couldn’t be held more often. Once a month would be nice. Of course, you’d never get any actual governing done, but this was so much more fun.
Dresden, capital of Saxony
“You’re sure?” Gretchen asked. “Absolutely certain?”
“Of course not!” exclaimed Jozef, doing his best to sound aggrieved and much put upon. He almost threw up his hands with exasperation but decided that would be overdoing it. You had to be careful, lying to Richter. It wasn’t right that a woman should be that good-looking and that smart at the same time. But… there it was.
He sighed—again—and tried—again—to convey just the right mixture of confidence in his conclusions and quibbling in his logic. “Everything I’ve told you comes from conversations I overheard in taverns between some of Holk’s soldiers. But some of them were officers and one of them was even a colonel.”
“How do you know he was a colonel? Holk’s army doesn’t use standar
dized insignia.”
She knew too much, too. How did she find out these things?
“Because they called him ‘colonel.’ Colonel Bentzen or Bensenn, I didn’t quite catch the name.”
He’d just have to hope the damn woman didn’t have a roster of Holk’s officers to check that against. She almost certainly didn’t, but with Richter…
“Where was that tavern?” she now asked. “You told me Holk’s men generally stayed out of the cities.”
“It wasn’t a city. Not even a big town. It was in Chojnów, between Boleslawiec and Lignica.” He used the Polish names of the towns to reinforce his image as a stubborn but upright native of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Richter glanced at Lovrenc Bravnicar, the Slovene who commanded the small cavalry force that was part of the loosely defined Saxon army-in-creation.
“I’ve been there once,” he said. “I’ve even been in the tavern he’s talking about. At the time—that was… four years ago, or so, it had about five hundred inhabitants. Since then an epidemic passed through so the population would be smaller. That’s probably why Holk stationed some units there. They could find billets in abandoned homes.”
Gretchen looked back at Jozef. Then, at Lukasz.
“You haven’t had much to say,” she observed. But she didn’t press for an explanation from the hussar. Instead, she went back to studying the map of Lower Silesia that she’d had spread over the table in her headquarters.
“What do you think, Ernst?” she asked.
The small man sitting at one end of the table was frowning. Until perhaps three minutes ago, he’d been intently studying the same map.
“I see no reason they wouldn’t be telling us the truth.” Ernst Wettin glanced at the two Poles facing Gretchen across the table. “But I don’t think that matters anyway. Whether Holk is really planning to attack Saxony or not, just having him there across the border poses a constant threat.”
Richter nodded. “What I think, too. Here’s the problem, though. If we march into Lower Silesia and take it”—her finger came down on a spot on the map—“we have to go as far as Breslau and take it also. Otherwise our position will be completely unstable. And if we do that, then we’ve not only seized the biggest city in Lower Silesia. For all practical purposes, we’ve seized the entire area. From Poland, mind you, which is the nation that formally claims it.”