“Who has not yet agreed to any of this—and you won’t be here to negotiate with him.”
Noelle snorted. “We’ll see about that. Follow me, O great count of Hungary, and do your best to look like a vampire.”
She headed for the door.
“What is a ‘vampire’?” he asked.
* * *
The Bavarian nobleman didn’t need much in the way of persuasion, as it turned out. Perhaps that was due to Noelle’s way of approaching the subject.
“Here’s how it is, Albrecht,” she began. “You can either finally agree to this deal and come with me—not now; maybe a couple of days—to Bavaria, where you’ll be reunited with your sons and become the new duke—understanding that Gustav Adolf is in no mood to dicker about the ‘protectorate’ part of the deal and if you’re wondering what ‘in no mood’ means think of a very big bear with a very sore tooth—or you can stay here in Prague and rot the rest of your life away while Gustav Adolf gobbles Bavaria up whole. You’ve got five minutes to decide.”
She made a display or looking at her up-time wristwatch. It was simply a piece of jewelry, these days, since the battery had died more than two years earlier. Albrecht probably even knew that himself. But it was still an impressive gesture.
“I need more time to consider the matter,” Albrecht protested.
“Sorry, but you haven’t got it. Four minutes, fifty seconds left.”
Albrecht turned toward Janos. “This is most precipitous!”
Drugeth shrugged. “It’s out of my hands, I’m afraid.” He nodded toward Noelle, who was peering intently at the watch as if the device were still functional. “The USE is in charge of it now, and she’s their emperor’s envoy.”
“Four minutes, thirty seconds. Time’s running out, Albrecht.”
* * *
“See?” she said, after they left. “That wasn’t so hard. I knew he’d be reasonable about it.”
“In much the same way a man facing the headsman’s ax will come to his senses,” mused Janos.
“Oh, that seems like a melodramatic way of putting it.” She displayed her wrist triumphantly. “All I had was a watch that doesn’t work.”
Chapter 42
Lower Silesia, near Legnica (Liegnitz)
By the third day of the expedition, Gretchen had come to detest her armor with a bone-deep passion.
She had been prepared for the weight of the miserable stuff. In fact, she’d curled her lip at the prospect of hauling around forty to fifty pounds of steel. Leave it to men—the boastful, whining, bombastic, histrionic gender—to pontificate on the crushing weight of armor.
Forty pounds—fifty pounds, even—pfah! It was well distributed across the entire body. Nothing at all like the burden of carrying a child on one hip and a basket of laundry on the other, which any stalwart girl could manage by the time she was twelve.
No, it wasn’t the weight. It was the heat.
They were in the middle of August, and while Lower Silesia did not have a particularly hot climate, August was still August—the peak of summer. The sun beat down on her steel armor from dawn to dusk. She might as well have been wearing an oven.
Worse than the armor itself was the padding underneath it. The gambeson she wore beneath the steel was essentially a quilted jacket, which was the last thing any sane person would wear in mid-summer.
But wear it she must. She’d initially rebelled and tried to wear the armor without it, but she’d given that up after a few minutes. To begin with, the armor had been designed to fit over a gambeson, so it was too loose without it. Just walking around—clumping around, rather—was enough to risk bruises. If she ever actually had to use the armor to fend off a weapon, the impact would simply be transmitted by the armor itself, without the padding.
She started sweating by sunup and sweat all day.
She itched.
She stank.
In the evening, when she removed the armor and gambeson, she expected to see chunks of soggy flesh being peeled off as well. To her surprise, that had never happened.
Yet. She was sure it was only a matter of time.
It was no wonder Poland’s warrior class, the szlachta, behaved like so many idiots. What could you expect of people who voluntarily roasted themselves every day? It was a wonder they had any brains left at all.
That was especially true because the most horrid part of wearing armor was the stupid helmet. Bad enough for her body to be half-melting; even worse was that her brains were being parboiled.
And she couldn’t see. All she had was a narrow slit to look through. Never mind that her eyes were half-blinded anyway by the sweat pouring off her brow. Even if her forehead had been as dry as a bone it was like trying to move around while looking through a keyhole.
A wide keyhole, fine. It was still a keyhole.
She swiveled her head around—that was the only way to see anything that wasn’t directly in front of you—and looked for Opalinski and Wojtowicz. Her two so-called bodyguards had ridden ahead a few minutes earlier to scout the terrain.
“So-called bodyguards” because if they’d really cared about guarding her body they never would have forced her into this idiotic armor to begin with. Gretchen thought she was far more likely to kill herself by falling off her horse because she couldn’t see where the dumb beast was putting its hooves than she was to get killed by an enemy soldier.
She’d been glad to see the two Poles ride off. Stupid cheery bastards. Despite the fact that he was wearing armor himself, Opalinski had even been singing for a while. Some Polish drinking song—she knew enough of the language to figure out that much—which was undoubtedly as crude and silly as any German drinking song.
(American drinking songs were even worse. Her husband had once forced her to listen to a song called 99 bottles of beer on the wall. Thankfully—he’d probably saved himself from getting divorced—Jeff couldn’t remember any of the lines after disposing of the 97th bottle.)
It took Gretchen a while to spot Jozef and Lukasz, since she could only inspect a narrow slice of the surrounding terrain through the eye slit in her helmet. But eventually she did.
Good. They were at least two hundred yards off. Even if they raced back immediately and started nattering at her she could get a few minutes’ worth of relief.
She undid the latches and took the helmet off her head. Then, shook her head vigorously so that her long hair, which had been pressed into a sodden mass, could blow free in the breeze.
What a relief!
* * *
A flash of yellow in the corner of his eye drew Jozef’s attention. He looked in that direction—like Gretchen, he had to swivel his head to do so—and then hissed his displeasure. If he hadn’t been wearing a helmet, he would have shaken his head with disapproval as well.
“The damn woman’s taken off her helmet, Lukasz,” he said, loudly, so that his companion could hear him. Opalinski was riding ahead, perhaps five yards distant.
Lukasz reined in his horse and turned to look. He, too, had to swivel his head to do so. Fortunately, the armor that all three of them were wearing was quite well-made. Poorly crafted armor could result in helmets that could barely be swiveled at all. A man had to turn his whole body around—or that of his horse—in other to look in a new direction.
When he saw the far-off little splash of yellow, he grunted. “I can’t say I really blame her. Try to imagine what your head would feel like in a helmet if you had hair like that.”
If he hadn’t been wearing plate armor, he would have shrugged. But, like head nodding and head shaking, that gesture was futile at best when you were cocooned in steel.
“Let’s leave her be for a few minutes before we insist that she put it back on,” he said. “I want to get to the crest of this rise ahead of us and see what’s beyond.”
He set his horse into motion. Jozef made ready to do the same, but paused to give the distant blonde figure a last glare of censure.
The glare was replaced a
lmost instantly by widened eyes.
“Lukasz!” he shouted.
* * *
Captain Philipp Asch lowered his spyglass. “It’s her,” he said. “It’s got to be her.”
Standing next to him in the ramshackle barn, Lieutenant Otto Bierman was squinting through a crack between two boards in the wall. He had no spyglass and was near-sighted to boot, so all he could really see was a vague splotch of yellow a few dozen yards away.
“Are you sure you recognize her?” he asked, frowning.
Asch issued a little snort of exasperation. “How could I recognize her when I’ve never met her? But what other blonde-haired woman would be riding a horse out here, wearing fancy armor like that? She’s good-looking, too, just like people say.”
Unlike his subordinate, the captain had quite good eyesight and the woman wasn’t all that far away. In the spyglass, he’d gotten a very good look at her.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Her ransom’s got to be good—and Holk will give us a bonus himself if we bring her in.”
“What about those two Polish hussars that were with her?”
Asch shook his head. “Who knows? They’ve ridden off anyway. She was probably negotiating something with them. I said, let’s go.”
He jammed his own helmet onto his head. It was nowhere close to being as fancy a helmet as the one the woman had removed, just the common sort of lobster-tailed pot helmet known as a zischagge. Like many low grade mercenary officers, Asch was a commoner who couldn’t afford a better helmet. He’d been born in a small town in Swabia, the son of a cooper. If they could capture the notorious Richter and collect a ransom, he’d be richer than he’d ever been in his life—or even dreamed of being.
“Now, Bierman,” he half-snarled. His lieutenant was prone to being slow-witted.
None of the other men in their unit had gotten off their horses when they entered the barn, which they’d done as soon as they spotted the trio of oncoming riders. So at least Asch didn’t have to chivvy them into the saddle as well. It would be stretching a point to say his men were “ready.” They were no worse than the average cavalryman in Holk’s army, but that wasn’t saying much.
Still, they’d do. The woman was alone now. Even if the pair of hussars decided to come to her help, which Asch thought was not likely, he wasn’t too concerned about it. Hussars could be ferocious in battle, true enough. But there were still only two of them—and he had eleven men with him. Two against twelve. Those were hopeless odds, even for hussars.
A few seconds later, he led the charge out of the barn. Within three seconds of emerging, he spotted Richter.
She hadn’t moved very far. She couldn’t be more than seventy yards off.
Splendid. This would all be over within a minute or two.
* * *
Gretchen’s eyes were drawn immediately to the group of horsemen piling out of the barn she’d noticed earlier. She hadn’t paid much attention to it, since it was half-ruined and obviously abandoned. Neither had Lukasz nor Jozef.
Stupid—all three of them. An abandoned barn made as good a hiding place for enemies as a functioning one. Better, actually, since there’d be no nervous livestock to make warning noises.
But what was done was done. She had no more than a few seconds to decide what to do.
Trying to escape from them was not an option. Not for her, at any rate. Gretchen wasn’t inept in a saddle, but she was no horsewoman, either. If she tried to gallop away from cavalrymen, she’d most likely just spill herself on the ground.
Within two seconds, in fact, she’d decided the horse was a liability altogether. With an agility that would have astonished her if she’d been thinking about it, given the armor she was wearing, she was out of the saddle and back down on the ground almost instantly.
Then, she slapped the horse on its rump to get it out of the way. She didn’t much like horses but she had no great animus against the beasts, either. No point in getting it killed, even leaving aside the fact that she didn’t want a panicky horse in her vicinity. She had enough trouble as it was.
All that had taken perhaps five seconds since she’d spotted the cavalrymen. They had covered half the distance between them, by now. She had only a few more seconds before they’d be upon her.
Happily, she had three factors working in her favor.
First, the stupid helmet had gone flying off somewhere so she could see what she was doing.
Second, she’d drawn the line at wearing armored gauntlets, so her hands were unencumbered and her fingers were nimble.
And, third, she’d bullied the armorer into making an addition to her cuirass that he’d considered an affront to both dignity and martial style. You couldn’t exactly call it a “shoulder holster”—it was more in the way of a pouched breast plate—but it served the same purpose, and did so quite well. She’d made sure of that.
Her nine millimeter pistol was now in hand—and she had two spare magazines if she needed them in the not-exactly-a-breast-plate’s match on the right side of her cuirass.
It was a Glock 17, the same one her husband had given her shortly after their marriage five years earlier. It had belonged to Jeff’s father. Gretchen had been trained in its use by Grantville’s police chief, Dan Frost, and had become a very good shot.
Gretchen adored her nine millimeter pistol—never more than this very moment.
She saw no point in trying to find shelter. There wasn’t any worth talking about on this stretch of what had once been farmland, and a suit of plate armor is hardly suited to agile leaping about. Best to just stand there, take a solid two-handed firing position—thankfully, the armor had been well enough made to allow for that also—and wait for the enemy to arrive.
Which she figured they would in about…
Three seconds.
* * *
Lukasz and Jozef were driving their horses toward her with all the recklessness and superb horsemanship that Polish hussars possessed. But it was already obvious they wouldn’t reach her in time. The first of the small mob of enemy cavalrymen were almost upon her.
* * *
Asch had been in the lead for most of the charge, but toward the end two of his cavalrymen surged ahead of him. They were both very good horsemen—better than he was, though he certainly wouldn’t have admitted that publicly.
All the greater his shock, then, when both men suddenly came out of their saddles. He had a glimpse of one of them as he fell. Blood was gushing out of his throat.
What happened? He had a memory of some sort of very loud ripping sound.
His mount shied away from the falling corpse and carried him right past the woman in armor. As he wheeled the horse around, he heard that same peculiar ripping sound.
Another one of his men was falling out of his saddle. His cheap cuirass was soaked in blood.
Again, the ripping sound—and, again, one of his cavalrymen slumped in his saddle. But now Asch was able to see the odd gun in Richter’s hand as it jittered about, and he suddenly understood that what he was hearing was the sound of multiple shots being fired one right after another. Asch realized that he was looking at one of the famed up-time pistols. “Semi-automatics,” they were called, if he remembered right.
He’d never encountered one before. He’d heard tales of their astonishing rates of fire, but he’d dismissed them as myths; or gross exaggerations, at least.
He shouldn’t have, perhaps. Asch had been one of the soldiers on the Stone Bridge at Prague who’d tried to cross in the face of Jews and students organized by a few Americans. But he’d been far in the rear and hadn’t personally witnessed the rockets that had broken the charge. None of the firearms had had a particularly unusual rate of fire, so far as he could remember.
Another cavalryman came charging at her but this time Richter killed the horse. He wasn’t sure how many shots she fired to do it. Three, four—perhaps even five?
The horse’s knees buckled and the rider was spilled right onto Richter. She managed
to lunge aside far enough that only her midriff was struck by the falling cavalryman. Still, even wearing that splendid plate armor, she was knocked down and had to be shaken by the impact.
Not that shaken, though. Even lying on her back, she managed to bring her pistol to bear and shoot the man who’d knocked her down. Right in the face. The bullet passed through his upper teeth and out the back of his head.
Asch saw his chance and drove his horse toward her supine body. He would trample her and worry about making the capture later. The ransom would be the same regardless of her condition, so long as she was alive, and it wasn’t likely that being trampled would kill her outright—not wearing that armor, at least.
She looked up at him as he came and that frightening pistol came up also. He ducked his head.
This time he heard the shots quite distinctly. One. Two.
His horse buckled and down he went. All thoughts of Richter vanished. Asch was far too experienced a cavalryman not to know how dangerous falling off a moving horse could be. All his attention was now concentrated on landing on the ground without breaking his neck.
The first thing he did, of course, was throw away his own pistol. Landing on top of a cocked wheel-lock was a good way to get killed.
* * *
.The horse trampled Gretchen before it fell—which was probably just as well, since otherwise the whole weight of the great brute might have landed on her. Still, even wearing a steel cuirass, having a horse’s hoof slam into your ribs was no fun at all.
Fortunately, the breath wasn’t knocked out of her. Everything was sheer chaos by now. For her, at least, and she could only hope the same was true for her enemies. All her attention was concentrated on getting a new magazine into her pistol. She’d used up the seventeen rounds she’d started with.
* * *
Jozef could no longer tell what was happening. He and Lukasz had crossed more than half the distance already, but the fracas was obscured by the fact that Lukasz was a better horseman than he was and had gotten ahead of him. It didn’t help that he was so blasted big, either, especially wearing armor. It was like trying to peer around an elephant—while galloping at full tilt yourself.