1636: The Saxon Uprising by Eric Flint
He glanced over to where Richter had stopped to talk to another group of people. Shop-keepers, from the look of them. “And you can forget about her altogether. Not even the reactionaries try to spread rumors about her. They say she dotes on that up-time husband of hers, even if he is fat and ugly. Well, plain-looking.”
Jozef hadn’t even been thinking about Richter in those terms. He’d admit to being stupid when it came to attractive women, but he wasn’t insane. And right now, he was much more concerned about people suspecting him of being a spy. Especially CoC-type people, who were notorious for being prone to summary justice.
“Why would anyone think Poland would send a spy here? We’re not really very close to where the war is going on.”
Szklenski stared at him, frowning. “What’s Poland got to do with anything? The guys were worried you might be a spy for the Swedes.”
Jozef shook his head. The gesture was not one of negation; just an attempt to clear his head.
“And the logic of thinking a Swedish general would hire a Pole to spy on Saxons is…what, exactly?”
Szklenski’s grin was back. “Don’t ask me. I told you I thought it was silly—and I told them so as well. But just to calm them down, I said I’d talk to you. There aren’t that many Polish CoCers in Dresden, so I figure we need to look out for each other.”
Jozef cleared his throat. “And…ah…why, exactly, would you assume I was a member of the CoCs myself?”
Szklenski got a sly look on his face. “Don’t want to talk about it, huh? That’s okay—but don’t think you’re fooling anybody. Why else would a Pole be in Dresden right now, unless he was a lunatic?”
Another excellent question.
That evening, Jozef decided it would be wise to follow Szklenski’s advice and spend his time at a different tavern. Where the now-revealed-to-be-not-entirely-good-humored Ursula did not work.
Szklenski himself escorted him there. “It’s where most of us Poles go,” he explained.
So it proved.
“You led me into a trap,” Jozef said. Accusingly, but not angrily. He wasn’t hot-tempered to begin with, and even if he had been he would have restrained himself. Being hot-tempered when you’re surrounded at a corner table in a dark tavern by eight men at least two of whom were armed with knives would be even more stupid than seducing two waitresses in one week who worked at the same establishment.
Szklenski shrugged, looking a bit embarrassed. Only a bit, though.
“Sorry, but we really do have to make sure,” he said. “We’ve got a good reputation with the USE guys here and we can’t afford to let it get damaged.”
Jozef looked around. “I take it all of you are in the CoCs?”
“We’re asking the questions, not you,” said one of them. That was Bogumil—no last name provided—whom Jozef had already pegged as the surliest of the lot. He didn’t think it was an act, either.
“Give us some names,” said the man to Bogumil’s left. That was Waclaw, who had also failed to provide a last name. “Something.”
Jozef thought about it, for a moment. Acting as if he were an innocent Pole not involved with politics who just happened to wander into Dresden right now was probably pointless. The question then became, what did he claim to be?
In for a penny, in for a pound, as the up-timers said. “Krzysztof Opalinski.”
“What about him?” That came from a third man at the table, who had provided no name at all. He was quite short, but very thick-shouldered and dangerous-looking.
“Nothing about him,” said Jozef, sounding bored. “I hope you’re not expecting me to provide you with details of what we’re doing? How do I know you’re not spies?”
“Who would we be spying for?” said Bogumil, jeeringly.
Jozef shrugged. “I can think of at least half a dozen great magnates who might be employing spies in the Germanies. So can you, so let’s stop playing.”
Bogumil started to say something but Waclaw held up his hand. “He’s right. But I want to make sure you really know him.” He stood up and held his hand, palm down, a few inches above his own head. “He’s about this tall, well-built, blonde, blue eyes, and he favors a tight-cut beard?”
Jozef leaned back in his chair and smiled. “That’s a pretty fair description of his younger brother Lukasz. But Krzysztof’s about two inches taller, to begin with. He’s got broad shoulders and he’s certainly in good shape, but nothing like Lukasz, who’s a hussar and bloody damn good at it. They both have blonde hair and blue eyes, but Krzysztof’s hair is a bit lighter and his eyes shade into green. What else do you want to know?”
He stood up himself—slowly, though, so as not to alarm anyone—lifted his shirt and pointed to a spot on his side just above the hip. “Krzysztof’s got a birth mark here, shaped like a crooked hourglass. His brother—as you’d expect with a hussar—has several scars. You want to know where they are and what they look like?”
Bogumil glared up at him. “How do you know what his body looks like? You a faggot?”
“We bathe, how else? Try it sometime.”
Bogumil spluttered and started to get up, but Waclaw placed a hand on his shoulder and drove him back down on the bench they shared. “You started the insults, so don’t complain.”
He studied Jozef for a few seconds, and then looked at his companions. “I think he’s probably okay. He obviously knows Krzysztof.”
The short, muscular fellow still looked a bit dubious. “Yes, but he could have known him from something else. By his accent, he’s szlachta himself.”
“So is one Pole in ten,” said a fellow sitting in the very corner. He was thin, sharp-featured, and called himself Kazimierz. “Including two of us at this table. Means nothing.”
Jozef pursed his lips. “All right. The up-timer, Red Sybolt.”
Eight pair of eyes got a bit wider. “You know Sybolt?” asked the short one.
Jozef shook his head. “I wouldn’t say I ‘know’ him. We’ve met only twice. But that’s the business I’ve been engaged in and that’s all I’m going to say about it. The truth is, I don’t know myself where Red is right now. Or Krzysztof.”
He said that with relaxed confidence, since for the most part it was perfectly true. He had no idea where either Red Sybolt or Krzysztof Opalinski was located at the moment. Or last month, or last year. Somewhere in the Ruthenian lands—which covered an area larger than France or Spain.
He was fudging with the business of having met Sybolt twice. He’d never met him at all. But he had seen two photographs of the man; good enough ones that he could describe him fairly well if necessary.
God help him, of course, if either Sybolt or Krzysztof showed up in Dresden.
“Good enough,” said Waclaw, sitting back down. He glanced at Bogumil, who still looked angry, and slapped him playfully on the head. “Come on, you started it! Say hello to our new comrade.”
“Hello, comrade,” Bogumil said. “And fuck both of you.”
Szklenski laughed. “You’ll get used to him, Joe.”
Jozef managed not to sigh. He’d gotten through months living in Grantville without getting saddled with one of those asinine American nicknames. One week in Dresden and he was saddled with Joe. And from a fellow Pole, to boot!
Probably a punishment visited on him by the patron saint of spies for sleeping with two women in the same week who both worked in the same tavern.
Who was the patron saint for spies, anyway? He thought it was Joshua, but he wasn’t sure.
He couldn’t very well ask his tablemates, under the circumstances.
Chapter 14
“We are ready, then?” Gretchen looked at Tata.
Tata looked at Eric Krenz. “Our people are ready. He’ll have to answer for the soldiers.”
Eric had taken off his hat when he entered the conference room and hung it on a hook by the door. Now, he wished he were still wearing it. He could pull down the brim in order to avoid Gretchen’s gaze without having to look away f
“He hates giving a straight answer to anything, Gretchen,” said Tata. “You know that.”
“Yes, and normally I accommodate him. But I can’t this time. We need to know. Now.” She turned her head to look at a man sitting at the far end of the long conference table. That was Wilhelm Kuefer, one of the Vogtlanders. Their leader Georg Kresse had appointed him to serve as liaison to Dresden’s Committee of Correspondence.
“Tell him, Wilhelm,” she said.
“Banér’s cavalrymen burned three more villages yesterday. The populations of two of them ran off in time, but the people in the third one got caught sleeping. There weren’t any survivors except for—we’re not sure about this, but we couldn’t find any such bodies—perhaps the young women.”
Gretchen turned back to face Eric, who was sitting across the table from her. “That makes nine villages so far—and these three were right out in the Saxon plain, not in the mountains. There is no way this is happening without Banér’s approval. Tacit approval, maybe, but he’s still responsible.”
She stopped and waited.
And waited.
Eric felt like screaming: I’m just a fucking lieutenant! How am I supposed to know if we can hold the bastards off?
But he knew what Tata’s response would be. She’d point to herself with a thumb—I’m just a tavern-keeper’s daughter—and then at Gretchen with a forefinger. And her father ran a print shop. So stop whining.
Gretchen was quite obviously prepared to wait all day for his answer. By mid-afternoon, though, Tata’s sarcasm would become unbearable.
“Yes,” he said, sighing. “I think. As best I can tell.”
“Not good enough, Lieutenant Krenz.” Gretchen’s voice was soft but her tone was iron. “I do not ask for guarantees. That would be silly. But I need a more firm response than that. If I order the gates closed and openly forbid Banér from coming into the city, that moment I make myself and every person in Dresden an outlaw. If the Swedes break in, they’ll massacre half the population.”
“As it is, even if we let them in without a fight, they’ll kill some people,” said Tata. “Me and Gretchen, for sure, if they catch us. Any CoC member—and there’ll be plenty who’ll serve as informers to ferret them out. There are always toadies, anywhere you go.”
Eric rose, strode to the door, plucked his hat off the hook, jammed it on, and came back to the table.
“I feel better now. Don’t ask me why the hat makes a difference. It just does. Here’s your answer, Gretchen. It may not be what you want but it’s the only answer I can give you. I don’t honestly know if we can hold off Banér. There are too many unknown variables in the equation. To name what’s probably the biggest, what will von Arnim do? If he adds his ten thousand men to Banér’s fifteen, we’ll be very badly outnumbered.”
He took a deep breath, to steel his will. “Here’s what I will promise. If you can hold the city’s populace firm, we’ll bleed the bastards till they’re white as sheets. If they do take the city, there won’t be more than half of them left standing.”
She nodded. “That’s good enough, I think. Those are mercenaries out there. If you bleed them enough, I think they’ll start deserting in droves. And we’re into winter, now. Disease will start ravaging them.”
“Ravage the city also,” said Friedrich Nagel. His tone was dark—but then, it usually was. Eric’s fellow lieutenant was possibly the most pessimistic man he’d ever met. Odd, really, that they’d become such good friends.
Gretchen made a face. It wasn’t a grimace; just an expression that conveyed the stoic outlook that was such an inseparable part of the woman. Nagel called it “the Richter Lack of Rue.”
“Not as badly as they’ll suffer,” she said. “Our patrols maintain sanitation a lot better than Banér will.”
“Well, that’s true,” said Friedrich. One thing you could always count on with Nagel was that he was a dispassionate pessimist. It wasn’t that he thought his lot in life was particularly hard. Everyone’s was, including his enemies. Eric would have assumed the attitude was that of a stark Calvinist, except that he knew Friedrich was an outright freethinker. What the up-timers called a deist. He didn’t think God had any personal animus against him. He’d simply set the universe in motion and went on His way, indifferent to the details that followed. Does a miller care if an unlucky gnat gets crushed between the stones, so long as the flour gets made?
Gretchen now looked back at Kuefer. “Have you gotten an answer from Kresse?”
She didn’t specify the question involved, because she didn’t need to. Everyone at the table knew that she’d proposed that the Vogtlanders unite formally with Dresden instead of simply maintaining a liaison.
Wilhelm nodded. “Yes. Georg says he’ll agree to it—on one condition. We’re not joining the CoCs. Meaning no offense, but we don’t necessarily agree with you on all issues and we reserve the right to express such disputes openly and publicly.”
“Understood,” said Gretchen. “We have the same arrangement with the Ram people in Franconia. So does the Fourth of July Party.”
She looked around the table. The majority of people sitting there were members of the city’s Committee of Correspondence. “Anybody disagree?”
She waited patiently, long enough to give anyone with doubts a chance to speak up. They would have done so, too. Richter was the dominant figure at that table, but she was not domineering. In fact, she went out of her way to make sure people felt at ease and were not afraid to express their opinions. That was a good part of the reason she was so dominant, of course. Her followers trusted her, they weren’t simply cowed by her.
“All right, then. We’ll need to form a new committee to take charge of the resistance against the Swedes. Politically neutral, as it were. I propose one-third of the seats will be held by the CoC, one-third will be divided between the soldiers, the militias, and the city council—however they choose to divide them—and the remaining third will be split evenly between the Vogtlanders and representatives of the towns in the plain.”
That was an exceedingly generous gesture on the part of the CoC, especially toward the Vogtlanders. Of course, the generosity was more formal than real, in some ways. The militias and especially the regular soldiers were so heavily influenced by the CoC that they could be relied upon to follow its guidance. Even the city council by now was close to the CoC, since most of its former patrician members had fled the city.
Still, the formalities were significant, not just empty posturing. The fact that Richter was willing to make such a proposal indicated that she would listen to people outside the CoC also.
“We’ll need a new name for it, Gretchen,” said Tata.
“Yes, I know. I propose to call it the Committee of Public Safety.”
Eric had to stifle a sudden, semi-hysterical laugh. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Friedrich’s lips purse.
But Nagel didn’t say anything. Looking around the table, Eric realized that he and his fellow lieutenant were the only ones there—leaving aside Gretchen herself, he presumed—who understood the historical allusion.
“I like it,” grunted Kuefer. “It’s neutral sounding but it ought to send the right message to the Swedes.”
After the meeting broke up, Eric and Friedrich waited for Gretchen in the corridor outside the conference chamber.
“What is it?” she asked, when she emerged. “I don’t have much time right now. I need to give Wettin the news myself. I don’t want him hearing it first in the form of rumor.”
Eric cleared his throat. “Friedrich and I were talking and…ah…that title for the committee you proposed…”
“That I proposed and everyone agreed to, including you. At least, you raised no objection. What about it?”
“Well…ah…some people might think we were being provocative…” He trailed off.
“For God’s sake, Gretchen,” burst out Nagel, “it’s the name Robespierre and his people used!”
She paused and gave both of them a cold stare. “Since you’ve apparently read the history, I will point out that this same Committee of Public Safety was responsible for defeating every one of the royalist nations who invaded France to restore the king. The reactionary propagandists against Robespierre and Danton don’t like to talk much about that, do they?”
“But…Surely you don’t propose to erect a guillotine in the central square?”
She frowned. “Why in the world would we do that, when we’ve got plenty of stout German axes at hand? We’re not French sissies.”
She swept off, down the corridor, headed toward the administrator’s chambers.
“I…think that was a joke,” ventured Friedrich.
Eric took off his hat and ran fingers through his hair. Then, jammed it back on. “With Gretchen, who knows? But we’ll take that as our working hypothesis. Anyway, what’s the difference? We’ll probably all be dead in a couple of months anyway, between Banér and typhus.”
“Don’t forget the plague,” said Friedrich, as they began walking in the other direction. He was more chipper already, now that he had catastrophes to dwell on. “Always a reliable guest in such affairs. And I hear there’s a new disease we’ll be encountering one of these days. They call it ‘cholera.’ It’s quite fascinating. Apparently, your bowels turn to water and you shit and puke yourself to death.”
After Gretchen Richter left his office, Ernst Wettin rose from his desk and went to the northern window. That provided him with his favorite view of the valley.
There were settlements over there on the north bank of the Elbe, but the big majority of the city’s populace lived south of the river. He’d been told by a friend who’d gotten a look at an up-time travel guide in Grantville that someday—about half a century from now, during a period they would call “the Baroque”—the city would expand greatly over there. But in this day and age, the walls of the city did not include those north bank settlements. They’d have no protection once a siege began.