1636: The Saxon Uprising-ARC (39 page)

Tonight, though, Rebecca wasn’t concerned about her own possible fate a few weeks or months from now. Not even that of her children. Tonight the snow was falling, and she knew what that meant.

Thought she did, at least. She’d gotten no messages from Michael. He wouldn’t have divulged his tactical plans to her anyway. But she knew her husband very well.

Mike Stearns was a charming man. Even his enemies would allow as much. Gracious, pleasant, courteous, rarely given to expressing a temper.

All of it was even true. But what the qualities disguised from those who didn’t know him as well as she did, was that he was also utterly pugnacious. Not belligerent, as such. He did not go looking for fights. But when a fight did come he would throw himself into it with a pure fury. Rebecca had never seen him fight with his fists, but she knew from Melissa Mailey what his record had been. All but one of his professional fights he’d won by knockout before the end of the fourth round.

So how would such a man fight as a general?

Snow was falling. Not only here but all across the Germanies. She’d checked the weather reports.

It would be falling in Saxony too. White, cold—and gentle, as snowfalls were. But tomorrow it would be bathed in blood. She could only hope Michael’s blood would not be part of that gruesome, incongruous mix.

Or not too much of it, at least. She was a Jewess. Her people had learned long ago that you had to be practical about these things.

Chapter 46

The Saxon plain, near Dresden

Johan Banér was awakened by the sound of gunfire. He came awake instantly.

“Fucking bastards! I warned them!”

He began pulling on his pants, calling for his orderly and his adjutant. The orderly arrived first, piling into the little room on the upper floor of the house. He’d have been sleeping just outside, in the hallway. The hallway was small and narrow, too, as you’d expect from a village home that wasn’t quite a hovel but came close.

Without speaking, the orderly helped the general put on the rest of his clothes. The adjutant arrived seconds later.

“I warned them, Sinclair! I warned the fucks! Which one of them started it?”

The Scot officer’s face was pale. “Sir, I’m not—”

“If you don’t know, find out! I intend have whoever started this brawl shot dead! No, I’ll—”

“Sir, I really don’t—”

“—have them hanged! Hanged, you hear me? If need be, a whole fucking company!”

“Sir, I think it’s the enemy!”
Sinclair shouted desperately.

Banér stared at him, as if he’d gone mad.

Sinclair pointed to the window. “Listen, sir! That’s too much gunfire to be coming from a brawl between companies.”

Still wide-eyed with disbelief, Banér stared at the window. An instant later, he rushed over, fumbled at the latch, and threw the window open.

The sky was lightening with the sunrise but he still couldn’t see very far because of the snowfall. The sound of gunfire was growing, though, and Sinclair was right. That wasn’t a brawl between drunken soldiers.

But—

“No sane man launches an attack in the middle of a snowstorm!”

He and Sinclair looked at each other. Sinclair shrugged. “He’s a rank amateur, sir. You know the old saying.”

Banér had always thought that saying was inane, actually.
The opponent a great swordsman fears the most is the worst swordsman.
Blithering nonsense. Still…

Stearns might be mad, but this could get dangerous. He had to get out there. His soldiers would be muzzy with sleep and confused. They’d no more been expecting this than he had, and the snowfall would make it difficult for his officers to get the men into proper formations. Everyone would be half-blind.

So would the enemy, though—and, just as Sinclair had said, they were rank amateurs.

Choose to fight real soldiers in a snowstorm, would they? He’d show them where children’s games left off and real war began.

You couldn’t see a thing beyond thirty yards or so and volley gun batteries didn’t blast away at nothing. Not batteries under Thorsten Engler’s command, anyway. And he wasn’t nervous, either. They’d trained with the sled arrangements, and had actually come to prefer them over wheels, in some ways. They were easier to bring to bear, for one thing. Their biggest drawback was the recoil, which could be a little unpredictable, but that wasn’t a factor in the first round. And it was usually the first round fired by volley guns that was the decisive one.

Finally, he could see shapes ahead. Those were the shapes of men, too, he was sure of it.

But they weren’t coming forward, they seemed to be just milling around. And now he spotted horses among them.

They’d caught a cavalry unit off guard then. Still trying to mount up.

Splendid. Ten more yards and they’d fire.

The sleds moved fast, too. It was just a matter of a few seconds before the entire battery started coming around.

By now they were only fifteen yards from their nearest enemy soldiers and they’d been spotted themselves. One of the Swedes who’d managed to get up onto his horse fired a wheel-lock pistol at them. In their direction, rather. Thorsten was pretty sure the shot had sailed at least ten feet over their heads. Confusion, surprise and a snowstorm do not combine to make for good marksmanship.

Happily, good marksmanship didn’t matter that much to a volley gun battery.

He glanced back and forth. All the guns he could see had been brought to bear. Good enough.

“Fire!”
he screeched, in that high-pitched tone he’d learned to use on a battlefield. Not even the heavy snow coming down could blanket it.

Only two guns in one of the batteries hadn’t been brought in line yet, but their fire came not more than three seconds later. Twenty-five barrels to a volley gun, six guns to a battery, six batteries to a company. Subtracting a few misfires, almost nine hundred musket balls struck the enemy just a few yards away.

That was equivalent to the fire from an entire regiment—except an entire regiment couldn’t fire its muskets all at once. Not on that narrow a front.

Thorsten couldn’t see most of them, but the clustered units his volley gun battery had just fired upon were two of the four companies of the Östergötland Horsemen. That first murderous volley killed and wounded dozens of them, including the commanding officer Colonel Claus Dietrich Sperreuter. The rest were sent reeling backward—where they collided into the other two companies and cast them into further confusion.

“Reload!”
Thorsten screeched.

As orders went, that one was superfluous to the point of being asinine. His men had already started reloading before he finished taking in his breath. What else would they be doing on a battlefield? Picking their teeth?

But it was tradition. Elite units took traditions seriously, as pointless as they might be.

The term “elite” was no empty boast, either. The company was ready to fire again in ten seconds—a better rate of fire than even musketmen could manage.

“Fire!”
he screeched.

This time, all the guns went off together. There were misfires, here and there, but not many.

Again, almost nine hundred balls hammered the milling cavalrymen. Thorsten’s men still hadn’t taken more than a couple of dozen shots fired in return and so far as Thorsten could tell, all of them had gone wild.

Dozens more were killed and wounded. The one company that had started to form up was shredded again, its captain thrown out of the saddle by a ball that struck him in the head. He survived the shot—just a crease, he wasn’t even stunned—but after he landed on the ground his horse stepped on his head and crushed it into the hard soil beneath the snow. He survived that, too, although he was no longer really conscious. Then his horse and another trampled his ribs before they stumbled off, away from the guns.

He survived that as well. But three ribs were broken, he was now bleeding internally, and everyone who looked at his body assumed he was dead. Engler’s soldiers did too, when they passed by.

So, a while later, he died from hypothermia. He’d never managed to get his boots on. He died in his socks—and both of them had holes. His had not been a wealthy family and the Swedes had been late with the pay.

Again.

Thorsten gauged the enemy, as much of them as he could see. Then, decided to take the risk. Instead of ordering another volley, he ordered the guns moved forward.

“Ten yards up!”
he screeched.

Jeff Higgins heard the screech, although he couldn’t make out the exact words. In the half-blindness of the snowfall, his volley gun company had gotten separated from the regiment and charged ahead. He’d been groping his way forward with the infantry battalions, trying to find them before it was too late. The volley guns were murderous but they were a lot more fragile than the gunners themselves liked to admit. If they got caught between volleys by cavalry—even well-led infantry that could move quickly—they were dead meat.

Engler was particularly oblivious to that reality, damn him. How could a man who planned to become a psychologist behave like a blasted lunatic on a battlefield? If Jeff didn’t find him and reunite the volley gun company with the regiment’s infantry, things were likely to get very hairy. The Hangman was light, when it came to regular artillery, so they relied a lot on the volley guns.

He heard another screech. Again, he couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded closer.

The words had been:
“Come into position!
”

Thirty-six volley guns swiveled on the snow, gliding easily on their Bartley rigs.

“Come on!” Jeff shouted, raising his sword and waving it. He detested the thing almost as much as he detested horses, but it was just a fact that an officer leading a charge had to wave a stupid sword around. Waving a pistol just didn’t do the trick, not even a big down-time wheel-lock.

Yes, it was asinine. Nothing but a pointless tradition left over from the days when illiterate men went into battled armed with nothing but oversized swords and blue paint. But the Hangman was an elite unit and elite units take tradition seriously.

Thankfully, Jeff was a big man and had big hands even for a man his size. So he probably wouldn’t lose his grip on the sword more than twice before the battle was over.

Somehow, it never occurred to him that he might be dead or maimed before the battle was over. He never thought of that, in the middle of a battle. He’d only think of it as he tried to sleep afterward, when sometimes he’d get the shakes.

He heard another screech. He might finally have been close enough to make out the words but the screech was immediately drowned by a thunderclap. Nine hundred volley gun barrels going off at once made the term “noisy” seem inadequate if you were anywhere nearby.

That third volley—again, at point blank range—destroyed the Östergötland Horsemen. Most of them survived, as men somehow do on a battlefield. Most of them weren’t even injured. But as a fighting formation, they were done. On this battlefield today, at least. The survivors raced to the rear, insofar as men could race through heavy snow and insofar as they could tell where “the rear” was in the middle of a heavy snowfall.

The sun was still invisible. It would remain invisible through that day and most of the next. But there was now enough light that a man could distinguish, approximately, between east and west. And, that done, determine which way was north—which is where they wanted to go. Back into the siege lines.

Miserable they might be, those trenches, but they weren’t as miserable as being savaged by musket balls fired by an unseen enemy.

Not more than one soldier in five of the Östergötland Horsemen had caught so much as a glimpse of the men who’d been killing them. Not more than a dozen had gotten a good look at them. Of those dozen, only two were still alive.

One of them was now hiding under the carcass of his horse, trying not to scream because of a broken leg. He was playing dead in the hopes that none of the enemy soldiers passing by would spot him. They were likely to cut his throat if he couldn’t offer ransom, which he couldn’t. His had not been a wealthy family, either, and the Swedes had been late with the pay.

Again.

Dresden, capital of Saxony

“Where? Where?” Jozef demanded, as soon as he came onto the platform around the tower.

Eric Krenz pointed to the south. “Over there. Somewhere. It’s hard to be sure, exactly.”

Wojtowicz peered into the snowfall. You really couldn’t see anything worth looking at. From this high up in the Residenzschloss, you couldn’t even see the city’s own walls.

Gretchen Richter came onto the platform, followed by Tata.

“So what is happening?” she asked.

“We’re not sure,” replied Friedrich Nagel. He was standing next to Krenz. Both lieutenants had their uniforms on, but neither one had finished buttoning up their outer jackets. Like Jozef himself, they must have scrambled out of bed in response to the distant gunfire.

Suddenly, Jozef saw a flash. A dim one, but it was definitely a flash. Followed, a moment later, by a muffled boom.

“That was an artillery piece,” he said. “Pretty big one, too. Probably a twelve-pounder.”

He looked at Eric and Friedrich. “Does the Third Division have any field ordnance that size?”

They both shook their heads. “Biggest we’ve got—unless something got added after Zwenkau—are six-pounders.”

So. Banér’s forces. And from the flash, not more than a mile from the trenches the Swedes had dug.

Jozef came to a decision. “Now,” he said. “We should sortie now.”

Krenz and Nagel looked at each other. “Are you sure?” asked Eric.

“No, of course I’m not sure. I wasn’t expecting a battle to start in the middle of a fucking storm. That must have been your general’s doing. He’s insane, by the way. But now that he’s gone and done it, we should take advantage of the opportunity.”

He leaned over the railing, pointing to the south—his arm angled downward. He was actually pointing at the enemy’s siege lines, which couldn’t be seen because of the snowfall.

“We should seize their own lines now, before they can retreat back into them.”

“
If
they
retreat back into them,” said Friedrich, a bit dubiously. “I thought the idea was to wait until we knew they were coming back.”

“Yes, it was.” Jozef was suddenly sure of himself. “But they will, they will. If your blessed general was mad enough to attack them in the middle of a storm, he’s mad enough to drive them back into their lines. So let’s be there to deny it to them, shall we?”

Krenz and Friedrich looked at each other again.

“He’s got a point,” said Eric.

“He’s right about Mike Stearns, too,” said Gretchen. “I won’t tell you what to do. I’m not a soldier and don’t pretend to be one. But I think Wojtowicz is right.”

“Okay, then,” said Nagel. “Let’s be about the mad business.”

If nothing else, the noisy labors of Denise and Minnie had expanded the hiding place in the root cellar enough for all three of them to fit into it.

Barely.

There would have been room to spare, though—that racket had gone on for days—if a third of the space hadn’t been taken up with barrels.

“What…?”

Minnie pointed to the one Noelle’s arm was lying across. “That’s got food in it. The two you’re crammed against on the other side are water barrels. And these two”—she patted the two barrels stacked on her left—“and the two over there by Denise—”