1632

Hearing that word, the sobbing ten-year-old boy at her side was suddenly clutching Gretchen's hip. A moment later, his sister joined him, clutching Gretchen's arm. The dazed look in her eyes seemed to lift, a bit.

Hans' 'family,' plain enough, had just grown. He was not surprised. A third of the camp followers belonged to Gretchen. Adopted, as it were.

Ludwig's bellow came again. Angry, now. There would be a cuffing, sure enough.

'Go,' hissed Gretchen.

***

The cuffing was not severe. Ludwig was in a good mood, insofar as that innocent expression can be applied to a troll in human guise. His gaiety, of course, was at Hans' expense.

'A real battle for you, chicklet!' roared Ludwig. 'Some of our boys got bloodied down south a ways, so we're going to sack Badenburg to teach these Protestant fucks a lesson.' The grin in the big man's bearded face was jeering. 'No more lazing about in the lap of luxury. You'll be blooded before tomorrow's over. Or bloody ruin yourself!'

The veteran mercenaries standing nearby echoed Ludwig's guffaws. The laughter was good-natured, for the most part. But Diego the Spaniard's humor, as always, was sadistic.

'A gutted mess you'll be,' he predicted. The sneer on his face became a leer. Diego grabbed his crotch. 'Annalise's looking better by the day!' he chortled.

Hans felt a spike of rage run down his spine. He detested the Spaniard as he did no other man in Ludwig's band. More, even, than Ludwig himself. Ludwig was a brute, a beast, an ogre. Diego was something far worse. It was no accident that the Spaniard was always the man chosen by Ludwig whenever torture was to be done.

Yet Hans said nothing. He averted his eyes. He was terrified of Diego. The sallow-faced Spaniard was not a big man. Nothing compared to Ludwig. But he was as savage as a weasel, and just as deadly.

Hans braced himself for further ridicule. Fortunately, a small knot of horsemen came cantering up, diverting everyone's attention. The captain 'in command' of Ludwig's band had arrived to give the orders.

Hans didn't even know the captain's name. It was meaningless. Hans took his orders from Ludwig. He only gave the captain and his three companions a glance.

But then, seeing the priest in the group, Hans' glance became a stare. Apparently, there was to be a sermon along with commands. The priest would almost certainly be a Jesuit, attached to the Papal Inquisition. He would exhort the troops to fight in the name of holiness.

Hans' guess was confirmed by Diego's muttered words of scorn. The Spaniard was contemptuous of the Jesuits and the pope's Inquisition. Weak-livered punks, he called them. Diego liked to boast about the Spanish Dominicans and their Holy Office of the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition answered to the crown of Spain, not the Vatican. They did as they pleased, and damn the pope's Italian lawyering. Just burn the filthy heretics. They're all Jews and Jew- lovers anyway, the ones who aren't outright Moors.

'Limpieza,' the Spanish called it. Pure blood, to be protected from taint. That mattered as much to them-more, in truth-than the pope's concerns over religious dogma.

The captain finished his brief exchange of words with Ludwig. The priest urged his horse to the fore.

A sermon, sure enough.

***

Hans tried to block the sermon from his mind. He did not even look at the Jesuit, lest his eyes betray him. He simply stared at the ground, hands clasped as if in prayer.

The priest was speaking of the need to safeguard the Catholic faith from heresy.

Hans could not help hearing the words. His thoughts seethed with fury.

Liar. We were Catholics ourselves. Our whole town was Catholic.

The priest was advocating the true faith.

We were kneeling in prayer when your 'Catholic' mercenaries came into my father's shop.

Denouncing the Protestants.

The Protestants murdered my grandfather, and took away my mother. But it was your good Catholic Ludwig who drove a sword into my father's belly when he held up the rosary.

Denouncing sin, now.

And what was it, priest, when your soldiers sired a bastard on my sister? Was it hers, tied hand and foot to my father's bed?

The rest, he managed not to hear. Hans' thoughts moved far away. Bleak and hopeless. Utterly despairing thoughts, as only those of an eighteen-year-old young man can be.

Hans knew the truth. Satan's rebellion, stymied for so long, had finally triumphed. It was no longer God who sat on the heavenly throne. The Beast had replaced Him. It was the serpent's minions, not the Lord's, who wore the vestments of the clergy. All clergy, of all creeds. The creeds themselves were meaningless. Satan's joke, nothing more. The Lord of Flies was amusing himself, tormenting the land and its folk.

The sermon was done. Hans, had he still retained Gretchen's vestige of faith, would have thanked God. But there was no God to be thanked, any longer. There was nothing.

He managed, barely, to pull himself back from that brink. Suicide was at the bottom of that plunge. Hans had been tempted, often enough. But He flared his nostrils, and took in a deep breath. Still staring at the ground, still with his hands clasped before him.

The hands were not clasped in prayer, for all the strength with which he squeezed the fingers. Hans Richter was simply reminding himself that all was not lost. He still had something. Something to call his own, and something to give what he could.

Family. That I have. That I will protect, as best I can. Whatever else.

Chapter 16

'How many, d'you think?' asked Mackay.

Andrew Lennox squinted nearsightedly. Then, remembering his new gift from the Americans, he took out the spectacles and put them on. It took him not more than five seconds, scanning the field, to pronounce judgment.

'Two thousand. Divided two an' one. Maybe e'en less. Tilly is more conservative than Gustav Adolf, an' this'll be one o' 'is poorer an' weaker units. They've got nae artillery 't'all.'

Mackay nodded. 'About my estimate.'

Next to him, Mike cocked his head. 'By two and one-?'

'Pikemen to arquebusiers,' replied Mackay. The Scots officer pointed to the tightly packed mass of men slowly approaching their own forces. 'See the formation? That's your typical Spanish-style tercio. All the Habsburg armies use it in battle, although the imperials prefer a higher proportion of arquebus than the Spaniards. Impressive, isn't it?'

Mike studied the advancing army. He had no difficulty agreeing with the word. Impressive, it most certainly was. The imperial army reminded him of a gigantic mastodon, bearing down with gleaming tusks.

And they're just about to become as extinct.

Tilly's mercenaries were packed into a rectangle approximately fifty files wide and forty ranks deep, covering not more than fifty yards of front. The men in the ranks were spaced every three feet, and the files were drawn up even closer. The formation was so tight that, even across the clear and level ground of what had once been plowed farmland, they could only move deliberately. Mike knew, from what Mackay and Lennox had told him, that if Tilly himself and his entire army had been here, the oncoming tercio would have been one of sixteen or seventeen such units. They would have been arrayed side by side, like a human glacier. Slow as a glacier, and just as unstoppable.

The pikemen formed the heart of the formation. Their great fifteen-foot spears, held erect, glistened even in the light of an overcast day. The five hundred arquebusiers were arrayed on either flank. The arquebusiers' principal duty was to fend off pistol-wielding cavalry and match volleys with enemy gunmen. But, as had been true for a century and more, it would be the press and charge of pike which would decide the day.

Such, at least, was the accepted theory and practice of the time. Frank Jackson, standing on Mike's left, echoed his own mental opinion. 'Talk about candidates for extinction. One cluster bomb would take out the whole bunch.'

'We don't have a cluster bomb,' pointed out Mike mildly.

Frank snorted. 'Neither did the NVA. But I'll tell you right now those tough little bastards in their black pajamas would have loved these guys. Mincemeat, coming up. Complete with nuoc mam.'

Mike grimaced at the image. Frank had brought home a Vietnamese wife from the war. In the decades since, Diane Jackson-she had Americanized her name-had blended in extremely well. But she still insisted on cooking at least one meal a month with that godawful Vietnamese fish sauce.

'Nuoc mam,' Frank repeated. Under other circumstances, the obvious relish in his voice would have been odd. Much as he doted on his wife, Frank was no fonder of the fish sauce than any other native-born American.

Mackay, listening, understood the essence if not the precise meaning of Frank's words. 'You are that confident?' The Scotsman pointed to the oncoming enemy. 'They outnumber us two to one.' He glanced to the left, where Ernst Hoffman's ragtag Protestant mercenaries were drawn up. About five hundred of them, more or less. Their formation was so irregular and undisciplined that an exact count was impossible. 'That's counting that sorry lot, who'll break in a minute.'

Mike shrugged. 'I'm not relying on Hoffman's goons at all. I just insisted they be here in order to get them out of the town.'

He cocked his head around. The little American/Scots/Protestant army was drawn up less than half a mile north of Badenburg. Unusually, for a town its size-the population was less than six thousand-Badenburg was walled. Those walls, as much as anything else, had determined Mike's political tactics over the past two weeks.