The same was not true, however, of Hand himself-much less the man lying on the bed before him.
Gustav Adolf raised his head and looked up when he entered. The king's blue eyes seemed perhaps a bit clearer today.
'Where is Kristina?' he asked.
Startled, Hand glanced at Erling Ljungberg. The big bodyguard shrugged. 'Don't know if it means anything,' he said. 'But starting yesterday he began saying stuff that makes sense, now and then. Doesn't last more than a sentence or two, though.'
Erik looked back down at his cousin. Gustav Adolf was still watching him.
'Why is my daughter rowing violets?' The king's brows were furrowed.
Puzzled? Angry? It was impossible to tell.
'Under a kitchen some antlers jumped,' he continued. Clearly, the moment of coherence-if that's what it had been at all-was over.
'Your tailor went thatch and flung,' said Gustav Adolf. Then he closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep.
Erik placed a hand on the king's shoulder. The thick muscle was still there, at least. Physically, his cousin had largely recovered from his injuries at the battle of Lake Bledno. If only his mind…
He gave his head a little shake. No point in dwelling on that.
A particularly loud roar from the distant assembly hall penetrated the room. Ljungberg glanced in that direction and scowled slightly.
'Assholes,' he muttered.
That was the first indication Hand had ever gotten that the king's new bodyguard wasn't entirely pleased with the new dispensation. Ljungberg was normally as taciturn as a doorpost.
He decided to risk pursuing the matter. 'Your loyalty is entirely to the king, I take it?'
The bodyguard gave him a look from under lowered brows. 'The Vasas always sided with the common folk,' Ljungberg said. He nodded toward Gustav Adolf. 'Him too, even if he did give the chancellor and his people most of what they wanted.'
Gustav Adolf's father had died when he was only seventeen-too young, legally, to inherit the throne without a regent. Axel Oxenstierna, the leader of Sweden's noblemen, had supported Gustav Adolf's ascension to the throne in exchange for concessions that restored much of the nobility's power taken away by the new king's grandfather, who had founded the Vasa dynasty.
'So they did,'?said Hand. 'And will again, if my cousin recovers.'
For a moment, the two men stared at each other. Then Ljungberg looked away. 'I'm the king's man. No other.'
'And I as well,' said Erik.
A good day's work, he thought. Best to leave things as they were, though, rather than rushing matters. Nothing could be done anyway unless Gustav Adolf regained his senses. Linz, Austria Janos Drugeth finished re- reading the letter from Noelle Stull.
He was not a happy man. Rather, his feelings were mixed. The very evident warmth of the letter pleased him greatly, of course. But what had possessed the woman to go to Dresden?
True, this was the same woman who had once emptied her pistol by firing into the Danube, in a moment of pique. But even for Noelle, this was incredibly rash.
Janos was not privy to most of the details, of course. But one of his duties was to monitor Austria's espionage network and he received regular reports from his spymasters. So he knew that the Swedish general Johan Baner was marching into Saxony and would soon be at the gates of Dresden-and that Gretchen Richter had taken up residence in the city.
Given Richter's nature-still more, given Baner's-the result was a foregone conclusion. Dresden was about to become a city under siege, and if Baner broke into the city there would most likely be a bloodbath. The Swedish general wasn't as purely brutish as Heinrich Holk, but he came fairly close. And, unlike Holk, Baner was a very competent commander.
Janos was no stranger to sieges, from either side of the walls. He didn't think there was much chance that amateur hotheads like Richter could hold Dresden against the likes of Baner and his mercenaries.
True, the woman had managed the defenses of Amsterdam quite well, by all accounts. But Janos was sure that a large factor involved had been the Cardinal-Infante's unwillingness to risk destroying Amsterdam and thereby losing its resources and skilled workers. Baner would have no such compunctions at Dresden.
What was Noelle thinking?
He sighed, and put aside the letter. There was another letter in the batch that had just arrived, and this one came from his monarch. By rights, he should have read it first. But he'd been in the privacy of his own chambers in the army's headquarters at Linz, so his personal concerns had momentarily overridden his duty.
When he unsealed the letter, he discovered nothing but a short message: Come to Vienna at once. The Turks have taken Baghdad. Ferdinand
Drugeth rose and strode to the door, moving so quickly that a servant barely opened the door in time. 'My horse!' he bellowed.
Noelle would have to wait. For the first time in his life, Janos Drugeth found himself in the preposterous position of hoping that a notorious malcontent like Richter was indeed a capable military commander. Such was the strange world produced by the Ring of Fire. Bamberg, capital of the State of Thuringia-Franconia Ed Piazza still hadn't gotten used to down-time desks. The blasted things were tiny-what he thought of as a lady's writing desk, not the reasonably-sized pieces of furniture that a man could use to get some work done. For about the hundredth time since he'd moved to Bamberg-no, make that the thousandth time-he found himself wishing he still had the desk from his study in Grantville.
Unfortunately, when he and Annabelle sold their house they'd sold all the furniture with it. And when Ed had inquired as to whether the down-timer who'd bought the house might be willing to let him have the desk back, the answer had been an unequivocal 'no.' The new owner was a young nobleman with a nice income and a firm conviction that literary greatness would soon be his-especially with the help of such a magnificently expansive desk to work on.
True enough, Ed and Annabelle had gotten a small fortune for their house. Real estate prices in Grantville were now astronomical. With a small portion of that money he could easily afford to have the sort of desk he wanted custom-made for him-and, indeed, he'd commissioned the work quite a while ago. Alas, down-time furniture makers in Bamberg were artisans. Medieval artisans, from what Ed could tell, for whom timely delivery of a commissioned work came a very long way second to craftsmanship. They seemed to measure time in feast days, nones and matins, not workdays, hours and minutes.
So, he suffered at his miniature desk. At least it was the modern style, by seventeenth century values of 'modern.' That meant he could sit at it, instead of standing at the more traditional lectern type of desk.
A good thing, too, given how long today's meeting had gone on. The only people Ed had ever encountered who rivaled theologians disputing fine points of doctrine were soldiers wrangling over fine points of logistics.
'The gist of it,' he said, trying not to sound impatient, 'is that you're confident you can supply our soldiers in the event we have to send them down to the Oberpfalz.'
He almost burst into laughter, seeing the expressions on the faces of the three officers in the room. Horror combined with outrage, muted by the need to keep a civilian superior from realizing his military commanders thought he was a nincompoop. Much the sort of look he saw on the faces of his son and daughter whenever he made so bold as to advise them on matters of teenage protocol.
Naturally, as with his children, the reaction was due to the precise formulation of his statement rather than the content of the statement itself.
'I wouldn't go so far as to use the term 'confident,' sir,' demurred Major Tom Simpson.
'Indeed not,' concurred his immediate superior, Colonel Friedrich Engels.
The third officer present was General Heinrich Schmidt. 'We do not lack confidence, certainly, but I think it would be more accurate to say that we are reasonably assured of the matter,' was his judicious contribution.
Theologians, soldiers and teenagers-who would have guessed they shared such a close kinship? But Ed Piazza kept the observation to himself. Taken each on his own, all three of the officers in the room had good senses of humor. But they were quite young for their ranks and in the case of two of them, Schmidt and Engels,
