corpse, after all. What possible further ill could you wish upon the fellow? But leaving that aside, Krenz was not much given to jealousy anyway. Or spite, or envy. He'd admit himself that he had faults, but they were generally the faults of a cheerful man perhaps a bit too fond of his immediate pleasures.
He heard a shrill, piercing call from ahead. A shriek, almost.
He couldn't make out the word, but he didn't need to. He'd heard that same call before, more than once. Incoming.
Fortunately, they'd reached a corner. He lunged forward, seized Tata around the waist, and hauled her behind the shelter of a tall building.
'What are you-!' But she didn't resist. She didn't even finish the sentence. Tata was very far from dimwitted.
A moment later, they heard a loud crashing sound. No explosion, though. Either the Swedes had fired a round shot into the city or the exploding shell had been a dud. Judging from the sound-bricks shattering; a lot of them-Eric was pretty sure it was round shot. Something awfully heavy had to have done that.
'We'll have to move carefully from here on,' he said. 'Stay under cover as much as we can.'
When they reached the fortifications, Eric saw that Gretchen Richter was already there. She was walking slowly down the line of soldiers manning the bastions and curtain wall, talking with each gun crew as she came to them. Doing what Eric was planning to do himself, and what other officers would be doing in other bastions and along other curtain walls. The words they'd be speaking were not really that important, taken by themselves. What mattered was an officer's relaxed and calm demeanor.
No officer could do that better than Gretchen, though. The woman had a knack for projecting confidence that, given her youth-she was only twenty-six years old-was uncanny. Friedrich Nagel was of the opinion that she'd either sold her soul to the devil or to Saint Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of lost causes and desperate situations.
Whatever the source of her poise, Krenz was glad to see her. Gretchen steadied his nerves the same way she did everyone else's.
The cannon fire from the Swedish lines started picking up. This would go on for weeks, in all likelihood. The army camped outside Dresden's walls numbered about fifteen thousand men. The city itself had a population of somewhere between thirty and forty thousand, but that had been greatly expanded by refugees pouring in from the countryside over the past weeks. Dresden's defenders could put three thousand able-bodied men on the walls, with at least that many available as a reserve in case Baner ordered a major frontal assault.
To make things still more difficult for Baner, he didn't have enough soldiers to really seal off the city. Especially not in wintertime, when his men would shirk their responsibility to maintain patrols at night and loads could be moved into the city by sleigh without needing to use roads. Dresden's population would be on short rations, but they wouldn't be in any danger of starving for at least a year.
Probably longer, in fact. Gretchen Richter and the CoC had clamped down their control of Dresden. The fact that Richter used a velvet glove whenever she could didn't change the fact that the grip itself was one of iron. Whatever anyone thought of the political program and policies of the CoC, one thing was indisputable: they greatly strengthened a city under siege, if they were in charge. Rations would be evenly and fairly apportioned; sanitation and medical measures would be rigorously applied and enforced; spies and traitors would be watched for vigilantly.
Those measures directly addressed the most common reasons a city fell-hunger, disease and treachery. The risks weren't eliminated, but they were significantly reduced. At a guess, Eric thought any city run by Gretchen Richter could withstand a siege half again as long as it would otherwise. Maybe even twice as long. She was one of those rare people of great notoriety whose reputations weren't overblown at all.
Odd, really, to think that she was the wife of his good friend Jeff Higgins.
'Stop daydreaming!' scolded Tata, giving his shoulder a little nudge. 'Shouldn't you be ordering the men to fire a cannon or something?'
Noelle Stull tried to ignore the sound of the cannonade. The house she'd rented was large, well-built, and located toward the center of the city. The odds that a cannon ball fired from one of the besiegers' guns would strike her down at her writing desk were very slight. She'd faced much greater risks any number of times in the past. Although she'd been classified as a statistician, her real duties for the State of Thuringia-Franconia's innocuously-named Department of Economic Resources had been those of an undercover operative. An investigator, officially, although given the murky realities of power in which she'd moved, she'd been as much a spy as a detective. At one time or another she'd been shot at, imprisoned, shackled, bombed-usually by someone seeking to do her personal harm.
Compared to that, the chance that a haphazardly aimed cannon ball fired from a great distance would come anywhere close to her was not even worth worrying about. Yet, somehow, it was the very random, impersonal vagaries involved that made her nervous.
She tried to concentrate on the letter she was writing to Janos Drugeth. That wasn't helped any by her knowledge that sending the letter off would be almost as much a matter of chance and happenstance as the trajectory of the cannonballs coming over the walls. Normal postal service was erratic, to say the least.
Amazingly, though, it still existed. The couriers who worked for the Thurn and Taxis service were like rats and cockroaches. Impossible to eradicate and able to squeeze through the tiniest cracks.
But not even such couriers could deliver a letter to an unknown address. Noelle had no idea where Janos was at present, just as she was quite sure he had no idea she was in Dresden. She hadn't gotten a letter from him in months. With another man, she might have worried that he'd lost interest and simply stopped writing her. But with Janos, somehow, she wasn't. That spoke well for their possible future, of course.
If they had one. A muted crash had come from not too far away. A cannon ball had caved in a wall somewhere.
'See?' said Denise triumphantly. She pointed to the spot across the square where a Swedish cannonball had punched a large hole in the upper floor of a building. 'Give it a few weeks and there'll be a plenty big enough runway.'
Next to her, Minnie nodded. 'Just have to shovel up the wreckage. Some of it'll make good gravel, too.'
Eddie examined the scene of their optimism. The siege would have to last for several years before the Swedish army's gunfire removed enough of the buildings fronting the square and lining the main boulevard leading from it to allow for an airplane runway that wasn't just an elaborate form of suicide.
He did not bother to point that out, however. Denise's response was a foregone conclusion.
So? A few years are nothing, in a siege! Those Trojan guys lasted…what? Twenty years? They'd still be holding out, too, if the stupid jerks hadn't fallen for that old wooden shoe trick.
Ernst Wettin turned away from the window. When all was said and done, and unless you happened to have exceptionally bad fortune and fall victim to a stray cannon ball, watching a siege was about as boring as watching ants at work. Not at the very end, of course, if the defense gave way. Then tedium would turn to terror. But until then…
He sat back down at his writing desk. Ernst was the sort of man who believed firmly that all situations provided their own advantages. Since he retained the formal trappings of authority here in Saxony but had had the real power stripped away from him by Richter, he no longer had any tasks to perform that required more than a modicum of attention, for not more than two hours a day. Yet he still had all his comforts and facilities available.
Ernst Wettin came from a very prominent noble family and was himself a very capable official and administrator. Inevitably, therefore, since he'd reached his majority, he'd had very little time to himself.
Now, he did. At last, he had the opportunity he needed to concentrate on what he believed to be his true calling. The development of a systematic and reasoned program of educational reform for the whole of the Germanies.
A faint crash came from the distance. Presumably, a lucky cannon ball had done some significant damage. But the sound barely registered on his consciousness.
What to call the essay? Tentatively, he penned a title.
A Treatise on the Subject of the Education of the German Peoples
