1636_ The Saxon Uprising - Eric Flint [0]
The Saxon Uprising-ARC
Eric Flint
Advance Reader Copy
Unproofed
Baen
The Ring of Fire series:
1632 by Eric Flint
1633 by Eric Flint & David Weber
1634: The Baltic War by Eric Flint & David Weber
Ring of Fire ed. by Eric Flint
Ring of Fire II ed. by Eric Flint
1634: The Galileo Affair by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis
Grantville Gazette ed. by Eric Flint
Grantville Gazette II ed. by Eric Flint
1634: The Ram Rebellion by Eric Flint with Virginia DeMarce et al.
1634: The Bavarian Crisis by Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce
1635: The Cannon Law by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis
Grantville Gazette III ed. by Eric Flint
Grantville Gazette IV ed. by Eric Flint
1635: The Dreeson Incident by Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce
1635: The Eastern Front by Eric Flint
1636: The Saxon Uprising by Eric Flint
Time Spike by Eric Flint & Marilyn Kosmatka
For a complete list of
Baen Books by Eric Flint,
please go to www.baen.com.
1636: THE SAXON UPRISING
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Eric Flint
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3425-2
Cover art by Tom Kidd
Maps by Gorg Huff
First printing, April 2011
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
t/k
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
To the memory of my sister, Kathy Flint.
Born September 11, 1948.
Died October 11, 2010.
PROLOGUE
An idle king
November 1635
Berlin
Colonel Erik Haakansson Hand gazed down at the man who was simultaneously King of Sweden, Emperor of the United States of Europe, and High King of the Union of Kalmar. He was Gustav II Adolf, the pre-eminent monarch of Europe as the year 1635 came to a close.
The Habsburgs might dispute the claim. And if that powerful dynastic family could by some magic means recombine their splintered realms into the great empire ruled a century earlier by Charles V, they could probably made the claim stick. But the great Holy Roman Emperor was long gone. Today, it would take genuinely magical methods to reunite Spain and Austria—not to mention the newly emerged third branch of the dynasty in the Netherlands.
France was now weak, too. Gustav Adolf’s general Lennart Torstensson had crushed the French at the battle of Ahrensbök a year and a half ago. Since then, Cardinal Richelieu’s control of France had grown steadily shakier. King Louis XIII’s younger brother Gaston, the duke of Orleans—usually called “Monsieur Gaston”—was and always had been an inveterate schemer who hated Richelieu with a passion. In times past, the cardinal had easily out-maneuvered him. But the disaster to which Richelieu had led France in his ill-fated League of Ostend’s war against the United States of Europe had produced widespread dissatisfaction and unrest, especially among the nobility and the urban patrician class.
In short, Gustav Adolf ought to be basking in the most glorious sunlight of a life which had been filled with a great deal of glory since he was a teenage king. Instead, he was lying on a bed in a palace in one of the most wretched cities in the Germanies with his mind apparently gone.
Gustav Adolf’s blue eyes stared up at Hand. Did he recognize his cousin? It was hard to say.
You certainly couldn’t tell anything from his speech.
“Bandits have knighted almost walrus,” said the king of Sweden. “Is there jewel?”
It was very frustrating. Gustav Adolf didn’t seem addle-pated, exactly. His words made no sense, but they weren’t pure gibberish, either. This last sentence, for instance, had clearly been a question, and beneath all of the meaningless sentences you could detect a still intact grammar.
But what was he saying?