1636_ The Saxon Uprising - Eric Flint [3]
So he simply uttered a noncommittal sound. A hum, you might call it.
Oxenstierna turned to face him. “Will your current assignment…?”
Hand raised his hand a few inches. “Please, Axel. Despite my cousin’s current condition, I feel obliged to maintain his confidentiality.”
“Yes, of course.”
The chancellor seemed on the verge of saying something further, by the expression on his face, but after a few seconds satisfied himself with an equally non-committal grunt.
He then gave Hand a polite little bow. More in the way of an exaggerated nod, really. “And now I’m afraid I must be off. Urgent affairs of the realm, as you can imagine.”
Hand returned the not-quite-a-bow. That was slightly rude, on his part. King’s cousin or not, Oxenstierna still ranked him in Sweden’s hierarchy. But Hand couldn’t afford to give any impression, especially to Oxenstierna, that he was in the least bit intimidated by Gustav Adolf’s predicament.
After the chancellor left, Hand glanced at the one other person in the room. That was Gustav Adolf’s personal bodyguard Erling Ljungberg, who was perched on a stool in a corner.
Ljungberg was new to the assignment. Silently, Erik cursed the fates on that evil battlefield that had not only stuck down the king but slain his bodyguard as well. That had been Anders Jönsson, a man whom Hand had known very well indeed. Had Anders still been alive…
But, he wasn’t. And Erik simply didn’t know Ljungberg well enough yet—he’d correct that as soon as possible, of course—to speak freely to him.
He was moving in perilous waters now, which the ancient Roman poet Ovid had described very well indeed. If treason prospers, none dare call it treason.
So, he did no more than give Ljungberg the same not-quite-a-bow, and then left the room. As he was passing through the door, he heard Gustav Adolf call out behind him.
“Weather not a wagon! Be drunken blue! Can empty trolls whisper crow?”
A protest? A question?
Probably both, Erik thought. What else would be coming from a king trapped in the chaos of his own mind, while those in power around him plotted treason?
For treason, it surely was. Hand was certain he knew what Oxenstierna and his cohorts were planning—and it was no accident that none of them would have dared propose those same plans to their sovereign while he still had his senses.
Six months. By then, one of them would be publicly given the label of traitor.
That might very well be Erik Haakansson Hand himself, of course, but he’d always enjoyed a challenge. No assignment his cousin had ever given him was as challenging as the one that he hadn’t because he could no longer speak.
Six months, then.
PART I
November 1635
The dark, broad seas
Chapter 1
Tetschen, near the border between Saxony and Bohemia
The view from Freiherr von Thun’s castle was magnificent. Set on a rocky knoll right above the quays of Tetschen, called Děčín by the Czech locals, the old castle not only dominated the river Elbe, but provided a fine view to the north. The building had been designed more as a customs and toll stop, rather than being a fortification built with combat in mind. Its old-fashioned curtain walls were ill-suited to receive artillery fire of any kind. Still, its few guns covered the riverfront from bank to bank and they could be expanded by leaving behind some of the Third Division’s artillery.
For the purpose Mike Stearns had in mind—possible purpose, he cautioned himself—Tetschen was better than any other place the Third Division had passed through since they entered the low range of mountains that separated the Bohemian and Saxon plains. Those mountains were called the Erzgebirge in German and Krušné hory in Czech.
Tetschen had three things to recommend it:
First, it was obviously the best bottleneck to thwart an army trying to enter Bohemia from the north or Saxony from the south.
The Erzgebirge were not tall mountains. The two highest peaks, Klínovec and Fichtelberg, were only four thousand feet high. The terrain resembled a scaled-down version of Mike’s familiar Appalachia.