1636_ The Saxon Uprising - Eric Flint [42]
The colonel opened the door, entered the emperor’s suite and passed through the outer rooms until he reached the bedroom. But Oxenstierna simply didn’t care, Hand had concluded. The man was so obsessed with restoring aristocratic dominance that he ignored the inevitable consequences if he succeeded.
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 Banér 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 Banér’s—the result was a foregone conclusion. Dresden was about to become a city under siege, and if Banér 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, Banér