Krenz did wind up in a palace bed. But Tata insisted that he had to share it with Lieutenant Nagel.
Who, for his part-he was a very odd young man-kept making peculiar remarks about hidden mothers and sightless men and the iniquity of fate.
Eric had been very disgruntled. Mostly, Tata thought, because having to share a bed with Nagel created obvious difficulties for his campaign to seduce Tata.
Which was part of the reason she'd done it, of course. She hadn't made up her mind yet and didn't like to feel unduly pressured. Krenz could be relentless, in his insouciant sort of way.
In a different part of the city, Noelle Stull was also studying the sky, and looking almost as disgruntled as Gretchen.
"This sucks," she pronounced.
"What are you talking about?" countered Denise Beasley. "I think it's way cool. Dresden's where all the excitement is. Or is gonna be, anyway. You watch."
She and Minnie Hugelmair were perched on a divan in the main room of the house, playing cards. Noelle had no idea which particular game they were playing. She'd been only passingly familiar with up-time card games. These down-time games were incomprehensible. The two teenagers were using Italian cards that Eddie had gotten for Denise as a gift. The cards were round, not oblong. And instead of the familiar four suits of spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds, they had five suits: swords, wands, cups, coins and rings.
"How is it 'cool'?" Noelle demanded crossly. "I want to get back home."
"Why? We're moving to Prague soon anyway. And that so-called 'home' you rented in Magdeburg was a tiny little dump."
Minnie nodded, as she laid another card on the cushion between them that they were using as a table. "Yeah. Compared to that place, this is a palace."
It was a very nice house, in most respects. The departure of so many of the city's upper crust had left a lot of vacancies-and Noelle was operating with Francisco Nasi's money here in Dresden, not her own. But she'd expected to be here for only a short time, to oversee the preparation of the airfield while Eddie flew back to get Gretchen. She hadn't anticipated getting trapped in the city by a storm.
A very nice house in most respects, yes. But not all-and not the most critical.
"My apartment in Magdeburg may have been tiny-"
"Smelly, too," Denise chipped in.
"Cockroaches everywhere you looked," was Minnie's contribution.
"-but it had plumbing."
That shut them up. With few exceptions, even the wealthiest residences in Dresden still had traditional seventeenth-century toilet facilities. The use of such facilities started with the verb "squat" and went downhill from there.
In contrast, buildings in Magdeburg were less than five years old, with very few exceptions. The sack of the city by Tilly's army in 1631 had destroyed almost everything. And since most of the construction that came later had happened after American influence started to spread, and given the CoCs' well-nigh-fanatical observation of sanitary measures, even the most wretched living quarters in Magdeburg had access to running water.
And sewers.
"You think my apartment smelled bad, Minnie? How d'you like the aroma out in the streets here? Should I open the window to remind you?"
"Don't rub it in," said Denise. "Besides, I bet the rain's washed most of it away by now."
"Yeah, I bet it has-right into the river. Where we get our water from. Can we say 'typhus,' girls?"
"She's going to keep rubbing it in, isn't she?" said Minnie.
Denise whooped and swept up the pile of cards on the cushion. Apparently, she'd won something. A hand? A game? A trick? Who knew?
Noelle's grandmother had warned her that cards were an instrument of the devil. Here, she figured, was living proof.
Chapter 34
The Warta river, between Gorzow and Poznan
The reports had been accurate. Hidden within a small grove of trees, Lukasz Opalinski looked onto the Warta. Just as the Cossacks had said, there on the road running by the river was one of the huge American war machines. An "APC," it was called, whatever that meant. Lukasz had forgotten to ask Jozef Wojtowicz what the initials stood for.
The thing was enormous, even bigger than Lukasz remembered from the battle of Zwenkau. It looked every bit as terrifying, too.
Or would have, had there not been one critical difference. At Zwenkau, the APCs had been moving almost as fast as horses. Faster, on good terrain. This APC wasn't moving at all. The rain-soaked road had given way as it passed, and the machine was now stuck.
It must have slid down and sidewise, Lukasz figured. The rear axle and its grotesquely fat wheels-those were called "tires," if he was remembering Jozef's account correctly-were off the road entirely, hanging out over the river.
Hanging into the river now, almost. The swollen waters of the Warta were not more than a foot below the tires. What was worse, those same swollen and rushing waters would be undercutting the riverbank. Before too much longer-a day, perhaps; not more than two-the APC would fall completely into the river.
Judging from the expressions on the faces of the machine's crew, who were standing around staring at the APC, they'd come to the same conclusion. They had placed ropes to tether the machine, but eventually those ropes would give way.
Judging from the marks in the mud, they'd tried to use those same ropes to haul the APC to safety.
With no success, obviously. All they had at their disposal were a half dozen horses, from what Lukasz could see. That wasn't nearly enough in the way of draft power to move something as immensely heavy as the war machine. On a dry, flat road, perhaps. But not here, in this pouring rain, on this soil.
No, for this you needed oxen. Lots of oxen.
Happily, since Lukasz had learned from Koniecpolski to trust the reports of Cossack scouts, if not the Cossacks themselves, he had brought oxen with him. He'd expropriated them from a nearby landowner, who'd objected at first but then seen his Polish duty after Opalinski pointed out that with as many Cossacks as he had with him he could easily just rustle the cattle. A process which, sadly-Cossacks being Cossacks-could get out of hand and result in the unfortunate demise of the landowner and his family and retainers after the most hideous travails along with the crops destroyed, the livestock slaughtered, the house burnt to the ground, the flowers in the meadows trampled, the…
The oxen weren't with him any longer, of course. They were now at least five or six miles back, and moving slowly as oxen always did. But nobody was going to be moving quickly here, so much was obvious.
This was a backwater in the war, now. The armies had passed on to the south. Gustav Adolf must have left this APC behind, secure in the knowledge that it was too far behind the lines to be at risk. Even if a passing unit of Poles did stumble across it, what could they do besides slaughter the crew and the soldiers he'd left as guards?
There weren't many of those soldiers. Just a platoon, large enough to frighten away bandits.
There was something profoundly satisfying to Lukasz in the thought that Poland was going to capture its first APC with the descendants of draft animals used by the Babylonians.
Southwest of Poznan
He'd miscalculated, Koniecpolski realized. He'd simply underestimated how much the rain-soaked terrain would slow down his own troops. His army had a much larger percentage of cavalry than Gustav Adolf's. A large enough number, in fact, that he'd taken the risk of dividing his own forces in order to maneuver with cavalry and artillery alone-the latter being the Polish equivalent of flying artillery, except they were armed with small sakers instead of volley guns.
He'd left his infantry behind to hold Poznan while he circled around Gustav Adolf's troops in order to attack the northernmost column of Torstensson's USE forces. That was their First Division, under Knyphausen's command. Koniecpolski's Cossacks reported that Knyphausen's column had become dispersed by the difficulties of crossing swollen streams in the area they were passing through. He'd decided that if he moved immediately, taking cavalry and flying artillery alone, he could hammer them badly. By now, with casualties, desertion, illness and the inevitable straggling caused by a march under very difficult conditions, Koniecpolski didn't think Knyphausen had more than seven thousand effective troops. The number was probably closer to six thousand, in fact.