Ring of Fire III

Chapter 12

That very moment, as it happened, Rita was looking down on Captain von Haslang-or rather, at the small group of mounted officers at the front of the Bavarian column, among whom he was riding. At that height, even with up-turned faces not hidden by hats, it was impossible to distinguish individual persons. And it wouldn’t have mattered if she could. She’d never met the captain, or, indeed, any of the Bavarian officers.

She’d never met Duke Maximilian either, for that matter. But she could probably have recognized him at close range, because she’d seen a good likeness of him in a portrait.

Not that she’d want to be in close range of the man. By all accounts she’d ever heard, Bavaria’s ruler was as cold and deadly as a viper.

The Pelican had just returned from its first refueling stop at Regensburg. That had gone quite smoothly, much more so than Rita had expected and certainly more smoothly than she’d feared. Not only had there been no quarrels, but the city’s authorities had already had barrels of fuel brought out to the airfield. It seemed that the administrator of the Oberpfalz and the president of the SoTF had both sent radio messages to Regensburg instructing the city’s officials to do everything possible to aid Major Simpson and his one-craft air force.

Even that might not have done the trick, by itself. German city officials could set the world standard for narrow-minded parochialism, in Rita’s experience. But General Schmidt had also gotten on the radio and explained that:

A. If Regensburg did not provide Major Simpson with sufficient aid and assistance-in a timely and efficient manner-then Major Simpson would almost certainly run into severe difficulties and setbacks in his attempt to save his regiment from the depredations of the Bavarians. Who set the world standard for wickedness, in the general’s professional military opinion.

B. That being so, General Schmidt himself-now already marching his National Guard division to come to the assistance of Regensburg-would have no choice but to divert his troops in order to rescue Major Simpson. Who, by then, would be engaged in a desperate last stand against that selfsame Bavarian wickedness.

C. In which case, Duke Maximilian, a man whose wickedness was only matched by his cunning, would immediately launch the most furious assaults upon Regensburg, intending to seize the city while it remained lightly defended. In which project he would almost certainly succeed, since the relieving force under General Schmidt was unfortunately preoccupied rescuing Major Simpson from the predicament he had been placed in by the slothful and selfish behavior of the authorities of the very same city about to fall into the hands of Bavarian wickedness.

D. Which wickedness, he reminded the officials listening to his radio message, had been demonstrated not five years earlier in the unspeakably barbaric sack of Magdeburg, carried out largely by troops on Maximilian’s payroll.

So there they were, three full barrels of gasoline, ready to be loaded as soon as the Pelican was tethered. With six more barrels, they were assured, already on their way to the airfield.

Rita didn’t wait for those next barrels. Stefano told her that they now had enough fuel for the burners and engines to stay in operation another day. So she ordered him to fly back to the location of the Danube Regiment.

That location had moved a few miles downstream, but only a few. Being married to a soldier, Rita had been abstractly aware that large military forces other than cavalry units-and those also, more often than not-simply could not and did not move quickly across a countryside. But seeing the phenomenon for herself at first hand drove home that reality in a way that listening to Tom talking with fellow officers never had.

The problem began with the very term that people used to refer to the process. They would say that an army “marched.”

Marched. The word brought up images of parades, or newsreels Rita had seen of GIs during World War II passing through a bombed-out French or German town. No longer in formation, just walking. But unless they were moving carefully because there were enemy troops in the immediate vicinity, they were still making quite rapid progress. A person in good physical condition, like a young soldier, can easily walk two miles in an hour, even carrying a heavy pack, and maintain that rate for hours. They can move fifteen or twenty or even twenty-five miles in a day.

But that presupposed, first of all, twentieth-century macadamized roads. Wide roads, at that. Rita didn’t usually think of up-time two-lane country roads as being “wide,” but compared to the roads that existed in central Europe in 1636 they were practically boulevards. A standard up-time lane measured somewhere between ten and twelve feet, which made a two-lane road somewhere between twenty and twenty-four feet wide-not even counting whatever shoulders might exist. Half a dozen men could comfortably march abreast on that sort of road. Place them in rows spaced six feet apart-again, a very comfortable distance-and you could fit an entire regiment of a thousand men in a stretch of road that was less than a quarter of a mile long.

And those World War II-era newsreels usually only showed the infantrymen, or perhaps the armored fighting vehicles. They rarely showed everything else that was needed to keep an army marching, such as the long line of trucks carrying all the necessary supplies, equipment and ammunition. You saw the quickly-moving teeth of an army, not the massive tail that came behind it-a tail which was itself mechanized and therefore able to move pretty quickly.

None of that applied here. The road that Tom’s men and the refugees were traveling on that ran more-or-less alongside the north bank of the Danube was no more than ten feet wide and often narrower than that. It was not macadamized. In fact, it was rarely even a gravel road. Most of it was just a dirt road. Hardened by the passage of many feet and hooves and wagon wheels over the years, to be sure, but still just a dirt road.

And now, in mid-January, very often covered in thin ice and snow. The ice and snow didn’t last long, of course, with hundreds of people and livestock moving over it. No, it melted and started turning a dirt road into a mud road, at least in patches.

Things weren’t helped any, of course, by the fact that Tom had decided to put the refugees ahead of the army so his soldiers could provide them with some protection from the pursuing Bavarians. But, in truth, that probably wasn’t slowing them down all that much. There simply wasn’t any way to move some fifteen hundred people and close to two hundred horses, mules and oxen at anything faster than a crawl.

From high in the air, the army and its accompanying crowd of refugees made Rita think of a giant caterpillar inching its way down the Danube. Just as with a caterpillar, the center would expand as the soldiers in the rear pressed against the refugees ahead of them, forcing some of the refugees to move off the road. Then the officers would order a halt while the refugees were able to move a little farther, and the whole process repeated itself.

The situation would have been horrendous if the enemy cavalry had been doing what it should have been doing, moving ahead of the column and tearing at its flank. But the cavalry was still nowhere to be seen. Not from the ground, at least. From her vantage point two thousand feet in the air, Rita could see cavalry units moving about in the distance. But the closest cluster of Bavarian horsemen she could spot was at least half a mile from the river.

She wondered why the Bavarian commander, whoever he might be, was tolerating the state of affairs. If she’d been in his position, she’d have blown her stack by now.

Colonel von Schnetter blew his stack no fewer than four times before the sun finally set that day. He kept his mounted adjutants racing all over the landscape, bearing orders-first, firm; then, stern; then, peremptory; then, furious and profane-to the cavalry commander, demanding that he leave off his so-called “foraging” and attend to his proper duties.

Colonel Johann von Troiberz ignored each and every one of those orders. He didn’t refuse to obey, he simply made no response at all. He was able to do that because the orders given by General von Lintelo had not specifically placed von Troiberz under von Schnetter’s command. Most likely, the general had simply assumed that the cavalry commander would have the sense of a goose-or, more to the point, wasn’t desperately trying to cover up the fact that he’d sold off his cavalry unit’s supplies.

Von Troiberz had done that the day before the assault on Ingolstadt began. He knew that the assault was predicated on treachery and was primarily planned as an infantry affair. Thereafter, his cavalrymen would have access to the city’s resources and could surely obtain replacements for vanished supplies within a couple of days. So he calculated that he could safely sell off the supplies before the assault began. Who pays attention to such things as hay and oats?

He hadn’t considered the possibility that he might be ordered into an immediate cavalry action to pursue enemy soldiers who had managed to escape the city. That had been a tense moment, when he realized what might be in the offing at von Lintelo’s staff meeting after the successful seizure of Ingolstadt. But von Troiberz had acted quickly-he was still patting himself on the back for it-and immediately volunteered his own force for the mission. Secure in his knowledge that von Lintelo had an inexplicable dislike for him and always favored one of his pets. So he wouldn’t be given the mission anyway.

Then, to his horror, von Lintelo had set forth his intention to send all the cavalry units available on a raid on Amberg. Von Troiberz had simply not considered the fact-perhaps obvious, in retrospect-that the unsettled state of Bavaria’s line of succession would result in a cavalry expedition being sent north immediately. He was not, as an up-timer might put it, the sharpest pencil in Bavaria’s military box. He was a lot closer to the eraser end of that spectrum.

Thankfully-the only useful thing the annoying fellow had ever done, so far as von Troiberz was concerned-Colonel von Schnetter insisted that he needed cavalry assistance, after von Lintelo placed him in charge of pursuing the retreating enemy. The general had eventually agreed and given the assignment of “assisting” the infantry to von Troiberz.

Such a vague and uncertain word, “assisting.” Truly delightful, the way its borders and boundaries wandered about.

It was still a very awkward situation for von Troiberz to be placed in, of course, but far better-far, far better-than if he’d been assigned to participate in a raid on Amberg under the direct command of von Lintelo’s most favored officers. He’d have been in trouble almost immediately. As it was, von Troiberz figured he could fend off the pestiferous infantry colonel’s demands for at least two days. That would give his men enough time to plunder what they needed immediately from the countryside.

Those so-called “commands” were nothing of the sort, anyway. Given that von Troiberz and the infantry colonel were of equal rank and the fact that the general had never specified the command arrangement, von Schnetter’s “orders” were legally nothing more than requests.

Very rude requests, to boot. The man could be quite insufferable.

Night finally fell, on that first day. Tom thought it had probably been the longest day in his life. It had certainly been the most harrowing.

Two thousand feet above him, as she tried to get to sleep, his wife Rita thought exactly the same. And she was afraid she’d have the nightmares to prove it. Throughout the day, she’d been getting periodic flashbacks to the gunfights of the night just passed. The most upsetting was the look on the face of the soldier whom she’d shot dead outside the broken shop window.

He’d been young, barely more than a boy. At the very end, just before she pulled the trigger, he’d obviously understood that he was about to die.

That look…

It hadn’t been so much an expression of despair as one of sorrow, for the things he would now never see, never do, never know, never feel. Rita was quite certain that she would carry that memory with her for all her days on earth, however many they might prove to be. She could live to be a hundred, and would never forget the man whom she’d severed from whatever days might have been his.

Not far from her in the gondola, on the other hand, Stefano Franchetti and Mary Tanner Barancek were having a very pleasant evening. They were engaged in the sort of lively conversation that young people think is dazzling beyond belief-no greater conversation had been held anywhere on the planet since Socrates questioned his guests-because every sentence, every phrase, seemed loaded with suggestion and invitation.

The conversation was all the more dazzling for the fact that Mary’s grim aunt and her two fellow Furies were no longer on board the Pelican. They had been dropped off in Regensburg when the airship made its refueling stop earlier in the day. Rita had pointed out that there was really no purpose in the three auditors staying aboard, and the Pelican could use the extra lift provided by their departure to carry more fuel. Willa had been reluctant, but finally agreed when Maydene stated-quite bluntly-that there was not much opportunity for premarital coitus in the gondola of an active airship, especially with Rita not more than ten feet away from the youngsters in question. Estelle then weighed in by pointing out-just as bluntly-that even if such activity did take place, the girl was now of legal age and she’d hardly be the first country bumpkin to get screwed by a slick fellow of the Latin persuasion. She’d survive.

Bonnie Weaver and Heinz Bocler did not get to sleep until much later in the evening. The secretary stayed up for hours, checking with everyone in the refugee camp to make sure that they’d gotten something to eat and that no one, especially children and the elderly, was going to spend the night in freezing conditions. Those people who were short of blankets or other sorts of bedding got some loaned to them by people who were in better shape. On their own, they might or might not have made such offers, but the combination of Bocler’s quiet persistence and his ever-ready notebook turned the trick. No one doubted for a moment that if the province administrator’s personal secretary said he would keep accurate records of who had lent what to whom, it would surely be done and done properly.

In the event, Bonnie wound up keeping most of those records. She accompanied Heinz on his rounds and figured out early on that it made more sense for him to concentrate on wheedling people and for her to do his bookkeeping for him. It wasn’t that he was a better wheedler than she was. Actually, he was rather inept at it. But he was extraordinarily persistent, long past the point where Bonnie herself would have stalked off in disgust at someone’s recalcitrance and pigheaded selfishness.

So, she let him wheedle and cajole and harass and pester, while she wielded the magic pen. That worked because Heinz always introduced her as his secretary, which apparently satisfied the proprieties. It turned out that maintaining a clear and precise chain of bureaucracy was every bit as essential in Heinz’s line of work as maintaining a clear and precise chain of custody was for police work.

Who knew?