Ring of Fire III

Chapter 15

Tom decided to launch the bombing raid just before sundown. By then, the cavalrymen staying in the targeted village would be settling in for the night. Most of them, anyway. But there would still be enough light for the airship’s bombardiers to see the targets easily. Even with a clear sky and moonlight, he didn’t think they could do so very well after nightfall.

So, he stopped the march an hour earlier in the day than he’d stopped the previous two days, and spent the extra time setting up fieldworks to guard the camp. He wasn’t sure how the Bavarians would react to the bombing. He didn’t think they’d retaliate with an attack, because the infantry were the only ones really in position to launch such an attack and they weren’t going to be the target of the bombing.

But you never knew. Relying too much on your own assessment of an enemy’s intentions was a military error that probably dated back to Cro-Magnon times. Naw, those guys won’t do nothing tonight so we may as well get some sleep. And so perishes another little band of hunter-gatherers…

He didn’t use all of his men for that purpose, though. Earlier in the day, once Bonnie explained her plans to him over the radio, he sent Bruno von Eichelberg and his mercenary company on a forced march down the river. Their assignment was to meet up with the Pelican and the Albatross at the landing area the airship crews had selected and provide them with a guard unit. Tom didn’t know yet if he would want to carry out a second bombing run, but he might. So he’d approved Bonnie’s plan to set up an impromptu combination airfield and bomb-making facility.

And, again, you never knew. There was certainly no way that the Bavarian infantry could get down there tonight or tomorrow morning. And he didn’t think it was likely at all that a cavalry unit would either. There had always been at least one airship in the sky above them since early morning. They could keep an eye out for any enemy troop movements within miles, and they’d reported no cavalry any closer than half a mile upstream. But you couldn’t rule out the possibility that some stray cavalry had gone unspotted and were now well down the river. If even a small number of cavalrymen came across the airships on the ground and unprotected, there’d be an outright slaughter.

And now, there was nothing left to do but wait.

“What do you think, Heinrich?” asked Colonel von Schnetter. He passed the telescope he’d been using to Captain von Haslang. The two of them were sitting on their horses atop a small rise near the river bank, studying the fieldworks the Danube Regiment was putting up a half mile or so downstream. From here, they had a good view.

“Can you think of any reason they made camp earlier today, and are taking the time to create fieldworks?”

Von Haslang didn’t reply for a few seconds, while he studied the enemy’s activity through the glass. Then, passing it back to his commander, he got a slight smile on his face. He and von Schnetter had known each other for years and this was not the first time they’d worked together. The colonel’s use of his given name was a subtle indicator that his friend wanted a frank and private discussion.

“Not really, Caspar. It’s not as if you’ve given them any reason to expect an assault.”

Von Schnetter took the eyeglass and slid it back into the case he kept attached to his saddle. He had the same slight smile also.

“No, I haven’t. And as I’m sure you’re figured out by now, I have no intention of attacking them. That American major-and it’s him, for a certainty; did you see the size of the bastard? — has shown himself to be altogether too competent for my taste. Any attack we launched with no cavalry to work at their flanks would be a bloodbath. We’d probably win, in the end, because we outnumber them three-to-one. But that’s more of a butcher’s bill than I’m willing to pay with good troops who’ve been left in the lurch by swine and…”

He let the end of the sentence trail off. The “swine,” of course, referred to von Troiberz. Von Haslang was quite sure that if his colonel had completed the thought, the “and” would have been followed by a very unfavorable reference to General von Lintelo.

He had gotten a good look at the commander of the enemy force. Just now, and also the day before when he and von Schnetter had studied their opponent making camp from another rise in the landscape. The colonel’s eyepiece was superb. He’d only been able to afford it because he came from a wealthy family.

It was conceivable, of course, that the Danube Regiment had two officers as huge as the one they’d been looking at. But it was not likely. The Simpson fellow was rather famous, all across the Germanies. So was his admiral father, but in the case of the son the fame came entirely from his physique, not his accomplishments. That would begin to change, of course, as a result of his exploits over the past few days.

It was said that the young American major had engaged in an up-time sport that required immense men. “Feetball,” it was called, if von Haslang remembered right. He was not clear with regard to the details of the game. His image of it, had he laid it before an up-timer, would have resulted in smiles, perhaps even laughter. Von Haslang’s conception of “feetball” bore a much closer resemblance to mass sumo wrestling than the actual American sport.

But the details were irrelevant. Von Haslang would hate to confront that man in a physical clash, armed with anything but a gun. And now that he’d experienced three days of maneuvering against him, he’d want to fire the gun at a distance.

He and von Schnetter went back to looking at the distant enemy fieldworks.

“Make camp for the night, sir?” von Haslang asked, figuring that the moment for informality had passed.

“Yes, please see to it, Captain. We’ll not be launching any attacks.”

Colonel Johann von Troiberz was planning no attacks of his own that night, either. Not even an attack on the virtue of the woman sharing his bed, since that virtue had fallen many years earlier. Not to him, but to a different officer.

He thought he was the second Bavarian officer for whom she’d become a concubine. In actual fact, he was the fifth, but the woman in question had never seen any need to enlighten the colonel on the matter. Men were always bothered by such details.

After von Troiberz fell asleep, Ursula Gerisch stared at the ceiling. It was the sort of ceiling that she’d become familiar with, since she’d cast her lot with von Troiberz.

The ceiling belonged to one of the rooms in the sort of inn you ran across in large German villages. “Large,” in this instance, was a term partly defined by the mere fact that the village had an inn, that was more than just a front room in a villager’s house that provided drink and food purely for the locals.

Needless to say, the room was neither large nor well-furnished. It was certainly not luxurious. There was a bed-not large; not comfortable-and a nightstand, one chair, and a chamber pot.

The chamber pot had not been washed lately. So much was obvious.

She tried to remember how she’d wound up in this state of affairs. She was still well short of thirty years old. She couldn’t even claim the excuse of desperately poor origins. Her father had been a tanner in a small town in Swabia-a trade that paid rather well, although you had to put up with the terrible stench.

It had begun with excitement, she recalled. Soldiers passing through town, a handsome young lieutenant. Ursula herself, bored. And she truly hated the stink of the tannery.

To this day, she liked to imagine that first liaison would have worked out well in the end. But the unfortunate young lieutenant had been serving under Ernst von Mansfeld at the disastrous battle of the Dessau Bridge, where the Protestants were crushed by Wallenstein. He’d vanished in the course of that battle. Presumably killed, but you never really knew. He might have just run off and decided to keep running. Whatever had happened, she’d never seen him again.

The second officer had not been exciting at all. A fat colonel in late middle-age, whose wife had died and whose career had stalled out. But he’d been a decent enough man, and she’d been desperate. Then, a year later, the colonel’s heart had failed. He’d left no provision for her in his will, despite his promises. Everything had gone to his own children.

Back on the streets again. She’d worked those just long enough to find another officer. Another lieutenant. Also, alas, another unfortunate. In this case, not a casualty of bullet and sword but a casualty of the still deadlier combination of getting stinking drunk and climbing onto a horse.

Then, finally, a stroke of luck. Not much, but some. A captain this time, in his mid-thirties and in good enough health that she could expect some considerable years with him. As a concubine, to be sure, not a wife. The hopes Ursula had once had of eventually getting married and raising a family had died of neglect and malnutrition, somewhere along the way. But the captain was faithful enough that she didn’t really fear he’d desert her for another woman or give her some sort of horrid disease.

He was something of a mean bastard, though, with a hot temper. He beat her from time to time. Life was far from perfect.

Worse than the beatings was the temper itself. The day came when he mistook the ease of beating a concubine with beating another officer. Unlike the concubine, the officer had a sword-and, as it turned out, was considerably more proficient in its use than the man who’d struck him.

They buried the captain’s arm in the same coffin that held the rest of his body. The cut had taken it right off, after which he’d bled to death.

Luckily for Ursula-well, it had seemed lucky at the time-Colonel von Troiberz had attended the funeral and took it upon himself to comfort the not-exactly-a-widow after the ceremony concluded.

That had been three years ago. Her life had been a slow but steady slide downhill ever since.

The colonel did not beat her. That was his one virtue. So far as Ursula could determine, his only virtue.

Otherwise, von Troiberz was an unpleasant man in every particular. He had no sense of humor, no capacity for joy. He smiled maybe once a week. Laughed, perhaps once a month.

He had no capacity for any sort of pleasure, for that matter, except ones deriving from spite and greed.

Petty spite and petty greed. The man lacked style and verve even in his vices and sins.

Mostly, von Troiberz was a sullen man, riddled with resentments and envies. He drank constantly. And then spent his few sober hours coming up with schemes that might save him from the consequences of other schemes he’d come up with while drunk. She knew perfectly well the reason he’d spent the last three days dragging her around this miserable countryside in January was because he was desperately trying to cover up one of his thefts.

The drinking also made him incapable in bed but that was not a problem, so far as Ursula was concerned. On the now-rare occasions when the colonel did choose to engage in sexual activity, the result was brief and would have left her completely unsatisfied except that she began the coupling with no such expectations anyway. Somewhere along the way, her hopes that sex would at least be enjoyable had also died a natural death. The causes, again, being neglect and malnutrition.

The biggest problem was that Colonel von Troiberz stank, most of the time-and Ursula had begun this life in the first place because she hated bad smells.

He bathed once a year, at most, not counting the occasions he fell into a creek or stumbled into a pond while inebriated. But that didn’t help because such bodies of water were usually smelly in their own right, not to mention the result of the time he’d fallen into a latrine.

He was flatulent. He had bad breath.

No, terrible breath. Even the food he preferred was nasty-smelling. His favorite meat was pickled pork, his favorite vegetables were onions, and his favorite herb was garlic.

His favorite drink was cheap korn made from rye taken with cheap beer. When he could afford it, he drank cheap schnapps made from apples. When he was short of money, he settled for cheap wine. All of it smelled bad to Ursula. Being fair to the colonel, all liquor smelled bad to her, even the expensive kind. She herself did not drink liquor except for an occasional glass of wine on celebratory occasions, and then only because it was expected of her.

He had no favorite flower. What was far worse was that he disliked flowers altogether-he claimed they made him sneeze and made him itch-and so he forbade her from putting any in their rooms. Even though she loved flowers and had ever since she was a child.

Lying in the bed staring at the ceiling, Ursula started to weep. No loud sobbing-the last thing she wanted to do was wake up von Troiberz-just tears, oozing slowly from her eyes. Eventually she would wipe them off, but not for a while. She was too tired. She was always too tired now. She could barely summon the energy to cook and do the laundry.

The colonel didn’t want much of the first, since he usually ate in taverns, and he wanted almost none of the other. His clothing was as filthy and bad-smelling as he was, and there wasn’t much point in her washing them because within a day he’d have them covered again with spilled liquor and food; within three days, vomit; and within a week, the condition of his breeches and underclothes didn’t bear thinking about.

Every day seemed to pass in gray colors. She was losing her hopes for simple contentment as surely as she’d lost her hopes for marriage, for children, for joy, for pleasure. She’d begun to think about suicide, from time to time. So far the residue of her Catholic upbringing kept her shying away from the idea. But she thought that eventually her faith would die also. She felt like a walking corpse, stumbling toward a grave that she simply hadn’t seen yet.

But she would see it some day, she knew. Probably before she saw her thirtieth birthday.

She knew her birthday, at least. Many people didn’t. February 11th, less than a month from now.

She wouldn’t be able to celebrate it, though. Von Troiberz disliked birthdays also, even his own. She wasn’t sure why. She thought it was probably because the colonel had lost whatever capacity he’d ever had to enjoy a day just because it was a day to enjoy. And so he found it irritating to have others expecting him to celebrate. So might a man who has lost all sense of taste react when people urge him to eat a cake.

If she wasn’t too tired, maybe she’d be able to have her own private little celebration. Just by herself. There still wouldn’t be any flowers she could pick yet, though. Even the crocus wouldn’t come up until March.

She’d often wished her birthday had been in April or May. Maybe then her life would have turned out differently. She liked to think so, anyway. There was still some small, not-quite-dead-and-buried part of Ursula Gerisch’s soul that thought most of her life’s trajectory had been the result of misfortune and happenstance. Not all, no; she accepted that she bore some of the guilt. But on her best days she thought-well, mostly she just wondered-about someday being able to find a new course for herself.

A peculiar sound coming from somewhere outside finally penetrated her bleak thoughts. Ursula realized that she’d been hearing it for some time but hadn’t paid attention. It had gotten quite loud, by now.

She found a clean portion of the bedding and wiped the tears from her face. Then she rose from the bed and went to the window.

The sight beyond, in the glow of sunset-even in January, it seemed warm-was the most wonderful she could remember seeing in years. The one thing in the past three days that had brought some happiness to her was seeing those incredible flying machines in the sky.

They were so big! Yet not frightening. Not to her, at least. Many of the soldiers were scared by them, but she wasn’t. Where they saw monsters in the air, she saw gigantic puppies.

She liked puppies. She liked dogs, too. They smelled nice to her, even if some people didn’t think so.

She’d have kept a dog except the colonel didn’t like dogs either.

And now there were three of them! All at once, in a line, one behind the other. She’d only seen one at a time, up until now.

They were coming in her direction, too-right at her, it seemed. And because they were approaching from the west, the setting sun lit up their huge, swollen bellies. She could easily see the boats that hung below them, with their noisy machines that apparently made them fly. She could even see people clearly, looking over the side of the boats.

They were quite low, she suddenly realized, much lower than she’d ever seen one of them come down before. They couldn’t be more than six or seven hundred feet high, maybe even less.

Suddenly, for the first time in years, Ursula was filled with excitement. She had to see them better! From outside, not through a small grimy window. It was a cheap window, too, which made everything look distorted.

She glanced at the colonel. Von Troiberz was sprawled on the bed, snoring heavily. He’d come to bed drunk, as he usually did. Nothing would wake him up except the clap of doom.

Splendid. If he were awake, he’d undoubtedly forbid her to go outside. Moving quickly, Ursula put on her clothes and shoes, wrapped a cloak around her, and left the room.

In less than a minute she was outside. But the tavern door opened into a small courtyard surrounded by buildings. She couldn’t see any of the ships from here. So, she hurried through the gate and out onto the village’s main street.

But the street was narrow and the buildings alongside it just as tall. Frustrated, she looked around and saw a meadow in the distance, perhaps twenty yards beyond the last building. She could get there in a couple of minutes, if she hurried. The soil would probably be icy, but she had good shoes. It was the one piece of apparel she owned that the colonel had been willing to spend some money on.

She got there in a minute and half. Looking up, she saw that the first ship-they were huge, now, huge — had come right overhead.

This was so marvelous! For the first time since childhood, she started jumping up and down with glee, clapping her hands.

Then, frowned. Not worried yet, just puzzled. Why were they dropping things from the boats? They looked like jugs or some sort of pottery.

Understanding came, and she made a small moue of disgust. Thank God she’d gotten out of the village! It was going to stink in a few seconds.

She was a little sad, though. A little upset, too. She wouldn’t have thought that people who could do such a wondrous thing as fly through the air would be so petty and spiteful that they’d drop their chamberpots on their enemies.

Ursula couldn’t help but giggle, though-and then realized that might be the first time she’d done that in years, too.

Colonel Johann von Troiberz was in for a rude awakening. He was about to get shat upon by leviathans.