The Saxon Uprising-ARC

Chapter 37


Osijek, the Balkans

“You look tired, Doctor,” said Janos Drugeth.

“I am in fact very tired.” Doctor Grassi wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I’ve been traveling almost constantly for weeks now.”

He tucked away the handkerchief and slumped back in his chair. The chair lent itself well to that, being one of the two very plush armchairs in the small suite of rooms Janos had rented in the town’s best tavern. Normally, he would have kept himself less conspicuous, but he hadn’t had a choice. Osijek had been packed with refugees when he arrived. Not poor refugees, who couldn’t have afforded to stay in taverns at all, but more prosperous people. By the time he arrived in the town, they’d already taken all of the cheaper housing.

He hadn’t expected that. Why would a war against Persians fought in Mesopotamia produce refugees in the Balkans?

Doctor Grassi had explained it to him.

“Murad’s campaign caught everyone by surprise, Baron.”

The doctor usually called Janos by that title. It was not technically correct, but Janos saw no reason to fuss over the matter. Rankings in the Austrian empire were complex, especially when it involved Hungarian nobility—and the Drugeth family was of French origin, to make things still more complicated. Janos was one of the handful of men in the Austrian empire who were so powerful and influential in actual fact that the formalities of titles didn’t overly concern them.

“Why?” he asked. “It’s been a foregone conclusion ever since the Persians seized Baghdad in 1624 that sooner or later the Ottomans would try to take it back. And Murad is a young and dynamic sultan.”

Grassi inclined his head. “Yes, that’s true. But copies of the American texts concerning the Ottoman-Safavid war have been circulated quite widely. Even the Persians have read them by now. And in that universe—”

Janos threw up his hands. “Is everyone a Calvinist idiot? For that matter, not even Calvinists think that because something happened in such-and-such a way in the American universe that it will happen the same way in ours, and at the same time. Unless they’re idiots to begin with.”

The doctor smiled. “Oh, yes—and if you ask anyone who has studied the up-time texts, be that man a Christian or a Moslem or a Jew, he will assure you he understands that events in that universe are not binding on our own. And then, nine times out of ten, he will act as if they are.”

Drugeth sighed. Grassi was quite right. He’d seen the same phenomenon himself—sometimes, emanating from his own emperor. Janos knew full well that a large part of the reason that Ferdinand discounted the Turk threat was because he knew that in another world, the Ottomans had not launched a major attack on Austria between Suleiman’s attempt in 1529 and Mehmed IV’s in 1683. And they’d been defeated on both occasions.

Unfortunately, while the history of that other world could certainly illuminate many things, it provided no guarantees of similar outcomes. The opposite was likely to happen, in fact, if a leader tried to guide himself too closely by that history.

“No one was surprised by the attack, as such,” Grassi continued. “But no one—possibly not even the Turks themselves, save only the sultan—expected such a powerful assault, and such a quick one.”

“They had the new weapons you expected, then?”

The doctor shook his head. “I wish I could claim such prescience, Baron. In fact, they were far better armed than I had expected. They had twice as many rifled muskets as I told you they would have last year. At least twice as many. And that was perhaps the least of it. They used massive rocket barrages also.”

“Rockets?” Drugeth’s eyebrows went up. Rockets had long been a weapon in the Ottoman arsenal, but the Turks hadn’t used them much in several decades now. The devices were too erratic and temperamental.

“Yes, rockets. They’ve improved them a great deal, it seems. I was not able to find out many details, unfortunately. I did learn that they are now enclosing them in metal cases and apparently spin them in some fashion. They are said to be more powerful and more accurate.”

Spinning rockets…

If Janos remembered correctly, the rockets the Jews used against Holk’s army when he tried to cross the great bridge in Prague had spun also. The Jews hadn’t designed the rockets themselves, though. They’d been provided to them by the notorious up-time revolutionist Sybolt.

Had the Turks somehow gotten their hands on such a rocket? Or the designs for it?

There was no way to know, at the moment. Whatever information existed on the rockets would have to be found in Bohemia—with which Austria was still officially at war, because Ferdinand was being pig-headed about that also. Not much chance Wallenstein would respond to any queries Janos sent him!

“What else?” he asked Grassi. It was obvious from the doctor’s expression that there was more bad news coming.

“They have new artillery also. Their own volley guns.”

“They’ve had volley guns since the last century.”

Grassi waved his hand. “Yes, I know. Those great cumbersome things with nine barrels. I saw one once, in Istanbul. But these new ones are said to be quite different. Much more like the ones the USE uses.”

Wonderful. Janos hadn’t faced those weapons in combat himself, but they’d become rather famous over the past year and half. The USE volley guns were credited in most accounts with having broken the French cavalry charge at Ahrensbök.

“And what else?”

“They do in fact have an air force, as I told you they might.”

“It needed only this,” Janos muttered. “And the nature of it is…?”

“Apparently they have no airplanes like those of the USE’s air force. What they have instead are lighter-than-air craft.”

“Ah, yes. ‘Zeppelins,’ I think they’re called.”

“Not quite, Baron. I investigated the matter and discovered that zeppelins are difficult to make. They’re the best such craft, but there are many obstacles to overcome. On the simplest side is what are called ‘blimps.’ Those have roughly the same elongated shape but the big envelope that lifts them is like that of a balloon—without any internal structure. Just a big bag, basically, filled either with hot air or some kind of light gas.”

“So these are blimps, you’re saying?”

The doctor held up his hand in a staying gesture. “Give me a moment, please. Somewhere in the middle is a hybrid design. They are only partly rigid, with a much simpler structure than that of a zeppelin properly so-named. They have what amounts to a sort of keel, but most of the bag is left to its own shape. That is apparently what the Ottomans have.”

He opened a pouch hanging from his shoulder and dug out some papers. “I have some diagrams here, which I got by bribing a Turk cavalryman. I wouldn’t count too much on its precision, because it’s just something the man drew from memory. Still, it gives you an idea of what they look like.”

Janos spent a couple of minutes studying the diagrams. There was no point spending more time than that, since it was obvious from the drawings themselves that they were only approximations based on memory.

“There is no sense of scale. How big are they?”

Grassi shrugged. “Hard to say. The cavalryman claimed they were enormous, but I imagine a device like that would inevitably seem enormous to someone who’d never seen one before. When I pressed him on the weapons they carried, though, he claimed they only occasionally dropped explosive devices and those were not large ones. Mostly, it seems, the Turk used the things as flying scouts.”

Which was quite bad enough. Janos had spent a lot of time over the past few years studying the campaigns and battles fought by the USE—and before it came into existence, by the little nation created by the up-timers in Thuringia, when they first arrived. The New United States, as they’d called it. One of the things that had quickly become obvious to him was how difficult it would be to fight an enemy who always knew where your own forces were because of their aircraft. Except in bad weather, at least. The Poles under Koniecpolski had been successful because they’d been able to take advantage of storms, when the airplanes were grounded.

Possessing aircraft of any type gave an army an enormous advantage, whether or not those aircraft could carry weapons. The real danger the things posed was their extraordinary expansion of an army’s reconnaissance capabilities.

He leaned back in his own chair. He was now feeling weary himself, in mind if not in body.

“I’m still puzzled, though.” He gestured with a thumb toward one of the windows. That window looked out over the town’s main thoroughfare. The window was closed because of the cold, but the sounds of the heavy traffic outside could easily be heard.

“What produced all these refugees?”

Grassi frowned. Then, rose and went to the window. After studying the scene below for a few seconds, he chuckled softly.

“Those aren’t precisely ‘refugees,’ Baron. They’re not people fleeing their homes ahead of an invading army. They’re mostly merchants racing ahead of an invading army to make sure their business concerns aren’t jeopardized when the army arrives. That’s why they’ve come so soon, even though they don’t expect anything to happen for some time yet. Arranging such business can be time-consuming.”

“Ah.” That made sense, now that it was explained. There was a fixed season for campaigning, if you were the Turk seeking to march a huge army through the Balkans. That sort of mobilization presupposed enormous numbers of livestock. You couldn’t start the march, therefore, until the spring grass was coming up or your horses and oxen would starve.

In the Balkans, once an army got past Belgrade, that meant waiting until early May. So the merchants crowded in the streets out there and packed into the taverns had three months or so to do their preparations.

“I take it they don’t have any doubts that the Ottomans plan to attack Vienna next year.”

Grassi chuckled again. “Not any, Baron. Neither do I. After such a great victory, the Turk is flushed with pride and ambition. That new young sultan intends to become as famous as Suleiman the Magnificent. More famous, even. And to do that…”

Suleiman had conquered most of Hungary, after the Battle of Mohacs in 1526. That, perhaps more than anything, is what had cemented his reputation as the greatest sultan in the Ottoman line. If Murad IV intended to match him, much less surpass him, he would have to take most of the Austrian empire. Conquer it, not simply defeat it and extract concessions.

Janos rose and came to stand by the window next to Grassi. In his case, not to study the crowd in the streets but the sky.

“The weather looks to be holding up,” he said. “I’ll need to leave early on the morrow.”

Grassi cleared his throat. “Yes, I thought you would. Back to Vienna, I assume?”

“Yes. I need to speak to the emperor as soon as possible.”

“Do you remember the occasion when you offered me sanctuary, should I ever need it?”

Drugeth nodded. “Yes. The time has come, I take it.”

“Indeed so. Schmid has disappeared entirely. I have no idea where he is. So has the Dutchman, Haga.”

Perhaps even more than Schmid, Cornelis Haga—or van Haag, as he preferred to style himself—was the epitome of an “old Ottoman hand” when it came to European ambassadors to the Sublime Porte. He’d been Holland’s ambassador in Istanbul for almost a quarter of a century. If he’d gone into hiding—or been taken in custody by the Turks—then things were getting chancy indeed.

“Is Murad on a rampage?”

Grassi made a face. “Hard to say, with that man. His rages are notorious, but I think at least some of them are feigned. Don’t make the mistake of under-estimating him, Baron. He’s probably the most capable sultan the Turks have had in a century. He’s certainly the most dangerous.”

The doctor turned away from the window. “Certainly too dangerous for me, at least for a while. I think my health would be greatly improved by a stay in Vienna.”

“Early tomorrow morning, then. This time of year, the weather can also be dangerous.”