Ring of Fire III (25 page)

Bestam had given a lot of thought to getting outside the area that the rockets had swept. He had had bridges built to let the horses cross over the ditch and had had the one placed in the center weakened so that it collapsed as the second horse walked over it. This gave an excuse for the cavalry to spread out and present a wide front outside the ditch, while the excitement at the center explained why the troop didn’t close up again quickly. Still, it took a while for a thousand men to get into position. Arash didn’t mind.

But eventually they were all across the ditch and Bestam gave the prearranged signal. Arash didn’t like the man, but his men were good at what they did. As one they turned and began their charge. Arash simply tried to keep pace with Bestam.

* * *

Kemal had watched with growing concern as the horsemen had crossed the ditch unmolested. He had been told it had to be allowed by no less a person than Ahmed Pasha himself. He had also been told that he would have to be ready to break up any charge that might be made. When he had pointed out that once they were outside the ditch, they would be inside the range at which the rockets were intended to work, he had simply been told to find a way.

He had quickly concluded that increasing the angle at which the rockets were launched was probably a bad idea. The horses would be moving fast, and he wasn’t sure just when he would be ordered to send them at their target. Calculating the right angle as cavalry closed was not a task he wanted to try. Instead he had lowered the angle. The rockets would be sent nearly horizontally at the Persians if they decided to attack. He had picked a place a little over halfway between his position and the ditch as an aiming point because it looked like a place where any attackers would have to bunch up.

He had also personally picked out the rockets they would use, avoiding any that seemed in any way imperfect. There had been some unpleasant surprises, including a rocket that had exploded before it had left the rack, killing the luckless Mustafa. Oddly, the explosion seemed to have fixed the launch rack—the adjusting crank no longer jammed.

He had also trimmed each of the fuses himself. The rockets would launch almost in the instant the fuses were lit—the men lighting them would have just enough time to leap away.

Then he turned away from the Persians and looked toward Ahmed Pasha. The commander had positioned himself a bit farther back and higher up, with two of the men with the new long barreled “rifles” and two men with traditional bows. As Kemal watched, he pointed at something back where the Persians were. The four men all shifted, clearly concentrating on what the Pasha had pointed to, but Kemal kept his attention on Küçük Ahmed. He didn’t want to chance even a second’s delay once the Pasha gave the order to launch.

Suddenly and within a heartbeat of one another the riflemen fired and the bowmen loosed their arrows. At the same moment the Pasha looked at Kemal and made a slashing gesture. Kemal didn’t wait for the formal signal, but turned back to his launchers, and for a moment his voice froze in his throat. The Persian cavalry was closing the distance incredibly quickly. “Light them, light them,” he screamed, running toward his launchers as if he could somehow make the rockets launch sooner by his presence.

* * *

Arash found himself on the ground looking up at the clouds. He had had the wind knocked out of him when he was shot off his horse, but somehow it no longer seemed important to try to breathe. He knew he had done everything he could. If God willed, it would be enough to save his family.

He didn’t hear the sound of cloth tearing.

* * *

Ahmed Pasha looked out over the ground where the bodies of the Persian cavalry lay. It had been an hour since a single volley of rockets had broken their charge. Even trained warhorses didn’t like the noisy flame-spitting rockets, whether or not they were hit by them. The cavalrymen trying to control their mounts had been defenseless against his cannon, his volley guns, and even his men with their old matchlocks. He had not lost a single man.

The stories that would reach the redheads about the fall of Revan would terrify them. Terrifying the sultan’s enemies was a good thing and Ahmed felt no regrets about doing it. If this new way of making war did not terrify the Persians into making peace, then Ahmed would urge the sultan to let him pursue them with the new weapons until they were utterly annihilated. Not because he hated the Persians. He didn’t. If they made peace, so much the better. But the day was coming when the Ottomans would be facing men who also fought war in this new way, and when that day came they could not afford to still be fighting the Persians. He didn’t hate those men either. The men who claimed to be from the future. The men from whom the knowledge of the new gun carriages and the new rockets and the new design of volley gun and, most importantly, the best ways to use them had come. He didn’t hate them, but he knew he would have to fight them. And they would be harder to terrify.

But now he had to deal with the Persians in the city. They had signaled that they wanted a truce. He would act angry, but in the end let them have the same terms. This attack would give him a reason for having them come out in small, easily controlled groups. His past experience told him that many of them would offer to forgo their false beliefs if it would save them from slavery. That would be good—even if they secretly continued in their errors, their allegiance would not be tested in the fight to come—these men from the future were all true infidels. And some of those who were adamant in their allegiance—perhaps a hundred—could be sent back to their shah with the body of Mir Arash Khan. A gesture of respect for a brave enemy, he would call it. That might make peace easier. And perhaps it might save some innocents in Esfahan.

* * *

Zaynab held her daughter and watched her son, who sat between her and the door. They waited in silence and near darkness. They had exhausted all possible diversions in the week that had passed since they had been confined after word had arrived of the fall of Iravan.

Zaynab was torn. She loved her husband. She had wanted Arash to return. But if he lived, and perhaps even if he did not, she knew she and her children would pay the price for his failure to prevent the loss of that city.

Beyond the fact that the city had fallen, she knew nothing. The servants who brought the plain food every day didn’t speak, and the guards that accompanied them also ignored her questions. All she had been told was that she and her children would be confined until the situation was clarified.

The sound of the bolt being drawn seemed to echo. It was too early for the meal. Rustem stood up, still facing the door. His stance said he intended to defend his mother and sister as well as a nine-year-old boy could do.

The door opened. Light spilled in, blinding her so that she could not make out the face of the man who stood in the doorway.

“Your husband has fallen in the service of the shah. Go home and mourn him.”

Frying Pan

Anette Pedersen

Part 1

Rostock, the harbor, 31 October 1634

“This is a cold evening, young man. Would you care to keep me company for a drink?”

Lasse had noticed the thin man eyeing him for a while, and wasn’t surprised when he finally spoke. Instead Lasse turned with his sweetest smile and the twist displaying his elegant legs that he learned during the year he’d spend as Otto von Quadt’s plaything.

“Gladly. I seem to have missed my ship.” Lasse tried to hide his lowborn Swedish accent, and imitate Otto’s upper-class German, but knew it wouldn’t quite work.

“Ah, are you a Dane?” The thin man opened the door to the half-timbered tavern, and stood aside to let Lasse enter first. Lasse considered accepting the man’s suggestion—anything to throw Otto off his trail would be fine—but decided to stick a bit closer to the truth.

“Only sort of. I’m from Norway.” Lasse wasn’t, but his grandmother had been, and had left just ahead of a witch-trial. It was the silver that the old harridan had earned from her herbal remedies and abortifacients that had enabled Lasse to buy an apprenticeship with the cook at the Oxenstierna manor house. The cooking she taught him had let him rise to junior cook in the household of Princess Kristina. But it was the poisons she taught him that let him escape from Otto’s house here in Mecklenburg.

Lasse sat down on the bench by the rough trestle table near the fireplace and wondered how to suggest something to eat as well. The landlord, happily, made that suggestion when the thin man ordered a bottle of Rhenish wine. Lasse knew how dangerous it could be to display any kind of weakness, in case the thin man turned out to have more in common with Otto than a taste for pretty young men. The last of the money he had stolen from the corpse of Otto’s comrade had run out yesterday, so he accepted an offer of a few slices of meat pie.

“My name is Friedrich Messer, silversmith,” said the thin man pouring the sweet, white wine into the clay mugs, “I’ve just arrived from Copenhagen and must continue on to Magdeburg tomorrow. Prince Ulrik of Denmark commissioned a set of silver goblets from me as a betrothal present for Princess Kristina. They are of course being guarded by my man in my room, so I find myself eating quite alone tonight. A state that I really dislike.” He looked at Lasse with what was probably supposed to be a knowing smile, but which actually made him look like a leering skull.

The mere mention of the princess made Lasse want to scream in pain and anger, but Otto had trained him well, so he made sure to smile back, while looking Herr Messer deep in the eyes. Two years ago Lasse had been so proud of his promotion into the royal Swedish household. It had been no secret among the servants that the queen didn’t like her daughter. She had even tried to do her harm before the king had given the princess her own household and ordered the queen to stay away. Lasse still had no idea whether accusing him of trying to poison the princess had been the queen’s attempt to get back into the king’s good graces, or Otto’s way to get Lasse into his power. What Otto had said during the months he had sent Lasse through Hell could certainly not be relied upon. Or perhaps it had been yet another skirmish in the ongoing power struggle between the queen and Axel Oxenstierna, who had recommended Lasse for the position as the princess’s junior cook. All Lasse really knew was that within minutes of the queen shouting poison, he had found himself being beaten senseless and thrown into a stinking hole of a cell beneath the castle. His attempts to protest that he really hadn’t noticed the hairline crack in the pewter had been ignored, and once he regained consciousness he had quickly become so terrified by the jailor’s talk of torture and execution for treason that he had barely felt the pain and humiliation of having the man rape him. This was repeated several times during the next days, alternating with new beating and threats of what the jailor would do to Lasse if he told of the rape during the process—even though no one would, of course, take the word of a traitorous servant over that of a respectable, church-going married man.

“Do try the egg pie as well.” Herr Messer pushed the brass dish towards Lasse. “It really is outrageous the prices farmers demand for food these days, but the political situation does open many new opportunities for a master craftsman.”

Lasse nodded in agreement, but in his mind he was seeing Otto coming to take him away from the cell in Stockholm. Otto had looked like the Savior himself in the flickering torch-light, with his handsome face and silver-embroidered white silk, taking Lasse away from the cell, promising that his hardships were over, and that Otto would keep him safe in his castle in Mecklenburg. Otto was the son of one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting from her youth in Germany. Immediately on his arrival in Stockholm, his beauty, wit and charm had made him the queen’s favorite. He had used his position quite ruthlessly to amass wealth and remove rivals, but that was business as usual for a courtier. Lasse had known nothing about the games Otto played for his pleasure.

Looking back Lasse could see that Otto had deliberately set out to break his will by gaining his love and trust, and then breaking it, over and over again, in a devil’s circle of betrayal and hope, abuse and excuse. And something had broken. It just hadn’t been Lasse’s will. Lasse wasn’t sure exactly what it was that was gone, but three weeks ago when he had stood looking at what was now the corpse of the most recent “friend” Otto had told him to entertain, he finally realized that the bright, young Swedish boy who had made such beautiful pies and sauces was now gone forever. He still planned to go back to Sweden, but his vague idea of seeking out Oxenstierna, exposing Otto’s schemes and crimes, and getting his old job back, could never work. Even if Oxenstierna believed him, he would be like a gutter rat set in the place of one of those caged songbirds in the queen’s garden.

On the other hand, there was now very little—if anything—Lasse would stop at doing to remain out of Otto’s power. Dragging his mind back to the present where Herr Messer droned on about his royal connections, how important he was, and how Lasse should really come to his room to see the goblets, Lasse laid his plans.

* * *

Shit! The bastard was a beater! Lasse twisted to break the silver chains binding him, as the whip hit him again. He hadn’t liked the chains, but Herr Messer’s explanation about liking to see a beautiful body wrapped in the work of his hands had seemed innocent enough, and it wasn’t until Herr Messer had suddenly tied a gag over his mouth that Lasse had realized his danger. Ignoring the pain from the whip, Lasse concentrated on twisting a kink in the chain. He had been tied before, both for real and with the purpose of letting him think he could escape, and knew that the chain would break easier at a kink than if he just pulled.

At last the chain broke, and when the whip came down again Lasse rolled off the bed and got hold of his knife from his doublet on the chair. Herr Messer stood frozen for a moment before shouting and running for the door. Before he could reach it, Lasse grabbed the fleeing man and with a hand over his mouth, cut his throat with a single stroke. Only when the blood stopped spouting did Lasse let go of the corpse. He held the knife ready to strike again, when the door in front of him began to open. The intruder was a short, rather skinny, young woman that he vaguely remembered seeing in the taproom. Seeing that she was also holding a knife in her hand made him pause.