Eric Flint: Ring of Fire III

Gribbleflotz paled. The doubt on his face was erased by slowly growing fear.

George had managed to palm one of his little lights, and he suddenly thrust it at Gribbleflotz’s belly, where it began to flash most alarmingly. “Sahib! Dr. Thomas!” George screamed in panic. “The Mishawaka! There is no time! I must operate!”

Before anyone in the room could react, Tom shoved Gribbleflotz down into a chair, and ruthlessly yanked up or tore open his clothing, exposing a very pale belly. In an instant, George had plunged his fingers into that belly, as both the king and Gribbleflotz’s eyes bulged and the king’s guards backed away, making furtive signs against evil.

One of them fainted dead away as George pulled his hand back out, bloody and sticky, and opened them to reveal a mass of what looked like bloody hair and things best left unidentified. “You see!” George shouted. “You see! It was almost too late!”

Gribbleflotz fainted dead away.

Back in Grantville at last, Tom and George gave the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia their reports in person. Ed Piazza had come up from the new provincial capital at Bamberg to hear their report, on his way to Magdeburg. He’d pass the information along to Mike Stearns and Rebecca Abrabanel later, when the current political ruckus settled down. The dynastic situation in Bohemia was important but not exactly an urgent matter.

“Although I thought you said no psychic surgery,” Tom said. “I thought-”

“Look,” George growled. “I’m not proud of myself, all right? I hate those bastards. But we needed something dramatic, something that couldn’t be explained away as up-timer science, and we needed it right then. I had the feeling we might, so I helped myself to some stuff from the kitchen and a hairball one of the cats coughed up that morning. When I saw he wasn’t falling for your crystal waving, I played my ace. Do not ask me to do it again.”

“I won’t,” Tom replied. He didn’t add that he was making no promises about Ed Piazza or Mike Stearns.

“So, the treatments are going well, then?” Ed prodded.

Tom nodded. “Wallenstein’s actually making some improvement-he’s not going on any long hikes, but he’s able to do pretty much everything that a king needs to do on most days. Edith’s pleased. She asked me about the dyes I used in his medicines. I just told her they’re safe enough. I didn’t have the guts to tell her that Doc Nichols said congestive heart failure is going to kill him long before the dye will.”

Ed nodded with sympathy, then one corner of his mouth quirked up in a half smile. “And just what is this “special treatment” she keeps objecting to in her letters?

“Oh…” Tom blushed. “That…”

“Go on-” Piazza ordered.

“Well…you know that the ‘root chakra’ is supposed to be located in the…ah…”

“Goolies,” George supplied helpfully.

Ed nodded. “Right, I follow you. And since you’re balancing all the chakras you can’t leave that one out.”

“Right.” Tom blushed further. “And the, ah…goolies…can’t drink. So we can’t exactly give them medicine. Except topically. But all the medicines are colored.”

“And-”

“So the salve is colored. Blue, because the root energy is supposed to get boosted.” By now Tom felt like his face was on fire. “Because a lot of impotence is psychological and I figured-well-”

“Right. And?”

“Well, besides coloring the salve, I really needed something that was going to, you know, remind the king that the stuff is working. So the…ah…the dye is kind of permanent.”

Tom watched as Ed mentally went over everything he had just said, then stared at them both incredulously.

“You don’t mean-”

“He does mean,” George said, with a grin on his face. “Old Tom gave the king a case of blue balls.”

Eric Flint

Ring of Fire III

Birds of a Feather

Charles E. Gannon

Owen Roe O’Neill started at the burst of gunfire, not because-as a veteran of the Lowlands Campaigns-he was unaccustomed to the sounds of combat, but because such sounds were now out of place near Brussels in 1635. Old habit had him reaching toward his saber, but the pickets at the gate leading into the combined field camps of the tercios Tyrconnell and Preston seemed utterly unconcerned by the reports. As O’Neill let his hand slip away from the hilt, his executive officer, Felix O’Brian, jutted a chin forward: never at ease atop a horse, O’Brian didn’t dare take either of his hands from the reins to point. “So what would all that be, then?”

Ahead and to the right, a score of the men of tercio Tyrconnell were skulking about in the trenchworks surrounding the commander’s blockhouse. So far as Owen could make out, they seemed to be engaged in some perverse, savage game of hide-and-seek with an almost equal number of troopers from tercio Preston. As he approached, the soldiers of the Tyrconnell regiment repeatedly bobbed and weaved around a sequence of corners, usually in pairs. One stayed low, training a handgun or musketoon on the next bend in the trenchworks while the other dodged forward. If one of Preston’s men popped his head around that far corner, the man with the gun fired, immediately reaching back for another weapon. If the approach was unopposed, the advancing trooper finished his short charge by sliding up to the corner and-without even checking first-lobbing a grenade around it.

Of course, these “dummy” grenades simply made a kind of ragged belching sound as they emitted puffs of thin grey smoke: rather anticlimactic. But the training and the tactics were startlingly new. And quite insane.

“This is what comes of O’Donnell’s visit to the up-timers,” Owen grumbled to O’Brian. “Thank God he’s given over his command.”

“It’s only rumored that he’s resigned his command,” amended O’Brian carefully.

“Well, yes,” Owen consented. “Too much to hope for until we see the truth of it, eh?” But as soon as he’d uttered the saucy gibe, Owen regretted it: Hugh O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, was hardly a poor commander. Quite the contrary. And humble enough, for all his many admitted talents. Maybe that’s what made him so damned annoying-

“Seems we’ve picked up an escort,” observed O’Brian, glancing behind.

Sure enough, close to a dozen monks-Franciscans, judging from the hooded brown habits-had swung in behind their guards, who remained tightly clustered around the tercio banners of Tyrone and O’Neill. One of the monks was pushing a handcart through the May mud, prompting Owen to wonder: had someone died en camp? Or maybe the brown robes had come to seek used clothes for the poor? If the latter, then the monks were in for a rude surprise: the Irish tercios were no longer a good source of that kind of easy charity. They were in dire want of it themselves, these days.

As he approached the tercios’ staff tents, Owen noticed that, in addition to the pennants of the staff officers, a small banner of the earl of Tyrconnell’s own colors were flying. As he gave the day’s camp countersign to the interior perimeter guards, he pondered the fluttering outline of the O’Donnell coat of arms. Strange: did this mean that Hugh was actually here?

A lean fellow, saber at his side, came bolting down the horse-track from the much larger commander’s tent, perched atop a small rise. The approaching trooper was an ensign: probably Nugent, O’Neill conjectured, or maybe the younger of the Plunkett brothers. No matter, though: they were all cut from the same cloth and class. New families, all half-Sassenach; all lip-service Catholics. Some allies, those.

But Nugent or Plunkett or whoever it was had stopped, staring at the banners carried by O’Neill’s oncoming entourage. Then he turned about and sprinted back up toward the commander’s tent without even making a sign of greeting.