Eric Flint: The Wallenstein Gambit

Watching Tanner, Ellie Anderson almost laughed. Something in the little twitches Len was making with his lips made it clear that he'd have been chewing on his huge mustache, if he still had one.

But, he didn't-and wouldn't, as long as Ellie had anything to say about it. However many of Len Tanner's quirks and foibles she'd grown accustomed to and decided she could live with, that damned walrus mustache was not one of them. She preferred her men clean-shaven and always had, a quirk of her own she suspected came from memories of a great bearded lout of a father. Dim memories. He'd been killed in a car wreck when she was only seven years old, caused by a drunk driver. Him. It was a one-car accident and the only other casualty had been the oak tree at the sharp bend in the road near their house.

Fortunately, the oak tree had survived. Ellie's memories of the oak tree were a lot more extensive, and a lot fonder, than those of her father. Years later, she'd even built a treefort in it. The neighbors had been a little scandalized. Not so much by the implied disrespect for her father-truth be told, nobody in that little eastern Kentucky town had had much use for Dick Anderson-but because it was yet another display of the tomboy habits that had already made her the despair of the town's gentility.

"Gentility" as they saw themselves, anyhow. Ellie had thought then-still did-that the term was ludicrous applied to seven matrons, not one of whom had more than a high school education and only two of whom had ever been anything more than housewives and professional busybodies.

She wondered, for a moment, what had happened to any or all of them. She hadn't been back to her hometown in ten years, since her mother died of cancer and her two brothers had made it clear they'd just as soon not be burdened with her company. Since the feeling was mutual, she'd simply come in for the funeral and left the same evening.

And what do you care, anyway? she asked herself sarcastically. They're a whole universe away, so it's a little late to be thinking about it now.

But she knew the answer. Hers had been a self-sufficient life, and she was not sorry for it. Still, it had often been a lonely one, too.

It wasn't now, because of Len Tanner. Ten times more aggravating, often enough, but… not lonely.

"Looks weird," he repeated.

"Oh, for God's sake, Len! Doesn't it strike you as a little eccentric to call a city 'weird' because it doesn't have statues from three and half centuries later, in another universe, that only you remember because-far as I know-you're the only resident of Grantville weird enough to go to Prague on vacation?"

The jibe, not to Ellie's surprise, simply made Tanner look smug.

"Not my fault the rest of 'em are a bunch of hicks. 'Vacation,' ha! For most of 'em, that meant fishing somewhere within fifty miles or-ooh, how daring-a trip to the big city called Pittsburgh." Again, his lips made that wish-there-was-a-mustache-here twitch. "Ha! I remember, back when Mike Stearns went to Los Angeles for three years. Everybody else in Grantville-'cept me-thought he'd gone to Mars or something. The only 'furrin country' most of those boys had ever been to was Vietnam. And that was hardly what you'd call a sight-seeing trip."

It was one of the many odd little things about Len Tanner, Ellie reflected. To her surprise, she'd discovered that he was probably the most widely traveled man she'd ever known. Tourism was one of Len's passions. His main passion, probably, leaving aside that grotesque mustache. For his entire adult life, every vacation he'd gotten-and he'd always been willing to work extra hours to pile up vacation time-Tanner had gone somewhere outside the old United States. Some of them pretty exotic places, like China and Ellie chuckled. One of Tanner's little brags was that he was the only American veteran in Grantville who'd made it all the way to Hanoi. True, he was a veteran of the Grenadan conquest, which the Vietnam vets in town didn't consider a "real war." Still, they didn't begrudge him the boast. They even chuckled at it, themselves, partly because most people who got to know him tended to like Len Tanner, and partly because…

He was a lonely man, and, what was worse, a man who was uncomfortable in his loneliness. So, for years, his friends and drinking buddies had indulged his little oddities.

Loneliness had been at the heart of his compulsive traveling, Ellie suspected. Tanner had adopted tourism as a hobby, the way other lonely people adopt other things. And if it was a more expensive hobby than most, it had at least made Tanner less parochial-minded than most people of Ellie's acquaintance. He actually had seen the "big wide world," even if his ingrained awkwardness with learning foreign languages always kept him at a certain distance from the people whose countries he'd visited.

Now, Tanner was staring up at the Hradcany. The hill upon which Prague Castle was perched overlooked the entire city. It wasn't much of a hill, really, but it hardly mattered. The Prazsky hrad-to use the Czech term for "Prague Castle"-seemed to dominate everything. It was an ancient edifice, begun in the ninth century a.d. by the rulers of the Slavic tribes who had migrated into the area a century or two earlier, and added to in bits and pieces as the centuries passed. But, always, whether the rulers of the area that eventually became known as Bohemia were Slavic princes or German Holy Roman Emperors, the seat of power was in Prague Castle.

"At least that's still pretty much the same," Tanner said. "Except for that stupid, boring facade they added in the eighteenth century. Good riddance-or riddance-never-come, I guess I should say." He exuded an air of satisfaction, studying the hill. "Even when I visited it, though, that gorgeous cathedral was the centerpiece. Now, even more so."

Ellie wouldn't have used the term "gorgeous" to describe St. Vitus Cathedral, herself. As far as she was concerned, the immense Gothic structure that loomed over the entire Hradcany belonged where everything Gothic belonged-in a romance novel, preferably featuring sexy vampires.

Womanfully, though, she restrained herself from calling it "ugly and grotesque." One of Tanner's many little quirks was that he invariably defended-ferociously-each and every architectural or artistic endeavor of the Roman Catholic Church. That was to make up, she'd once accused him, for the fact that he was never found in church more than once a year.

I ain't a "lapsed Catholic"! he'd responded hotly, at the time. Just, y'know, not around as much as maybe I oughta be.

Well, that's one way to put it, Ellie had retorted. Is that why Father Mazzare greets you with "howdy, stranger"?

Remembering that minor fight, she smiled a little. She and Tanner bickered a lot, but, truth be told, he really was a hard man to dislike. Once you got to know him, at least. Most of his vices and character flaws he wore on his sleeve. What lay underneath-assuming you could cut your way through that damn crust-was… really pretty nice and warm.

At least, Ellie Anderson thought so. More and more, in fact, as time went on.

As was her own nature, the surge of sentiment made her brusque.

"C'mon, Len! Let's quit gawking at the sights. We're supposed to be on a secret mission for Morris Roth, remember?"

Tanner gave her a sour look. Then, bestowed a look considerably more sour on the squad of men who were following them. Lounging along behind them, it might be better to say. The four mercenary soldiers in Pappenheim's pay somehow managed to make their way across a bridge as if they were loafing in an alehouse.

"Some 'secret' mission," he grumbled. "With those clowns in our wake. Why don't we just put on signs saying: Attention! Dangerous furriners!"

She took him by the arm and began leading him along the bridge, toward that part of Prague known as the Stare Mesto-which meant nothing fancier than "Old Town"-where the eastern end of the Charles Bridge abutted.