told. It almost made up for being left behind with just two companies of supply troops.
On the down side, he was the only significant officer left in Tetschen—and now, quite famous to boot. The campaign waged by the town’s matrons kicked into high gear. If there was a single eligible daughter or niece to be found anywhere in the region who was not introduced to the newly-promoted Major Bartley, she had to be deaf, dumb and blind.
Literally deaf, dumb and blind. Merely being hard of hearing, tongue-tied and myopic was no disqualification at all, from what David could tell.
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