the countryside over the past weeks. Dresden’s defenders could put three thousand able-bodied men on the walls, with at least that many available as a reserve in case Banér ordered a major frontal assault.
To make things still more difficult for Banér, he didn’t have enough soldiers to really seal off the city. Especially not in wintertime, when his men would shirk their responsibility to maintain patrols at night and loads could be moved into the city by sleigh without needing to use roads. Dresden’s population would be on short rations, but they wouldn’t be in any danger of starving for at least a year.
Probably longer, in fact. Gretchen Richter and the CoC had clamped down their control of Dresden. The fact that Richter used a velvet glove whenever she could didn’t change the fact that the grip itself was one of iron. Whatever anyone thought of the political program and policies of the CoC, one thing was indisputable: they greatly strengthened a city under siege, if they were in charge. Rations would be evenly and fairly apportioned; sanitation and medical measures would be rigorously applied and enforced; spies and traitors would be watched for vigilantly.
Those measures directly addressed the most common reasons a city fell—hunger, disease and treachery. The risks weren’t eliminated, but they were significantly reduced. At a guess, Eric thought any city run by Gretchen Richter could withstand a siege half again as long as it would otherwise. Maybe even twice as long. She was one of those rare people of great notoriety whose reputations weren’t overblown at all.
Odd, really, to think that she was the wife of his good friend Jeff Higgins.
“Stop daydreaming!” scolded Tata, giving his shoulder a little nudge. “Shouldn’t you be ordering the men to fire a cannon or something?”
Noelle Stull tried to ignore the sound of the cannonade. The house she’d rented was large, well-built, and located toward the center of the city. The odds that a cannon ball fired from one of the besiegers’ guns would strike her down at her writing desk were very slight. She’d faced much greater risks any number of times in the past. Although she’d been classified as a statistician, her real duties for the State of Thuringia-Franconia’s innocuously-named Department of Economic Resources had been those of an undercover operative. An investigator, officially, although given the murky realities of power in which she’d moved, she’d been as much a spy as a detective. At one time or another she’d been shot at, imprisoned, shackled, bombed—usually by someone seeking to do her personal harm.
Compared to that, the chance that a haphazardly aimed cannon ball fired from a great distance would come anywhere close to her was not even worth worrying about. Yet, somehow, it was the very random, impersonal vagaries involved that made her nervous.
She tried to concentrate on the letter she was writing to Janos Drugeth. That wasn’t helped any by her knowledge that sending the letter off would be almost as much a matter of chance and happenstance as the trajectory of the cannonballs coming over the walls. Normal postal service was erratic, to say the least.
Amazingly, though, it still existed. The couriers who worked for the Thurn and Taxis service were like rats and cockroaches. Impossible to eradicate and able to squeeze through the tiniest cracks.
But not even such couriers could deliver a letter to an unknown address. Noelle had no idea where Janos was at present, just as she was quite sure he had no idea she was in Dresden. She hadn’t gotten a letter from him in months. With another man, she might have worried that he’d lost interest and simply stopped writing her. But with Janos, somehow, she wasn’t. That spoke well for their possible future, of course.
If they had one. A muted crash had come from not too far away. A cannon ball had caved in a wall somewhere.
“See?” said Denise triumphantly. She pointed to the spot across the square where a Swedish cannonball had punched a large hole in the upper floor of a building. “Give it a few weeks and there’ll be a plenty big enough runway.”
Next to her, Minnie nodded. “Just have to shovel up the wreckage. Some of it’ll make good gravel, too.”
Eddie examined the scene of their optimism. The siege would have to last for several years before the Swedish army’s gunfire removed enough of the buildings fronting the square and lining the main boulevard leading from it to allow for an airplane runway that wasn’t