Liar. We were Catholics ourselves. Our whole town was Catholic.

The priest was advocating the true faith.

We were kneeling in prayer when your "Catholic" mercenaries came into my father's shop.

Denouncing the Protestants.

The Protestants murdered my grandfather, and took away my mother. But it was your good Catholic Ludwig who drove a sword into my father's belly when he held up the rosary.

Denouncing sin, now.

And what was it, priest, when your soldiers sired a bastard on my sister? Was it hers, tied hand and foot to my father's bed?

The rest, he managed not to hear. Hans' thoughts moved far away. Bleak and hopeless. Utterly despairing thoughts, as only those of an eighteen-year-old young man can be.

Hans knew the truth. Satan's rebellion, stymied for so long, had finally triumphed. It was no longer God who sat on the heavenly throne. The Beast had replaced Him. It was the serpent's minions, not the Lord's, who wore the vestments of the clergy. All clergy, of all creeds. The creeds themselves were meaningless. Satan's joke, nothing more. The Lord of Flies was amusing himself, tormenting the land and its folk.

The sermon was done. Hans, had he still retained Gretchen's vestige of faith, would have thanked God. But there was no God to be thanked, any longer. There was nothing.

He managed, barely, to pull himself back from that brink. Suicide was at the bottom of that plunge. Hans had been tempted, often enough. But He flared his nostrils, and took in a deep breath. Still staring at the ground, still with his hands clasped before him.

The hands were not clasped in prayer, for all the strength with which he squeezed the fingers. Hans Richter was simply reminding himself that all was not lost. He still had something. Something to call his own, and something to give what he could.

Family. That I have. That I will protect, as best I can. Whatever else.

Chapter 16

"How many, d'you think?" asked Mackay.

Andrew Lennox squinted nearsightedly. Then, remembering his new gift from the Americans, he took out the spectacles and put them on. It took him not more than five seconds, scanning the field, to pronounce judgment.

"Two thousand. Divided two an' one. Maybe e'en less. Tilly is more conservative than Gustav Adolf, an' this'll be one o' 'is poorer an' weaker units. They've got nae artillery 't'all."

Mackay nodded. "About my estimate."

Next to him, Mike cocked his head. "By two and one-?"

"Pikemen to arquebusiers," replied Mackay. The Scots officer pointed to the tightly packed mass of men slowly approaching their own forces. "See the formation? That's your typical Spanish-style tercio. All the Habsburg armies use it in battle, although the imperials prefer a higher proportion of arquebus than the Spaniards. Impressive, isn't it?"

Mike studied the advancing army. He had no difficulty agreeing with the word. Impressive, it most certainly was. The imperial army reminded him of a gigantic mastodon, bearing down with gleaming tusks.

And they're just about to become as extinct.

Tilly's mercenaries were packed into a rectangle approximately fifty files wide and forty ranks deep, covering not more than fifty yards of front. The men in the ranks were spaced every three feet, and the files were drawn up even closer. The formation was so tight that, even across the clear and level ground of what had once been plowed farmland, they could only move deliberately. Mike knew, from what Mackay and Lennox had told him, that if Tilly himself and his entire army had been here, the oncoming tercio would have been one of sixteen or seventeen such units. They would have been arrayed side by side, like a human glacier. Slow as a glacier, and just as unstoppable.

The pikemen formed the heart of the formation. Their great fifteen-foot spears, held erect, glistened even in the light of an overcast day. The five hundred arquebusiers were arrayed on either flank. The arquebusiers' principal duty was to fend off pistol-wielding cavalry and match volleys with enemy gunmen. But, as had been true for a century and more, it would be the press and charge of pike which would decide the day.

Such, at least, was the accepted theory and practice of the time. Frank Jackson, standing on Mike's left, echoed his own mental opinion. "Talk about candidates for extinction. One cluster bomb would take out the whole bunch."

"We don't have a cluster bomb," pointed out Mike mildly.

Frank snorted. "Neither did the NVA. But I'll tell you right now those tough little bastards in their black pajamas would have loved these guys. Mincemeat, coming up. Complete with nuoc mam."

Mike grimaced at the image. Frank had brought home a Vietnamese wife from the war. In the decades since, Diane Jackson-she had Americanized her name-had blended in extremely well. But she still insisted on cooking at least one meal a month with that godawful Vietnamese fish sauce.

"Nuoc mam," Frank repeated. Under other circumstances, the obvious relish in his voice would have been odd. Much as he doted on his wife, Frank was no fonder of the fish sauce than any other native-born American.

Mackay, listening, understood the essence if not the precise meaning of Frank's words. "You are that confident?" The Scotsman pointed to the oncoming enemy. "They outnumber us two to one." He glanced to the left, where Ernst Hoffman's ragtag Protestant mercenaries were drawn up. About five hundred of them, more or less. Their formation was so irregular and undisciplined that an exact count was impossible. "That's counting that sorry lot, who'll break in a minute."

Mike shrugged. "I'm not relying on Hoffman's goons at all. I just insisted they be here in order to get them out of the town."

He cocked his head around. The little American/Scots/Protestant army was drawn up less than half a mile north of Badenburg. Unusually, for a town its size-the population was less than six thousand-Badenburg was walled. Those walls, as much as anything else, had determined Mike's political tactics over the past two weeks. Hoffman had been reluctant, to put it mildly, to risk bringing his mercenaries into the open field. But Mike had insisted, and Mackay had sweetened the pot with a portion of the king of Sweden's money.

When he turned his head back, he found that the young Scots officer was giving him a very peculiar look. Well… Not so peculiar, perhaps. Mackay still hadn't quite gotten over his shock, once he realized the full extent of Mike's intentions. Defeating Tilly's mercenaries was only the first part of those plans. Liberating Badenburg, Mike had explained, required dealing with the Protestant mercenaries as well. Decisively and, if necessary, ruthlessly. Even Lennox, for all his grisly experience, had been impressed by Mike's cold-bloodedness.

"Yes, Mackay, I am that confident." Mike's eyes ranged up and down his own battle line. The UMWA members, reinforced by high-school seniors, were lying prone behind a log parapet. There were, by exact count, 289 Americans in that line. All of them were wearing hunting camouflage, and all of them were armed with high-power rifles.

Mackay had been skeptical, but he had agreed to let the Americans form up at the center. His cavalry, evenly divided, was marshaled on the flanks. Every one of those Scotsmen had been at least as skeptical as Mackay, once they understood what Mike had planned for them.

Pursuit? Cough, cough. Doesn't that, ahem, presuppose that you've already defeated the enemy?

Mike smiled thinly. A half hour from now, he didn't think the Scots would be skeptical any longer. His eyes moved to the enemy, now less than two hundred yards away. The tercio was marching across the open field almost as slowly as a turtle.

"If I wanted to, Mackay," Mike said softly, "I could end this battle right now. Your arquebuses can't hit anything much beyond fifty yards, even in a volley, and they take a minute to reload. I know you think our tactics are only suitable for skirmishers, but you've never seen breech-loading rifles in action. With our accuracy and rate of fire, we could have half that army dead before they could get in range."