The Last Fire, Part Beginning
1648, Munich. Konrad is tasked with a quest that could finally end the Thirty Years War. She must complete it, while maintaining her disguise as a man.
Konrad surveyed the Munich marketplace crowds, watching between shadows for danger as she guarded her lord, and pretended to be a man. She wore a hauberk tight enough to smother the lines of her figure, and over it a velvet doublet with billowing scarlet sleeves, black breeches to her knees, and purple silk stockings. Her wrists were adorned in silver bangles. The red dyes and velvet had been furnished by her lord, for in accordance with the emperor’s laws, only nobles could access such clothing. The montante she carried on her shoulder was her own trusty sword of fifteen years. Together her sword, her raiment, and the ash painted on her chin, she cut such a figure the crowds gave her lord a wide berth.
The stench of raw shit and mud curled wafted up from the streets to burn her nose like acid. The market shops had hollowed out in the past year, but the crowds had grown vastly in size. The few nobles like her lordship, or even stately city residents, were surrounded by masses of starving debtors and ragged farmers, deprived of home and income by war. There were no more upper-class districts. The entire city was overrun.
Through all that, the newly of age Duke Nicolaus Berrig wandered from stall to stall, taking care of estate purchases without an eye outside his ledger pad. She shadowed his every step and took care of his safety.
Konrad didn’t like cities. Taking them required laying siege, which meant months to years of waiting in the same spot, digging ditches, and living in constant danger. Living in them meant sewage and plague. Munich was one of the largest and now the most overcrowded. Soon, plague would follow the dung and fan like fire through the slums. That made her stomach churn with more terror than anything, for she could not ward it off with her sword or intimidate it into fleeing. It would strike her and her Lord down like God’s invisible finger.
Nicolaus stopped before a blacksmith’s shop. The blacksmith’s wife and daughter sold his fine metal creations, while the smith himself hammered away at his forge behind. Black smoke belched into the sky as hot charcoal drove the stench of shit away from this little corner.
Three women in homespun smocks scurried towards him. Their cheeks were hollow from starvation. Their hands were out and there were no weapons on their dresses, but that didn’t change the danger. Konrad had seen more than one pretty girl stab a man soon as his guard fell. She’d killed younger and more destitute herself for a variety of reasons Konrad slid her montante off her shoulder and spun it before her.
The montante was a weapon of area denial, with a blade high as her shoulder and an extended hilt for an impressive reach. Despite that it was light enough to flit nimbly through the air without straining her arms. By twirling it, she created a vast void no one could pass through to reach her lord. Effective as Munich’s sloped, packed dirt and stone rampart walls
“Milord, please, some charity!” one woman cried out. She raised her arms to the heavens. Arm, singular, Konrad realized as her left sleeve flopped empty above her elbow.
“They burned our farms. The devil’s own favorites the French harvested everything they could and slew everyone they could find. We have nothing left,” another added.
The third pulled her apron aside and stuck out her swollen belly.
Munich, and the Electorate of Bavaria it was capital of, had been ravaged early in the war, then granted a respite of a decade and half when the fighting moved elsewhere in the HRE. That respite had ended last year when France invaded and burned everything not behind solid walls defended with cannon to the ground. Thus had the refugees fled here.
It was too bad, because there was nothing here for them and Konrad wouldn’t give them what little she had.
“Sire, for the poor waifs,” Nicolaus said and held out a hand with three glittering thalers.
“Your greatness, more are going to swarm you. There’s no amount of gold that can help them and they’ll just drain you and murder you for everything you have, down to eating your leather boots,” Konrad said, and shook her head. Nicolaus had fine heeled leather boots, and those would make a meal and a half for anyone hungry enough to soften them over a fire.
One of the women clasped her hands and began praying.
“But it will help those three very much, so I command you,” Nicolaus said and patted her elbow.
Konrad sighed. This poor, innocent lordling was going to get punched in the face by the reality outside Munich’s walls soon enough. She wasn’t sure how but she knew his type of innocence and could see it coming. As long as he paid her, she’d be there to protect his body. She tossed a coin to each girl. They threw themselves down on their faces and cried in thanks, before fleeing.
Nicolaus paid a stack of thalers for all the blacksmith’s finest nails, to be delivered to his estate. Then produced his white eagle feather quill and signed an order for all the blacksmith’s nails produced for the next year.
The House of Berrig had made its money in construction. Nicolaus had signed a lucrative deal to build new suburbs to help with the refugees. They were to be outside the city walls and made of fine timber, so they could be burned quickly in case the French tried their luck with a siege. And they had to be done fast, so the city center could be emptied before plague did come.
Nicolaus moved on without telling her, but she’d gotten in the habit of always keeping him in the corner of her eye. She quickened her pace to keep up. Quite a few of the poorfolk tracked him from the gutters lining the marketplace. As she’d predicted.
“Where are we taking your charity next?” Konrad said.
Nicolaus grinned at her from the corner of his eyes. “I am getting a beer from Ulriff’s tavern, then I am going to try a few more blacksmiths. We’ll need more than one blacksmith providing nails and tools to build those houses. You may have a beer.”
“I don’t drink and stand watch,” Konrad said.
“You’re not a Landsknecht anymore. You’re in higher employment now, protecting my household,” he said.
Indeed, but that was a low bar. Any employment was higher than being a Landsknecht to Konrad. They were the nomadic mercenaries of the Holy Roman Empire. While nominally in service to the Empire, of which Bavaria was a part of, Landsknechts fought for both protestant and Catholic sides of the war, killing, looting, and raping everything in the countryside they came across.
Konrad had done her fair share of murder, and robbery. Farmers, traders, children, and more. They all bled the same. She had a spot waiting for her in hell, as did every other Landsknecht. “The principal remains the same, My Duke,” she said.
“Suit yourself,” he said with a hearty chuckle.
The streets narrowed ahead. Hamburg’s four main streets formed a cross. Ulriff’s tavern sat at the intersection of the four streets, surrounded by cobblestones. It was four floors high, with the tavern itself on the first, board on the first and second, and Ulriff himself living on the fourth.
Except footsteps slapped on the cobblestones behind them.
Konrad spun about and drew her sword halfway off her shoulder. A fair-faced boy with a black doublet and red stockings ran up to them. He wore Prince Maximilian’s royal sigil as a brooch on his chest, under his frilled collar. One of the Prince’s pages in the flesh. He bowed so low his nose tapped a dry spot on the street.
“My lord, I bear a message from the Prince,” he said, and produced an envelope from the collar of his doublet as he rose. He flourished it with youthful enthusiasm. Konrad reckoned he’d be twelve, only six years younger than Nicolaus.
Konrad accepted it and turned it over to examine it. Maximilian’s seal was stamped in red wax upon it, matching the boy’s brooch. It was authentic. Something moved in the corners of her vision. She brushed it off.
Except the movement was all around them and moving in time with her. Someone matched her moves, waiting.
Konrad widened her eyes to stare out their corners. A handful of traders squeezed around them towards the exit.
She popped the seal with her thumb. As she did, the movement snapped taught, like a hunter’s bowstring. Her own body coiled up in turn, her knees bending as her muscles tensed to spring forwards. As her thoughts struggled to keep up, two decades of honed instinct did the work.
A trader threw back his cloak as he stepped behind the page. Metal glinted as he yanked a handgun from beneath its folds. A match sizzled, ready to fire.
Konrad sprung forwards, batting the poor page boy aside as she swiped the handgun’s wooden barrel aside. When the assassin pulled the trigger, there was a quarter-second between the match hitting the powder pan and the gunpower igniting. That quarter second was when she swiped the weapon aside. It roared past her. The sheer force of gunpower igniting still smacked her exposed face and stung her eyes with white smoke.
Konrad buried her shoulder through his chest another quarter-second later. A crunch rang through her body as she hit his large bottle. She felt heavy muscle, and a form larger than she was capable of overcoming.
But her other hand had been diving into her belt while she opened the letter and when she bounced off his massive frame with a grunt of agony and ringing in her ears, she left her dagger through his heart.
She stumbled and spun about to check on her Lord.
Two traders had their swords out and swinging. Nicolaus listened to her for the first time ever and threw himself into the street.
That let her spin the montante before her, deflecting both blades and then driving their owners back.
The assassins broke to either side of her to get around. She chose the one on the left and swung at him. In a single step she’d driven him against the wall, then split his belly open.
She continued the swing around in the full circle again clear the last assassin away from her lord’s huddled form. With no other opponents in sight, she focused in. She twirled her sword like a dancing peasant girl’s skirt, constraining him in the whirlwind, beating his guard down, driving him to his knees, then hacking his sword arm off when he tried to defend himself.
“Mercy!” he cried.
She split him shoulder to hip. Silence fell, except for her harsh panting. Every window had been slammed shut, and everyone had fled at the gunshot.
“Well fought!” Nicolaus said and pulled himself to his feet.
“I said after you get out of the way, you run!” she snapped. Lordship didn’t matter for this was her profession he was paying her for.
“And leave your protection?” he said. “I’m safer right here than fleeing through the streets.” He looked around. He stopped, and his eyes went wide.
The page lay on his back, all bunched up in a ball of mud-stained lace and silk. Blood leaked from the hole through the back of his head where the stray bullet had caught him. His sweet little freckled face stared upwards forever, blank as the white sky above.
“We need to leave,” she said. She walked over wrenched the dagger from the dead man’s heart.
“Not without him. He shouldn’t rot in the street. We’ll take him back to his masters. Here, stand guard.” He knelt to the young body with a sigh. He picked the boy up tenderly and cradled him close to his chest. “The letter.”
She switched her montante grip to one hand and held the letter before his nose.
“We’re summoned to the presence of Elector Maximilian himself,” he said. He turned up the street. The child’s arms swung limply before him.
As they went, Konrad composed a small prayer and whispered it under her breath.
Oh Virgin Maria, mother of Christ and us all. Please look after this child when he comes before the great gates. Many have died for our schemes and sins but look after him, because I did not mean it. Oh Virgin Maria, please look after him. Amen.
Konrad stared up and up at Hamburg palace’s iron gates. Above them rose the great marble towers, and in the sky itself, emmeshed in tendrils of white fog, flapped the banners of Prince Maximilian, Prince of Bavaria and one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire.
She breathed in deeply. Whatever the man up there wanted, it meant more danger for her. Noble’s business was always done in blood. Landsknechts after all, were the Emperor’s way of raising an army without tying himself to the forces of any one of his electors or lesser landlords.
The gates were thrown open at Nicolaus’ request and presentation of House Berrig’s signet ring.
Guards, servants, and a few brightly clad nobles stopped and stared at Nicolaus as he carried the boy along. Until a matronly woman in a maid’s white apron ran up. Two young waifs in aprons, carrying a broom and bucket of water hurried after.
“Pietro!” the woman gasped.
“I’m sorry, my dear madame,” Nicolaus said. “He was delivering me a letter when men attempted to kill me. A stray bullet found him. It was not his fault; he never even knew what happened.”
The woman held out her arms and Nicolaus transferred the boy. Behind, one of the girls let out a wail skyward. The other clapped her hands over her mouth and sank into a heap on the ground.
Relieved, they were led on by guards and up the grand staircase to the very highest floor. From here, Konrad looked over the handrail and stared straight down to the specks of people she’d just left behind. They proceeded down a long corridor, to a great set of wooden doors. These were thrown open immediately and without proper ceremony, which told Konrad her Lord was urgently expected by the Prince.
Maximilian himself sat upon his raised throne. He was clad in the finest black silks and velvet, with white lace billowing from his collar and cuffs. Long worry lines gnarled his face. His white moustache was wilted as his body beneath his clothes. The man had rebuilt Bavaria from a divided, impoverished collection of estates to a powerful singular princedom within the holy roman empire. During the early years of the war, he’d wrested the electorship from its protestant prior owners. That meant he and his successors had one of seven votes to choose the Holy Roman Empire, and all the bounty attached to such an important position.
And now he’d grown old watching France burn Bavaria down.
“His grace, the Duke Berrig,” the court chamberlain said. The entire crowd of nobles and counsellors turned to look.
Nicolaus walked forwards. He dropped to his knees before the Prince, dripping mud onto the fine floorboards. Konrad’s eyes went to his ankles, where his stockings bunched up above his shoes. Warmth flushed her cheeks.
She tried to smite it before they turned red, but it was a struggle against a rising flood. Nicolaus was, in the confines of nobility, a gallant and sweet young man, with a handsome face. She’d spent so much time around him that it was impossible for that to not rub off when she was not hard at work guarding him.
“What happened?” Maximilian said and let the simplicity of the royal request make a void in his throne room.
“I was assaulted at the same time your poor page delivered your message. There were three of them, one with a handgun. My brave bodyguard slew all three,” Nicolaus said.
“I told the page to run, for as fast as news reached me it surely reached our enemies,” Maximilian said. “Rise, my boy, and listen closely, for events have proceeded rapidly.”
Nicolaus stood. The wrinkles about his ankles smoothed. “Yes, my prince?” he said.
“Two years ago, the many sides of this war met in the town of Westphalia to formalize a treaty to end the war. They’ve been negotiating for two years. My own foreign minister assures me the end is in sight, but it will be as fragile as the paper it’s written on. So myself, the Emperor, and the other princes both Catholic and Protestant have come up with something deeper than paper. A bond between the two branches of Christendom that started the war thirty years ago.”
You are to be married. Your bride is the protestand Duchess Caterina of Brandenburg, from the northern Baltic coast. She has blood ties to many Protestant houses, as well as those traitorous catholic bastards the French. I am told she is also immensely beautiful and quite intelligent. You will meet her in Prague, where the war began, and end it in the bonds of matrimony,” he said.
“As you command, My Prince,” Nicolaus said. He swiped off his hat and bowed once more. Konrad started doing the math. Prague was three weeks of riding if they stuck to the roads. That was three weeks through French armies who might respect their diplomatic rights, and marauding regiments of Landsknecht who would kill them at a thought, as easily as they killed anyone caught outside city walls.
“Are you committed? This requires more than a vow and a pretty kiss,” Maximilian said and shot up in his throne. Fire danced in his eyes.
“My prince. My Jesuit tutor survived the infamous sack of Magdeburg. I remember his stories about the screams, the fire, and our own Imperial forces closing in on all sides. He told me of mothers and their children raped side by side in their homes, families locked up together then their houses burned. It didn’t matter, Catholic or protestant, they all died except for a lucky few like him. He hid in a well with a pregnant protestant woman and they survived. I see that desperation reflected in the faces of every survivor who limps through Magdeburg’s gates. Enough with this war. No one has won,” he said.
“Wise words, and a sign of good breeding,” Maximilian said. “And your bodyguard. Come forth.”
Konrad felt every eye on her as she strode to her Lord’s side and knelt. Her raiment held her disguise tight, hiding her feminine features from all their stares. “My prince, I am yours,” she said.
“I recognize a blooded veteran by your scars. Who did you serve?” he said.
“I was a Landsknecht, with first the White Mountain regiment, then with the Tercio de Cadiz,” she said. Murmurs rang all around the room. Spain did not have regiments in the same way the Empire did. They had Tercios.
“Tell me, what was your first battle?” Maximilian said.
“At Lutzen in 1632, I ran powder to the handgunners for I was just sixteen and therefore too young to fight. Then a Swedish charge caught the handgunners between volleys and I had to pick up a pike to save my own life,” she said. “My first kill was a Swedish Cavalryman who was blinded by the smoke and rode so hard into me he impaled his horse and himself and fell atop me.”
She’d been so excited to survive, she’d almost kissed the Lieutenant that pulled her out from under that horse. Instead she’d doubled over in pain at her broken ribs.
“How many more have you fought?” Maximilian said.
“I was at Nordlingen two years later, when we crushed those blasted swedes. Then at Rocroi in 1641, and Freiburg in 1644,” Konrad said. There were many smaller engagements, raids, and general butchery in between but those were the big ones. “I have killed protestant Germans, Swedes, French, Poles, Dutch, and everything else that has wandered across the Empire during this war.”
“Why did you leave the emperor’s Landschneckts and settle down, comparatively?” Maximilian said.
“I decided I wanted a daily bath, and a solid bed under me,” Konrad said. Laughter rang through the room. She looked around and saw all the Princely guards grinning.
“A noble cause,” Maximilian said, and the soldiers’ laughter grew. “How devoted are you to the Duke Berrig?” he said.
“I am utterly his,” she said.
“You must be more. You must be with God and his good son Jesus himself to complete this,” Maximilian said sharply. He stood from his throne. A guard ran forwards and handed him a cane. “I want to send a regiment with you, but the French are out there with entire armies. We would lose the regiment, and then this city for the lack of defenders. I am forced to the alternative. Duke Berrig, you will need to slip through the countryside to reach Prague. My good Landsknecht, you must be his only escort for secrecy and safety. Bring him to Prague, so he may seal this treaty in marriage, and end this war.”
The entire court stared at them. It was a mixture of fear and horror at their journey.
Konrad immediately began plotting the journey. It was three weeks to Prague, she estimated. That was three weeks of riding past French armies, marauding regiments of Landsknechts, and simple bandits. The first two would kill or ransom them depending on how they were feeling the moment they seized them. The third would kill them. Maybe strip them of all valuables first and rape her once they learned the truth.
They couldn’t carry three weeks of food either. The countryside could no longer support its own natives, much less some travelers. Somehow, amidst the landscape burned to the ground, they’d need to find food too. On her own, she could. While carrying the soft little lordling.
She should have just retired fully, she thought. Be around a noble, get involved in the silly games nobles played.
“My prince. It would be my honor,” Nicolaus said, for that was the only answer he could give to a royal order. He swept his cap off and bowed. Konrad did the same.
Thank you for reading
Part Two is HERE