"Yes," Eddie said cautiously. Sweat beaded on the back of his neck.
"I should like to see a place like that," Anne Cathrine said. Her fingers fiddled with the white lawn shirt she'd brought, aligning the seams as though it mattered. "Later, after you speak to Papa's councilors, I wish for you to tell me all about this Grantville, with its wonderful clockwork carriages and flying machines."
"Sure, sure," Eddie mumbled. "Just let me get dressed."
"Oh." She nodded. "Very well." She turned to the maid. "Put the crutch where he can reach it, Gudrun."
The maid, a tiny dark-haired girl no older than the king's daughter, scurried forward, leaned the crutch against Eddie's bed, curtsied, then fled. Anne Cathrine followed, skirts rustling, glancing wistfully at him over one shoulder. "Promise you will tell me about the future."
"Yes, whatever!" Eddie said.
The door closed and he collapsed back against his pillows, drenched in nervous sweat. Now he needed to take that darned bath all over again, and he could just bet the water was as cold as the December air outside his window.
He thought of Anne Cathrine's blue eyes, the exact shade of the winter sky, and her supple young figure, then sighed. Maybe a cold bath wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.
The trip down to the king's audience chamber was arduous. Unfortunately, his room was at the top of one of the castle's towers. Eddie hadn't tried walking with a crutch until now. He'd asked for one, for a pair of them, actually, weeks ago, but the doctor had refused, finally saying through a translator that he was too weak. Eddie suspected that the real reason for denying him had been that, with crutches, he would be mobile and harder to confine.
Unfortunately, using one wasn't as easy as he hoped. He had a number of narrow winding staircases to negotiate, and in the end, the male servant sent to fetch him had to practically carry him the last few yards. Eddie was soaked in sweat all over again, despite the day's chill.
Just as they reached the audience chamber, he heard voices inside, arguing in German. "We have lost too many ships already, both at Luebeck and Wismar," one of them was saying. "More warships will cost money that Your Majesty's treasury simply does not have!"
"These future people are very clever," the king's voice said. "Think of all the damage done by one roaring little boat and a single air machine. If we could use this prisoner to get access in trade to armaments built in such a style, we might just achieve the edge we need to hold off the Swedes. And if we have even one of these devices in hand, our artisans might then be able to build our own."
"They will never sell us any of these marvels," someone else said in a froggy bass. "They have allied themselves with that wretch Gustavus Adolphus!"
"They were hasty," the king said calmly. "Alliances can change."
"They have no reason to change!" another voice put in. "After our failure at Wismar, we will be lucky to just to keep what we have. Mark my words, the island of Bornholm is at extreme risk! The Swedes have had their eyes on it for years."
Eddie shook off the servant's arm, straightened his back as best he could, and hobbled through the door. King Christian looked up from his thronelike chair at the head of a vast gleaming wooden table. "You are here, Lieutenant Cantrell! Good!" he boomed with his customary good humor. "Now we can get started."
He recognized the king's heir, Prince Christian, a slight thirty-year-old, standing behind the king. The son had come up to the tower, accompanying the king, several times during Eddie's convalescence, but never spoken to him.
The other seats at the table were filled with eight richly dressed men, some old and some merely middle-aged. Only two were anywhere near as young as the prince, and they stared, one and all, at Eddie as though they had a burr under their saddle.
And there was no chair for him. He hobbled closer on the single crutch, feeling horribly unbalanced. The thought of tripping and putting any weight on that still-healing stump was terrifying. Black dots shivered behind his eyes like the blobs in a lava lamp, merging and merging until he could hardly see. The room seemed to be buzzing. He reeled, then felt strong hands easing him into a chair.
After a moment, his vision cleared and he realized the minister seated closest to the king had surrendered his place to Eddie and was now glaring at him from a few paces away. Embarrassed, he tried to get up, but Christian himself pushed Eddie back as the servants brought another chair for the displaced man.
"No, no," Christian said. The icy eyes were intent. "You have not much strength yet. Americans are not as hardy as Danes. I should have realized."
A servant wearing the black royal livery pressed a goblet of hot mulled wine into Eddie's trembling hands. "Drink!" Christian said heartily, then upended his own golden goblet and clanked it down on the table. Drops of red wine glistened in his beard as a manservant hastened forward to refill the empty cup.
Eddie's dad had been an alcoholic, so on the whole, he avoided the stuff, but he sipped the wine. It was deliciously hot and heady and burned all the way down. After a moment, he did feel a bit better. His heart stopped racing and his hands shook less.
"Now," Christian said, leaning toward Eddie. "Grantville. Tell us how to defeat your navy. How many more of those deadly little boats do you have? How many flying machines?"
The Outlaw power boat, now reduced to fiberglass splinters floating in Wismar Bay, had been a one-off, though Grantville had a few other power boats, none as big. They were building more planes back home, but he wasn't sure how that was going. Parts were of course limited to what had come back through the Ring of Fire with them, and anyway he'd been too busy helping with the construction of the ironclads in the Magdeburg shipyards.
He just wished he could be there when the first ironclad met Christian's navy and blew it out of the water.
"Lieutenant Cantrell!" Christian's florid face with its fussy goatee hovered inches from his nose. "Are you well enough to speak now?"
It would be easier to say no, to plead infirmity and retreat back to his bed, but, dammit, Eddie'd had enough of lying about, staring at the stupid ceiling. He was ready to do something, anything, even if it was just sparring wits with royalty.
"Yes, Your Majesty," he said and took another sip of the heady wine. "I am fine."
"The little boats that dash about in the water, then." The king gazed at him expectantly and Eddie noticed that, despite being bloodshot, those chill eyes were very intelligent. "How many?"
When he'd first been captured, he'd raised the issue of the Geneva Convention, refusing to give more than his name and rank, professing to have forgotten his serial number, though the truth was that he'd never been issued one. That had worked at the time, but now misinformation and misdirection might help Grantville more than his continued silence.
"Twenty," Eddie said off the top of his head and saw the councilors stiffen. A murmur ran through the room. "More or less. How long have I been here?"
"It has been two months since you were plucked out of the sea," Christian said and sat back in his gem-encrusted chair, thinking.
"Oh, then it's probably more," Eddie said and squirmed until he was sitting up straighter. Maybe if he told a big enough lie, they would think twice before attacking American and Swedish forces again. "We, um, build at least"-he was tempted to say "ten" but decided that would make it seem too implausible-"five or six a month."
"I… see." The king's tone was frankly disbelieving.
"We have over three thousand 'engines,' which we use to power machines like speed boats and airplanes, in Grantville," Eddie said. "I'm not sure how many have been allocated to the speed boat program, the airplane program, and other… projects. I'm just a lieutenant. They don't tell me everything."