Monday, August 2, 1683
Toby
Vienna
“More sandbags. Three ought to do it.” Toby kept his voice a whisper in case Turkish miners were nearby, hidden from view by walls of dirt and stone. He reached back and felt the bag Ferdinand passed up to him. The narrow tunnel he was hunched inside didn’t let him turn around far enough to actually see his friend, and the soil roof lay only a handwidth above his head. If he moved more than a bit to the left or the right, his shoulders would bump into the earthen wall. He’d heard a team of enemy miners in the area. He had to hope they weren’t yet finished, because he didn’t want to be buried alive if they exploded their mine before he exploded his.
He made sure the fuse ran where it was supposed to and stacked another sandbag in front of the opening they’d dug out and filled with gunpowder. He reached for another sandbag after that, then a third. He packed the space on the sides and above the sandbags with dirt. They wanted the entire force of the blast to go toward the Turks, not back into the countermine.
“I think it’s time to clear everyone else out.” Toby scooted back and twisted until he could just see the light from Ferdinand’s oil lamp disappearing into a larger tunnel as Ferdinand went to tell the others. They kept activity in the countermines as quiet as possible to decrease the likelihood of the Turks hearing them, but excavating tunnels wasn’t a silent work. Picks and shovels made noise, as did hammers when Toby laid supports along the main galleries.
Now all that noise faded. Toby closed his eyes. The silence should have been pleasant. Up above the earth, the boom of cannon was constant, punctuated with the blast of muskets and the cries of men. So many sounds, none of them cheerful. Church bells no longer rang—von Starhemberg had silenced them with an order. Only when the Turks broke into the city would the bells of St. Stephen’s sound the alarm and call every remaining defender to a last desperate struggle.
But the quiet inside the mines wasn’t peaceful. It was eerie, like being buried alive. The air in the small tunnel was stale and the silence gloomy. Toby put his hand on the earthen wall, but he didn’t detect the vibrations that had revealed the presence of their enemy. They thought their room of powder was under a Turkish gallery, but to Toby, it all felt like guesswork.
“Toby?” Ferdinand’s voice.
“Yes?”
“Everyone else is out.”
Toby scooted the rest of the way from the tunnel but somehow extinguished his lamp in the process. He was glad Ferdinand was in the secondary tunnel with a light. They’d debated the process—whether to have one or two men stay in the tunnels to light the fuse. He was glad they’d settled on two.
They checked the saucisson fuse as they went, and upon reaching the main gallery, Toby said a silent prayer. He’d been doing that more often lately—something about losing his workshop, having an enormous army outside the city, and being sent underground to wage war had that effect. The fuse was essentially a long cloth tube filled with powder that stretched from the countermine to the main gallery. Toby held a candle to the end of it and hoped they’d made the right calculations. No one in Vienna had ever done it before.
The fuse cord glowed, and that glow moved along the cord toward the secondary shaft, where it would turn into another smaller shaft and into the wall of sandbags. There it would slip through and ignite the powder barrels.
He and Ferdinand jogged along the main gallery supported with a wooden roof—it ought to survive the blast. They would go outside anyway, just to be sure. They ran up the last bit of sloped tunnel into the open air and blinked in the light. The sun was low on the horizon. It would disappear soon, but their eyes needed a few moments to adjust to the difference between twilight and tunnel.
“Heller and Vischer. That’s everyone.” A man of about sixty stood at the entrance to the mine and wrote down everyone who went in and crossed the names off when they came out.
Captain Hafner, too, waited near the countermine’s entrance. “Let’s go up and see what happens.”
They climbed to the top of the counterscarp and joined the musketeers stationed on the parapet.
“How have things been up here today?” Captain Hafner asked a lieutenant.
“Nothing too exciting from them, sir.” He gestured to the enemy lines. “But a few of them got too close, and some of Count von Kielmansegg’s gamekeepers picked them off.” The lieutenant shook his head. “One of those shots had to be from four hundred and fifty paces. Wouldn’t have believed it possible if I hadn’t seen it myself.”
Four hundred and fifty paces? A quarter that distance would have been an impressive shot.
“They have longer barrels on their muskets, of course,” the lieutenant said. “No doubt the Turk he shot was just as shocked as we were.”
The ground rumbled, just enough for Toby to feel it but not enough to knock anyone from their feet. He, Ferdinand, and Captain Hafner turned to where they thought they’d set the mine, beneath a jumble of Turkish trenches. It was hard to see exactly what was happening, but some of the trenches seemed to collapse and disappear.
Captain Hafner nodded in satisfaction. “Now we’re fighting back both above and beneath the ground.”
Toby watched the confusion in the enemy trenches for a while, hoping it would slow them down and keep the city safe a little longer. That was what they were doing—stalling, playing for time, and hoping the emperor would find allies so the city would be relieved before the Turks destroyed all their defenses and took Vienna for themselves.
* * *
Toby had gotten into the habit of washing up after he finished his day’s work, then seeing if any of the injured needed help to the Ursulinenkirche. If there were no casualties, he would go there anyway to meet Katja.
One of the volunteers in charge of helping the wounded nodded at Toby in recognition. “Yes, we can use you today. Those men there need another set of hands on the stretchers.”
Toby took an end and helped haul a man with a head injury along the streets of Vienna.
“Look at that.” The man at the front of the stretcher glanced at a roof pierced by a Turkish cannonball. So many of the city’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed, and more were falling victim to Ottoman artillery every day. “I hope there’s still a few buildings to defend when this is all over.”
That was what everyone hoped. The city’s defenses had cracked and wouldn’t last indefinitely. They had to hope the siege would end in victory—either because the relieving army arrived or because the Ottomans gave up—before the defenses were shattered. But today they’d given the enemy a crack too by countermining underneath them. That was progress.
When he arrived at the Ursulinenkirche, he helped carry the man to where the stern-faced nun directed him, but he already knew that they organized patients by their wounds or illness. Head wounds went near the golden chandelier and the double columns with gold-plated figures on top.
“You’ll have good care here,” he told the man as they helped him onto a pallet. The man was barely conscious, so Toby stayed only a while. The other carrier left with the stretcher to take it back to the southern edge of the city, where most of the siege action was taking place.
Katja approached Toby as he stood. That seemed to be their pattern now. She worked until he came. She put in long hours—they both did—but she didn’t seem to begrudge waiting for him, and she always smiled, no matter how dirty her apron or how raw her hands. They said their greetings to each other and their farewells to everyone else and left the convent.
“Did you finish it?” Katja asked once they were outside.
Toby nodded. He’d told her about the plan to countermine the Turks yesterday—after they’d seen dried peas moving along the top of a drum as the Turks had excavated. “We set it off, and it seems we managed to sink a few Turkish trenches.”
She asked question after question about the mine, and he answered all of them, then asked about her work.
“It’s exhausting, but the days go by quickly. I just wish more of them would recover. We lost five today, just from the time I arrived in the morning until the time I left. I try not to let it get to me, try not to think about it too much.” Katja stopped to stare at a building. “That roof was whole when I walked past this morning.”
Toby walked closer for a better look. Yet another roof damaged by a Turkish cannonball. “It’s hard to tell with so little light left, but it doesn’t seem too bad, from a structural standpoint.” None of the main beams appeared damaged, but he couldn’t see what was inside.
“There’ll be lots of jobs for a woodworker when this is all over.”
Toby nodded. “I’ve had the same thought, then wondered if it was wrong to think of future opportunity when we’re living through something like this.” He didn’t want to profit from misery, but having as much work as he could manage would certainly help him rebuild his shop.
Katja shook her head. “It’s not wrong to plan for the future, not when you’re doing all you can to keep the city from falling.”
As they continued, Toby looked at the road in front of him often enough to avoid tripping over upturned cobblestones or falling into craters from Turkish cannon fire, but he spent most of the time staring at Katja. Neither the lines of exhaustion that touched her mouth nor the chapped redness of her hands lessened the thrill of being with her. He would never have wished for a siege, but if the Turks hadn’t come, he doubted he could have seen her again, and certainly not so frequently.
Katja took in a sharp breath. Then she ran off before Toby could focus on the cause of her dismay—a hole in her own roof, one significantly larger than the other home they’d looked at.
“Wait, Katja. It might not be safe.” If it was recent, the ball could still explode, or she might bump into something unstable and bring part of the house crashing down on her. He sprinted after her, but she’d had a head start, and as soon as he ran through the front door, he had to pause and listen before he knew which way she’d gone. Very little light came through the windows, and he didn’t remember the house well enough to run through it in the dark.
Normally, he wouldn’t have followed her inside without an invitation, and he certainly wouldn’t have chased her into the more private rooms for the family, but there was a time and place for decorum, and now wasn’t it. “Katja, wait for me, at least. It could still be dangerous.”
When he found her, he wondered why he hadn’t guessed her destination. She bent over her father’s violin, holding it to the window to check for damage. Toby lit a candle for her—the Schor family had expensive wax ones rather than the cheap tallow ones—so she could better inspect the instrument.
“I was foolish to leave it here last night.” Tears streaked down Katja’s cheeks, but her voice was steady. “I should have put it in its case and brought it to the cellar. I was so tired, but I hadn’t played in days, and I thought a few minutes of music would lift my spirits.”
“Is it damaged?”
Katja didn’t answer. She gently tucked the violin under her chin and tested it with a few scales, then began a concerto.
Toby watched, transfixed by the double beauty: Katja, as she concentrated on the violin, and the sound she drew from the strings. Her downcast eyes, the smooth motions of the hand that guided the bow and the fingers that pressed the strings, the look of contentment on her face—it all pulled at his heart. And the notes pulled at his imagination, taking him somewhere with peace and hope and promise.
“Is it all right?” he whispered as she finished.
“It is.” She lowered the violin. “But I am out of practice.”
“I thought it was beautiful.” He would have thought she was beautiful regardless of the music she made, but he also would have noticed if the song was off. He’d listened to her father often enough and to the amateur musicians at the small towns he’d worked in as a journeyman to recognize mastery when he heard it.
She glanced at her hands. “They’re sore. All that scrubbing all day long. I suppose it takes a toll, makes the strings feel like strangers instead of old friends.”
Toby took her hands and examined the calluses. “You’re making a worthy sacrifice, but I’m sorry it makes it harder for you to do what you most love.”
“Is it wrong for me to care so much about this violin?” Her brown eyes held his.
He thought a little before answering. “Did you ever feel less loved by your father because he also loved his music?”
“Of course not.”
“Loving music and beauty, that’s part of who you are. There’s nothing wrong with loving the instrument your father loved. I’m glad the cannonball didn’t harm it.”
Katja nodded.
Toby looked at the hole in the roof. He should be resting—he had a long day ahead of him tomorrow—but being around Katja gave recovery in a different sort of way. “I have an idea. How about we see if Agnes left any food for us down in the kitchen?”
A few weeks ago, he never would have invited himself over for a meal. But Agnes had insisted often enough, and the food wasn’t just for Katja and Toby. It was also for Agnes, Maria, and Maria’s grandmother, and for Xavier when he could come and for Martin and Paul and Aloys and any members of the garrison or fire brigade they brought back with them. The Schor family couldn’t feed all of Vienna, but they’d laid up a good supply of grains, root vegetables, and salted meat before the Turks had surrounded and invested the city.
“After we eat, I’ll see what type of tools we can find, and I’ll patch your roof.”
Katja nodded. “In exchange, I would be most pleased to contribute to your workshop’s replacement fund.”
“I’m not going to charge you for it. Even if I wanted to, it’s against policy. I’ll be working in the dark without my own tools, so it won’t be up to guild standards. Lately, I’ve been spending all my daylight hours in the countermines, so waiting until I have good light isn’t an option. In the meantime, the damage might get worse, especially if it were to rain.”
“You’ve worked all day at the defenses. I can’t let you do more work for me and not give you something in return.”
Toby would gladly do work for her with no expectation of reward. How many times had her family fed him when he was a boy and over the last few weeks of the siege? Beyond that, they were friends. But he sensed that she wanted to give him something in exchange. He glanced at her hands, so worn with her work at the hospital. He also remembered how she’d looked while she’d played. The violin might be hard on her hands, but making music was good for her soul. “I’ll patch the roof for you today, and you can give me a concert tomorrow.”
Katja smiled, pulling at his heart yet again. “Agreed.”