THE RINGSTETTEN SAGA IV: THE RHINELAND WINTER

Previously on the Ringstetten saga:
At dusk, the winners started to celebrate their unexpected success and to raid the League's encampment. They took all the cannons, lots of money and provisions, some camp followers like the stunning Natasha as POWs, Madonnas (for their children to play with)... In short, everything that the fleeing foes had left behind. And they snatched it all like a swarm of locusts.
Of course, our ensign received a nice share of the spoils and presented half of it to his would-be father-in-law, who insisted that Gerhard should keep it for himself. He also offered the prisoner he had made to his liege as a gift. But His Majesty freed all the POWs and had them join the Swedish ranks. And he also made young Ringstetten a lieutenant!
Later that evening, Liselotte tended to Gerhard's wounds. She congratulated him and looked at him. It had been, so far, the best day in his life!
The prisoner that Gerhard had made was put under his command as his orderly, or personal servant. His name was Alois, and he had been a half-Croatian, half-Flemish captain of pikemen before his capture. He looked typically Mediterranean, with nutbrown eyes and a copper suntan... but he was far more reserved than his new commanding officer.

Another POW, a young Austrian count who had been Alois's ensign, Rainer Leopold von Liebenstein, is also put in Gerhard's company, keeping the rank of ensign but with the flag of Sweden, and soon clashes with his new commanding officer, mistrusting the rank of Lieutenant and Prussians, while flirting with Liselotte just to provoke young Ringstetten, whom he calls "Herr Leutnant" in a sissy-sounding ironic tone.

As for Kurtius Waldmeister, he tells the Elector that he'd rather join the Swedish army, and soon he appears, trading his scarlet doublet for a blue one, in the Swedish encampment.
Cue autumn turning to winter, and the Swedes getting from Saxony to the Rhineland. What happens next will be related in another post.
The quartet of leading characters is now complete.

In October, the Swedish ranks stand across the Main River from the fortress of Marienberg, which towers like an eyrie on top of a steep mesa, on the other side of the river. During the siege, the Catholic garrison fires cannon-shot after cannon-shot and gunshot after gunshot at the Swedish besiegers, even next to the King himself, driving gravel from the rampart into his blue eyes. Yet Swedish fire has already reduced one of the castle’s own towers to gravel. Now Gustavus is in the mood for a storming! Though the commandant of Marienberg has blown up two of the bridges across the Main, the Swedes quickly rebuild the bridge by throwing plank after plank on the ruined pillars. The Scots at Sweden’s service, led by both the Ramsay brothers, run across the shore in a storm of bullets, that mortally wound both the Ramsays, as the King finds rowboats, the whole Swedish host, Gerhard and Alois among them, crosses the river and rushes into the fortress, showing no mercy to soldiers or Catholic clergy… until Gustavus notices that the “dead bodies” in the castle courtyard look too rosy to be deceased, and, seeing through the ruse, he tells them to rise again, sparing the “resurrected” Jesuits, who thank their conqueror.

The spoils of that storming are legendary, even grander than those of Breitenfeld: rapiers, daggers, pistols, muskets, immense quantities of grain and wine (should the siege have lasted for ages), dozens of noble steeds… the golden Virgin and silver Apostles (Judas Iscariot included) worshipped in the chapel, and the whole library, sent to Uppsala University… Their stay in Marienberg is grand and meant to be celebrated: there, Gustavus and Eleanor will keep their winter court.
The Swedish royals, with their army and entourage, spend the winter 1631-1632 in the Rhineland. They lavishly celebrate their victories as well as Christmas and New Year's Eve, but don't forget the training either!
Before Christmas, they cross the Rhine to capture a fort/watchtower/dungeon of sorts on the other side. It's freezing, though not frozen! So each and every warrior in the Protestant ranks, starting with Gustavus himself, quaffs a nice draught of brandy before the crossing. Gerhard had drunk some before, when his wounds were tended to, so it doesn't affect him that much... WRONG! Our young lieutenant wants to impress his liege and, having drunk more than he can hold, he gets subsequently intoxicated. Luckily, Alois was there to save Gerhard from hypothermia!
The regiment is quartered in a beautiful Gothic-style Rhineland chateau, that turns out to be the birthplace of Liselotte's late mother Anne-Marie and where a treasure was hidden from a Catholic invasion. Before an impressive Christmas, our heroes decide to combine their training with a treasure hunt, and the treasure is then shared among the officers and privates. A gilt dagger and a crystal necklace from the hoard are given to the royals as Christmas presents.
While Gerhard himself receives, from His Majesty, the royal permission to marry Liselotte!
The royals also send a storybook about Gustavus's victory over Tilly to their five-year-old daughter Christina, who is living at Stegeborg with relatives of hers. Pretty soon, Gustavus and Eleanor give an anecdote: when the garrison at Kalmar Slott fired a salute to welcome the royal carriage, the Queen was so scared that she nearly fainted, while her only child clapped her hands and laughed with glee. Gustavus took little Christina in his arms and presented her to the gunners: "A warrior's daughter is never afraid of gunfire! She's asking for an encore!" And a second cannon shot followed. The Vasa loves to let his only child ride on his back and play games together, while Eleanor is far more concerned with her own spouse than with their young hopeful... appointed heir to the Swedish throne! 

Christina is being educated like a boy of her rank, taught fencing, marksmanship, horse riding, several foreign languages, history, philosophy, military skills...
Though, during the winter revels, an event occurs that shakes the royal court as well as Gerhard's company. Though our lieutenant outranks Rainer von Liebenstein, the far more extroverted and suave Austrian is chosen to be the royals' cupbearer at the feast. No one but Rainer and a few Vasa servants, who are actually a Jesuit fifth column, and who promise him a way to flee into Bavaria and join Tilly once more, aside from rewarding him, if he performs a series of dastardly deeds, the first one being lacing Gustavus's drink with strychnine, which he has been given as powder in an envelope. Rainer, who faces a serious moral dilemma, thinks for and against the plot, weighing in the Breitenfeld trauma and the pros and cons (lost many friends and commanding officers but won new ones in exchange, the Swedish king is far nicer than the Count of Tilly… vs. he is among heretics who have killed nearly everyone in his life and forced him to accept their “false” religion), until, at the eleventh hour, von Liebenstein finally decides to be true to Gustavus and, after the Vasa has toasted his dear Eleanor, the young ensign drains his liege lord's cup, which he has already laced, right before everyone's eyes, then, with cyanosis, locked jaws, and eyes forced open dying of suffocation amidst painful convulsions. As Rainer is buried in the estate gardens, soft snowflakes fall and everyone sheds tears for his sacrifice.
As a side story, Hedwig and Alois fall for each other, but Gerhard doesn't approve of his sister's crush on a former Leaguesman. During the celebrations, the young maid asks the Queen, who had previously told her about her (rather shocking) first meeting with Gustavus in in Potsdam, before their official introduction in her own birthplace of Schloss Königsberg (at the Potsdam court, she lured him into her bedchamber, dressed herself like a page, and then stole a kiss from him as she revealed her identity!), why she left their homeland of Prussia for a much wilder and harsher country like Sweden.

Eleanor replied: "I did it for love. When you fall in love yourself, you'll be capable of any sacrifice."
Cue Hedwig realizing that she's fallen for Alois (together, they do look like Othello and Desdemona)!
So, when winter changes into spring and the Swedes have designed to march further south into Bavaria, the blond and blue-eyed handmaid leaves her employment in the Queen's household to become a camp follower.
Alois also reveals his backstory to his sweetheart and to his commanding officer: he was conceived and born during a repression of Hungarian Protestants, as a bastard sired by one of Tilly's old Walloons while intoxicated unto the wife of a Croatian officer loyal to Wallenstein. The lovechild of René and Ljubica was named Aliosha Ivanovic, and he grew up in camps around the fringes of the Catholic world, unaware of his illegitimacy, until Wallenstein was dismissed by the Kaiser. Then, young Aliosha had come of age and his stepfather Nikola had been killed at Lutter. At Tilly's service, he met a sixty-something veteran, René Jacques van der Heide, who recognized the rosary the young ensign was wearing as the one he had given to a certain Croatian lady (Ljubica Ivanovna) and revealed that he was his birth father, giving him his French-Flemish name Alois and a flag of the League to protect. But René died during the conflagration of Magdeburg, leaving Alois orphaned and a ward of Tilly’s.
In the meantime, old Count Tilly has recovered from his wounds, but only from those of the flesh. Having said his prayers at Our Lady's of Altötting, he has promised the Virgin that he will defeat the leader of the heretics, whom he secretly admires.
And, being informed that the Swedes are encroaching against his own liege's electorate, he decides to break all the bridges across the Lech (across whitewater rapids, when the glaciers thaw in springtime) and set up, on the right bank, an encampment for himself, his liege Maximilian I, and his closest generals: Pappenheim, Altringer et consortes. The wooden planks from the bridges are re-used for the palisade, while the woods shelter the Catholic headquarters. In late March, right before April Fools' Day, the Protestants show up and encamp on the left bank, across the Leaguers. And Gustavus ironically laughs across the rapids: "We have nothing to fear! What? Are you afraid of crossing this stream!? Shall we, after having crossed the Oder, the Rhine and the Danube, stop before this rill!?"