Chapter 19
Gryzelda sat, and thought. Her headache was Sobiepan.
She could tell Jeremi and he would have her brother impaled, in anger that he had tried to push her about, and to try to get his hands on the innocent Marysieńka.
And as she thought, she smiled.
If she could frighten her brother enough, he would be tractable. And by now, he would have worked out that the Sejm would be likely to militate against him being impaled. And Gryzelda did not really want him to be executed in any manner. But he had become unbearable of late. Whether it was the madness of the pox, or just his natural arrogance allied with being associated with the throne, she was not sure, but it must be curbed.
And she could coerce him with quite as fine a piece of blackmail as any might bring. Because of the makeup of the Sejm, the jealousy the ordinary szlachcice felt towards the magnates, and the jealousy for position felt by one magnate towards all others.
And everyone knew that Sobiepan was jealous of Jeremi. It was but one leap to believing that he was seizing the opportunity to marry into a suitable French family in order to make a bid for the throne of France.
It was unlikely to be a possibility; but stranger things had happened. And of course, it had never crossed Sobiepan's lust-filled mind. But so long as he understood that she could make the Sejm believe it... Gryzelda sighed in satisfaction.
She could make him dismantle his harem with that as well.
If he wanted to marry, he could marry one of them, he liked them well enough to bed them, after all.
oOoOo
Jurko was happier leading his Cossacks in sallies against the royal army and its foreign mercenaries. There was the joy to be had of completely spoiling the formations of the native Russian troops, insufficiently drilled, and easy to disrupt.
"They aren't really here for your personal amusement, you know," said Jan, as Jurko returned, laughing almost hysterically at the mayhem he had wrought by leading an insane charge into a group of pikemen surrounding a general.
"Yes, they are," said Jurko. "And look what Kuryło and Wasyl have caught; I kept the guards occupied long enough for them to go fishing, and behold! They have caught a goldfish. At least, he has enough gold on him to be a goldfish."
"All very well, but why don't we turn our skills on the hardened troops?" said Jan.
"We are, Janko, we are! We're whittling down the native generals, and the mercenaries are going to try to step in, and what a lot of mayhem they will find in trying to order about truculent, frightened men who are not sure what's going on. Moreover, we have work to do when darkness falls."
"You found a source of amanita?"
"No, but I found an apothecary shop with enough senna to dye all these gaudy uniforms when they've finished squatting," said Jurko, happily.
oOoOo
"Your majesty! The new copy of the amended treaty!" declared De Lumbres. He had not seen Zamoyski since the day before, but hopefully the Pole had been working on his sister.
Gryzelda glanced through the document.
It had been pared down, somewhat.
"Well, De Lumbres, let us get to the point," said Gryzelda. "I am well aware that you and my brother have been making a deal together. And his part in it clear enough. Nobody in their right mind is going to believe that he would agree to a treaty which is detrimental to his whole belief in the structure of the Golden Rights, just to have the chance to bed the lovely, but still very young, Marie Casimire, as I believe you style her. And that excuse is forestalled since her parents signed her over to our late king's wife, whose lady-in-waiting she was. The girl is betrothed, and is consequently off the market. And also very incidental. Now, M. Le Marquise, what is it worth to you for me to not write to Cardinal Mazarin, telling him how concerned I am over how you have fostered my poor foolish brother's ambitions to aspire to the throne of France through a French bride?"
"I... I beg your pardon?" stammered De Lumbres.
"Was I not clear?" said Gryzelda. "I was offering you the chance to bribe me, to avoid telling Mazarin that you were plotting to overthrow the poor little fourteen year old Ludvik the sixteenth, and seize the throne of France, using my brother's personal army of ten thousand men whom he has not committed to the war with Russia."
"I... I... but we have not plotted to seize the throne of France," said De Lumbres.
"No? But will Mazarin believe that if I tell him what I have just told you?" said Gryzelda.
De Lumbres started hyperventilating.
"Now, I have drawn up a treaty," said Gryzelda. "Please read it with care. In short, it says that France will pay the Sarmatian Rzeczpospolita six million livres1 per year that we do not ally with any Habsburg-run nations, which is the same as the subsidy to Sweden, and will give the Rzeczpospolita favoured trading status."
"I... I cannot sign that!" said De Lumbres.
"Why not? You wanted me to sign a document which was almost the precise reverse of it," said Gryzelda. "Now, don't you think it is easier to pretend to have been caught out when too drunk to recognise that the treaty had been switched than it is to explain away what you planned to do with four thousand winged hussars, two thousand pancerci, three thousand Ulans, and a thousand artillery men and their two hundred long cannons?"
"Make it four million," he said.
Gryzelda passed him the document It had been written to four million.
"I thought you would haggle, and I am prepared to be reasonable," she said, with a bright smile.
He signed.
His career was broken; but his neck was intact.
oOoOo
Cossacks slipped through shadows, adding senna to wine, and spicing some of it further with added wódka, so that drunken and incontinent soldiers might stagger about in misery at various places in their anatomy.
The Cossacks sang hymns to the morning, very loudly, and with drums and trumpets.
The mercenaries surrendered.
Chmielnicki arrived, having rounded up further flung troops.
"Jeremi! Having fun?" he said.
"No, Bohdan, not really," said Jeremi. "Your son's about somewhere. I have an apoplectic patriarch in gaol for wanting to excommunicate anyone who doesn't go by his idea of minor doctrinal issues."
"Sounds like a dick; hang him," said Chmielnicki.
"He's Orthodox; what the hell do you suppose will happen if I, a Catholic, hang him?" said Jeremi.
"Give him to me, then, and I'll hang him," said Chmielnicki.
oOoOo
"Well, brother, you have had a chance to cool off, and perhaps to be ready to listen to a proposition," said Gryzelda.
"You can't keep me here! If the Sejm found out, they'd be out for your blood! And they will find out eventually, someone will let it slip."
"Hence the deal, my brother," said Gryzelda. "You see, I thought about this very, very deeply. And if you had agreed with what was on that treaty, why, it would have been very close to treason, since the terms were the sort of terms a defeated country signs for the victor. Did you know that when you agreed to help De Lumbres? Not that I care, because nobody in the Sejm would believe you did not know. Now I know, and you know, that you are so ruled by your little head that the thought of getting your lascivious hands on Marysieńka was enough to drive from your upper head all thought of what was in the treaty. But you see, brother dear, most magnates know when to let a passing lust go. And most of them, if I present it properly, will see your lust for the girl as a secondary reason to want to marry her."
Sobiepan frowned.
"What do you mean?" he demanded.
"Why, she is a French noblewoman, associated with our former queen, who has much influence in France. There are a sufficiency of people in France who dislike Mazarin, and his lover, the boy king's mother, and the idea of a boy king. And you have ten thousand troops kicking their heels doing nothing... unless they were waiting to march into France as you, with De Lumbres' connivance, stage a coup."
"But it's not true!" said Sobiepan.
"Of course it isn't true," said Gryzelda. "As your sister, I know full well how disgusting you can be when lusting after someone hard to obtain. But your lusts fall outside the ordinary, and I doubt anyone would believe your claim that you would want me to sign a near treasonous document if you did not plan something larger than the systematic rape of a frightened little girl. No other magnate would think you had not got something large up your sleeve, rather than something rabid down your trousers."
"Gryzelda! You should not speak to me in such terms!"
"Grow up, Sobiepan; I'm married to a Cossack. I do sabre drill with the lads, and bathe with them in the steam baths, I'm no sheltered child. And you are only protesting to buy time because you know what the magnates would think – and the less exalted szlachcice would assume a magnate was up to more than a little seduction."
"You... you would do that to your own brother?"
"I swore to protect that child. I also swore to uphold the Rzeczpospolita in Jeremi's stead. It is not a funny joke or a bit of a laugh for an ambassador to put over a wicked piece of work on a country just because he thinks he can confuse, bully, or browbeat a woman. Where would we be if we were paying four million złoty a year to Sweden, sworn not to ally with any country in the Holy Roman Empire, and with French troops permitted free access to inspect our troops? We would be isolated and vulnerable. And you were prepared to see that happen for your sexual gratification. You are disgusting, Jan Zamoyski, and I am only prepared to strike a deal with you because I have some vestige of love for my baby brother left in me, and because I don't really want Jeremi to have the scandal surrounding it."
"What do you want?" said Sobiepan, sulkily.
"Good, I am glad you are being sensible," said Gryzelda. "I want you to get rid of your harem; marry one of them if you want to try for a child, though I think you're too riddled with disease to get one. And I want you to write a will in which you leave the Ordynat of Zamość to Ruryk and failing him to Raina, and after her, to little Stanisłáw, our nephew."
"I can't name a female as an Ordynat..."
"If there's no clear heir or you don't leave it to one of your nephews or niece, I will take it when you die, and I will hold it," said Gryzelda. "And I want you to stay out of politics; you're so hopeless at it that your tomcatting looks like plotting, and your plotting is about as effective as that of a petty unbreeched."
"Leave the insults. I'll do it," said Sobiepan, sulkily. "I don't know why you get so exercised about me having a few women stashed away."
"Because it's technical slavery, and Jeremi swore to stamp it out, and because he would make an example of you because you are his brother-in-law, to show he shows no favour, because he's like that."
"Yes, he's a damned nasty fellow at times, and a total monk. I have no idea how he managed to find enough manhood to get you with child three times. I suppose that's the number of times he visited your chamber."
"How vulgar you are, equating manhood with volume and extravagance! I'm not going to dignify your crassness with an answer about Jeremi's prowess in the bedroom. It's none of your damned business. But I don't have to be ashamed of him if he strips to the waist, as your wife would be, from your soft living and appetites."
Sobiepan flushed, but held his tongue.
He had not asked the terms of the treaty, and he had not even considered that they might be unacceptable. He had been blinded by his desire for Marysieńka, which still made him ache for her. But his sister was right, most magnates who were not such stallions as he was would see political manoeuvring, not sexual.
And he was caught in a trap, and his sister was clever to spring it.
"I d o have to hand it to you, Gryzelda, you are a clever piece, and cunning," he admitted. "You have a brain as good as any man's."
"And better than most," said Gryzelda.
"So that little rat of an ambassador..."
"Is weeping for the profitable career I have put a stop to when I made him sign a treaty which gives us the stipend from France, because he did not want me to tell Mazarin about your ten thousand men waiting to invade France with his aid."
"Bugger me, my sister, you are as ruthless as Jeremi!"
"Yes," said Gryzelda.
She took it as a compliment.
It had not been more than half meant as such.
1 Around 600 thousand thalers/gold złoty; comparable to the subsidy from France to Sweden.
