She forced her fingers to grip his palm, even though her skin was crawling and she was starting to shake. “What are you goingto do, rob a bank?”
“Now that’s a suitable job for a mercenary,” he said, “not counting cards.” He had done passably well at learning to count, but Flicka suspected that her and Wulf’s weird eidetic memories made it easier to learn how.
“I thought you weren’t a mercenary,” she said. “Every time I’ve called you that, or a soldier of fortune, or whatever, you and Wulf have been so adamant thatyou aren’t. I’ve never seen what the problem is.”
“That’s because you’re German,” Dieter said, “and I’m Swiss.”
“Oh, it’s the Swiss neutrality thing, again,” she said.
“Yes, it’s the Swiss neutrality thing. There’s a law against any Swiss citizen being a mercenary.”
“Because it might break your precious neutrality.” The shakes hadn’t taken hold of her too much, and she managed to smile a littlemore at him. “You have the oldest buildings in Europe because no one bombed you during World War Two.”
“Have you ever read our Constitution?” he asked.
“Only Wulf took out Swiss citizenship. I didn’t.”
“We must refrain from engaging in war, not allow belligerent states to use our territory, and not supply mercenary troops to belligerent states.”
“That makes sense. Switzerland never fightsin wars, so you can’t be mercenaries. The Swiss would probably stand in the middle of a battlefield with your hands up, proclaiming your neutrality while bullets and bombs whiz by. You’d make terrible mercenaries.”
Dieter rolled his head on the pillow, shaking his head no. “It’s because we’re the best mercenaries in the world, and we’re too dangerous to be let loose.”
Flicka laughed. “Thinkthat much of yourself, do you?”
“It’s the absolute truth. The Swiss were heavily involved in all the medieval land grab wars, fighting hard for the new Swiss Confederacy. Back in the Middle Ages, we became very good at winning wars. So very good, that it became a thriving business. Are you sure you care about this?”
Flicka tightened her hand on his, holding on. “Keep talking to me.”
“All right.I knew all of this from learning our history when I was a child, but I studied it more at university when I took that military history degree in London.”
That was an interesting admission from the man with no childhood or past, that he had learned Swiss history,ourhistory, as a child. “So you speak from authority.”
His hand curled more tightly around hers, and his smile reached his eyes. “Inthe early Middle Ages, Switzerland was a poor country, very poor. Because the Alps dominate our topography, we could not farm to any sustainable level. There’s just no flat land, anywhere. We had no colonies to strip-mine faraway lands and send back gold. Because Switzerland is landlocked, we don’t have a seaport for trade. We weren’t farmers or traders, but we were large, strong men, suitablefor military service. The one thing that we could do was to fight and win wars better than anyone else. We had to import food, cloth, and all materials, so Switzerland’s principal export was war.”
Flicka smiled at her very large, strong Swiss mercenary.
“We had some serious setbacks, however. In the Battle of Marignano in 1515, the French and Venetians arrived on the battlefield with artilleryand armored cavalry, and we were armed only with pikes and spears. We were losing the medieval arms race. That was our first step toward neutrality, and we stepped back from involvement in Europe’s major wars. We did, however, rent ourselves exclusively to France as cannon fodder.”
Flicka asked, “Is that why they haven’t won a battle since you guys became neutral?”
“Now, now, your German rootsare showing.”
Flicka touched her blond hair. “I don’t have any roots. It’s natural.”
Dieter smiled a little more at her joke. “Yeah, I know it’s natural. The problem was that, even though we only served as mercenaries for French masters, we still had the problem we had been having for centuries. Sometimes we ended up on both sides of the battle, fighting our fellow Swiss mercenaries.”
Flickabarely noticed when Dieter drew her hand a little closer to his chest.
He continued, “We held the Swiss Alps and the strategically important passes through the mountains for ourselves, but we pulled back within our borders. Our last major mercenary endeavors were serving as bodyguards for the French monarchy, hired by the last king, Louis XVI, and then we served France during the Napoleonic Wars,where we Swiss mercenaries crushed the Prussian-Saxon army during the Jena campaign. You know, the one commanded by Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, the Duke of Brunswick.”
Flicka, a current Duchess ofBrunswick-Lüneburg,rolled her eyes in her head. That military writer who had written theOn Warbooks that she had given to Dieter had served under Ferdinand during the Jena campaign. “Yeah, you’ve mentionedhim once or twice.”
The back of her hand touched Dieter’s chest.
Panic rippled, but she tamped it down.
“The French turned on us and invaded Switzerland, breaking up the first confederacy,” he said. “So, when the Congress of Vienna met in 1814, partly to discuss the end of the French civil war but also to discuss how to stop the Swiss from killing everyone else in Europe, we made a suggestion:let us be neutral. If everyone recognized us as neutral, we would stop being mercenaries forever.”
