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said, and I knew what I spoke of.   I had seen the smoking ruins with no one left alive, the frightened people taking to the road looking for a safe place when there is none, their screams when cavalry cut through them, riding down children for sport.   "There will be nothing," I said.   Orchards ablaze, apple blossoms standing for a moment incongruous against the flames before the darkness took them, fields unplowed that would yield no harvest except skeletons, smoke rising to the sky from the pyre of the world.  
    "No planting and no harvest," Trcka said.  
    No glass blown in empty shops, a fine pulverized powder all that was left of a craftsman's life, book pages twisting on the wind, torn and worthless and ultimately empty….
    "No learning and no printing, no building and no crafting."   Trcka put his hands together around his brandy.   "We will make a wasteland.   We already do."
    The words came unbidden in my mind, like words of a song I had heard in childhood.   "Who will plant young olive trees?   Who will plow fields that are fallow?"
    "You will," Trcka said, and his words fell like the bronze tolling of a bell in the silence.
    I looked at him, this ordinary man with his ordinary face.   "I am a soldier," I said.
    He spread his hands.   "Let me show you something," he said.   He got up and went to the press, returned with papers that he spread before me.   "You read well enough."   He opened the first and smoothed it before me.   "This was from a courier intercepted in the spring.   The second was from one taken in September.   I need not tell you their importance."
    I read them.   I read them twice, turning the pages with careful hands.
    "This is a letter," I said, "from Cardinal Richelieu to the Emperor."
    "Just so," Trcka said.   "From that Richelieu who rules France in all but name.   To our Emperor."
    "He offers money," I said, reading it again.   "A great deal of money.   And by the second one it has been accepted, one Catholic monarch to another.   Money and guns.   Money and cannon."   I looked up at Trcka, who bent over the table.   "France is allied with the Swedes against us.   They have already given them a great deal, otherwise they would have already withdrawn to their own country.   Richelieu has been the prop of their army for the last four years."
    "And so?" Trcka asked.
    "And now he would secretly support us?"   Wheels within wheels, a game I could parse too easily.   Far too easily.
    "What does he gain by that?" Trcka asked quietly.
    "You know well what he does," I said.   My mouth compressed into a thin line.   "He pays us to fight one another.   We dance like puppets on a string for his amusement.   No, not for his amusement, but for the good of France.   Sweden and Bohemia and Poland and all the states of the Empire tear one another apart like dogs in a fight, while France stands back unsullied, her wealth and her palaces intact.   He goads us to attack one another, to destroy our universities and kill our farmers, and all it costs him is a bit of gold!"
    Trcka nodded.
    "We are played for fools," I said.   My mind should not compass this, but it too easily did.   "Richelieu has played us all for fools.   We have spent a decade and more killing one another, Catholic and Protestant alike in the name of God, and it is nothing but Richelieu's game."   I looked up at him.   "Wallenstein knows?"
    "Wallenstein knows," Trcka said.   "He gave me leave to speak to you."
    I blinked.   I said the first thing that came to mind.   "Why?"
    "Because he seeks a separate peace with the Swedes, and you are his man, not the Emperor's."  
    I let out a long breath.   "That is true," I said.   Wallenstein was a soldier and a good one, and I had not met Ferdinand.   He did not sully his hands with the likes of me.
    "Will you support him?"
    "Yes."   I looked down at the paper again, proof of the greatest treason.   Yes, we were but playthings for the great, but this…