Jozef laughed. "How should I know? I'm just a bastard, not an honest workingman. But at a guess, I'd say…"

He gave his friend yet another sideways glance, this one quite sly. "I'd say not. After all, you have lots of calluses on your soul and they don't hurt, do they?"

Lukasz called him a very unfavorable term in Lithuanian.

Jozef grinned. "I have the most marvelous American expression."

After he spoke it a few times, Lukasz began practicing the pronunciation. "Modderfooker… mudder-yes, it is nice."

The Anaconda Project, Episode Six

Written by Eric Flint

When Jozef finished with his presentation, the immediate reaction of his two listeners was about what he'd expected.

Silence. Total, complete silence.

After a few seconds, Lukasz Opalinski sighed faintly and leaned back a little further in his heavily-upholstered armchair. He gave the big hetman sitting to his left a glance that was just short of apprehensive.

For his part, Koniecpolski's expression might have been that of a statue. Josef could not detect a trace of whatever thoughts or emotions might be stirring within that large and imposing head. The hetman simply gazed at him, almost serenely.

And… said nothing. Nothing at all.

Eventually, Jozef realized that Koniecpolski didn't plan to say anything, either. The hetman wasn't going to agree, nor was he going to argue.

Instead…

"These are matters for the king and the Sejm to decide," the hetman said heavily. "So there is no point in discussing them further here."

Matters for the king and the Sejm to decide.

Given the current king and the Sejm as it existed, that amounted to saying that nothing would be done. The Vasa dynasty that had come to rule the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania after the Jagiellonian dynasty died out-insofar as any monarch could be said to "rule" that land dominated by noblemen-was a branch of the same dynasty that ruled Sweden. Wladislaw IV, like his father Zygmunt III, was obsessed with gaining the Swedish crown to which he felt he was entitled. He viewed the land he actually ruled as nothing much more than a footstool to reach the land he wished to rule. He'd even said in public that he disliked Poland.