You certainly couldn't tell anything from his speech.

"Bandits have knighted almost walrus," said the king of Sweden. "Is there jewel?"

It was very frustrating. Gustav Adolf didn't seem addle-pated, exactly. His words made no sense, but they weren't pure gibberish, either. This last sentence, for instance, had clearly been a question, and beneath all of the meaningless sentences you could detect a still intact grammar.

But what was he saying? It was as if his vocabulary was completely jumbled.

Before he left Magdeburg for Berlin, Colonel Hand had spent several hours with the American Moorish doctor, James Nichols. By now, four and a half years after the Ring of Fire which had brought the Moor into this world along with the other Americans in Grantville, it was the generally accepted opinion throughout Europe that Nichols was the continent's greatest living doctor. Probably even the world's.

One might ask, therefore, why Hand had had to interview Nichols in Magdeburg-instead of here in Berlin, at the bedside of Europe's most powerful ruler and Nichols' own sovereign. Or, perhaps even more to the point, why it was that Gustav Adolf had not been brought to Magdeburg with its superb medical facilities, instead of being kept in primitive Berlin.

He'd posed those questions directly, in fact. The answers had been…interesting.

"Ask your blessed chancellor," replied Nichols. His tone was blunt, to the point of being almost hostile. "It was Axel Oxenstierna who insisted on keeping Gustav Adolf in Berlin. Just as it was he who insisted-oh, sure, politely, but he had about a dozen goons with him to enforce the matter-that I leave Berlin and come back here, once I eliminated the risk of peritonitis."

"What reasons did he give for his decisions?"

"Bullpucky and hogwash." Hand didn't know those particular Americanisms, but their general meaning was clear enough.