The Lenello made the goldpiece disappear. Grinning, he said, "You may be a foreigner, and you sure talk funny, but you're a sport."
"Thanks," Hasso said dryly, and began his tour of the battlefield.
He'd walked plenty of fields in his own world, wherever victory let him do it. The last year and a half of the war, he thanked God every time he got away from a battlefield in one piece. He hadn't had many chances to look around afterwards, not unless he wanted the Russians to leave his body there along with too many others wearing Feldgrau.
Here, though… The Bucovinans had stood more bravely than he'd thought they could. Even after they had to know they were beaten, they went on doing as well as they could for as long as they could. They fought like soldiers, not like savages fierce in victory who panicked and broke the minute things went wrong.
A dead native clutched the shaft of the spear that pinned him to the ground. The horrible grimace he'd worn when he died was relaxing towards a corpse's blankness. His eyes stared sightlessly up at the sky.
Not far away, a dead Lenello sprawled in a pool of blood. His left hand clutched the stump of his right arm. He'd lost his right hand, and bled to death before a surgeon or a wizard could do anything to help him. Flies buzzed around the blood. A big one landed in the blood-streaked, callused palm of the severed hand.
You had an easier time telling how hard and how well someone fought on this field than on a lot of them on the Russian front. Artillery and bullets could be nearly random in how they killed and maimed. But if a sword or spear went in from the front, the dead man faced his foe when he died. If he had a wound in the back, he was likely trying to run away when he died.
The Grenye killed from behind almost all lay at some distance from where they'd posted their line. Those were the men who'd tried to escape, most of them after the fight was irretrievably lost. Yes, they'd fought hard, all right.
King Bottero rode up to Hasso. The king had a cut on the back of his right hand; he'd been in the thick of the fighting himself. The edge of his shield was as notched as a saw blade. His horse limped.
"You did what you said you'd do," Bottero declared. "Have you got any idea how unusual that is?"
Hasso saluted Lenello-style, his fist over his heart. "Your Majesty, I am a stranger, a foreigner, at your court. I don't dare fail."
"Why not? My own people do, all the time."
"They are your people," Hasso replied. "You forgive them because they are. But if I go wrong, you say, 'He is a foreigner trying to fool us. Off with his head!'"
Bottero threw back his head and laughed. "Are you sure you were never a king yourself?"
"Never!" Hasso pushed away the words with both hands, which set Bottero laughing again. The German went on, "Never want to be a king, either."
"You're smart," Bottero said. "You don't have everybody below you looking up at you and thinking what an idiot you are."
"Not me, your Majesty," Hasso said, which was plenty to make Bottero almost fall off his horse with mirth. Hasso spoke as innocently as he could — with exaggerated innocence, in fact. He was glad he'd amused his new sovereign. He was also glad Bottero believed him when he said he had no royal ambitions. It was true. Even if it weren't, he had to act as if it were. Confessing that you did want to wear a crown was apt to be more hazardous to your life expectancy than a Russian armored division.
"Find any loot worth keeping?" Bottero asked.
Soldiers here made a big part of their living from booty. Hasso, used to regular pay, had to remind himself of that. He had picked up one nice dagger with gold chasing on the blade. He showed it to the king.
Bottero nodded. "That's not bad. It's one of our patterns, but it looks to me like a copy by a Grenye smith. The chasing is very nice — I like that dragon — but the work on the blade itself is cruder than what we'd do."
Hasso didn't have the eye for such fine details. He'd kept the dagger because of the gold. He didn't expect to use it as a weapon. He had nothing against war knives; he carried one of his own. But it was just a tool, not a fancy Solingen blade like the ones SS men were so proud of.
"Where do we go now?" Hasso asked. "We should push after the Bucovinans. Not let them come back together, get ready to fight again." He wanted to say regroup, but he couldn't come up with the word in Lenello. He was a lot more fluent than he had been even a month before, but talking still sometimes felt like wading through glue.
"You have been eating meat, haven't you?" King Bottero smiled at him like a father smiling at an adventurous little boy. "We need to get ready to fight again ourselves, you know. Do you think your striking column will work as well now that they know we use it?"
That was a genuinely shrewd question. "I don't know, your Majesty," Hasso replied. "You know the Bucovinans better than I do, so you are a better judge. How fast do they learn? Will they have an assault column of their own in the next battle?" The possibility hadn't occurred to him till now.
"No." The king shook his head. "They aren't that quick. But they'll look for ways to stop the column from breaking through. And they'll have their own soon. You can bet on that. When the other Lenello kingdoms hear about what we're doing, they'll start using these columns, too."
"Defense," Hasso muttered. Did he know enough about the Swiss hedgehog to teach it to Bottero's men? He had to hope he did, because they were going to need it, if not at the next battle then before too long. He could see that coming.
"All this is worry for another time," Bottero said. "You kept your word to me. I won't forget, and you won't be sorry." With the wave of a gauntleted hand, he rode off.
Not far away, a Lenello foot soldier was slitting the throat of a feebly writhing Bucovinan. Still holding the bloody knife, he nodded to Hasso. "Boy, I wish the king would talk to me that way," he said.
Everybody had problems. The foot soldier thought his were worse than Hasso's. Maybe he was even right. All the same, Hasso knew his own weren't small. He also knew they wouldn't go away any time soon.
Back in Germany, women prided themselves on how little they ate. A birdlike appetite was a sign of femininity. After the battle, Velona ate enough for two troopers, maybe three. "Where do you keep it?" Hasso asked. He was hungry, but not that hungry. "Have you got a hollow leg?"
The joke was old in German, but new in Lenello. Velona laughed so hard, she almost spat out the swig of beer she'd just taken. "No, no, no," she said. "You have to understand — I'm eating for two."
"You're going to have a baby?" Hasso took the phrase to mean what it would have in his native tongue. The next question that ran through his mind was, Is it mine? He didn't ask that one, not least for fear she would up and tell him no.
But she laughed again, this time at him, though as far as he could tell without malice. "No, not a baby. I'm sure I'm not pregnant," she said. "I just stopped flowing a couple of days before the battle, remember, and I'm glad I did, too. What I meant was, I'm eating for me and the goddess both."
"Oh." Feeling like a fool, Hasso thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. It hurt more than it should have; somewhere in the battle, he'd got a bruise there, even if he couldn't remember how or when. And he found himself nodding. No wonder Velona never gained a gram! But carrying a goddess around wasn't the sort of diet likely to become popular in Berlin or Cologne or Vienna… even if the German women in those towns were free of invaders, which they weren't.
How big a toll did the goddess take on a mere mortal's metabolism? Hasso had no idea, but Velona knew the answer from the inside out.
Her smile, he judged, held more than a little relief. "I could feel the goddess' power running through me," she said. "The savages could feel it, too, when I struck and even before that, when I bore down on them. I could tell."
"I believe you," Hasso said, which was nothing but the truth. When the goddess manifested herself in Velona, she definitely seemed more than human. Just being near her at such times made your hair prickle up, as if lightning had crashed down clo
se by. Then, several beats more slowly than a Lenello would have, Hasso saw what she was driving at here. "We are in Bucovin, but the power still runs through you."
"The goddess is still with me," Velona agreed. But then her smile slipped. "It was like this the last time I came into Bucovin, too. At first, it was like this. After that… It wasn't that the goddess left me, or not exactly like that. When she tried to speak, though, I couldn't make out what she was saying. The land in these parts was thinking about something else."
How did she mean that? Never having had any kind of divinity speak to him or through him, Hasso couldn't know, not the way Velona did. He thought of a bad telephone connection. Then he laughed at himself. What good did a thought from his own world do him? He couldn't make Velona or anyone else here understand it. What would telephones seem to the Lenelli but magic?
Crystal balls, now… They had crystal balls, or something like them. "Wizards can talk back and forth from far away, right?" he asked, an idea starting to sprout in his mind.
"Yes, that's true." Velona nodded. She laid her hand on his in what was, he realized a moment later, a gesture of sympathy. "I can guess how strange that must be to you, coming from a world with so little magic in it."
Hasso didn't laugh. If he started, he feared he wouldn't be able to stop. Stick to business, he told himself. And so he did: "All right. If we split our army in two, the Grenye would also have to split their army in two, wouldn't they?"
"I'd think so, but I'm no Grenye general, goddess be praised," Velona said. "Where are you going with this?"
All at once, the sprouted idea flowered and fruited. "We can keep track of our two armies with magic, always know where they are, move together thanks to magic. We can come back together when we need to, and defeat the Grenye in detail." For once, he found the technical term he needed right on the tip of his tongue. If that wasn't a good omen, what would be?
Would Velona get it? Was it, in fact, a thought worth getting? Or was he misunderstanding the way things worked here? He waited to see how she responded.
He started to worry when she didn't answer right away. Her brow creased in serious thought. Seeing those tiny wrinkles reminded him she was human as well as divine. Were these human, normal moments the ones Jesus' followers had cherished most? Hasso wouldn't have been surprised, though none of the Gospels talked about anything so completely mundane.
"It could work," Velona said at last. "It could well work. We didn't need such tricks when we fought the Grenye after we first came across the sea. We knew so much more than they did, the fights were walkovers. A ploy like that wouldn't work when Lenelli fight Lenelli, because there's magic on both sides then. But against Bucovin… Yes, it might be just the thing." A slow smile spread across her face. "And how fitting to turn their mindblindness against them, to use it as one of our weapons of war."
She kissed him. It didn't go any further than that, not then. They were both weary from the fighting. Hasso stank even in his own nostrils: of horse, of sweat, of fear, and of the blood that splashed his mailshirt and his skin. He didn't think Velona smelled of fear. That was a pretty good sign she had the goddess dwelling in her. After a battle, few people could avoid the sour stink of terror.
"You will tell the king tomorrow," she said, as if she were an officer giving a common soldier his orders.
Does she have the right to tell me what to do like that? Hasso wondered. In her own person, she probably didn't. But that was the point, as he'd realized a moment before. She wasn't just in her own person, not when she had the goddess for company. And the goddess could tell King Bottero what to do, let alone a newly arrived foreigner like Hasso Pemsel.
Automatically, Hasso's arm shot out in the salute he was more used to than the one the Lenelli used. "Zu Befehl!" he said, German tasting strange in his mouth. He turned it into Lenello: "At your command!"
"Well, all right," Velona said. "I didn't mean it quite like that. But for now, let's get some sleep." There was an order Hasso was glad to obey.
IX
"I am your slave," the Grenye prisoner insisted.
Hasso had never expected to see the warrior he'd captured again. But there the fellow was, helping one of the cooks dole out bowls of porridge flavored with salty, fennel-filled sausage and onions. It wasn't delicious, but it filled the belly. On campaign, that counted for more.
"Is he yours, sir?" the cook asked. "I didn't mean to take him if he really belonged to somebody, but you know how it is. We can always use an extra pair of hands."
"What is the custom?" Hasso asked in return. "He did surrender to me yesterday."
"Then he's yours if you want him," the cook said. "If you don't, I'll go on using him — he seems willing enough. Or you can feed him to the water snakes — but if you wanted to do that, you could have done it when he tried to give up."
The Bucovinan pointed to Hasso. "You spared me. I work for you now. I am Berbec." He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "You are a great lord, yes? A great lord, sure, but you never have man like me before."
"That's what I'm afraid of," Hasso said dryly. Berbec laughed louder than the joke deserved… if it was a joke. Was taking a prisoner as a batman, as a valet — hell, as a slave — clasping a water snake to his bosom? The cook didn't seem to think so. Hasso found himself nodding. "Well, come on, then, Berbec. What can you do for me that I can't do for myself?"
"All kinds of things." Berbec bowed to him, then also bowed to the cook for whom he'd been working. The motion was different from the stiffer one the Lenelli — and the Germans — used. It might almost have been a move from a dance. "You don't have any other slaves?"
"Not right now," Hasso said.
Berbec clicked his tongue between his teeth. "You poor fellow." He cocked his head to one side, eyeing Hasso with sparrowish curiosity. "You look like a Lenello, but you don't talk like. Where you from?"
"A faraway country," the German replied, which was true but uninformative. He still didn't trust Berbec not to disappear the minute he turned his back. "Can you take care of a horse?"
"I do that." Berbec nodded eagerly. He might have picked the next thought out of Hasso's mind, for he went on, "Not steal him, neither. You could kill me, but you spare. I owe you my life. I pay back."
Maybe he meant it. Some people, and some peoples, were punctilious about their honor, to the point that looked like stupidity to anyone with a less rigid code. Whether the Grenye of Bucovin were like that, whether Berbec himself was… I just have to find out, Hasso thought. In the meantime, I have to be careful.
"You have funny helmet," Berbec remarked. His hands shaped the flare of the German Stahlhelm.
"In the style of my country," Hasso said. The Lenelli wore plain conical helms, more like those of the Normans than any others he knew. So did the Bucovinans, probably in imitation of the blonds from overseas.
"Not bad. Maybe turn sword better." Berbec might be a little man, but he was a warrior. "But nasal is new. Not have before?" He was a warrior with sharp eyes, too. That nasal was riveted on. The Lenelli couldn't weld steel, and Hasso didn't trust solder to hold. Berbec chattered on: "Why you not have before? Keep face from getting split open."
"War in my land doesn't usually come down to swordstrokes," Hasso replied. And wasn't that the sad and sorry truth? A helmet wouldn't stop a rifle round, though it would keep out some shell fragments. High-velocity bullets made most body armor more trouble than it was worth. Only if you were fighting with bayonets or entrenching tools would a nasal matter. Once in a blue moon, in other words. German armorers didn't see the point of adding one, and who was he to say they were wrong… for the kind of war they fought?
Berbec stared at him. Hasso thought the Bucovinan would call him a liar. But then Berbec thrust out a stubby, accusing finger. "You have the thunderflasher," he said. That wasn't a word in Lenello, but it was a pretty good description of a firearm. "You point it at someone, and it goes boom, and he falls over. All soldiers in your country carry thunderflash
ers, then?"
No, he was nobody's fool. "That's right," Hasso said.
"The Lenelli have all kinds of things. They are clever, the Lenelli." Maybe Berbec felt he could talk freely about them because Hasso wasn't one. "But they don't have thunderflashers." He eyed Hasso again, this time, the Wehrmacht officer judged, apprehensively. And why not? If the Lenelli all carried Schmeissers, Bucovinan resistance would last a minute and a half, tops.
"Can't make them here." Hasso wanted the words back as soon as they came out. Some Intelligence officer he was, blabbing like a fool!
Velona came up to the two of them. As soon as she saw Berbec, she understood what was going on. "He's one you caught yourself?" she asked. When Hasso nodded, she went on, "Good. You've been doing too much for yourself." She brushed her lips across his and walked on.
Berbec stared after her — not as a man will watch a good-looking woman, but more as anyone might stare at a lightning bolt smashing down close by. "That was — the goddess — the woman who, uh, carries the goddess." He might be a slave, but this was the first time Hasso had seen him without his self-possession.
"Yeah." Hasso nodded.
"She doesn't need a thunderflasher to cut through us," Berbec said sadly. "Only a sword — and herself."
Hasso nodded again, not without sympathy. What was it like for the Grenye, without magic of their own, to try to stand against Velona when the goddess was strong in her? Like a lone rifleman against a King Tiger panzer? Worse, probably, because the panzer and the infantryman belonged to the same world. The Grenye had to feel the very heavens were fighting against them — and they wouldn't be so far wrong, would they?
Berbec's stare swung back to Hasso. It was as if he could still see the mark of her kiss glowing on the Wehrmacht officer's face. "She is… your woman?" He sounded like someone afraid to be right.
"Yes, she's my woman." Hasso felt the irony in his voice. Berbec might not understand, but, to the Lenello way of thinking, Hasso was Velona's man and not the other way around.
After the downfall Page 15