After the downfall

by Harry Turtledove

  They hadn't killed everybody. A few Bucovinan men survived as slaves, a few women as — Hasso supposed — playthings. Some of the locals had the dazed look of people who'd lost everything in a natural disaster but somehow come through alive. Others seemed more calculating, perhaps trying to figure out how to make the best of what had happened to them. Seeing that thoughtful gleam in some of the women's eyes made Hasso want to cry and swear at the same time.

  Berbec clung close to him — close enough to be annoying, like a dog that always stayed at his heel. "Why don't you get lost?" Hasso snapped when he'd had enough.

  "If I leave you, master, I am lost," the captive replied. "I think someone will do for me." He hacked at his throat with the edge of his hand to leave no doubt about what he meant.

  And he was right enough to embarrass the German. "All right. Stay with me, then," Hasso said roughly. "Enough killing."

  "Too much killing," Berbec said.

  King Bottero took matters into his own hands — or rather, used his own foot. He booted the cooks out of their cots and bedrolls. They grumbled, but they came. When the king woke you up, you either got to work or tried to assassinate him. None of the cooks seemed ready for anything that drastic.

  Across the river, the Bucovinans in their castle would be eating breakfast, too. They had to know the Lenelli would try to cross the Oltet as soon as they could. They also had to know that, if Bottero's men made it across the river, their own chances weren't good. Hasso had seen and joined in more rear-guard actions than he liked to remember. Recruiting sergeants with medals and campaign ribbons all over their chests didn't talk about that kind of soldiering.

  He was spooning up porridge when Bottero came over to him. Berbec tried to disappear without moving a muscle. He needn't have worried; the king either truly didn't notice him or affected not to. It amounted to the same thing either way. To Hasso, Bottero came straight to the point: "Do you know any easy way to get across the Oltet?"

  "Is there a ford close by?" Hasso asked.

  Bottero shook his big head. "No."

  The Wehrmacht would have used rubber rafts to seize a bridgehead. No such items were part of the Lenello logistics train. "Have we got boats? Can we make rafts?"

  "We don't have boats. How could we carry them along?" Bottero said. With ox-drawn wagons as his main supply vehicles, he had a point. "Building rafts would take too cursed long. The weather won't get better. I want to hit the Grenye again, just as soon as I can."

  That made good sense. Even if the winter here wouldn't turn Russian, it wouldn't be a delight, either. Hasso shrugged. "Sorry, your Majesty. Then we have to do it the hard way — or can your wizards knock down that castle for you?"

  What did the Americans call that? Passing the buck, that's what it was. King Bottero, who had been scowling, brightened. "I'll find out," he said, and stomped off.

  Hasso carefully didn't smile. Even if the wizards told Bottero no, he'd get angry at them, not at his military adviser who'd fallen out of the sky. That suited Hasso just fine.

  Berbec might have tried to disappear, but he'd kept his ears open. He sketched a salute. "You are not just a bold warrior, my master," he said. "You are sly, too."

  "Danke schon" Hasso said, perhaps with less irony than he'd intended. He studied the Grenye he'd vanquished and then acquired. How much of that did Berbec mean, and how much was the grease job any slave with a gram of sense gave his master? Some of each, the German judged: the best flattery held a grain of truth that made all of it more likely to be believed.

  "What do you say?" Berbec scratched his head over the sounds of a language only one man in this world would ever speak.

  "I say, 'Thank you,'" Hasso answered, and then, "How do you say that in your language?" Berbec told him. When Hasso pronounced the words, Berbec's dark eyebrows twitched, so the German judged he'd made a hash of things. "Tell me when I am wrong," he said. "I want to say it right. Repeat for me, please." He'd had plenty of practice saying that in Lenello.

  "You sure you want me to say you are wrong?" Berbec understood the dangers inherent in that, all right.

  But Hasso nodded. "By the goddess, I do. I am angrier if I make mistake than if you tell me I make mistake."

  "Hmm." The native's eyebrows were very expressive. Frenchmen had eyebrows like that. So did Jews in Poland and Russia. Their eyebrows hadn't done them any good. Neither had anything else. Berbec's… made Hasso smile, anyway. "Well, we see." The Bucovinan still seemed anything but convinced.

  "If you tell me sweet lies and I find out, I make you sorry." Hasso tried to sound as fierce as… as what? As a Lenello who'd just sacked a town in Bucovin, that was what. Yes, that would do, and then some.

  It would if it convinced Berbec, anyhow. "Hmm," he repeated. Next to the Lenelli, maybe I'm not such a tough guy after all. He'd spent five and a half years in the biggest war in the history of the world, most of the last four on the Russian front — and in spite of everything he'd seen and done, he was still a softie next to Bottero's knights and foot soldiers. Maybe that said something good about the civilization that had blown itself to smithereens from the Atlantic to the Volga. He smacked Berbec on the back, not too hard. "You listen to me, you hear?"

  "You are my master. You could have killed me, and you didn't. Of course I listen to you," Berbec said. Something in his deep-set dark eyes added, If I feel like it.

  Hasso did him a favor: he pretended not to see that. He just laughed and slapped the Bucovinan on the back again and got ready for another day of warfare, for all the world as if there hadn't been a sack and a slaughter here the day before. He'd done that kind of thing back in his own world, too.

  King Bottero's artisans started gathering lumber from what was left of Muresh to resurface to bridge across the Oltet. That told Hasso the king's wizards hadn't come up with any brilliant ideas on their own. The artisans had to do considerable scrounging, too, because not much was left of Muresh.

  Orosei came over to Hasso as the Wehrmacht man watched the artisans at work. "You didn't have any sneaky schemes for getting across?" the master-at-arms asked.

  Hasso shrugged and spread his hands. "No miracles in my pockets. No ford. No boats. I think we have to do it the hard way."

  "Oh, well." Orosei shrugged, too. "I told the king to ask you. It was worth a try"

  "So you're to blame, eh?" Hasso made a joke of it. Orosei might have been doing him a favor.

  "That's me." Orosei grinned. Either he wasn't trying to screw Hasso or he had more guile in him than the German guessed.

  "I say to King Bottero, try the wizards." Hasso shrugged. "They have no miracles in their pockets, either."

  "Too bad," Orosei said. "They talk big. I'd like 'em better if they delivered on more of their promises, though. That poor bastard the Bucovinans caught… If he was hot stuff, why didn't he turn 'em into a bunch of trout before they got to work on him?"

  "Swords are faster than spells," Hasso said. So everybody had told him. Like a lot of things everybody said, it must have held some truth, or Flegrei would still be around. Hasso suspected it wasn't the last word, though.

  Bottero's master-at-arms let out a sour chuckle. "Yeah, they are. A good thing, too, or clowns like you and me'd be out of work. When kings wanted to fight wars, they wouldn't use anybody but those unicorn-riding nancy boys." He spat in the mud to show what he thought of wizards.

  Hasso had seen his share of homos in the Wehrmacht, and maybe more than his share in the Waffen-SS, where they seemed to gravitate. Yeah, sometimes you could blackmail them. But when they fought, they fought at least as well as anybody else. Some of them, in fact, made uncommonly ferocious soldiers, because they didn't seem to give a damn whether they lived or died.

  More boards thudded onto the stone framework of the bridge across the Oltet. The Bucovinans in the keep on the far bank watched the Lenelli work without trying to interfere… till Bottero's men replanked about half of the bridge. That brought them into archery range, and the Grenye s
tarted shooting as if arrows were going to be banned day after tomorrow.

  A Lenello shot through the throat clutched at himself and tumbled into the turbid green water five meters below. He wore a heavy mailshirt; he wouldn't have lasted long even without a mortal wound. Another big blond warrior came back cussing a blue streak, an arrow clean through his forearm.

  "You're lucky," somebody told the wounded man. "Now they can get it out easy — they won't have to push it through."

  "Bugger you with a pinecone, you stinking fool," the bleeding Lenello retorted. "If I was lucky, this goddess-cursed thing would've missed." Good grammar would have called for a subjunctive there. None of the soldiers seemed to miss it. Like any language, Lenello spoken informally was a different beast from the one the schoolmasters taught. Hasso smiled reminiscently, remembering all the German dialects he'd coped with. He wouldn't have to worry about that any more.

  The archery on the bridge was a different story. Other Lenelli fell, a few dead, more wounded. Some of the hurt men made it back under their own power; others needed buddies' help. Every soldier who helped a wounded friend was a soldier who wasn't retimbering the bridge. That work slowed to a crawl.

  Bottero sent archers out onto the span to shoot back. They were bigger, stronger men than the Bucovinans in the castle. But most of their arrows fell short. The natives, shooting down from a height, had gravity on their side. Working against it was a losing proposition.

  The Lenelli didn't need long to see as much. They quit shooting at the Grenye, and brought a troop of men with shields forward to protect the soldiers moving the planking forward. That wasn't perfect, but it worked well enough.

  Meter by meter, the planking advanced. As it neared the east bank of the Oltet, the Bucovinans in the castle tried something new. They stopped shooting at the men setting the planks in place and sent volley after volley of fire arrows at the lumber itself. Some of the long shafts with burning tow and tallow attached near the tip fell into the river and hissed out. But the Lenelli had to stomp out lots of others or drench them with buckets of water dipped up from below. One soldier, in a display of bravado, dropped his trousers and pissed a flame into oblivion.

  Here and there, though, the fire arrows started blazes before the Lenelli could suppress them. If those had spread, they might have driven King Bottero's men from the bridge. But some of the wood the Lenelli used was wet, which slowed down the flames. And the blonds managed to keep ahead of the fires in spite of everything their enemies could do.

  When it became clear that the Lenelli were going to make it over the Oltet, the Bucovinans in the castle fled, as they'd abandoned Muresh. They left Bottero nothing he could use. Not long after they abandoned the tower, smoke started pouring from it — they'd fired whatever was left inside.

  "Miserable bastards," Orosei grumbled.

  "Good soldiers," Hasso said. "They do their job, then they pull out. They hurt us, they delay us, they deny us the tower. Good soldiers."

  "They've got no business being good soldiers," the master-at-arms said. "They're nothing but a pack of Grenye savages."

  He sounded personally affronted that the enemy should do anything right. Some Germans in Russia had sounded the same way about the Ivans in 1941. After that, such expressions of amazement came a lot less often. The Wehrmacht was the best army in the world — which meant the Red Army had the best schoolmasters in the world. The same was bound to be true here.

  "How much do the Bucovinans learn from you?" Hasso asked.

  "Too bloody much, if you want to know what I think." No, Orosei didn't want to take them seriously.

  After the defenders fled, replanking the last bit of bridge went fast. With typical Lenello swagger, an officer leaped from the bridge onto the riverbank. He leaped — and he vanished. A moment later, a shriek rang out that Hasso could hear all the way across the river.

  "What the — ?" he said. Orosei spread his hands and shrugged, as baffled as the man from another world.

  Before long, the story came back across the bridge. So did the officer's body. The Bucovinans had dug themselves a mantrap on the riverbank: a cunningly concealed pit, with upward-pointing spikes set in the bottom. They knew their foes' habits, all right. They made the trap, and the Lenello jumped into it.

  "I've heard of them doing things like that before," Orosei said. "You've got to watch out for the spikes they use. They smear shit on them, to poison the wounds they make."

  "No matter here," Hasso said. He'd got a look at the dead officer. One of those spikes had gone through his chest, another through his throat. He'd bled like a stuck pig, which he might as well have been. His wounds wouldn't have time to fester.

  More Lenelli stepped onto the eastern bank of the Oltet. They moved more cautiously than that first luckless officer had, and probed the ground in front of them with spears. They found another mantrap a few meters farther in from the water's edge. The Grenye had used the night well indeed.

  Hasso wondered whether watchers would be waiting to harass the Lenelli as they filled in the pits. But the natives seemed to think they'd done everything they could to slow down Bottero's men here. The Lenelli crossed the Oltet with no further trouble.

  Orosei pointed to smoke rising up in the east. "They're burning things again," he said. "Do they really think that will slow us down?"

  "Yes," Hasso answered. "They're liable to be right, too. Where's the wagon train that should be here yesterday?"

  "Should have been — you talk funny, you know that?" the master-at-arms said. "I don't know where the miserable wagons are. We can't detach enough men to cover all of them."

  "I know," Hasso said. "Do you think the Bucovinans don't know, too? Without the wagons, without foraging on the country, what do we eat?"

  Orosei looked around. "Mud. Rocks." He rubbed his belly. "Yum."

  He startled a laugh out of Hasso. "All right — you have me there. But what do we do when we get hungry?"

  "Eat the goddess-cursed Bucovinans, for all I care," the Lenello answered. For all Hasso knew, he meant it. The Germans thought the Ivans were Untermenschen. The Lenelli thought the same thing about the natives here, only more so. Did they think the Grenye were far enough down the scale to do duty as meat animals? Hasso decided he didn't want to find out.

  He didn't want to let go of his own worries, either. "If the Bucovinans burn their crops, what do they eat?"

  "Their seed grain," Orosei answered. "Then they starve along with us, but they take longer."

  Bucovin was a big place — Hasso remembered the maps Bottero used. They weren't anywhere near so good as the ones the Wehrmacht used, but they showed that well enough. Could the natives bring in enough food from places where they weren't burning it to supply the ones where they were?

  He had no idea. When he asked Orosei, the master-at-arms only shrugged his broad shoulders. "Beats me," he said. "You're the spymaster, right? You're the one who's supposed to find out stuff like that, right?"

  "Right," Hasso said tightly. Orosei made intelligence work sound easy, which only proved he'd never done any. By the end of 1941, the Germans were sure they'd knocked out as many divisions as the Red Army had at the start of the war — but the Russians weren't within a million kilometers of quitting, or of running out of men.

  King Bottero sent out raiding parties to the north and south of his main line of march. They drove some pigs and a few cattle and sheep back to the army — and a few horses and donkeys as well. Those were riding or draft animals, but you could eat them if you had to. Though not a Frenchman who did it by choice, Hasso had chewed gluey horseflesh plenty of times on the Russian front. He'd been glad to get it then; if the Lenello cooks served it up, he'd eat it again now.

  The raiders also brought back some grain the Grenye had already harvested. It didn't make up for the wagons that weren't going to get to the army, though. Had the Bucovinans burned that grain or captured it? Only they knew.

  But they left no doubt about what had happened to t
he Lenello teamsters. They left a bloated, foul-smelling blond head in the road in front of Bottero's oncoming army. Someone had written a message in Lenello on a sheet of bark and put it by the head. Even Hasso had no trouble sounding out the two words: YOU NEXT.

  When King Bottero saw that, Hasso thought he would have a stroke. Hitler's rages were the stuff of legend in Germany; Bottero's fury now matched any fit the Fuhrer could have pitched. For a little while, the German didn't understand just why the king was going off like a grenade. Yes, the warning in the road was grisly, but it was no worse than a hundred things the Lenelli had done when they sacked Muresh.

  But then Bottero roared, "My horse — my horse, I tell you! — has more business pushing me around than these goddess-cursed, mindblind, soul-dead Grenye! They'll pay! Oh, how they'll pay!"

  That made the Wehrmacht officer nod to himself. It came down to the business of who were Untermenschen again. Bottero really would have taken it better had his horse tried to tell him to go back to his own kingdom. For the Bucovinans to assume equality with the invaders, even an equality of terror, was a slap in the face to everything the Lenello kingdoms stood for.

  And it wasn't just Bottero. All the Lenelli who saw the head and, even more important, who could read the crude threat by it, quivered with outrage. Velona was quieter than the king — Krakatoa erupting might have been noisier than Bottero, but Hasso couldn't think of anything else that would — but no less angry.

  "They dare," she whispered, as if speaking louder might make her burst. "They truly dare to try conclusions with us, do they? Well, his Majesty has the right of it — we'll teach them a lesson they'll remember for the next hundred years. The ones we leave alive will, anyhow."

  Germans had talked like that in Poland in 1939, and in Russia in 1941. Poles and Russians by the millions had died, too. The Germans had expected nothing less; those deaths were reckoned a prerequisite for clearing the Lebensraum Germans needed in the fertile croplands of the east.