What the Germans hadn't expected was how many of their own number would die. The Slavs were uncommonly stubborn about refusing to be cleared, and now Hasso's folk fled before them instead of driving them away.
Could that happen here? He had trouble believing it. The Bucovinans were brave, and there were lots of them, but they were outclassed in ways the Ivans hadn't been. Still, that head and the warning by it spoke of more implacable purpose than Hasso had looked to see from the natives.
They spoke of such things to him, anyhow. King Bottero took another message from them. "Burn the head," he commanded in a voice like iron. "His soul will ascend to the heavens." He looked around. Had he spotted any Bucovinans, he probably would have ordered them sacrificed to serve the Lenello teamster in the world to come. His face had that kind of intense, purposeful stare, anyhow. But, since he didn't, he pointed to the bark with the writing. "Dig a hole and throw that in. Don't cover it over yet, though, by the goddess."
His men sprang to obey him. That was partly their own anger working, and partly their fear. Anyone who tried standing against Bottero in that moment would have been a dead man in the next. The dirt by the side of the road was soft and easy to dig up. One of the Lenelli picked up the piece of bark with his fingertips, as if it were unclean. After he dropped it into the hole, he scrubbed his hands on the dead grass and then spat after it.
Spitting wasn't enough to satisfy Bottero. He dismounted from his great war-horse, walked over to the hole, undid his trousers, and took the most furious and majestic leak Hasso had ever imagined, let alone seen.
Even that didn't suffice, not for the king. He gestured to the leaders around him. Hasso didn't care one way or the other about pissing on an offensive sign. If Bottero wanted him to, he would. The king did, and so he did. Other officers' efforts made a pretty fair puddle in the hole in the ground.
Hasso was taken aback when Bottero waved Velona up to the hole. He could see why Bottero wanted to show the goddess' utter contempt for the Bucovinan warning, but… Velona didn't seem embarrassed; she just squatted and pissed. If it didn't bother her, Hasso told himself it shouldn't bother him, either.
After that, the Lenelli shoveled in some dirt, too. The army rode on. Velona looked… maybe unhappy, maybe just distant. "You don't like what you just did?" Hasso asked, guiding his horse up alongside hers.
"Oh," she said in some surprise, as if recalled to herself. "No. It isn't that. The natives deserve what we gave them. But… I wish he hadn't buried it, that's all. The earth here fights for Bucovin."
She'd said that before, about her last visit to the Grenye land. What did it mean here? Did even she know? Hasso thought about asking, and then thought again.
XI
Bucovinan raiders hit harder at Bottero's scouts and supply wagons once the Lenelli got over the Oltet. They didn't stop the king's army, but they harassed it and slowed it down — the last thing it needed as fall moved on toward winter. Falticeni, the capital of Bucovin, lay… somewhere up ahead, anyhow.
As winter snow came down, a few German units fought their way into the suburbs of Moscow and, in the distance, got a glimpse of the Kremlin. Then the Ivans threw them back, and they never came so close again. Hasso wished he hadn't thought of that, even if the weather here was milder.
The king's temper frayed. He gathered his generals and wizards together so he could shout at them all at the same time. "Why aren't you keeping the outriders safe, curse you?" Bottero bellowed.
"We're doing everything we know how to do, your Majesty." An officer named Nuoro had charge of the supply train. "But there aren't enough of us, and there are too stinking many Bucovinans. Things go wrong sometimes, that's all."
"That's all, he says!" King Bottero rolled his eyes. "If things go on like this, we'll be eating our belts and our boots before too long."
He exaggerated — by how much, Hasso wasn't sure. Nuoro gave him a stiff, almost wooden, salute. "What would you have me do, your Majesty?"
"Push the supplies through. Don't let the teamsters get massacred. How hard is that?" Bottero demanded.
"In a land full of raiders and bushwhackers, sire, it's not so easy. How many more soldiers will you give me to keep the wagons safe?" Nuoro asked.
"Well, maybe a few," the king said. "I can't give you too many more. We need them to beat the savages back. That's what we're here for, you know."
"Maybe we haven't got enough soldiers for everything we need to do… sire," Nuoro said. How many times had the Germans worked through the same agonizing choices in the vastnesses of the Soviet Union? How much good did their agonizing do them? Not bloody much.
But Bottero had options that weren't available to the Wehrmacht. He turned to his wizards. "If I string you out along the route back to the border, you can smell out ambushes, right? You can stop them?"
"Well, yes, your Majesty," Aderno said. "But then we won't be here with the striking force in case of battle."
"What?" Now Bottero looked — and sounded — highly offended, so much so that he might almost have struck a pose. People in a position to know said the Fuhrer did stuff like that. Acting had to be one of the things that went into ruling. Still offended, the king went on, "You think we can't beat the barbarians by ourselves?"
That question had only one possible answer, and Aderno gave it: "Of course you can, your Majesty. We might make it a little easier for you, that's all."
"By the goddess, we'll manage on our own," Bottero said. "But if you can't conjure up the grub we need to keep going — and it doesn't look like you can do that — the next best thing for you is to make sure the plain old ordinary grub from our own kingdom gets here safe. How does that sound?"
Aderno saluted. "As you wish it, your Majesty, so shall it be."
A German would have shot out his arm and said, "Heil Hitler!" An Ivan, no doubt, would have nodded and said, "Yes, Comrade General Secretary!" It all amounted to the same thing in the end.
Then Hasso had a disconcerting thought. Stalin had almost led his country right off a cliff in the early days of war on the Russian front, but the Ivans went right on saying, "Yes, Comrade General Secretary!" And the Fuhrer damn well had led the Reich off a cliff as the war ground on, but the Germans went right on saying, "Heil Hitler!" Obedience was all very well, but didn't it have limits somewhere?
Somewhere, certainly. Here? No. Bottero had given a reasonable order. It might not work out, but chances were it would. And Hasso also thought the Lenelli could beat whatever Bucovin threw at them. The natives were brave, but all the courage in the world didn't matter when it ran into technique.
So the Wehrmacht taught, anyhow. But who wasn't in Moscow, and who was in Berlin? So what if one German was worth three Ivans? If every Landser knocked down his three Russians, and then a fourth Russian showed up, and a fifth…
Exactly how big was Bucovin? How many swarthy little men did it hold, swarthy little men who didn't want to live under a big blond king who could roar like a lion? Enough for their numbers to cancel out the huge advantage in weapons and skill the Lenelli had? Hasso didn't know.
He hoped like hell Bottero did.
Off rode the wizards on their gleaming unicorns. Hasso was sorry to see them go, not so much because he'd miss them — they were a contentious, bad-tempered lot — but because he'd miss their mounts. The unicorns were marvelous and beautiful. Without them, the army seemed only… an army. Its glamour was gone.
Well, almost. Velona still rode with Bottero and his soldiers. Her glamour was of a different sort from the unicorns', which didn't make it any less real. Most of the time, she was just herself, not a woman in whom the goddess dwelt. Even as herself, she was striking, of course, but there was more to it than that. She held the memory of the goddess whether touched by the deity or not.
Hasso sometimes wondered if he was imagining that, but never for long. He knew better. That doubt was just the sputtering of his rational mind, here in a world where rationality mattered so much less than it did
in the one where he grew to manhood.
As if to prove as much, two wagon trains in a row made it through to King Bottero's army. The teamsters were full of praise for what the wizards had done to help them on the way. "They sent them savages running with lightning singeing the hair off their balls," one driver said enthusiastically. "I'll buy those bastards a beer any day of the week, twice on Sundays."
Weeks here had ten days, and Sundays were feast days instead, but Hasso tried to turn Lenello into idiomatic German inside his head. Most of the time, he did pretty well. Every once in a while… Every once in a while, he might as well have been in another world. Funny how that works, he thought with a sour smile.
Things didn't get better the next day. The Lenelli were marching near a river — the Aryesh, it was called — that ran north and east. It should have shielded their left from any trouble from the Bucovinans. It should have, but it didn't. Somehow, a raiding party appeared at dawn where no raiding party had any business being. The enemy soldiers shot volleys of arrows into the startled Lenello infantry, then galloped off before King Bottero's horsemen could harry them.
Bottero, predictably, was furious. "They have no business doing that!" he shouted. "They have no right to do that! How did they get there? They came out of nowhere!"
"They must have crossed the river, your Majesty," said the infantry commander, a stolid soldier named Friddi.
"Brilliant!" The king was savagely sarcastic. "And how did they do that? No bridge in these parts, and it's too deep to ford. Maybe they had catapults fling them across!"
"Maybe magic flung them across, sire," Friddi said.
"Don't be any dumber than you can help," Bottero said. "They're Grenye, by the goddess! They can't do that. And we don't think they've got any renegades doing it for them. If they do, those bastards'll be a long, hard time dying, I promise you that."
Hasso thought of Scanno, back in Drammen. Scanno liked Grenye better than his own folk, and made no bones about it. Dammit, we never did pick him up and grill him about how he beat Aderno's spell, he thought — there was something that slipped through the cracks as the campaign revved up. But he was a drunk, a ruin of his former self. He wouldn't make a wizard if he lived to be a thousand, and Hasso wouldn't have bet on him to last another five years.
Stubbornly, Friddi said, "Well, your Majesty, unless it was wizardry, I don't know how the demon they got there."
However the men of Bucovin managed to cross the Aryesh, they threw the Lenello army into enough confusion to make it halt for the day. Hasso hunted up Orosei. "You know some men who are good trackers?" he asked.
"Oh, I might. I just might." The master-at-arms' eyes gleamed. "You've got an idea."
"Oh, I might. I just might." Hasso mimicked Orosei's tone well enough to send the Lenello into gales of laughter.
The half-dozen soldiers Orosei told off had the look of hunters, or more likely poachers. "You do what our foreign friend says," Orosei told them. "We've got some tricks he doesn't know about, but I expect he's got some we don't know about, too."
"What's on your mind, lord?" By one tracker's tone of voice, he was suspicious of Hasso on general principles first, then because the German was trying to order him around.
"Take me to where the Bucovinans cross the river. Track them back to there for me," Hasso said.
"If they did cross it," the Lenello said. "If they didn't just show up, like. I don't suppose Grenye can do magic, but you never can tell, now can you?" He seemed a lot less convinced than King Bottero. What that meant… Well, who the hell knew what that meant? Hasso had more urgent things to worry about.
"Track them back," he said. "Then we see. Till we try to find out, we can't really know." That was true in his world. Here…It had better be true here, he thought.
"You don't need us for this," another tracker said as they all set out. "A blind man could follow these hoofprints."
"A blind man, nothing," still another Lenello put in. "A dead man could."
"Fine. Pretend I am blind. Pretend I am dead," Hasso said. "But remember one thing, please. If you make a mistake, I haunt you." That got some grins from the men Orosei had picked, and one or two nervous chuckles. Back in Germany, he would have been joking. Here, as the first Lenello tracker said, you never could tell.
Back through the bushes and saplings the train led, back to the Aryesh. The trackers were right; Hasso could have done this himself. He shrugged. He hadn't known ahead of time. But now he had witnesses if his hunch turned out to be right. And if it turned out to be wrong, they would see him looking like a jerk.
He shrugged again. If you're going to try things, sometimes you damn well will look like a jerk, that's all.
The Aryesh was muddy and foamy. It looked almost like Viennese coffee. Hasso sighed. Along with tobacco, that was something he would never enjoy again. Nothing he could do about it. No, there was one thing: he could do without.
He unsheathed his belt knife and trimmed a sapling into a pole about a meter and a half long. "Nice blade," one of the trackers said. "Where'd you get it?"
"I have it with me when I come from my world," Hasso answered.
"How about that?" the Lenello said, and then, in a low voice to one of his pals,
"Never seen one like it before. Almost makes you believe that cock-and-bull story, doesn't it?" Hasso didn't think he was supposed to overhear that, but he did.
"What's he going to do now?" the other tracker said, his voce also not quite sotto enough. "Dowse with that stick? We already know where the cursed river is."
Hasso hadn't even thought of dowsing. In Germany, that was an old wives' tale. It probably wasn't here. If any kind of magic was practical, finding water fit the bill. But, as the tracker said, he already knew where the water was here. He was after something else.
He thrust the pole into the Aryesh. He wasn't enormously surprised when only the first twenty-five or thirty centimeters went in. After that, it hit an obstruction. His grin was two parts satisfaction and one part relief.
Orosei was only confused. "What's going on?" he asked.
Instead of answering with words, Hasso probed with the pole again. Then he stepped out into — or onto — the river. Walking on the water, he felt like Jesus. The Aryesh didn't come up to the tops of his boots. He strode forward, probing as he went.
"What the — ?" one of the trackers exclaimed.
"They don't put their bridge where we can see it," Hasso said, turning back toward the Lenelli. "They build it underwater, build it sneaky, so they can use it and we don't know."
"Well, fuck me," the tracker said. If that wasn't his version of coming to attention and saluting, Hasso didn't know what would be.
"I don't know, not till I see," Hasso answered. "But I think maybe. In my world, the enemies of my land use this trick." The Russians used every trick in the book, and then wrote a new book for all the tricks that weren't in the old one. The Wehrmacht used this one, too. A bridge that was hard to spot was a bridge artillery wouldn't knock out in a hurry.
Artillery couldn't knock this one out — no artillery here. Hasso looked across the Aryesh. He didn't see anybody, which was all to the good.
"What we need to do is, we need to pull up ten or fifteen cubits of this tonight," he said. He almost said five or six meters, but that wouldn't have meant anything to the blonds with him. They used fingers and palms and cubits, and weights that were even more cumbersome. What could you do? Since he couldn't do anything, he went on, "Then the Bucovinans ride across, go splash."
Orosei grinned at him. "If that doesn't make those bastards turn up their toes, I don't know what would!"
"That's the idea, isn't it?" Hasso said.
Even the trackers, who had been dubious about him, laughed and nudged one another. "He's not so dumb after all, is he?" one of them said.
"Not so dumb," another agreed, which struck Hasso as praising with faint damn. But he would take what he could get.
He made the trackers love him
even more when he said, "You stay here and keep an eye on things. Orosei and I, we go back to the king and let him know what needs doing."
"What if the savages come across the river at us now?" a tracker demanded.
"Not likely, not in the daytime. They want to keep this a secret, right?" Hasso said. Before the trackers could answer or complain, he added, "But if they do, then you bug out." They couldn't very well bitch about that, and they didn't.
"An underwater bridge?" King Bottero said when Hasso brought him the news. "How the demon did they do that?"
When Hasso hesitated, Orosei took over. The German's Lenello wasn't up to technical discussions of pilings and planking. Bottero's master-at-arms finished, "I never would have thought of it. I didn't know what to think when I saw him walking on the water." (Yes, that was funny, though only Hasso in all this world knew why.) "But he says they use this trick in war where he comes from, so he was ready for it."
Nice to know Orosei doesn't try to hog credit, Hasso thought, or not when the guy who deserves it is around to hear him, anyway.
"What do we do about it?" the king asked. Hasso told him what he had in mind. Bottero stroked his beard. A slow smile stole over his heavy-featured face. "I like that, fry me if I don't. We'll do it tonight, and we'll watch the Grenye go sploot." Hasso didn't think sploot was a word in Lenello, but he had no trouble figuring out what it meant.
"Send a good-sized band of men, your Majesty," Orosei suggested. "If the barbarians decide to bring more raiders across tonight, they might swamp a little party of artisans."
Hasso hadn't thought of that. Plainly, neither had King Bottero. He nodded. "You're right. I'll do it." He turned and shouted orders to the officers who would take charge of that. Then he nodded again. "There. I've dealt with something, anyhow." A frown spread across his face like rain clouds. "Or have I? Have the Bucovinans built more of these underwater bridges, ones we don't know about yet?"
"A wizard could — " Hasso broke off, feeling stupid. All the wizards were scattered along the army's long supply line. Now that the main force needed one, it didn't have any.
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