After the downfall

by Harry Turtledove

  If it was, how worried did he need to be?

  He was still chewing on that, and not liking the taste of it very much, when King Bottero strode over to him. The king paused every few steps to kick mud off his boots. Berbec saw him coming, too, and unobtrusively got lost. Bottero's smile almost made a substitute for sunshine. "You see? I knew you could do it," he said.

  "Did I do it?" Hasso shrugged. "I don't know, your Majesty. Still some rain." He blinked as a drop got him in the eye.

  "Not bloody much." King Bottero was inclined to look on the bright side of things. "It was coming down like pig piss" — which was what the Lenelli said when they meant it was raining cats and dogs — "but now we've only got this drizzle. We can cope with this. The other, that was pretty bad."

  "I don't know if this is because of me," Hasso repeated. "If it starts raining hard again — "

  "In that case, you'll work your magic again and slow it down." The king didn't have to listen to anybody if he didn't feel like it. The Fuhrer hadn't had to, either. Hitler was still in Berlin when Hasso disappeared from that world. If he was lucky now, he was dead. If he wasn't so lucky, Stalin had him. Hasso had trouble thinking of anything worse than getting caught by Uncle Joe.

  And Stalin didn't have to listen to anybody, either.

  "It's still muddy." Bottero kicked glop off his boots again. "But if it doesn't get any worse than this, we'll manage. It's on to Falticeni."

  "I hope so, your Majesty." Hasso meant that, anyway.

  The king slapped him on the back. "You can do it. We can do it. And you will do it, and so will we." Off he went, pausing every now and then to clear those boots.

  When the army set out, of course, the ground was still muddy from all the rain that had fallen before. That meant the Lenelli still had to move slowly. Hasso's horse probably felt like doing what Bottero had done. No matter what it felt like, it kept slogging forward.

  One bit of good news: with all that rain, the Bucovinans couldn't burn everything in the path of the king's army. They did dig more camouflaged pits in the roadway, as they had when the Lenelli forced their way across the Oltet. A few unwary scouts rode their horses into them. The sharp stakes set up at the bottom of the pits pierced men and horses alike.

  Bottero fumed when supplies didn't come up fast enough to suit him. "What are our wizards doing back there?" he complained. "Are they too busy screwing little brown women to pay attention to their proper business?"

  He was screwing little brown women himself, or at least one little brown woman. No one seemed to want to mention Sfinti to him. Hasso, a near-stranger in these ranks, found discretion the better part of valor. Orosei did remark, "It's muddy behind us, too, your Majesty."

  "Well, yes," Bottero said. "But we need the food, curse it."

  "Jumping up and down about what you can't help won't make it any better," the master-at-arms said. Hasso would have liked to tell King Bottero the same thing, but didn't know how the monarch would take it from him. Orosei, more at ease in a society where he'd belonged since birth, didn't hesitate.

  And the king did take it from him. A sheepish grin spread across Bottero's face. "It makes me feel better," he said.

  "Hurrah." Orosei wasn't afraid to be sarcastic to his sovereign, either. And King Bottero laughed out loud, for all the world as if the soldier were kidding.

  Somewhere up ahead lay Falticeni. Over the next set of hills? Past the next forest? Around the next bend in the road? The Germans had looked for Moscow like that in the winter of '41, and they knew exactly where it was. Half the time, the Lenelli seemed to think Falticeni lay somewhere over the rainbow. With the maps they had, who could blame them? They knew its direction, but not where along that line it was.

  And, the farther east they went, the worse the rain got again. Hasso worked his amateur spell once more. He was smoother at it the second time around; he didn't come close to cooking himself in his own juices, the way he had the first try. But he couldn't see that the magic did much to the weather this time.

  "We're deeper into Bucovin now," Velona said in what had to be meant for consolation. "The land does work against spells here."

  "Why isn't that magic?" Hasso asked irritably. "It screws magic up."

  "It's like trying to fight a battle in the rain and mud," she answered. "It screws up everything. It's just the way things are here. If the Grenye worked magic, they'd have trouble with it, too."

  But the natives didn't, couldn't, work magic. The Lenelli sneered at them for that, and made them out to be, well, Untermenschen on account of it. If the big blonds' big advantage faded, though, the farther east they went…

  "We just have to do it the hard way, that's all," Velona declared. "We can do that, too. We're better warriors than those scrawny little buggers ever dreamt of being. And speaking of doing it the hard way…" She looked at him sidelong That turned out to be better consolation than all the words in the world.

  The Bucovinans didn't seem to know they couldn't stand up against Bottero's army. Raiding parties tangled with his scouts. No mystery about where these bands came from: they rode down from the northeast, shot arrows at the Lenelli or pitched into them when enjoying the advantage of numbers, and then rode off again.

  Bottero thought about sending Hasso forward with the scouts. "A wizard could remind the little bastards why we're better than they are," the king said.

  "I don't know how much I can do on this ground." Hasso left it there: anymore and he would have looked bad.

  "We'll save you," Bottero decided after some thought. "You go up with just a few of our men along, something stupid can happen. Don't want that, not when there's bound to be a big battle ahead. Chances are we'll need you more then."

  "Whatever you say, your Majesty." Hasso was more relieved than he let on. The prospect of combat didn't faze him. After everything he'd been through, he had its measure. No, what did make him sigh (unobtrusively, he hoped) was the good sense King Bottero showed. He didn't throw away the potential of a large gain later for some small one — or the potential of that small one — now.

  The striking column of Lenello knights practiced whenever it could. It had won a battle for the army, so even Marshal Lugo wasn't complaining about it anymore. The big blonds did like to fight aggressively; the idea fit them well enough once they got used to it. Punch a hole in the other fellow's line, then pour on through. What could be better than that?

  Nothing — as long as it worked.

  "This time, the Bucovinans likely expect us to do something with the column," Hasso warned. "A surprise is only a surprise once. We need to watch their line, see where the weakness is. Then we hit there." He slammed his right fist into his left palm.

  Captain Nornat got the idea. "They'll give us a hole to go through, sure as sure," he predicted. "They're nothing but Grenye, after all. They always make sloppy mistakes like that. It's one of the reasons we keep thrashing them."

  "You don't want to have to count on the other guy doing something dumb," Hasso said. "You want to be able to beat him even if he does everything as well as he can."

  "Well, sure," the Lenello officer said. "But when he does screw up, you want to make him sorry."

  Hasso nodded; he couldn't very well disagree. In Russia, you could bet the Ivans wouldn't move as fast as they should have. Lieutenants didn't dare do much on their own — they had to get authorization from higher up the chain of command. For that matter, so did colonels. Again and again, the Germans made them pay for being slow.

  Hasso's laugh was so bitter, Nornat raised a questioning eyebrow. "Nothing," Hasso said, which was an out-and-out lie. The Wehrmacht had taken advantage of the Russians time and again, sure. And in the end, so what? Stalin won the goddamn war anyhow.

  The Bucovinans' faults were different from the Russians'. These guys were still trying to figure out how the Lenelli fought. They didn't have enough practice to be as good as the invaders from across the sea. No wonder they screwed up every once in a while.

/>   "They fall to pieces when we take Falticeni?" Hasso asked.

  "They'd better!" Nornat said. "We grab their stupid king or lord or whatever they call him, we hold his toes to the fire, they'll spread their legs for us, never you fear."

  "Good." That was what Hasso wanted to hear. He remembered how Skorzeny's paratroopers had stolen Mussolini. What if some of those guys had managed to grab Uncle Joe? Wouldn't that have been something? The Reich would have got what it wanted then, by God!

  Or would it? Would some other Moscow bureaucrat have grabbed the reins instead and gone on fighting? How could you know with Russians? Stalin was a strong leader, but he didn't personify things the way Hitler did in Germany. You couldn't imagine the Reich without the Fuhrer. Russia might be able to go on without the tough bastard from Georgia.

  What about Bucovin, which was the only enemy that mattered to Hasso nowadays? "What's the lord in Falticeni like?" he asked. "Can they find somebody to take over if we get our hands on him?"

  "He's a Grenye," Nornat said. "He kind of pretends to be like a Lenello king, but it's just pretend. The savages used to think their lords were gods, like. That was before they found out we knew about the real gods and we could work magic on account of it. Now the poor stupid bastards don't know what the demon to think." His snort held more scorn than sympathy.

  Magic here was like gunpowder in America: it not only gave the invaders an edge, it gave them a big, scary edge. But the Grenye were closer to the Lenelli than the American Indians had been to the Spaniards. They knew how to work iron, and they had had plenty of real kingdoms of their own.

  If the Lenelli had guns as well as wizardry… That thought had gone through Hasso's mind before. But it was one for another time, another war. Bottero wouldn't let him fool around with sulfur and saltpeter and charcoal now, or stand by while he tried to show local smiths how to make cannon that wouldn't blow up.

  Nornat hadn't said anything about whether the Bucovinans could get along without their lord. That probably meant he didn't know. If the Grenye had decided their kings weren't gods after all, they had a better chance of doing without them.

  I hope we get to find out, that's all, Hasso thought.

  The Bucovinans hadn't given up. They didn't seem afraid of the Lenelli, either, even if they couldn't fully match them. The raiding bands they sent out against Bottero's army got bigger and bolder, and slowed the army's advance. Several times, the king had to send reinforcements forward to keep his scouts from getting overwhelmed. And, in spite of all of Hasso's magic, the rain got worse again.

  He waited for Bottero to scream at him. To his surprise, the king kept quiet. Velona explained why: "I reminded him how deep inside Bucovin we are. We can't expect things like that to go our way here. We just have to win anyway."

  Maybe the Grenye didn't think their rulers were gods any more. King Bottero had no doubt Velona was at least part goddess, and that what she said went. After some of the things Hasso had seen, he didn't have many doubts along those lines, either.

  And then the rain blew away. Hasso would have taken credit for it if he'd worked a spell any time recently. Since he hadn't, he just accepted it along with the Lenelli. The weather stayed cool — it was November, after all, or something close to it — but it was crisp and sunny: the kind of weather that made having seasons worthwhile. It seemed as if he could see for a thousand kilometers.

  One of the things he could see was a smudge of smoke on the horizon ahead, a smudge big enough to mark a good-sized city or a really big camp. "Is that Falticeni?" he asked Velona, pointing. Are we there yet?

  She shook her head. "I don't think so. It looks like the Grenye are going to fight us again after all."

  "It sure does," Hasso said. It looks like they're going to throw the whole goddamn world at us, too.

  Velona looked at that differently. "We'll beat them here, and they won't be able to stop us again." If the goddess said it, didn't that make it true?

  XIII

  No matter what Velona — or maybe the goddess, speaking through her — said, the Bucovinans didn't think they were bound to lose. King Bottero's army found that out midway through the next morning, when they came upon their foes drawn up in line of battle ahead of them.

  "They pick their ground well, anyhow," Hasso said to Orosei. Trees protected both sides of the enemy line, and the field in front of them sloped upward toward their position. A few bushes and a lot of calf-high dead grass covered the field. Hasso didn't think the Grenye could find enough cover there for ambushes.

  "Even if they do, they aren't very smart. It's like I told you — look a little to the left of their center." The master-at-arms didn't point in that direction; he didn't want to show the foe he'd spotted anything out of the ordinary. "See that, outlander? They've left a gap between a couple of knots of horsemen. It's not a big gap, but — "

  "We can pour through there," Hasso finished, excitement rising in him. Orosei nodded, a smug grin on his face. He'd spotted it, and Hasso damn well hadn't. Fine, then: let him take the credit. Hasso said, "We need to tell the king. The striking column goes in there."

  "Just what I was thinking," Orosei agreed.

  "They're standing there waiting for us to hit them, aren't they?"

  "You bet they are," the Lenello said. "Whenever they try to take the lead in a big battle, we clobber 'em even worse than we do this way. They've figured that much out. I bet they're just trying to slow us down, waiting for snow to make even more trouble for us."

  "I wouldn't be surprised," Hasso said. Tactics like that didn't surprise anybody who'd won the Frozen Meat Medal.

  Hasso and Orosei rode over to Bottero. Hasso let the master-at-arms take the lead in showing the king the gap in the Bucovinan line. Orosei still didn't point. King Bottero needed longer to spot the opening than Hasso had, which made the Wehrmacht officer feel good. When Bottero did, a predatory grin spread across his face. "They're ours!" he cried. "The goddess has delivered them into our hands!"

  He sounded like an Old Testament prophet. For a moment, that thought cheered Hasso. Then he frowned, wondering whether it should. After all, what were the Old Testament prophets but a bunch of damn Jews? Hasso hadn't done anything to Jews himself, not directly. But he had no great use for them, and he'd made sure to look the other way when the SS cleaned them out of Polish and Russian villages. Like the priest and the Levite, he'd passed by on the other side of the road.

  Well, he didn't have to worry about Jews here. Things were simple. There was his side, and there was the other side, and that was it.

  The guys on the other side were feeling pretty cocky, too. Even if the Grenye stood on the defensive, they waved their weapons and yelled what had to be insults at the oncoming Lenelli. They wanted Bottero's men to think they were plenty ready for a fight, anyway.

  Orosei turned to the king again. "By your leave, your Majesty?" he murmured.

  "Oh, yes," Bottero said. "By all means."

  Leave for what? Hasso wondered. He understood all the words, but still had no idea what was going on. He supposed he ought to be glad that didn't happen to him more often here.

  Orosei didn't leave him in the dark for long. The master-at-arms rode out into the open space between the two armies. He brandished his lance and shouted in the direction of the Bucovinans, challenging their champion to come out and meet him in single combat.

  Hasso whistled softly. There was a grand madness to this. War in his own world had lost that personal touch; you seldom saw the men you fought. You didn't want them to see you, either. If they did, they'd shoot you before you knew they were around. This was a different kind of warfare. It was personal.

  Would any of the Bucovinans dare to meet Orosei? If they were smart — from Hasso's point of view — they'd send out half a dozen guys at once and try to finish him off. Nothing degraded the idea of military honor like years on the Russian front.

  But a single lancer rode out from the line waiting ahead. The natives cheered him like m
en possessed. He stopped a few meters out in front of them, turned in the saddle to wave, and then turned back and gave Orosei a formal salute. Damned if the master-at-arms didn't return it. Then they spurred their horses straight at each other.

  Riding downhill give the Bucovinan a little edge: he could go faster and build more momentum. If that bothered Orosei, he didn't let on. He bent low over his horse's neck, his lance aimed straight for his opponent's short ribs. The other guy was aiming at his, too, but that didn't faze him a bit. From what Hasso had seen, nothing that had to do with battle fazed Orosei.

  Clang! Both lances struck home. Both riders went off their horses and crashed to the ground. And both riders were up with swords drawn faster than their comrades could cheer and groan at the same time.

  As lancers, the two champions proved evenly matched. As swordsmen Orosei towered head and shoulders above his foe, who was good-sized for a Grenye but nothing much against a big Lenello. Orosei's arm was longer, and so was his blade. If the Bucovinan turned out to be fast as a striking cobra, he might have a chance. Otherwise, Hasso guessed he was in over his head, literally and figuratively.

  And he was. He had no quit in him. He ran straight at Orosei, probably figuring his best chance was to get in close and see what he could do. Iron belled on iron as they hacked away at each other. Orosei had no trouble holding off the Bucovinan champion. They were both well armored, so getting through with wounds that mattered took a while. The one that did the Grenye in never got through his mailshirt. It didn't matter. That stroke had to break ribs even through chainmail and padding. The Bucovinan staggered back and sagged to one knee.

  He kept on trying to fight, though he must have known it was hopeless. Orosei approached him like a stalking tiger. The master-at-arms was a professional; he didn't take anything for granted. Sure as hell, the Grenye jumped up for a last charge. With his side so battered, though, he couldn't use the sword the way he wanted to. After a sharp exchange, it flew from his hand.