After the downfall

by Harry Turtledove

  However much he didn't want to, he had to find out. He couldn't very well stay right here and carve out a one-man realm sandwiched between Bottero's and Zgomot's. Since the Lenelli wanted him dead for sure, he had to hope the Bucovinans didn't. How much fancy talking would he need to do?

  The answer turned out to be — none. When he got back to the camp, he found Rautat and the rest of the natives still sawing wood. They'd hardly moved from where they were lying when he slipped away. He hadn't expected his magic to work that well. Of course, he hadn't expected it to clobber him, either.

  Next interesting question was, could he wake them up again? If he couldn't, he would have to throw them into the wagon and get out of there as best he could. But Rautat's eyes opened when Hasso shook him.

  "What's going on?" the Bucovinan said, and then, seeing how light the sky was, "Lavtrig! Is it daytime? I was supposed to take a watch in the night, wasn't I?"

  "I don't know. I don't keep track of that," Hasso said. They didn't give him night watches. They didn't trust him not to desert to the Lenelli — and they had reason not to. Fortunately, they didn't know for sure what good reason they had.

  Rautat scrambled to his feet. "Did anybody keep watch in the night? Doesn't look like it. We're all asleep!" He started shaking his countrymen. As he did, he went on, "Did the Lenello doglegs use a spell on us? You could've just walked off, and we never would've known the difference. Or were you asleep, too?"

  "Till a little while ago," Hasso answered. The spell had got him, too. That it was his own spell hadn't occurred to Rautat. Damn good thing, too, the German thought.

  The other Bucovinans woke up as readily as Rautat had. But how long would they have gone on sleeping if Hasso hadn't got Rautat moving? He had no idea. "Where are the Lenelli, anyway?" Dumnez asked as he ambled off to take a leak behind a tree.

  "Somewhere over that rise," Hasso and Rautat answered together.

  "Then we don't have to worry about them right away," Peretsh said. "Let's eat breakfast." That was such a good idea, nobody said a word against it. Hasso ate hard bread and an onion — a funny breakfast, but any food was better than none, as he'd found out too often in Russia. He washed it down with lousy Bucovinan beer. If he knew anything at all about brewing, he could have made a fortune among the Lenelli or a bigger fortune in Bucovin.

  He started digging holes in the road, filling them in, and running lengths of fuse off to the side. Yeah, he'd tried to desert, but his magic seemed to have covered his tracks. The other side didn't want him. This side did. Even if he didn't much want it, it looked like his best bet — his only bet — right now.

  "What are you doing?" Rautat asked. "You aren't putting any gunpowder in those holes."

  "I know." Hasso started digging another one.

  "A hole in the ground won't hurt anybody, even with a fuse running off from it."

  "I know," Hasso said again.

  "I should have cut your throat in the pit and saved myself the aggravation," Rautat opined. "Do you have some kind of reason for doing this the way you are?"

  "Ja." Hasso went on digging without another word.

  The air Rautat blew out through his lips made a whuffling noise. "Will you tell a poor dumb Grenye savage what your brilliant reason is?"

  Hasso realized he'd pushed it as far as he could. When Bucovinans talked like that, they were only half kidding. The other half was all pain and rage. They didn't want to think they were as stupid and backward as the Lenelli made them out to be. They didn't want to, but they had trouble thinking anything else. When they made those jokes about themselves, you'd better not agree, not if you were big and blond.

  So Hasso said, "You aren't dumb. But the Lenelli think Grenye are. You know that. I saw that." He wanted to remind Rautat he wasn't what he looked like.

  "Well, sure," the underofficer said. "But what's the point of the holes?"

  "I want the Lenelli to see dug-up places in the road. I want them to see fuses, even burning fuses," Hasso answered. "I want them to see that none of that does anything. Then they forget about it. They think, Stupid Grenye try to make magic, and of course it doesn't work. Then they don't worry about dug-up places or fuses any more. You follow?"

  He wasn't just kissing Rautat's ass — the Bucovinan was plenty smart. And, after frowning for a few seconds, Rautat started to laugh. "Yeah, I get it! Bugger me blind if I don't! One of these times, they won't be just dug-up places. They'll be jars of gunpowder. And the Lenelli won't even care — till too late!"

  "That's it," Hasso agreed.

  Rautat came over to him, pulled him down so their faces were on a level, and kissed him on both cheeks like a Frenchman. Rautat had been eating onions, too, and hadn't cleaned his teeth any more recently than Hasso had. They were odorous kisses. Hasso didn't care. He was glad to get them. But if he'd kissed the Bucovinan, he would have felt like Judas.

  "So we don't drive forward, then?" Dumnez had the wagon ready to go. "We drive back instead?"

  "That's right," Hasso said.

  "They'll think we were scouts or something, or maybe a crazy merchant because of the wagon," Rautat said.

  One of the other Bucovinans pointed west, toward the rise. "Here come some of the bastards!" he called.

  "Let's get out of here!" Rautat said.

  That was a wonderful order. Hasso was sure he couldn't have put it better himself. "When we get over the next rise, we can make some more fake holes," he said. "Someone ought to stay behind to light fuses for them. I do it if you want — there are bushes to hide in."

  "No, I'll let Gunoiul take care of it." Rautat pointed to one of the Bucovinan escorts. "We can't afford to lose you if anything goes wrong."

  We can't afford to have you go back to the Lenelli, either. Rautat didn't say that. Hasso thought he heard it even so. Rautat was right to worry, too; Hasso would have gone back to Bottero's men if only they would have taken him. Since they wouldn't, he was stuck on this side.

  He was, he feared, stuck on the losing side. No matter what he showed the Bucovinans, there was only one of him. All the Lenelli had several hundred years' worth of technology the natives didn't — no matter how hard they were working to get it.

  And the Lenelli had magic, and the Grenye couldn't match that no matter what they did. So the big blonds insisted, and Hasso hadn't seen anything to make him think they were wrong.

  "Well? So what?" he muttered in German. Rautat gave him a quizzical look. He pretended he didn't notice. It wasn't as if he hadn't fought in a losing war before. Any German who'd been on the Eastern Front knew all about a losing war: knew more about it than anybody in this world was likely to. Hell, any German who'd lived under a rain of Allied bombs that only got worse and worse knew all about a losing war.

  Maybe the Bucovinans were doomed to go under. The Reich had turned out to be. But, like the Reich, they could sure make their foes remember they'd been in a fight.

  All of his escorts joined him in digging holes in the road east of the next rise. They had fun running lengths of fuse into the undergrowth off to either side of the dirt track. Gunoiul grinned because he was the one who got to stay behind and light some of those fuses.

  "Don't let 'em catch you, now," Rautat warned him. "We don't want them knowing what we know." Hasso beamed at him in pleased surprise. Somebody who understood what security was all about!

  "Don't worry about me," Gunoiul said. "I don't want those whoresons nabbing me, either — and they won't. I'll catch up with you tonight if I can't do it any quicker than that."

  The wagon and the riders with it retreated farther east still. Hasso kept looking back over his shoulder. His companions and he were moving faster than the Lenelli. The filled-in holes in the road and the lengths of cord that ran from them confused the invaders out of the west, anyhow. Maybe they made them wary. Hasso could hope so. He and the natives had done all that digging to give the Lenelli the willies.

  To give them the willies for a little while, anyhow. Then the big bl
onds would decide it was all a big bluff, one more weird, useless thing the barbarians did to try to scare them. And they would stop paying attention to filled-in holes and to cords that ran from them, even if the cords sizzled and smoked. Once they stopped paying attention — well, that was the time to show them they shouldn't have.

  And once a bunch of Lenelli went sky-high, they would never be able to trust any filled-in hole in the ground with a cord again. They would have to treat all of them as real, even if most of them wouldn't be. Dummy minefields served the same purpose in Hasso's world. A few lying signs could slow down a whole armored division. He'd seen it happen.

  "Grenye peasants back in the Lenello kingdoms can make these holes, too," he remarked to Rautat. "The Lenelli cannot — will not — trust their own roads."

  Rautat laughed. "You're full of evil notions, aren't you?"

  "I try," Hasso said modestly.

  "Yes, you do." Rautat eyed him again. "If you aren't careful, you know, you'll have us trusting you in spite of everything."

  "No! You wouldn't do that!" Hasso exclaimed, as if it were the worst thing he could think of. All the Bucovinans thought he was a funny fellow. How much would they be laughing if they knew he'd tried to bail out the night before? Not so very much, he feared.

  Rautat ordered a halt after they made it over the next low swell of ground. "If the blonds come after us, we'll go on," he said. "But if they don't, we'll wait here for Gunoiul."

  None of the Bucovinans argued. "Sounds good," Hasso said. Rautat gave him a hooded look that he understood too late. His position in the chain of command was ambiguous, to put it mildly. What kind of rank badge did an important collaborator wear? When it came to gunpowder, Rautat had to listen to him — he was the expert. When it came to tactics, the way it did here, the native could choose for himself. He didn't need Hasso butting in.

  They waited. No Lenelli came over the crest of the hill to the west. After an hour or so, Gunoiul popped out of the bushes. The little dark man was grinning from ear to ear. "You should have heard them! You should have seen them!" he said.

  "Well? Tell us the story," Rautat urged, as he must have known he was supposed to.

  "The big blond bastards just kind of poked at the holes at first — made sure they weren't horse traps, you know," Gunoiul said. "Then I started lighting the, uh, fuses." He glanced toward Hasso, who'd given him his technical vocabulary. "The Lenelli saw the fire and smoke going through the grass, and they started having puppies. It was the funniest thing you ever saw. They were yelling and pointing and carrying on like you wouldn't believe."

  All the Bucovinans laughed. Nothing they liked better than discomfited Lenelli. "Did they send soldiers after you?" Dumnez asked.

  "They sure did," Gunoiul said. "I could have shot a couple of them, too, easy as you please. But I made a scary noise instead" — he went "Woooo!" on a high, wailing note — "and got out of there."

  "Good!" Hasso punched him in the shoulder, the way he would have with a soldier on the Eastern Front who'd done something unexpected and clever. They wanted to spook the Lenelli here, and Gunoiul had found a new way to do it.

  "Well, after that they didn't want to go very fast, let me tell you," the Bucovinan continued. "I didn't have any trouble staying ahead of them and lighting more fuses."

  "That's what we wanted, by Lavtrig's curly beard," Rautat said. "And now that you're back, we want to get out of here in case you stirred up an even bigger hornets' nest than you think."

  Hasso would have said that if Rautat hadn't. The Wehrmacht officer figured there was a pretty good chance the Lenelli were well and truly stirred. He also figured the filled-in holes and smoking, crackling fuses had only so much to do with it. Bottero's men knew he was around, even if Rautat didn't know they knew. And the Lenelli wanted him… no, not dead or alive. They wanted him dead or dead.

  As he rode off toward the northeast, he wondered whether he could escape to some other Lenello kingdom than Bottero's. That way, he would have a chance to live among folk who looked like him and who thought more like him than the Bucovinans did. But when would he get that kind of chance? And even if he did, weren't all the Lenelli likely to reckon him a renegade now?

  Besides, some other Lenello kingdom wouldn't have Velona in it. There was only one of her. That there was one of her seemed more than miracle enough.

  If he couldn't have Velona, how much difference did it make whether he lived among Lenelli or Grenye? And so…

  "I think maybe you truly are Lord Zgomot's man," Rautat said out of the blue. Hasso started to laugh — who said the small, swarthy men couldn't work magic? Rautat, not surprisingly, didn't get it. "What's so funny?" he demanded.

  "Nothing," Hasso said — nothing he wanted to talk about, anyhow. "I think I am truly Lord Zgomot's man, too." Dammit, he added, but only to himself.

  The dreams came back two nights later. He'd been free of them for months, and thought they were gone for good. No such luck. As he lay asleep, wrapped in a blanket by a fire that had guttered down to crimson embers, he felt someone stalking him through the inside of his own head. I ought to work out a spell to put a stop to this, he thought, which would have been wonderful one of these days — but not now.

  Patient as a wolf chasing an elk, the Lenello wizard pursued him through slumber and finally caught him. Hasso was anything but surprised to find it was Aderno. "What do you want?" the German asked.

  "What are you up to?" Aderno returned.

  "None of your business, not after you try to kill me twice," Hasso said.

  "It's my king's business, by the goddess." When Aderno named her, Hasso saw Velona behind him. "It's my folk's business."

  "I am no part of your folk. You make that plain enough. When I come to you, all you want to do is murder me."

  "What are we supposed to do with you?" Yes, that was Velona. Seeing her, hearing her even in dreams tore at Hasso from the inside out. "You're up to something with the cursed Grenye."

  "You Lenelli don't want me anymore." Hasso didn't waste time denying it.

  "King Bottero tried to ransom you. The savage who runs Bucovin wouldn't take his money," Velona replied.

  What she said was true — and also missed the point. Lord Zgomot was a decent, capable, worried, rather gray little man doing the best job he knew how in a predicament Hasso wouldn't have wished on his worst enemy. To the Lenelli, he was only a Grenye. He would have been only a Grenye to Hasso, too, but for the fortunes — and misfortunes — of war.

  "Sorry. I can't do anything about it," Hasso said. "Then you try to kill me. Should I love you after that?" He started bleeding inside again. He still wanted to love Velona, and wanted her to love him.

  "We were denying you to the enemy," Aderno said.

  He made perfect military sense. He also made Hasso want to wring his neck. The combination reminded the German of some of his own country's less clever policies during the war. He said, "When you try to kill me you turn me into an enemy."

  "If you're a dead enemy, it doesn't matter," the wizard said.

  If the Reich had knocked the Russians out in six weeks, nothing else would have mattered. Since they hadn't, they had to try to deal with the consequences of that failure — only to discover they couldn't. Now Aderno and Velona were trying to deal with the consequences of failing to kill Hasso. They could try again — and they might succeed if they did.

  "You are up to something with the Grenye." Velona made that sound even more disgusting and outrageous than sleeping with a little swarthy woman.

  "They could kill me, and they don't," Hasso answered stolidly. "More than I can say for some people."

  "Killing is better than renegades deserve. Killing is much better than renegade wizards deserve." Velona was as implacable as an earthquake. Her dream-self turned to Aderno. "Now!"

  Hasso had thought his own modest sorcerous abilities were what had kept him from harm when the two of them struck at him in Falticeni. Maybe those abilities helped, but he'd forg
otten Falticeni lay at the heart of Bucovin: the place where, for whatever reason, Lenello magic was weakest. Here near the western border…

  He didn't just scream himself awake, as he had in Lord Zgomot's palace. He puked his guts out, as if he'd eaten bad fish. He shat himself, too. He thought his ears were bleeding, but he was in too much more immediate torment to stick a finger in one of them and find out. When he had to piss, he pissed dark. What had they done to him? Everything but kill him, plainly. While the fit was going on, he almost wished they had.

  Rautat and the other Bucovinans stared at him while he writhed and heaved. "I'd heard about this at the palace," the underofficer said to his comrades — Hasso heard his voice as if from a million kilometers away. "It wasn't so bad there." He was right. Nothing could have been as bad as this. Hasso would rather have stood out in the open during a volley of Katyushas than go through this — and if that didn't say everything that needed saying, what could?

  The only good thing about the fit was that it didn't last long. Once it passed, Hasso lay on the ground, spent and gasping like a fish out of water. "Give me a little beer," he choked out. Dumnez poured him some. He didn't swallow it, but used it to rinse his mouth. It couldn't get rid of all the foul taste; some of his vomit had gone up his nose. "Where is a stream?" he asked. "Need to wash."

  "Back over there." Rautat pointed. "Will anything more happen to you?"

  "I hope not," Hasso said.

  His drawers were ruined beyond hope. He used them to wipe himself as clean as he could, then threw them away. From now on, he would be bare-assed under his trousers. Well, the world wouldn't end. He was battered but almost unbowed when he came back to the embers of the fire.

  "Look at the moon. It's still the middle of the night," Rautat said. "We're going back to sleep. Can you do the same?"

  "I don't know. I find out," Hasso answered grimly. Aderno and Velona hadn't attacked him twice in one night. Did that mean they couldn't? He could only hope so.

  In what was plainly meant for consolation, Rautat said, "Soon, now, you'll give the Lenelli worse than they just gave you."