And it did console, where it wouldn't have before. That only went to show how badly abused Hasso was. "I will," he said, and he really meant it for the first time since his capture.
"Get moving, you fools!" a soldier shouted. The word for fools literally meant donkey heads; Bucovinan was not without its charms. The small, swarthy warrior went on, "The accursed Lenelli are on their way — lots of them!"
"How about that?" Rautat said, and then, to Hasso, "If lots of those big blond bastards are coming, this is the time to use the gunpowder for real, yes?"
"Yes," Hasso answered. He hadn't exactly chosen Bucovin. He'd had the choice made for him. Bottero's followers wanted him dead. Well, if they thought that was what they wanted now, he was going to give them some real reasons to feel that way. "We dig real holes. We put jars of gunpowder into them. We light the fuses."
"Boom!" Rautat said. Hasso nodded. Rautat continued, "And they won't be expecting it. They think it's all a bunch of Grenye crap." He laughed. "We'll show them what's crap, all right."
"One thing," Hasso said. Rautat raised a questioning eyebrow. Hasso pointed at himself. "I light the fuses this time."
He waited for Rautat to swell up and turn purple. He waited for the Bucovinan to say he was too valuable to do something like that — which meant he couldn't be trusted to do it. He had all his arguments ready. He was braced to threaten to put a spell on the powder so it wouldn't go off unless he lit it himself. If they provoked him enough, he was ready to try to cast that spell.
But Rautat only nodded. "You've earned the right. We'll find a good spot, with thick growth by the side of the road. That way, you'll have an easy time getting away, same as Gunoiul did."
"You really aim to let me do this?" Hasso couldn't hide his surprise.
Rautat nodded again. "I really do. If you aren't loyal to us now, you never will be. Either way, it's about time we found out." He turned to the rest of the Bucovinans who'd traveled west from Falticeni. "Come on, you lazy lugs! This is what we came here for. We've played all the games. Now we give it to the Lenelli, the way we've wanted to give it to them ever since they got here. So dig, curse you!"
They dug like moles. If he'd told them to dig to China, or whatever lay on the other side of this world, Hasso thought they would have done that. The hope of getting their own back against the Lenelli fired them like burning gasoline.
Was this how the Russians felt when they started winning after the Wehrmacht pushed them back more than a thousand kilometers across their own country?
Maybe this was even fiercer, because the Grenye had been retreating not for a year and a half but for generations. They must have wondered if they would ever get the chance to go forward. But here it was… if the gunpowder worked.
Rautat talked to the soldier who warned of the advancing Lenelli. Not too much later, he talked to another Bucovinan, this one an officer sweating in a helmet and mailshirt. Rautat pointed toward Hasso several times. He pounded his fist into his palm once. He might be only a Feldwebel, but he acted like a general.
He got away with it, too — damned if he didn't. The Bucovinan officer nodded, sketched a salute, and hurried away. Rautat grinned till the top of his head threatened to fall off. He also nodded to Hasso. If he hadn't been the Official Bucovinan in Charge of the Dangerous and Important Blond Person, he never could have pulled that one off, and he knew it.
Hasso placed the fuses in the jars. Next time, he would come with jars already fused. You couldn't think of everything at once, not when you were reinventing a whole art all by yourself. The Bucovinans watched him intently. If they got away and he didn't, they would at least be able to go on with what he'd already shown them. Whether they'd be able to do anything more… wouldn't be his worry, not in that case.
He hid in some bushes off to the side of the road. A lot of the fuses ran toward those bushes, but he wasn't too worried about that. For one thing, there were some dummies that went other places. And, for another, by now the Lenelli ought to think all the fuses were nothing but a big bluff. They wouldn't pay any attention to them — till too late.
Rautat left him some hard bread and dried meat, a jar of beer, and, most important of all, a couple of sticks of something a lot like punk. It glowed red and slowly smoldered without burning away in nothing flat. "Good luck," the Bucovinan said, and then, "Want me to hang around with you?"
"Whatever you want." After what had happened while they slept, Hasso didn't have any trouble sounding casual when he answered the question. "I'm not running back to the Lenelli." No matter how much he might regret it, he was telling the truth there, too.
Rautat plucked a hair from his beard, considering. At last, he said, "Maybe I'd better. I don't think you're any trouble, but if it turns out I'm wrong I don't want to have to explain to Drepteaza and Lord Zgomot how I left you all by yourself."
"Fair enough," Hasso said. From the underofficer's perspective, it was. You did need to be careful about relying on a turncoat. The German felt he had to ask, "Can you stay down and keep quiet?" Those talents were more useful in warfare in his world than they were here. Most fighting in this world was right out in the open. How long would that last if gunpowder caught on?
"I'll do it. I already thought about that," Rautat said.
"Good. Start now, because here they come," Hasso said, and hunkered down in the bushes. The first Lenello scouts had just topped the swell of ground to the west. Rautat got as flat as if a Stalin panzer had run over him. He didn't let out a peep. He barely even breathed.
Hasso didn't get quite so low as that: he needed to see out. One of the blond outriders stared at a dummy hole with a dummy fuse running from it. Another one said something to him. They both laughed and rode on. They were convinced it was just the Grenye savages trying to play games with their minds. Hasso wished he'd left somebody to light some of the dummy fuses. Too late to worry about it now.
Much too late — here came Bottero's main body, red flags flying. This had to be a bigger force than the one that was plundering Bucovinan villages. Hasso wondered why, but he didn't wonder for long. They're after me, he thought. It was a compliment of sorts, but one he would gladly have done without.
On rode the Lenelli: big fair men in mail and surcoats on horses big enough to bear their weight. Soon Hasso could hear the thud of hoofbeats, the jingle of harness and armor, and even the odd snatch of conversation: "Oh, that? Don't worry about it. Just the Bucovinans, trying to make us jumpy."
"Dumbass barbarians," another Lenello said.
"When?" Rautat's question was a tiny thread of whisper, inaudible from more than a couple of meters away.
"Soon," Hasso whispered back. He wanted about a third of the enemy army to pass over the real gunpowder pots before he lit the fuses. His guess was that that would cause the most confusion — and the most casualties.
He swung a stick of punk through the air to get it to glow red. Then he touched it to the fuses, one after another. From the ground beside him, Rautat grinned wolfishly. Trails of smoke streaked toward the burning pots.
A couple of Lenelli pointed to them. Others snickered and shook their heads, as if to say those didn't mean anything, either. Up till today, they would have been right. The pots buried in the road blew up, one after another.
They didn't just hold gunpowder. They had rocks and sharp bits of metal in there, too — homemade shrapnel. They gutted horses and flayed knights' lightly armored legs. Some fragments hit men in the face. Some managed to punch right through mail.
And the noise was like the end of the world, especially to men and beasts who'd never heard the like and weren't expecting it. Hasso was closer than he might have been, but still used to much worse. But even Rautat, who'd heard gunpowder go off before, let out an involuntary yip of alarm. The Lenelli and their horses screamed as if damned.
The big blonds in back of the explosions wheeled their mounts and rode off to the west as fast as they could go. The ones in front… They don't know whether to
shit or go blind, Hasso thought happily. They milled about, afraid to advance and even more afraid to retreat.
Then Bucovinans started sliding forward and shooting at them. Normally, Bottero's men would have driven off the archers annoying them without even breaking a sweat. Here, the bowmen were just enough to tip the Lenelli into panic.
"Magic!" somebody screamed. "The goddess-cursed Grenye do have magic!"
They fled then, with no shame and in no order at all. Had more Bucovinans and better-mounted Bucovinans pursued, they might have bagged most of that leading detachment of the army. Next time, Hasso thought. No matter how much you wanted to, you couldn't do everything perfectly the first time around.
But he'd done plenty. The way Rautat sprang up and kissed him on both cheeks proved that. So did the way the Lenelli ran. From now on, they'd piss themselves whenever they saw a cord running to some freshly turned earth. Professionally, Hasso was happy. Personally… He'd worry about that later. When he had time. If he ever did.
XXII
Things in western Bucovin were going to be different for a while — maybe for quite a while. Hasso could already see that. The natives had their peckers up. And the Lenelli… The Lenelli had to be wondering what the devil had hit them. They sure would start to sweat whenever they saw string running to what looked like holes in the ground. And they would have to be ten times more worried about bushwhackers than they ever had before.
And all because of black powder, Hasso thought. If I knew how to make nitroglycerine… After a little pondering, he realized he might. Medieval alchemists had used nitric acid, so maybe the Bucovinans knew about it. And you got glycerine from animal fat some kind of way.
Then he shook his head. To make nitro safe to handle, you had to turn it into dynamite, and he knew he didn't know how to do that. Turning out gunpowder was dangerous. You had to be careful as hell. Turning out nitroglycerine? No, he didn't even want to try. And he really didn't want untrained Bucovinans trying. That wasn't a disaster waiting to happen — it was a goddamn catastrophe.
Rautat nudged him. "Let's get out of here."
Plain good sense ended his woolgathering in a hurry. "Right," he said. Getting away wasn't hard. King Bottero's men had either fled back to the west or were hotly engaged with Lord Zgomot's soldiers. They didn't have time to worry about a couple of men heading the other way.
Not getting scragged by the Bucovinans was more interesting. Hasso was glad he had Rautat along. The underofficer was able to convince his countrymen that the big blond beside him wasn't a Lenello and was a friend. Hasso might not have had an easy time doing that on his own.
He felt better when he and Rautat caught up with the wagon that held the rest of the gunpowder jars. Dumnez and Peretsh and Gunoiul and the other Bucovinans on his crew were beside themselves with excitement. "It worked!" they shouted, and, "We heard it blow up!" and other things besides. Once they'd said those first two, though, they'd said everything that mattered.
"What now?" Hasso asked
"Now we go back to Falticeni and find out what new orders Lord Zgomot has for us," Rautat answered.
"We ought to leave the wagon somewhere closer to the front, so even without us it can go into action fast if it has to," Hasso said.
"Not too close," Rautat said. "Can't let it get captured no matter what."
He would have been right about that in medieval Europe. He was righter here. Hasso still worried about magic. The longer till Aderno and the other Lenello wizards figured out what gunpowder was and how it worked, the better. How much of a spell would you need to ignite it from a distance? "Where do you want to leave it, then?" the Wehrmacht officer asked.
"How about Muresh?" Rautat said. "Even if the big blond bastards do come that far, it can always go back over the Oltet."
Hasso found himself nodding. "Muresh should do." He liked the idea of putting such a potent weapon in a town the enemy had ravaged only the autumn before.
In fact, he needed a moment to remember that he'd been part of the army that ravaged Muresh. It seemed a long time ago — and that despite his trying to rejoin that army only a few days before. King Bottero didn't want him back? Well, long live Lord Zgomot, then!
He really had turned his coat. He shook his head. No, he'd had it turned for him. If the Lenelli wanted him dead — and they damn well did — how could he think he owed them anything but a good kick in the nuts the first chance he got?
It all made good logical sense. Which proved… what, exactly? If Jews had a country of their own, would Germans feel easy about fighting for it? He had a hard time seeing how. Why would Jews want Germans on their side, anyway?
But that one had an answer. Whatever else you said about Germans, they were better at war than damn near anybody else. They'd shown twice now that they weren't as good as everybody else put together, but that wasn't the same thing.
So here I am. I'm good at war, by God. I'm even better here than I would be back home. And I'm fighting for the side that looks like a bunch of fucking Jews. And if that ain't a kick in the ass, what is?
"Why are you laughing?" Rautat asked.
"Am I?" Hasso said. "Maybe because I am starting to pay the Lenelli back for trying to kill me." And maybe for other reasons, too.
The one he named satisfied Rautat. "Revenge is good," the native said seriously. "If anyone wrongs you, pay him back a hundredfold. We say that, and you're doing it."
"Yes. I'm doing it. How about that?" Hasso loved How about that? Along with Isn't that interesting? it was one of the few things you could say that were almost guaranteed not to get you in trouble.
And I'm already in enough trouble, thank you very much.
He ended up in more trouble when they got to Muresh. His name pursued him through his dreams. He knew what that meant: Aderno and Velona were after him again. He tried to wake himself up, but couldn't do it. And here in the west of Bucovin, magic worked better than it did farther east.
So Aderno caught up with him in the corridors of sleep. "What did you do?" the Lenello wizard demanded.
"I pay you back for trying to kill me, that's what," Hasso said savagely. He found he liked Rautat's proverb. "You try to kill me three times now. You think I kiss you after that?" He told Aderno where the wizard could kiss him.
"And you pay us back by working magic for the savages?" Aderno said. "You don't know how filthy that is."
Lying in these dream quarrels wasn't easy — Hasso remembered that. So he didn't say anything at all. He just laughed his ass off. Let Aderno make whatever he wanted out of that. And if he thought Hasso'd routed Bottero's army with spells, he would only have a harder time figuring out what was really going on.
"Why should I worry?" Aderno said. "If we don't get you, the Grenye are bound to. They don't trust renegades, you know."
"They don't try to murder me," Hasso answered. "That's you."
"Yes, and we'd do it again in a heartbeat," Velona said, appearing beside Aderno out of thin air — or, more likely, out of thin dreamstuff. "You deserve it. Anyone who goes over to the savages deserves it. And everyone who goes over to the Grenye will get it. The goddess has told me so."
"Telling things is easy. Backing up what you say is a lot harder." How many promises did Hitler make? How many did he keep? "Is the goddess really big enough to swallow all of Bucovin?"
"Of course she is." Velona had no doubts — when did she ever? "This land will be ours — all of it. So even if you showed the barbarians the trick of your thunder weapon, it won't matter, because the goddess is on our side."
God wills it! the Crusaders shouted. And sometimes He did, and sometimes He didn't, and after a while no more Crusaders were left in the Middle East. Velona was smarter than Aderno, though. She'd figured out what the booms were, and he hadn't.
"We should have killed you the last time," she went on. "We'll just have to try again now."
"This is what I get for loving you?" Hasso asked, though all the while he knew the answer was yes.
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"No one who beds Grenye women can truly love the goddess in me," Velona said. "And if you don't care about the goddess, then you don't care about me, either. Now the goddess cares about you, Hasso Pemsel." She was still beautiful — beautiful and terrible and terrifying. "I warned you long ago that there was more danger to loving me than the chance of a broken heart. Now you begin to see, and now you begin to pay!"
She gestured to Aderno. Hasso didn't think she would have let him see that if she could have helped it. But the other side evidently had trouble lying in the dreamscape, too. That was something of a relief. And Hasso sorcerously braced himself as well as he could.
The blow wasn't so strong as the one a few nights earlier. His being farther east likely had something to do with that. He woke with a shriek, yes, but by now he was almost used to doing that. He didn't heave his guts out or foul himself, so he reckoned the encounter a success.
Rautat was less delighted. "Do you have to make so much noise?" he asked crossly. "You sound like you're dying, and you scare me to death."
"Sorry," Hasso said. "What do you want me to do when a wizard's after me?"
"Go after him instead. Make him wake up screaming instead. You can do that shit, right? So do it."
"I wish I could," Hasso said, but the Bucovinan underofficer wasn't listening to him anymore. He swore under his breath. He had no idea how to track Aderno through the Lenello wizard's dreams, or what to do if he caught him. Having the ability and having the knowledge were two different things. Expecting Rautat to understand that was… hopeless.
Not a sword. A shield. Hasso was a mediocre chess player, but he'd learned enough to know defending was easier than putting together a strong attack. If the other guy needed to work hard to beat you, maybe he'd get sick of trying and go away. Maybe.
"What do you people do against sendings of bad dreams?" he inquired.
"Why ask me?" Rautat said. "Whatever we do, it isn't real magic." The common Grenye mixture of fear and bitterness edged his voice. Coming up against magic that did work must have been as horrible a shock for the natives here as the Spaniards' gunpowder was to the Indians.
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