After the downfall

by Harry Turtledove

  Once Hasso got the carpenters to understand what he wanted, they had no trouble mounting catapults on wheeled carts. Horses — or even donkeys — could pull them. "Field artillery," he said happily. Back in the world he'd left behind, you couldn't live without it… not very long, anyway. The Wehrmacht always used as much as it could. The Red Army had guns in carload lots.

  Yes, the field artillery was easy. The ammo wasn't. Hasso rapidly found earthenware pots wouldn't do. He couldn't fuse them precisely enough. If a pot hit the ground before a spark hit the gunpowder, it smashed like a broken plate. That wasted far too much precious gunpowder to work.

  "Have to be metal," he said. "Bronze or iron."

  "Expensive!" Rautat said in dismay. He wasn't kidding, either. Part of Hasso still took an industrial economy for granted. Where everybody did everything by hand… You didn't get anywhere near so much, and what you did get cost a lot more.

  But he answered, "Not as expensive as losing to the Lenelli, eh?"

  "Lord Zgomot will have to say," Rautat told him. "I can't order smiths to start making these things, not by myself I can't."

  "Send to him," Hasso said. "We find out. If he says no, we go back to Falticeni."

  Zgomot must have said yes, because several bronzesmiths and ironsmiths came out to the estate to find out what Hasso wanted. He explained. One of the smiths tapped his forehead, as if to say this foreigner was out of his mind. Hasso let the short, wide-shouldered men watch an ordinary clay pot full of gunpowder blow up. One of them pissed himself in surprise and fear. After that, they didn't think he was crazy any more.

  "Hollow balls," one of them said. "Can we make halves and solder them together? That would be a lot faster."

  Hasso shook his head. "Not strong enough, I'm afraid."

  "Can we rivet halves together?" another smith asked. "That should hold them till your magic works."

  "It isn't magic," Hasso said wearily. "But yes, try riveting." It wouldn't be as fast as soldering, but he could see that it would be a lot faster than making hollow spheres from scratch. The bronzesmiths looked especially pleased. They could cast their hemispheres instead of beating them out. The Bucovinans knew how to make and work wrought iron, but they couldn't cast it.

  Yet another smith asked, "How many do you need, and how soon do you need them?" — the basic questions of war.

  As many as you can make and a hundred more besides, and I need them all yesterday. That was any field officer's automatic answer. Here, though, caution looked like a good idea. "How many do you think you can make? How fast?" he asked in return.

  They had to put their heads together before they gave him an answer. Some of them were scratching their heads, too — they weren't used to thinking in terms of numbers. When they did speak up, he was pleasantly surprised. Even cutting their claims in half, he'd have enough shells to fight a battle soon enough to give the Lenelli a proper greeting.

  "You really think you can do that?" he asked.

  "We do. By Lavtrig, we do," answered the man who spoke for them. He had impressive dignity — and scarred, gnarled hands that were even more convincing.

  All the same, Hasso pressed: "Lord Zgomot is not happy if you promise one thing and give something else."

  "We will not disappoint the Lord of Bucovin," said the senior smith, whose name was Unaril.

  "Go, then. Do it," Hasso said. And maybe they would, and maybe they wouldn't. If they didn't, Bucovin would fight the Lenelli the same old way, and chances were she'd take it on the chin.

  But the big blond bastards would have a harder time if Zgomot's men got back with the dragon bones. As soon as that went through Hasso's mind, he wondered, Did I just think of the Lenelli as big blond bastards? He didn't wonder long. Damned if I didn't. Maybe he really had switched sides after all, even inside himself.

  And wouldn't that be weird? he thought.

  A double handful of bronze shells came to the estate. Field Marshal Manstein would have laughed his ass off as soon as he took one look at them. Hell, so would Frederick the Great, for that matter. When you measured them by the standards of an art that had had some time to grow, they were somewhere between funny and pathetic.

  When you measured them against nothing at all, though, they suddenly didn't seem half bad.

  He didn't load them with gunpowder right away. He had the catapult crews practice flinging them while they were empty. They went somewhere close to 400 meters. He had to hope that would be good enough. He thought it would, for one battle, anyway. The Lenelli would be looking for buried pots of gunpowder — and he intended to use those, too. Artillery would take them by surprise… unless they had better spies than he thought.

  Some of the shells dented a little when they came down. A few rivets popped. A smith who'd stayed behind repaired them — and sneered at the workmanship. Hasso only grinned at him. The Wehrmacht officer hadn't imagined everything would go perfectly. The Bucovinans were doing things they'd never tried before. He was pleased they'd done as well as they had.

  He filled a shell with gunpowder and lead balls — the Bucovinans had no trouble making those, because they used slingers as well as archers. He jammed down the stopper: a wooden plug with a hole drilled through for the length of fuse. And then he assembled everybody by the catapult to watch as the shell went downrange on the meadow he'd been bombarding.

  "As soon as I light the fuse, you shoot," he told the catapult crew. "I light, I yell 'Now!' and you shoot. No waiting, not even a little. You understand?"

  "What happens if we're slow?" a Bucovinan asked.

  "You get a lead ball in the face, that's what. Or in the nuts." And so do I, Hasso thought. He wished for an 81mm mortar and a trained crew. Since wishing — surprise! — failed to produce them, he got back to business. "You ready?" The Bucovinans solemnly nodded. Hasso waved a stick of punk to heat up the coal. Then he brought it down on the fuse, which sizzled to life. "Now!" he shouted. He didn't throw himself flat, not because he trusted the catapult crew but because the natives didn't know enough to do the same. If something went wrong, the survivors would think he took unfair advantage.

  Swoosh! The catapult arm shot forward, hurling the shell far across the meadow — but not so far as a lighter, emptier one. It was just about to hit the ground when fire touched the main charge.

  Boom! Hasso whooped. If he could do it that well all the time, he'd make one hell of a gunner. Then he stopped whooping, because a catapult man yelped and grabbed his leg. Blood ran out between his fingers. One of the lead balls had flown all the way back here. Hasso hadn't dreamt that could happen.

  "Lie down," he said. "Let me see it."

  "Hurts," the catapult man said as he obeyed.

  "I bet it does." When the German got a good look at the wound, he breathed easier. It was a gash, not a puncture — the ball must have grazed the Bucovinan going by. If he bled freely, chances were he wouldn't get lockjaw. If he did, neither Hasso nor anybody else in this world could do anything for him.

  One of the other catapult men handed Hasso a rag for a bandage. It looked pretty clean. He put it on. One of these days, he would have to talk about boiling bandages. No time now, and he didn't figure it would matter here.

  "Can you walk?" he asked the wounded Bucovinan.

  "I… think so." The fellow got to his feet. He limped, but he managed. "Yeah, it's not too bad. Thanks, foreigner. You tied it up good."

  "Sure." Hasso always would be a foreigner. That didn't mean he enjoyed getting reminded of it.

  The catapult man hadn't meant any offense. "You've got a demon of a weapon there. I never figured it could bite from so far off. You weren't kidding when you said close would be worse."

  "No, I wasn't kidding," Hasso agreed. Why had the other man wondered if he was? Because he'd never seen anything like this, that was why. Hasso understood as much. Well, now the native hadn't just seen it — he'd felt it. And he was a believer.

  Everybody except the wounded man walked out into the meadow
to see what was left of the shell. What was left was about what Hasso had expected: some sharp, twisted shards of bronze casing, and not much more.

  "Lavtrig! Every time you throw one of these metal balls, you waste it." The smith who'd stayed behind at the estate sounded appalled.

  "Not waste." Hasso shook his head. "We hurt the enemy with it."

  "But you can't use it again," the smith said. "The metal flies once, and it's gone.

  Gone for good. Metal isn't cheap, you know."

  "Neither is losing a war," Hasso pointed out once more. "You want your smithy burned? You want to get killed? You want your daughter raped and killed? You want another Muresh?"

  "Of course not," the Bucovinan answered. "But I don't want to go bankrupt, either. We could win the war and throw all our metal away. Then where would we be? Does Lord Zgomot really know this is how things are?"

  "Yes," Hasso said, a one-word reply that made the smith blink.

  "Hasso is right. We have to do this. Lord Zgomot says so, and I think he is right, too," Drepteaza said. "The other choice is giving up more land and more people to the Lenelli. Do you want that?"

  "No, priestess," the smith answered. He would argue with Hasso. The German was just… a foreigner. But he wouldn't argue with Drepteaza. He assumed she knew what she was talking about because she was a priestess.

  Well, Drepteaza commonly did know what she was talking about. But that was because she was Drepteaza, not because she was a priestess. Hasso understood as much. He thought Drepteaza did, too, which was a measure of her good sense. The smith, by contrast, had not a clue.

  "Shall we send off another one?" Rautat asked.

  "Maybe not right now," Hasso said. "First we make sure our wounded can do what they need to do."

  "I'm all right," the injured catapult man said.

  "It can wait. It should wait," Hasso said. "One thing at a time."

  "Suits me — and not because of my leg," the catapult man said, wrinkling his nose. "Smells like demon farts around here."

  "How do you know what demon farts smell like?" That wasn't Hasso, even if he had the thought. It was Drepteaza.

  "Well, I don't, not really," the native soldier admitted. "But it smells like what I think demon farts ought to smell like."

  "Does it smell that way to you, too, Hasso?" Drepteaza asked.

  He shook his head. "It reminds me of fireworks." The key word came out in German. He had to explain what fireworks were, starting just about from scratch — the Bucovinans had no idea. "They can light up the sky with flames of different colors," he finished. "Best at night, of course."

  "How do you make flames different colors?" Rautat asked. "Flames are flames, right?"

  Hasso didn't know how pyrotechnic engineers did what they did. But Drepteaza said, "Haven't you seen how salt makes a flame yellower?"

  "Bits of copper or copper ore can turn flames green," the smith added.

  "You should know that, Rautat," Hasso said. "You were a smith."

  "An ironsmith, not a coppersmith or bronzesmith," Rautat said. "That's why I went to learn Lenello tricks. Iron is the coming thing. I wanted to see what the blond bastards knew that we don't."

  The coming thing. Hasso hid his smile. Rautat wasn't wrong, not for the way things were in Bucovin. And if iron had come to Germany a couple of thousand years earlier… well, so what? Hasso damn well wasn't in Germany any more, and he never would be again. A damn good thing, too. He was better off here. There he would have got killed. Or, if he was very lucky — or maybe very unlucky — he would have ended up a Russian POW.

  He supposed he was still a Bucovinan POW. But the Ivans wouldn't have hurt any V-2 engineers they caught. They needed what those fellows knew. The Bucovinans needed what Hasso knew. If good treatment was the price of getting it, they were willing to pay. The Reds were probably doing the same for their German engineers. Come to that, the Amis were bound to be acting the same way.

  Love got stale or flamed out. No one knew that better than Hasso these days. Common interests, on the other hand, could last. They'd better, the Wehrmacht officer thought. If they didn't, he was dead.

  Without the least bit of warning, flat-footed, Drepteaza tried to kick Hasso in the crotch. He sprang back out of danger — one of the rules when they trained together was that you had to be alert every second. She'd never actually got him in the balls. Bruises on his hip and thigh where he'd had to twist away instead of jumping back said she'd come close more than once.

  She looked disappointed that she hadn't made him sing soprano this time. "What did I do wrong?" she asked.

  "Nothing," Hasso said. "But I know you are dangerous, so I watch you all the time. When you move, I move, too."

  "You're fast," she said. "I didn't think anybody that big could be that quick. I'm sure you're faster than most of the Lenelli who live in Bucovin."

  She didn't say than most of the other Lenelli. Hasso couldn't remember when she'd last said that. It had been a while, anyhow. He shrugged. "They can do things I can't. I am never going to be anything much with a sword. They learn when they're little. I learn now. They have too much head start. But this? This I know how to do."

  "You must," she said. "You — " She tried to kick him again. Again, she gave nothing away beforehand. If he hadn't suspected she might try to give him a double shot, she might have done what she aimed to do — leave him writhing in the tall grass clutching at himself.

  Instead of leaping away or twisting, he grabbed her right foot and yanked it up farther than she'd intended it to go. She let out a startled squawk as she lost her balance and went over on her back.

  He sprang on her and pinned her to the ground. She tried to knee him when he did — he really had trained her well — but he didn't let her do that, either. "Got you this time," he said, his face a few centimeters above hers.

  She nodded. "Yes, you did. Now will you let me up? You're squashing me flat."

  "Sorry." He shifted so he took more of his weight on his knees and elbows. But then he said, "I let you up in a little bit," and leaned down and kissed her.

  If she'd wanted to nail him then, she could have done it. He realized as much just after his lips met hers, which was exactly too late. If she'd twisted away and screamed… Well, nobody was anywhere close by, but someone likely would have heard her. People would have come running. And then he wouldn't have got hurt — he would have died: chances were, a millimeter at a time.

  She didn't do either of those things. For a couple of seconds, she didn't do anything at all. He feared it would be a hopeless botch like the one in the garden back in Falticeni. But then she kissed him back — after a fashion. It was the most… experimental kiss he'd had since he was a kid and learning how himself.

  The way she did it convinced him he'd better not push anything too hard. He drew back instead, and asked, "Well?"

  Drepteaza stared up at him. "Not… so bad," she said, sounding honestly surprised. "I didn't used to think I would ever want a big blond to touch me in any way. But with you teaching me to fight… You had to touch me for that. And it was what it was, and after a while I didn't worry about it anymore. And this, what you just did, what we just did, wasn't so bad after all."

  Hasso bent toward her again. "How about this?" he asked softly.

  This time, the kiss got down to business. She knew how, all right. She hadn't been sure she wanted to. Now she seemed to be. Quite a while later, when their lips parted, she murmured, "That was pretty good."

  "Ja," Hasso said, and she smiled. So did he, no doubt like an idiot. He went on, "I want to do this for a very long time."

  "You haven't known me for a very long time." Drepteaza was relentlessly precise. "What else have you wanted to do?"

  He did his best to show her. He hadn't thought he would be her first, and he wasn't. He did hope he pleased her. He wasn't sure, because she didn't show what she felt as extravagantly as Velona. That he should think of Velona now, even for an instant… only showed he really h
ad it bad. Well, he did, dammit.

  Afterwards, he had no idea what to say. Before he could come up with anything, Drepteaza beat him to the punch: "There. Are you happier now?"

  He started to laugh. That was as blunt as usual. "Yes," he answered. "Are you?"

  She frowned, thinking it over the way she so often did. If she said no, he thought he would sink down into the ground. But, thoughtful still, she nodded. "Yes, I am. I don't know whether I will be if I bear a wizard's child three seasons from now, but that is in the hands of the gods."

  Could a halfbreed work magic? Hasso thought so, but he wasn't sure. He also wasn't sure a German-Grenye halfbreed would be the same as a Lenello-Grenye halfbreed. Since he couldn't do anything about that, or about whether Drepteaza would catch, he asked her, "Was it all right for you?"

  If you have to ask, you won't like the answer. That was a rule as ancient as women. Drepteaza, though, was out of the ordinary. She kept so much of herself to herself.

  She nodded now — slowly, but she nodded. "You were… sweeter than I thought you would be," she said. "You really meant it."

  "I said so," Hasso replied. "What I say, I mean."

  "It would seem so," Drepteaza admitted. "But I told you before — I know a lot of men will say anything to get a woman to go to bed with them."

  "Not in bed," Hasso said with dignity — and with precision of his own. "On the grass."

  "So we are," Drepteaza said. "We ought to get dressed, too, before someone comes over to find out why we're not trying to ruin each other."

  "Wait," Hasso said, and kissed her again. The kiss took on a life of its own, but not quite enough to start a second round. I'm getting old, dammit, the German thought. Even if he was still this side of forty, two in a row were only a memory.

  She shook her head as she put on her breeches and tunic. "You are a very strange man, Hasso Pemsel."

  He shrugged. He couldn't very well tell her she was wrong, not here, even if he would have been ordinary enough in the Reich. "I come from another world. What do you expect?"

  As she had a habit of doing, she answered what he'd meant for a rhetorical question: "I expected you to act the way you look. I expected you to act like a Lenello. If I'd doubted you were one, I'd be sure you weren't now."