After the Downfall (17 page)

“Or do they have their own gods, the ones they have before you Lenelli come here?”

She sipped from a mug of beer. Hasso still missed coffee and tobacco. This was this world’s New World, wasn’t it? Why didn’t it have tobacco in it? Whatever the reason, it didn’t. After swallowing, Velona said, “Some worship the goddess. They’ve seen she has true power. Their old gods are just statues of stone or wood. Some of them look pretty, but what do they do?”

She might have been a Hebrew prophet mocking the local Baals. No sooner had that thought crossed Hasso’s mind than he laughed at himself. If the prophets had any descendants, the
Reich
would have settled most of them once and for all. You didn’t ask questions about what the
Einsatzgruppen
were up to. You didn’t really need to ask. The big wheels were serious about making sure the lands they ruled were
Judenfrei.

But the goddess here wasn’t sleepy like the long-ignored Baals of Palestine. She didn’t ignore her worshipers, the way the Jews’ God forgot about them. She was as real as a river. No wonder the Grenye started bowing down before her. The wonder was that any of them stayed stubborn enough to keep on following whatever gods they’d had before.

That brought up another question. “What goed - no,
went,
curse it - wrong when you went into Bucovin before?” Hasso asked.

Before answering, Velona smiled at him. “Your Lenello is getting better all the time.”

“Baptism by total immersion,” Hasso said in German. It wouldn’t have meant anything to Velona even in her language. But when he needed to use Lenello to talk at all, he had the biggest incentive in the world for getting fluent as fast as he could. He could have used Aderno to translate ... if he and the wizard didn’t rub each other the wrong way all the time. He’d learned the language faster because he was doing it on his own. With an effort, he brought his mind back to the business at hand. “Bucovin.”

“Yes, Bucovin.” Velona stopped smiling. “I don’t know what went wrong. I told you that before, I think. Things ... stopped working, that was all. The whole country might have been trying to see through me, and finally it did.”

“How do you stop it?” Hasso asked.

“If I knew, I would tell you,” she answered. “Once we settle our knights on the land, once we have our wizards in the towns, things should take care of themselves. I hope so, anyhow.”

Hasso didn’t know what to say to that. The Germans had been sure that, once they seized Moscow, things would take care of themselves. Then, after Moscow didn’t fall, they’d been just as sure that grabbing Stalingrad would set everything right. Then, after Stalingrad didn’t fall ... Hasso forced his mind out of that unhappy groove.

Saddling his horse and getting going did the job. The tackle the Lenelli used wasn’t the same as what he’d known in Germany. The way horses and people were made dictated a lot about bits and reins and saddles and straps and stirrups, but not everything. He had to think about what he was doing here, more than he would have with familiar equipment.

The land was new, too. Far off to the east, he saw mountains against the horizon. Were they visible from Castle Svarag? If they were, he didn’t remember them. A Lenello told him that was the Palmorz Range.

“What is on the other side of it?” Hasso asked.

“Well, I don’t exactly know,” the horseman answered. “Not many Lenelli have been over it, and you know what liars travelers are. Could be anything.” He shook his head. “Well, I don’t think there’s mermaids. Dragons, though, maybe.”

“Dragons?” Hasso had seen them on everything from banners to belt buckles. But he could have seen them on things like that in Germany, too. “Are they real?”

“I hope to spit,” the Lenello said, or words to that effect. “Didn’t one burn down a village in King Cherso’s realm three winters back? Wouldn’t he have burned another one if a catapult didn’t get lucky and put a bolt through his wing and make him fly away?”

King Cherso’s realm lay well to the north of Bottero’s. That was all Hasso knew about it. No, now he knew one thing more: it had a dragon problem, or had had one three winters back. “If the catapult missed, what would the dragon have done?” he asked - he was starting to get the hang of the subjunctive.

“Torn up everything in sight, I expect,” the Lenello said. “That’s what dragons do when they get pissed off, right?”

“I suppose,” Hasso answered - a handy phrase that could mean anything or nothing. Hasso approved of clichés. They helped him get his meaning across, even when he hardly had one. By the way Bottero’s army behaved in Bucovin, it might have been an angry dragon. A lot of Grenye farmers fled before it, taking as much of their livestock with them as they could. The Lenelli grabbed everything the locals left behind. The pigs and occasional cattle and sheep went into the army’s larder. So did the ducks and odd chickens and geese. So did all the grain the soldiers could find, regardless of type. The horses and donkeys were mostly too small for Lenelli to ride, but the invaders took them anyhow, to help haul wagons and carts.

And farmhouse after farmhouse, village after village, went up in flames. Bottero’s soldiers took a childlike delight in arson. Hasso hadn’t known any soldiers, Germans or Russians or Poles or Frenchmen or British, who didn’t. He would have bet the Grenye got hard-ons watching things burn, too. But there was more to it than that.

The way the Lenelli went about torching houses and smithies and taverns and shops, they might have felt the Grenye had no right to build such things. No, it wasn’t that they might have felt the Grenye had no right to do it - they
did
feel that way, and weren’t shy about saying so.

“Goddess-cursed savages,” a sergeant growled as he touched a burning brand to the overhanging thatch of a farmhouse roof. He swore some more when the thatch, which was damp, sent up a cloud of thick gray smoke without catching the way he wanted it to. In the end, persistence paid, and he got the farmhouse blazing. “They’ve got their nerve, pretending to be as good as we are.”

“Where do you want them to live?” Hasso asked, genuinely curious. “In holes in the ground?”

The sergeant spat. “They’ll be in holes in the ground when we’re done with ‘em, all right. Only thing is, they won’t be living.”

Bucovin affronted Aderno at least as much as it did the underofficer. The wizard was more articulate about it - or at least mouthier. “Do you know what this land reminds me of?” he said as the Lenelli rode past the funeral pyre of a village.

“No, but you’re going to tell me, aren’t you?” Hasso said.

Aderno missed the sarcasm. “Yes, I am,” he said, and Hasso carefully didn’t smile. “You’ve seen the paintings we do, haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes. Fine work.” Hasso sounded more enthusiastic than he was. Some of the canvases he’d seen in Drammen did show talent, but the Lenelli were just starting to understand perspective. To someone who’d admired work by Raphael and Rembrandt and Rubens, among many others, these people were no better than promising amateurs.

“I should hope so.” Confident of his own folk’s superiority, Aderno heard enthusiasm whether it was there or not. “Well, the Grenye remind me of a twelve-year-old trying to copy, say, Tibero’s
Coming
Ashore.
You know the painting I mean?”

“Oh, yes,” Hasso said again. To his eye, the artist had tried to do too much in not enough space. Ships and heroic Lenelli and savage Grenye and waves and animals peering from the forest... and the naked goddess watching everything next to the sun. Sometimes art was more about knowing what to leave out than about what all to put in. Tibero wasn’t a bad artist, but he’d never figured that out.

“Well, if a child tries to copy a masterpiece, all you get is a sorry mess,” the wizard said. “And that’s what Bucovin is - a sorry mess.”

Hasso nodded. And the Lenelli were making it a worse mess. They didn’t care what the Grenye thought of them because of their fondness for arson. The
Wehrmacht
hadn’t cared what the Ivans thought when it marched into Russia, either. Later... Later turned out to be too late. A Lenello died of lockjaw not long after Bottero’s army entered Bucovin. Hasso wondered how the warrior managed to puncture himself. With so much manure around, a tiny wound was all it took. No vaccine or antitoxin here - even the idea for them was a universe away. Hasso hadn’t seen or heard of smallpox in this world, for which he was duly grateful. He did know that cowpox could keep you from coming down with the horrible disease. And, except for first aid, his knowledge of medicine started and stopped right there.

He wondered when the Grenye would try to fight back. Or would they at all? Would they try to suck the Lenelli into their heartland and let winter deal with them, the way the Russians did with Napoleon? How bad were winters here, anyway? Milder than Russia’s, anyhow, from what Velona said.

“Cursed Grenye are cowardly scuts,” King Bottero said when Hasso asked him what the enemy was up to. “If they can keep from fighting us, chances are they will.”

Not half an hour after the king said that, an excited courier brought word that a Grenye scout had popped up from behind a bush, shot an arrow into the unarmored leg of a Lenello scout, and managed to get away in the confusion that followed. “Miserable skulker!” The man who brought the news sounded furious at the native. “Stinking sneak!”

Remembering how the partisans went about their business in German-occupied Russia, Hasso said,

“Teamsters need to be careful. Outriders need to be careful. The Grenye may go after people who don’t expect to fight.”

“Only proves they’re cowards,” the king said.

“If they hurt us, how much does that matter?” Hasso asked. “War is not about being brave. Not all about that, anyway.”

Bottero stared at him, an uncomprehending gape he’d seen too many times. “What
is
war about, then?”

the king demanded.

“Winning.” Hasso’s one-word answer came without the least hesitation. It was the answer of a man who’d seen his comrades show more courage than humanly possible in the grinding retreat across Russia and Poland and Germany itself. It was the answer of a man who’d seen that courage on display in Berlin, where in the end it would do no good at all. “Winning, your Majesty,” the
Wehrmacht
officer repeated.

“In the end, nothing else counts.”

King Bottero still didn’t get it. “Well, of course we’ll win,” he said. “How we do it counts, too.”

Hasso saw only one thing to say to that, and he said it: “Yes, your Majesty.” He didn’t believe it for a minute. A few Lenelli - Orosei sprang to mind - knew better. The rest of them were full of chivalric nonsense ... except when they were pillaging Bucovinan farmhouses and firing Bucovinan villages. That was the small change of war, though. In battle, they could show their style. His deep attacking column let the Lenelli show their style. Bottero had probably said he could try it out for just that reason. After everything Hasso had seen on all the fronts of Europe, he’d given up on style. Only results mattered.

The natives seemed to agree with him. They dug pits in the road ahead of the advancing Lenello army and mounted sharp stakes in the bottom. Those killed one horse and wounded a rider. Then Bottero’s men started to be more careful.

When they saw that the roadway looked suspicious, they pulled off into the fields to either side of the dirt track.

Before long, the Grenye started digging pits in the fields, too. Those were harder to spot than the ones in the road. They killed several horses and a couple of Lenelli. They also infuriated the survivors. Some of the Lenelli wanted to kill all the Bucovinans they found from then on to warn the others not to do such things. Velona was in that camp, which worried Hasso. She did make it plain she was speaking for herself, not for the goddess. That being so, Bottero had the nerve to say no. “After we conquer this country, who will till the land if we use up all the peasants?” he demanded, and no one had an answer for him.

Frightfulness... Hasso had mixed feelings about it. The Germans had used it widely, of course. Sometimes it intimidated people into behaving. Other times the hatred it stirred up only made occupied areas boil with resistance. You couldn’t know which ahead of time.

Frustration and anger built up in Bottero’s army because there were no enemy soldiers to attack. And then, all at once, there were. Lenello scouts reported a large force of Grenye ahead, blocking Bottero’s advance deeper into Bucovin.

When the news came back, the Lenelli burst into cheers. “Now they’ll pay for screwing around with us!”

a horseman yelled.

“Now we’ll see how well your famous attacking column works,” Marshal Lugo told Hasso. The German had no trouble understanding the words behind the words.
Now we’ll see how smart you really are,
the marshal meant.

VIII

Battle came early the next morning. The Lenelli eagerly pushed forward. King Bottero didn’t have to harangue them to get them moving. They
wanted
to hit the Grenye. They were champing at the bit for the chance. They seemed more enthusiastic about fighting than any
Wehrmacht
or even
Waffen-SS
troops Hasso had ever seen.

He wondered why. Arrows and swords weren’t bullets and shell fragments, but they could still dish out some pretty horrendous wounds. But nobody in this world looked forward to dying at a ripe old age. Dying, however you did it, was commonly slow and painful here, the way it had been in Europe up until not long before Hasso’s time. If you died on the battlefield, at least it was over in a hurry. That was bound to have something to do with things.

Hasso got a glimpse of the rest when the Bucovinan battle line came into sight. The natives didn’t seem eager for battle. They hadn’t rushed forward the way the Lenelli had. They aimed to defend, not to attack.

Just seeing them infuriated Bottero’s men. It was as if the Germans had faced an army of chimpanzees or Jews. “Think they can stand against us, do they?” Aderno growled. “Well, they’d better think twice, that’s all.”

Velona didn’t say anything at all. She stared out toward the assembled Grenye, stared and stared and stared. Her eyes showed white all around the iris. Her breath rasped in her throat; each inhalation made her chest heave, and not in any erotically exciting way. She looked like a woman about to have, or maybe in the throes of, an epileptic fit.