After the Downfall (19 page)

Velona’s sword was red with blood. Scarlet drops flew from the blade as she brandished it. Her face bore the same intent, inward, seeking expression it did just before she came. Was she communing with the goddess, or did she
really
enjoy fighting? Hasso wondered whether he wanted to know. More and more Grenye broke away from the battle and made off toward the east. Some went singly, others in knots of five or ten or twenty. The men who stuck together and still showed fight had a better chance of getting away in one piece. The Lenelli were like any soldiers in any world - they went after what looked like easy victims first. Why chance getting hurt when you didn’t have to?

A Bucovinan came up to Hasso with his helmet hanging on the point of his spear. “Peace,” he said in halting Lenello. “Peace, please.”

Hasso realized he didn’t know the rules for taking prisoners here. But that question no sooner formed in his mind than it got answered. Not ten meters away, a Lenello tapped a surrendering Grenye on the shoulder with his sword.

In Hasso’s world, he might have been knighting the enemy warrior. Not here. Here, with a doglike grin of relief, the Grenye threw down his weapons and kissed his captor’s hand. Then, hands clasped behind his head, he shuffled off toward the rear.

Now that Hasso knew how to do it, he did it. The Grenye in front of him also looked massively relieved. He understood that. Deciding to give up wasn’t the hard part. Getting the guys on the other side to accept your surrender was. Plenty of would-be POWs got killed. It wasn’t always ill-will. Sometimes the winners were just too busy to bother with prisoners, so they disposed of them instead.

“Thank you! Thank you! I is your slave!” the Bucovinan said as he fervently kissed Hasso’s hand. Did he mean that, or was he only being polite? In his own world, Hasso would have known the answer. Here

... Well, he’d worry about it later.

He jerked his thumb in the direction the other captive had taken. “Go there,” he said. Away the Grenye went. He too put his hands behind his head. It wasn’t quite the same as raising them high, but it evidently meant the same thing.

Hasso looked around to see if any more fighting was left. There wasn’t much. As he watched, a Lenello used the broken shaft of his lance to smash in a Bucovinan’s skull. No, surrendering here was no easier than it was in Hasso’s world. The big blond knights with the brutal one laughed and cheered him on. Lenello foot soldiers and dismounted lancers walked over the field. Every so often, they stooped to plunder or to finish off a wounded Bucovinan. Hasso’s men had done that with the Ivans often enough. Here, a knife across the throat did duty for a bullet in the back of the neck. The Lenelli also gave the
coup de grace
to some of their own wounded men: those too badly hurt to have any hope of recovering. Hasso had seen that happen, too. It happened more often here. German doctors could do things nobody here had ever dreamt of. He made a note to himself not to get wounded here. Then he laughed. If he knew how to guarantee that...

Somebody slapped him on the back, almost hard enough to pitch him off his horse. “We did it!” Nornat yelled. “The column worked. Your scheme worked!” He sounded overjoyed and surprised at the same time.

“Good men make it work,” Hasso said. The Lenello cavalry captain grinned and bowed in the saddle. Hasso wouldn’t have wanted to try that himself. He hadn’t been kidding, though. Grinning back, he went on, “Commanders get the glory. Lancers do the hard part and make commanders look good.”

“Goddess only knows that’s the truth,” Nornat said. “Too many marshals can’t see it, though. They think the sun rises and sets on them. I could name names, but....”

But you’d put your ass in a sling if you did,
Hasso thought. But if Nornat wasn’t thinking of brave but hidebound Marshal Lugo, Hasso would have been mightily surprised. “We could do better,” he said.

“We should do better. Column should all turn in on center, not out on wing.” He gestured with his hands.

“We do that, maybe we catch enemy, uh, lord. He can’t get away.”

“Well, yes.” Nornat sounded as if he was humoring him. “Don’t get too upset, though. We walloped the snot out of the savages the way it was.”

Somebody - a Frenchman? - said the good was the enemy of the best. A solid victory satisfied Nornat. Hasso wanted more. He wanted to annihilate the enemy, the way Hannibal annihilated the Romans at Cannae.

Ever since before the First World War, German officers made that battle their model. Hasso understood why - who’d ever done better? But despite the triumph, Carthage lost the war. How many officers who carefully memorized every detail of Hannibal’s double envelopment remembered that?

Hasso got down from his horse. “You! Come here!” he called to the first foot soldier he saw. When the man obeyed, Hasso tossed him the reins. “Here. Hold these for me till I get back.”

“Yes, lord,” the foot soldier said - the only possible answer. But then he went on, “What about my chance to loot?”

That was a fair question. Hasso dug in his belt pouch and pulled out one of the gold coins he’d won from the wizards. It bore the jowly image of Bottero’s father. “Here. You might do better than this, but you might not, too.”

The Lenello made the goldpiece disappear. Grinning, he said, “You may be a foreigner, and you sure talk funny, but you’re a sport.”

“Thanks,” Hasso said dryly, and began his tour of the battlefield.

He’d walked plenty of fields in his own world, wherever victory let him do it. The last year and a half of the war, he thanked God every time he got away from a battlefield in one piece. He hadn’t had many chances to look around afterwards, not unless he wanted the Russians to leave his body there along with too many others wearing
Feldgrau.

Here, though ... The Bucovinans had stood more bravely than he’d thought they could. Even after they had to know they were beaten, they went on doing as well as they could for as long as they could. They fought like soldiers, not like savages fierce in victory who panicked and broke the minute things went wrong.

A dead native clutched the shaft of the spear that pinned him to the ground. The horrible grimace he’d worn when he died was relaxing towards a corpse’s blankness. His eyes stared sightlessly up at the sky. Not far away, a dead Lenello sprawled in a pool of blood. His left hand clutched the stump of his right arm. He’d lost his right hand, and bled to death before a surgeon or a wizard could do anything to help him. Flies buzzed around the blood. A big one landed in the blood-streaked, callused palm of the severed hand.

You had an easier time telling how hard and how well someone fought on this field than on a lot of them on the Russian front. Artillery and bullets could be nearly random in how they killed and maimed. But if a sword or spear went in from the front, the dead man faced his foe when he died. If he had a wound in the back, he was likely trying to run away when he died.

The Grenye killed from behind almost all lay at some distance from where they’d posted their line. Those were the men who’d tried to escape, most of them after the fight was irretrievably lost. Yes, they’d fought hard, all right.

King Bottero rode up to Hasso. The king had a cut on the back of his right hand; he’d been in the thick of the fighting himself. The edge of his shield was as notched as a saw blade. His horse limped.

“You did what you said you’d do,” Bottero declared. “Have you got any idea how unusual that is?”

Hasso saluted Lenello-style, his fist over his heart. “Your Majesty, I am a stranger, a foreigner, at your court. I don’t dare fail.”

“Why not? My own people do, all the time.”

“They
are
your people,” Hasso replied. “You forgive them because they are. But if I go wrong, you say,

‘He is a foreigner trying to fool us. Off with his head!’“

Bottero threw back his head and laughed. “Are you sure you were never a king yourself?”

“Never!” Hasso pushed away the words with both hands, which set Bottero laughing again. The German went on, “Never want to be a king, either.”

“You’re smart,” Bottero said. “You don’t have everybody below you looking up at you and thinking what an idiot you are.”

“Not me, your Majesty,” Hasso said, which was plenty to make Bottero almost fall off his horse with mirth. Hasso spoke as innocently as he could - with exaggerated innocence, in fact. He was glad he’d amused his new sovereign. He was also glad Bottero believed him when he said he had no royal ambitions. It was true. Even if it weren’t, he had to act as if it were. Confessing that you did want to wear a crown was apt to be more hazardous to your life expectancy than a Russian armored division.

“Find any loot worth keeping?” Bottero asked.

Soldiers here made a big part of their living from booty. Hasso, used to regular pay, had to remind himself of that. He had picked up one nice dagger with gold chasing on the blade. He showed it to the king.

Bottero nodded. “That’s not bad. It’s one of our patterns, but it looks to me like a copy by a Grenye smith. The chasing is very nice - I like that dragon - but the work on the blade itself is cruder than what we’d do.”

Hasso didn’t have the eye for such fine details. He’d kept the dagger because of the gold. He didn’t expect to use it as a weapon. He had nothing against war knives; he carried one of his own. But it was just a tool, not a fancy Solingen blade like the ones SS men were so proud of.

“Where do we go now?” Hasso asked. “We should push after the Bucovinans. Not let them come back together, get ready to fight again.” He wanted to say
regroup,
but he couldn’t come up with the word in Lenello. He was a lot more fluent than he had been even a month before, but talking still sometimes felt like wading through glue.

“You
have
been eating meat, haven’t you?” King Bottero smiled at him like a father smiling at an adventurous little boy. “We need to get ready to fight again ourselves, you know. Do you think your striking column will work as well now that they know we use it?”

That was a genuinely shrewd question. “I don’t know, your Majesty,” Hasso replied. “You know the Bucovinans better than I do, so you are a better judge. How fast do they learn? Will they have an assault column of their own in the next battle?” The possibility hadn’t occurred to him till now.

“No.” The king shook his head. “They aren’t
that
quick. But they’ll look for ways to stop the column from breaking through. And they’ll have their own soon. You can bet on that. When the other Lenello kingdoms hear about what we’re doing, they’ll start using these columns, too.”

“Defense,” Hasso muttered. Did he know enough about the Swiss hedgehog to teach it to Bottero’s men? He had to hope he did, because they were going to need it, if not at the next battle then before too long. He could see that coming.

“All this is worry for another time,” Bottero said. “You kept your word to me. I won’t forget, and you won’t be sorry.” With the wave of a gauntleted hand, he rode off.

Not far away, a Lenello foot soldier was slitting the throat of a feebly writhing Bucovinan. Still holding the bloody knife, he nodded to Hasso. “Boy, I wish the king would talk to me that way,” he said. Everybody had problems. The foot soldier thought his were worse than Hasso’s. Maybe he was even right. All the same, Hasso knew his own weren’t small. He also knew they wouldn’t go away any time soon.

Back in Germany, women prided themselves on how little they ate. A birdlike appetite was a sign of femininity. After the battle, Velona ate enough for two troopers, maybe three. “Where do you keep it?”

Hasso asked. He was hungry, but not
that
hungry. “Have you got a hollow leg?”

The joke was old in German, but new in Lenello. Velona laughed so hard, she almost spat out the swig of beer she’d just taken. “No, no, no,” she said. “You have to understand - I’m eating for two.”

“You’re going to have a baby?” Hasso took the phrase to mean what it would have in his native tongue. The next question that ran through his mind was,
Is it mine?
He didn’t ask that one, not least for fear she would up and tell him no.

But she laughed again, this time at him, though as far as he could tell without malice. “No, not a baby. I’m sure I’m not pregnant,” she said. “I just stopped flowing a couple of days before the battle, remember, and I’m glad I did, too. What I meant was, I’m eating for me and the goddess both.”

“Oh.” Feeling like a fool, Hasso thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. It hurt more than it should have; somewhere in the battle, he’d got a bruise there, even if he couldn’t remember how or when. And he found himself nodding. No wonder Velona never gained a gram! But carrying a goddess around wasn’t the sort of diet likely to become popular in Berlin or Cologne or Vienna... even if the German women in those towns were free of invaders, which they weren’t. How big a toll
did
the goddess take on a mere mortal’s metabolism? Hasso had no idea, but Velona knew the answer from the inside out.

Her smile, he judged, held more than a little relief. “I could feel the goddess’ power running through me,”

she said. “The savages could feel it, too, when I struck and even before that, when I bore down on them. I could tell.”

“I believe you,” Hasso said, which was nothing but the truth. When the goddess manifested herself in Velona, she definitely seemed more than human. Just being near her at such times made your hair prickle up, as if lightning had crashed down close by. Then, several beats more slowly than a Lenello would have, Hasso saw what she was driving at here. “We are in Bucovin, but the power still runs through you.”

“The goddess is still with me,” Velona agreed. But then her smile slipped. “It was like this the last time I came into Bucovin, too. At first, it was like this. After that... It wasn’t that the goddess left me, or not exactly like that. When she tried to speak, though, I couldn’t make out what she was saying. The land in these parts was thinking about something else.”

How did she mean that? Never having had any kind of divinity speak to him or through him, Hasso couldn’t know, not the way Velona did. He thought of a bad telephone connection. Then he laughed at himself. What good did a thought from his own world do him? He couldn’t make Velona or anyone else here understand it. What would telephones seem to the Lenelli but magic?