After the Downfall (22 page)

Hasso hadn’t noticed it till the soldier pointed it out. It wasn’t much more than a flash; the barn hid it pretty well. That made him apprehensive. So did the fruit trees within easy bowshot of the barn. All the same, he said, “We have to check it out.” The knights nodded with the air of men who knew they were liable to be sticking their dicks in a meat grinder and also knew they had no choice. Or did they? Hasso turned to Aderno. “Do you sense an ambush?”

After a few passes and a murmured versicle, the wizard shook his head. “I sense no enemies close by,”

he said. But he didn’t sound happy about his own judgment, either, for he added, “If we were in Lenello-ruled land, I would be surer.”

It wasn’t magic. The Lenelli swore it wasn’t, anyway. But the countryside of Bucovin liked the Grenye better than it liked their foes. The blonds had been grumbling about that ever since they crossed the border. “We go like we expect an attack,” Hasso said.

Nobody quarreled with him. One knight said, “You may be a foreigner, but you’ve got your head nailed on tight, by the goddess.” That made Hasso feel good.

That good feeling didn’t last long - only till he got a closer look at the flash of white the alert Lenello had spotted. It was a unicorn; it was on the ground; and it was dead. Blood marred the pristine perfection of its coat: blood from at least a score of wounds. Hasso saw some that came from arrows, others from spears, and a few sword cuts as well. The unicorn’s silvered horn wasn’t bloodied; the beast hadn’t had the chance to fight back.

“You hate to see them hurt,” Aderno said. Hasso found himself nodding. Seeing a unicorn brought down that way was like looking at the corpse of a beautiful woman caught in a bomb blast. Hasso had had to do that more often than he cared to remember. In a way, this was even worse. A beautiful woman could be a deadly enemy. The poor unicorn didn’t know anything about the war between Lenelli and Grenye. Somehow, Hasso didn’t think the Grenye of Bucovin would have appreciated the distinction.

“Here’s the wizard,” a Lenello knight called, pointing into the woods. Hasso swung down from his horse and tossed the reins to another Lenello. There didn’t seem to be any Bucovinans close by. He drew his sword anyway.

Because of the unicorn, the smell of blood was already thick in his nostrils. It got thicker. He walked around a scrubby oak sapling and got a good look at what the enemy had done to Flegrei. He swore softly, in Lenello and then in German. He’d seen such things on the Eastern Front, when the Ivans got hold of some Germans. He’d seen his countrymen do the like to Russians they caught. It jolted him here all the same. The men who started seeing how clever they could be with their knives always aimed to make their foes afraid - if they aimed at anything past a little sport and revenge. They commonly made those foes more determined than they would have been otherwise.

The first thing that came out of his mouth was, “Well, now we know.”

“Now we know,” Aderno agreed in a voice like ashes. “I hope he was dead before they did ... some of that, anyway.”

“Yes.” Hasso nodded. Flegrei couldn’t have lived through everything the Bucovinans did to him... could he? Hasso didn’t like to think the wizard had been alive when they.... He didn’t cross his hands in front of his crotch, but he had to make himself hold still. “He is a wizard,” he said. “How do they do this? Why doesn’t he hit them with spells?”

“If they tied his hands, he wouldn’t have been able to make passes. Maybe he was stunned when the unicorn went down,” Aderno said. “And then after that, of course...” He pointed to one of the creative things the Grenye had done.

“Yes. After that.” Hasso wanted to look away, but he didn’t. He couldn’t remember the Ivans coming up with that particular mutilation and insult. If the Bucovinans were more inventive than Stalin’s soldiers... He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. He didn’t like believing it now.

“They aren’t usually this bad,” a knight said. “Of course, I don’t suppose they catch a wizard very often.”

“I wonder what made poor Flegrei ride back of that farmhouse,” Aderno said. “Maybe he just wanted to ease himself away from everybody else. Whatever it was, he should have known better.”

“Do Lenelli do ... this to Grenye, too?” Hasso asked.

“To avenge him, we will,” the knight answered. “Those bastards have to know they can’t get away with this crap. We haven’t done anything this bad in a while, and they had it coming then.”

Would they have thought so?
Hasso wondered. But that was a pointless question. He found one that wasn’t: “What do we do with him?”

“Two choices I see,” the knight answered. “Either we burn him here or we take back the pieces so the king and the army find out what kind of war we’re fighting.”

Hasso couldn’t see anything else to do, either. He didn’t feel the call was his to make, even if he held the highest rank here. As a foreigner, he would be missing too many nuances. He turned to Aderno. “You follow the same craft,” he said. “What would he want?”

The wizard plucked at his neatly trimmed beard. “I don’t think he would want to be a spectacle, not... the way he is,” he answered. “Better we make a pyre for him here.”

“All right. We do that, then.” Hasso waved at the forest. “Plenty of branches, as long as we cut them. Can we get them dry enough to burn well?”

“I know a spell for that,” Aderno said. “It’s mostly used to get enough wood for campfires, but I can make it bigger.”

Hasso started hacking at branches with his sword. “Let’s get to work, then.” The Lenelli joined in. Maybe they wouldn’t have done it of their own accord; like the knights of medieval Germany or France, they thought a lot of physical labor was beneath their dignity. But seeing the man set over them go to work without hesitation brought them around. If he didn’t hold back, how could they?

They got enough for a pyre in less than an hour. Aderno murmured and swayed in front of the pile. Steam rose from the rain-soaked wood. When it stopped, the wizard nodded to Hasso. “This magic worked, anyhow. We can burn him now. Lay him on the pyre.”

“Me?” Hasso hoped he didn’t squeak too much.

“Of course,” Aderno said. “You command here. Who else?”

Hasso had dealt with enough corpses that one more didn’t really faze him, but it wasn’t a duty he would have wanted. He had to make sure he had all of Flegrei; the Lenelli wouldn’t have liked it had he left any of the cut-off bits behind. After he finished, he scrubbed his hands on wet grass. That got most of the blood off, but not all of it. The knights gathered around the pyre nodded to one another. They would have done the same thing. Then they would have forgotten about it. Hasso still wanted to get his hands really clean, which showed he came from a different world.

“May the life to come prove kinder to Flegrei than this one did,” Aderno said.

“So may it be,” the knights intoned.

“May he have joy of all his friends to come, and overcome all his foes,” the wizard went on.

“So may it be.” This time, Hasso joined the chorus. It wasn’t the funeral service a German chaplain would have read, but it wasn’t so very different, either.

“May the goddess avenge him against the barbarians who wickedly stole his life.”

“So may it be.”

“As the smoke of the pyre rises to the sky, so may Flegrei’s spirit rise to the heavens beyond the sky.”

“So may it be.”

One of the knights had used flint and steel to get a small fire going. The Lenelli carried their firestarters the way
Wehrmacht
men carried matches and cigarette lighters. Aderno lit a small branch and used it to touch off the pyre. His magic had done what it needed to do; the flames took hold with no trouble. Hasso smelled wood smoke, and then the stink of burning meat. Flegrei might have been - was - a bastard, but they were on the same side. You never wanted to see one of your guys get it. That reminded you your number might come up next. You knew anyway, sure, but who needed reminding?

X

Stories were enough to get out the word about how Flegrei died. Before long, everybody in Bottero’s army seemed to be talking about it. Not all the stories had much to do with what really happened. Hasso heard Lenelli talking about how a squadron of sorcerers had been ground up in a mill and fed to Grenye hogs.

“You gonna quit eating spare ribs?” one knight asked another.

His friend thought about it, but not for long. “Nah,” he said. “They probably won’t be from the same pigs. And if they are ... Well, shit. If they are, I won’t
think
they are, so that’s jake.”

“Sounds right,” the first knight agreed, and they rode on.

Since they were arguing about the shadow of an ass that wasn’t there, Hasso didn’t waste his time trying to set them straight. Crazy rumors were part and parcel of war. Some of the stories he’d heard on the Russian front... There, they didn’t talk about feeding dead Germans to pigs. They talked about Ivans eating German corpses, and their own. He’d believed those yarns, too. As a matter of fact, he still did believe some of them. If you got hungry enough, you were liable to do anything. If you got mean enough, you were liable to do anything, too. Three days after Flegrei’s untimely and unpleasant demise, the Lenelli came to a place big enough to show up on their map. It was called Muresh, and it was bigger than a village, even if it didn’t make much of a town. Behind it, a bridge spanned the Oltet River; the bridge was probably the reason Muresh had been founded, and the reason it had grown.

The place didn’t boast a wall. It did have a Bucovinan garrison, in a small, sad imitation of a Lenello castle just in front of the bridge. The soldiers in there couldn’t have held the place more than a few hours against everything King Bottero had to throw at them. They weren’t idiots. They could see that for themselves.

So they got out. They hurried across the bridge, tipping its timbers into the Oltet as they went. Another castle, none too big and none too strong-looking, stood on the far bank. The Lenelli wouldn’t have a whole lot of trouble repairing the bridge... till they came within bowshot of that other castle. Then things wouldn’t be so much fun. Fixing bridges while the bastards on the other side took potshots at you was nobody’s idea of fun, not in any army.

A few ordinary Bucovinans escaped from Muresh, too, fleeing with the men who were there to guard the bridge and not them. Most of the locals stayed where they were, though, either because they couldn’t get away or because they didn’t think anything bad would happen to them. Most of the time, they would have been right. The Lenelli hadn’t struck Hasso as wantonly cruel. Maybe he just hadn’t watched enough. Maybe he hadn’t seen them when their blood was up. King Bottero looked at the peasants and craftsmen of Muresh, at the women and children. He folded his thick arms across his broad chest. “Boys, these stinking Bucovinans killed Flegrei filthy,” he shouted to his men. “I want you to go in there and pay the bastards back!”

The soldiers roared, a deep, baying sound that put Hasso in mind of the wolves he’d heard in Russian woods. The locals knew what a noise like that meant. They made a noise of their own then: a cry of horror and despair. Some of them tried to run away. Laughing at the joke, the knights rode after the running men and women and speared them from behind.

Then they swarmed into Muresh, and things got worse.

Some of the Grenye went down on their knees and begged for their lives. Most of them were, on the whole, lucky. The Lenelli killed them quickly. What happened to the men who tried to fight back... No one could say the Lenelli didn’t have imagination. A gray-bearded cook had used a big two-pronged fork and a knife to try to keep them out of his tavern. It didn’t work - the Lenelli laughed as they beat down his unskilled defense. One of Bottero’s soldiers smeared cooking oil into the Bucovinan’s beard while three more knights held him. The native snapped like a dog, which only made the Lenelli laugh harder.

Then the fellow who’d used the oil lit a stick at the tavern’s cookfire. The Bucovinan must have known what was coming next. Hasso feared he did, too. “No!” the cook howled - it might have been the only word of Lenello he knew. “No!
No! NO!”

His howls did him no more good than his tries at biting had. Stretching out the moment, enjoying every bit of it, the Lenello slowly brought the flame closer to the oil-soaked beard. Then he set the cook’s face on fire. “Fight us, will you, you stinking, scrawny savage!” he shouted. The men who had been holding the Grenye didn’t just let go of him. They shoved him away, so that he ran down the streets of Muresh screaming and beating at his burning hair and skin. The Lenelli thought he was the funniest thing they ever saw. “Look at him go!” they yelled.

“Maybe he’ll burn this louse-trap down,” one of them added.

“Serve them right if he does,” another said. “Serve them all right if he does, by the goddess!”

In the sack and massacre that followed, Hasso might as well have been ... aman from another world. He didn’t hate the Bucovinans enough to want to kill them for the fun of it, though he’d done that to Russians a time or two. But he knew the Lenelli wouldn’t listen to him if he tried to stop them. And so he walked through the narrow, stinking, muddy streets of Muresh as if he were a camera. All the Lenelli who saw the cook with the burning beard liked the idea. They set the faces of several other Bucovinans on fire. One of them torched a woman’s hair. Her shrieks were even higher and shriller than those of the men. Some of Bottero’s troopers laughed at that. But others shook their heads. “Waste of pussy,” one of them declared.

“Still plenty to go around,” said a knight who thought the woman with her hair ablaze was funny. He wasn’t wrong. Even more than the Germans in Russia, the Lenelli in Bucovin lived by the law of the jungle. Winners did whatever they wanted, and the enemy’s women were fair game. The Lenelli raped with the practiced efficiency of men who took it for granted. A gang of them would catch a woman, throw her down on the ground, force her legs apart and hold her arms, and then mount her one after another, roughly in order of rank.