After the Downfall (23 page)

Some of them let the women shriek; maybe they thought the noise added spice to the game. Others used rough gags of cloth or leather to cut down the din. Sometimes, when they were finished, they would send the woman off with a pat on the backside or even a coin. Sometimes they would get a final thrill by cutting her throat and leaving her there to die in the mud.

One Lenello tried to gag a screaming woman with his member instead of a crumpled rag. A moment later, he was screaming himself, and pouring blood - she bit down, hard. It did her no good, of course. Another blond soldier thrust his sword up where he and his friends had taken their pleasure. She died, slowly and agonizingly, while they tried to bandage their wounded buddy. Velona watched the rapes as she might have watched animals rutting in the farmyard. “What does the goddess think of this?” Hasso asked her.

For a moment, the incomprehension with which she greeted the question made him wonder if he’d asked it in German by mistake. But no - he’d spoken Lenello. Even if he had, Velona didn’t understand him.

“Why should the goddess care about Grenye?” she said.

A potbellied Lenello missing half his left ear flung himself onto a wailing Grenye woman spreadeagled on the ground in front of them and started pumping away, his heavy buttocks rising and falling. “Does the goddess care about women?” Hasso asked. “She is one, yes, in a way?”

“She is a Lenello woman.” Velona set a finger between her breasts. “She is, some of the time,
this
Lenello woman. And the Grenye... are only Grenye. When I say she doesn’t care about them, I know what I’m talking about.”

“All right. I only wonder - wondered.” Hasso didn’t feel like quarreling. If she did care anything about the natives, she might have done something about the sack. The soldiers would have listened to her. If they didn’t, the goddess might have come to her... and it would have taken a bold - and a foolish Lenello to gainsay her when the goddess made herself manifest. He looked across the river. The Bucovinan soldiers in the castle on the other side of the Oltet had to be watching - and listening to - the ruination of Muresh. Did they have wives or sweethearts or sisters in the town? What were they thinking? Hasso knew too well the bitter mix of fury and despair and impotence that descended on the
Wehrmacht
as the Ivans started raping their way through Germany. Were the little swarthy men draining that cup to the dregs right now? How could they be doing anything else?

The Lenello sergeant or whatever he was grunted and pulled out of the Grenye woman. A last few thick drops of semen trickled from the head of his cock as he did up his trousers again. A younger Lenello took his place and began to thrust like a man possessed.

Somebody handed Hasso a big jar of beer. He drank - and drank, and drank. That way, he didn’t have to think. And maybe, just maybe, he’d forget some of the things he’d seen. Come morning, he wasn’t sure whether King Bottero’s men had deliberately torched Muresh or the fires they set got out of hand. What difference did it make, anyhow? The place was just as gone either way. He woke with a bursting bladder, a pounding headache, and a mouth that tasted like the bottom of a latrine trench. The stink of smoke and burnt flesh assailed his nose when he left the tent he shared with Velona to ease himself. He looked around for the cookfires - maybe porridge would settle his sour stomach. He didn’t see them anywhere, though. The cooks still had to be sleeping off the previous day’s orgy of slaughter and lust.

He looked across the Oltet again. The Bucovinans had men on the battlements of their keep. The place would be easy to take even so - once the army got across the river. With the planking down from the bridge, that might not be so easy. He shrugged and winced, wishing again for aspirin. As far as the Lenelli were concerned, what they’d done was all part of a day’s work. They hardly looked at the smoldering ruins of Muresh. Instead, they started yelling for the cooks. Burning the place and massacring the people only seemed to have given them an appetite. They hadn’t killed everybody. A few Bucovinan men survived as slaves, a few women as - Hasso supposed - playthings. Some of the locals had the dazed look of people who’d lost everything in a natural disaster but somehow come through alive. Others seemed more calculating, perhaps trying to figure out how to make the best of what had happened to them. Seeing that thoughtful gleam in some of the women’s eyes made Hasso want to cry and swear at the same time.

Berbec clung close to him - close enough to be annoying, like a dog that always stayed at his heel. “Why don’t you get lost?” Hasso snapped when he’d had enough.

“If I leave you, master, I
am
lost,” the captive replied. “I think someone will do for me.” He hacked at his throat with the edge of his hand to leave no doubt about what he meant. And he was right enough to embarrass the German. “All right. Stay with me, then,” Hasso said roughly.

“Enough killing.”

“Too much killing,” Berbec said.

King Bottero took matters into his own hands - or rather, used his own foot. He booted the cooks out of their cots and bedrolls. They grumbled, but they came. When the king woke you up, you either got to work or tried to assassinate him. None of the cooks seemed ready for anything that drastic. Across the river, the Bucovinans in their castle would be eating breakfast, too. They had to know the Lenelli would try to cross the Oltet as soon as they could. They also had to know that, if Bottero’s men made it across the river, their own chances weren’t good. Hasso had seen and joined in more rear-guard actions than he liked to remember. Recruiting sergeants with medals and campaign ribbons all over their chests didn’t talk about that kind of soldiering.

He was spooning up porridge when Bottero came over to him. Berbec tried to disappear without moving a muscle. He needn’t have worried; the king either truly didn’t notice him or affected not to. It amounted to the same thing either way. To Hasso, Bottero came straight to the point: “Do you know any easy way to get across the Oltet?”

“Is there a ford close by?” Hasso asked.

Bottero shook his big head. “No.”

The
Wehrmacht
would have used rubber rafts to seize a bridgehead. No such items were part of the Lenello logistics train. “Have we got boats? Can we make rafts?”

“We don’t have boats. How could we carry them along?” Bottero said. With ox-drawn wagons as his main supply vehicles, he had a point. “Building rafts would take too cursed long. The weather won’t get better. I want to hit the Grenye again, just as soon as I can.”

That made good sense. Even if the winter here wouldn’t turn Russian, it wouldn’t be a delight, either. Hasso shrugged. “Sorry, your Majesty. Then we have to do it the hard way - or can your wizards knock down that castle for you?”

What did the Americans call that? Passing the buck, that’s what it was. King Bottero, who had been scowling, brightened. “I’ll find out,” he said, and stomped off.

Hasso carefully didn’t smile. Even if the wizards told Bottero no, he’d get angry at them, not at his military adviser who’d fallen out of the sky. That suited Hasso just fine. Berbec might have tried to disappear, but he’d kept his ears open. He sketched a salute. “You are not just a bold warrior, my master,” he said. “You are sly, too.”

“Danke schön”
Hasso said, perhaps with less irony than he’d intended. He studied the Grenye he’d vanquished and then acquired. How much of that did Berbec mean, and how much was the grease job any slave with a gram of sense gave his master? Some of each, the German judged: the best flattery held a grain of truth that made all of it more likely to be believed.

“What do you say?” Berbec scratched his head over the sounds of a language only one man in this world would ever speak.

“I say, ‘Thank you,’“ Hasso answered, and then, “How do you say that in your language?” Berbec told him. When Hasso pronounced the words, Berbec’s dark eyebrows twitched, so the German judged he’d made a hash of things. “Tell me when I am wrong,” he said. “I want to say it right. Repeat for me, please.” He’d had plenty of practice saying that in Lenello.

“You sure you want me to say you are wrong?” Berbec understood the dangers inherent in that, all right. But Hasso nodded. “By the goddess, I do. I am angrier if I make mistake than if you tell me I make mistake.”

“Hmm.” The native’s eyebrows were very expressive. Frenchmen had eyebrows like that. So did Jews in Poland and Russia. Their eyebrows hadn’t done them any good. Neither had anything else. Berbec’s

... made Hasso smile, anyway. “Well, we see.” The Bucovinan still seemed anything but convinced.

“If you tell me sweet lies and I find out, I make you sorry.” Hasso tried to sound as fierce as ... as what?

As a Lenello who’d just sacked a town in Bucovin, that was what. Yes, that would do, and then some. It would if it convinced Berbec, anyhow. “Hmm,” he repeated.
Next to the Lenelli, maybe I’m not
such a tough guy after all.
He’d spent five and a half years in the biggest war in the history of the world, most of the last four on the Russian front - and in spite of everything he’d seen and done, he was still a softie next to Bottero’s knights and foot soldiers. Maybe that said something good about the civilization that had blown itself to smithereens from the Atlantic to the Volga. He smacked Berbec on the back, not too hard. “You listen to me, you hear?”

“You are my master. You could have killed me, and you didn’t. Of course I listen to you,” Berbec said. Something in his deep-set dark eyes added,
If I feel like it.

Hasso did him a favor: he pretended not to see that. He just laughed and slapped the Bucovinan on the back again and got ready for another day of warfare, for all the world as if there hadn’t been a sack and a slaughter here the day before. He’d done that kind of thing back in his own world, too. King Bottero’s artisans started gathering lumber from what was left of Muresh to resurface to bridge across the Oltet. That told Hasso the king’s wizards hadn’t come up with any brilliant ideas on their own. The artisans had to do considerable scrounging, too, because not much
was
left of Muresh. Orosei came over to Hasso as the
Wehrmacht
man watched the artisans at work. “You didn’t have any sneaky schemes for getting across?” the master-at-arms asked.

Hasso shrugged and spread his hands. “No miracles in my pockets. No ford. No boats. I think we have to do it the hard way.”

“Oh, well.” Orosei shrugged, too. “I told the king to ask you. It was worth a try”

“So you’re to blame, eh?” Hasso made a joke of it. Orosei might have been doing him a favor.

“That’s me.” Orosei grinned. Either he wasn’t trying to screw Hasso or he had more guile in him than the German guessed.

“I say to King Bottero, try the wizards.” Hasso shrugged. “They have no miracles in their pockets, either.”

“Too bad,” Orosei said. “They talk big. I’d like ‘em better if they delivered on more of their promises, though. That poor bastard the Bucovinans caught ... If he was hot stuff, why didn’t he turn ‘em into a bunch of trout before they got to work on him?”

“Swords are faster than spells,” Hasso said. So everybody had told him. Like a lot of things everybody said, it must have held some truth, or Flegrei would still be around. Hasso suspected it wasn’t the last word, though.

Bottero’s master-at-arms let out a sour chuckle. “Yeah, they are. A good thing, too, or clowns like you and me’d be out of work. When kings wanted to fight wars, they wouldn’t use anybody but those unicorn-riding nancy boys.” He spat in the mud to show what he thought of wizards. Hasso had seen his share of homos in the
Wehrmacht,
and maybe more than his share in the
Waffen-SS,
where they seemed to gravitate. Yeah, sometimes you could blackmail them. But when they fought, they fought at least as well as anybody else. Some of them, in fact, made uncommonly ferocious soldiers, because they didn’t seem to give a damn whether they lived or died. More boards thudded onto the stone framework of the bridge across the Oltet. The Bucovinans in the keep on the far bank watched the Lenelli work without trying to interfere ... till Bottero’s men replanked about half of the bridge. That brought them into archery range, and the Grenye started shooting as if arrows were going to be banned day after tomorrow.

A Lenello shot through the throat clutched at himself and tumbled into the turbid green water five meters below. He wore a heavy mailshirt; he wouldn’t have lasted long even without a mortal wound. Another big blond warrior came back cussing a blue streak, an arrow clean through his forearm.

“You’re lucky,” somebody told the wounded man. “Now they can get it out easy - they won’t have to push it through.”

“Bugger you with a pinecone, you stinking fool,” the bleeding Lenello retorted. “If I was lucky, this goddess-cursed thing would’ve missed.” Good grammar would have called for a subjunctive there. None of the soldiers seemed to miss it. Like any language, Lenello spoken informally was a different beast from the one the schoolmasters taught. Hasso smiled reminiscently, remembering all the German dialects he’d coped with. He wouldn’t have to worry about that any more.

The archery on the bridge was a different story. Other Lenelli fell, a few dead, more wounded. Some of the hurt men made it back under their own power; others needed buddies’ help. Every soldier who helped a wounded friend was a soldier who wasn’t retimbering the bridge. That work slowed to a crawl. Bottero sent archers out onto the span to shoot back. They were bigger, stronger men than the Bucovinans in the castle. But most of their arrows fell short. The natives, shooting down from a height, had gravity on their side. Working against it was a losing proposition. The Lenelli didn’t need long to see as much. They quit shooting at the Grenye, and brought a troop of men with shields forward to protect the soldiers moving the planking forward. That wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough.

Meter by meter, the planking advanced. As it neared the east bank of the Oltet, the Bucovinans in the castle tried something new. They stopped shooting at the men setting the planks in place and sent volley after volley of fire arrows at the lumber itself. Some of the long shafts with burning tow and tallow attached near the tip fell into the river and hissed out. But the Lenelli had to stomp out lots of others or drench them with buckets of water dipped up from below. One soldier, in a display of bravado, dropped his trousers and pissed a flame into oblivion.