After the Downfall (24 page)

Here and there, though, the fire arrows started blazes before the Lenelli could suppress them. If those had spread, they might have driven King Bottero’s men from the bridge. But some of the wood the Lenelli used was wet, which slowed down the flames. And the blonds managed to keep ahead of the fires in spite of everything their enemies could do.

When it became clear that the Lenelli
were
going to make it over the Oltet, the Bucovinans in the castle fled, as they’d abandoned Muresh. They left Bottero nothing he could use. Not long after they abandoned the tower, smoke started pouring from it - they’d fired whatever was left inside.

“Miserable bastards,” Orosei grumbled.

“Good soldiers,” Hasso said. “They do their job, then they pull out. They hurt us, they delay us, they deny us the tower. Good soldiers.”

“They’ve got no business being good soldiers,” the master-at-arms said. “They’re nothing but a pack of Grenye savages.”

He sounded personally affronted that the enemy should do anything right. Some Germans in Russia had sounded the same way about the Ivans in 1941. After that, such expressions of amazement came a lot less often. The
Wehrmacht
was the best army in the world - which meant the Red Army had the best schoolmasters in the world. The same was bound to be true here.

“How much do the Bucovinans learn from you?” Hasso asked.

“Too bloody much, if you want to know what I think.” No, Orosei didn’t want to take them seriously. After the defenders fled, replanking the last bit of bridge went fast. With typical Lenello swagger, an officer leaped from the bridge onto the riverbank. He leaped - and he vanished. A moment later, a shriek rang out that Hasso could hear all the way across the river.

“What the - ?” he said. Orosei spread his hands and shrugged, as baffled as the man from another world.

Before long, the story came back across the bridge. So did the officer’s body. The Bucovinans had dug themselves a mantrap on the riverbank: a cunningly concealed pit, with upward-pointing spikes set in the bottom. They knew their foes’ habits, all right. They made the trap, and the Lenello jumped into it.

“I’ve heard of them doing things like that before,” Orosei said. “You’ve got to watch out for the spikes they use. They smear shit on them, to poison the wounds they make.”

“No matter here,” Hasso said. He’d got a look at the dead officer. One of those spikes had gone through his chest, another through his throat. He’d bled like a stuck pig, which he might as well have been. His wounds wouldn’t have time to fester.

More Lenelli stepped onto the eastern bank of the Oltet. They moved more cautiously than that first luckless officer had, and probed the ground in front of them with spears. They found another mantrap a few meters farther in from the water’s edge. The Grenye had used the night well indeed. Hasso wondered whether watchers would be waiting to harass the Lenelli as they filled in the pits. But the natives seemed to think they’d done everything they could to slow down Bottero’s men here. The Lenelli crossed the Oltet with no further trouble.

Orosei pointed to smoke rising up in the east. “They’re burning things again,” he said. “Do they really think that will slow us down?”

“Yes,” Hasso answered. “They’re liable to be right, too. Where’s the wagon train that should be here yesterday?”

“Should have been - you talk funny, you know that?” the master-at-arms said. “I don’t know where the miserable wagons are. We can’t detach enough men to cover all of them.”

“I know,” Hasso said. “Do you think the Bucovinans don’t know, too? Without the wagons, without foraging on the country, what do we eat?”

Orosei looked around. “Mud. Rocks.” He rubbed his belly. “Yum.”

He startled a laugh out of Hasso. “All right - you have me there. But what do we do when we get hungry?”

“Eat the goddess-cursed Bucovinans, for all I care,” the Lenello answered. For all Hasso knew, he meant it. The Germans thought the Ivans were
Untermenschen.
The Lenelli thought the same thing about the natives here, only more so. Did they think the Grenye were far enough down the scale to do duty as meat animals? Hasso decided he didn’t want to find out.

He didn’t want to let go of his own worries, either. “If the Bucovinans burn their crops, what do
they
eat?”

“Their seed grain,” Orosei answered. “Then they starve along with us, but they take longer.”

Bucovin was a big place - Hasso remembered the maps Bottero used. They weren’t anywhere near so good as the ones the
Wehrmacht
used, but they showed that well enough. Could the natives bring in enough food from places where they weren’t burning it to supply the ones where they were?

He had no idea. When he asked Orosei, the master-at-arms only shrugged his broad shoulders. “Beats me,” he said. “You’re the spymaster, right? You’re the one who’s supposed to find out stuff like that, right?”

“Right,” Hasso said tightly. Orosei made intelligence work sound easy, which only proved he’d never done any. By the end of 1941, the Germans were sure they’d knocked out as many divisions as the Red Army had at the start of the war - but the Russians weren’t within a million kilometers of quitting, or of running out of men.

King Bottero sent out raiding parties to the north and south of his main line of march. They drove some pigs and a few cattle and sheep back to the army - and a few horses and donkeys as well. Those were riding or draft animals, but you could eat them if you had to. Though not a Frenchman who did it by choice, Hasso had chewed gluey horseflesh plenty of times on the Russian front. He’d been glad to get it then; if the Lenello cooks served it up, he’d eat it again now.

The raiders also brought back some grain the Grenye had already harvested. It didn’t make up for the wagons that weren’t going to get to the army, though. Had the Bucovinans burned that grain or captured it? Only they knew.

But they left no doubt about what had happened to the Lenello teamsters. They left a bloated, foul-smelling blond head in the road in front of Bottero’s oncoming army. Someone had written a message in Lenello on a sheet of bark and put it by the head. Even Hasso had no trouble sounding out the two words:
YOU NEXT.

When King Bottero saw that, Hasso thought he would have a stroke. Hitler’s rages were the stuff of legend in Germany; Bottero’s fury now matched any fit the
Führer
could have pitched. For a little while, the German didn’t understand just why the king was going off like a grenade. Yes, the warning in the road was grisly, but it was no worse than a hundred things the Lenelli had done when they sacked Muresh.

But then Bottero roared, “My horse - my
horse,
I tell you! - has more business pushing me around than these goddess-cursed, mindblind, soul-dead Grenye! They’ll pay! Oh, how they’ll pay!”

That made the
Wehrmacht
officer nod to himself. It came down to the business of who were
Untermenschen
again. Bottero really would have taken it better had his horse tried to tell him to go back to his own kingdom. For the Bucovinans to assume equality with the invaders, even an equality of terror, was a slap in the face to everything the Lenello kingdoms stood for.

And it wasn’t just Bottero. All the Lenelli who saw the head and, even more important, who could read the crude threat by it, quivered with outrage. Velona was quieter than the king - Krakatoa erupting might have been noisier than Bottero, but Hasso couldn’t think of anything else that would - but no less angry.

“They dare,” she whispered, as if speaking louder might make her burst. “They truly dare to try conclusions with us, do they? Well, his Majesty has the right of it - we’ll teach them a lesson they’ll remember for the next hundred years. The ones we leave alive will, anyhow.”

Germans had talked like that in Poland in 1939, and in Russia in 1941. Poles and Russians by the millions had died, too. The Germans had expected nothing less; those deaths were reckoned a prerequisite for clearing the
Lebensraum
Germans needed in the fertile croplands of the east. What the Germans hadn’t expected was how many of their own number would die. The Slavs were uncommonly stubborn about refusing to be cleared, and now Hasso’s folk fled before them instead of driving them away.

Could that happen here? He had trouble believing it. The Bucovinans were brave, and there were lots of them, but they were outclassed in ways the Ivans hadn’t been. Still, that head and the warning by it spoke of more implacable purpose than Hasso had looked to see from the natives. They spoke of such things to him, anyhow. King Bottero took another message from them. “Burn the head,” he commanded in a voice like iron. “His soul will ascend to the heavens.” He looked around. Had he spotted any Bucovinans, he probably would have ordered them sacrificed to serve the Lenello teamster in the world to come. His face had that kind of intense, purposeful stare, anyhow. But, since he didn’t, he pointed to the bark with the writing. “Dig a hole and throw that in. Don’t cover it over yet, though, by the goddess.”

His men sprang to obey him. That was partly their own anger working, and partly their fear. Anyone who tried standing against Bottero in that moment would have been a dead man in the next. The dirt by the side of the road was soft and easy to dig up. One of the Lenelli picked up the piece of bark with his fingertips, as if it were unclean. After he dropped it into the hole, he scrubbed his hands on the dead grass and then spat after it.

Spitting wasn’t enough to satisfy Bottero. He dismounted from his great war-horse, walked over to the hole, undid his trousers, and took the most furious and majestic leak Hasso had ever imagined, let alone seen.

Even that didn’t suffice, not for the king. He gestured to the leaders around him. Hasso didn’t care one way or the other about pissing on an offensive sign. If Bottero wanted him to, he would. The king did, and so he did. Other officers’ efforts made a pretty fair puddle in the hole in the ground. Hasso
was
taken aback when Bottero waved Velona up to the hole. He could see why Bottero wanted to show the goddess’ utter contempt for the Bucovinan warning, but.... Velona didn’t seem embarrassed; she just squatted and pissed. If it didn’t bother her, Hasso told himself it shouldn’t bother him, either. After that, the Lenelli shoveled in some dirt, too. The army rode on. Velona looked ... maybe unhappy, maybe just distant. “You don’t like what you just did?” Hasso asked, guiding his horse up alongside hers.

“Oh,” she said in some surprise, as if recalled to herself. “No. It isn’t that. The natives deserve what we gave them. But ... I wish he hadn’t buried it, that’s all. The earth here fights for Bucovin.”

She’d said that before, about her last visit to the Grenye land. What did it mean here? Did even she know? Hasso thought about asking, and then thought again.

XI

Bucovinan raiders hit harder at Bottero’s scouts and supply wagons once the Lenelli got over the Oltet. They didn’t stop the king’s army, but they harassed it and slowed it down - the last thing it needed as fall moved on toward winter. Falticeni, the capital of Bucovin, lay ... somewhere up ahead, anyhow. As winter snow came down, a few German units fought their way into the suburbs of Moscow and, in the distance, got a glimpse of the Kremlin. Then the Ivans threw them back, and they never came so close again. Hasso wished he hadn’t thought of that, even if the weather here was milder. The king’s temper frayed. He gathered his generals and wizards together so he could shout at them all at the same time. “Why aren’t you keeping the outriders safe, curse you?” Bottero bellowed.

“We’re doing everything we know how to do, your Majesty.” An officer named Nuoro had charge of the supply train. “But there aren’t enough of us, and there are too stinking many Bucovinans. Things go wrong sometimes, that’s all.”

“That’s all, he says!” King Bottero rolled his eyes. “If things go on like this, we’ll be eating our belts and our boots before too long.”

He exaggerated - by how much, Hasso wasn’t sure. Nuoro gave him a stiff, almost wooden, salute.

“What would you have me do, your Majesty?”

“Push the supplies through. Don’t let the teamsters get massacred. How hard is that?” Bottero demanded.

“In a land full of raiders and bushwhackers, sire, it’s not so easy. How many more soldiers will you give me to keep the wagons safe?” Nuoro asked.

“Well, maybe a few,” the king said. “I can’t give you
too
many more. We need them to beat the savages back. That’s what we’re here for, you know.”

“Maybe we haven’t got enough soldiers for everything we need to do ... sire,” Nuoro said. How many times had the Germans worked through the same agonizing choices in the vastnesses of the Soviet Union? How much good did their agonizing do them? Not bloody much.

But Bottero had options that weren’t available to the
Wehrmacht.
He turned to his wizards. “If I string you out along the route back to the border, you can smell out ambushes, right? You can stop them?”

“Well, yes, your Majesty,” Aderno said. “But then we won’t be here with the striking force in case of battle.”

“What?” Now Bottero looked - and sounded - highly offended, so much so that he might almost have struck a pose. People in a position to know said the
Führer
did stuff like that. Acting had to be one of the things that went into ruling. Still offended, the king went on, “You think we can’t beat the barbarians by ourselves?”

That question had only one possible answer, and Aderno gave it: “Of course you can, your Majesty. We might make it a little easier for you, that’s all.”

“By the goddess, we’ll manage on our own,” Bottero said. “But if you can’t conjure up the grub we need to keep going - and it doesn’t look like you
can
do that - the next best thing for you is to make sure the plain old ordinary grub from our own kingdom gets here safe. How does that sound?”

Aderno saluted. “As you wish it, your Majesty, so shall it be.”

A German would have shot out his arm and said,
“Heil
Hitler
!
” An Ivan, no doubt, would have nodded and said, “Yes, Comrade General Secretary!” It all amounted to the same thing in the end. Then Hasso had a disconcerting thought. Stalin had almost led his country right off a cliff in the early days of war on the Russian front, but the Ivans went right on saying, “Yes, Comrade General Secretary!”