After the Downfall (27 page)

“He wants to.” Hasso was glad to talk about the campaign instead of anything that had to do with Sfmti’s charms. “Can’t conquer them unless they stand - or unless they let us walk into Falticeni.”

“They won’t,” Velona said flatly, and Hasso nodded. He didn’t think the Bucovinans would, either; they were fighting the Lenelli every way they knew how. And they had sense enough to see that pitched battles weren’t the best way to do it. Her gaze went far away. “It won’t be easy.” Her voice might have been coming from Beyond, too.

Was that prophecy? Could there be such a thing in this world? Once more, Hasso didn’t know. He did know his shiver, this time, had nothing to do with the cold outside.

XII

Two mornings later, a Bucovinan - noble? - approached the army to parley. He did it formally, with an escort of a dozen or so horsemen with armor as good as any Hasso had seen on a Bucovinan. As usual, they carried greenery in lieu of the white flags that served as truce signs in Hasso’s world. Some of the Lenelli muttered at that. “Who do they think they are, acting like civilized men?” Marshal Lugo grumbled. “We ought to run this beggar off just to teach him proper manners.”

“Better to hear him,” Hasso said. “Let us find out what he and his master have in mind.”
Hortatory
subjunctive,
he thought, pleased with himself. He hadn’t needed to come out with one of those since he was taking Latin a hell of a long time ago.

“Bring him here,” Bottero decided. “Listening to him doesn’t cost us anything, and we can always run him off later if we don’t like what he says.”

The Bucovinan envoy bowed in the saddle to the king. “I am Otset, your Majesty,” he said in excellent Lenello. “I bring you the words of Zgomot, Lord of Bucovin.” He didn’t claim Zgomot was a king; any Lenello sovereign would have either laughed or got furious at such presumption. “Hear my lord’s words and marvel at how generous and full of forbearance he is.”

King Bottero’s face turned the color of brick dust. “Do you want us to horsewhip you home, little man?

You sound like you do.”

Otset bit his lip. He
wasn’t
very big, especially when measured against the enormous Lenelli. But he answered calmly enough: “If someone invaded your kingdom, your Majesty, would you greet him with cheers and flowers and bread and salt?”

When the
Wehrmacht
rolled into the Ukraine in 1941, some of the locals had greeted the Germans just like that. If the Germans had treated them better, the Ukrainians and other Soviet subjects might have stayed friendly, which would have made an enormous difference in the war. The measure of Stalin’s damnation was that close to a million of his citizens fought on Hitler’s side in spite of everything. And the measure of Hitler’s damnation was that almost the whole goddamn world fought on Stalin’s side in spite of everything.

Bottero rumbled, deep down in his chest. He could not and would not see any Grenye ruler as an equal. With the air of one making a great concession to a churl who didn’t come close to deserving it, he said,

“Well, say your worthless say, and then you can go and get lost.”

“Thank you so much for your gracious kindness, your Majesty,” Otset said, deadpan. He might be a shrimp, but he had nerve. Bottero rumbled some more, but he didn’t seem to realize he’d been one-upped. The ambassador or herald or whatever he was went on, “Lord Zgomot says, you have his leave to return to your own realm. His brave armies will not harry you if you turn around and go home.”

That set not only Bottero but most of the high officers who rode at the fore with him laughing their heads off. “What a generous worm your so-called lord is,” the king said. “We thought we didn’t see your armies because they didn’t have the nerve to stand against us.” He mockingly bowed in the saddle. “So thanks for telling us they’re brave. Without you, we never would have known.”

Most of the Lenelli went right on laughing. Hasso didn’t. Bottero was pushing it, and had to know he was. The Bucovinan army the Lenelli had beaten didn’t fight badly. The Grenye had no magic working for them, and they’d never had a striking column shatter their line before. Under those circumstances, no wonder they lost. But they didn’t disgrace themselves.

Otset only shrugged his narrow shoulders. He wore a dark blue woolen cloak with a hood over a linen shirt brightened with embroidery. His breath smoked as he replied, “Plenty of other Lenello armies have come into Bucovin out of the west. We still stand. We will go on standing after you have to leave our land, too.”

King Bottero went brick-red again. “By the goddess, little man you will not!” he shouted. “We’ll burn Falticeni around your heads, savage, and when we catch
you
we’ll throw you on the fire. Now get away from me, before I kill you on the spot for spewing shit at your betters!”

“Word of your charm has preceded you, your Majesty,” Otset said. This time, Bottero did recognize the sarcasm. He bellowed wordless fury, like a bull. Otset took no notice of it, but continued, “The folk of Bucovin will fight you. The land of Bucovin will fight you, too. And the last time the goddess visited us, she barely got free with her life.” He nodded to Velona, who rode not far from the king - he knew her for what she was. “If you persist, if she persists, luck may be different this time.”

Bottero bellowed again. Hasso paid him little heed, but eyed Velona instead. She jerked in the saddle as if taking a wound, then pretended, not quite well enough, that she’d done no such thing. “You may mock me,” she said, “but you scorn the goddess at your peril.”

Otset shook his head. “I do no such thing, lady. But this is not the goddess’ land. Better for you to go back to places she has taken for her own.”

“She will take this land, too,” Velona said. “She will take all this land, however far it reaches. It will be hers. It
is
hers, and her folk will settle it.”

Lebensraum,
Hasso thought, not for the first time. Velona put it differently from the way the
Führer
had, but it amounted to the same thing. The only trouble was, the Ivans had the
Lebensraum
now, and the Germans damn well didn’t. All kinds of things were different here, though. Chances were that one would be, too.

“You say it, lady, but saying it does not make it so.” Otset sketched a salute to Velona, a courtesy he omitted with King Bottero. He spoke to his escort. They turned their horses and rode off in the direction from which they’d come.

Several Lenelli nocked arrows, ready to shoot Otset and the rest of the Bucovinan riders out of the saddle. Bottero did not a thing to stop them. But Velona, her face troubled, raised a hand, and none of the big blond men let fly. “The goddess would not want us to slay an envoy,” she said.

“Even an envoy who knows her not?” Marshal Lugo sounded scandalized.

“He knows her.” Velona’s voice was troubled. “But he denies she has power here. It is up to us to prove him wrong.”

That stirred the king. “Right!” he shouted. “We’ll smash them!” How the Lenelli cheered!

After Otset’s warning about the land, Hasso more than half expected blizzards to start roaring down out of the north. He’d been through that in Russia in 1941, and had a Frozen Meat Medal to prove it. Not many of the old sweats who’d earned that one were still in one piece; he was, as those things went, lucky.

When he worried about blizzards out loud, the Lenelli laughed at him. “We don’t get weather like that, goddess be praised,” Orosei said.

“Even if we did, the stinking Grenye couldn’t bring ‘em down on us,” King Bottero added. And they turned out to be right. No stormwinds full of snow blew in the advancing soldiers’ faces. But that didn’t mean the Lenelli advanced very far or very fast. No snow came, no, but rain fell in buckets, barrels, hogsheads. The muddy road turned to swamp. The invaders started getting hungry, too, because they couldn’t forage widely, and the supply wagons had even more trouble moving than did men mounted or afoot.

“We whipped the weather once,” Bottero told Hasso. “Why don’t you cast a spell so we can do it again?”

Why don’t I?
Hasso thought wildly.
Because I don’t have the faintest idea how, that’s why.
He tried to put that less blatantly: “Your Majesty, I work one spell my whole life. You want me to get rid of
this?

He looked up at the gray, gloomy sky, and got a faceful of rain for his trouble. But the king only nodded. “Yes, that’s what I want. You’re what I’ve got. I’m going to use you, or else use you up.”

A
Wehrmacht
colonel ordering a platoon to stay behind as a rear guard so the rest of the regiment could get away from the Ivans couldn’t have been more brutally blunt. Soldiering was soldiering, no matter which world you wound up in. Sometimes you got the shitty end of the stick, that was all. Hasso found himself holding it here. He saluted. “I do my best, your Majesty.”

“Never mind your best. Just do what I tell you.” Sure as hell, Bottero thought like a king.
Rain, rain, go away. Come again some other day.
That was the only charm Hasso knew along those lines. Just on the off chance, he chanted it up at the heavens, first in German and then in Lenello. The rain kept right on falling. He hadn’t expected anything different. He sighed. It would have been nice if things were simple.

Since they weren’t, he went to talk with Velona. She wore a thick wool cloak with a hood, not very different from Otset’s. It smelled powerfully of sheep, and so was probably good and greasy - better than the one he had on, anyhow. She heard him out, her face getting graver and graver as he went on. Then she said, “Well, you can try.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hasso asked.

“Weather magic is never easy,” she answered, her tone as somber as her expression. “And weather magic in Bucovin will be harder yet. That wretch of an Otset wasn’t wrong. I’ve seen it for myself, and I’ve spoken of it with you - there is a bond between the Grenye and the land here. It isn’t magic. I don’t know what the right name for it is. But it is real.”

“What can I do about it? How can I beat it?”

She shrugged, which made water bead up and run down the cloak. “Do the best you can, Hasso Pemsel. I will pray to the goddess to grant you favor and lend strength to your spell. Back in our own lands, I am sure she would hearken to me. Here - ” Velona shrugged again and spread her hands. Raindrops splashed off her palms, which did nothing to encourage Hasso. He scratched his beard. By now, he was used to wearing it. It had got long enough not to itch any more. Back in the
Wehrmacht,
he’d had to shave it off when he found the chance. The only problem with it was that it gave lice more room to roam when he got infested.

What was the opposite of rain? Sunshine.
Brilliant, Hasso,
he told himself. He couldn’t pull the sun out of a pouch on his belt. He could, he supposed, make a fire and use that to symbolize the sun. Maybe it would serve, if he could get a fire going in this dripping, puddle-filled land. And the opposite of wet was dry. If he could find a dry sponge or even a dry cloth to symbolize soaking up the rainwater, he could try his magic.

Maybe it would work. Even if it didn’t, King Bottero would know he’d tried. Sometimes making the effort counted as much as succeeding or failing. The Germans had put in plenty of pointless attacks against the Russians to keep Hitler happy, and then gone back to what really needed doing. Hasso understood how that game was played.

As she had with his first spell, Velona helped him here. He was convinced he had even fewer poetic gifts in Lenello than in German. But she nodded as they worked together. “You’ve got a good notion of how magic is supposed to work,” she told him.

“You say the sweetest things, darling,” Hasso answered, deadpan. Velona’s face lit up like a flashbulb a comparison that, in all this world, would have occurred to him alone. He added, “If only it were true.”

The subjunctive was for talking about conditions contrary to fact. He used it here without the slightest hesitation.

Bottero’s army slogged and sloshed forward, not going anywhere very fast. In Russia, even tracked vehicles bogged down in mud like this. The Ivans had light wagons with enormous wheels, wagons that almost doubled as boats, that could navigate such slop. Every German outfit tried to lay hold of a few of them. Hasso hadn’t seen anything like them here. He could describe them to Lenello wainwrights, but they wouldn’t get built in time to do any good on this campaign. And so ...
So I get to work magic,
he thought.
Again.

He waited till the army stopped to encamp for the evening. That was in midafternoon, not only because darkness came even earlier with the clouds but also because the Lenelli needed extra time to set up an elaborate web of sentries. The Bucovinans liked to sneak in a few marauders to hamstring horses and murder men in their tents. If the raiders died instead, that might discourage them. It would certainly discourage the ones who got killed.

“You’re ready, are you?” Bottero boomed. “Good. That’s good, Hasso.”

“I don’t know how good it is, your Majesty,” the German answered. “I can try, that’s all.”

“You’ll do fine. You did before.” The king didn’t lack for confidence.
Maybe I will,
Hasso thought. He hadn’t dreamt he would be able to divine where the Bucovinans’

underwater bridges lay. No matter what he hadn’t dreamt, he’d done it.
Why shouldn’t I do it again?

No reason at all.

After Poland and France and the Balkan campaign, that kind of reasoning took the
Führer
into the Soviet Union. The German gamble there
almost
paid off. The
Wehrmacht
came so close to knocking the Ivans out of the fight. But what did they say? Close only counted with horseshoes and hand grenades. Hasso wished he had a few potato-mashers on his belt, They wouldn’t help with his rain magic, but they made a damn fine life-insurance policy.

But he didn’t, and he didn’t like to dwell on things he didn’t have. Velona had warned him more than once that you had to pay attention when you cast a spell. If you didn’t, the magic could turn and bite you. Hasso wished she hadn’t told him that. The magic could also turn and bite you if you screwed up your chant. For somebody with a still uncertain grasp of Lenello, that was also less than encouraging news. Velona chose that moment to ask him, “Are you ready?”