After the Downfall (49 page)

And so...

“I think maybe you truly are Lord Zgomot’s man,” Rautat said out of the blue. Hasso started to laugh who said the small, swarthy men couldn’t work magic? Rautat, not surprisingly, didn’t get it. “What’s so funny?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” Hasso said - nothing he wanted to talk about, anyhow. “I think I am truly Lord Zgomot’s man, too.”
Dammit,
he added, but only to himself.

The dreams came back two nights later. He’d been free of them for months, and thought they were gone for good. No such luck. As he lay asleep, wrapped in a blanket by a fire that had guttered down to crimson embers, he felt someone stalking him through the inside of his own head.
I ought to work out a
spell to put a stop to this,
he thought, which would have been wonderful one of these days - but not now.

Patient as a wolf chasing an elk, the Lenello wizard pursued him through slumber and finally caught him. Hasso was anything but surprised to find it was Aderno. “What do you want?” the German asked.

“What are you up to?” Aderno returned.

“None of your business, not after you try to kill me twice,” Hasso said.

“It’s my king’s business, by the goddess.” When Aderno named her, Hasso saw Velona behind him.

“It’s my folk’s business.”

“I am no part of your folk. You make that plain enough. When I come to you, all you want to do is murder me.”

“What are we supposed to do with you?” Yes, that was Velona. Seeing her, hearing her even in dreams tore at Hasso from the inside out. “You’re up to something with the cursed Grenye.”

“You Lenelli don’t want me anymore.” Hasso didn’t waste time denying it.

“King Bottero tried to ransom you. The savage who runs Bucovin wouldn’t take his money,” Velona replied.

What she said was true - and also missed the point. Lord Zgomot was a decent, capable, worried, rather gray little man doing the best job he knew how in a predicament Hasso wouldn’t have wished on his worst enemy. To the Lenelli, he was only a Grenye. He would have been only a Grenye to Hasso, too, but for the fortunes - and misfortunes - of war.

“Sorry. I can’t do anything about it,” Hasso said. “Then you try to kill me. Should I love you after that?”

He started bleeding inside again. He still wanted to love Velona, and wanted her to love him.

“We were denying you to the enemy,” Aderno said.

He made perfect military sense. He also made Hasso want to wring his neck. The combination reminded the German of some of his own country’s less clever policies during the war. He said, “When you try to kill me you turn me into an enemy.”

“If you’re a dead enemy, it doesn’t matter,” the wizard said.

If the
Reich
had knocked the Russians out in six weeks, nothing else would have mattered. Since they hadn’t, they had to try to deal with the consequences of that failure - only to discover they couldn’t. Now Aderno and Velona were trying to deal with the consequences of failing to kill Hasso. They could try again - and they might succeed if they did.

“You
are
up to something with the Grenye.” Velona made that sound even more disgusting and outrageous than sleeping with a little swarthy woman.

“They could kill me, and they don’t,” Hasso answered stolidly. “More than I can say for some people.”

“Killing is better than renegades deserve. Killing is
much
better than renegade wizards deserve.” Velona was as implacable as an earthquake. Her dream-self turned to Aderno.
“Now!”

Hasso had thought his own modest sorcerous abilities were what had kept him from harm when the two of them struck at him in Falticeni. Maybe those abilities helped, but he’d forgotten Falticeni lay at the heart of Bucovin: the place where, for whatever reason, Lenello magic was weakest. Here near the western border...

He didn’t just scream himself awake, as he had in Lord Zgomot’s palace. He puked his guts out, as if he’d eaten bad fish. He shat himself, too. He thought his ears were bleeding, but he was in too much more immediate torment to stick a finger in one of them and find out. When he had to piss, he pissed dark. What had they done to him? Everything but kill him, plainly. While the fit was going on, he almost wished they had.

Rautat and the other Bucovinans stared at him while he writhed and heaved. “I’d heard about this at the palace,” the underofficer said to his comrades - Hasso heard his voice as if from a million kilometers away. “It wasn’t so bad there.” He was right. Nothing could have been as bad as this. Hasso would rather have stood out in the open during a volley of
Katyushas
than go through this - and if that didn’t say everything that needed saying, what could?

The only good thing about the fit was that it didn’t last long. Once it passed, Hasso lay on the ground, spent and gasping like a fish out of water. “Give me a little beer,” he choked out. Dumnez poured him some. He didn’t swallow it, but used it to rinse his mouth. It couldn’t get rid of all the foul taste; some of his vomit had gone up his nose. “Where is a stream?” he asked. “Need to wash.”

“Back over there.” Rautat pointed. “Will anything more happen to you?”

“I hope not,” Hasso said.

His drawers were ruined beyond hope. He used them to wipe himself as clean as he could, then threw them away. From now on, he would be bare-assed under his trousers. Well, the world wouldn’t end. He was battered but almost unbowed when he came back to the embers of the fire.

“Look at the moon. It’s still the middle of the night,” Rautat said. “We’re going back to sleep. Can you do the same?”

“I don’t know. I find out,” Hasso answered grimly. Aderno and Velona hadn’t attacked him twice in one night. Did that mean they couldn’t? He could only hope so.

In what was plainly meant for consolation, Rautat said, “Soon, now, you’ll give the Lenelli worse than they just gave you.”

And it
did
console, where it wouldn’t have before. That only went to show how badly abused Hasso was. “I will,” he said, and he really meant it for the first time since his capture.

“Get moving, you fools!” a soldier shouted. The word for
fools
literally meant
donkey heads;
Bucovinan was not without its charms. The small, swarthy warrior went on, “The accursed Lenelli are on their way lots of them!”

“How about that?” Rautat said, and then, to Hasso, “If lots of those big blond bastards are coming, this is the time to use the gunpowder for real, yes?”

“Yes,” Hasso answered. He hadn’t exactly chosen Bucovin. He’d had the choice made for him. Bottero’s followers wanted him dead. Well, if they thought that was what they wanted
now,
he was going to give them some real reasons to feel that way. “We dig real holes. We put jars of gunpowder into them. We light the fuses.”

“Boom!” Rautat said. Hasso nodded. Rautat continued, “And they won’t be expecting it. They think it’s all a bunch of Grenye crap.” He laughed. “We’ll show them what’s crap, all right.”

“One thing,” Hasso said. Rautat raised a questioning eyebrow. Hasso pointed at himself.
“I
light the fuses this time.”

He waited for Rautat to swell up and turn purple. He waited for the Bucovinan to say he was too valuable to do something like that - which meant he couldn’t be trusted to do it. He had all his arguments ready. He was braced to threaten to put a spell on the powder so it wouldn’t go off unless he lit it himself. If they provoked him enough, he was ready to try to cast that spell. But Rautat only nodded. “You’ve earned the right. We’ll find a good spot, with thick growth by the side of the road. That way, you’ll have an easy time getting away, same as Gunoiul did.”

“You really aim to let me do this?” Hasso couldn’t hide his surprise. Rautat nodded again. “I really do. If you aren’t loyal to us now, you never will be. Either way, it’s about time we found out.” He turned to the rest of the Bucovinans who’d traveled west from Falticeni. “Come on, you lazy lugs! This is what we came here for. We’ve played all the games. Now we give it to the Lenelli, the way we’ve wanted to give it to them ever since they got here. So
dig,
curse you!”

They dug like moles. If he’d told them to dig to China, or whatever lay on the other side of this world, Hasso thought they would have done that. The hope of getting their own back against the Lenelli fired them like burning gasoline.

Was this how the Russians felt when they started winning after the
Wehrmacht
pushed them back more than a thousand kilometers across their own country?

Maybe this was even fiercer, because the Grenye had been retreating not for a year and a half but for generations. They must have wondered if they would ever get the chance to go forward. But here it was

... if the gunpowder worked.

Rautat talked to the soldier who warned of the advancing Lenelli. Not too much later, he talked to another Bucovinan, this one an officer sweating in a helmet and mailshirt. Rautat pointed toward Hasso several times. He pounded his fist into his palm once. He might be only a
Feldwebel,
but he acted like a general.

He got away with it, too - damned if he didn’t. The Bucovinan officer nodded, sketched a salute, and hurried away. Rautat grinned till the top of his head threatened to fall off. He also nodded to Hasso. If he hadn’t been the Official Bucovinan in Charge of the Dangerous and Important Blond Person, he never could have pulled that one off, and he knew it.

Hasso placed the fuses in the jars. Next time, he would come with jars already fused. You couldn’t think of everything at once, not when you were reinventing a whole art all by yourself. The Bucovinans watched him intently. If they got away and he didn’t, they would at least be able to go on with what he’d already shown them. Whether they’d be able to do anything more ... wouldn’t be his worry, not in that case.

He hid in some bushes off to the side of the road. A lot of the fuses ran toward those bushes, but he wasn’t too worried about that. For one thing, there were some dummies that went other places. And, for another, by now the Lenelli ought to think all the fuses were nothing but a big bluff. They wouldn’t pay any attention to them - till too late.

Rautat left him some hard bread and dried meat, a jar of beer, and, most important of all, a couple of sticks of something a lot like punk. It glowed red and slowly smoldered without burning away in nothing flat. “Good luck,” the Bucovinan said, and then, “Want me to hang around with you?”

“Whatever you want.” After what had happened while they slept, Hasso didn’t have any trouble sounding casual when he answered the question. “I’m not running back to the Lenelli.” No matter how much he might regret it, he was telling the truth there, too.

Rautat plucked a hair from his beard, considering. At last, he said, “Maybe I’d better.
I
don’t think you’re any trouble, but if it turns out I’m wrong I don’t want to have to explain to Drepteaza and Lord Zgomot how I left you all by yourself.”

“Fair enough,” Hasso said. From the underofficer’s perspective, it was. You
did
need to be careful about relying on a turncoat. The German felt he had to ask, “Can you stay down and keep quiet?” Those talents were more useful in warfare in his world than they were here. Most fighting in this world was right out in the open. How long would that last if gunpowder caught on?

“I’ll do it. I already thought about that,” Rautat said.

“Good. Start now, because here they come,” Hasso said, and hunkered down in the bushes. The first Lenello scouts had just topped the swell of ground to the west. Rautat got as flat as if a Stalin panzer had run over him. He didn’t let out a peep. He barely even breathed.

Hasso didn’t get quite so low as that: he needed to see out. One of the blond outriders stared at a dummy hole with a dummy fuse running from it. Another one said something to him. They both laughed and rode on. They were convinced it was just the Grenye savages trying to play games with their minds. Hasso wished he’d left somebody to light some of the dummy fuses. Too late to worry about it now. Much too late - here came Bottero’s main body, red flags flying. This had to be a bigger force than the one that was plundering Bucovinan villages. Hasso wondered why, but he didn’t wonder for long.
They’re after me,
he thought. It was a compliment of sorts, but one he would gladly have done without. On rode the Lenelli: big fair men in mail and surcoats on horses big enough to bear their weight. Soon Hasso could hear the thud of hoofbeats, the jingle of harness and armor, and even the odd snatch of conversation: “Oh, that? Don’t worry about it. Just the Bucovinans, trying to make us jumpy.”

“Dumbass barbarians,” another Lenello said.

“When?” Rautat’s question was a tiny thread of whisper, inaudible from more than a couple of meters away.

“Soon,” Hasso whispered back. He wanted about a third of the enemy army to pass over the real gunpowder pots before he lit the fuses. His guess was that that would cause the most confusion - and the most casualties.

He swung a stick of punk through the air to get it to glow red. Then he touched it to the fuses, one after another. From the ground beside him, Rautat grinned wolfishly. Trails of smoke streaked toward the burning pots.

A couple of Lenelli pointed to them. Others snickered and shook their heads, as if to say those didn’t mean anything, either. Up till today, they would have been right. The pots buried in the road blew up, one after another.

They didn’t just hold gunpowder. They had rocks and sharp bits of metal in there, too - homemade shrapnel. They gutted horses and flayed knights’ lightly armored legs. Some fragments hit men in the face. Some managed to punch right through mail.

And the noise was like the end of the world, especially to men and beasts who’d never heard the like and weren’t expecting it. Hasso was closer than he might have been, but still used to much worse. But even Rautat, who’d heard gunpowder go off before, let out an involuntary yip of alarm. The Lenelli and their horses screamed as if damned.

The big blonds in back of the explosions wheeled their mounts and rode off to the west as fast as they could go. The ones in front ...
They don’t know whether to shit or go blind,
Hasso thought happily. They milled about, afraid to advance and even more afraid to retreat. Then Bucovinans started sliding forward and shooting at them. Normally, Bottero’s men would have driven off the archers annoying them without even breaking a sweat. Here, the bowmen were just enough to tip the Lenelli into panic.