After the Downfall (50 page)

“Magic!” somebody screamed. “The goddess-cursed Grenye
do
have magic!”

They fled then, with no shame and in no order at all. Had more Bucovinans and better-mounted Bucovinans pursued, they might have bagged most of that leading detachment of the army.
Next time,
Hasso thought. No matter how much you wanted to, you couldn’t do everything perfectly the first time around.

But he’d done plenty. The way Rautat sprang up and kissed him on both cheeks proved that. So did the way the Lenelli ran. From now on, they’d piss themselves whenever they saw a cord running to some freshly turned earth. Professionally, Hasso was happy. Personally ... He’d worry about that later. When he had time. If he ever did.

XXII

Things in western Bucovin were going to be different for a while - maybe for quite a while. Hasso could already see that. The natives had their peckers up. And the Lenelli ... The Lenelli had to be wondering what the devil had hit them. They sure would start to sweat whenever they saw string running to what looked like holes in the ground. And they would have to be ten times more worried about bushwhackers than they ever had before.

And all because of black powder,
Hasso thought.
If I knew how to make nitroglycerine ...
After a little pondering, he realized he might. Medieval alchemists had used nitric acid, so maybe the Bucovinans knew about it. And you got glycerine from animal fat some kind of way. Then he shook his head. To make nitro safe to handle, you had to turn it into dynamite, and he knew he didn’t know how to do that. Turning out gunpowder was dangerous. You had to be careful as hell. Turning out nitroglycerine? No, he didn’t even want to try. And he
really
didn’t want untrained Bucovinans trying. That wasn’t a disaster waiting to happen - it was a goddamn catastrophe. Rautat nudged him. “Let’s get out of here.”

Plain good sense ended his woolgathering in a hurry. “Right,” he said. Getting away wasn’t hard. King Bottero’s men had either fled back to the west or were hotly engaged with Lord Zgomot’s soldiers. They didn’t have time to worry about a couple of men heading the other way. Not getting scragged by the Bucovinans was more interesting. Hasso was glad he had Rautat along. The underofficer was able to convince his countrymen that the big blond beside him wasn’t a Lenello and was a friend. Hasso might not have had an easy time doing that on his own. He felt better when he and Rautat caught up with the wagon that held the rest of the gunpowder jars. Dumnez and Peretsh and Gunoiul and the other Bucovinans on his crew were beside themselves with excitement. “It worked!” they shouted, and, “We heard it blow up!” and other things besides. Once they’d said those first two, though, they’d said everything that mattered.

“What now?” Hasso asked

“Now we go back to Falticeni and find out what new orders Lord Zgomot has for us,” Rautat answered.

“We ought to leave the wagon somewhere closer to the front, so even without us it can go into action fast if it has to,” Hasso said.

“Not too close,” Rautat said. “Can’t let it get captured no matter what.”

He would have been right about that in medieval Europe. He was righter here. Hasso still worried about magic. The longer till Aderno and the other Lenello wizards figured out what gunpowder was and how it worked, the better. How much of a spell would you need to ignite it from a distance? “Where do you want to leave it, then?” the
Wehrmacht
officer asked.

“How about Muresh?” Rautat said. “Even if the big blond bastards do come that far, it can always go back over the Oltet.”

Hasso found himself nodding. “Muresh should do.” He liked the idea of putting such a potent weapon in a town the enemy had ravaged only the autumn before.

In fact, he needed a moment to remember that he’d been part of the army that ravaged Muresh. It seemed a long time ago - and that despite his trying to rejoin that army only a few days before. King Bottero didn’t want him back? Well, long live Lord Zgomot, then!

He really had turned his coat. He shook his head. No, he’d had it turned for him. If the Lenelli wanted him dead - and they damn well did - how could he think he owed them anything but a good kick in the nuts the first chance he got?

It all made good logical sense. Which proved ... what, exactly? If Jews had a country of their own, would Germans feel easy about fighting for it? He had a hard time seeing how. Why would Jews want Germans on their side, anyway?

But that one had an answer. Whatever else you said about Germans, they were better at war than damn near anybody else. They’d shown twice now that they weren’t as good as everybody else put together, but that wasn’t the same thing.

So here I am. I’m good at war, by God. I’m even better here than I would be back home. And I’m
fighting for the side that looks like a bunch of fucking Jews. And if that ain’t a kick in the ass,
what is?

“Why are you laughing?” Rautat asked.

“Am I?” Hasso said. “Maybe because I am starting to pay the Lenelli back for trying to kill me.”
And
maybe for other reasons, too.

The one he named satisfied Rautat. “Revenge is good,” the native said seriously. “If anyone wrongs you, pay him back a hundredfold. We say that, and you’re doing it.”

“Yes. I’m doing it. How about that?” Hasso loved
How about that?
Along with
Isn’t that
interesting?,
it was one of the few things you could say that were almost guaranteed not to get you in trouble.

And I’m already in enough trouble, thank you very much.

He ended up in more trouble when they got to Muresh. His name pursued him through his dreams. He knew what that meant: Aderno and Velona were after him again. He tried to wake himself up, but couldn’t do it. And here in the west of Bucovin, magic worked better than it did farther east. So Aderno caught up with him in the corridors of sleep. “What did you do?” the Lenello wizard demanded.

“I pay you back for trying to kill me, that’s what,” Hasso said savagely. He found he liked Rautat’s proverb. “You try to kill me three times now. You think I kiss you after that?” He told Aderno where the wizard could kiss him.

“And you pay us back by working magic for the savages?” Aderno said. “You don’t know how filthy that is.”

Lying in these dream quarrels wasn’t easy - Hasso remembered that. So he didn’t say anything at all. He just laughed his ass off. Let Aderno make whatever he wanted out of that. And if he thought Hasso’d routed Bottero’s army with spells, he would only have a harder time figuring out what was really going on.

“Why should I worry?” Aderno said. “If we don’t get you, the Grenye are bound to. They don’t trust renegades, you know.”

“They don’t try to murder me,” Hasso answered. “That’s you.”

“Yes, and we’d do it again in a heartbeat,” Velona said, appearing beside Aderno out of thin air - or, more likely, out of thin dreamstuff. “You deserve it. Anyone who goes over to the savages deserves it. And everyone who goes over to the Grenye will get it. The goddess has told me so.”

“Telling things is easy. Backing up what you say is a lot harder.” How many promises did Hitler make?

How many did he keep? “Is the goddess really big enough to swallow all of Bucovin?”

“Of course she is.” Velona had no doubts - when did she ever? “This land will be ours - all of it. So even if you showed the barbarians the trick of your thunder weapon, it won’t matter, because the goddess is on our side.”

God wills it!
the Crusaders shouted. And sometimes He did, and sometimes He didn’t, and after a while no more Crusaders were left in the Middle East. Velona was smarter than Aderno, though. She’d figured out what the booms were, and he hadn’t.

“We should have killed you the last time,” she went on. “We’ll just have to try again now.”

“This is what I get for loving you?” Hasso asked, though all the while he knew the answer was yes.

“No one who beds Grenye women can truly love the goddess in me,” Velona said. “And if you don’t care about the goddess, then you don’t care about me, either. Now the goddess cares about you, Hasso Pemsel.” She was still beautiful - beautiful and terrible and terrifying. “I warned you long ago that there was more danger to loving me than the chance of a broken heart. Now you begin to see, and now you begin to pay!”

She gestured to Aderno. Hasso didn’t think she would have let him see that if she could have helped it. But the other side evidently had trouble lying in the dreamscape, too. That was something of a relief. And Hasso sorcerously braced himself as well as he could.

The blow wasn’t so strong as the one a few nights earlier. His being farther east likely had something to do with that. He woke with a shriek, yes, but by now he was almost used to doing that. He didn’t heave his guts out or foul himself, so he reckoned the encounter a success. Rautat was less delighted. “Do you have to make so much noise?” he asked crossly. “You sound like you’re dying, and you scare me to death.”

“Sorry,” Hasso said. “What do you want me to do when a wizard’s after me?”

“Go after him instead. Make him wake up screaming instead. You can do that shit, right? So do it.”

“I wish I could,” Hasso said, but the Bucovinan underofficer wasn’t listening to him anymore. He swore under his breath. He had no idea how to track Aderno through the Lenello wizard’s dreams, or what to do if he caught him. Having the ability and having the knowledge were two different things. Expecting Rautat to understand that was ... hopeless.

Not a sword. A shield.
Hasso was a mediocre chess player, but he’d learned enough to know defending was easier than putting together a strong attack. If the other guy needed to work hard to beat you, maybe he’d get sick of trying and go away. Maybe.

“What do you people do against sendings of bad dreams?” he inquired.

“Why ask me?” Rautat said. “Whatever we do, it isn’t real magic.” The common Grenye mixture of fear and bitterness edged his voice. Coming up against magic that
did
work must have been as horrible a shock for the natives here as the Spaniards’ gunpowder was to the Indians.

“Just curious,” Hasso said. Whatever the Grenye did wasn’t real magic for them. For him, with the right spell cast by the right kind of mind, it might be. Their notions would give him a place to start, anyhow. And he knew he couldn’t screw every night till he got to Falticeni. He didn’t
want
to screw in Muresh. It would remind him of all the rapes here during the sack.

With the air of a man humoring an eccentric - a lunatic? - Rautat answered, “Well, we use nettle and yarrow and prayer.”

Hasso discovered that he was smiling. What did Shakespeare say?
Out of this nettle, danger, we
pluck this flower, safety
- that was it. Maybe old Will knew more than he let on. He often seemed to.

“Can you get me some of each?” Hasso asked. He knew nettles when he saw them. Yarrow, to him, was only a name.

“I’ll send someone out to get you the plants, yes.” Rautat gave him a crooked smile. “You’ll have to find our own prayer, though. I don’t know where that grows around here.”

After what the Lenelli did to Muresh, Hasso guessed all the prayer in these parts had been torn up by the roots. He laughed anyway, to show Rautat he got the joke. And, a couple of hours later, a gray-haired Bucovinan woman brought in a nettle and another plant - Hasso supposed it was yarrow. The woman eyed him. “Do you speak our language?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yes - not too well, though.”

“Were you in Muresh when the Lenelli ravished it?”

“Yes,” Hasso said again.

She nodded, too, as if he’d proved some point. And he must have, because she said, “No wonder you have bad dreams.” She knew what the yarrow and nettle were for, then. Well, who likelier to believe an old wives’ tale than an old wife?

“I take any oath you want - I fought clean here.” Hasso was amazed by how glad he was to be telling the truth. He couldn’t have said the same thing about what he’d done in Russia. Well, how many Russians had clean hands in Germany?

And, truthteller or not, he failed to impress the Bucovinan woman. “Even so,” she said, and walked away without waiting for an answer. What had happened to her when Bottero’s army came through Muresh? What had happened to the people she loved? Hasso didn’t have the nerve to ask. Yarrow had fine, tiny leaves and a spicy scent. As the woman had, Hasso handled the nettle by the root to keep from getting stung. He held the yarrow in the other hand and chanted in German. He was sure the natives would rather he’d used Bucovinan. But he had no idea whether magic here paid any attention to the natives’ language. He knew damn well he could cast a spell in German that worked: he’d done it before. So he tried it again.

And what would happen when Aderno and Velona tried to afflict him again?
That’s why you’re casting
the spell, jerk
-
to find out what’ll happen.
With luck, Aderno wouldn’t be able to get through at all.
I’m sorry, sir. You seem to have reached a disconnected brain.
Hasso snorted. Yeah, his brain seemed disconnected, all right, even to him.

The only way to discover what would happen was to fall asleep. Hasso approached the night with all the enthusiasm of a soldier about to have a wound tended by a drunken, stupid medic. When it came to wizardry, that was about what he was, and he knew it. The only reason he looked like a doctor in a clean white coat to the Bucovinans was that they were even worse off than he was. He lay down. After a while, he slept. Next thing he knew, it was morning. He approved. Of course, he had no idea whether Aderno had tried a spell of his own during the night. But no news seemed good news.

He wasn’t the only one who thought so. “You didn’t scream. Your magic must have worked,” Rautat said. “It’s a lot more restful when you don’t scream, you know?”

“For me, too,” Hasso said, and the underofncer chuckled, for all the world as if he were kidding. Nobody’d ever tried to blow Rautat’s head off from the inside out. The Bucovinan didn’t know how lucky he was. If he stayed lucky, he would never find out, either.