After the Downfall (25 page)

And the
Führer
damn well
had
led the
Reich
off a cliff as the war ground on, but the Germans went right on saying,
“Heil
Hitler
!
” Obedience was all very well, but didn’t it have limits somewhere?

Somewhere, certainly. Here? No. Bottero had given a reasonable order. It might not work out, but chances were it would. And Hasso also thought the Lenelli could beat whatever Bucovin threw at them. The natives were brave, but all the courage in the world didn’t matter when it ran into technique. So the
Wehrmacht
taught, anyhow. But who wasn’t in Moscow, and who was in Berlin? So what if one German was worth three Ivans? If every
Landser
knocked down his three Russians, and then a fourth Russian showed up, and a fifth....

Exactly how big was Bucovin? How many swarthy little men did it hold, swarthy little men who didn’t want to live under a big blond king who could roar like a lion? Enough for their numbers to cancel out the huge advantage in weapons and skill the Lenelli had? Hasso didn’t know. He hoped like hell Bottero did.

Off rode the wizards on their gleaming unicorns. Hasso was sorry to see them go, not so much because he’d miss them - they were a contentious, bad-tempered lot - but because he’d miss their mounts. The unicorns were marvelous and beautiful. Without them, the army seemed only ... an army. Its glamour was gone.

Well, almost. Velona still rode with Bottero and his soldiers. Her glamour was of a different sort from the unicorns’, which didn’t make it any less real. Most of the time, she was just herself, not a woman in whom the goddess dwelt. Even as herself, she was striking, of course, but there was more to it than that. She held the memory of the goddess whether touched by the deity or not. Hasso sometimes wondered if he was imagining that, but never for long. He knew better. That doubt was just the sputtering of his rational mind, here in a world where rationality mattered so much less than it did in the one where he grew to manhood.

As if to prove as much, two wagon trains in a row made it through to King Bottero’s army. The teamsters were full of praise for what the wizards had done to help them on the way. “They sent them savages running with lightning singeing the hair off their balls,” one driver said enthusiastically. “I’ll buy those bastards a beer any day of the week, twice on Sundays.”

Weeks here had ten days, and Sundays were feast days instead, but Hasso tried to turn Lenello into idiomatic German inside his head. Most of the time, he did pretty well. Every once in a while ... Every once in a while, he might as well have been in another world.
Funny how that works,
he thought with a sour smile.

Things didn’t get better the next day. The Lenelli were marching near a river - the Aryesh, it was called that ran north and east. It should have shielded their left from any trouble from the Bucovinans. It should have, but it didn’t. Somehow, a raiding party appeared at dawn where no raiding party had any business being. The enemy soldiers shot volleys of arrows into the startled Lenello infantry, then galloped off before King Bottero’s horsemen could harry them.

Bottero, predictably, was furious. “They have no business doing that!” he shouted. “They have no
right
to do that! How did they get there? They came out of nowhere!”

“They must have crossed the river, your Majesty,” said the infantry commander, a stolid soldier named Friddi.

“Brilliant!” The king was savagely sarcastic. “And how did they do that? No bridge in these parts, and it’s too deep to ford. Maybe they had catapults fling them across!”

“Maybe magic flung them across, sire,” Friddi said.

“Don’t be any dumber than you can help,” Bottero said. “They’re Grenye, by the goddess! They can’t do that. And we don’t
think
they’ve got any renegades doing it for them. If they do, those bastards’ll be a long, hard time dying, I promise you that.”

Hasso thought of Scanno, back in Drammen. Scanno liked Grenye better than his own folk, and made no bones about it.
Dammit, we never did pick him up and grill him about how he beat Aderno’s
spell,
he thought - there was something that slipped through the cracks as the campaign revved up. But he was a drunk, a ruin of his former self. He wouldn’t make a wizard if he lived to be a thousand, and Hasso wouldn’t have bet on him to last another five years.

Stubbornly, Friddi said, “Well, your Majesty, unless it was wizardry, I don’t know how the demon they got there.”

However the men of Bucovin managed to cross the Aryesh, they threw the Lenello army into enough confusion to make it halt for the day. Hasso hunted up Orosei. “You know some men who are good trackers?” he asked.

“Oh, I might. I just might.” The master-at-arms’ eyes gleamed. “You’ve got an idea.”

“Oh, I might. I just might.” Hasso mimicked Orosei’s tone well enough to send the Lenello into gales of laughter.

The half-dozen soldiers Orosei told off had the look of hunters, or more likely poachers. “You do what our foreign friend says,” Orosei told them. “We’ve got some tricks he doesn’t know about, but I expect he’s got some we don’t know about, too.”

“What’s on your mind, lord?” By one tracker’s tone of voice, he was suspicious of Hasso on general principles first, then because the German was trying to order him around.

“Take me to where the Bucovinans cross the river. Track them back to there for me,” Hasso said.

“If they
did
cross it,” the Lenello said. “If they didn’t just show up, like. I don’t
suppose
Grenye can do magic, but you never can tell, now can you?” He seemed a lot less convinced than King Bottero. What that meant... Well, who the hell knew what that meant? Hasso had more urgent things to worry about.

“Track them back,” he said. “Then we see. Till we try to find out, we can’t really know.” That was true in his world. Here
...It had better be true here,
he thought.

“You don’t need us for this,” another tracker said as they all set out. “A blind man could follow these hoofprints.”

“A blind man, nothing,” still another Lenello put in. “A dead man could.”

“Fine. Pretend I am blind. Pretend I am dead,” Hasso said. “But remember one thing, please. If you make a mistake, I haunt you.” That got some grins from the men Orosei had picked, and one or two nervous chuckles. Back in Germany, he would have been joking. Here, as the first Lenello tracker said, you never could tell.

Back through the bushes and saplings the train led, back to the Aryesh. The trackers were right; Hasso could have done this himself. He shrugged. He hadn’t known ahead of time. But now he had witnesses if his hunch turned out to be right. And if it turned out to be wrong, they would see him looking like a jerk. He shrugged again.
If you’re going to try things, sometimes you damn well
will
look like a jerk,
that’s all.

The Aryesh was muddy and foamy. It looked almost like Viennese coffee. Hasso sighed. Along with tobacco, that was something he would never enjoy again. Nothing he could do about it. No, there was one thing: he could do
without.

He unsheathed his belt knife and trimmed a sapling into a pole about a meter and a half long. “Nice blade,” one of the trackers said. “Where’d you get it?”

“I have it with me when I come from my world,” Hasso answered.

“How about that?” the Lenello said, and then, in a low voice to one of his pals,

“Never seen one like it before. Almost makes you believe that cock-and-bull story, doesn’t it?” Hasso didn’t think he was supposed to overhear that, but he did.

“What’s he going to do now?” the other tracker said, his
voce
also not quite
sotto
enough. “Dowse with that stick? We already know where the cursed river is.”

Hasso hadn’t even thought of dowsing. In Germany, that was an old wives’ tale. It probably wasn’t here. If any kind of magic was practical, finding water fit the bill. But, as the tracker said, he already knew where the water was here. He was after something else.

He thrust the pole into the Aryesh. He wasn’t enormously surprised when only the first twenty-five or thirty centimeters went in. After that, it hit an obstruction. His grin was two parts satisfaction and one part relief.

Orosei was only confused. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Instead of answering with words, Hasso probed with the pole again. Then he stepped out into - or onto

- the river. Walking on the water, he felt like Jesus. The Aryesh didn’t come up to the tops of his boots. He strode forward, probing as he went.

“What the - ?” one of the trackers exclaimed.

“They don’t put their bridge where we can see it,” Hasso said, turning back toward the Lenelli. “They build it underwater, build it sneaky, so they can use it and we don’t know.”

“Well, fuck me,” the tracker said. If that wasn’t his version of coming to attention and saluting, Hasso didn’t know what would be.

“I don’t know, not till I see,” Hasso answered. “But I think maybe. In my world, the enemies of my land use this trick.” The Russians used every trick in the book, and then wrote a new book for all the tricks that weren’t in the old one. The
Wehrmacht
used this one, too. A bridge that was hard to spot was a bridge artillery wouldn’t knock out in a hurry.

Artillery couldn’t knock this one out - no artillery here. Hasso looked across the Aryesh. He didn’t see anybody, which was all to the good.

“What we need to do is, we need to pull up ten or fifteen cubits of this tonight,” he said. He almost said
five or six meters,
but that wouldn’t have meant anything to the blonds with him. They used fingers and palms and cubits, and weights that were even more cumbersome. What could you do? Since he couldn’t do anything, he went on, “Then the Bucovinans ride across, go splash.”

Orosei grinned at him. “If that doesn’t make those bastards turn up their toes, I don’t know what would!”

“That’s the idea, isn’t it?” Hasso said.

Even the trackers, who had been dubious about him, laughed and nudged one another. “He’s not so dumb after all, is he?” one of them said.

“Not so dumb,” another agreed, which struck Hasso as praising with faint damn. But he would take what he could get.

He made the trackers love him even more when he said, “You stay here and keep an eye on things. Orosei and I, we go back to the king and let him know what needs doing.”

“What if the savages come across the river at us now?” a tracker demanded.

“Not likely, not in the daytime. They want to keep this a secret, right?” Hasso said. Before the trackers could answer or complain, he added, “But if they do, then you bug out.” They couldn’t very well bitch about that, and they didn’t.

“An underwater bridge?” King Bottero said when Hasso brought him the news. “How the demon did they do that?”

When Hasso hesitated, Orosei took over. The German’s Lenello wasn’t up to technical discussions of pilings and planking. Bottero’s master-at-arms finished, “I never would have thought of it. I didn’t know
what
to think when I saw him walking on the water.” (Yes, that was funny, though only Hasso in all this world knew why.) “But he says they use this trick in war where he comes from, so he was ready for it.”

Nice to know Orosei doesn’t try to hog credit,
Hasso thought,
or not when the guy who deserves it
is around to hear him, anyway.

“What do we do about it?” the king asked. Hasso told him what he had in mind. Bottero stroked his beard. A slow smile stole over his heavy-featured face. “I like that, fry me if I don’t. We’ll do it tonight, and we’ll watch the Grenye go
sploot.”
Hasso didn’t think
sploot
was a word in Lenello, but he had no trouble figuring out what it meant.

“Send a good-sized band of men, your Majesty,” Orosei suggested. “If the barbarians decide to bring more raiders across tonight, they might swamp a little party of artisans.”

Hasso hadn’t thought of that. Plainly, neither had King Bottero. He nodded. “You’re right. I’ll do it.” He turned and shouted orders to the officers who would take charge of that. Then he nodded again. “There. I’ve dealt with
something,
anyhow.” A frown spread across his face like rain clouds. “Or have I? Have the Bucovinans built more of these underwater bridges, ones we don’t know about yet?”

“A wizard could - ” Hasso broke off, feeling stupid. All the wizards were scattered along the army’s long supply line. Now that the main force needed one, it didn’t have any. Then he noticed that Bottero was eyeing him. “Didn’t Aderno say
you
had some of the talent?” the king rumbled.

“He says it, but I don’t know if I believe it.” Hasso’s voice broke as if he were one of the fifteen-year-olds to whom the
Volkssturm
gave a rifle and a “Good luck!” as they sent them off to try to slow down the Red Army. “And even if it’s true, I don’t know how to use it.”

“About time you find out, then, isn’t it?” Bottero said. “If you
can
do it, you’ll give us a big hand.”

“But - But - ” Hasso spluttered.

“His Majesty’s right,” Orosei said. “Magic isn’t a common gift. If you’ve got it, you shouldn’t let it lie idle. The goddess wouldn’t like that.”

Did he mean Velona or the deity who sometimes inhabited her? Hasso didn’t know, and wondered whether the Lenello did. “But - But - ” he said again. He hated sounding like a broken record, but he didn’t know what else to say.

The king slapped him on the back, which almost knocked him out of the saddle. If he’d fallen off the horse and landed on his head, it would have been a relief. “Talk to Velona,” Bottero said. “She’ll give you some pointers, and you can go from there. It doesn’t sound like the kind of magic that can kill you if you don’t do it right. Give it your best shot.”

Hasso hadn’t even thought about the consequences of a spell gone wrong. He wished his new sovereign hadn’t reminded him of such things, too. But what were his choices here? He saw only two: say no and get a name for cowardice - the last thing he needed - or give it his best shot. He’d long since decided that a big part of courage was nothing more than a reluctance to look like a coward in front of people who mattered to him. And so, reluctantly, he said, “Yes, your Majesty.”