After the Downfall (28 page)

“No,” he answered honestly. She blinked - that wasn’t what she’d expected to hear. He went on, “But I don’t get - I
won’t
get - any readier if I wait. So I try the spell. We see what happens.”

She kissed him, which was distracting in a much more pleasant way than his own gloomy and uncertain thoughts. “You can do it. I’ve seen that you can.”

Maybe she’d been listening to Bottero.

“Well, I hope so.” He got a little fire going in the bottom of a pot that he put under an awning made of tent cloth. He set another pot upside down under the awning and put the dry cloth under it. He couldn’t help thinking that a real wizard would have used far more elaborate preparations. Aderno probably would have laughed his ass off at what Hasso was doing. But Aderno wasn’t here, and Hasso damn well was. Like those kids who found themselves in the
Volkssturm,
he had to do the best he could. He wished he hadn’t thought of it like that. The Ivans and the Amis and the Tommies slaughtered the poor damned kids in the
Volkssturm
in carload lots. A few lived long enough to learn how to soldier. Most got wounded or killed before they could. Was that true of wizards, too? There was another cheerful notion.

No time for it now. “Give me the parchment,” he told Velona. She did, and held her cloak over it so the rain wouldn’t wash away the words before he could chant them. He called on the goddess. He called on the heavens. He called on the sun and the clouds. Once, when he stumbled over a word, the fabric of the world seemed to stretch very tight. Sudden frightening heat built up inside him. He got the next word right, and the one after that, and found his rhythm again. The heat receded. His fear didn’t. He wondered if it ever would. Yeah, you could blow yourself up with this stuff if you didn’t know what you were doing. And he didn’t. Worse, he knew he didn’t. Recognizing his own ignorance made him want to race through the spell, to get it over with as fast as he could. That probably wasn’t smart - it made him more likely to screw up.
Tortoise,
he told himself.
Not
hare. Tortoise. You have to do it right. That’s more important than doing it fast.
Making himself believe it wasn’t easy.

At last, he got through it. He didn’t burst into flames or explode from water buildup inside him or dry out as if he’d been stuck in the Sahara for a million years or do any of the other interesting and horrible things his overactive imagination came up with. He just said, “So may it be,” one more time and slumped down, exhausted. Was that rain soaking him, or sweat? Did it matter?

Velona straightened him up. She had strength for two, or maybe for an army. “There,” she said. “You did it. You did everything a man could do. But I already knew you did everything a man can do.” To leave him in no possible doubt of what she meant, she kissed him again. He was sure she would have taken him to bed if he’d shown even the slightest interest. Just then, though, he was so weary, he didn’t think he could have got it up with a crane. “Wine,” he croaked. “Or beer, anyhow.”

Velona didn’t get angry, which had to make her a princess - no, a goddess - among women. “I’ll get you some,” she said, but she didn’t. Instead, she shouted for Berbec. The captured Bucovinan obeyed her faster than he followed Hasso’s orders, and with less back talk. By the standards of this world, Hasso was probably a softy. He shrugged. He couldn’t do much about that, and he was too damn tired to care right now, anyway.

Berbec came back with wine. Hasso wondered where he’d got it. From the king’s cooks, maybe? If Berbec said the goddess wanted something, who would have the nerve to tell him no? Even Bottero would think twice before he did that.

The wine was thick and sweet, like all the vintages here. Anybody with a sophisticated palate would have thrown up his hands in despair. Hasso didn’t give a damn. The alcohol gave him a jolt, and the sugar gave him another one. By the time he’d downed a big mug, he’d improved all the way up to elderly.

Velona drank some, too. Then she kissed him one more time. He didn’t know about kisses sweeter than wine, but kisses sweetened with wine were pretty nice. And he remembered Berbec, and the line in the Bible about not binding the mouths of the cattle that thresh the grain. He sloshed the wine jar. It was almost empty, but not quite. He gave it to the Bucovinan. “Here,” he said. “Finish this.”

“Me?” Berbec sounded astonished. Velona looked even more astonished, and angry, too. Hasso nodded, pretending he didn’t see the storm on her brow. Berbec gulped hastily, then gave a sort of half-bow. “Much obliged, master,” he said, and scurried away before that storm burst. It did, as soon as he was gone. “Keeping slaves content is one thing. Wasting wine on them is something else,” Velona said pointedly.

“So I’m a crappy master. The world won’t end,” Hasso said. “I don’t have it in me to fight right now, either. Let’s see how the magic turns out, all right?”

He wondered if a soft answer
would
turn away wrath. Velona followed her own road, first, last, and always. If you weren’t heading in that direction, you were commonly smart to stay out of her way. But she just said, “I’ll try to talk sense into you later, then.”

If those weren’t words of love, Hasso didn’t think he’d ever heard any. Come morning, he looked up into the sky. It was still cloudy. It wasn’t exactly raining, but it wasn’t exactly
not
raining, either. A fine mist got his face wet.

He had the feeling someone was watching him. He looked around, but the only person he saw was Berbec. The servant had his tunic off. He was getting lice and their eggs out of the seams. Hasso wondered how many times he’d done that since 1939. More than he wanted to remember, anyhow. You never got ahead of the goddamn bugs. You had a bastard of a time staying even.

“Are you watching me?” Hasso asked.”
Were
you watching me?” Yes, pasts and futures were starting to come.

Berbec paused. After crushing something between his thumbnails, he said, “I try to keep an eye on you, see what you want.” He had a mat of hair on his chest and belly. He also had some impressive muscles. He might be a runt, but he was a well-built runt.

And he and Hasso were talking past each other. “No,” the
Wehrmacht
officer said. “I mean, were you watching me just now?”

“Not me.” Berbec shook his head. “I was paying attention to these lousy things.” He looked surprised, then started to laugh. His Lenello was also imperfect, and he’d made the joke by accident.

“All right. Maybe it isn’t - wasn’t - you, then.” Hasso looked around again. He still didn’t see anyone else close enough to have given him the willies that way. He looked up into the sky again. The mist kept coming down, but it was no more than mist.

And the feeling that he was being watched got worse. He remembered the Bucovinan envoy, and he remembered how Velona felt when she got deep into Bucovin. The land wasn’t on the Lenelli’s side here. Did the land include the sky? He didn’t know. How could he? He was more foreign in these parts than the Lenelli were, a million times more foreign. His sorcery might not have stopped the rain, but did seem to have slowed it down. Would that be enough to get the countryside pissed off at him?

If it was, how worried did he need to be?

He was still chewing on that, and not liking the taste of it very much, when King Bottero strode over to him. The king paused every few steps to kick mud off his boots. Berbec saw him coming, too, and unobtrusively got lost. Bottero’s smile almost made a substitute for sunshine. “You see? I knew you could do it,” he said.

“Did I do it?” Hasso shrugged. “I don’t know, your Majesty. Still some rain.” He blinked as a drop got him in the eye.

“Not bloody much.” King Bottero was inclined to look on the bright side of things. “It was coming down like pig piss” - which was what the Lenelli said when they meant it was raining cats and dogs - “but now we’ve only got this drizzle. We can cope with this. The other, that was pretty bad.”

“I don’t know if this is because of me,” Hasso repeated. “If it starts raining hard again - ”

“In that case, you’ll work your magic again and slow it down.” The king didn’t have to listen to anybody if he didn’t feel like it. The
Führer
hadn’t had to, either. Hitler was still in Berlin when Hasso disappeared from that world. If he was lucky now, he was dead. If he wasn’t so lucky, Stalin had him. Hasso had trouble thinking of anything worse than getting caught by Uncle Joe.

And Stalin didn’t have to listen to anybody, either.

“It’s still muddy.” Bottero kicked glop off his boots again. “But if it doesn’t get any worse than this, we’ll manage. It’s on to Falticeni.”

“I hope so, your Majesty.” Hasso meant that, anyway.

The king slapped him on the back. “You can do it. We can do it. And you will do it, and so will we.”

Off he went, pausing every now and then to clear those boots.

When the army set out, of course, the ground was still muddy from all the rain that had fallen before. That meant the Lenelli still had to move slowly. Hasso’s horse probably felt like doing what Bottero had done. No matter what it felt like, it kept slogging forward.

One bit of good news: with all that rain, the Bucovinans couldn’t burn everything in the path of the king’s army. They did dig more camouflaged pits in the roadway, as they had when the Lenelli forced their way across the Oltet. A few unwary scouts rode their horses into them. The sharp stakes set up at the bottom of the pits pierced men and horses alike.

Bottero fumed when supplies didn’t come up fast enough to suit him. “What are our wizards doing back there?” he complained. “Are they too busy screwing little brown women to pay attention to their proper business?”

He was screwing little brown women himself, or at least one little brown woman. No one seemed to want to mention Sfinti to him. Hasso, a near-stranger in these ranks, found discretion the better part of valor. Orosei did remark, “It’s muddy behind us, too, your Majesty.”

“Well, yes,” Bottero said. “But we need the food, curse it.”

“Jumping up and down about what you can’t help won’t make it any better,” the master-at-arms said. Hasso would have liked to tell King Bottero the same thing, but didn’t know how the monarch would take it from him. Orosei, more at ease in a society where he’d belonged since birth, didn’t hesitate. And the king did take it from him. A sheepish grin spread across Bottero’s face. “It makes
me
feel better,” he said.

“Hurrah.” Orosei wasn’t afraid to be sarcastic to his sovereign, either. And King Bottero laughed out loud, for all the world as if the soldier were kidding.

Somewhere up ahead lay Falticeni. Over the next set of hills? Past the next forest? Around the next bend in the road? The Germans had looked for Moscow like that in the winter of ‘41, and they knew exactly where it was. Half the time, the Lenelli seemed to think Falticeni lay somewhere over the rainbow. With the maps they had, who could blame them? They knew its direction, but not where along that line it was. And, the farther east they went, the worse the rain got again. Hasso worked his amateur spell once more. He was smoother at it the second time around; he didn’t come close to cooking himself in his own juices, the way he had the first try. But he couldn’t see that the magic did much to the weather this time.

“We’re deeper into Bucovin now,” Velona said in what had to be meant for consolation. “The land
does
work against spells here.”

“Why isn’t that magic?” Hasso asked irritably. “It screws magic up.”

“It’s like trying to fight a battle in the rain and mud,” she answered. “It screws up everything. It’s just the way things are here. If the Grenye worked magic, they’d have trouble with it, too.”

But the natives didn’t, couldn’t, work magic. The Lenelli sneered at them for that, and made them out to be, well,
Untermenschen
on account of it. If the big blonds’ big advantage faded, though, the farther east they went...

“We just have to do it the hard way, that’s all,” Velona declared. “We can do that, too. We’re better warriors than those scrawny little buggers ever dreamt of being. And speaking of doing it the hard way...”

She looked at him sidelong That turned out to be better consolation than all the words in the world. The Bucovinans didn’t seem to know they couldn’t stand up against Bottero’s army. Raiding parties tangled with his scouts. No mystery about where these bands came from: they rode down from the northeast, shot arrows at the Lenelli or pitched into them when enjoying the advantage of numbers, and then rode off again.

Bottero thought about sending Hasso forward with the scouts. “A wizard could remind the little bastards why we’re better than they are,” the king said.

“I don’t know how much I can do on this ground.” Hasso left it there: anymore and he would have looked bad.

“We’ll save you,” Bottero decided after some thought. “You go up with just a few of our men along, something stupid can happen. Don’t want that, not when there’s bound to be a big battle ahead. Chances are we’ll need you more then.”

“Whatever you say, your Majesty.” Hasso was more relieved than he let on. The prospect of combat didn’t faze him. After everything he’d been through, he had its measure. No, what did make him sigh (unobtrusively, he hoped) was the good sense King Bottero showed. He didn’t throw away the potential of a large gain later for some small one - or the potential of that small one - now. The striking column of Lenello knights practiced whenever it could. It had won a battle for the army, so even Marshal Lugo wasn’t complaining about it anymore. The big blonds did like to fight aggressively; the idea fit them well enough once they got used to it. Punch a hole in the other fellow’s line, then pour on through. What could be better than that?

Nothing - as long as it worked.

“This time, the Bucovinans likely expect us to do something with the column,” Hasso warned. “A surprise is only a surprise once. We need to watch their line, see where the weakness is. Then we hit there.” He slammed his right fist into his left palm.

Captain Nornat got the idea. “They’ll give us a hole to go through, sure as sure,” he predicted. “They’re nothing but Grenye, after all. They always make sloppy mistakes like that. It’s one of the reasons we keep thrashing them.”