After the Downfall (51 page)

Hasso did feel a pang at riding away from the remaining pots of gunpowder: they ended up stowing them in the castle on the east bank of the Oltet, which, like Muresh, had been - somewhat - repaired. There was bound to be more explosive in Falticeni. The Bucovinans knew how to make the stuff now, and they wouldn’t have stopped because he’d ridden west.

He did wonder whether Zgomot would have the chopper waiting. If the ruler decided he’d learned enough from the dangerous blond ... Hasso shrugged. He just had to hope that wasn’t so. Bottero’s men wanted to kill him. If Zgomot’s did, too... He’d damn well die in that case, and he didn’t know what he could do about it.

“Catapults,” he said out of the blue. He said it in Lenello, but the Bucovinan name was almost the same; the natives had taken the word as well as the thing. It was what Drepteaza called a bastard word, with long and short vowels.

“What about them?” Rautat asked.

“We need light ones on wheeled carts,” Hasso said. “Then they can throw pots of gunpowder at the Lenelli.”

“Oh, yeah?” A slow grin spread over Rautat’s face. “I
like
that, Lavtrig give me boils on my ass if I don’t. What other sneaky ideas have you got?”

“That would be telling,” Hasso answered. Rautat laughed. So did Hasso, but he wasn’t kidding. What kept him alive was being the goose that laid golden eggs. As long as he could keep laying them, and as long as none of them turned out to be gilded lead, he figured he was all right. If he screwed up, Lord Zgomot would start sharpening that chopper.

So don’t screw up,
he thought. Good advice - but hard to live up to. Coming back to Falticeni wasn’t exactly coming home. Hasso had no home in this world, and wondered whether he ever would. But he knew lots of people in the palace. Zgomot was interesting to talk to. And Drepteaza - was Drepteaza. Hasso sighed. He would be glad to see her. One of these days before too long, he would probably need to get drunk, too.

Hell, he’d done that on account of Velona, too. But it was different with her. He’d got smashed because she screwed Bottero. Drepteaza wasn’t screwing anybody, not as far as Hasso knew. That was the problem.

How the natives stared when he rode through the crowded, muddy, smelly streets with his Bucovinan escort! Nobody had any idea who he was - the Bucovinans figured him for a Lenello. Without photography and printing, nobody except kings could get famous enough for everyone to recognize them. And kings put their portraits on coins, which struck Hasso as cheating.

“Look at that big blond prick,” a Bucovinan said, pointing at him.

“Who are you calling a prick, you asshole?” Hasso replied in Bucovinan. The native gaped. His buddies gave him the horselaugh. Rautat slapped Hasso on the back. They rode on.

“So he did it?” one of the gate guards said to Rautat when they got to the palace.

“He sure did.” The underofficer sounded proud of Hasso. He probably was. If he hadn’t found the
Wehrmacht
officer in the pit and decided not to finish him off, he wouldn’t have got soft duty at the palace. He was enough of a
Feldwebel
to know when - and why - he was well off.

“Good,” the gate guard said. “About time we had some magic on our side.”

It wasn’t magic. Lord Zgomot understood that. So did Drepteaza. So did the Bucovinans who worked with gunpowder. As for the rest - well, what if they thought it was? That was probably good for morale. Grooms came out to take charge of the travelers’ horses. Hasso stretched and grunted. He stumped around bowlegged, like an arthritic chimpanzee. That got a laugh from Rautat and the rest of the Bucovinans. Then he said, “I want a bath.”

“Me, too,” Rautat said. Gunoiul and Peretsh and Dumnez and the others who’d ridden with them nodded.

“Boy, when he says things like that, you’d hardly think he was a Lenello,” the gate guard said, as if Hasso weren’t there or didn’t speak Bucovinan. The German didn’t bash the native in the head, however much he wanted to. The man had already shown he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. But most of the Grenye in Falticeni were bound to think the same things about Hasso - the ones who’d heard of him, anyway. How many had? No way for him to know.

He wondered if he could figure out how to make a printing press. In the long run, ideas were as important as weapons. Ideas
were
weapons. But that was in the long run. Lots of other things to worry about first.

That bath, for instance. Hasso let Rautat lead the way. He was glad to get out of his grubby clothes, and even gladder to soak in the warm water with the root the Bucovinans used in place of soap. If only he had some cigarettes ...

“If you were a Lenello, you’d still stink,” Rautat said.

“If I were a Lenello - ” Hasso dropped it right there. If he were a Lenello, he would have deserted when he got to the west. If he were a Lenello, he probably would have got away with it, too. “But I’m not.” He was sick of saying that. If only the Bucovinans would listen to him for a change!

Or maybe Rautat
was
listening. “I said, ‘If you were,’“ he reminded Hasso. “You don’t stink. You enjoy being clean, just like a human being does.”

Back in Drammen, Hasso hadn’t especially missed baths. When you got into the field, when you stayed in the line for weeks at a time, you learned to do without getting clean. You stopped worrying about it. It was nice to have the chance to scrub the dirt off, though. Hasso grabbed it without hesitation. He didn’t even have to get back into his dirty duds. Servants laid out some others that fit him, no doubt borrowed from one renegade or another. “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

“Not even a little bit,” Rautat agreed. He had on clean clothes, too. “Now I could do with chopped pork and garlic over millet. That’d fill up the hole in my belly - and some mead to wash it down, too.”

“Sounds pretty good,” Hasso said. Rautat leered at him. He even understood why. The underofficer’s meal was what the Lenelli would sneer at as native food. Hasso didn’t care, even if he wasn’t wild about garlic. Once you spent some time campaigning, you ate anything that didn’t eat you first. Either that or you starved. He did add, “I think beer goes better.”

“Suit yourself,” Rautat said magnanimously. “Let’s go get outside some.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Food brightened the way Hasso looked at the world. It always did. Some of the meals he remembered mostly fondly were, by any objective standard, pretty horrible. Half a kilo of part-burnt, part-raw horsemeat wouldn’t put the Ritz out of business any time soon. But when you’d had nothing but snow and a mouthful of kasha for three days before you stumbled over the carcass, it seemed like the best supper you’d ever had.

The Bucovinan meal wasn’t half bad, even if it wasn’t what Hasso would have ordered given a choice. He’d just emptied his mug of beer when an attendant came up to him and said, “Lord Zgomot wants to see you now that you’re done eating.”

“He tells you to wait till I finish?” Hasso asked. The man nodded. Hasso shook his head in amazement. A ruler who thought of things like that! What was this world coming to? The
Wehrmacht
officer got to his feet. He towered over the native, as he towered over all the natives here. “I am at his service, of course.”

“Congratulations, Hasso Pemsel,” Zgomot said.

Hasso bowed. “Thank you, Lord.” As usual, he found the throne room cold and drafty and badly lit. Zgomot’s throne looked like a dining-room chair smothered in gold leaf.

“You kept your promise. Your weapon did everything you claimed it would.” The Lord of Bucovin raised an eyebrow. “Do you have any notion of how unusual that is, Hasso Pemsel?”

How many people - renegades and Bucovinans alike - would have promised him and other Grenye rulers that they could drive back the Lenelli? How many of those snake-oil salesmen would have been talking through their hats? Just about all of them, or the big blonds wouldn’t have pushed forward as far as they had.

“What I say I can do, Lord, I can do,” Hasso answered stolidly.

“So it would seem,” Zgomot allowed. “If you knew how many of the others said the same thing, though...” His mouth tightened, likely at some unhappy memory. Then he brightened - as much as he ever did, anyhow. “And you did something else marvelous, too.”

“What’s that?” Hasso asked.

“You came back,” Zgomot said. “We trusted you. We had not a lot of choice, maybe, when you were showing us something so new and strange, but we did it, and you did not betray us.” He might have been a priest solemnly proclaiming a miracle.

Shame flooded through Hasso. He hoped the throne room was too dim to let the Lord of Bucovin see him blush. Yeah, he’d come back, but only because the Lenelli didn’t want him anymore. He wondered whether Bottero was wishing he’d given his soldiers different orders. And he wondered whether Velona wished she hadn’t lost her temper with him.

Maybe Bottero did wish he’d welcomed back the man from another world. Hasso couldn’t make himself believe Velona felt any different about him. Velona didn’t do things because they were expedient. She did them because she felt like doing them. She loved as she pleased - and she hated as she pleased, too.

“Here I am, all right,” Hasso said. Let the Lord of Bucovin make anything he pleased of that.

“Yes.” Zgomot actually smiled a smile that didn’t look cynical. That didn’t happen every day - nor every week, either. “And now that you are here again, what other things can you show us that will drive the Lenelli wild?”

“Well...” Hesitantly, in a mixture of Lenello and Bucovinan, Hasso explained what he hoped to do with catapults and flying pots of gunpowder.

“Interesting,” Zgomot said - which, from him, was better than wild enthusiasm from a lot of people Hasso knew. “But a catapult only shoots so far. It only shoots so fast. How do you keep the Lenello knights from charging up and murdering the crew while they put a new pot in the throwing arm and cut the fuse just so?”

Hasso bowed low. “Those are the right things to worry about, Lord.” He wasn’t trying to butter Zgomot up, either. The Lord of Bucovin had a good eye for problems. Spending his whole reign trying to hold off people with more tricks up their sleeve than he had doubtless contributed to that. Hasso went on, “Very steady pikemen with long pikes can hold off knights. Good archers can do the same thing. If you have knights of your own, they can keep the Lenelli from getting too close in the first place.”

“How sure are these ploys?” Zgomot asked.

“It’s war, Lord.” Hasso spread his hands. “Nothing is sure in war. You already show that to King Bottero, yes?” He mimed falling into a pit. “And you already show that to me.”

“We have to do such things,” Zgomot said. “When we face the big blond bastards straight up, we lose. We don’t have enough big horses to raise swarms of knights the way they do. We will one of these days, but not yet. How long would your long pikes have to be?”

“About ten cubits,” Hasso answered. That was five meters, more or less. “Several rows of spearheads stick out in front of the first row of soldiers. If the pikemen stay steady and don’t run, knights can’t get through. A hedgehog, we call that.” The proper term was a Swiss hedgehog, but Zgomot didn’t know anything about the Swiss.

The Lord of Bucovin thought hard now. “These men would need training. They would need practice. What would happen if a wizard beset them?”

Again, he saw the problems very clearly. “They would need training, yes,” Hasso said. “As for a wizard

... A wizard is more likely to go after the catapults and the gunpowder, I think.”

“I think so, too,” Zgomot said. “But we could use a hedgehog against the Lenelli even without catapults and gunpowder, could we not?”

“No doubt about it, Lord.” And no doubt that Zgomot was one plenty sharp cookie indeed. Hasso added, “Archers would need better bows to fight knights. They would need training, too.” He knew of English longbows, but he didn’t know much about them.

“So this is not something we can do right away?” Zgomot said.

“No,” Hasso admitted. “War is a trade like any other. You have to learn how if you want to do it well.”

The Lord of Bucovin sighed. “I suppose so. If we get beaten before we can learn, though...” He sighed again. “That only means we should have started sooner, I suppose.” He was right, however little good being right might do him.

Hasso was eyeing the dragon’s tooth in the corridor on the way to the throne room when Drepteaza came up. She stopped when she saw him. “So,” she said. “You came back after all, Hasso Pemsel.”

“People keep telling me so,” Hasso said. “Here I am, so I suppose I have to believe them.” He gave her something more than a nod but less than a bow. “I am glad to see you.”

“And I’m glad to see you - here,” Drepteaza said, which wasn’t the same thing at all. “Lord Zgomot was worried about you.”

“Yes, I know.” Hasso frowned. Something in her voice wasn’t quite right. “Were you worried, too?”

“Not as much as Lord Zgomot was,” she answered.

Whatever was bothering her, it wasn’t aimed at him. “Why are you angry at the Lord of Bucovin?”

Hasso asked.

Drepteaza gave him a sidelong glance. “You ought to know.”

“Me? What have I got to do with it?” Hasso had thought he was off the hook. Maybe he was wrong.

“I told you - Lord Zgomot feared you would run off, run back to the Lenelli.” It all made perfect sense to the priestess.

Not to Hasso. “What does that have to do with you?” he asked.

“You really don’t know? You really don’t understand?” Drepteaza sounded as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

In some exasperation, Hasso shook his head. “If I understood, would I be asking?”

“Well, you never can tell.” Drepteaza had to tilt her head back to look up at him. He always wondered if she was looking up his nose. With the air of someone giving a dull person the benefit of the doubt, she said, “If you had run off to the Lenelli, Lord Zgomot would have blamed me.”

“You? What could you do about me?” Hasso reached to scratch his head - and banged his knuckles on the ceiling. Dammit, he didn’t fit in castles built for Grenye. “You stay here in Falticeni.”