After the Downfall (58 page)

“What are the amulets good for?” one of the Bucovinans asked.

Instead of answering straight out, Hasso came back with a question of his own: “Is King Bottero marching yet? Does anybody know?”

The wagon driver nodded. “He’s marching, all right. He wasn’t that far behind us when we left his realm. One of the border guards who passed us through said it was nice of us to manure our fields - the big blond pricks would get good crops out of them.” The little swarthy man aimed an obscene gesture back toward the west. Then he noticed Hasso watching him. “Uh, no offense.”

“It’s all right. They are a bunch of big blond pricks,” Hasso said.

“Then what does that make you?” Cheeky as a park sparrow, the Bucovinan grinned at him.

“Oh, I’m a big blond prick, too,” Hasso answered easily. “But I’m a big blond prick with two differences.”

“Yeah? What are they?” the driver asked, a split second in front of one of his pals.

“For one thing, I’m a foreign big blond prick, not a Lenello big blond prick. And I’m a big blond prick who’s on your side.”

When Lord Zgomot heard the invasion had begun, he started assembling his own army. Bucovin was a big, sprawling kingdom or lordship or whatever the hell the right name was. The natives sensibly laid up supplies here and there on the main routes around the realm so soldiers wouldn’t starve as they came in to Falticeni. But, without the telegraph, without trains, without trucks, nothing happened as fast as Hasso wished it would.

He got a surprise of his own not long after the mobilization order went out. Into the tent city that was sprouting in front of Falticeni came perhaps a thousand men who marched with long pikes held straight up and down. They marched well, too - the pikes stayed vertical, and didn’t dip and foul one another. After seeing them come in, Hasso hurried back to Lord Zgomot. “They look good,” he said. “Can they fight?”

“They have all fought before,” the Lord of Bucovin answered. “They have never fought like this, but they have been drilling hard. They like being called Hedgehogs, by the way - that is what they named the regiment.”

“Good for them,” Hasso said. “If they don’t keep Lenello knights off the catapults, no one does.” That last was always possible, even if he would have preferred not to dwell on it. He went on, “How long are they working?”

“I pulled them together before you went off to my estate to try the catapults and the gunpowder shells,”

Zgomot answered. “When you described them, I thought,
This is something we really can do.
It does not take anything we did not already have - it is only a new way to use tools we already knew about.”

“You did it without me, too.” Hasso didn’t know whether to be proud or worried. If the natives decided they could get along without him, would they knock him over the head and do just that?

“You were busy with other things. I thought we could manage this ourselves, and I turned out to be right,” Zgomot said. “I hope they stay steady when the fighting starts, that is all.”

“So do I,” Hasso said. “I am going to be with the catapults. The Hedgehogs keep - will keep - the big blond pricks off my neck.”

“That would be good,” Lord Zgomot said, his voice dry. “You should watch them drill, to make sure we did not forget anything.”

“I do that,” Hasso promised.

He kept the promise, too - as he said, it was his own personal, private neck on the line. The picked regiment of Bucovinan foot soldiers knew he’d had the idea for their formation. That didn’t seem to bother them; they were used to having new ideas come from foreigners. The Japanese would have been like that in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Now they could stand up to anybody in the world. How long would it be before the Bucovinans could stand up to anybody in this world?
Win this fight
first, or you won t get the chance,
Hasso thought. He fingered the dragon’s-fang amulet he wore under his tunic. Aderno and Velona hadn’t paid any sorcerous calls on him since he donned it. Maybe that meant they couldn’t. He sure hoped so. But maybe it just meant they hadn’t tried the past few days.
Win this fight first.
That was always the imperative. And when he watched the Hedgehogs go through their evolutions, he began to think the Bucovinans could. They marched very well. They formed ten rows and lowered their pikes into a bristling wall of points. If he were a horse, he wouldn’t have wanted to try to charge through them. You could hurt yourself that way.

He said as much to the officer in charge of them. The native - his name was Meshterul - nodded. “We will hold. The gods-cursed Lenelli will never get through us,” he vowed. That was an important consideration. Whether the Bucovinans knew it or not, it wasn’t the only consideration. “All right. They can’t get through you,” Hasso said. “Can they get around you?”

Meshterul frowned. “Around?” No, he didn’t get it.

“Around, yes.” Hasso nodded. “Who is on your flanks? If the Lenelli get to the catapults through those people, we are still screwed.”

“Ah.” Meshterul nodded. He sketched a salute. “You’re right. I was just thinking about the Hedgehogs. But the real point is keeping the big blond pricks off the catapults, isn’t it?”

“Ja”
Hasso said. Drepteaza and Rautat and maybe even Lord Zgomot might know what that meant, but Meshterul only gave him a blank look. Hasso kept to Bucovinan after that: “Yes. You’re right - that is the point. The Hedgehogs may be very important later on. If the whole line of foot soldiers carries long pikes, how do the Lenelli break through at all?”

Meshterul’s eyes sparkled. “That’ll be the day, by Lavtrig!”

“Yes,” Hasso said again, once more in Bucovinan. “But that day is not here yet.”
You’ve got the
Hedgehogs, and you’ve got a bunch of odds and sods armed with this and that, the kind of troops
the Lenelli have been licking ever since they crossed the Western Ocean.

“We’ll need riders on our flanks, then,” the Bucovinan officer said. Hasso found himself nodding. Bucovinan knights mostly couldn’t match their Lenello counterparts. They were better than ordinary Bucovinan infantry, though. After some thought of his own, the
Wehrmacht
officer said, “And we put mines in front of and around the catapults, too, if we fight in a position that gives us time to do it.”

“I haven’t seen those in action. Everybody tells me they’re strong magic, though,” Meshterul said.

“Not magic at all,” Hasso said ... one more time. Meshterul stayed polite, but plainly didn’t believe him. If something went
boom!
and blew Lenelli to hell and gone, it had to be magic, didn’t it? People in this world sure as hell thought so. Even though Hasso knew better, he also knew he had to remember to take care of a couple of things: “Some of the mines will be fakes, bluffs - just turned earth with a fuse sticking out.”

“What good does that do?” Meshterul asked.

“It saves gunpowder. It keeps the Lenelli guessing. And we can make fake mines faster than real ones. If the Lenelli don’t know they’re fakes, they might as well be real,” Hasso answered. The Bucovinan captain started to laugh. “I’m glad you’re on our side, dip me in shit and fry me for a pork chop if I’m not.”

Hasso wasn’t nearly so sure he was glad to be on the Bucovinans’ side. But he wasn’t sure he
wasn’t
glad, either, which marked a change in the way he looked at this world. And it wasn’t just because he was sleeping with Drepteaza; he was sure of that. He’d lived here long enough now and seen enough to have gained a perspective different from the one he had when he first got here ... and different from the one he brought from his own world.
Ubermenschen? Untermenschen?
No, and no. People were ... people, dammit.

So here he was, fighting for the little swarthy bastards, getting ready to go to war against the big blond pricks. He started to laugh, which made Meshterul give him a funny look. He didn’t care. Just because people were people, that didn’t mean everybody loved everybody else. Oh, no. Not even close. Several days later than Hasso thought it should have, the Bucovinan army moved west from Falticeni. He used the time as well as he could. He made sure every pot of gunpowder and every metal shell the army was taking with it had a little bit of dragon bone inside or on it. Accidents could still happen: a spark, a fire. You treated gunpowder with the proper respect and made those as unlikely as you could. And now he’d magicproofed the powder, too. Or he hoped like anything he had. He began to believe the dragon bones would do what he wanted them to do. Aderno and Velona hadn’t come close to troubling him since he started wearing his dragon-fang amulet. He didn’t believe they weren’t trying to bother him anymore. They had every reason to hurt him if they didn’t kill him. If they couldn’t... then the amulet was working the way he had in mind.

By now, almost everybody in Lord Zgomot’s army wore an amulet. Artisans with saws and thongs had turned them out as fast as they could. Hasso knew Zgomot wore one himself: he’d given one to the Lord of Bucovin himself, and watched him put it on under his tunic. Zgomot wore a different tunic today on horseback, but the bulge was still there.

“I tried to shoot you last year,” Hasso said, riding up alongside him.

“Yes, I know,” Zgomot answered. “You killed one of my guards, and wounded two more.”

“You don’t hold it against me?” Hasso asked.

“If you
had
killed me, I would hold that against you,” Zgomot said. Hasso laughed, as much in surprise as for any other reason - the Lord of Bucovin didn’t make jokes, even wintry ones, very often. Zgomot went on, “As things stand, no. You were on the other side. You were doing what you could for Bottero. I might fault your taste, but not your loyalty. If you tried to shoot me now, I
would
hold that against you and I would have good reason to, I think.”

“So do I, Lord,” Hasso said quickly. “I have no reason to do that.”

“Well, I hope not,” Lord Zgomot said. “We are giving you as much as we can. And I hope you stay happy with Drepteaza, and I hope she stays happy with you. I spent a lot of time worrying about that.”

“I know, Lord,” Hasso replied. Zgomot had damn near ordered her to go to bed with him for what the
Reich
would have called national-security reasons. The only problem was, Drepteaza didn’t take orders like that worth a damn. Hasso thanked whatever gods happened to be in business locally that she’d eventually found reasons of her own. He said, “I am very happy. I hope Drepteaza is, too.”

“She cannot be too unhappy, or she would drop you. She has a mind and a will of her own,” Zgomot said, which paralleled Hasso’s thoughts of a moment before only too well. The native continued, “I have tried to ask her a time or two, but she does not always tell me all of what she thinks. She does not always tell anyone all of what she thinks.”

Hasso nodded; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t also noticed that. “She is her own person, yes. I like the person she is.”

“So do I, though not, I daresay, the same way.” Zgomot smiled one of his crooked, knowing smiles.

“Since you came to this world, you have been lovers with two women with minds of their own. Well, not all of Velona’s mind is her own, since part of it belongs to the Lenello goddess, but you know what I mean. Attracting two women of that sort is a compliment to you.”

“I would like it better if one of them didn’t keep trying to kill me, Lord,” Hasso said.

“Indeed. I can see how that might be so. But I assure you that you would like it less if they both did. If both of those two went after a man at the same time, I do not think he would last long.”

“Neither do I,” Hasso said, which was the truth. When he was coming back from trying to re-defect to the Lenelli, he’d had similar thoughts about Bottero and Zgomot. He couldn’t make it here without one of them, not unless he aimed to go into the king business himself. And he didn’t. He might like to carry whatever they gave you here instead of a
Generalfeldmarschall’s
baton, but he had not the slightest desire to wear a crown.

Yes, if Bottero and Zgomot both wanted him dead, dead he would be. If Velona and Drepteaza both wanted him dead, dead he would be, too. He suspected he would enjoy dying a lot less in that case. Suppose Velona didn’t want him dead. Suppose she wanted him back. What would he do then? If he had any brains, he would stay with Drepteaza even so. If he had any brains ... Being with Velona had nothing to do with brains. You went with Velona for the same reason a test pilot climbed into a new fighter plane’s cockpit - to see what kind of thrills it would give you next. And Velona’s thrills were a hell of a lot more exciting than any you could get from a lousy airplane.

Hasso shook his head. It was dead. It would never come back to life. He might miss it - he
did
miss it. If he spent all his time mooning over what was lost, he would lose sight of what he had. What he had was pretty goddamn special, too.

“The goddess’ rules are different from anyone else’s,” Zgomot said quietly.

“
Ja
,” Hasso said, and then did a double take. “Are you sure you are not a wizard, Lord?” He didn’t like being so transparent. It was dangerous. And if Zgomot could read him like that, couldn’t Drepteaza do the same thing?

“I am only a man, Hasso Pemsel,” the Lord of Bucovin answered. “But I am a man who knows something of women - as much as a man can, anyhow. And I am a man who has heard a lot about the Lenello goddess. I am jealous of you - maybe only half an hour’s worth of jealous, but jealous even so.”

Half an hour’s worth of jealous ... That sounded about right. Would you throw away the chance for happiness for the rest of your life for half an hour? If the half-hour was with Velona, you just might. And for a while afterwards you might think you’d made a good bargain, too. If that wasn’t power, what was it?

With a shiver, Hasso said, “Let’s beat them, Lord.” Zgomot nodded.

XXVI

Drepteaza rode with the army, too. Hasso wasn’t sure she was there to help him translate or just because she couldn’t bear to stay behind. He wouldn’t have wanted to wait back in Falticeni, either. Better to know than to worry about every courier who came into town.