After the Downfall (62 page)

But he didn’t have much time to dwell on the archers. The knights were nearing him with frightening speed. They looked as if they could ride down anything on earth, the way a company of panzers would have looked to foot soldiers in his own world. If the Hedgehogs panicked and broke and ran... They didn’t. The men in the first row went to one knee, the better to receive the charge. Without Hasso’s telling them what to do, the Bucovinans in charge of setting off the mines in front of the Hedgehogs lit their fuses at just about the right time. He didn’t know whether to cheer or to puddle up his students were going out into the world on their own, and they were doing well. The world was also trying to break in on them. Velona shouted something. Hasso couldn’t make out what it was, but he shouldn’t even have been able to hear it from a range of several hundred meters, not through his own side’s yells, those of the other Lenelli, and the rising thunder of the horses’ hooves. He shouldn’t have been able to, but he did.
The goddess,
he thought uneasily. Maybe - probably - the wizards were thwarted. Whatever power Velona had was wilder and stronger than theirs. It scared the bejesus out of him, because he didn’t know what its limits were or if it had any. He didn’t know, but he was about to find out. He touched a glowing length of punk to the fuse on the shell in the catapult’s hurling arm. As soon as it caught, he jumped back, yelling, “Loose!”

Swoosh! Thump!
The arm shot forward and thudded into place against the padded rest. Other swooshes and thumps said the rest of the catapults were shooting, too. Hasso breathed a prayer of thanksgiving to Whomever that no shell went off too soon. Blowing up a catapult crew would have been bad for morale. An air burst right above the Hedgehogs’ heads would have been worse.

Boom! Boom!
Those were mines, going off a little too soon. Horses reared and snorted in fear, but the Lenelli fought them down and kept on coming. They wouldn’t panic the way they did the first time. Experience counted, here as anywhere else. You lived and you learned - if you lived. The Lenelli had nerve, too. Not even their worst enemies, among whom Hasso now counted himself, would have denied that for a moment.

Boom! Boom!
More mines. This time, horses went down. Knights crashed to the ground or flew through the air. The charge was disordered, but it came on anyhow. German fifteen-year-olds advancing on Josef Stalin tanks with
Panzerfausts
couldn’t have shown more guts. Things happened very fast now.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Those were the flying shells bursting on and above the Lenelli and spraying lead balls and sharp fragments of bronze and iron through them. More horses fell. More knights got blasted.

Hasso thought they would break then. His catapult crew, like all the rest, worked frantically to reload the weapon and tighten up the ropes of hair that powered it. They grunted and cursed and sweated as they yanked at windlasses. They didn’t seem to have cranks. Hasso made a note to himself to do something about that before too long. He wondered if he’d remember.

Off on the wings, where the defense wasn’t so tough, the Lenelli engaged the Bucovinans. If the blonds broke through on either side, they might still win no matter what happened to their center. Germany had built up motorized panzer and panzergrenadier divisions, but the rest of the
Wehrmacht,
the bulk of the
Wehrmacht,
still relied on horses and shoe leather. Hasso had modernized some of the Bucovinan army, but not all. How well would the rest perform?

For that matter, the Lenelli weren’t beaten yet, even in the center. Hasso lit another fuse. “Loose!”

Swoosh! Thump!
The catapult flung it away.
Boom!
It blew up and hurt some blonds. In spite of the pounding to which they couldn’t reply, they kept on coming.

He’d heard that a charging horse would stop short, and wouldn’t impale itself on a picket fence of spearpoints. No doubt that was true - if the horse was left to its own inclinations. But determined riders could
make
their horses go forward against those long spears. They could, and they did. Wounded horses shrieked like wounded women. Some of them fouled pikes as they fell. Others pushed forward into the gaps. So did dismounted Lenelli, trying to get within sword reach of the Bucovinans. The spears held them out. Meshterul and the rest of the Hedgehogs’ officers deserved the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords. This was the first time they’d ever used their phalanx, but they performed like ten-year veterans. Every time a pike got fouled, another man stepped forward to get his point into the fight. Hasso just hoped they didn’t run out of men. They were only ten deep. Next time, they’d be deeper.

Was that Bottero there, a third of a meter taller than the natives? That
was
Velona, slashing away as if possessed - and so, no doubt, she was. If even she, if even the goddess, couldn’t break through... well, the Bucovinans had a chance, anyhow.

One catapult crew wrestled its unwieldy contraption around so it could shoot at the Lenelli off to the right.
Swoosh! Thump! ..Boom!
One shell bursting where the blonds didn’t expect it created far more fear than a whole salvo they were braced to receive.

“Good job!” Hasso yelled. “Good job!”

And then Meshterul yelled a command the natives might never have given on the battlefield before:

“Forward!”

Hasso wondered if the Hedgehogs’ commander had lost his mind. The pike-men had stopped the Lenello cavalry charge in its tracks. That was all they had to do. Hasso had been far from sure they could do even so much. Could they drive the blond horsemen back?

Damned if they couldn’t. They thrust their long pikes at the unarmored horses, not at the knights on their backs. The wounded horses shrieked. Some reared. Some fell. Their riders had a devil of a time keeping them under control. The Bucovinans speared the Lenello knights who went down with their mounts speared them and then trampled them underfoot as they surged ahead. The Lenello line wavered. The knights had never met infantry like this. As Hasso knew too well from bitter experience, if you couldn’t go forward, all too often you couldn’t hold your ground, either. In what seemed like no time at all, there
was
no line in front of the Hedgehogs. There were only frightened knights riding away as fast as they could.

Swoosh! Thump! ... Boom!
More shells sped the Lenelli fleeing the center on their way. Then, at Hasso’s shouted orders, all the catapult crews swung their weapons to one side or the other and started bombarding the Lenelli on the wings.

A bigger force of Hedgehogs could have rolled up the Lenelli to either side of them. By what struck Hasso as a miracle, Meshterul realized he didn’t have that kind of force, and halted his men before they advanced too far and got cut off. Such intrepid, brainless heroism had cost the Saxons dear at Hastings.
Swoosh! Thump. ..Boom!
The catapults couldn’t fling shells anywhere near so fast as a battery of 105s. They didn’t have so many shells
to
fling, either. Hasso was painfully aware that they wouldn’t have any more for weeks once they ran dry here. Everything rode on this battle.
Swoosh! Thump! ..Boom!
That was a good one. It burst just above the Lenelli on the left, and knocked down four of them. A 105 round couldn’t have done much more. And it panicked the knights who were still fighting. They decided all at once that they’d had enough. Going up against Grenye savages was one thing. Facing death from out of the air? That was something else. They rode off, too. Seeing them retreat, the knights on the right also pulled back. The Lenello archers who’d come up behind them now screened their withdrawal. Well, the archers tried. The catapults outranged them, though. Three or four shells bursting among them sent them on their way.

“You know what we just did?” Rautat said as the archers withdrew.

“We beat ‘em.” Hasso knew it damn well.

But Rautat was going to make his joke whether Hasso gave him a straight line or not. “We just circumcised the big blond pricks, that’s what,” he said, and went off in gales of laughter. All the natives who heard him broke up, too. And Hasso laughed along. Why the hell not? To a winner, everything was funny.

Along with the Bucovinans, Hasso tramped the field after the battle. They were looking for loot, and to finish off or capture surviving Lenelli. He was looking for faces he knew. He soon found one, too: there lay Mertois, castellan of Castle Svarag. A pike had punched through his thigh, and he must have bled to death.

“So many dead horses,” Rautat said sadly. “What a waste.” At least a hundred of them lay twisted right in front of the Hedgehogs’ position. They’d done what their riders told them to do, and they’d paid for it. So had a lot of the men who spurred them forward. The Lenelli didn’t know what they were up against till too late.

There lay King Bottero. Bucovinans had already stolen his fine sword, his helm with the gold circlet, his gilded mailshirt. Despite the byrnie, he’d taken a lot of wounds. He didn’t have a son. The succession in Drammen was liable to get messy. That was good news for Bucovin, too. And there lay Velona, her golden hair all sodden with blood. None of the Bucovinans had taken the sword from her hand. They knew who she was, and they knew what she was, and they didn’t want anything to do with her.

They weren’t so dumb.

Even Rautat hung back a couple of steps as Hasso knelt beside her. “So that’s what she looks like up close,” the underofficer said. “If you like great big blondes, I guess she’s pretty.”

Hasso hardly heard him. He eased the sword from his one-time beloved’s grip, then reached out to touch her hand. When he did, he frowned. She should have been cooler than that if she were dead. His index and middle fingers found that spot on her wrist by the thumb side of the tendons. Her pulse was slow, but it was there. “Jesus!” he muttered: another deity missing in action here.

“What?” Rautat said.

“She’s not dead,” Hasso said. “She’s just knocked out.”

Rautat started to draw his belt knife to remedy that. Then he jammed it back into the sheath. “I don’t dare,” he said, “not against the goddess.” He took off on the dead run. Hasso would have stopped him if he had tried to kill Velona. He wondered why, when she’d come so close to killing him. He also wondered what the hell he was going to do with her - to her? - when she came to. He didn’t fear the goddess the way Rautat did, which probably meant he didn’t understand the situation as well as the native did.

Cautiously feeling, he found a knot on the side of her head. He nodded to himself. Going into battle without a helmet was great for heartening your friends and frightening your foes. When it came to actually fighting ... not so good. He probed a little harder. If she had a fractured skull, she might not wake up which might prove a relief for everybody but her. She grimaced and tried to twist away from him. She wasn’t deeply out, then. That was a good sign, or maybe a bad one, depending on how you looked at things. Then her eyes opened. For a moment, she had no idea who he was, who she was herself, or what the hell was going on. Hasso sympathized. He’d been down that road himself the autumn before. A concussion was not your friend. She blinked, and blinked again. Her mouth set. Reason was coming back. Those blue, blue eyes found his. “You!” she said, her voice a hoarse croak.

“Afraid so.” Lenello came rustily from his lips. He wasn’t used to hearing it without a rough Bucovinan accent any more, either. “Want some water?”

“Please.”

He had a jug on his belt. He took it off and held it to her lips. She drank and drank. “Better?” he asked when she’d almost emptied it.

“A little, maybe.” She needed two tries to sit up. When she looked around and saw Bucovinans roaming the field and Lenelli and their chargers down and dead in windrows, she looked first humanly astonished and then more than humanly outraged. “What did you do to us? What did we do to you to deserve ... this?”

“Well, trying to kill me makes a pretty good start.” Hasso worked hard to remember the past tenses that had given him so much trouble; he needed them here. “I loved you, and you tried to cook my brains for me.”

He watched her gaze sharpen. If she could have slain him right there, she would have done it. But she couldn’t even start; it was like watching an archer try to shoot in a driving rainstorm. “My wits are all scrambled,” she muttered.

“I believe it,” Hasso said. “You are going to have headaches like you don’t believe. Takes days, maybe weeks, to get over.” He tapped the side of his own head. “I know.”

“What did you do?” Velona repeated. “The flying thunder ... That forest of spears ...” She shuddered, then winced, plainly wishing she hadn’t. “And none of our magic worked. We’ve had to deal with renegades, but this ...! How the goddess must hate you!”

“I take my chances,” Hasso said, which shocked her. Well, too bad. It
was
too bad, in too many ways, but he couldn’t do anything about any of them now. He continued, “I tell you something else, too. You need to remember it. All Lenelli need to remember it.”

“Go on,” she said. “I’m listening. Right now, I don’t have much choice.”

“Simple. Easy. Four words - Grenye are people, too.” In Bucovinan, it would have been one word.

“People,” Hasso said again. “Strong enough to stand against Lenelli. Isn’t that a big part of what makes people?”

Velona’s chin came up. “Little black-haired mindblind savages.” Cutting through a couple of hundred years’ worth of Lenello arrogance wouldn’t be easy or quick.

Hasso was about to remind her that King Zgomot’s so-called savages had whipped the living snot out of her kingdom twice running. Before he could, someone behind him said, “I didn’t know she would be so beautiful.”

He whirled. There stood Drepteaza and, several paces behind her and looking scared, Rautat. Hasso felt almost as if she’d caught him being unfaithful with Velona. He glanced at the goddess on earth. She looked like hell: haggard, battered, bruised, and filthy, her hair all matted with blood. All the same, the essence remained, and Drepteaza saw down to it.