After the Downfall

hadn’t been good about noticing them in Russia, either. Why bother? The Ivans were nothing but Untermenschen, weren’t they?

Four years earlier, the answer to that question would have seemed obvious. As a matter of fact, it still did. But the obvious answer now wasn’t the same as it had been in 1941.

To keep from thinking about that, Hasso watched Trandafir ride back to his line. Bucovin used banners of dark blue and ocher. The Wehrmacht officer wasn’t surprised to see their envoy ride over to where those banners clustered thickest. The Grenye king or general or whatever he was would be there.

Passing on Bottero’s reply took only a moment. The natives couldn’t have expected anything else. The Lenelli wouldn’t have come here in arms intending to turn around and go home again. But here as in the world from which Hasso came, the forms had to be observed.

Horns blared along the Bucovinan battle line, first in that center group of banners and then up and down its whole length. The timbre wasn’t quite the same as that of the Lenelli horns; even summoning men to imminent battle, it sounded mournful in Hasso’s ears. The horns themselves looked different. They had a strange curve to them, one that didn’t look quite right to the German.

Regardless of whether the horn calls seemed strange to him, they did what they were supposed to do: they roused the enemy army to defiance. The Bucovinans shouted their hatred and derision at the oncoming Lenelli. When they brandished their weapons, sunlight and fire seemed to ripple up and down their ranks. They might be barbarians, but they looked and sounded ready to fight.

And so were the Lenelli. Their trumpets roared forth familiar notes. These tunes weren’t the ones the Wehrmacht used, but they were ones the Wehrmacht might have used. They did the same thing German trumpets would have done: they got Hasso ready to fight. Bottero’s men were ready, too. The threats they shouted at the Grenye would have horrified the men who framed the Geneva Convention.

Velona rode out ahead of the Lenello battle line. She pointed toward the Grenye. “Forward!” she bugled. “Forward to victory!” Was she talking, or was the goddess speaking through her? Hasso thought he heard the goddess, but he wasn’t sure.

As soon as Velona gave the war cry, she galloped straight at the Bucovinan line. The rest of the Lenelli – and Hasso – thundered after her.

A cavalry charge! There’d been a few even in the war from which Hasso had contrived to extract himself. He’d never imagined he would take part in one, though. He looked back over his shoulder at the striking column. Could he really translate panzer tactics into ones knights and swordsmen could use? He was going to find out.

He’d hoped the Bucovinans would stand there and receive the charge. No such luck – they knew better. They’d been fighting the Lenelli for a long time now. They’d learned a lot from the invaders from overseas. They had armored men on horseback, too – not a lot, but some – and sent them forward to blunt the big blonds’ onslaught.

And they had a devil of a lot of infantry waiting there behind their horsemen. Some of the foot soldiers had spears. Some had swords. Quite a few carried what looked like scythes and pitchforks. Most of the men with real weapons wore helmets and carried shields. The rest had no more than they would have worn in the fields. Maybe that would have been enough against other Grenye. Against Bottero’s hard-bitten professionals? Hasso didn’t think so.

The Bucovinan knights were a different story. They were pros themselves. Their horses were smaller than the ones the Lenelli rode, but they knew what to do with them. They handled their lances as well as the Lenelli did. Seeing a three-meter toothpick aimed straight at his chest gave Hasso the cold horrors.

He rose in the stirrups and gave the enemy knight a short burst from his submachine gun. The Grenye’s lance went flying. He threw up his hands and pitched from the saddle. He was probably dead before he hit the ground.

Hasso almost got pitched from the saddle, too. Staid gelding or not, his horse didn’t like a gun going off right behind its ears. But the German had expected that. He hadn’t ridden much, but he knew enough to fight the horse back down onto all fours when it tried to rear. He wished he’d had enough ammunition to familiarize the beast to the dreadful noise, but he didn’t. Once his cartridges were gone, they were gone forever.

He’d better get the best use from them he could, then. He shot the next Bucovinan in front of him. Then he shot one of the natives who was bearing down on Velona. She rode into battle with a goddess’ confidence – with the goddess’ confidence? – that nothing could hurt her. That Grenye hadn’t seem convinced. But Hasso made as sure as he could that Velona stayed right.

He shot two more lancers in quick succession. After that, the Bucovinans got the idea and stayed away from him – which helped open a gap in their line of horsemen. “Come on!” Hasso yelled, and rode through it. The rest of the striking column followed him. He aimed just to the left of the thicket of enemy banners. “There!” He pointed. “That’s where we’ll break through!”

The Bucovinan foot soldiers saw the column coming. They couldn’t very well not see it, and they couldn’t very well not understand what a breakthrough there would mean. Shouts in that guttural, unintelligible – at least to Hasso – language filled the air. The natives who had spears lowered them in a desperate effort to hold off the onrushing knights.

Back in the Middle Ages, the Swiss hedgehog – rank on rank of long pikes, a new version of the Macedonian phalanx – could hold knights at bay. The men of Bucovin were trying to improvise that kind of defense on the fly. It didn’t work. Hasso would have been surprised if they really expected it to work. If you were a brave man in a bad spot, you did whatever you could and hoped for the best. He knew all about that.

A shouting little man set himself, pointing his spear in the general direction of Hasso’s gelding. The Wehrmacht officer shot him in the face from less than ten meters away. The Bucovinan didn’t even have time to look surprised before he toppled. The spear hit the ground before he did, but only by a split second.

Hasso shot three more Grenye, one after the next. Then he changed magazines on his Schmeisser again. He was down to his last one, the last one in all this world. But he’d done what he needed to do – he’d breached the Bucovinan line. And the Lenelli poured into the gap he’d made.

No denying the natives were brave. They swarmed toward the lancers, trying to spear them, to slash them, to pull them out of the saddle and stomp them to death. They didn’t have a chance. Maybe they didn’t realize it. Maybe they just didn’t care. The Lenelli spitted them like partridges or knocked them over the head with the shafts of their lances or cut them down with long straight swords. Warhorses smashed dark faces and dashed out brains with iron-shod hooves.

Aderno’s unicorn had blood on its horn.

Where was the King of Bucovin or the chief or whatever he called himself? Hasso looked to the right. He saw a man in fancy regalia, and fired several shots at him. With luck, he could decapitate the enemy army, the enemy state, on the spot and make everything that came afterwards a hell of a lot easier.

He couldn’t tell whether his bullets struck home. After a moment, not just Bucovinans stood between him and the man he thought to be their sovereign. Hard-charging Lenello knights also blocked his view. The Grenye went on fighting as ferociously as the Poles had in the first few days of the war.

All the ferocity in the world hadn’t done the Poles one goddamn bit of good. The harder they fought, the faster they died. And all the courage in the world wouldn’t help the Bucovinans, either. Hasso shot one more man. Then he let out a wordless whoop.

“We’re through the savages!” a Lenello shouted – all the words that mattered.

“Now we swing in!” Hasso called. Even if he hadn’t shot the Bucovinan leader, King Bottero’s men might capture him. That would do the job just about as well. “Swing in!” he yelled again, and pointed to show what he meant.

The striking column had practiced this maneuver over and over on the meadows outside of Drammen. The Lenelli should have been able to bring it off in their sleep. And about half of them did turn in against the enemy center. But the other half turned out, against the wing they’d cut off.

Hasso screamed abuse at the Lenelli. He called them every kind of idiot under the sun. They paid no attention to him. German troops probably wouldn’t have screwed up like that. If they had, their officers would have straightened them out in a hurry.

Here, the officers didn’t seem to see the problem. “The fighting’s good every which way,” Marshal Lugo yelled