After the Downfall

– he was there, all right, and battling hard.

“Yes, but – ” Hasso did some more swearing. Were they all blind?

He didn’t need long to realize blindness wasn’t the problem. His own medieval ancestors probably would have fought the same boneheaded way. There’s the enemy, they would have thought. Let’s go bash him over the head. And if the battle might have turned out better had they bashed him here instead of there, they wouldn’t have got all hot and bothered about it. They were having a good time fighting any old way.

And so were the Lenelli now. The rest of their line had come to grips with the Grenye, which meant the enemy couldn’t turn and give all his attention to the riders who’d broken into the rear. As Hasso had hoped, the men of Bucovin were getting smashed between hammer and anvil.

But they weren’t getting smashed as thoroughly as he’d had in mind. Sure, Bottero’s warriors were chewing up that cut-off wing. The center, though, held longer and more stoutly than he’d thought it could. When people there did start to flee, a stubborn rear guard made sure they had an open escape route.

“Don’t worry – we’ll get ‘em,” a Lenello said when Hasso swore again. “See? The lord’s banners are still in place.”

Dear God in heaven! Which side is supposed to be the barbarians? Hasso wondered. “The banners are there, ja,” he said with more patience than he’d thought he had in him. “But does that mean the lord is still there under them?”

“Huh?” The Lenello trooper really was slow on the uptake. After much too long, he went, “Oh.” Then he got angry – not at himself, but at the Bucovinans. “Why, those cursed, sneaky sons of whores!”

“Right,” Hasso said tightly. If you expected the enemy to act dumb all the time, you’d get your head handed to you. The Ivans had driven that lesson home with a sledgehammer.

A Bucovinan pikeman, seeing Hasso on a horse without a lance, rushed at him shouting something unintelligible that probably wasn’t a compliment. As so many of the men from Bucovin had found out the hard way, being without a lance didn’t mean he was unarmed. He shot the Grenye down. By now, his horse didn’t jump out of its skin every time he fired.

But the Schmeisser ran dry just then. Automatically, Hasso reached for another clip. That was when he remembered he didn’t have one. He felt much more naked without the submachine gun than he would have without his mailshirt and the Wehrmacht helmet with a nasal riveted on. He slung the Schmeisser over his back; even though it was useless now and would be forevermore, he couldn’t stand to throw it away. Out came his sword. With it in his hand, he looked every inch the warrior. Maybe that would be enough to keep the Bucovinans from harrying him. After all, they couldn’t – he hoped to God they couldn’t – tell at a glance what a lousy swordsman he was.

Velona’s sword was red with blood. Scarlet drops flew from the blade as she brandished it. Her face bore the same intent, inward, seeking expression it did just before she came. Was she communing with the goddess, or did she really enjoy fighting? Hasso wondered whether he wanted to know.

More and more Grenye broke away from the battle and made off toward the east. Some went singly, others in knots of five or ten or twenty. The men who stuck together and still showed fight had a better chance of getting away in one piece. The Lenelli were like any soldiers in any world – they went after what looked like easy victims first. Why chance getting hurt when you didn’t have to?

A Bucovinan came up to Hasso with his helmet hanging on the point of his spear. “Peace,” he said in halting Lenello. “Peace, please.”

Hasso realized he didn’t know the rules for taking prisoners here. But that question no sooner formed in his mind than it got answered. Not ten meters away, a Lenello tapped a surrendering Grenye on the shoulder with his sword.

In Hasso’s world, he might have been knighting the enemy warrior. Not here. Here, with a doglike grin of relief, the Grenye threw down his weapons and kissed his captor’s hand. Then, hands clasped behind his head, he shuffled off toward the rear.

Now that Hasso knew how to do it, he did it. The Grenye in front of him also looked massively relieved. He understood that. Deciding to give up wasn’t the hard part. Getting the guys on the other side to accept your surrender was. Plenty of would-be POWs got killed. It wasn’t always ill-will. Sometimes the winners were just too busy to bother with prisoners, so they disposed of them instead.

“Thank you! Thank you! I is your slave!” the Bucovinan said as he fervently kissed Hasso’s hand. Did he mean that, or was he only being polite? In his own world, Hasso would have known the answer. Here … Well, he’d worry about it later.

He jerked his thumb in the direction the other captive had taken. “Go there,” he said. Away the Grenye went. He too put his hands behind his head. It wasn’t quite the same as raising them high, but it evidently meant the same thing.

Hasso looked around to see if any more fighting was left. There wasn’t much. As he watched, a Lenello used the broken shaft of his lance to smash in a Bucovinan’s skull. No, surrendering here was no easier than it was in Hasso’s world. The big blond knights with the brutal one laughed and cheered him on.

Lenello foot soldiers and dismounted lancers walked over the field. Every so often, they stooped to plunder or to finish off a wounded Bucovinan. Hasso’s men had done that with the Ivans often enough. Here, a knife across the throat did duty for a bullet in the back of the neck.

The Lenelli also gave the coup de grace to some of their own wounded men: those too badly hurt to have any hope of recovering. Hasso had seen that happen, too. It happened more often here. German doctors could do things nobody here had ever dreamt of. He made a note to himself not to get wounded here. Then he laughed. If he knew how to guarantee that…

Somebody slapped him on the back, almost hard enough to pitch him off his horse. “We did it!” Nornat yelled. “The column worked. Your scheme worked!” He sounded overjoyed and surprised at the same time.

“Good men make it work,” Hasso said. The Lenello cavalry captain grinned and bowed in the saddle. Hasso wouldn’t have wanted to try that himself. He hadn’t been kidding, though. Grinning back, he went on, “Commanders get the glory. Lancers do the hard part and make commanders look good.”

“Goddess only knows that’s the truth,” Nornat said. “Too many marshals can’t see it, though. They think the sun rises and sets on them. I could name names, but….”

But you’d put your ass in a sling if you did, Hasso thought. But if Nornat wasn’t thinking of brave but hidebound Marshal Lugo, Hasso would have been mightily surprised. “We could do better,” he said. “We should do better. Column should all turn in on center, not out on wing.” He gestured with his hands. “We do that, maybe we catch enemy, uh, lord. He can’t get away.”

“Well, yes.” Nornat sounded as if he was humoring him. “Don’t get too upset, though. We walloped the snot out of the savages the way it was.”

Somebody – a Frenchman? – said the good was the enemy of the best. A solid victory satisfied Nornat. Hasso wanted more. He wanted to annihilate the enemy, the way Hannibal annihilated the Romans at Cannae.

Ever since before the First World War, German officers made that battle their model. Hasso understood why – who’d ever done better? But despite the triumph, Carthage lost the war. How many officers who carefully memorized every detail of Hannibal’s double envelopment remembered that?

Hasso got down from his horse. “You! Come here!” he called to the first foot soldier he saw. When the man obeyed, Hasso tossed him the reins. “Here. Hold these for me till I get back.”

“Yes, lord,” the foot soldier said – the only possible answer. But then he went on, “What about my chance to loot?”

That was a fair question. Hasso dug in his belt pouch and pulled out one of the gold coins he’d won from the wizards. It bore the jowly image of Bottero’s father. “Here. You might do better than this, but you might not, too.”

The Lenello made the goldpiece disappear. Grinning, he said, “You may be a foreigner, and you sure talk funny, but you’re a sport.”

“Thanks,” Hasso said dryly, and began his tour of the battlefield.

He’d walked plenty of fields in his own world, wherever victory let him do it. The last year and a half of the war, he thanked God every time he got away from a battlefield in one piece. He hadn’t had many chances to look around afterwards, not unless he wanted the Russians to leave his body there along with too many others wearing