After the Downfall

Feldgrau.

Here, though … The Bucovinans had stood more bravely than he’d thought they could. Even after they had to know they were beaten, they went on doing as well as they could for as long as they could. They fought like soldiers, not like savages fierce in victory who panicked and broke the minute things went wrong.

A dead native clutched the shaft of the spear that pinned him to the ground. The horrible grimace he’d worn when he died was relaxing towards a corpse’s blankness. His eyes stared sightlessly up at the sky.

Not far away, a dead Lenello sprawled in a pool of blood. His left hand clutched the stump of his right arm. He’d lost his right hand, and bled to death before a surgeon or a wizard could do anything to help him. Flies buzzed around the blood. A big one landed in the blood-streaked, callused palm of the severed hand.

You had an easier time telling how hard and how well someone fought on this field than on a lot of them on the Russian front. Artillery and bullets could be nearly random in how they killed and maimed. But if a sword or spear went in from the front, the dead man faced his foe when he died. If he had a wound in the back, he was likely trying to run away when he died.

The Grenye killed from behind almost all lay at some distance from where they’d posted their line. Those were the men who’d tried to escape, most of them after the fight was irretrievably lost. Yes, they’d fought hard, all right.

King Bottero rode up to Hasso. The king had a cut on the back of his right hand; he’d been in the thick of the fighting himself. The edge of his shield was as notched as a saw blade. His horse limped.

“You did what you said you’d do,” Bottero declared. “Have you got any idea how unusual that is?”

Hasso saluted Lenello-style, his fist over his heart. “Your Majesty, I am a stranger, a foreigner, at your court. I don’t dare fail.”

“Why not? My own people do, all the time.”

“They are your people,” Hasso replied. “You forgive them because they are. But if I go wrong, you say, ‘He is a foreigner trying to fool us. Off with his head!’“

Bottero threw back his head and laughed. “Are you sure you were never a king yourself?”

“Never!” Hasso pushed away the words with both hands, which set Bottero laughing again. The German went on, “Never want to be a king, either.”

“You’re smart,” Bottero said. “You don’t have everybody below you looking up at you and thinking what an idiot you are.”

“Not me, your Majesty,” Hasso said, which was plenty to make Bottero almost fall off his horse with mirth. Hasso spoke as innocently as he could – with exaggerated innocence, in fact. He was glad he’d amused his new sovereign. He was also glad Bottero believed him when he said he had no royal ambitions. It was true. Even if it weren’t, he had to act as if it were. Confessing that you did want to wear a crown was apt to be more hazardous to your life expectancy than a Russian armored division.

“Find any loot worth keeping?” Bottero asked.

Soldiers here made a big part of their living from booty. Hasso, used to regular pay, had to remind himself of that. He had picked up one nice dagger with gold chasing on the blade. He showed it to the king.

Bottero nodded. “That’s not bad. It’s one of our patterns, but it looks to me like a copy by a Grenye smith. The chasing is very nice – I like that dragon – but the work on the blade itself is cruder than what we’d do.”

Hasso didn’t have the eye for such fine details. He’d kept the dagger because of the gold. He didn’t expect to use it as a weapon. He had nothing against war knives; he carried one of his own. But it was just a tool, not a fancy Solingen blade like the ones SS men were so proud of.

“Where do we go now?” Hasso asked. “We should push after the Bucovinans. Not let them come back together, get ready to fight again.” He wanted to say regroup, but he couldn’t come up with the word in Lenello. He was a lot more fluent than he had been even a month before, but talking still sometimes felt like wading through glue.

“You have been eating meat, haven’t you?” King Bottero smiled at him like a father smiling at an adventurous little boy. “We need to get ready to fight again ourselves, you know. Do you think your striking column will work as well now that they know we use it?”

That was a genuinely shrewd question. “I don’t know, your Majesty,” Hasso replied. “You know the Bucovinans better than I do, so you are a better judge. How fast do they learn? Will they have an assault column of their own in the next battle?” The possibility hadn’t occurred to him till now.

“No.” The king shook his head. “They aren’t that quick. But they’ll look for ways to stop the column from breaking through. And they’ll have their own soon. You can bet on that. When the other Lenello kingdoms hear about what we’re doing, they’ll start using these columns, too.”

“Defense,” Hasso muttered. Did he know enough about the Swiss hedgehog to teach it to Bottero’s men? He had to hope he did, because they were going to need it, if not at the next battle then before too long. He could see that coming.

“All this is worry for another time,” Bottero said. “You kept your word to me. I won’t forget, and you won’t be sorry.” With the wave of a gauntleted hand, he rode off.

Not far away, a Lenello foot soldier was slitting the throat of a feebly writhing Bucovinan. Still holding the bloody knife, he nodded to Hasso. “Boy, I wish the king would talk to me that way,” he said.

Everybody had problems. The foot soldier thought his were worse than Hasso’s. Maybe he was even right. All the same, Hasso knew his own weren’t small. He also knew they wouldn’t go away any time soon.

Back in Germany, women prided themselves on how little they ate. A birdlike appetite was a sign of femininity. After the battle, Velona ate enough for two troopers, maybe three. “Where do you keep it?” Hasso asked. He was hungry, but not that hungry. “Have you got a hollow leg?”

The joke was old in German, but new in Lenello. Velona laughed so hard, she almost spat out the swig of beer she’d just taken. “No, no, no,” she said. “You have to understand – I’m eating for two.”

“You’re going to have a baby?” Hasso took the phrase to mean what it would have in his native tongue. The next question that ran through his mind was, Is it mine? He didn’t ask that one, not least for fear she would up and tell him no.

But she laughed again, this time at him, though as far as he could tell without malice. “No, not a baby. I’m sure I’m not pregnant,” she said. “I just stopped flowing a couple of days before the battle, remember, and I’m glad I did, too. What I meant was, I’m eating for me and the goddess both.”

“Oh.” Feeling like a fool, Hasso thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. It hurt more than it should have; somewhere in the battle, he’d got a bruise there, even if he couldn’t remember how or when. And he found himself nodding. No wonder Velona never gained a gram! But carrying a goddess around wasn’t the sort of diet likely to become popular in Berlin or Cologne or Vienna… even if the German women in those towns were free of invaders, which they weren’t.

How big a toll did the goddess take on a mere mortal’s metabolism? Hasso had no idea, but Velona knew the answer from the inside out.

Her smile, he judged, held more than a little relief. “I could feel the goddess’ power running through me,” she said. “The savages could feel it, too, when I struck and even before that, when I bore down on them. I could tell.”

“I believe you,” Hasso said, which was nothing but the truth. When the goddess manifested herself in Velona, she definitely seemed more than human. Just being near her at such times made your hair prickle up, as if lightning had crashed down close by. Then, several beats more slowly than a Lenello would have, Hasso saw what she was driving at here. “We are in Bucovin, but the power still runs through you.”

“The goddess is still with me,” Velona agreed. But then her smile slipped. “It was like this the last time I came into Bucovin, too. At first, it was like this. After that… It wasn’t that the goddess left me, or not exactly like that. When she tried to speak, though, I couldn’t make out what she was saying. The land in these parts was thinking about something else.”

How did she mean that? Never having had any kind of divinity speak to him or through him, Hasso couldn’t know, not the way Velona did. He thought of a bad telephone connection. Then he laughed at himself. What good did a thought from his own world do him? He couldn’t make Velona or anyone else here understand it. What would telephones seem to the Lenelli but magic?

Crystal balls, now … They had crystal balls, or something like them. “Wizards can talk back and forth from far away, right?” he asked, an idea starting to sprout in his mind.