rose from the rain-soaked wood. When it stopped, the wizard nodded to Hasso. “This magic worked, anyhow. We can burn him now. Lay him on the pyre.”
“Me?” Hasso hoped he didn’t squeak too much.
“Of course,” Aderno said. “You command here. Who else?”
Hasso had dealt with enough corpses that one more didn’t really faze him, but it wasn’t a duty he would have wanted. He had to make sure he had all of Flegrei; the Lenelli wouldn’t have liked it had he left any of the cut-off bits behind. After he finished, he scrubbed his hands on wet grass. That got most of the blood off, but not all of it. The knights gathered around the pyre nodded to one another. They would have done the same thing. Then they would have forgotten about it. Hasso still wanted to get his hands really clean, which showed he came from a different world.
“May the life to come prove kinder to Flegrei than this one did,” Aderno said.
“So may it be,” the knights intoned.
“May he have joy of all his friends to come, and overcome all his foes,” the wizard went on.
“So may it be.” This time, Hasso joined the chorus. It wasn’t the funeral service a German chaplain would have read, but it wasn’t so very different, either.
“May the goddess avenge him against the barbarians who wickedly stole his life.”
“So may it be.”
“As the smoke of the pyre rises to the sky, so may Flegrei’s spirit rise to the heavens beyond the sky.”
“So may it be.”
One of the knights had used flint and steel to get a small fire going. The Lenelli carried their firestarters the way
X
Stories were enough to get out the word about how Flegrei died. Before long, everybody in Bottero’s army seemed to be talking about it. Not all the stories had much to do with what really happened. Hasso heard Lenelli talking about how a squadron of sorcerers had been ground up in a mill and fed to Grenye hogs.
“You gonna quit eating spare ribs?” one knight asked another.
His friend thought about it, but not for long. “Nah,” he said. “They probably won’t be from the same pigs. And if they are … Well, shit. If they are, I won’t
“Sounds right,” the first knight agreed, and they rode on.
Since they were arguing about the shadow of an ass that wasn’t there, Hasso didn’t waste his time trying to set them straight. Crazy rumors were part and parcel of war. Some of the stories he’d heard on the Russian front… There, they didn’t talk about feeding dead Germans to pigs. They talked about Ivans eating German corpses, and their own. He’d believed those yarns, too. As a matter of fact, he still did believe some of them. If you got hungry enough, you were liable to do anything.
If you got mean enough, you were liable to do anything, too. Three days after Flegrei’s untimely and unpleasant demise, the Lenelli came to a place big enough to show up on their map. It was called Muresh, and it was bigger than a village, even if it didn’t make much of a town. Behind it, a bridge spanned the Oltet River; the bridge was probably the reason Muresh had been founded, and the reason it had grown.
The place didn’t boast a wall. It did have a Bucovinan garrison, in a small, sad imitation of a Lenello castle just in front of the bridge. The soldiers in there couldn’t have held the place more than a few hours against everything King Bottero had to throw at them. They weren’t idiots. They could see that for themselves.
So they got out. They hurried across the bridge, tipping its timbers into the Oltet as they went. Another castle, none too big and none too strong-looking, stood on the far bank. The Lenelli wouldn’t have a whole lot of trouble repairing the bridge… till they came within bowshot of that other castle. Then things wouldn’t be so much fun. Fixing bridges while the bastards on the other side took potshots at you was nobody’s idea of fun, not in any army.
A few ordinary Bucovinans escaped from Muresh, too, fleeing with the men who were there to guard the bridge and not them. Most of the locals stayed where they were, though, either because they couldn’t get away or because they didn’t think anything bad would happen to them.
Most of the time, they would have been right. The Lenelli hadn’t struck Hasso as wantonly cruel. Maybe he just hadn’t watched enough. Maybe he hadn’t seen them when their blood was up.
King Bottero looked at the peasants and craftsmen of Muresh, at the women and children. He folded his thick arms across his broad chest. “Boys, these stinking Bucovinans killed Flegrei filthy,” he shouted to his men. “I want you to go in there and pay the bastards back!”
The soldiers roared, a deep, baying sound that put Hasso in mind of the wolves he’d heard in Russian woods. The locals knew what a noise like that meant. They made a noise of their own then: a cry of horror and despair. Some of them tried to run away. Laughing at the joke, the knights rode after the running men and women and speared them from behind.
Then they swarmed into Muresh, and things got worse.
Some of the Grenye went down on their knees and begged for their lives. Most of them were, on the whole, lucky. The Lenelli killed them quickly. What happened to the men who tried to fight back…
No one could say the Lenelli didn’t have imagination. A gray-bearded cook had used a big two-pronged fork and a knife to try to keep them out of his tavern. It didn’t work – the Lenelli laughed as they beat down his unskilled defense. One of Bottero’s soldiers smeared cooking oil into the Bucovinan’s beard while three more knights held him. The native snapped like a dog, which only made the Lenelli laugh harder.
Then the fellow who’d used the oil lit a stick at the tavern’s cookfire. The Bucovinan must have known what was coming next. Hasso feared he did, too. “No!” the cook howled – it might have been the only word of Lenello he knew. “No!
His howls did him no more good than his tries at biting had. Stretching out the moment, enjoying every bit of it, the Lenello slowly brought the flame closer to the oil-soaked beard. Then he set the cook’s face on fire. “Fight us, will you, you stinking, scrawny savage!” he shouted.
The men who had been holding the Grenye didn’t just let go of him. They shoved him away, so that he ran down the streets of Muresh screaming and beating at his burning hair and skin. The Lenelli thought he was the funniest thing they ever saw. “Look at him go!” they yelled.
“Maybe he’ll burn this louse-trap down,” one of them added.
“Serve them right if he does,” another said. “Serve them all right if he does, by the goddess!”
In the sack and massacre that followed, Hasso might as well have been … aman from another world. He didn’t hate the Bucovinans enough to want to kill them for the fun of it, though he’d done that to Russians a time or two. But he knew the Lenelli wouldn’t listen to him if he tried to stop them. And so he walked through the narrow, stinking, muddy streets of Muresh as if he were a camera.
All the Lenelli who saw the cook with the burning beard liked the idea. They set the faces of several other Bucovinans on fire. One of them torched a woman’s hair. Her shrieks were even higher and shriller than those of the men. Some of Bottero’s troopers laughed at that. But others shook their heads. “Waste of pussy,” one of them declared.
“Still plenty to go around,” said a knight who thought the woman with her hair ablaze was funny.
He wasn’t wrong. Even more than the Germans in Russia, the Lenelli in Bucovin lived by the law of the jungle. Winners did whatever they wanted, and the enemy’s women were fair game. The Lenelli raped with the practiced efficiency of men who took it for granted. A gang of them would catch a woman, throw her down on the ground, force her legs apart and hold her arms, and then mount her one after another, roughly in order of rank.
Some of them let the women shriek; maybe they thought the noise added spice to the game. Others used rough gags of cloth or leather to cut down the din. Sometimes, when they were finished, they would send the woman off with a pat on the backside or even a coin. Sometimes they would get a final thrill by cutting her throat and leaving her there to die in the mud.
One Lenello tried to gag a screaming woman with his member instead of a crumpled rag. A moment later, he
