After the Downfall

They waited. No Lenelli came over the crest of the hill to the west. After an hour or so, Gunoiul popped out of the bushes. The little dark man was grinning from ear to ear. “You should have heard them! You should have seen them!” he said.

“Well? Tell us the story,” Rautat urged, as he must have known he was supposed to.

“The big blond bastards just kind of poked at the holes at first – made sure they weren’t horse traps, you know,” Gunoiul said. “Then I started lighting the, uh, fuses.” He glanced toward Hasso, who’d given him his technical vocabulary. “The Lenelli saw the fire and smoke going through the grass, and they started having puppies. It was the funniest thing you ever saw. They were yelling and pointing and carrying on like you wouldn’t believe.”

All the Bucovinans laughed. Nothing they liked better than discomfited Lenelli. “Did they send soldiers after you?” Dumnez asked.

“They sure did,” Gunoiul said. “I could have shot a couple of them, too, easy as you please. But I made a scary noise instead” – he went “Woooo!” on a high, wailing note – “and got out of there.”

“Good!” Hasso punched him in the shoulder, the way he would have with a soldier on the Eastern Front who’d done something unexpected and clever. They wanted to spook the Lenelli here, and Gunoiul had found a new way to do it.

“Well, after that they didn’t want to go very fast, let me tell you,” the Bucovinan continued. “I didn’t have any trouble staying ahead of them and lighting more fuses.”

“That’s what we wanted, by Lavtrig’s curly beard,” Rautat said. “And now that you’re back, we want to get out of here in case you stirred up an even bigger hornets’ nest than you think.”

Hasso would have said that if Rautat hadn’t. The Wehrmacht officer figured there was a pretty good chance the Lenelli were well and truly stirred. He also figured the filled-in holes and smoking, crackling fuses had only so much to do with it. Bottero’s men knew he was around, even if Rautat didn’t know they knew. And the Lenelli wanted him … no, not dead or alive. They wanted him dead or dead.

As he rode off toward the northeast, he wondered whether he could escape to some other Lenello kingdom than Bottero’s. That way, he would have a chance to live among folk who looked like him and who thought more like him than the Bucovinans did. But when would he get that kind of chance? And even if he did, weren’t all the Lenelli likely to reckon him a renegade now?

Besides, some other Lenello kingdom wouldn’t have Velona in it. There was only one of her. That there was one of her seemed more than miracle enough.

If he couldn’t have Velona, how much difference did it make whether he lived among Lenelli or Grenye? And so…

“I think maybe you truly are Lord Zgomot’s man,” Rautat said out of the blue. Hasso started to laugh – who said the small, swarthy men couldn’t work magic? Rautat, not surprisingly, didn’t get it. “What’s so funny?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” Hasso said – nothing he wanted to talk about, anyhow. “I think I am truly Lord Zgomot’s man, too.” Dammit, he added, but only to himself.

The dreams came back two nights later. He’d been free of them for months, and thought they were gone for good. No such luck. As he lay asleep, wrapped in a blanket by a fire that had guttered down to crimson embers, he felt someone stalking him through the inside of his own head. I ought to work out a spell to put a stop to this, he thought, which would have been wonderful one of these days – but not now.

Patient as a wolf chasing an elk, the Lenello wizard pursued him through slumber and finally caught him. Hasso was anything but surprised to find it was Aderno. “What do you want?” the German asked.

“What are you up to?” Aderno returned.

“None of your business, not after you try to kill me twice,” Hasso said.

“It’s my king’s business, by the goddess.” When Aderno named her, Hasso saw Velona behind him. “It’s my folk’s business.”

“I am no part of your folk. You make that plain enough. When I come to you, all you want to do is murder me.”

“What are we supposed to do with you?” Yes, that was Velona. Seeing her, hearing her even in dreams tore at Hasso from the inside out. “You’re up to something with the cursed Grenye.”

“You Lenelli don’t want me anymore.” Hasso didn’t waste time denying it.

“King Bottero tried to ransom you. The savage who runs Bucovin wouldn’t take his money,” Velona replied.

What she said was true – and also missed the point. Lord Zgomot was a decent, capable, worried, rather gray little man doing the best job he knew how in a predicament Hasso wouldn’t have wished on his worst enemy. To the Lenelli, he was only a Grenye. He would have been only a Grenye to Hasso, too, but for the fortunes – and misfortunes – of war.

“Sorry. I can’t do anything about it,” Hasso said. “Then you try to kill me. Should I love you after that?” He started bleeding inside again. He still wanted to love Velona, and wanted her to love him.

“We were denying you to the enemy,” Aderno said.

He made perfect military sense. He also made Hasso want to wring his neck. The combination reminded the German of some of his own country’s less clever policies during the war. He said, “When you try to kill me you turn me into an enemy.”

“If you’re a dead enemy, it doesn’t matter,” the wizard said.

If the Reich had knocked the Russians out in six weeks, nothing else would have mattered. Since they hadn’t, they had to try to deal with the consequences of that failure – only to discover they couldn’t. Now Aderno and Velona were trying to deal with the consequences of failing to kill Hasso. They could try again – and they might succeed if they did.

“You are up to something with the Grenye.” Velona made that sound even more disgusting and outrageous than sleeping with a little swarthy woman.

“They could kill me, and they don’t,” Hasso answered stolidly. “More than I can say for some people.”

“Killing is better than renegades deserve. Killing is much better than renegade wizards deserve.” Velona was as implacable as an earthquake. Her dream-self turned to Aderno. “Now!”

Hasso had thought his own modest sorcerous abilities were what had kept him from harm when the two of them struck at him in Falticeni. Maybe those abilities helped, but he’d forgotten Falticeni lay at the heart of Bucovin: the place where, for whatever reason, Lenello magic was weakest. Here near the western border…

He didn’t just scream himself awake, as he had in Lord Zgomot’s palace. He puked his guts out, as if he’d eaten bad fish. He shat himself, too. He thought his ears were bleeding, but he was in too much more immediate torment to stick a finger in one of them and find out. When he had to piss, he pissed dark. What had they done to him? Everything but kill him, plainly. While the fit was going on, he almost wished they had.

Rautat and the other Bucovinans stared at him while he writhed and heaved. “I’d heard about this at the palace,” the underofficer said to his comrades – Hasso heard his voice as if from a million kilometers away. “It wasn’t so bad there.” He was right. Nothing could have been as bad as this. Hasso would rather have stood out in the open during a volley of Katyushas than go through this – and if that didn’t say everything that needed saying, what could?

The only good thing about the fit was that it didn’t last long. Once it passed, Hasso lay on the ground, spent and gasping like a fish out of water. “Give me a little beer,” he choked out. Dumnez poured him some. He didn’t swallow it, but used it to rinse his mouth. It couldn’t get rid of all the foul taste; some of his vomit had gone up his nose. “Where is a stream?” he asked. “Need to wash.”

“Back over there.” Rautat pointed. “Will anything more happen to you?”

“I hope not,” Hasso said.

His drawers were ruined beyond hope. He used them to wipe himself as clean as he could, then threw them away. From now on, he would be bare-assed under his trousers. Well, the world wouldn’t end. He was battered but almost unbowed when he came back to the embers of the fire.

“Look at the moon. It’s still the middle of the night,” Rautat said. “We’re going back to sleep. Can you do the same?”

“I don’t know. I find out,” Hasso answered grimly. Aderno and Velona hadn’t attacked him twice in one night.