After the Downfall

Did that mean they couldn’t? He could only hope so.

In what was plainly meant for consolation, Rautat said, “Soon, now, you’ll give the Lenelli worse than they just gave you.”

And it did console, where it wouldn’t have before. That only went to show how badly abused Hasso was. “I will,” he said, and he really meant it for the first time since his capture.

“Get moving, you fools!” a soldier shouted. The word for fools literally meant donkey heads; Bucovinan was not without its charms. The small, swarthy warrior went on, “The accursed Lenelli are on their way – lots of them!”

“How about that?” Rautat said, and then, to Hasso, “If lots of those big blond bastards are coming, this is the time to use the gunpowder for real, yes?”

“Yes,” Hasso answered. He hadn’t exactly chosen Bucovin. He’d had the choice made for him. Bottero’s followers wanted him dead. Well, if they thought that was what they wanted now, he was going to give them some real reasons to feel that way. “We dig real holes. We put jars of gunpowder into them. We light the fuses.”

“Boom!” Rautat said. Hasso nodded. Rautat continued, “And they won’t be expecting it. They think it’s all a bunch of Grenye crap.” He laughed. “We’ll show them what’s crap, all right.”

“One thing,” Hasso said. Rautat raised a questioning eyebrow. Hasso pointed at himself. “I light the fuses this time.”

He waited for Rautat to swell up and turn purple. He waited for the Bucovinan to say he was too valuable to do something like that – which meant he couldn’t be trusted to do it. He had all his arguments ready. He was braced to threaten to put a spell on the powder so it wouldn’t go off unless he lit it himself. If they provoked him enough, he was ready to try to cast that spell.

But Rautat only nodded. “You’ve earned the right. We’ll find a good spot, with thick growth by the side of the road. That way, you’ll have an easy time getting away, same as Gunoiul did.”

“You really aim to let me do this?” Hasso couldn’t hide his surprise.

Rautat nodded again. “I really do. If you aren’t loyal to us now, you never will be. Either way, it’s about time we found out.” He turned to the rest of the Bucovinans who’d traveled west from Falticeni. “Come on, you lazy lugs! This is what we came here for. We’ve played all the games. Now we give it to the Lenelli, the way we’ve wanted to give it to them ever since they got here. So dig, curse you!”

They dug like moles. If he’d told them to dig to China, or whatever lay on the other side of this world, Hasso thought they would have done that. The hope of getting their own back against the Lenelli fired them like burning gasoline.

Was this how the Russians felt when they started winning after the Wehrmacht pushed them back more than a thousand kilometers across their own country?

Maybe this was even fiercer, because the Grenye had been retreating not for a year and a half but for generations. They must have wondered if they would ever get the chance to go forward. But here it was … if the gunpowder worked.

Rautat talked to the soldier who warned of the advancing Lenelli. Not too much later, he talked to another Bucovinan, this one an officer sweating in a helmet and mailshirt. Rautat pointed toward Hasso several times. He pounded his fist into his palm once. He might be only a Feldwebel, but he acted like a general.

He got away with it, too – damned if he didn’t. The Bucovinan officer nodded, sketched a salute, and hurried away. Rautat grinned till the top of his head threatened to fall off. He also nodded to Hasso. If he hadn’t been the Official Bucovinan in Charge of the Dangerous and Important Blond Person, he never could have pulled that one off, and he knew it.

Hasso placed the fuses in the jars. Next time, he would come with jars already fused. You couldn’t think of everything at once, not when you were reinventing a whole art all by yourself. The Bucovinans watched him intently. If they got away and he didn’t, they would at least be able to go on with what he’d already shown them. Whether they’d be able to do anything more … wouldn’t be his worry, not in that case.

He hid in some bushes off to the side of the road. A lot of the fuses ran toward those bushes, but he wasn’t too worried about that. For one thing, there were some dummies that went other places. And, for another, by now the Lenelli ought to think all the fuses were nothing but a big bluff. They wouldn’t pay any attention to them – till too late.

Rautat left him some hard bread and dried meat, a jar of beer, and, most important of all, a couple of sticks of something a lot like punk. It glowed red and slowly smoldered without burning away in nothing flat. “Good luck,” the Bucovinan said, and then, “Want me to hang around with you?”

“Whatever you want.” After what had happened while they slept, Hasso didn’t have any trouble sounding casual when he answered the question. “I’m not running back to the Lenelli.” No matter how much he might regret it, he was telling the truth there, too.

Rautat plucked a hair from his beard, considering. At last, he said, “Maybe I’d better. I don’t think you’re any trouble, but if it turns out I’m wrong I don’t want to have to explain to Drepteaza and Lord Zgomot how I left you all by yourself.”

“Fair enough,” Hasso said. From the underofficer’s perspective, it was. You did need to be careful about relying on a turncoat. The German felt he had to ask, “Can you stay down and keep quiet?” Those talents were more useful in warfare in his world than they were here. Most fighting in this world was right out in the open. How long would that last if gunpowder caught on?

“I’ll do it. I already thought about that,” Rautat said.

“Good. Start now, because here they come,” Hasso said, and hunkered down in the bushes. The first Lenello scouts had just topped the swell of ground to the west. Rautat got as flat as if a Stalin panzer had run over him. He didn’t let out a peep. He barely even breathed.

Hasso didn’t get quite so low as that: he needed to see out. One of the blond outriders stared at a dummy hole with a dummy fuse running from it. Another one said something to him. They both laughed and rode on. They were convinced it was just the Grenye savages trying to play games with their minds. Hasso wished he’d left somebody to light some of the dummy fuses. Too late to worry about it now.

Much too late – here came Bottero’s main body, red flags flying. This had to be a bigger force than the one that was plundering Bucovinan villages. Hasso wondered why, but he didn’t wonder for long. They’re after me, he thought. It was a compliment of sorts, but one he would gladly have done without.

On rode the Lenelli: big fair men in mail and surcoats on horses big enough to bear their weight. Soon Hasso could hear the thud of hoofbeats, the jingle of harness and armor, and even the odd snatch of conversation: “Oh, that? Don’t worry about it. Just the Bucovinans, trying to make us jumpy.”

“Dumbass barbarians,” another Lenello said.

“When?” Rautat’s question was a tiny thread of whisper, inaudible from more than a couple of meters away.

“Soon,” Hasso whispered back. He wanted about a third of the enemy army to pass over the real gunpowder pots before he lit the fuses. His guess was that that would cause the most confusion – and the most casualties.

He swung a stick of punk through the air to get it to glow red. Then he touched it to the fuses, one after another. From the ground beside him, Rautat grinned wolfishly. Trails of smoke streaked toward the burning pots.

A couple of Lenelli pointed to them. Others snickered and shook their heads, as if to say those didn’t mean anything, either. Up till today, they would have been right. The pots buried in the road blew up, one after another.

They didn’t just hold gunpowder. They had rocks and sharp bits of metal in there, too – homemade shrapnel. They gutted horses and flayed knights’ lightly armored legs. Some fragments hit men in the face. Some managed to punch right through mail.

And the noise was like the end of the world, especially to men and beasts who’d never heard the like and weren’t expecting it. Hasso was closer than he might have been, but still used to much worse. But even Rautat, who’d heard gunpowder go off before, let out an involuntary yip of alarm. The Lenelli and their horses screamed as if damned.