After the Downfall

“Yeah? What are they?” the driver asked, a split second in front of one of his pals.

“For one thing, I’m a foreign big blond prick, not a Lenello big blond prick. And I’m a big blond prick who’s on your side.”

When Lord Zgomot heard the invasion had begun, he started assembling his own army. Bucovin was a big, sprawling kingdom or lordship or whatever the hell the right name was. The natives sensibly laid up supplies here and there on the main routes around the realm so soldiers wouldn’t starve as they came in to Falticeni. But, without the telegraph, without trains, without trucks, nothing happened as fast as Hasso wished it would.

He got a surprise of his own not long after the mobilization order went out. Into the tent city that was sprouting in front of Falticeni came perhaps a thousand men who marched with long pikes held straight up and down. They marched well, too – the pikes stayed vertical, and didn’t dip and foul one another.

After seeing them come in, Hasso hurried back to Lord Zgomot. “They look good,” he said. “Can they fight?”

“They have all fought before,” the Lord of Bucovin answered. “They have never fought like this, but they have been drilling hard. They like being called Hedgehogs, by the way – that is what they named the regiment.”

“Good for them,” Hasso said. “If they don’t keep Lenello knights off the catapults, no one does.” That last was always possible, even if he would have preferred not to dwell on it. He went on, “How long are they working?”

“I pulled them together before you went off to my estate to try the catapults and the gunpowder shells,” Zgomot answered. “When you described them, I thought, This is something we really can do. It does not take anything we did not already have – it is only a new way to use tools we already knew about.”

“You did it without me, too.” Hasso didn’t know whether to be proud or worried. If the natives decided they could get along without him, would they knock him over the head and do just that?

“You were busy with other things. I thought we could manage this ourselves, and I turned out to be right,” Zgomot said. “I hope they stay steady when the fighting starts, that is all.”

“So do I,” Hasso said. “I am going to be with the catapults. The Hedgehogs keep – will keep – the big blond pricks off my neck.”

“That would be good,” Lord Zgomot said, his voice dry. “You should watch them drill, to make sure we did not forget anything.”

“I do that,” Hasso promised.

He kept the promise, too – as he said, it was his own personal, private neck on the line. The picked regiment of Bucovinan foot soldiers knew he’d had the idea for their formation. That didn’t seem to bother them; they were used to having new ideas come from foreigners. The Japanese would have been like that in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Now they could stand up to anybody in the world.

How long would it be before the Bucovinans could stand up to anybody in this world? Win this fight first, or you won t get the chance, Hasso thought. He fingered the dragon’s-fang amulet he wore under his tunic. Aderno and Velona hadn’t paid any sorcerous calls on him since he donned it. Maybe that meant they couldn’t. He sure hoped so. But maybe it just meant they hadn’t tried the past few days.

Win this fight first. That was always the imperative. And when he watched the Hedgehogs go through their evolutions, he began to think the Bucovinans could. They marched very well. They formed ten rows and lowered their pikes into a bristling wall of points. If he were a horse, he wouldn’t have wanted to try to charge through them. You could hurt yourself that way.

He said as much to the officer in charge of them. The native – his name was Meshterul – nodded. “We will hold. The gods-cursed Lenelli will never get through us,” he vowed.

That was an important consideration. Whether the Bucovinans knew it or not, it wasn’t the only consideration. “All right. They can’t get through you,” Hasso said. “Can they get around you?”

Meshterul frowned. “Around?” No, he didn’t get it.

“Around, yes.” Hasso nodded. “Who is on your flanks? If the Lenelli get to the catapults through those people, we are still screwed.”

“Ah.” Meshterul nodded. He sketched a salute. “You’re right. I was just thinking about the Hedgehogs. But the real point is keeping the big blond pricks off the catapults, isn’t it?”

“Ja” Hasso said. Drepteaza and Rautat and maybe even Lord Zgomot might know what that meant, but Meshterul only gave him a blank look. Hasso kept to Bucovinan after that: “Yes. You’re right – that is the point. The Hedgehogs may be very important later on. If the whole line of foot soldiers carries long pikes, how do the Lenelli break through at all?”

Meshterul’s eyes sparkled. “That’ll be the day, by Lavtrig!”

“Yes,” Hasso said again, once more in Bucovinan. “But that day is not here yet.” You’ve got the Hedgehogs, and you’ve got a bunch of odds and sods armed with this and that, the kind of troops the Lenelli have been licking ever since they crossed the Western Ocean.

“We’ll need riders on our flanks, then,” the Bucovinan officer said.

Hasso found himself nodding. Bucovinan knights mostly couldn’t match their Lenello counterparts. They were better than ordinary Bucovinan infantry, though. After some thought of his own, the Wehrmacht officer said, “And we put mines in front of and around the catapults, too, if we fight in a position that gives us time to do it.”

“I haven’t seen those in action. Everybody tells me they’re strong magic, though,” Meshterul said.

“Not magic at all,” Hasso said … one more time. Meshterul stayed polite, but plainly didn’t believe him. If something went boom! and blew Lenelli to hell and gone, it had to be magic, didn’t it? People in this world sure as hell thought so. Even though Hasso knew better, he also knew he had to remember to take care of a couple of things: “Some of the mines will be fakes, bluffs – just turned earth with a fuse sticking out.”

“What good does that do?” Meshterul asked.

“It saves gunpowder. It keeps the Lenelli guessing. And we can make fake mines faster than real ones. If the Lenelli don’t know they’re fakes, they might as well be real,” Hasso answered.

The Bucovinan captain started to laugh. “I’m glad you’re on our side, dip me in shit and fry me for a pork chop if I’m not.”

Hasso wasn’t nearly so sure he was glad to be on the Bucovinans’ side. But he wasn’t sure he wasn’t glad, either, which marked a change in the way he looked at this world. And it wasn’t just because he was sleeping with Drepteaza; he was sure of that. He’d lived here long enough now and seen enough to have gained a perspective different from the one he had when he first got here … and different from the one he brought from his own world. Ubermenschen? Untermenschen? No, and no. People were … people, dammit.

So here he was, fighting for the little swarthy bastards, getting ready to go to war against the big blond pricks. He started to laugh, which made Meshterul give him a funny look. He didn’t care. Just because people were people, that didn’t mean everybody loved everybody else. Oh, no. Not even close.

Several days later than Hasso thought it should have, the Bucovinan army moved west from Falticeni. He used the time as well as he could. He made sure every pot of gunpowder and every metal shell the army was taking with it had a little bit of dragon bone inside or on it. Accidents could still happen: a spark, a fire. You treated gunpowder with the proper respect and made those as unlikely as you could. And now he’d magicproofed the powder, too. Or he hoped like anything he had.

He began to believe the dragon bones would do what he wanted them to do. Aderno and Velona hadn’t come close to troubling him since he started wearing his dragon-fang amulet. He didn’t believe they weren’t trying to bother him anymore. They had every reason to hurt him if they didn’t kill him. If they couldn’t… then the amulet was working the way he had in mind.

By now, almost everybody in Lord Zgomot’s army wore an amulet. Artisans with saws and thongs had turned them out as fast as they could. Hasso knew Zgomot wore one himself: he’d given one to the Lord of Bucovin himself, and watched him put it on under his tunic. Zgomot wore a different tunic today on horseback, but the bulge was still there.

“I tried to shoot you last year,” Hasso said, riding up alongside him.

“Yes, I know,” Zgomot answered. “You killed one of my guards, and wounded two more.”