"Yes, sir." Nebun might have been talking to a superior. "I will obey you as I would obey my own father."
Hasso glanced over to Aderno. "Can I rely on that?" he asked — in German, so the Grenye wouldn't understand.
Aderno's magic let him follow the alien tongue. He nodded. "I think so. You might almost have set a spell on him." He glanced over at Nebun. "For all I know, you did. You are not without power, as my lost goldpiece reminds me."
The idea that he might be able to work magic made Hasso want to laugh. The extra gold jingling in his belt pouch was a good reason to take the notion seriously, though. "Go, Nebun," he said. "Go back to your chiefs. Tell them how strong we are. Tell them we are very strong. Tell them you see all this with your own eyes. Go now."
"I go." Nebun booted his pony up into a walk, and then into a trot. He wasn't such a smooth rider as most of the Lenelli, but he got the job done.
"That should confuse them," Hasso said. "If they think they know things that are not so, they get confused. They make mistakes."
"If they think they know…" Aderno raised a wry eyebrow. "I get confused, too."
"Finding out what is really so is important," Hasso said. "The one who knows that better usually wins."
Inevitably, the German invasion of Russia came to mind again. The Wehrmacht thought Stalin had far fewer divisions than he proved able to pull out of his hat. By the time the first winter's fighting was under way, the Germans had destroyed as many divisions as they'd believed the Russians could raise. But more Ivans kept coming at them, and more, and still more… and now, if Hasso were magically transported back to Berlin, it would be a Berlin under the Hammer and Sickle. Anything was better than that.
"One thing that is really so I already told you — we can work magic and the Grenye can't," Aderno said. "Now you see it with your own eyes."
"I see that you can work magic and that that Grenye can't," Hasso half-agreed. He said nothing about his own magical abilities, if any. "But if this is so wonderful, why don't Lenelli take Falticeni a long time ago?"
The wizard gave him a dirty look but no answer. Not even Velona had an answer for that, or so it seemed. If your men are so much better, why didn't they take Moscow? How many times would people throw that in Germany's face? The surviving veterans would blame the winter, the Russian T-34 tank's wide tracks, the Siberian troops brought in to stiffen the Soviet line… everyone and everything but themselves. No, some things didn't change a bit from one world to another.
"Do the Grenye in Bucovin worship the goddess?" Hasso asked Velona at breakfast the next morning. "Or do they have their own gods, the ones they have before you Lenelli come here?"
She sipped from a mug of beer. Hasso still missed coffee and tobacco. This was this world's New World, wasn't it? Why didn't it have tobacco in it? Whatever the reason, it didn't. After swallowing, Velona said, "Some worship the goddess. They've seen she has true power. Their old gods are just statues of stone or wood. Some of them look pretty, but what do they do?"
She might have been a Hebrew prophet mocking the local Baals. No sooner had that thought crossed Hasso's mind than he laughed at himself. If the prophets had any descendants, the Reich would have settled most of them once and for all. You didn't ask questions about what the Einsatzgruppen were up to. You didn't really need to ask. The big wheels were serious about making sure the lands they ruled were Judenfrei.
But the goddess here wasn't sleepy like the long-ignored Baals of Palestine. She didn't ignore her worshipers, the way the Jews' God forgot about them. She was as real as a river. No wonder the Grenye started bowing down before her. The wonder was that any of them stayed stubborn enough to keep on following whatever gods they'd had before.
That brought up another question. "What goed — no, went, curse it — wrong when you went into Bucovin before?" Hasso asked.
Before answering, Velona smiled at him. "Your Lenello is getting better all the time."
"Baptism by total immersion," Hasso said in German. It wouldn't have meant anything to Velona even in her language. But when he needed to use Lenello to talk at all, he had the biggest incentive in the world for getting fluent as fast as he could. He could have used Aderno to translate… if he and the wizard didn't rub each other the wrong way all the time. He'd learned the language faster because he was doing it on his own. With an effort, he brought his mind back to the business at hand. "Bucovin."
"Yes, Bucovin." Velona stopped smiling. "I don't know what went wrong. I told you that before, I think. Things… stopped working, that was all. The whole country might have been trying to see through me, and finally it did."
"How do you stop it?" Hasso asked.
"If I knew, I would tell you," she answered. "Once we settle our knights on the land, once we have our wizards in the towns, things should take care of themselves. I hope so, anyhow."
Hasso didn't know what to say to that. The Germans had been sure that, once they seized Moscow, things would take care of themselves. Then, after Moscow didn't fall, they'd been just as sure that grabbing Stalingrad would set everything right. Then, after Stalingrad didn't fall… Hasso forced his mind out of that unhappy groove.
Saddling his horse and getting going did the job. The tackle the Lenelli used wasn't the same as what he'd known in Germany. The way horses and people were made dictated a lot about bits and reins and saddles and straps and stirrups, but not everything. He had to think about what he was doing here, more than he would have with familiar equipment.
The land was new, too. Far off to the east, he saw mountains against the horizon. Were they visible from Castle Svarag? If they were, he didn't remember them. A Lenello told him that was the Palmorz Range. "What is on the other side of it?" Hasso asked.
"Well, I don't exactly know," the horseman answered. "Not many Lenelli have been over it, and you know what liars travelers are. Could be anything." He shook his head. "Well, I don't think there's mermaids. Dragons, though, maybe."
"Dragons?" Hasso had seen them on everything from banners to belt buckles. But he could have seen them on things like that in Germany, too. "Are they real?"
"I hope to spit," the Lenello said, or words to that effect. "Didn't one burn down a village in King Cherso's realm three winters back? Wouldn't he have burned another one if a catapult didn't get lucky and put a bolt through his wing and make him fly away?"
King Cherso's realm lay well to the north of Bottero's. That was all Hasso knew about it. No, now he knew one thing more: it had a dragon problem, or had had one three winters back. "If the catapult missed, what would the dragon have done?" he asked — he was starting to get the hang of the subjunctive.
"Torn up everything in sight, I expect," the Lenello said. "That's what dragons do when they get pissed off, right?"
"I suppose," Hasso answered — a handy phrase that could mean anything or nothing. Hasso approved of cliches. They helped him get his meaning across, even when he hardly had one.
By the way Bottero's army behaved in Bucovin, it might have been an angry dragon. A lot of Grenye farmers fled before it, taking as much of their livestock with them as they could. The Lenelli grabbed everything the locals left behind. The pigs and occasional cattle and sheep went into the army's larder. So did the ducks and odd chickens and geese. So did all the grain the soldiers could find, regardless of type. The horses and donkeys were mostly too small for Lenelli to ride, but the invaders took them anyhow, to help haul wagons and carts.
And farmhouse after farmhouse, village after village, went up in flames. Bottero's soldiers took a childlike delight in arson. Hasso hadn't known any soldiers, Germans or Russians or Poles or Frenchmen or British, who didn't. He would have bet the Grenye got hard-ons watching things burn, too. But there was more to it than that.