"You're smart," Bottero said. "You don't have everybody below you looking up at you and thinking what an idiot you are."
"Not me, your Majesty," Hasso said, which was plenty to make Bottero almost fall off his horse with mirth. Hasso spoke as innocently as he could — with exaggerated innocence, in fact. He was glad he'd amused his new sovereign. He was also glad Bottero believed him when he said he had no royal ambitions. It was true. Even if it weren't, he had to act as if it were. Confessing that you did want to wear a crown was apt to be more hazardous to your life expectancy than a Russian armored division.
"Find any loot worth keeping?" Bottero asked.
Soldiers here made a big part of their living from booty. Hasso, used to regular pay, had to remind himself of that. He had picked up one nice dagger with gold chasing on the blade. He showed it to the king.
Bottero nodded. "That's not bad. It's one of our patterns, but it looks to me like a copy by a Grenye smith. The chasing is very nice — I like that dragon — but the work on the blade itself is cruder than what we'd do."
Hasso didn't have the eye for such fine details. He'd kept the dagger because of the gold. He didn't expect to use it as a weapon. He had nothing against war knives; he carried one of his own. But it was just a tool, not a fancy Solingen blade like the ones SS men were so proud of.
"Where do we go now?" Hasso asked. "We should push after the Bucovinans. Not let them come back together, get ready to fight again." He wanted to say regroup, but he couldn't come up with the word in Lenello. He was a lot more fluent than he had been even a month before, but talking still sometimes felt like wading through glue.
"You have been eating meat, haven't you?" King Bottero smiled at him like a father smiling at an adventurous little boy. "We need to get ready to fight again ourselves, you know. Do you think your striking column will work as well now that they know we use it?"
That was a genuinely shrewd question. "I don't know, your Majesty," Hasso replied. "You know the Bucovinans better than I do, so you are a better judge. How fast do they learn? Will they have an assault column of their own in the next battle?" The possibility hadn't occurred to him till now.
"No." The king shook his head. "They aren't that quick. But they'll look for ways to stop the column from breaking through. And they'll have their own soon. You can bet on that. When the other Lenello kingdoms hear about what we're doing, they'll start using these columns, too."
"Defense," Hasso muttered. Did he know enough about the Swiss hedgehog to teach it to Bottero's men? He had to hope he did, because they were going to need it, if not at the next battle then before too long. He could see that coming.
"All this is worry for another time," Bottero said. "You kept your word to me. I won't forget, and you won't be sorry." With the wave of a gauntleted hand, he rode off.
Not far away, a Lenello foot soldier was slitting the throat of a feebly writhing Bucovinan. Still holding the bloody knife, he nodded to Hasso. "Boy, I wish the king would talk to me that way," he said.
Everybody had problems. The foot soldier thought his were worse than Hasso's. Maybe he was even right. All the same, Hasso knew his own weren't small. He also knew they wouldn't go away any time soon.
Back in Germany, women prided themselves on how little they ate. A birdlike appetite was a sign of femininity. After the battle, Velona ate enough for two troopers, maybe three. "Where do you keep it?" Hasso asked. He was hungry, but not that hungry. "Have you got a hollow leg?"
The joke was old in German, but new in Lenello. Velona laughed so hard, she almost spat out the swig of beer she'd just taken. "No, no, no," she said. "You have to understand — I'm eating for two."
"You're going to have a baby?" Hasso took the phrase to mean what it would have in his native tongue. The next question that ran through his mind was, Is it mine? He didn't ask that one, not least for fear she would up and tell him no.
But she laughed again, this time at him, though as far as he could tell without malice. "No, not a baby. I'm sure I'm not pregnant," she said. "I just stopped flowing a couple of days before the battle, remember, and I'm glad I did, too. What I meant was, I'm eating for me and the goddess both."
"Oh." Feeling like a fool, Hasso thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. It hurt more than it should have; somewhere in the battle, he'd got a bruise there, even if he couldn't remember how or when. And he found himself nodding. No wonder Velona never gained a gram! But carrying a goddess around wasn't the sort of diet likely to become popular in Berlin or Cologne or Vienna… even if the German women in those towns were free of invaders, which they weren't.
How big a toll did the goddess take on a mere mortal's metabolism? Hasso had no idea, but Velona knew the answer from the inside out.
Her smile, he judged, held more than a little relief. "I could feel the goddess' power running through me," she said. "The savages could feel it, too, when I struck and even before that, when I bore down on them. I could tell."
"I believe you," Hasso said, which was nothing but the truth. When the goddess manifested herself in Velona, she definitely seemed more than human. Just being near her at such times made your hair prickle up, as if lightning had crashed down close by. Then, several beats more slowly than a Lenello would have, Hasso saw what she was driving at here. "We are in Bucovin, but the power still runs through you."
"The goddess is still with me," Velona agreed. But then her smile slipped. "It was like this the last time I came into Bucovin, too. At first, it was like this. After that… It wasn't that the goddess left me, or not exactly like that. When she tried to speak, though, I couldn't make out what she was saying. The land in these parts was thinking about something else."
How did she mean that? Never having had any kind of divinity speak to him or through him, Hasso couldn't know, not the way Velona did. He thought of a bad telephone connection. Then he laughed at himself. What good did a thought from his own world do him? He couldn't make Velona or anyone else here understand it. What would telephones seem to the Lenelli but magic?
Crystal balls, now… They had crystal balls, or something like them. "Wizards can talk back and forth from far away, right?" he asked, an idea starting to sprout in his mind.
"Yes, that's true." Velona nodded. She laid her hand on his in what was, he realized a moment later, a gesture of sympathy. "I can guess how strange that must be to you, coming from a world with so little magic in it."
Hasso didn't laugh. If he started, he feared he wouldn't be able to stop. Stick to business, he told himself. And so he did: "All right. If we split our army in two, the Grenye would also have to split their army in two, wouldn't they?"
"I'd think so, but I'm no Grenye general, goddess be praised," Velona said. "Where are you going with this?"
All at once, the sprouted idea flowered and fruited. "We can keep track of our two armies with magic, always know where they are, move together thanks to magic. We can come back together when we need to, and defeat the Grenye in detail." For once, he found the technical term he needed right on the tip of his tongue. If that wasn't a good omen, what would be?
Would Velona get it? Was it, in fact, a thought worth getting? Or was he misunderstanding the way things worked here? He waited to see how she responded.
He started to worry when she didn't answer right away. Her brow creased in serious thought. Seeing those tiny wrinkles reminded him she was human as well as divine. Were these human, normal moments the ones Jesus' followers had cherished most? Hasso wouldn't have been surprised, though none of the Gospels talked about anything so completely mundane.
"It could work," Velona said at last. "It could well work. We didn't need such tricks when we fought the Grenye after we first came across the sea. We knew so much more than they did, the fights were walkovers. A ploy like that wouldn't work when Lenelli fight Lenelli, because there's magic on both sides then. But against Bucovin… Yes, it might be just the thing." A slow smile spread across her face. "And how fitting to turn their mindblindness against them, to use it as one of our weapons of war."