In the sack and massacre that followed, Hasso might as well have been… aman from another world. He didn't hate the Bucovinans enough to want to kill them for the fun of it, though he'd done that to Russians a time or two. But he knew the Lenelli wouldn't listen to him if he tried to stop them. And so he walked through the narrow, stinking, muddy streets of Muresh as if he were a camera.
All the Lenelli who saw the cook with the burning beard liked the idea. They set the faces of several other Bucovinans on fire. One of them torched a woman's hair. Her shrieks were even higher and shriller than those of the men. Some of Bottero's troopers laughed at that. But others shook their heads. "Waste of pussy," one of them declared.
"Still plenty to go around," said a knight who thought the woman with her hair ablaze was funny.
He wasn't wrong. Even more than the Germans in Russia, the Lenelli in Bucovin lived by the law of the jungle. Winners did whatever they wanted, and the enemy's women were fair game. The Lenelli raped with the practiced efficiency of men who took it for granted. A gang of them would catch a woman, throw her down on the ground, force her legs apart and hold her arms, and then mount her one after another, roughly in order of rank.
Some of them let the women shriek; maybe they thought the noise added spice to the game. Others used rough gags of cloth or leather to cut down the din. Sometimes, when they were finished, they would send the woman off with a pat on the backside or even a coin. Sometimes they would get a final thrill by cutting her throat and leaving her there to die in the mud.
One Lenello tried to gag a screaming woman with his member instead of a crumpled rag. A moment later, he was screaming himself, and pouring blood — she bit down, hard. It did her no good, of course. Another blond soldier thrust his sword up where he and his friends had taken their pleasure. She died, slowly and agonizingly, while they tried to bandage their wounded buddy.
Velona watched the rapes as she might have watched animals rutting in the farmyard. "What does the goddess think of this?" Hasso asked her.
For a moment, the incomprehension with which she greeted the question made him wonder if he'd asked it in German by mistake. But no — he'd spoken Lenello. Even if he had, Velona didn't understand him. "Why should the goddess care about Grenye?" she said.
A potbellied Lenello missing half his left ear flung himself onto a wailing Grenye woman spreadeagled on the ground in front of them and started pumping away, his heavy buttocks rising and falling. "Does the goddess care about women?" Hasso asked. "She is one, yes, in a way?"
"She is a Lenello woman." Velona set a finger between her breasts. "She is, some of the time, this Lenello woman. And the Grenye… are only Grenye. When I say she doesn't care about them, I know what I'm talking about."
"All right. I only wonder — wondered." Hasso didn't feel like quarreling. If she did care anything about the natives, she might have done something about the sack. The soldiers would have listened to her. If they didn't, the goddess might have come to her… and it would have taken a bold — and a foolish — Lenello to gainsay her when the goddess made herself manifest.
He looked across the river. The Bucovinan soldiers in the castle on the other side of the Oltet had to be watching — and listening to — the ruination of Muresh. Did they have wives or sweethearts or sisters in the town? What were they thinking? Hasso knew too well the bitter mix of fury and despair and impotence that descended on the Wehrmacht as the Ivans started raping their way through Germany. Were the little swarthy men draining that cup to the dregs right now? How could they be doing anything else?
The Lenello sergeant or whatever he was grunted and pulled out of the Grenye woman. A last few thick drops of semen trickled from the head of his cock as he did up his trousers again. A younger Lenello took his place and began to thrust like a man possessed.
Somebody handed Hasso a big jar of beer. He drank — and drank, and drank. That way, he didn't have to think. And maybe, just maybe, he'd forget some of the things he'd seen.
Come morning, he wasn't sure whether King Bottero's men had deliberately torched Muresh or the fires they set got out of hand. What difference did it make, anyhow? The place was just as gone either way.
He woke with a bursting bladder, a pounding headache, and a mouth that tasted like the bottom of a latrine trench. The stink of smoke and burnt flesh assailed his nose when he left the tent he shared with Velona to ease himself. He looked around for the cookfires — maybe porridge would settle his sour stomach. He didn't see them anywhere, though. The cooks still had to be sleeping off the previous day's orgy of slaughter and lust.
He looked across the Oltet again. The Bucovinans had men on the battlements of their keep. The place would be easy to take even so — once the army got across the river. With the planking down from the bridge, that might not be so easy. He shrugged and winced, wishing again for aspirin.
As far as the Lenelli were concerned, what they'd done was all part of a day's work. They hardly looked at the smoldering ruins of Muresh. Instead, they started yelling for the cooks. Burning the place and massacring the people only seemed to have given them an appetite.
They hadn't killed everybody. A few Bucovinan men survived as slaves, a few women as — Hasso supposed — playthings. Some of the locals had the dazed look of people who'd lost everything in a natural disaster but somehow come through alive. Others seemed more calculating, perhaps trying to figure out how to make the best of what had happened to them. Seeing that thoughtful gleam in some of the women's eyes made Hasso want to cry and swear at the same time.
Berbec clung close to him — close enough to be annoying, like a dog that always stayed at his heel. "Why don't you get lost?" Hasso snapped when he'd had enough.
"If I leave you, master, I am lost," the captive replied. "I think someone will do for me." He hacked at his throat with the edge of his hand to leave no doubt about what he meant.
And he was right enough to embarrass the German. "All right. Stay with me, then," Hasso said roughly. "Enough killing."
"Too much killing," Berbec said.
King Bottero took matters into his own hands — or rather, used his own foot. He booted the cooks out of their cots and bedrolls. They grumbled, but they came. When the king woke you up, you either got to work or tried to assassinate him. None of the cooks seemed ready for anything that drastic.
Across the river, the Bucovinans in their castle would be eating breakfast, too. They had to know the Lenelli would try to cross the Oltet as soon as they could. They also had to know that, if Bottero's men made it across the river, their own chances weren't good. Hasso had seen and joined in more rear-guard actions than he liked to remember. Recruiting sergeants with medals and campaign ribbons all over their chests didn't talk about that kind of soldiering.
He was spooning up porridge when Bottero came over to him. Berbec tried to disappear without moving a muscle. He needn't have worried; the king either truly didn't notice him or affected not to. It amounted to the same thing either way. To Hasso, Bottero came straight to the point: "Do you know any easy way to get across the Oltet?"
"Is there a ford close by?" Hasso asked.
Bottero shook his big head. "No."
The Wehrmacht would have used rubber rafts to seize a bridgehead. No such items were part of the Lenello logistics train. "Have we got boats? Can we make rafts?"
"We don't have boats. How could we carry them along?" Bottero said. With ox-drawn wagons as his main supply vehicles, he had a point. "Building rafts would take too cursed long. The weather won't get better. I want to hit the Grenye again, just as soon as I can."
That made good sense. Even if the winter here wouldn't turn Russian, it wouldn't be a delight, either. Hasso shrugged. "Sorry, your Majesty. Then we have to do it the hard way — or can your wizards knock down that castle for you?"