What the Germans hadn't expected was how many of their own number would die. The Slavs were uncommonly stubborn about refusing to be cleared, and now Hasso's folk fled before them instead of driving them away.
Could that happen here? He had trouble believing it. The Bucovinans were brave, and there were lots of them, but they were outclassed in ways the Ivans hadn't been. Still, that head and the warning by it spoke of more implacable purpose than Hasso had looked to see from the natives.
They spoke of such things to him, anyhow. King Bottero took another message from them. "Burn the head," he commanded in a voice like iron. "His soul will ascend to the heavens." He looked around. Had he spotted any Bucovinans, he probably would have ordered them sacrificed to serve the Lenello teamster in the world to come. His face had that kind of intense, purposeful stare, anyhow. But, since he didn't, he pointed to the bark with the writing. "Dig a hole and throw that in. Don't cover it over yet, though, by the goddess."
His men sprang to obey him. That was partly their own anger working, and partly their fear. Anyone who tried standing against Bottero in that moment would have been a dead man in the next. The dirt by the side of the road was soft and easy to dig up. One of the Lenelli picked up the piece of bark with his fingertips, as if it were unclean. After he dropped it into the hole, he scrubbed his hands on the dead grass and then spat after it.
Spitting wasn't enough to satisfy Bottero. He dismounted from his great war-horse, walked over to the hole, undid his trousers, and took the most furious and majestic leak Hasso had ever imagined, let alone seen.
Even that didn't suffice, not for the king. He gestured to the leaders around him. Hasso didn't care one way or the other about pissing on an offensive sign. If Bottero wanted him to, he would. The king did, and so he did. Other officers' efforts made a pretty fair puddle in the hole in the ground.
Hasso was taken aback when Bottero waved Velona up to the hole. He could see why Bottero wanted to show the goddess' utter contempt for the Bucovinan warning, but… Velona didn't seem embarrassed; she just squatted and pissed. If it didn't bother her, Hasso told himself it shouldn't bother him, either.
After that, the Lenelli shoveled in some dirt, too. The army rode on. Velona looked… maybe unhappy, maybe just distant. "You don't like what you just did?" Hasso asked, guiding his horse up alongside hers.
"Oh," she said in some surprise, as if recalled to herself. "No. It isn't that. The natives deserve what we gave them. But… I wish he hadn't buried it, that's all. The earth here fights for Bucovin."
She'd said that before, about her last visit to the Grenye land. What did it mean here? Did even she know? Hasso thought about asking, and then thought again.
XI
Bucovinan raiders hit harder at Bottero's scouts and supply wagons once the Lenelli got over the Oltet. They didn't stop the king's army, but they harassed it and slowed it down — the last thing it needed as fall moved on toward winter. Falticeni, the capital of Bucovin, lay… somewhere up ahead, anyhow.
As winter snow came down, a few German units fought their way into the suburbs of Moscow and, in the distance, got a glimpse of the Kremlin. Then the Ivans threw them back, and they never came so close again. Hasso wished he hadn't thought of that, even if the weather here was milder.
The king's temper frayed. He gathered his generals and wizards together so he could shout at them all at the same time. "Why aren't you keeping the outriders safe, curse you?" Bottero bellowed.
"We're doing everything we know how to do, your Majesty." An officer named Nuoro had charge of the supply train. "But there aren't enough of us, and there are too stinking many Bucovinans. Things go wrong sometimes, that's all."
"That's all, he says!" King Bottero rolled his eyes. "If things go on like this, we'll be eating our belts and our boots before too long."
He exaggerated — by how much, Hasso wasn't sure. Nuoro gave him a stiff, almost wooden, salute. "What would you have me do, your Majesty?"
"Push the supplies through. Don't let the teamsters get massacred. How hard is that?" Bottero demanded.
"In a land full of raiders and bushwhackers, sire, it's not so easy. How many more soldiers will you give me to keep the wagons safe?" Nuoro asked.
"Well, maybe a few," the king said. "I can't give you too many more. We need them to beat the savages back. That's what we're here for, you know."
"Maybe we haven't got enough soldiers for everything we need to do… sire," Nuoro said. How many times had the Germans worked through the same agonizing choices in the vastnesses of the Soviet Union? How much good did their agonizing do them? Not bloody much.
But Bottero had options that weren't available to the Wehrmacht. He turned to his wizards. "If I string you out along the route back to the border, you can smell out ambushes, right? You can stop them?"
"Well, yes, your Majesty," Aderno said. "But then we won't be here with the striking force in case of battle."
"What?" Now Bottero looked — and sounded — highly offended, so much so that he might almost have struck a pose. People in a position to know said the Fuhrer did stuff like that. Acting had to be one of the things that went into ruling. Still offended, the king went on, "You think we can't beat the barbarians by ourselves?"
That question had only one possible answer, and Aderno gave it: "Of course you can, your Majesty. We might make it a little easier for you, that's all."
"By the goddess, we'll manage on our own," Bottero said. "But if you can't conjure up the grub we need to keep going — and it doesn't look like you can do that — the next best thing for you is to make sure the plain old ordinary grub from our own kingdom gets here safe. How does that sound?"
Aderno saluted. "As you wish it, your Majesty, so shall it be."
A German would have shot out his arm and said, "Heil Hitler!" An Ivan, no doubt, would have nodded and said, "Yes, Comrade General Secretary!" It all amounted to the same thing in the end.
Then Hasso had a disconcerting thought. Stalin had almost led his country right off a cliff in the early days of war on the Russian front, but the Ivans went right on saying, "Yes, Comrade General Secretary!" And the Fuhrer damn well had led the Reich off a cliff as the war ground on, but the Germans went right on saying, "Heil Hitler!" Obedience was all very well, but didn't it have limits somewhere?
Somewhere, certainly. Here? No. Bottero had given a reasonable order. It might not work out, but chances were it would. And Hasso also thought the Lenelli could beat whatever Bucovin threw at them. The natives were brave, but all the courage in the world didn't matter when it ran into technique.
So the Wehrmacht taught, anyhow. But who wasn't in Moscow, and who was in Berlin? So what if one German was worth three Ivans? If every Landser knocked down his three Russians, and then a fourth Russian showed up, and a fifth…
Exactly how big was Bucovin? How many swarthy little men did it hold, swarthy little men who didn't want to live under a big blond king who could roar like a lion? Enough for their numbers to cancel out the huge advantage in weapons and skill the Lenelli had? Hasso didn't know.
He hoped like hell Bottero did.
Off rode the wizards on their gleaming unicorns. Hasso was sorry to see them go, not so much because he'd miss them — they were a contentious, bad-tempered lot — but because he'd miss their mounts. The unicorns were marvelous and beautiful. Without them, the army seemed only… an army. Its glamour was gone.
Well, almost. Velona still rode with Bottero and his soldiers. Her glamour was of a different sort from the unicorns', which didn't make it any less real. Most of the time, she was just herself, not a woman in whom the goddess dwelt. Even as herself, she was striking, of course, but there was more to it than that. She held the memory of the goddess whether touched by the deity or not.