Hasso sometimes wondered if he was imagining that, but never for long. He knew better. That doubt was just the sputtering of his rational mind, here in a world where rationality mattered so much less than it did in the one where he grew to manhood.
As if to prove as much, two wagon trains in a row made it through to King Bottero's army. The teamsters were full of praise for what the wizards had done to help them on the way. "They sent them savages running with lightning singeing the hair off their balls," one driver said enthusiastically. "I'll buy those bastards a beer any day of the week, twice on Sundays."
Weeks here had ten days, and Sundays were feast days instead, but Hasso tried to turn Lenello into idiomatic German inside his head. Most of the time, he did pretty well. Every once in a while… Every once in a while, he might as well have been in another world. Funny how that works, he thought with a sour smile.
Things didn't get better the next day. The Lenelli were marching near a river — the Aryesh, it was called — that ran north and east. It should have shielded their left from any trouble from the Bucovinans. It should have, but it didn't. Somehow, a raiding party appeared at dawn where no raiding party had any business being. The enemy soldiers shot volleys of arrows into the startled Lenello infantry, then galloped off before King Bottero's horsemen could harry them.
Bottero, predictably, was furious. "They have no business doing that!" he shouted. "They have no right to do that! How did they get there? They came out of nowhere!"
"They must have crossed the river, your Majesty," said the infantry commander, a stolid soldier named Friddi.
"Brilliant!" The king was savagely sarcastic. "And how did they do that? No bridge in these parts, and it's too deep to ford. Maybe they had catapults fling them across!"
"Maybe magic flung them across, sire," Friddi said.
"Don't be any dumber than you can help," Bottero said. "They're Grenye, by the goddess! They can't do that. And we don't think they've got any renegades doing it for them. If they do, those bastards'll be a long, hard time dying, I promise you that."
Hasso thought of Scanno, back in Drammen. Scanno liked Grenye better than his own folk, and made no bones about it. Dammit, we never did pick him up and grill him about how he beat Aderno's spell, he thought — there was something that slipped through the cracks as the campaign revved up. But he was a drunk, a ruin of his former self. He wouldn't make a wizard if he lived to be a thousand, and Hasso wouldn't have bet on him to last another five years.
Stubbornly, Friddi said, "Well, your Majesty, unless it was wizardry, I don't know how the demon they got there."
However the men of Bucovin managed to cross the Aryesh, they threw the Lenello army into enough confusion to make it halt for the day. Hasso hunted up Orosei. "You know some men who are good trackers?" he asked.
"Oh, I might. I just might." The master-at-arms' eyes gleamed. "You've got an idea."
"Oh, I might. I just might." Hasso mimicked Orosei's tone well enough to send the Lenello into gales of laughter.
The half-dozen soldiers Orosei told off had the look of hunters, or more likely poachers. "You do what our foreign friend says," Orosei told them. "We've got some tricks he doesn't know about, but I expect he's got some we don't know about, too."
"What's on your mind, lord?" By one tracker's tone of voice, he was suspicious of Hasso on general principles first, then because the German was trying to order him around.
"Take me to where the Bucovinans cross the river. Track them back to there for me," Hasso said.
"If they did cross it," the Lenello said. "If they didn't just show up, like. I don't suppose Grenye can do magic, but you never can tell, now can you?" He seemed a lot less convinced than King Bottero. What that meant… Well, who the hell knew what that meant? Hasso had more urgent things to worry about.
"Track them back," he said. "Then we see. Till we try to find out, we can't really know." That was true in his world. Here…It had better be true here, he thought.
"You don't need us for this," another tracker said as they all set out. "A blind man could follow these hoofprints."
"A blind man, nothing," still another Lenello put in. "A dead man could."
"Fine. Pretend I am blind. Pretend I am dead," Hasso said. "But remember one thing, please. If you make a mistake, I haunt you." That got some grins from the men Orosei had picked, and one or two nervous chuckles. Back in Germany, he would have been joking. Here, as the first Lenello tracker said, you never could tell.
Back through the bushes and saplings the train led, back to the Aryesh. The trackers were right; Hasso could have done this himself. He shrugged. He hadn't known ahead of time. But now he had witnesses if his hunch turned out to be right. And if it turned out to be wrong, they would see him looking like a jerk.
He shrugged again. If you're going to try things, sometimes you damn well will look like a jerk, that's all.
The Aryesh was muddy and foamy. It looked almost like Viennese coffee. Hasso sighed. Along with tobacco, that was something he would never enjoy again. Nothing he could do about it. No, there was one thing: he could do without.
He unsheathed his belt knife and trimmed a sapling into a pole about a meter and a half long. "Nice blade," one of the trackers said. "Where'd you get it?"
"I have it with me when I come from my world," Hasso answered.
"How about that?" the Lenello said, and then, in a low voice to one of his pals,
"Never seen one like it before. Almost makes you believe that cock-and-bull story, doesn't it?" Hasso didn't think he was supposed to overhear that, but he did.
"What's he going to do now?" the other tracker said, his voce also not quite sotto enough. "Dowse with that stick? We already know where the cursed river is."
Hasso hadn't even thought of dowsing. In Germany, that was an old wives' tale. It probably wasn't here. If any kind of magic was practical, finding water fit the bill. But, as the tracker said, he already knew where the water was here. He was after something else.
He thrust the pole into the Aryesh. He wasn't enormously surprised when only the first twenty-five or thirty centimeters went in. After that, it hit an obstruction. His grin was two parts satisfaction and one part relief.
Orosei was only confused. "What's going on?" he asked.
Instead of answering with words, Hasso probed with the pole again. Then he stepped out into — or onto — the river. Walking on the water, he felt like Jesus. The Aryesh didn't come up to the tops of his boots. He strode forward, probing as he went.
"What the — ?" one of the trackers exclaimed.
"They don't put their bridge where we can see it," Hasso said, turning back toward the Lenelli. "They build it underwater, build it sneaky, so they can use it and we don't know."
"Well, fuck me," the tracker said. If that wasn't his version of coming to attention and saluting, Hasso didn't know what would be.
"I don't know, not till I see," Hasso answered. "But I think maybe. In my world, the enemies of my land use this trick." The Russians used every trick in the book, and then wrote a new book for all the tricks that weren't in the old one. The Wehrmacht used this one, too. A bridge that was hard to spot was a bridge artillery wouldn't knock out in a hurry.
Artillery couldn't knock this one out — no artillery here. Hasso looked across the Aryesh. He didn't see anybody, which was all to the good.
"What we need to do is, we need to pull up ten or fifteen cubits of this tonight," he said. He almost said five or six meters, but that wouldn't have meant anything to the blonds with him. They used fingers and palms and cubits, and weights that were even more cumbersome. What could you do? Since he couldn't do anything, he went on, "Then the Bucovinans ride across, go splash."