“Not bloody much.” King Bottero was inclined to look on the bright side of things. “It was coming down like pig piss” – which was what the Lenelli said when they meant it was raining cats and dogs – “but now we’ve only got this drizzle. We can cope with this. The other, that was pretty bad.”
“I don’t know if this is because of me,” Hasso repeated. “If it starts raining hard again – ”
“In that case, you’ll work your magic again and slow it down.” The king didn’t have to listen to anybody if he didn’t feel like it. The Fuhrer hadn’t had to, either. Hitler was still in Berlin when Hasso disappeared from that world. If he was lucky now, he was dead. If he wasn’t so lucky, Stalin had him. Hasso had trouble thinking of anything worse than getting caught by Uncle Joe.
And Stalin didn’t have to listen to anybody, either.
“It’s still muddy.” Bottero kicked glop off his boots again. “But if it doesn’t get any worse than this, we’ll manage. It’s on to Falticeni.”
“I hope so, your Majesty.” Hasso meant that, anyway.
The king slapped him on the back. “You can do it. We can do it. And you will do it, and so will we.” Off he went, pausing every now and then to clear those boots.
When the army set out, of course, the ground was still muddy from all the rain that had fallen before. That meant the Lenelli still had to move slowly. Hasso’s horse probably felt like doing what Bottero had done. No matter what it felt like, it kept slogging forward.
One bit of good news: with all that rain, the Bucovinans couldn’t burn everything in the path of the king’s army. They did dig more camouflaged pits in the roadway, as they had when the Lenelli forced their way across the Oltet. A few unwary scouts rode their horses into them. The sharp stakes set up at the bottom of the pits pierced men and horses alike.
Bottero fumed when supplies didn’t come up fast enough to suit him. “What are our wizards doing back there?” he complained. “Are they too busy screwing little brown women to pay attention to their proper business?”
He was screwing little brown women himself, or at least one little brown woman. No one seemed to want to mention Sfinti to him. Hasso, a near-stranger in these ranks, found discretion the better part of valor. Orosei did remark, “It’s muddy behind us, too, your Majesty.”
“Well, yes,” Bottero said. “But we need the food, curse it.”
“Jumping up and down about what you can’t help won’t make it any better,” the master-at-arms said. Hasso would have liked to tell King Bottero the same thing, but didn’t know how the monarch would take it from him. Orosei, more at ease in a society where he’d belonged since birth, didn’t hesitate.
And the king did take it from him. A sheepish grin spread across Bottero’s face. “It makes me feel better,” he said.
“Hurrah.” Orosei wasn’t afraid to be sarcastic to his sovereign, either. And King Bottero laughed out loud, for all the world as if the soldier were kidding.
Somewhere up ahead lay Falticeni. Over the next set of hills? Past the next forest? Around the next bend in the road? The Germans had looked for Moscow like that in the winter of ‘41, and they knew exactly where it was. Half the time, the Lenelli seemed to think Falticeni lay somewhere over the rainbow. With the maps they had, who could blame them? They knew its direction, but not where along that line it was.
And, the farther east they went, the worse the rain got again. Hasso worked his amateur spell once more. He was smoother at it the second time around; he didn’t come close to cooking himself in his own juices, the way he had the first try. But he couldn’t see that the magic did much to the weather this time.
“We’re deeper into Bucovin now,” Velona said in what had to be meant for consolation. “The land does work against spells here.”
“Why isn’t that magic?” Hasso asked irritably. “It screws magic up.”
“It’s like trying to fight a battle in the rain and mud,” she answered. “It screws up everything. It’s just the way things are here. If the Grenye worked magic, they’d have trouble with it, too.”
But the natives didn’t, couldn’t, work magic. The Lenelli sneered at them for that, and made them out to be, well, Untermenschen on account of it. If the big blonds’ big advantage faded, though, the farther east they went…
“We just have to do it the hard way, that’s all,” Velona declared. “We can do that, too. We’re better warriors than those scrawny little buggers ever dreamt of being. And speaking of doing it the hard way…” She looked at him sidelong That turned out to be better consolation than all the words in the world.
The Bucovinans didn’t seem to know they couldn’t stand up against Bottero’s army. Raiding parties tangled with his scouts. No mystery about where these bands came from: they rode down from the northeast, shot arrows at the Lenelli or pitched into them when enjoying the advantage of numbers, and then rode off again.
Bottero thought about sending Hasso forward with the scouts. “A wizard could remind the little bastards why we’re better than they are,” the king said.
“I don’t know how much I can do on this ground.” Hasso left it there: anymore and he would have looked bad.
“We’ll save you,” Bottero decided after some thought. “You go up with just a few of our men along, something stupid can happen. Don’t want that, not when there’s bound to be a big battle ahead. Chances are we’ll need you more then.”
“Whatever you say, your Majesty.” Hasso was more relieved than he let on. The prospect of combat didn’t faze him. After everything he’d been through, he had its measure. No, what did make him sigh (unobtrusively, he hoped) was the good sense King Bottero showed. He didn’t throw away the potential of a large gain later for some small one – or the potential of that small one – now.
The striking column of Lenello knights practiced whenever it could. It had won a battle for the army, so even Marshal Lugo wasn’t complaining about it anymore. The big blonds did like to fight aggressively; the idea fit them well enough once they got used to it. Punch a hole in the other fellow’s line, then pour on through. What could be better than that?
Nothing – as long as it worked.
“This time, the Bucovinans likely expect us to do something with the column,” Hasso warned. “A surprise is only a surprise once. We need to watch their line, see where the weakness is. Then we hit there.” He slammed his right fist into his left palm.
Captain Nornat got the idea. “They’ll give us a hole to go through, sure as sure,” he predicted. “They’re nothing but Grenye, after all. They always make sloppy mistakes like that. It’s one of the reasons we keep thrashing them.”
“You don’t want to have to count on the other guy doing something dumb,” Hasso said. “You want to be able to beat him even if he does everything as well as he can.”
“Well, sure,” the Lenello officer said. “But when he does screw up, you want to make him sorry.”
Hasso nodded; he couldn’t very well disagree. In Russia, you could bet the Ivans wouldn’t move as fast as they should have. Lieutenants didn’t dare do much on their own – they had to get authorization from higher up the chain of command. For that matter, so did colonels. Again and again, the Germans made them pay for being slow.
Hasso’s laugh was so bitter, Nornat raised a questioning eyebrow. “Nothing,” Hasso said, which was an out-and-out lie. The Wehrmacht had taken advantage of the Russians time and again, sure. And in the end, so what? Stalin won the goddamn war anyhow.
The Bucovinans’ faults were different from the Russians’. These guys were still trying to figure out how the Lenelli fought. They didn’t have enough practice to be as good as the invaders from across the sea. No wonder they screwed up every once in a while.
“They fall to pieces when we take Falticeni?” Hasso asked.
“They’d better!” Nornat said. “We grab their stupid king or lord or whatever they call him, we hold his toes to the fire, they’ll spread their legs for us, never you fear.”