“Can you touch them off?” Now that Hasso had gunpowder, he could use figures of speech based on it. He hadn’t realized how many of those there were till he had to do without them. “If the peasants blow up behind Bottero’s line, he’ll need to leave Bucovin alone to deal with them.”
“Gods help them when he does,” Zgomot said. Hasso only shrugged. The Lord of Bucovin sent him a measuring stare. “You’re as cold-blooded as a serpent, aren’t you, Hasso Pemsel?”
With another shrug, Hasso said, “If I serve Bucovin, I have to think of Bucovin first, yes?”
“Yes … if you serve Bucovin.” Zgomot didn’t mean it the same way Hasso had.
Well, he had his reasons for doubting the German. His biggest reason likely was that Hasso looked like a Lenello. Besides, Hasso was fighting on King Bottero’s side when the Bucovinans captured him. The Lord of Bucovin wouldn’t forget it, or that Hasso had been boffing the goddess on earth. None of that would inspire confidence, not from Zgomot’s point of view. All right, maybe my looks aren’t the biggest reason, Hasso thought. But they sure aren’t the smallest one, either.
Back to business now. “What I tell you to do probably does hurt King Bottero,” Hasso said. “I don’t see how it can hurt Bucovin. A lot of Grenye in Bottero’s kingdom aren’t even Bucovinans.”
“I should hope not. They belong to the small tribes, the weak tribes,” Zgomot said. Bucovinans had almost as much scorn for the Grenye who’d quickly succumbed to the invaders from overseas as Lenelli did for Grenye in general. But the Lord of Bucovin continued, “Even if they are ruined men, I hate to throw them into the fire. They are still of our blood, of our flesh.”
“What good does it do them if Bucovin falls?” Hasso asked.
Zgomot grunted. “A point, no doubt. I do not know how much good an uprising will do us, but I do not suppose it can hurt. And you are right, of course – we have ways of making one happen.”
If the border was as tightly held as Hasso had tried to arrange, it wouldn’t be so easy to sneak into Bottero’s realm. He’d tried to make it hard for Grenye to sneak out of the Lenello kingdom, though; he hadn’t worried about any of them sneaking in. He thought he would have, sooner or later, but he hadn’t yet. So many different things going on…
And how much attention would Bottero’s marshals and wizards pay to his advice now that he wasn’t in Drammen anymore? How much attention would they pay now that he’d gone over to the other side? They would probably do the opposite of anything he’d ever proposed, just on general principles.
If he aimed to return to the Lenelli’s good graces, he’d find some magical way to get in touch with Aderno and warn him the uprising was coming. Could he manage to touch the wizard in his dreams? Maybe he could. He whistled softly. Talk about playing both ends against the middle!
Next question was, did he want to try anything like that? He fit in better in Drammen than he did in Falticeni, no doubt about it. But fitting in better wasn’t the same as fitting in well – no doubt about that, either. And Aderno and Velona had both done their level best to kill him, which didn’t encourage him to try to do anything nice for them.
If I could get Velona back again … Any man would do almost anything to have a woman like that. But it wouldn’t be the same as it was. He could see as much, however much he wished he couldn’t. And, except for Velona, he had no overwhelming reasons to prefer the Lenelli to the Grenye.
I look right among the Lenelli. There was the other side of Zgomot’s worrying about his loyalty because he was big and blond. It did matter, but only so much. He was a foreigner in Bottero’s kingdom, too, even if a less obvious foreigner.
Grenye women are homely. Much of that went back to Velona again. Velona would have been a knockout – a knockout and a half – anywhere. Next to her, most Lenello women were homely, too; Hasso wouldn’t have wanted to end up in bed with Queen Pola for all the tea in China. He did think the average Lenello woman was prettier than the average Grenye.
Drepteaza … He muttered to himself. No matter what he thought of Drepteaza, she didn’t think much of him. She thought he looked like a goddamn Lenello, was what she thought. And there he was, banging head-on into looks again.
“You’re thinking hard.” Zgomot startled him out of his none too happy reverie.
“Yes, Lord.” Hasso couldn’t very well deny it.
“You don’t say much,” the Lord of Bucovin remarked.
“My head is full of mud,” Hasso answered. “I don’t have much worth saying.”
“No, eh?” Zgomot didn’t believe him, but seemed too polite to push about it. Since Hasso hadn’t told the whole truth, that was just as well. Zgomot lifted an imaginary mug. “May you bring as much confusion to our enemies.”
“May it be so.” Did Hasso mean it? He decided he didn’t want to try to reach Aderno in his dreams, so maybe he did.
When Scanno was sober, he remembered he was a fighting man. He liked to practice with Hasso. “Now I can pick on somebody my own size,” he said. He was bigger than the German, too, but only a little. When they used wooden practice swords, he did pick on Hasso. Even half-drunk, which he was a lot of the time, he was better with a blade than the Wehrmacht officer ever would be.
“How old were you the first time you picked up a sword?” Hasso asked, rubbing his ribcage where one of Scanno’s strokes had got through. He would have an ugly bruise there tonight.
The renegade shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Two, three, maybe four. If you’re going to be a warrior, you need to be a warrior. You start learning how as soon as you can.”
That was true among the Prussian Junkers, too, but not to the same degree. Learning to shoot a rifle – especially a modern one, with a flat trajectory and good sights – was a lot easier than learning to fence and ride. Hand-to-hand combat in Hasso’s world was nice to know, but you needed it a lot less than you did here.
“Let’s try spears,” Hasso said. The Bucovinans used shafts with rags padding the end, the same as the Lenelli did. Had they come up with the idea on their own or borrowed it from the blonds? Hasso wondered whether even the locals knew any more.
He could hold his own with spears. That made him feel better about himself and his place here. Moral – don’t get caught with just a sword, he thought. Though the day was chilly, he and Scanno worked up a good sweat thrusting and parrying.
Scanno swigged from a big mug of beer. “Can’t sweat all the good stuff out of me,” he said, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. He took another pull at the mug. “Now I suppose you’ll want to thump my sorry ass.”
“You give me fencing lessons. Shouldn’t I give you wrestling lessons?” Hasso hoped he sounded more innocent than he felt – he did want some of his own back. “If you’re going to be a warrior, you need to be a warrior. Who says – said – that? Somebody who looks a lot like you.”
“Me and my big mouth.” Scanno gave a crooked – and rather slack-lipped – grin. “All right. Let’s get it over with. You can throw me around like a sack of beans.”
Hasso did, too. He also got thrown around some himself, even if Scanno wasn’t so quick learning the new moves as Orosei had been. But then, Orosei was the king’s master-at-arms, and Scanno never more than middling good. He might have learned faster had he stayed sober more, but he might have done all kinds of things had he stayed sober more.
At one point in the proceedings, he landed on his head. He didn’t move for close to a minute afterwards. Hasso eyed him in some alarm – he hadn’t intended to throw him that hard. You didn’t want to hurt anybody while you trained, but accidents happened every now and then.
Just when the German was about to see whether artificial respiration would do any good, Scanno rolled over, sat up, shook his head, and winced. “Got to make my eyes uncross there,” he said.