Then the landscape started looking more familiar. “Somewhere not far from here, you catch me,” he said to Rautat.
“That’s right.” The Bucovinan nodded. “We’re only a little ways away from the battlefield. If you know how hard we worked to open up a gap in our line to make you aim your horses there without having it look like we wanted you to…”
“Nicely done,” Hasso said. “You fool the Lenelli. You fool me, too.”
Rautat grinned as if the idea were all his. But he said, “Lord Zgomot is a clever man. Better to use your own strength against you, he said.”
Hasso nodded. It was good strategy – if you could bring it off. Manstein had, when the Red Army charged west after Stalingrad and then got an unpleasant surprise. And the Russians had at Kursk the next summer, letting the Wehrmacht bleed itself white trying to bang through defenses tens of kilometers deep. Nobody in the other world would ever hear about Lord Zgomot’s ploy. Maybe nobody in this world would, either, not in any lasting way. The Lenelli did most of the writing here, and they were no fonder than anyone else of chronicling their own defeats.
But Hasso knew full well what Zgomot had done. He messed up my life along with Bottero’s campaign, the German thought.
They came over the top of a low rise and started down the other side. Hasso started to laugh – it was that or pound his head against something. “You waited for us here,” he said.
A few heads – skulls, now, pretty much – sat on poles, Lenello helmets atop them, as a memorial to the battle. The pits the Bucovinans had dug still yawned, unconcealed now. But the field had been efficiently plundered. Even the horses’ skeletons were gone. What had the natives done with them? Burned them and smashed them to powder for fertilizer, he supposed.
“Yes, we did,” Rautat said. “We were scared shitless. Blond bastards are bad enough anyway, and we didn’t know if the thunder thing would hit us again.”
“But you stood.” Hasso had to respect that.
The Bucovinan underofficer shrugged. “Can’t run all the time. Have to stand somewhere, or we lose.”
Sometimes you stood and you lost anyway. Hasso knew all about that, the hard way. So, no doubt, did Rautat. They rode on.
Bucovinans had reoccupied the keeps on both sides of the bridge over the Oltet. They’d torn out the makeshift planking the Lenelli put down to force the crossing and replaced it with new, stronger timbers. As the wagon jounced and rattled and banged across, Hasso was glad. If it went into the river, he would have to start over.
Or would that be so bad? It would give me the perfect excuse not to fight the Lenelli.
Then he got over onto the west bank of the Oltet, and into what was left of Muresh. New shanties had gone up since Bottero’s men sacked and plundered and raped and killed there, but plenty of devastation remained. The people stared without a word as a big blond rode through the place in the company of Bucovinans. Nobody threw anything at him, which was good.
But Hasso remembered what had happened the autumn before. Maybe there were reasons to fight the Lenelli after all.
Once they’d ridden out of Muresh, Hasso asked, “How far ahead are King Bottero’s men?” In Bucovinan, the question needed only two words. German often made compound words. Bucovinan revolved around them.
“We still have a ways to go,” Rautat answered – another two words. “They aren’t even where we fought the first battle last fall. Not a strike at the heart this time. More like taking away a hand and half an arm.”
Hasso nodded; he had the same impression of Bottero’s strategy. The Lenelli had got themselves a bloody nose when they charged ahead too fast. Now Bottero seemed to want a digestible piece of Bucovin. Once he had it, he’d go and take another bite, and then, no doubt, one more.
That wasn’t how Hasso would have gone about things, which wasn’t the same as saying it wouldn’t work. The rule here seemed to be that the Lenelli moved forward and the Grenye gave ground before them. Sometimes they didn’t move forward very fast – sometimes the frontier stood still for years at a time. But they never seemed to move back.
Maybe I’ll fix that, Hasso thought. Yeah, maybe I will. And maybe I’ll do something else instead. Who knows what the hell I can do if I set my mind to it?
He himself had no idea. That should have alarmed him. Sometimes it did. Sometimes he thought it was blackly funny.
When he came to the first battlefield, he wondered whether he ought to comb the ground for the cartridges his machine pistol spat out. Could wizards do something nefarious if they found one? For the life of him, he couldn’t see how, not when the Schmeisser would never work again.
“Do you know – did you know – a fellow named Berbec?” he asked suddenly. Rautat shook his head. Hasso asked the rest of the Bucovinans with him, but they didn’t know Berbec, either.
“Who is he?” Rautat asked. “Sounds like one of our names.”
“It is.” Hasso explained how he’d acquired the native on the field here. “I don’t know what happens to him after I get caught. Maybe he belongs to Velona now. I hope she treats him well.”
“Velona?” one of the Bucovinans asked.
“She was my woman.” Hasso would have left it there. Rautat, who knew more, shared the gossip with his countrymen. They all muttered back and forth, too low for Hasso to make out what they were saying.
Finally, the driver of the powder wagon, a stocky fellow named Dumnez, said, “The big blonds’ goddess is strong.”
“Yes,” Hasso said. Nobody who’d ever come within a kilometer and a half of Velona would have dreamt of saying no.
“That woman the goddess lives in is strong, too,” Rautat said, so maybe Dumnez hadn’t been talking about Velona after all. Rautat went on, “I saw her in both battles last fall. I’m glad I didn’t get within reach of her sword.”
One of the other Bucovinans pointed at Hasso. “He must be pretty strong, too, then, if she was his woman.”
“He is pretty strong – not the best swordsman, but pretty strong,” Rautat said. “Pretty tricky, too. Lord Zgomot thinks well of him.”
He does? Hasso almost blurted it out in surprise. If the Lord of Bucovin did think well of him, he kept it to himself mighty well. But if Zgomot didn’t think well of Hasso, all he had to do was say the word and the German was a dead man.
The native who’d pointed said, “The priestess likes him pretty well, too, even if he is a blond.”
Hasso stiffened. Rautat hissed like a snake. The other Bucovinan winced, though plainly he wasn’t sure how he’d stuck his foot in it. Hasso was, worse luck. Maybe Drepteaza did like him, but she didn’t like him enough, or didn’t like him the right way. Rautat obviously knew as much. If the other fellow didn’t, he had to be out of the loop.
Sure enough, Rautat said, “Don’t pay any attention of Peretsh. He doesn’t know what the demon he’s talking about.”
“I can see that for myself,” Hasso said.
They traveled west in silence for some little while.
When they started running into parties of Bucovinan soldiers, Hasso knew they had to be getting close to the marchlands Bottero’s men were trying to occupy. Lord Zgomot wasn’t going to give up his territory without a fight. In a way, seeing the soldiers made Hasso feel better – he wasn’t out here by himself against everything the Lenelli could throw at Bucovin.
In another way…
Well, my life gets more complicated, he thought. He hadn’t expected things to be simple. Every so often, he caught Rautat watching him when there was no earthly need for it. The underofficer always looked away in a hurry when he noticed Hasso’s eye on him, but Hasso had a pretty good idea of what was going on in his head. The native had to be wondering what the big blond would do when it came time to fight the folk who looked so much like him.
Who could blame Rautat for wondering that? Who could blame him, especially when Hasso was wondering the same thing himself?