After the Downfall

To give them the willies for a little while, anyhow. Then the big blonds would decide it was all a big bluff, one more weird, useless thing the barbarians did to try to scare them. And they would stop paying attention to filled-in holes and to cords that ran from them, even if the cords sizzled and smoked. Once they stopped paying attention – well, that was the time to show them they shouldn’t have.

And once a bunch of Lenelli went sky-high, they would never be able to trust any filled-in hole in the ground with a cord again. They would have to treat all of them as real, even if most of them wouldn’t be. Dummy minefields served the same purpose in Hasso’s world. A few lying signs could slow down a whole armored division. He’d seen it happen.

“Grenye peasants back in the Lenello kingdoms can make these holes, too,” he remarked to Rautat. “The Lenelli cannot – will not – trust their own roads.”

Rautat laughed. “You’re full of evil notions, aren’t you?”

“I try,” Hasso said modestly.

“Yes, you do.” Rautat eyed him again. “If you aren’t careful, you know, you’ll have us trusting you in spite of everything.”

“No! You wouldn’t do that!” Hasso exclaimed, as if it were the worst thing he could think of. All the Bucovinans thought he was a funny fellow. How much would they be laughing if they knew he’d tried to bail out the night before? Not so very much, he feared.

Rautat ordered a halt after they made it over the next low swell of ground. “If the blonds come after us, we’ll go on,” he said. “But if they don’t, we’ll wait here for Gunoiul.”

None of the Bucovinans argued. “Sounds good,” Hasso said. Rautat gave him a hooded look that he understood too late. His position in the chain of command was ambiguous, to put it mildly. What kind of rank badge did an important collaborator wear? When it came to gunpowder, Rautat had to listen to him – he was the expert. When it came to tactics, the way it did here, the native could choose for himself. He didn’t need Hasso butting in.

They waited. No Lenelli came over the crest of the hill to the west. After an hour or so, Gunoiul popped out of the bushes. The little dark man was grinning from ear to ear. “You should have heard them! You should have seen them!” he said.

“Well? Tell us the story,” Rautat urged, as he must have known he was supposed to.

“The big blond bastards just kind of poked at the holes at first – made sure they weren’t horse traps, you know,” Gunoiul said. “Then I started lighting the, uh, fuses.” He glanced toward Hasso, who’d given him his technical vocabulary. “The Lenelli saw the fire and smoke going through the grass, and they started having puppies. It was the funniest thing you ever saw. They were yelling and pointing and carrying on like you wouldn’t believe.”

All the Bucovinans laughed. Nothing they liked better than discomfited Lenelli. “Did they send soldiers after you?” Dumnez asked.

“They sure did,” Gunoiul said. “I could have shot a couple of them, too, easy as you please. But I made a scary noise instead” – he went “Woooo!” on a high, wailing note – “and got out of there.”

“Good!” Hasso punched him in the shoulder, the way he would have with a soldier on the Eastern Front who’d done something unexpected and clever. They wanted to spook the Lenelli here, and Gunoiul had found a new way to do it.

“Well, after that they didn’t want to go very fast, let me tell you,” the Bucovinan continued. “I didn’t have any trouble staying ahead of them and lighting more fuses.”

“That’s what we wanted, by Lavtrig’s curly beard,” Rautat said. “And now that you’re back, we want to get out of here in case you stirred up an even bigger hornets’ nest than you think.”

Hasso would have said that if Rautat hadn’t. The Wehrmacht officer figured there was a pretty good chance the Lenelli were well and truly stirred. He also figured the filled-in holes and smoking, crackling fuses had only so much to do with it. Bottero’s men knew he was around, even if Rautat didn’t know they knew. And the Lenelli wanted him … no, not dead or alive. They wanted him dead or dead.

As he rode off toward the northeast, he wondered whether he could escape to some other Lenello kingdom than Bottero’s. That way, he would have a chance to live among folk who looked like him and who thought more like him than the Bucovinans did. But when would he get that kind of chance? And even if he did, weren’t all the Lenelli likely to reckon him a renegade now?

Besides, some other Lenello kingdom wouldn’t have Velona in it. There was only one of her. That there was one of her seemed more than miracle enough.

If he couldn’t have Velona, how much difference did it make whether he lived among Lenelli or Grenye? And so…

“I think maybe you truly are Lord Zgomot’s man,” Rautat said out of the blue. Hasso started to laugh – who said the small, swarthy men couldn’t work magic? Rautat, not surprisingly, didn’t get it. “What’s so funny?” he demanded.