After the Downfall

“Ha!” Drepteaza replied, which wasn’t a laugh at all. She yawned once more. “Try not to wiggle too much. I don’t feel like going back to my room.”

“You wiggle more than I do,” Hasso said. From where the two of them ended up when they slept together, he thought that was true. He added, “Besides, tonight I don’t wiggle at all,” and mimed limp exhaustion.

“A likely story,” Drepteaza said, but she closed her eyes and soon fell asleep. So did Hasso, and Aderno’s wizardry didn’t trouble him for the rest of the night.

The wagon full of dragon bones came into Falticeni the next morning. The driver had to fight his way through the narrow, winding, crowded streets to the palace. None of the locals knew what an important cargo he had. Thanks to the way the bone-hunters were chosen, the driver didn’t fully understand that himself.

One look at some of the teeth and claws in the wagon told Hasso the bones were real. “Good,” he said. “Now we go to work. We cut them up small, we make them into amulets.”

“What are the amulets good for?” one of the Bucovinans asked.

Instead of answering straight out, Hasso came back with a question of his own: “Is King Bottero marching yet? Does anybody know?”

The wagon driver nodded. “He’s marching, all right. He wasn’t that far behind us when we left his realm. One of the border guards who passed us through said it was nice of us to manure our fields – the big blond pricks would get good crops out of them.” The little swarthy man aimed an obscene gesture back toward the west. Then he noticed Hasso watching him. “Uh, no offense.”

“It’s all right. They are a bunch of big blond pricks,” Hasso said.

“Then what does that make you?” Cheeky as a park sparrow, the Bucovinan grinned at him.

“Oh, I’m a big blond prick, too,” Hasso answered easily. “But I’m a big blond prick with two differences.”

“Yeah? What are they?” the driver asked, a split second in front of one of his pals.

“For one thing, I’m a foreign big blond prick, not a Lenello big blond prick. And I’m a big blond prick who’s on your side.”

When Lord Zgomot heard the invasion had begun, he started assembling his own army. Bucovin was a big, sprawling kingdom or lordship or whatever the hell the right name was. The natives sensibly laid up supplies here and there on the main routes around the realm so soldiers wouldn’t starve as they came in to Falticeni. But, without the telegraph, without trains, without trucks, nothing happened as fast as Hasso wished it would.

He got a surprise of his own not long after the mobilization order went out. Into the tent city that was sprouting in front of Falticeni came perhaps a thousand men who marched with long pikes held straight up and down. They marched well, too – the pikes stayed vertical, and didn’t dip and foul one another.

After seeing them come in, Hasso hurried back to Lord Zgomot. “They look good,” he said. “Can they fight?”

“They have all fought before,” the Lord of Bucovin answered. “They have never fought like this, but they have been drilling hard. They like being called Hedgehogs, by the way – that is what they named the regiment.”

“Good for them,” Hasso said. “If they don’t keep Lenello knights off the catapults, no one does.” That last was always possible, even if he would have preferred not to dwell on it. He went on, “How long are they working?”

“I pulled them together before you went off to my estate to try the catapults and the gunpowder shells,” Zgomot answered. “When you described them, I thought, This is something we really can do. It does not take anything we did not already have – it is only a new way to use tools we already knew about.”

“You did it without me, too.” Hasso didn’t know whether to be proud or worried. If the natives decided they could get along without him, would they knock him over the head and do just that?

“You were busy with other things. I thought we could manage this ourselves, and I turned out to be right,” Zgomot said. “I hope they stay steady when the fighting starts, that is all.”

“So do I,” Hasso said. “I am going to be with the catapults. The Hedgehogs keep – will keep – the big blond pricks off my neck.”

“That would be good,” Lord Zgomot said, his voice dry. “You should watch them drill, to make sure we did not forget anything.”

“I do that,” Hasso promised.

He kept the promise, too – as he said, it was his own personal, private neck on the line. The picked regiment of Bucovinan foot soldiers knew he’d had the idea for their formation. That didn’t seem to bother them; they were used to having new ideas come from foreigners. The Japanese would have been like that in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Now they could stand up to anybody in the world.