After the Downfall

How long would it be before the Bucovinans could stand up to anybody in this world? Win this fight first, or you won t get the chance, Hasso thought. He fingered the dragon’s-fang amulet he wore under his tunic. Aderno and Velona hadn’t paid any sorcerous calls on him since he donned it. Maybe that meant they couldn’t. He sure hoped so. But maybe it just meant they hadn’t tried the past few days.

Win this fight first. That was always the imperative. And when he watched the Hedgehogs go through their evolutions, he began to think the Bucovinans could. They marched very well. They formed ten rows and lowered their pikes into a bristling wall of points. If he were a horse, he wouldn’t have wanted to try to charge through them. You could hurt yourself that way.

He said as much to the officer in charge of them. The native – his name was Meshterul – nodded. “We will hold. The gods-cursed Lenelli will never get through us,” he vowed.

That was an important consideration. Whether the Bucovinans knew it or not, it wasn’t the only consideration. “All right. They can’t get through you,” Hasso said. “Can they get around you?”

Meshterul frowned. “Around?” No, he didn’t get it.

“Around, yes.” Hasso nodded. “Who is on your flanks? If the Lenelli get to the catapults through those people, we are still screwed.”

“Ah.” Meshterul nodded. He sketched a salute. “You’re right. I was just thinking about the Hedgehogs. But the real point is keeping the big blond pricks off the catapults, isn’t it?”

“Ja” Hasso said. Drepteaza and Rautat and maybe even Lord Zgomot might know what that meant, but Meshterul only gave him a blank look. Hasso kept to Bucovinan after that: “Yes. You’re right – that is the point. The Hedgehogs may be very important later on. If the whole line of foot soldiers carries long pikes, how do the Lenelli break through at all?”

Meshterul’s eyes sparkled. “That’ll be the day, by Lavtrig!”

“Yes,” Hasso said again, once more in Bucovinan. “But that day is not here yet.” You’ve got the Hedgehogs, and you’ve got a bunch of odds and sods armed with this and that, the kind of troops the Lenelli have been licking ever since they crossed the Western Ocean.

“We’ll need riders on our flanks, then,” the Bucovinan officer said.

Hasso found himself nodding. Bucovinan knights mostly couldn’t match their Lenello counterparts. They were better than ordinary Bucovinan infantry, though. After some thought of his own, the Wehrmacht officer said, “And we put mines in front of and around the catapults, too, if we fight in a position that gives us time to do it.”

“I haven’t seen those in action. Everybody tells me they’re strong magic, though,” Meshterul said.

“Not magic at all,” Hasso said … one more time. Meshterul stayed polite, but plainly didn’t believe him. If something went boom! and blew Lenelli to hell and gone, it had to be magic, didn’t it? People in this world sure as hell thought so. Even though Hasso knew better, he also knew he had to remember to take care of a couple of things: “Some of the mines will be fakes, bluffs – just turned earth with a fuse sticking out.”

“What good does that do?” Meshterul asked.

“It saves gunpowder. It keeps the Lenelli guessing. And we can make fake mines faster than real ones. If the Lenelli don’t know they’re fakes, they might as well be real,” Hasso answered.

The Bucovinan captain started to laugh. “I’m glad you’re on our side, dip me in shit and fry me for a pork chop if I’m not.”

Hasso wasn’t nearly so sure he was glad to be on the Bucovinans’ side. But he wasn’t sure he wasn’t glad, either, which marked a change in the way he looked at this world. And it wasn’t just because he was sleeping with Drepteaza; he was sure of that. He’d lived here long enough now and seen enough to have gained a perspective different from the one he had when he first got here … and different from the one he brought from his own world. Ubermenschen? Untermenschen? No, and no. People were … people, dammit.

So here he was, fighting for the little swarthy bastards, getting ready to go to war against the big blond pricks. He started to laugh, which made Meshterul give him a funny look. He didn’t care. Just because people were people, that didn’t mean everybody loved everybody else. Oh, no. Not even close.