After the Downfall

“Yes!” they shouted. Sure as hell, they thought they could hold the Lenelli out. Hasso was sure of that. And it mattered. If you thought you could win, you were halfway home. Not all the way; Hasso knew that too bitterly well. But halfway was a lot better than going into a fight with your heart in your throat, sure the enemy would do something horrible to you any minute now.

Slowly, the Lenelli formed their battle line. Would they use a strike column? If they did, where would it go in? He knew where he expected it to go: toward the Hedgehogs. Whether he wanted it going there was a different story. If they held, he would blow the Lenelli to kingdom come. If they didn’t… Well, shit, if they didn’t he’d be too dead to worry about anything else anyway.

As he looked toward the building enemy line of battle, he didn’t see a striking column, though. Maybe Bottero’s men were disguising it well. Or maybe Bottero thought Hasso knew the perfect counter and so didn’t dare use a deep column. Or, again, maybe the Lenello king was just against everything Hasso had ever been for.

Whatever Bottero was thinking, Hasso sure hoped the Lenelli didn’t throw a striking column at his army. He had no perfect counter, and getting his line broken scared the crap out of him.

But he saw knights all the way across the Lenello front. Were more of them in one place than in another? He wished again for the Zeiss field glasses. Whatever he wished for from the world in which he was born, he didn’t get it. He wondered why that didn’t stop him from wishing.

Where was Velona? Somewhere in that line. Somewhere in the middle of it, odds were. If she couldn’t kill him by exploding his head from the inside out, she’d be willing to try a more conventional way of getting rid of him. Willing, hell – she’d be eager. And she’d be deadly as a cobra, too.

Horns blared, there in the Lenello line. Lances swept down to point at the Bucovinans, their points sparkling in the sunshine. At the same time, Captain or Colonel or whatever the hell his rank was Meshterul shouted,”Lower!” Down swept the pikes, too. Those of the first five rows stuck out beyond the leading men, creating a fence of spearheads. The back rows of pikemen didn’t drop their spears all the way to horizontal, but kept them up at increasing angles. The pikeshafts would deflect a few arrows. As the men moved forward, they would lower their spears more and more.

Hasso went from one catapult to another. Each one had a shell on the casting arm. He wouldn’t do all the lighting this time, not with several catapults fighting at the same time. All he could do was fight one catapult and direct the rest. “Are we ready?” he asked. “Is everything the way it should be?”

“Ready!” the crews shouted. He hoped to God they were right. Catapults were complicated machinery for this world, and as liable to break down as panzers were back in the world he came from. Well, he’d done what he could do. Now most of it was up to the natives.

More horns blew. The Lenelli moved forward, slowly at first – they wouldn’t boot their horses up to a gallop till they came within missile range of the Bucovinan line. The Bucovinan knights would have to go forward, too, or take the charge with no momentum of their own. That worried Hasso. If something went wrong, the moving wings and the stationary center could come unglued and let the Lenelli in. He didn’t know what to do about it. He hadn’t seen anything he could do about it – except worry.

There was Bottero’s banner, heading straight for him. The king would ride right by his standard-bearer. His lance would be couched, and he would be ready to kill anything that got in his way. Bottero was as tough as any of the men he led, which was saying a good deal.

Before long, Hasso recognized his former sovereign. Zgomot made a better administrator. In a fight, Hasso would have bet on Bottero every goddamn time.

And there was Velona, brandishing a sword. She wore a mailshirt, but her head was bare. Her long, fair hair swept out behind her. But that wasn’t what drew his eye to her. The goddess filled her; he could tell. She was beautiful and terrible and terrifying.

He glanced warily toward the sky. The day stayed bright and clear. Hasso allowed himself a sigh of relief. The worst thing the Lenello wizards could have done, as far as he could see, was to start a driving rainstorm. Dragon-bone amulets wouldn’t stop that. Trying to set off mines and launch shells with wet fuses would have been a nightmare. But the wizards hadn’t thought of it… this time, anyhow.

Off to his left, on the forest flank, a mine exploded too soon, and then another one. A Bucovinan there must have come down with buck fever and lit his fuses too soon. Some of the Lenello knights’ horses over there flinched inward, which threw their charge into a little confusion, but not enough, not enough.