After the Downfall

Saddling his horse and getting going did the job. The tackle the Lenelli used wasn’t the same as what he’d known in Germany. The way horses and people were made dictated a lot about bits and reins and saddles and straps and stirrups, but not everything. He had to think about what he was doing here, more than he would have with familiar equipment.

The land was new, too. Far off to the east, he saw mountains against the horizon. Were they visible from Castle Svarag? If they were, he didn’t remember them. A Lenello told him that was the Palmorz Range. “What is on the other side of it?” Hasso asked.

“Well, I don’t exactly know,” the horseman answered. “Not many Lenelli have been over it, and you know what liars travelers are. Could be anything.” He shook his head. “Well, I don’t think there’s mermaids. Dragons, though, maybe.”

“Dragons?” Hasso had seen them on everything from banners to belt buckles. But he could have seen them on things like that in Germany, too. “Are they real?”

“I hope to spit,” the Lenello said, or words to that effect. “Didn’t one burn down a village in King Cherso’s realm three winters back? Wouldn’t he have burned another one if a catapult didn’t get lucky and put a bolt through his wing and make him fly away?”

King Cherso’s realm lay well to the north of Bottero’s. That was all Hasso knew about it. No, now he knew one thing more: it had a dragon problem, or had had one three winters back. “If the catapult missed, what would the dragon have done?” he asked – he was starting to get the hang of the subjunctive.

“Torn up everything in sight, I expect,” the Lenello said. “That’s what dragons do when they get pissed off, right?”

“I suppose,” Hasso answered – a handy phrase that could mean anything or nothing. Hasso approved of cliches. They helped him get his meaning across, even when he hardly had one.

By the way Bottero’s army behaved in Bucovin, it might have been an angry dragon. A lot of Grenye farmers fled before it, taking as much of their livestock with them as they could. The Lenelli grabbed everything the locals left behind. The pigs and occasional cattle and sheep went into the army’s larder. So did the ducks and odd chickens and geese. So did all the grain the soldiers could find, regardless of type. The horses and donkeys were mostly too small for Lenelli to ride, but the invaders took them anyhow, to help haul wagons and carts.

And farmhouse after farmhouse, village after village, went up in flames. Bottero’s soldiers took a childlike delight in arson. Hasso hadn’t known any soldiers, Germans or Russians or Poles or Frenchmen or British, who didn’t. He would have bet the Grenye got hard-ons watching things burn, too. But there was more to it than that.

The way the Lenelli went about torching houses and smithies and taverns and shops, they might have felt the Grenye had no right to build such things. No, it wasn’t that they might have felt the Grenye had no right to do it – they did feel that way, and weren’t shy about saying so.

“Goddess-cursed savages,” a sergeant growled as he touched a burning brand to the overhanging thatch of a farmhouse roof. He swore some more when the thatch, which was damp, sent up a cloud of thick gray smoke without catching the way he wanted it to. In the end, persistence paid, and he got the farmhouse blazing. “They’ve got their nerve, pretending to be as good as we are.”

“Where do you want them to live?” Hasso asked, genuinely curious. “In holes in the ground?”

The sergeant spat. “They’ll be in holes in the ground when we’re done with ‘em, all right. Only thing is, they won’t be living.”

Bucovin affronted Aderno at least as much as it did the underofficer. The wizard was more articulate about it – or at least mouthier. “Do you know what this land reminds me of?” he said as the Lenelli rode past the funeral pyre of a village.

“No, but you’re going to tell me, aren’t you?” Hasso said.

Aderno missed the sarcasm. “Yes, I am,” he said, and Hasso carefully didn’t smile. “You’ve seen the paintings we do, haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes. Fine work.” Hasso sounded more enthusiastic than he was. Some of the canvases he’d seen in Drammen did show talent, but the Lenelli were just starting to understand perspective. To someone who’d admired work by Raphael and Rembrandt and Rubens, among many others, these people were no better than promising amateurs.

“I should hope so.” Confident of his own folk’s superiority, Aderno heard enthusiasm whether it was there or not. “Well, the Grenye remind me of a twelve-year-old trying to copy, say, Tibero’s Coming Ashore. You know the painting I mean?”

“Oh, yes,” Hasso said again. To his eye, the artist had tried to do too much in not enough space. Ships and heroic Lenelli and savage Grenye and waves and animals peering from the forest… and the naked goddess watching everything next to the sun. Sometimes art was more about knowing what to leave out than about what all to put in. Tibero wasn’t a bad artist, but he’d never figured that out.