After the Downfall

He’d better get the best use from them he could, then. He shot the next Bucovinan in front of him. Then he shot one of the natives who was bearing down on Velona. She rode into battle with a goddess’ confidence – with the goddess’ confidence? – that nothing could hurt her. That Grenye hadn’t seem convinced. But Hasso made as sure as he could that Velona stayed right.

He shot two more lancers in quick succession. After that, the Bucovinans got the idea and stayed away from him – which helped open a gap in their line of horsemen. “Come on!” Hasso yelled, and rode through it. The rest of the striking column followed him. He aimed just to the left of the thicket of enemy banners. “There!” He pointed. “That’s where we’ll break through!”

The Bucovinan foot soldiers saw the column coming. They couldn’t very well not see it, and they couldn’t very well not understand what a breakthrough there would mean. Shouts in that guttural, unintelligible – at least to Hasso – language filled the air. The natives who had spears lowered them in a desperate effort to hold off the onrushing knights.

Back in the Middle Ages, the Swiss hedgehog – rank on rank of long pikes, a new version of the Macedonian phalanx – could hold knights at bay. The men of Bucovin were trying to improvise that kind of defense on the fly. It didn’t work. Hasso would have been surprised if they really expected it to work. If you were a brave man in a bad spot, you did whatever you could and hoped for the best. He knew all about that.

A shouting little man set himself, pointing his spear in the general direction of Hasso’s gelding. The Wehrmacht officer shot him in the face from less than ten meters away. The Bucovinan didn’t even have time to look surprised before he toppled. The spear hit the ground before he did, but only by a split second.

Hasso shot three more Grenye, one after the next. Then he changed magazines on his Schmeisser again. He was down to his last one, the last one in all this world. But he’d done what he needed to do – he’d breached the Bucovinan line. And the Lenelli poured into the gap he’d made.

No denying the natives were brave. They swarmed toward the lancers, trying to spear them, to slash them, to pull them out of the saddle and stomp them to death. They didn’t have a chance. Maybe they didn’t realize it. Maybe they just didn’t care. The Lenelli spitted them like partridges or knocked them over the head with the shafts of their lances or cut them down with long straight swords. Warhorses smashed dark faces and dashed out brains with iron-shod hooves.

Aderno’s unicorn had blood on its horn.

Where was the King of Bucovin or the chief or whatever he called himself? Hasso looked to the right. He saw a man in fancy regalia, and fired several shots at him. With luck, he could decapitate the enemy army, the enemy state, on the spot and make everything that came afterwards a hell of a lot easier.

He couldn’t tell whether his bullets struck home. After a moment, not just Bucovinans stood between him and the man he thought to be their sovereign. Hard-charging Lenello knights also blocked his view. The Grenye went on fighting as ferociously as the Poles had in the first few days of the war.

All the ferocity in the world hadn’t done the Poles one goddamn bit of good. The harder they fought, the faster they died. And all the courage in the world wouldn’t help the Bucovinans, either. Hasso shot one more man. Then he let out a wordless whoop.

“We’re through the savages!” a Lenello shouted – all the words that mattered.

“Now we swing in!” Hasso called. Even if he hadn’t shot the Bucovinan leader, King Bottero’s men might capture him. That would do the job just about as well. “Swing in!” he yelled again, and pointed to show what he meant.

The striking column had practiced this maneuver over and over on the meadows outside of Drammen. The Lenelli should have been able to bring it off in their sleep. And about half of them did turn in against the enemy center. But the other half turned out, against the wing they’d cut off.

Hasso screamed abuse at the Lenelli. He called them every kind of idiot under the sun. They paid no attention to him. German troops probably wouldn’t have screwed up like that. If they had, their officers would have straightened them out in a hurry.

Here, the officers didn’t seem to see the problem. “The fighting’s good every which way,” Marshal Lugo yelled – he was there, all right, and battling hard.

“Yes, but – ” Hasso did some more swearing. Were they all blind?

He didn’t need long to realize blindness wasn’t the problem. His own medieval ancestors probably would have fought the same boneheaded way. There’s the enemy, they would have thought. Let’s go bash him over the head. And if the battle might have turned out better had they bashed him here instead of there, they wouldn’t have got all hot and bothered about it. They were having a good time fighting any old way.