After the Downfall

“The Lenelli have all kinds of things. They are clever, the Lenelli.” Maybe Berbec felt he could talk freely about them because Hasso wasn’t one. “But they don’t have thunderflashers.” He eyed Hasso again, this time, the Wehrmacht officer judged, apprehensively. And why not? If the Lenelli all carried Schmeissers, Bucovinan resistance would last a minute and a half, tops.

“Can’t make them here.” Hasso wanted the words back as soon as they came out. Some Intelligence officer he was, blabbing like a fool!

Velona came up to the two of them. As soon as she saw Berbec, she understood what was going on. “He’s one you caught yourself?” she asked. When Hasso nodded, she went on, “Good. You’ve been doing too much for yourself.” She brushed her lips across his and walked on.

Berbec stared after her – not as a man will watch a good-looking woman, but more as anyone might stare at a lightning bolt smashing down close by. “That was – the goddess – the woman who, uh, carries the goddess.” He might be a slave, but this was the first time Hasso had seen him without his self-possession.

“Yeah.” Hasso nodded.

“She doesn’t need a thunderflasher to cut through us,” Berbec said sadly. “Only a sword – and herself.”

Hasso nodded again, not without sympathy. What was it like for the Grenye, without magic of their own, to try to stand against Velona when the goddess was strong in her? Like a lone rifleman against a King Tiger panzer? Worse, probably, because the panzer and the infantryman belonged to the same world. The Grenye had to feel the very heavens were fighting against them – and they wouldn’t be so far wrong, would they?

Berbec’s stare swung back to Hasso. It was as if he could still see the mark of her kiss glowing on the Wehrmacht officer’s face. “She is … your woman?” He sounded like someone afraid to be right.

“Yes, she’s my woman.” Hasso felt the irony in his voice. Berbec might not understand, but, to the Lenello way of thinking, Hasso was Velona’s man and not the other way around.

He succeeded in impressing his new servant, anyway. “I knew you were a great lord. I already told you that,” Berbec said. “But I didn’t know you were such a great lord.” He bowed himself almost double. “I cry pardon. Forgive me.”

He wouldn’t straighten till Hasso touched him on the back. “It’s all right. Forget it. I still put on trousers like anybody else. I still shit. I still piss. I still need you to see to my horse. That’s what you say you do.” He was getting better with past tenses, but he still wasn’t good enough to feel comfortable using them.

“I do it,” Berbec said. He seemed mostly stuck in the present indicative, too. For no sensible reason, that made Hasso feel better.

King Bottero’s army pressed deeper into Bucovin. The natives didn’t stand and fight again. They didn’t go away, either. Raiders picked off Lenello scouts. Horsemen attacked the wagons that brought supplies forward. And, to Hasso’s dismay if not to his surprise, flames and clouds of smoke rose up in front of the invaders.

“They burn their own crops,” he said. The Russians had scorched the earth in front of the oncoming Wehrmacht. Later, moving from east to west instead of from west to east, the Germans used the same ploy to slow down the Red Army. The Ivans screamed about war crimes. They hadn’t said a word when they used those tactics. Winners said what they pleased. Who could call a winner a liar?

King Bottero eyed the smoke and sniffed the breeze. Hasso couldn’t smell the burning, not yet. Maybe the enormous Lenello could. “They think they’ll make us too hungry to go on,” the king said.

“Are they right?” Hasso asked.

“Not yet,” Bottero said, an answer that struck the German as reasonable.

Aderno and the other wizards put their heads together. They worked a spell that might have come straight out of Macbeth. They danced; they chanted; they incanted. Dark clouds filled the sky. Rain came down – rain poured down, in fact. It drenched the fires. Whether it did the Lenelli any good was a different question, and one harder to answer. The roads got soaked, too, and turned to mud.

Hasso remembered the first Russian rasputitsa, the time of rain and muck. He remembered motorcycle drivers, their mechanized steeds hub-deep – sometimes headlight-deep – in muck, their rubberized greatcoats ten or twenty kilos heavier than they should have been, their goggles so splashed that they were almost useless (or, sometimes, worse than useless), the eyes behind those goggles gradually growing alarmed as one rider after another began to see it wouldn’t be as easy as the High Command claimed. He remembered bogged-down panzers and artillery pieces, half-drowned horses, the sucking goo trying to pull the marching boots off his feet with every step. He remembered bone-crushing exhaustion at the end of every day – and well before the end, too.