After the Downfall

One of the knights had used flint and steel to get a small fire going. The Lenelli carried their firestarters the way Wehrmacht men carried matches and cigarette lighters. Aderno lit a small branch and used it to touch off the pyre. His magic had done what it needed to do; the flames took hold with no trouble. Hasso smelled wood smoke, and then the stink of burning meat. Flegrei might have been – was – a bastard, but they were on the same side. You never wanted to see one of your guys get it. That reminded you your number might come up next. You knew anyway, sure, but who needed reminding?

X

Stories were enough to get out the word about how Flegrei died. Before long, everybody in Bottero’s army seemed to be talking about it. Not all the stories had much to do with what really happened. Hasso heard Lenelli talking about how a squadron of sorcerers had been ground up in a mill and fed to Grenye hogs.

“You gonna quit eating spare ribs?” one knight asked another.

His friend thought about it, but not for long. “Nah,” he said. “They probably won’t be from the same pigs. And if they are … Well, shit. If they are, I won’t think they are, so that’s jake.”

“Sounds right,” the first knight agreed, and they rode on.

Since they were arguing about the shadow of an ass that wasn’t there, Hasso didn’t waste his time trying to set them straight. Crazy rumors were part and parcel of war. Some of the stories he’d heard on the Russian front… There, they didn’t talk about feeding dead Germans to pigs. They talked about Ivans eating German corpses, and their own. He’d believed those yarns, too. As a matter of fact, he still did believe some of them. If you got hungry enough, you were liable to do anything.

If you got mean enough, you were liable to do anything, too. Three days after Flegrei’s untimely and unpleasant demise, the Lenelli came to a place big enough to show up on their map. It was called Muresh, and it was bigger than a village, even if it didn’t make much of a town. Behind it, a bridge spanned the Oltet River; the bridge was probably the reason Muresh had been founded, and the reason it had grown.

The place didn’t boast a wall. It did have a Bucovinan garrison, in a small, sad imitation of a Lenello castle just in front of the bridge. The soldiers in there couldn’t have held the place more than a few hours against everything King Bottero had to throw at them. They weren’t idiots. They could see that for themselves.

So they got out. They hurried across the bridge, tipping its timbers into the Oltet as they went. Another castle, none too big and none too strong-looking, stood on the far bank. The Lenelli wouldn’t have a whole lot of trouble repairing the bridge… till they came within bowshot of that other castle. Then things wouldn’t be so much fun. Fixing bridges while the bastards on the other side took potshots at you was nobody’s idea of fun, not in any army.

A few ordinary Bucovinans escaped from Muresh, too, fleeing with the men who were there to guard the bridge and not them. Most of the locals stayed where they were, though, either because they couldn’t get away or because they didn’t think anything bad would happen to them.

Most of the time, they would have been right. The Lenelli hadn’t struck Hasso as wantonly cruel. Maybe he just hadn’t watched enough. Maybe he hadn’t seen them when their blood was up.

King Bottero looked at the peasants and craftsmen of Muresh, at the women and children. He folded his thick arms across his broad chest. “Boys, these stinking Bucovinans killed Flegrei filthy,” he shouted to his men. “I want you to go in there and pay the bastards back!”

The soldiers roared, a deep, baying sound that put Hasso in mind of the wolves he’d heard in Russian woods. The locals knew what a noise like that meant. They made a noise of their own then: a cry of horror and despair. Some of them tried to run away. Laughing at the joke, the knights rode after the running men and women and speared them from behind.

Then they swarmed into Muresh, and things got worse.

Some of the Grenye went down on their knees and begged for their lives. Most of them were, on the whole, lucky. The Lenelli killed them quickly. What happened to the men who tried to fight back…

No one could say the Lenelli didn’t have imagination. A gray-bearded cook had used a big two-pronged fork and a knife to try to keep them out of his tavern. It didn’t work – the Lenelli laughed as they beat down his unskilled defense. One of Bottero’s soldiers smeared cooking oil into the Bucovinan’s beard while three more knights held him. The native snapped like a dog, which only made the Lenelli laugh harder.

Then the fellow who’d used the oil lit a stick at the tavern’s cookfire. The Bucovinan must have known what was coming next. Hasso feared he did, too. “No!” the cook howled – it might have been the only word of Lenello he knew. “No! No! NO!”