After the Downfall

His howls did him no more good than his tries at biting had. Stretching out the moment, enjoying every bit of it, the Lenello slowly brought the flame closer to the oil-soaked beard. Then he set the cook’s face on fire. “Fight us, will you, you stinking, scrawny savage!” he shouted.

The men who had been holding the Grenye didn’t just let go of him. They shoved him away, so that he ran down the streets of Muresh screaming and beating at his burning hair and skin. The Lenelli thought he was the funniest thing they ever saw. “Look at him go!” they yelled.

“Maybe he’ll burn this louse-trap down,” one of them added.

“Serve them right if he does,” another said. “Serve them all right if he does, by the goddess!”

In the sack and massacre that followed, Hasso might as well have been … aman from another world. He didn’t hate the Bucovinans enough to want to kill them for the fun of it, though he’d done that to Russians a time or two. But he knew the Lenelli wouldn’t listen to him if he tried to stop them. And so he walked through the narrow, stinking, muddy streets of Muresh as if he were a camera.

All the Lenelli who saw the cook with the burning beard liked the idea. They set the faces of several other Bucovinans on fire. One of them torched a woman’s hair. Her shrieks were even higher and shriller than those of the men. Some of Bottero’s troopers laughed at that. But others shook their heads. “Waste of pussy,” one of them declared.

“Still plenty to go around,” said a knight who thought the woman with her hair ablaze was funny.

He wasn’t wrong. Even more than the Germans in Russia, the Lenelli in Bucovin lived by the law of the jungle. Winners did whatever they wanted, and the enemy’s women were fair game. The Lenelli raped with the practiced efficiency of men who took it for granted. A gang of them would catch a woman, throw her down on the ground, force her legs apart and hold her arms, and then mount her one after another, roughly in order of rank.

Some of them let the women shriek; maybe they thought the noise added spice to the game. Others used rough gags of cloth or leather to cut down the din. Sometimes, when they were finished, they would send the woman off with a pat on the backside or even a coin. Sometimes they would get a final thrill by cutting her throat and leaving her there to die in the mud.

One Lenello tried to gag a screaming woman with his member instead of a crumpled rag. A moment later, he was screaming himself, and pouring blood – she bit down, hard. It did her no good, of course. Another blond soldier thrust his sword up where he and his friends had taken their pleasure. She died, slowly and agonizingly, while they tried to bandage their wounded buddy.

Velona watched the rapes as she might have watched animals rutting in the farmyard. “What does the goddess think of this?” Hasso asked her.

For a moment, the incomprehension with which she greeted the question made him wonder if he’d asked it in German by mistake. But no – he’d spoken Lenello. Even if he had, Velona didn’t understand him. “Why should the goddess care about Grenye?” she said.

A potbellied Lenello missing half his left ear flung himself onto a wailing Grenye woman spreadeagled on the ground in front of them and started pumping away, his heavy buttocks rising and falling. “Does the goddess care about women?” Hasso asked. “She is one, yes, in a way?”

“She is a Lenello woman.” Velona set a finger between her breasts. “She is, some of the time, this Lenello woman. And the Grenye… are only Grenye. When I say she doesn’t care about them, I know what I’m talking about.”

“All right. I only wonder – wondered.” Hasso didn’t feel like quarreling. If she did care anything about the natives, she might have done something about the sack. The soldiers would have listened to her. If they didn’t, the goddess might have come to her… and it would have taken a bold – and a foolish – Lenello to gainsay her when the goddess made herself manifest.

He looked across the river. The Bucovinan soldiers in the castle on the other side of the Oltet had to be watching – and listening to – the ruination of Muresh. Did they have wives or sweethearts or sisters in the town? What were they thinking? Hasso knew too well the bitter mix of fury and despair and impotence that descended on the Wehrmacht as the Ivans started raping their way through Germany. Were the little swarthy men draining that cup to the dregs right now? How could they be doing anything else?

The Lenello sergeant or whatever he was grunted and pulled out of the Grenye woman. A last few thick drops of semen trickled from the head of his cock as he did up his trousers again. A younger Lenello took his place and began to thrust like a man possessed.

Somebody handed Hasso a big jar of beer. He drank – and drank, and drank. That way, he didn’t have to think. And maybe, just maybe, he’d forget some of the things he’d seen.