After the Downfall

Come morning, he wasn’t sure whether King Bottero’s men had deliberately torched Muresh or the fires they set got out of hand. What difference did it make, anyhow? The place was just as gone either way.

He woke with a bursting bladder, a pounding headache, and a mouth that tasted like the bottom of a latrine trench. The stink of smoke and burnt flesh assailed his nose when he left the tent he shared with Velona to ease himself. He looked around for the cookfires – maybe porridge would settle his sour stomach. He didn’t see them anywhere, though. The cooks still had to be sleeping off the previous day’s orgy of slaughter and lust.

He looked across the Oltet again. The Bucovinans had men on the battlements of their keep. The place would be easy to take even so – once the army got across the river. With the planking down from the bridge, that might not be so easy. He shrugged and winced, wishing again for aspirin.

As far as the Lenelli were concerned, what they’d done was all part of a day’s work. They hardly looked at the smoldering ruins of Muresh. Instead, they started yelling for the cooks. Burning the place and massacring the people only seemed to have given them an appetite.

They hadn’t killed everybody. A few Bucovinan men survived as slaves, a few women as – Hasso supposed – playthings. Some of the locals had the dazed look of people who’d lost everything in a natural disaster but somehow come through alive. Others seemed more calculating, perhaps trying to figure out how to make the best of what had happened to them. Seeing that thoughtful gleam in some of the women’s eyes made Hasso want to cry and swear at the same time.

Berbec clung close to him – close enough to be annoying, like a dog that always stayed at his heel. “Why don’t you get lost?” Hasso snapped when he’d had enough.

“If I leave you, master, I am lost,” the captive replied. “I think someone will do for me.” He hacked at his throat with the edge of his hand to leave no doubt about what he meant.

And he was right enough to embarrass the German. “All right. Stay with me, then,” Hasso said roughly. “Enough killing.”

“Too much killing,” Berbec said.

King Bottero took matters into his own hands – or rather, used his own foot. He booted the cooks out of their cots and bedrolls. They grumbled, but they came. When the king woke you up, you either got to work or tried to assassinate him. None of the cooks seemed ready for anything that drastic.

Across the river, the Bucovinans in their castle would be eating breakfast, too. They had to know the Lenelli would try to cross the Oltet as soon as they could. They also had to know that, if Bottero’s men made it across the river, their own chances weren’t good. Hasso had seen and joined in more rear-guard actions than he liked to remember. Recruiting sergeants with medals and campaign ribbons all over their chests didn’t talk about that kind of soldiering.

He was spooning up porridge when Bottero came over to him. Berbec tried to disappear without moving a muscle. He needn’t have worried; the king either truly didn’t notice him or affected not to. It amounted to the same thing either way. To Hasso, Bottero came straight to the point: “Do you know any easy way to get across the Oltet?”

“Is there a ford close by?” Hasso asked.

Bottero shook his big head. “No.”

The Wehrmacht would have used rubber rafts to seize a bridgehead. No such items were part of the Lenello logistics train. “Have we got boats? Can we make rafts?”

“We don’t have boats. How could we carry them along?” Bottero said. With ox-drawn wagons as his main supply vehicles, he had a point. “Building rafts would take too cursed long. The weather won’t get better. I want to hit the Grenye again, just as soon as I can.”

That made good sense. Even if the winter here wouldn’t turn Russian, it wouldn’t be a delight, either. Hasso shrugged. “Sorry, your Majesty. Then we have to do it the hard way – or can your wizards knock down that castle for you?”

What did the Americans call that? Passing the buck, that’s what it was. King Bottero, who had been scowling, brightened. “I’ll find out,” he said, and stomped off.

Hasso carefully didn’t smile. Even if the wizards told Bottero no, he’d get angry at them, not at his military adviser who’d fallen out of the sky. That suited Hasso just fine.

Berbec might have tried to disappear, but he’d kept his ears open. He sketched a salute. “You are not just a bold warrior, my master,” he said. “You are sly, too.”

“Danke schon” Hasso said, perhaps with less irony than he’d intended. He studied the Grenye he’d vanquished and then acquired. How much of that did Berbec mean, and how much was the grease job any slave with a gram of sense gave his master? Some of each, the German judged: the best flattery held a grain of truth that made all of it more likely to be believed.

“What do you say?” Berbec scratched his head over the sounds of a language only one man in this world would ever speak.