After the Downfall

Hasso wondered whether watchers would be waiting to harass the Lenelli as they filled in the pits. But the natives seemed to think they’d done everything they could to slow down Bottero’s men here. The Lenelli crossed the Oltet with no further trouble.

Orosei pointed to smoke rising up in the east. “They’re burning things again,” he said. “Do they really think that will slow us down?”

“Yes,” Hasso answered. “They’re liable to be right, too. Where’s the wagon train that should be here yesterday?”

“Should have been – you talk funny, you know that?” the master-at-arms said. “I don’t know where the miserable wagons are. We can’t detach enough men to cover all of them.”

“I know,” Hasso said. “Do you think the Bucovinans don’t know, too? Without the wagons, without foraging on the country, what do we eat?”

Orosei looked around. “Mud. Rocks.” He rubbed his belly. “Yum.”

He startled a laugh out of Hasso. “All right – you have me there. But what do we do when we get hungry?”

“Eat the goddess-cursed Bucovinans, for all I care,” the Lenello answered. For all Hasso knew, he meant it. The Germans thought the Ivans were Untermenschen. The Lenelli thought the same thing about the natives here, only more so. Did they think the Grenye were far enough down the scale to do duty as meat animals? Hasso decided he didn’t want to find out.

He didn’t want to let go of his own worries, either. “If the Bucovinans burn their crops, what do they eat?”

“Their seed grain,” Orosei answered. “Then they starve along with us, but they take longer.”

Bucovin was a big place – Hasso remembered the maps Bottero used. They weren’t anywhere near so good as the ones the Wehrmacht used, but they showed that well enough. Could the natives bring in enough food from places where they weren’t burning it to supply the ones where they were?

He had no idea. When he asked Orosei, the master-at-arms only shrugged his broad shoulders. “Beats me,” he said. “You’re the spymaster, right? You’re the one who’s supposed to find out stuff like that, right?”

“Right,” Hasso said tightly. Orosei made intelligence work sound easy, which only proved he’d never done any. By the end of 1941, the Germans were sure they’d knocked out as many divisions as the Red Army had at the start of the war – but the Russians weren’t within a million kilometers of quitting, or of running out of men.

King Bottero sent out raiding parties to the north and south of his main line of march. They drove some pigs and a few cattle and sheep back to the army – and a few horses and donkeys as well. Those were riding or draft animals, but you could eat them if you had to. Though not a Frenchman who did it by choice, Hasso had chewed gluey horseflesh plenty of times on the Russian front. He’d been glad to get it then; if the Lenello cooks served it up, he’d eat it again now.

The raiders also brought back some grain the Grenye had already harvested. It didn’t make up for the wagons that weren’t going to get to the army, though. Had the Bucovinans burned that grain or captured it? Only they knew.

But they left no doubt about what had happened to the Lenello teamsters. They left a bloated, foul-smelling blond head in the road in front of Bottero’s oncoming army. Someone had written a message in Lenello on a sheet of bark and put it by the head. Even Hasso had no trouble sounding out the two words: YOU NEXT.

When King Bottero saw that, Hasso thought he would have a stroke. Hitler’s rages were the stuff of legend in Germany; Bottero’s fury now matched any fit the Fuhrer could have pitched. For a little while, the German didn’t understand just why the king was going off like a grenade. Yes, the warning in the road was grisly, but it was no worse than a hundred things the Lenelli had done when they sacked Muresh.

But then Bottero roared, “My horse – my horse, I tell you! – has more business pushing me around than these goddess-cursed, mindblind, soul-dead Grenye! They’ll pay! Oh, how they’ll pay!”

That made the Wehrmacht officer nod to himself. It came down to the business of who were Untermenschen again. Bottero really would have taken it better had his horse tried to tell him to go back to his own kingdom. For the Bucovinans to assume equality with the invaders, even an equality of terror, was a slap in the face to everything the Lenello kingdoms stood for.

And it wasn’t just Bottero. All the Lenelli who saw the head and, even more important, who could read the crude threat by it, quivered with outrage. Velona was quieter than the king – Krakatoa erupting might have been noisier than Bottero, but Hasso couldn’t think of anything else that would – but no less angry.

“They dare,” she whispered, as if speaking louder might make her burst. “They truly dare to try conclusions with us, do they? Well, his Majesty has the right of it – we’ll teach them a lesson they’ll remember for the next hundred years. The ones we leave alive will, anyhow.”