After the Downfall

“Maybe we haven’t got enough soldiers for everything we need to do … sire,” Nuoro said. How many times had the Germans worked through the same agonizing choices in the vastnesses of the Soviet Union? How much good did their agonizing do them? Not bloody much.

But Bottero had options that weren’t available to the Wehrmacht. He turned to his wizards. “If I string you out along the route back to the border, you can smell out ambushes, right? You can stop them?”

“Well, yes, your Majesty,” Aderno said. “But then we won’t be here with the striking force in case of battle.”

“What?” Now Bottero looked – and sounded – highly offended, so much so that he might almost have struck a pose. People in a position to know said the Fuhrer did stuff like that. Acting had to be one of the things that went into ruling. Still offended, the king went on, “You think we can’t beat the barbarians by ourselves?”

That question had only one possible answer, and Aderno gave it: “Of course you can, your Majesty. We might make it a little easier for you, that’s all.”

“By the goddess, we’ll manage on our own,” Bottero said. “But if you can’t conjure up the grub we need to keep going – and it doesn’t look like you can do that – the next best thing for you is to make sure the plain old ordinary grub from our own kingdom gets here safe. How does that sound?”

Aderno saluted. “As you wish it, your Majesty, so shall it be.”

A German would have shot out his arm and said, “Heil Hitler!” An Ivan, no doubt, would have nodded and said, “Yes, Comrade General Secretary!” It all amounted to the same thing in the end.

Then Hasso had a disconcerting thought. Stalin had almost led his country right off a cliff in the early days of war on the Russian front, but the Ivans went right on saying, “Yes, Comrade General Secretary!” And the Fuhrer damn well had led the Reich off a cliff as the war ground on, but the Germans went right on saying, “Heil Hitler!” Obedience was all very well, but didn’t it have limits somewhere?

Somewhere, certainly. Here? No. Bottero had given a reasonable order. It might not work out, but chances were it would. And Hasso also thought the Lenelli could beat whatever Bucovin threw at them. The natives were brave, but all the courage in the world didn’t matter when it ran into technique.

So the Wehrmacht taught, anyhow. But who wasn’t in Moscow, and who was in Berlin? So what if one German was worth three Ivans? If every Landser knocked down his three Russians, and then a fourth Russian showed up, and a fifth….

Exactly how big was Bucovin? How many swarthy little men did it hold, swarthy little men who didn’t want to live under a big blond king who could roar like a lion? Enough for their numbers to cancel out the huge advantage in weapons and skill the Lenelli had? Hasso didn’t know.

He hoped like hell Bottero did.

Off rode the wizards on their gleaming unicorns. Hasso was sorry to see them go, not so much because he’d miss them – they were a contentious, bad-tempered lot – but because he’d miss their mounts. The unicorns were marvelous and beautiful. Without them, the army seemed only … an army. Its glamour was gone.

Well, almost. Velona still rode with Bottero and his soldiers. Her glamour was of a different sort from the unicorns’, which didn’t make it any less real. Most of the time, she was just herself, not a woman in whom the goddess dwelt. Even as herself, she was striking, of course, but there was more to it than that. She held the memory of the goddess whether touched by the deity or not.

Hasso sometimes wondered if he was imagining that, but never for long. He knew better. That doubt was just the sputtering of his rational mind, here in a world where rationality mattered so much less than it did in the one where he grew to manhood.

As if to prove as much, two wagon trains in a row made it through to King Bottero’s army. The teamsters were full of praise for what the wizards had done to help them on the way. “They sent them savages running with lightning singeing the hair off their balls,” one driver said enthusiastically. “I’ll buy those bastards a beer any day of the week, twice on Sundays.”

Weeks here had ten days, and Sundays were feast days instead, but Hasso tried to turn Lenello into idiomatic German inside his head. Most of the time, he did pretty well. Every once in a while … Every once in a while, he might as well have been in another world. Funny how that works, he thought with a sour smile.

Things didn’t get better the next day. The Lenelli were marching near a river – the Aryesh, it was called – that ran north and east. It should have shielded their left from any trouble from the Bucovinans. It should have, but it didn’t. Somehow, a raiding party appeared at dawn where no raiding party had any business being. The enemy soldiers shot volleys of arrows into the startled Lenello infantry, then galloped off before King Bottero’s horsemen could harry them.