After the Downfall

Maybe I will, Hasso thought. He hadn’t dreamt he would be able to divine where the Bucovinans’ underwater bridges lay. No matter what he hadn’t dreamt, he’d done it. Why shouldn’t I do it again? No reason at all.

After Poland and France and the Balkan campaign, that kind of reasoning took the Fuhrer into the Soviet Union. The German gamble there almost paid off. The Wehrmacht came so close to knocking the Ivans out of the fight. But what did they say? Close only counted with horseshoes and hand grenades.

Hasso wished he had a few potato-mashers on his belt, They wouldn’t help with his rain magic, but they made a damn fine life-insurance policy.

But he didn’t, and he didn’t like to dwell on things he didn’t have. Velona had warned him more than once that you had to pay attention when you cast a spell. If you didn’t, the magic could turn and bite you. Hasso wished she hadn’t told him that. The magic could also turn and bite you if you screwed up your chant. For somebody with a still uncertain grasp of Lenello, that was also less than encouraging news.

Velona chose that moment to ask him, “Are you ready?”

“No,” he answered honestly. She blinked – that wasn’t what she’d expected to hear. He went on, “But I don’t get – I won’t get – any readier if I wait. So I try the spell. We see what happens.”

She kissed him, which was distracting in a much more pleasant way than his own gloomy and uncertain thoughts. “You can do it. I’ve seen that you can.”

Maybe she’d been listening to Bottero.

“Well, I hope so.” He got a little fire going in the bottom of a pot that he put under an awning made of tent cloth. He set another pot upside down under the awning and put the dry cloth under it. He couldn’t help thinking that a real wizard would have used far more elaborate preparations. Aderno probably would have laughed his ass off at what Hasso was doing. But Aderno wasn’t here, and Hasso damn well was. Like those kids who found themselves in the Volkssturm, he had to do the best he could.

He wished he hadn’t thought of it like that. The Ivans and the Amis and the Tommies slaughtered the poor damned kids in the Volkssturm in carload lots. A few lived long enough to learn how to soldier. Most got wounded or killed before they could. Was that true of wizards, too? There was another cheerful notion.

No time for it now. “Give me the parchment,” he told Velona. She did, and held her cloak over it so the rain wouldn’t wash away the words before he could chant them. He called on the goddess. He called on the heavens. He called on the sun and the clouds. Once, when he stumbled over a word, the fabric of the world seemed to stretch very tight. Sudden frightening heat built up inside him. He got the next word right, and the one after that, and found his rhythm again. The heat receded.

His fear didn’t. He wondered if it ever would. Yeah, you could blow yourself up with this stuff if you didn’t know what you were doing. And he didn’t. Worse, he knew he didn’t.

Recognizing his own ignorance made him want to race through the spell, to get it over with as fast as he could. That probably wasn’t smart – it made him more likely to screw up. Tortoise, he told himself. Not hare. Tortoise. You have to do it right. That’s more important than doing it fast.

Making himself believe it wasn’t easy.

At last, he got through it. He didn’t burst into flames or explode from water buildup inside him or dry out as if he’d been stuck in the Sahara for a million years or do any of the other interesting and horrible things his overactive imagination came up with. He just said, “So may it be,” one more time and slumped down, exhausted. Was that rain soaking him, or sweat? Did it matter?

Velona straightened him up. She had strength for two, or maybe for an army. “There,” she said. “You did it. You did everything a man could do. But I already knew you did everything a man can do.” To leave him in no possible doubt of what she meant, she kissed him again.

He was sure she would have taken him to bed if he’d shown even the slightest interest. Just then, though, he was so weary, he didn’t think he could have got it up with a crane. “Wine,” he croaked. “Or beer, anyhow.”

Velona didn’t get angry, which had to make her a princess – no, a goddess – among women. “I’ll get you some,” she said, but she didn’t. Instead, she shouted for Berbec. The captured Bucovinan obeyed her faster than he followed Hasso’s orders, and with less back talk. By the standards of this world, Hasso was probably a softy. He shrugged. He couldn’t do much about that, and he was too damn tired to care right now, anyway.