After the Downfall

Bottero rode out in front of his army, not to challenge the enemy as Orosei had done but to harangue his own soldiers. “One more fight, boys!” he said. “One more fight, and then it’s on to Falticeni. Then we take over Bucovin, and all the other Lenello kings turn green with envy and die. And we all get rich, and we all get estates, and we all get lots of slaves, and we all get plenty of pretty Grenye women to screw!”

The soldiers cheered like maniacs. Hasso yelled along with everybody else. No German officer’s speech had ever been so direct. But this was what war was all about, wasn’t it? You killed the other guys and you took away what they had. Whether you talked about estates and slaves and women or about Lebensraum, it boiled down to the same thing.

“All right, then!” King Bottero yelled. “Let’s go get ‘em! The goddess is with us!”

“The goddess is with us!” the Lenelli shouted. Hasso looked over to Velona. She blew him a kiss. He sent one back to her.

Bottero waved to the trumpeters. They blared out the charge. The Lenelli – and Hasso – set spur to their horses. They thundered forward. The striking column aimed straight for the little gap Orosei had noted in the Bucovinan line. Break through there and they’d cut the enemy army in half.

While Bottero heartened his men, some Bucovinan bigwig or another was doing the same with the small, swarthy natives. They’d shouted, too, but the lusty cheers of the Lenelli all but drowned them out. As Hasso galloped toward the Bucovinans’ battle line, he knew the same feeling of invincibility, of playing on the winning team, he’d felt in France in 1940 and in Russia in the summer of 1941.

Once he’d been dead right to feel that way. Once…

To his surprise, the waiting Bucovinans just held their ground. They didn’t gallop forward to meet the Lenelli with impetus of their own, the way they had the first time the armies met. That went dead against everything he thought he’d learned about cavalry. “Are they going to stand there and take a charge?” he shouted to Nornat, trying to pitch his voice to carry through the drumroll of hoofbeats all around them.

“Looks that way, the cursed fools,” the Lenello answered. “They should have found out they couldn’t do that a hundred years ago. Well, if they need a fresh lesson, we’ll give ‘em one.” Below the bar nasal of his helmet, his lips skinned back in a predatory grin.

Closer … Closer … Along with the thuds of the horses’ hooves, the Lenelli were howling like wolves, both to nerve themselves for the collision and to scare the living piss out of the Bucovinans. Would the natives break and run? If this kind of charge were bearing down on Hasso, he knew damn well he would think hard about running himself.

Here and there along the enemy line, archers started shooting at Bottero’s soldiers. Beside Hasso, Nornat laughed what had to be the most scornful laugh the German had ever heard. “Do they think they’ll even slow us down like that?” he said.

One or two riders clutched at themselves and slid from the saddle. One or two horses crashed to the ground. One or two more fell over them, spilling their riders. The rest of the charge rolled on.

Bucovinan foot soldiers set themselves, spears thrust forward in a forest of iron points to withstand the oncoming lancers. Did they really believe they could make the Lenelli stop that way? Could they possibly be so stupid? Hasso had trouble believing it.

For a moment, he simply accepted that. All right, he had trouble believing the Bucovinans could be so stupid. Then what? Only at that point did alarm bells start clanging in his mind. The natives had to know the Lenelli thought they were stupid and inept. If they could play on that, take advantage of it…

“Something’s wrong!” Hasso shouted to Nornat. “They’re trying to fool us!”

“What?” Nornat yelled back.

Before Hasso could say it again, the first Lenello horses fell into the lovingly concealed pits the Bucovinans had dug in front of their line.

The horses screamed. So did the men on top of them. Hasso and Nornat weren’t in the very first rank of the charge anymore; men on swifter horses had got a little ways ahead of them. But they were close, too close. Hasso reined in frantically. His horse saw the danger, too, and tried to swerve, but it was too near the edge. In it went, in and down. Hasso wasn’t ashamed to scream, either.

Then another falling horse’s hoof caught him in the side of the head. Blackness swooped down on him. How the fight went from there … he had no idea.

He came back to himself a little at a time. He was hearing things before he realized he was hearing them. He thought he made out words, but he didn’t understand any of them. Had whatever happened to him – he didn’t remember what it was, not yet – scrambled his wits for fair?

Lenello. He had to think of Lenello, not just German. He felt more than a little pride at recalling that. But it didn’t help. He thought he could understand Lenello if he heard it. Whatever this was, it wasn’t Lenello.