After the Downfall (18 page)

She looks like a woman the goddess is about to possess,
Hasso thought, and gooseflesh prickled up on his arms.

Then - anticlimax - the Bucovinans sent a rider forward under sign of truce. They didn’t use a white flag here. Instead, the horseman carried a leafy branch, which he waved over his head. He paused right at the edge of bowshot.

King Bottero leaned over to speak to a herald: a man who’d got his job with leather lungs. “Come ahead and say your say!” the herald bawled. “We won’t kill you ... yet.”

The Bucovinan envoy rode closer. Was he here to get a good look at the Lenello line of battle? Hasso had disguised the assault column as well as he could; lancers were deployed all along the line, and the ones at the front rode with lances raised. The men farther back in the column kept their lances down so they would be harder to notice from a distance.

“Why have you invaded our land?” the native asked in good Lenello. “We are not at war. Go back to your own homes. Leave us alone. Leave us at peace.”

How many nations that found themselves suddenly at war made the same agonized request? Almost all of them, chances were. Hasso had heard that, when German invaded Russia on 22 June 1941, a Soviet diplomat plaintively asked, “What did we do to deserve this?” The Ivans had done plenty; no doubt about it. But Hasso’s wry amusement lasted no longer than a heartbeat. How could it last, when things turned out so disastrously different from what the
Führer
had in mind? If anyone in his own world asked that question these days, it was the Germans themselves.

King Bottero had never had to worry about godless Russian hordes killing and raping their way through his country. Because he hadn’t, he laughed in the Bucovinan herald’s face. “This is not your land, little man,” he said. “It is ours, and we have come to take it.”

The native’s mouth tightened. A flush further darkened his already-swarthy cheeks. By the standards of the Lenelli, he
was
a little man; he was at least twenty centimeters shorter than Hasso, and Hasso was a shrimp next to Bottero and a lot of his warriors. But the Grenye’s voice remained calm as he answered,

“It is not yours till you take it, your Majesty ... if you do.”

Bottero laughed again. “Oh, we will, little man. We will. Tell me your name, so that after the fight I can claim you for my personal slave.”

“I am called Trandafir, your Majesty,” the Bucovinan replied. “You need not tell me your name - I already know it. I will take your words back to my lord.” He turned his pony and rode off toward his own line.

Bottero stared after him - stared and then glared. The king needed longer than he should have to realize the native had given him the glove. Maybe he had trouble believing a Grenye would have the nerve to imply he’d take Bottero as
his
personal slave.

“By the goddess, that wretch will be no bondsman,” Bottero snarled. “I will make sure he is dead, the way I would with any snapping dog.”

“And well you should, your Majesty,” Marshal Lugo said. “He offered you intolerable insult.” He didn’t seem to notice that the king had insulted the herald first. The Lenelli weren’t good about noticing such things. The Germans hadn’t been good about noticing them in Russia, either. Why bother? The Ivans were nothing but
Untermenschen,
weren’t they?

Four years earlier, the answer to that question would have seemed obvious. As a matter of fact, it still did. But the obvious answer now wasn’t the same as it had been in 1941. To keep from thinking about that, Hasso watched Trandafir ride back to his line. Bucovin used banners of dark blue and ocher. The
Wehrmacht
officer wasn’t surprised to see their envoy ride over to where those banners clustered thickest. The Grenye king or general or whatever he was would be there. Passing on Bottero’s reply took only a moment. The natives couldn’t have expected anything else. The Lenelli wouldn’t have come here in arms intending to turn around and go home again. But here as in the world from which Hasso came, the forms had to be observed.

Horns blared along the Bucovinan battle line, first in that center group of banners and then up and down its whole length. The timbre wasn’t quite the same as that of the Lenelli horns; even summoning men to imminent battle, it sounded mournful in Hasso’s ears. The horns themselves looked different. They had a strange curve to them, one that didn’t look quite right to the German. Regardless of whether the horn calls seemed strange to him, they did what they were supposed to do: they roused the enemy army to defiance. The Bucovinans shouted their hatred and derision at the oncoming Lenelli. When they brandished their weapons, sunlight and fire seemed to ripple up and down their ranks. They might be barbarians, but they looked and sounded ready to fight. And so were the Lenelli. Their trumpets roared forth familiar notes. These tunes weren’t the ones the
Wehrmacht
used, but they were ones the
Wehrmacht
might have used. They did the same thing German trumpets would have done: they got Hasso ready to fight. Bottero’s men were ready, too. The threats they shouted at the Grenye would have horrified the men who framed the Geneva Convention. Velona rode out ahead of the Lenello battle line. She pointed toward the Grenye. “Forward!” she bugled. “Forward to victory!” Was she talking, or was the goddess speaking through her? Hasso thought he heard the goddess, but he wasn’t sure.

As soon as Velona gave the war cry, she galloped straight at the Bucovinan line. The rest of the Lenelli and Hasso - thundered after her. A cavalry charge! There’d been a few even in the war from which Hasso had contrived to extract himself. He’d never imagined he would take part in one, though. He looked back over his shoulder at the striking column. Could he really translate panzer tactics into ones knights and swordsmen could use? He was going to find out.

He’d hoped the Bucovinans would stand there and receive the charge. No such luck - they knew better. They’d been fighting the Lenelli for a long time now. They’d learned a lot from the invaders from overseas. They had armored men on horseback, too - not a lot, but some - and sent them forward to blunt the big blonds’ onslaught.

And they had a devil of a lot of infantry waiting there behind their horsemen. Some of the foot soldiers had spears. Some had swords. Quite a few carried what looked like scythes and pitchforks. Most of the men with real weapons wore helmets and carried shields. The rest had no more than they would have worn in the fields. Maybe that would have been enough against other Grenye. Against Bottero’s hard-bitten professionals? Hasso didn’t think so.

The Bucovinan knights were a different story. They were pros themselves. Their horses were smaller than the ones the Lenelli rode, but they knew what to do with them. They handled their lances as well as the Lenelli did. Seeing a three-meter toothpick aimed straight at his chest gave Hasso the cold horrors. He rose in the stirrups and gave the enemy knight a short burst from his submachine gun. The Grenye’s lance went flying. He threw up his hands and pitched from the saddle. He was probably dead before he hit the ground.

Hasso almost got pitched from the saddle, too. Staid gelding or not, his horse didn’t like a gun going off right behind its ears. But the German had expected that. He hadn’t ridden much, but he knew enough to fight the horse back down onto all fours when it tried to rear. He wished he’d had enough ammunition to familiarize the beast to the dreadful noise, but he didn’t. Once his cartridges were gone, they were gone forever.

He’d better get the best use from them he could, then. He shot the next Bucovinan in front of him. Then he shot one of the natives who was bearing down on Velona. She rode into battle with a goddess’

confidence - with
the
goddess’ confidence? - that nothing could hurt her. That Grenye hadn’t seem convinced. But Hasso made as sure as he could that Velona stayed right. He shot two more lancers in quick succession. After that, the Bucovinans got the idea and stayed away from him - which helped open a gap in their line of horsemen. “Come on!” Hasso yelled, and rode through it. The rest of the striking column followed him. He aimed just to the left of the thicket of enemy banners. “There!” He pointed. “That’s where we’ll break through!”

The Bucovinan foot soldiers saw the column coming. They couldn’t very well not see it, and they couldn’t very well not understand what a breakthrough there would mean. Shouts in that guttural, unintelligible - at least to Hasso - language filled the air. The natives who had spears lowered them in a desperate effort to hold off the onrushing knights.

Back in the Middle Ages, the Swiss hedgehog - rank on rank of long pikes, a new version of the Macedonian phalanx - could hold knights at bay. The men of Bucovin were trying to improvise that kind of defense on the fly. It didn’t work. Hasso would have been surprised if they really expected it to work. If you were a brave man in a bad spot, you did whatever you could and hoped for the best. He knew all about that.

A shouting little man set himself, pointing his spear in the general direction of Hasso’s gelding. The
Wehrmacht
officer shot him in the face from less than ten meters away. The Bucovinan didn’t even have time to look surprised before he toppled. The spear hit the ground before he did, but only by a split second.

Hasso shot three more Grenye, one after the next. Then he changed magazines on his Schmeisser again. He was down to his last one, the last one in all this world. But he’d done what he needed to do - he’d breached the Bucovinan line. And the Lenelli poured into the gap he’d made. No denying the natives were brave. They swarmed toward the lancers, trying to spear them, to slash them, to pull them out of the saddle and stomp them to death. They didn’t have a chance. Maybe they didn’t realize it. Maybe they just didn’t care. The Lenelli spitted them like partridges or knocked them over the head with the shafts of their lances or cut them down with long straight swords. Warhorses smashed dark faces and dashed out brains with iron-shod hooves.

Aderno’s unicorn had blood on its horn.

Where was the King of Bucovin or the chief or whatever he called himself? Hasso looked to the right. He saw a man in fancy regalia, and fired several shots at him. With luck, he could decapitate the enemy army, the enemy state, on the spot and make everything that came afterwards a hell of a lot easier. He couldn’t tell whether his bullets struck home. After a moment, not just Bucovinans stood between him and the man he thought to be their sovereign. Hard-charging Lenello knights also blocked his view. The Grenye went on fighting as ferociously as the Poles had in the first few days of the war. All the ferocity in the world hadn’t done the Poles one goddamn bit of good. The harder they fought, the faster they died. And all the courage in the world wouldn’t help the Bucovinans, either. Hasso shot one more man. Then he let out a wordless whoop.

“We’re through the savages!” a Lenello shouted - all the words that mattered.

“Now we swing in!” Hasso called. Even if he hadn’t shot the Bucovinan leader, King Bottero’s men might capture him. That would do the job just about as well. “Swing in!” he yelled again, and pointed to show what he meant.

The striking column had practiced this maneuver over and over on the meadows outside of Drammen. The Lenelli should have been able to bring it off in their sleep. And about half of them did turn in against the enemy center. But the other half turned out, against the wing they’d cut off. Hasso screamed abuse at the Lenelli. He called them every kind of idiot under the sun. They paid no attention to him. German troops probably wouldn’t have screwed up like that. If they had, their officers would have straightened them out in a hurry.

Here, the officers didn’t seem to see the problem. “The fighting’s good every which way,” Marshal Lugo yelled - he was there, all right, and battling hard.

“Yes, but - ” Hasso did some more swearing. Were they all blind?

He didn’t need long to realize blindness wasn’t the problem. His own medieval ancestors probably would have fought the same boneheaded way.
There’s the enemy,
they would have thought.
Let’s go
bash him over the head.
And if the battle might have turned out better had they bashed him here instead of there, they wouldn’t have got all hot and bothered about it. They were having a good time fighting any old way.

And so were the Lenelli now. The rest of their line had come to grips with the Grenye, which meant the enemy couldn’t turn and give all his attention to the riders who’d broken into the rear. As Hasso had hoped, the men of Bucovin were getting smashed between hammer and anvil. But they weren’t getting smashed as thoroughly as he’d had in mind. Sure, Bottero’s warriors were chewing up that cut-off wing. The center, though, held longer and more stoutly than he’d thought it could. When people there did start to flee, a stubborn rear guard made sure they had an open escape route.

“Don’t worry - we’ll get ‘em,” a Lenello said when Hasso swore again. “See? The lord’s banners are still in place.”

Dear God in heaven! Which side is supposed to be the barbarians?
Hasso wondered. “The banners are there, ja,” he said with more patience than he’d thought he had in him. “But does that mean the lord is still there under them?”

“Huh?” The Lenello trooper really was slow on the uptake. After much too long, he went, “Oh.” Then he got angry - not at himself, but at the Bucovinans. “Why, those cursed, sneaky sons of whores!”

“Right,” Hasso said tightly. If you expected the enemy to act dumb all the time, you’d get your head handed to you. The Ivans had driven that lesson home with a sledgehammer. A Bucovinan pikeman, seeing Hasso on a horse without a lance, rushed at him shouting something unintelligible that probably wasn’t a compliment. As so many of the men from Bucovin had found out the hard way, being without a lance didn’t mean he was unarmed. He shot the Grenye down. By now, his horse didn’t jump out of its skin every time he fired.

But the Schmeisser ran dry just then. Automatically, Hasso reached for another clip. That was when he remembered he didn’t have one. He felt much more naked without the submachine gun than he would have without his mailshirt and the
Wehrmacht
helmet with a nasal riveted on. He slung the Schmeisser over his back; even though it was useless now and would be forevermore, he couldn’t stand to throw it away. Out came his sword. With it in his hand, he looked every inch the warrior. Maybe that would be enough to keep the Bucovinans from harrying him. After all, they couldn’t - he hoped to God they couldn’t - tell at a glance what a lousy swordsman he was.