After the Downfall (54 page)

“You talk about the Lenelli. I am no Lenello, no matter what I look like.”

“You look like one, no matter what you are.” The old impasse.
You’re ugly. Go away.

“I can’t help what I am,” he muttered.

“And I can’t help what I feel,” Drepteaza said. “I almost wish -”

“What?”

“Nothing. Let it go.”

“When you start to say something like that, you should finish.”

She sighed. “I suppose you’re right. I almost wish I could help what I feel. It would keep you from mooning around the way you do. At least you don’t paw me all the time, the way a real Lenello would. If you did, I would have to learn to throw you over my shoulder. And who could I learn that from but you?

You see what a problem it would be.”

He couldn’t help smiling. She had a barbed wit when she felt like turning it loose. “If you want to learn to throw people, even people my size, I can teach you.”

He thought she would say no, not wanting to give him any excuse to get his hands on her. But she nodded. “That might be useful. Lenelli aren’t the only troublemakers around here. We have thieves and robbers of our own.”

“Sometimes, if someone comes with a sword or knife, better to give what he wants,” Hasso said. “Don’t be stupid. You can get killed for no good reason if you are stupid.”

“I understand,” Drepteaza answered. “Is there ever a good reason to get killed?”

“You ask a soldier, remember. Sometimes it’s worse for everyone else - and for you, too - if you run away instead.” How many men, friends and enemies alike, had Hasso seen making that same unhappy choice? A lot of soldiers - most of them - died from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But some chose their time and place, and died trying to keep the bastards on the other side from doing something nasty. And sometimes it made a difference, and sometimes it didn’t. You couldn’t know ahead of time. You did what you did, that was all.

“Am I big enough to throw you around if I have to?” Drepteaza asked, derailing his train of thought.

“To throw someone my size, anyway. I throw Lenelli much bigger than me. Maybe throwing me is harder, because I know what you do before you do it,” Hasso answered.

“I see.” She nodded. “How does someone small throw someone larger, though?”

“Size is not the trick. The trick is knowing what to do.” Hasso muttered to himself. He wanted to say
leverage,
but he had no idea how, either in Bucovinan or in Lenello.

“I hope you’re right. Let me go change into breeches, so I can get thrown around without embarrassing myself.”

Hasso laughed in surprise. “What about the baths?”

“The baths are the baths. This is different,” Drepteaza said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it, but it is. Doesn’t your country have customs that wouldn’t make any sense to an outsider? The gods know the Lenelli do.”

“Maybe we do. I’m sure we do.” Hasso sketched a salute. “All right. Go change, then. I meet you in the fencing practice room.”

“See you there.” Drepteaza got up and left the table.

As Hasso walked down the corridor, he almost ran into Dumnez. His driver said, “Hello. I’m going to be one of the people getting dragon bones. We set out tomorrow.”

“No!” The
Wehrmacht
officer clapped a hand to his forehead. “You can’t! You mustn’t! Somebody screws up to let you.”

“Why shouldn’t I? I want to give the Lenelli one in the teeth, same as everybody else does,” Dumnez said. “This has to do that some kind of way. It’s too important not to.”

“But you know about gunpowder. You shouldn’t go where they might catch you.” Security! Hasso was sure Lord Zgomot would see it when it got pointed out to him. He’d worried about Scanno, who could tell the Lenelli just why Bucovin wanted their dragon bones. The people who were going didn’t know that, which was all to the good. But Zgomot hadn’t thought about other security worries. Dumnez looked mutinous. “They won’t catch me.”

“True. You don’t go, so they don’t catch you,” Hasso said. Dumnez tried to slip past him, but Hasso grabbed his arm. For a moment, he wondered if he would need his dirty-fighting talents. Taking on somebody he outweighed by more than thirty kilos wasn’t close to fair, but if Dumnez grabbed a knife. . To forestall him, Hasso added, “We talk to Lord Zgomot. If you don’t listen to me, you listen to him, right?”

“He won’t waste time on the likes of me,” Dumnez said.

“He does - he will - for this,” Hasso said. “Come on.”

He had to talk his way past the stewards and chamberlains who shielded any ruler from the slings and arrows of outrageous reality. But, even though gunpowder wasn’t magic, it was a magic word. It got Hasso and Dumnez through to the Lord of Bucovin in short order. Zgomot listened, pondered, and spoke: “The foreigner is right, Dumnez. You stay here. Is anyone else who knows about gunpowder going?”

“I don’t think so, Lord,” Dumnez replied.

“Go find out. If anybody is, pull him off,” Zgomot said. “Good thing you bumped into Hasso. We don’t want to take chances we don’t have to.” Dumnez gave the
Wehrmacht
officer a sour look, but he didn’t argue with his sovereign.

And Hasso wasn’t very late to the fencing room. He apologized to Drepteaza, explaining what had happened. “That wouldn’t have been good,” she agreed, and then got down to business. “So. You’re going to throw me around, are you?”

“Yes. You know how to land soft?”

“I think so.”

“All right. We go slow at first.”

He showed her how to flip a man. He didn’t take any undue liberties with her person when he flipped her. He was sure he bruised her, though she did land well. She was strong for her size, and well coordinated. He’d thought she would catch on fast, and he was right. It wasn’t hard - grab, turn, duck, twist, heave.

“Now I come at you,” he said, and he did. When she flipped him, he didn’t do anything to try to stop her. He went over on his back, and got a bruise or two of his own.

“You let me do that.” Her voice was accusing. “You even helped.”

“Well, sure,” he said as he climbed to his feet. “You have to learn.” He tried not to think about the feel of her against him. “I went easy with King Bottero’s master-at-arms at first, too.”

“So he knows these flips?” Drepteaza said.

“Not any more. He’s dead.”

“Oh.” That seemed to satisfy her. “Let’s try it again. Faster this time?”

“A little,” Hasso agreed. He went over her shoulder and thudded down. “Oof! That’s good.”

Drepteaza smiled. “It is! Again!”

Hasso picked up more bruises. He couldn’t have cared less. “You will be sudden death on two legs,” he said. Drepteaza positively beamed.

XXIV

When Hasso started working with gunpowder and catapults, Lord Zgomot changed his mind and suggested that he move away from Falticeni for a while. Hasso didn’t say no. The Lord of Bucovin had two excellent reasons on his side. One was not showing everybody in a good-sized city what Bucovin was up to. The other was not unnerving everybody in a good-sized city with strange booms and blasts. The place where Hasso ensconced himself was more than a farm and less than an estate. Maybe it was as close as the Bucovinans could come to a Lenello-style estate. It had a big, fancy house - but one with a thatched roof. Several peasant families who worked the fields and tended stock in the meadows lived in cottages not far from the big house. The house and land belonged to Zgomot himself. The place was more than thirty kilometers away from Falticeni - far enough to let Hasso and his men make as much noise as they needed to.

Rautat and Drepteaza went with him. The underofficer translated for him with carpenters and catapult makers when his Bucovinan ran dry. The priestess did some of that, too. She also taught him more of the natives’ language. And she seemed intent on learning all the dirty fighting he knew how to teach.

‘“Sudden death on two legs,’“ she quoted. “That’s what I want.”

“You’re on your way,” Hasso said. She wasn’t as strong as he was, and she didn’t have his reach. But she was a long way from a weakling, and she was fast as a striking snake. She could hurt him, and she had, more than once. He’d knocked her about, too; once you started practicing anywhere close to full speed, that was bound to happen. Thumping down on thick grass in a meadow hurt less than the rammed-earth floor of the fencing room had.

The more-or-less estate didn’t stink the way Falticeni did - another advantage of moving to the country. Sure, it had a dungheap and some odorous privies. But it didn’t have tens of thousands of people crapping and pissing and not worrying much about how to dispose of the filth. Bucovinans bathed more than Lenelli, but their notions of sanitation were just as rudimentary as those of the blonds. Once Hasso got the carpenters to understand what he wanted, they had no trouble mounting catapults on wheeled carts. Horses - or even donkeys – could pull them. “Field artillery,” he said happily. Back in the world he’d left behind, you couldn’t live without it ... not very long, anyway. The
Wehrmacht
always used as much as it could. The Red Army had guns in carload lots.

Yes, the field artillery was easy. The ammo wasn’t. Hasso rapidly found earthenware pots wouldn’t do. He couldn’t fuse them precisely enough. If a pot hit the ground before a spark hit the gunpowder, it smashed like a broken plate. That wasted far too much precious gunpowder to work.

“Have to be metal,” he said. “Bronze or iron.”

“Expensive!” Rautat said in dismay. He wasn’t kidding, either. Part of Hasso still took an industrial economy for granted. Where everybody did everything by hand ... You didn’t get anywhere near so much, and what you did get cost a lot more.

But he answered, “Not as expensive as losing to the Lenelli, eh?”

“Lord Zgomot will have to say,” Rautat told him. “I can’t order smiths to start making these things, not by myself I can’t.”

“Send to him,” Hasso said. “We find out. If he says no, we go back to Falticeni.”

Zgomot must have said yes, because several bronzesmiths and ironsmiths came out to the estate to find out what Hasso wanted. He explained. One of the smiths tapped his forehead, as if to say this foreigner was out of his mind. Hasso let the short, wide-shouldered men watch an ordinary clay pot full of gunpowder blow up. One of them pissed himself in surprise and fear. After that, they didn’t think he was crazy any more.

“Hollow balls,” one of them said. “Can we make halves and solder them together? That would be a lot faster.”

Hasso shook his head. “Not strong enough, I’m afraid.”

“Can we rivet halves together?” another smith asked. “That should hold them till your magic works.”

“It isn’t magic,” Hasso said wearily. “But yes, try riveting.” It wouldn’t be as fast as soldering, but he could see that it would be a lot faster than making hollow spheres from scratch. The bronzesmiths looked especially pleased. They could cast their hemispheres instead of beating them out. The Bucovinans knew how to make and work wrought iron, but they couldn’t cast it.

Yet another smith asked, “How many do you need, and how soon do you need them?” - the basic questions of war.

As many as you can make and a hundred more besides, and I need them all yesterday.
That was any field officer’s automatic answer. Here, though, caution looked like a good idea. “How many do you think you can make? How fast?” he asked in return.

They had to put their heads together before they gave him an answer. Some of them were scratching their heads, too - they weren’t used to thinking in terms of numbers. When they did speak up, he was pleasantly surprised. Even cutting their claims in half, he’d have enough shells to fight a battle soon enough to give the Lenelli a proper greeting.

“You really think you can do that?” he asked.

“We do. By Lavtrig, we do,” answered the man who spoke for them. He had impressive dignity - and scarred, gnarled hands that were even more convincing.

All the same, Hasso pressed: “Lord Zgomot is not happy if you promise one thing and give something else.”

“We will not disappoint the Lord of Bucovin,” said the senior smith, whose name was Unaril.

“Go, then. Do it,” Hasso said. And maybe they would, and maybe they wouldn’t. If they didn’t, Bucovin would fight the Lenelli the same old way, and chances were she’d take it on the chin. But the big blond bastards would have a harder time if Zgomot’s men got back with the dragon bones. As soon as that went through Hasso’s mind, he wondered,
Did I just think of the Lenelli as big blond
bastards?
He didn’t wonder long.
Damned if I didn’t.
Maybe he really had switched sides after all, even inside himself.

And wouldn’t that be weird?
he thought.

A double handful of bronze shells came to the estate. Field Marshal Manstein would have laughed his ass off as soon as he took one look at them. Hell, so would Frederick the Great, for that matter. When you measured them by the standards of an art that had had some time to grow, they were somewhere between funny and pathetic.

When you measured them against nothing at all, though, they suddenly didn’t seem half bad. He didn’t load them with gunpowder right away. He had the catapult crews practice flinging them while they were empty. They went somewhere close to 400 meters. He had to hope that would be good enough. He thought it would, for one battle, anyway. The Lenelli would be looking for buried pots of gunpowder - and he intended to use those, too. Artillery would take them by surprise ... unless they had better spies than he thought.

Some of the shells dented a little when they came down. A few rivets popped. A smith who’d stayed behind repaired them - and sneered at the workmanship. Hasso only grinned at him. The
Wehrmacht
officer hadn’t imagined everything would go perfectly. The Bucovinans were doing things they’d never tried before. He was pleased they’d done as well as they had.

He filled a shell with gunpowder and lead balls - the Bucovinans had no trouble making those, because they used slingers as well as archers. He jammed down the stopper: a wooden plug with a hole drilled through for the length of fuse. And then he assembled everybody by the catapult to watch as the shell went downrange on the meadow he’d been bombarding.