After the Downfall (60 page)

He did know he wasn’t about to put up with the unicorn’s doing anything like that to Drepteaza. To his surprise, it didn’t even start. It stood quietly and let her come close.

“Boy, I like that!” Rautat said. “What’s she got that I don’t?” He snickered, coming up with his own obvious answer to that. Drepteaza bent down, picked up a pebble, and threw it at him. The unicorn let out a snuffling noise and bobbed its head, as if to say he had it coming.

“Go get some more honeycomb,” Hasso told the underofficer. “I promised, and maybe that makes it put up with you.” Rautat nodded and scurried away.

“Do you - do you think I could touch it?” Drepteaza asked.

“I don’t know,” Hasso answered. “You can try - but be ready to get out of the way in a hurry if it doesn’t want you to.” Without bit, reins, and stirrups, he had next to no control over the unicorn. If it decided to rear, for instance, all he could do was grab its mane and hang on for - literally - dear life. Eyes wide and shining, Drepteaza stepped up alongside the unicorn. She reached out and set her palm on the side of its neck. “Oh,” she whispered. “It’s like ... I don’t know what it’s like. But it’s wonderful. It’s - more finely woven than a horse, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” That was a better way of putting it than Hasso had found for himself.

“Thank you,” she told him, and moved away. Had Velona been standing there, she would have been wild to ride the animal. Drepteaza was sure she couldn’t, and didn’t try. Hasso suddenly wasn’t so sure himself. He slid down from the unicorn’s back. “Wait!” he called to Drepteaza. She stopped. A few quick strides brought him over to her. She let out a startled squawk when he picked her up. It was easy - she couldn’t have weighed more than forty-five kilos.

“What are you doing?” she said. But she needed only a moment to realize exactly what he was doing.

“No! Stop! You can’t! The unicorn won’t let you! The unicorn won’t let me -”

And, sure enough, the unicorn looked extremely dubious when Hasso started to put Drepteaza on its back. “Cut that out!” he said again. “She’s not going to hurt you. Nobody’s going to hurt you.” He still didn’t think the unicorn could understand him, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure it couldn’t. Rautat chose that exact moment to come back with the honeycomb, which didn’t hurt. Hasso set Drepteaza down for a moment and kept his promise to the unicorn. Then he picked her up again. She had the sense not to kick and flail. She alighted on the unicorn’s back as smoothly as she could, and sat very still once she got there. The animal snorted and rolled its eyes, but it didn’t try to buck her off. Hasso patted its flank. “Walk,” he told it, and damned if it didn’t take a couple of steps.

“It can’t do that,” Drepteaza said. “I’m not magic!”

“You are to me, babe,” Hasso said. She gave him a look that warned she would have a lot to say to him later, but this wasn’t the time or place. Pretending he didn’t notice, he went on, “Maybe it just needs someone who can do magic close by. Or maybe the Lenelli are full of shit. Who knows?”

“We could never ride them,” Drepteaza said. “If we caught them and tried to tame them, they starved themselves to death. But I’m really on it, aren’t I?”

“You really are. And everything is good, yes?”

“Yes!” she said, but then, “Maybe you’d better get me down. I don’t think I want to push my luck.”

“All right.” Hasso took her in his arms again. He wanted to give her a quick kiss before he set her on the ground, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to look like a big blond taking advantage of her in front of her people. As her feet touched the ground, she patted him on the hand, as if to tell him he’d done that right.

“I’m a Grenye,” she said. “I’m a Grenye, and I’ve ridden a unicorn. Who could have imagined that?”

“Will it carry other people?” someone asked.

“It won’t carry me, the stupid creature,” Rautat said. The glare the unicorn gave him told the world he was right, honeycomb or no honeycomb.

Wondering whether the unicorn disliked Grenye men in particular, Hasso asked a cook’s wife if she wanted to try it. “Sure, if the creature will let me,” she said.

She giggled when he lifted her off the ground.
He
didn’t giggle; she was at least fifteen kilos heavier than Drepteaza. But the unicorn made it very plain it didn’t want her on its back. “Sorry,” Hasso said, setting her down.

“Don’t worry about it, foreign sir,” she replied with more grace than a lot of noblewomen probably would have shown under the same circumstances. “
I
know I’m no priestess. The unicorn must know the same thing.”

Did it? If it did, how? The cook’s wife smelled of garlic. But so did Drepteaza. All Bucovinans did; they ate the stuff with everything except melons and strawberries. So what made the difference? The unicorn wasn’t talking.

Lord Zgomot came over to see why people were kicking up a fuss. “A unicorn?” he said. “Well, well. I have never been lucky enough to see one close up before.” He gave Hasso something that was more than a nod but less than a bow. “An advantage to having a wizard with us that I had not thought about.”

“It let me on its back, Lord!” Drepteaza exclaimed. “Me!”

“Really?” Zgomot
did
bow to her. “I am jealous.”

“Do you want to try, Lord?” Hasso asked. Zgomot wasn’t much heftier than the cook’s wife. Hasso thought he could get him onto the unicorn’s back. Whether the unicorn would put up with it...

“Me?” The Lord of Bucovin sounded surprised.

“If it doesn’t want you up there, it lets you know, but it doesn’t hurt you. It is a polite unicorn,” Hasso said.

That made several Bucovinans smile, so it probably wasn’t just the word he should have used. But what the hell? It got his meaning across. And the cook’s wife affirmed that she’d tried, failed, and still had all her giblets. Lord Zgomot plucked at his beard. “Well, why not?” he said. “Let us see what will happen.”

The unicorn let him come up alongside it. It let him touch it, which seemed to impress him as much as it had Drepteaza. “Can you lift me up there?” he asked Hasso.

“I think so, Lord,” the German answered. “You don’t eat a big lunch, I hope?”

Zgomot smiled a crooked smile. “No, I was moderate.” Wonderingly, he stroked the unicorn again. You had to touch a unicorn like that. If you were a man, it was like touching your first girl, only more so.

“Whenever you are ready,” Zgomot said.

Hasso picked him up. The unicorn laid back its ears and snorted when the Lord of Bucovin’s behind touched its back, but it didn’t buck or run wild or do any of the other things that could have made Zgomot’s bodyguards use Hasso for a pincushion. “You are on a unicorn,” Hasso told him.

“I
am
on a unicorn.” Lord Zgomot sounded amazed. Well, who could blame him?

How the Bucovinans cheered! Drepteaza looked as proud of her sovereign as could be. And Hasso said, “King Bottero never does this.”

“No? He is missing something, then,” Zgomot said. “Will it walk for me?” He urged the unicorn forward as if it were a horse. But it wouldn’t go, not even the couple of steps it had for Drepteaza. Shrugging, Zgomot slid off. “I am a Grenye, and I have been on a unicorn,” he declared, as Drepteaza had. By the way
he
said it; he might have been the first man to set foot on the moon. His subjects cheered louder than ever. Hasso looked at the unicorn. It looked back at him. If it didn’t wink, he was losing his mind. Or maybe he was losing his mind if he thought it did wink. No one else seemed to notice. Was he going to start collecting omens and portents?

Why not? Everybody else in this world did. And, as far as he could see, a winking unicorn couldn’t be anything but a good one.

A Bucovinan named Shugmeshte was almost out of his mind with glee. He was one of the gunpowdermen who’d gone forward to slow down Bottero’s advancing army. “I fooled ‘em!” he told Hasso and Zgomot. “Bugger me blind if I didn’t fool ‘em!”

“What did you do?” Hasso asked.

Shugmeshte swigged from a mug of beer. “So I dig holes in the road and run fuses to them, right? This is before the big blond bastards get there, you understand. So then I plant some real jugs in the field alongside, but real careful-like, so you can’t spot ‘em easy.”

Hasso grinned.” I think I like the way this story is going.” The Lord of Bucovin nodded. Hasso said,

“Well? Tell us more.”

“So the blond pricks come by,” Shugmeshte said. “So they see there’s trouble in the road. So they get smart - or they think they do. So they ride into the field so whatever happens in the road doesn’t hurt

‘em. So I light the fuses, and
bam!
They go flying! I blew up a unicorn, I did.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear that,” Hasso said - he was still riding the wild one himself. But he clapped Shugmeshte on the back. “You do good - you
did
good. And this says something important.”

“What?” Zgomot asked.

“It says the amulets really do keep Lenello wizards from spotting gunpowder. This is good news.” Hasso wondered whether Shugmeshte had blown Aderno to hell and gone. That would be
very
good news. He could hope, anyhow.

“Ah.” The Lord of Bucovin nodded. “I see. Yes, what you say makes good sense. You seem to have a way of doing that.”

“Thank you, Lord,” Hasso said. Coming from a resolutely sensible fellow like Zgomot, that praise meant something.

Zgomot turned back to Shugmeshte. “Are you ready to do this to the Lenelli again?”

“Lavtrig, yes!” the gunpowderman exclaimed.”We can hurt them. We can scare them. We’ve never been able to scare them before. I like it.”

“Go, then,” Zgomot said. Shugmeshte saluted: clenched fist over his heart, the same gesture the Lenelli used. How long ago had the Bucovinans adopted it? Did anyone here even remember? Hasso wouldn’t have bet on it. Zgomot nodded to Hasso. “We have kept security as well as we could. None of the gunpowdermen knows how to make the stuff. Not many folk besides us and the men who get them - oh, and Scanno - know our amulets are made from dragon bone.”

“This is how you should do things, Lord,” Hasso said. “Sooner or later, secrets get out, but you always want it to be later, not sooner.”

“You
do
make sense,” Zgomot told him. “One of the first things a ruler learns is that secrets always get out.”

Hasso thought of the American bazooka. It was a wonderful weapon - it let a foot soldier wreck a panzer without needing to creep suicidally close. As soon as the Germans saw it, they knew they wanted something like it. They made capturing one a top priority. Once they had one, the
Panzerschreck
got into production in a few months. And it was better than the bazooka that spawned it. With a larger-caliber rocket, it had a longer range and could pierce thicker armor.

“Later is better,” Hasso said again.

Once the Lenelli got their hands on some gunpowder - and they would, because his fuses were imperfectly reliable - how long would they need to figure out what went into it? Not too long, odds were: none of the ingredients was especially rare. How long would they need to start making their own? That could take a while. They would need to work out the right proportions. Then they would have to figure out how to mix them without blowing themselves a mile beyond the moon. So it wouldn’t be a few months. But it might be only a few years.

Cannon! Can I build a cannon?
Hasso got the same answer he always did - maybe, but not right now. And how long would the Lenelli take to realize dragon bone was thwarting their spells? Getting their hands on an amulet wouldn’t be hard, but how could you sorcerously analyze something that didn’t let you work magic?
Damn good question,
he thought.

Even if they did know, what could they do about it? Even if you knew what water was, could you get something to burn in it?

He wished he hadn’t thought of it that way, because you could if you were sly enough and smart enough. Magnesium would burn even underwater. If you tossed a lump of metallic sodium into water, it would start burning all by itself.

So ... did the Lenelli have the sorcerous equivalent of sodium? Hasso shrugged. How was he supposed to know? He was a stranger here himself.

The Lenelli - the Lenelli of Bottero’s kingdom, anyhow - had Velona. If she wasn’t sodium, Hasso couldn’t imagine what would be. Did they know how to use her, or perhaps the goddess, to best advantage? He shrugged again. One more thing he couldn’t be sure of.

Well find out,
he thought, a little - or maybe more than a little - uneasily. Zgomot knew where he wanted to make his fight. Hasso hadn’t been there before, so he couldn’t judge the position firsthand. When he listened to Zgomot and Rautat talk about it, it sounded good. Sometimes you had to assume the other guys on your side knew what the hell they were doing. Sometimes you got royally screwed making assumptions like that, too. Hasso had to hope this wasn’t one of those times.

Knowing where his own force would stand let Zgomot chivvy Bottero in the direction he wanted him to go. Bucovinan raiding parties shoved the Lenello line of march a little farther south than it might have gone otherwise. With a little luck, the invaders wouldn’t even notice they were getting shoved. Peasants fled before the Lenelli. They clogged the roads. In the Low Countries and France, fleeing civilians had worked to the
Wehrmacht’s
advantage. They slowed up the enemy. Then, years later, German civilians fled before the Ivans and made life difficult for the army. What went around came around.

At Hasso’s suggestion, Zgomot tried channeling the refugees down some roads, with luck leaving others clear so his soldiers could move on them. It didn’t work as well as Hasso hoped. The Bucovinan traffic cops were trying something they’d never done before, and the peasants didn’t want to listen to them. You did what you could with what you had, that was all. With a couple of machine guns and enough ammo, he could have slaughtered the Lenelli without losing a Bucovinan. With a battery of 105s, a forward observer, and a couple of radio sets, he could have slaughtered them before they got within ten kilometers of him. With experienced German
Feldgendarmerie
personnel, he could have kept the peasants from mucking up the roads so badly.