After the downfall

VII

King Bottero didn't invade Bucovin along the causeway road through the swamp. He sent soldiers along it, but only to hold it against any counterthrusts from the Grenye to the east.

"Once we drive the savages back, we can send supplies and reinforcements up the causeway," he said.

Hasso nodded along with Bottero's marshals. The men of Bucovin could have blocked an advance along the causeway for a long time with only a handful of men. Hasso was relieved that the Lenelli could see as much for themselves. He didn't like having to point out their stupidities and blindnesses to them. Some of it was necessary — hell, a lot of it was necessary — but he recognized the difference between gadfly and pain in the ass.

He felt Orosei's ironic eye on him. The master-at-arms was no marshal, but Bottero would have had a mutiny on his hands if he tried to keep him in the dark. Did Orosei know what Hasso was thinking? It looked that way to the Wehrmacht officer.

Some of the lighter boats could go out into the marsh, at least partway. The rest unloaded their supplies, which went into more wagons. That made the army slower and more unwieldy than it had been, but Hasso didn't know what anybody could do about it. You needed things to fight, and you needed to haul them to where you fought.

His horse's hooves drummed on the planks of a bridge that took him over the Drammion to the south bank. Grenye farmers looked up from their fields to stare at the Lenelli riding by. In their dull homespun, the peasants seemed hardly more than domestic animals themselves. Looks could deceive, though — and probably did.

In Russia, the Germans hadn't paid much attention to the peasants. Once the Red Army was beaten, the new overlords would get around to the muzhiks. Then the partisans started dynamiting railroad lines and sniping from the woods.

How many of these Grenye would try to slip off and let Bucovin know which way the Lenelli were going? Too many — Hasso was sure of that. His security cordon had stopped a lot of the natives from succeeding as spies. Had it stopped all of them? Could it? He knew better.

He rode up alongside the king. Pointing out the peasants in the fields, he said, "More spy trouble."

"Well, we'll deal with it," Bottero answered. "By now, we're moving as fast as they are. They won't get to Bucovin much ahead of us."

"Yes, your Majesty," Hasso said — that was true. "I wished they like Lenelli better than they do."

"I don't care what they think about us. As long as they don't make trouble, they can think whatever they want," the king said.

In a way, he made sense. That offered the Grenye a safety valve. In another way, though… "If they think bad things about Lenelli, maybe they try to do bad things, too," Hasso said.

"Let them try. We'll squash them. We've done it before — we can do it again." Bottero didn't lack confidence. From everything Hasso had seen, Lenelli rarely did. But the Germans had been sure they would have no trouble ruling Russia. Maybe they wouldn't have, had they won.

The Lenelli would be fine, too — as long as they kept winning. So it seemed to Hasso, anyway. If they ever started to lose…

With magic on their side, could they lose? Were the Grenye really forever barred from it? What about halfbreeds? There had been renegade wizards — Bottero had spoken of them. What if another one arose?

Hasso laughed at himself. Was he trying to see how much trouble he could borrow? The laughter died. Every time he'd done that in the Wehrmacht, there always turned out to be even more than he thought.

He had a tent for himself and Velona. He wondered why she'd come along. Was she a mascot for Bottero's army? Did she intend to fight? He knew she was strong enough and skilled enough to do that if she wanted to. She'd gone into Bucovin all alone, without an army at her back.

She'd gone in alone, yes, and she'd barely come out alive. If not for somebody literally falling into the swamp from another world, she wouldn't have. The Grenye would have caught her and killed her. What did that say?

Whatever it said, she didn't want to talk about it. All she wanted to do was joke. Holding her nose, she said, "You smell like a horse, my dear."

"So do you," Hasso answered. She did, too. But she also smelled like herself — better than any other woman Hasso had ever known. Still bantering, he went on, "I love you anyhow."

That sobered her as effectively as a bucket of cold water in the face. "Be careful, Hasso Pemsel," she said, her voice altogether serious. "It is dangerous to love me too much. Deadly dangerous for a Lenello. Deadly dangerous for you, too, unless you're much more different from us than I think you are."

"How can anyone help it?" he asked.

"Men can't help it," she answered, without modesty and also without doubt. "That's part of what makes it so dangerous."

"Only part?" He kept trying to tease.

But Velona's nod was the next thing to somber. "Yes, only part. Remember, I am the goddess, too. A man, a mere man, who loves me is like a moth that loves a torch. He flies too close — and he burns."

"What about King Bottero?" No, the night of the summer solstice wouldn't go away. And the autumn equinox was coming. Would Bottero and Velona — and the goddess — celebrate it in front of the army? If they did, Hasso expected another drunken night and another painful morning.

In the dim lamplight, Velona's eyes went even wider and bigger than they were already. "By the goddess, no!" she exclaimed. "He enjoys me. I know that. But love me? He's not so foolish — he knows better."

"But I don't? Is that what you mean?" Hasso didn't try to hide his bitterness.

"Some of what I mean." Velona was nothing if not blunt. Maybe some of that had to do with the indwelling divinity she carried. More, though, Hasso judged, came from her own nature. She went on, "The other difference is, I like Bottero, but I really care for you. I don't want anything bad to happen to you because of me, but it may."

"If you care for someone" — he stayed away from the explosive word love — "you worry about things like that. I thank you." He gave her a gesture that was half a nod, half a salute.

She sighed. "You don't know what you're talking about. You're thinking of a broken heart. You can get a broken heart if you fall in love with a milkmaid. Even a Grenye in love with another ugly little Grenye can get a broken heart. But if the goddess ever has reason to be angry at you…" She left it there.

Hasso started to ask her what might happen. Maybe she'd already answered him, though. Like a moth that loves a torch. In his world, it would have been one more figure of speech. Here? He wasn't so sure he wanted to find out.

"Have to keep the goddess happy with me, then," he said, and reached for Velona. "Even if she does smell like a horse."

Laughing, Velona kissed him. But then she said, "Oh, no — that's just me." He thought about teasing her some more. It didn't seem like a good idea. Making love, on the other hand… never seemed like a bad idea. He blew out the lamp.

Castle Pedio, hard by the border between Bottero's kingdom and Bucovin, was less a fortress than an observation post. It had the tallest towers Hasso had seen since coming to this new world. The reason was simple: those towers let the Lenelli see as far into Bucovin as they could.

Half a kilometer east of Castle Pedio rose another structure, one that looked a lot like it. Castle Galats, that one was called. The Grenye had built it. It was clumsier, heavier — the Grenye didn't have the tools or the skills the Lenelli did. But Castle Galats served its purpose: a signal fire at the top warned Bucovin that King Bottero was on his way by this route.

Hasso swore when he saw the fire. "Should take that castle by surprise when you decide to go to war," he told Bottero. "Then signal doesn't go out."

The king frowned. "You tell me that now. I see it makes sense, but why didn't you suggest it before?"

"I don't know this castle is here then," Hasso answered with a shrug. "Why don't you tell me about it?"

"Everyone must have thought you did know," Bottero said. "Anybody who knows anything about the border would." He stopped and sighed. "But you don't know anything much about the border, do you?"

"Only what I hear," Hasso said. "I don't hear about watchtowers — I'm sorry. But this is the first time I am here, your Majesty. I am stranger here. This place can still surprise me. It still does surprise me every day."

"Well, you surprise us, too — mostly in good ways," King Bottero said. "Except when you show you don't belong here, we think you do."

"Thank you," Hasso said, even if the king meant, You don't seem too barbarous most of the time. He pointed toward Castle Galats. "Do we take that place, or do we just mask it?"

"Mask it," Bottero said at once. "The men from Castle Pedio can do that. Neither place has a big garrison."

"However you like," Hasso said. "I just don't want any nasty surprises when we go by. I don't like getting nasty surprises. Giving is better." He pointed toward the beacon fire in the Grenye tower. "We don't give any for a while now."

"Sooner or later, we will." As usual, the king sounded confident. "When the Grenye try to face us, we'll make them pay. Your striking column will help, by the goddess."

"I hope so." Hasso had all kinds of reasons for saying that. He wanted to make Marshal Lugo look like the stick-in-the-mud, the French general in Lenello's clothing, that he was. He wanted to make his own stock rise. And he wanted to beat Bucovin, which would help him reach both those other goals.

The Grenye in Castle Galats jeered at the Lenelli as the invaders went by. Bottero's men stayed out of arrow range of the watchtower, so Hasso couldn't get a close look at the barbarians' equipment. Some of the Grenye seemed to be wearing iron, while others made do with bronze.

"They know iron when Lenelli come here?" Hasso asked Aderno.

"Yes, but they were just learning to use it." The wizard looked as if he'd just bitten down on a particularly sour pickle. "They've learned a lot more since — from us. They buy as much as they make themselves — from us."

"Why sell to them?"

"Some people care more about money than anything else, and don't care how they get it," Aderno replied. "Is it not the same in your world?"

Since it was, Hasso nodded and let it go. He looked around. "So we are inside Bucovin now?"

"Oh, yes." Aderno nodded, too. "Can't you see how shabby everything looks?"

To Hasso's eyes, the land on this side of the border seemed no different from the land on the other side. The peasants in Bottero's kingdom were also Grenye. The thatch-roofed cottages here looked the same as the ones farther east — to the Wehrmacht officer, anyway. "How do you mean?" he asked.

Aderno made an exasperated noise. "Anyone with eyes to see would know… Well, maybe you don't have eyes to see. All right, then." He started ticking points off on his fingers. "A lot of their crops here are native weeds. They don't grow the fine vegetables and good grains we brought with us from across the sea. You can live on millet and sorghum and squashes, but why would you want to?" He made a face.

Were the Grenye slobs, or was Aderno a snob? Some of both, probably, Hasso judged. He and his buddies had sneered at the Ivans for eating kasha and sunflower seeds… till they gradually realized that sneering at the Ivans wasn't such a good idea any which way. "I see," he said slowly.

"Do you? I hope so," Aderno said. "I was just getting started, though. Their livestock is inferior, too. They had no chickens before we came, only ducks — miserable things, too — and half-tame quail and partridges. Their pigs are only a short step up from wild boars. The sheep and cattle they breed, they stole from us. Their native horses are barely even ponies. And they have no unicorns at all. They can't ride them, and unicorns also come from across the sea." He laid a hand on the side of his mount's white neck.

Europeans would have said the same kinds of things about Red Indians. But how much of what the Grenye had was really that much worse than its Lenello equivalents, and how much just seemed unfamiliar to Aderno and his folk? Hasso didn't know the answer. He did know Aderno didn't even see the question.

"Are you sure the Grenye can't ride unicorns?" he asked. An edge came into his voice as he added, "Remember, not long ago you say that about me."

This time, Aderno might have been sucking on the mother of all lemons. "I was wrong about you, and it cost me. I am not wrong about the Grenye, by the goddess." He paused thoughtfully. "Maybe I was wrong when I said they had no unicorns. They've stolen a few from us, the way they steal big horses to improve their herds, and it's possible that they've bred the unicorns, too. But no one has ever seen a Grenye on unicornback, not in all the years since Lenelli crossed the sea."

He sounded positive. Hasso, who'd been here a matter of months, was in no position to contradict him. "I see," the German said again — let Aderno make whatever he wanted of that.

Before long, Hasso saw something else, too: the first armed Grenye he'd spotted in the field. They weren't an army, only scouts — a handful of men on horseback who kept their eye on King Bottero's army but stayed as far away from it as they could while still doing their job. Every so often, one of them would ride off; no doubt to report to their superiors, while another took his place.

"We should catch some of them," Hasso said. "We should find out what they know. We should find out what they think."

"We should find out if they think," Aderno said scornfully. "Besides, they'll just scurry off into the woods if we chase them. You see how close to the trees they stay?"

"Yes." Hasso had noticed that. "Can't you bring them in by magic, though?"

He'd rarely seen any Lenello at a loss. He did now with Aderno. "By the goddess, I don't know," the wizard said. "It would be child's play on the other side of the border. Here? Well, I can find out."

Back in his own world, Hasso might have asked a radio technician to find the direction from which a Soviet signal was coming. Aderno set to work with that same kind of unflustered competence. He rummaged first in his belt pouches and then in his saddlebags for what he needed. He found a chunk of amber, a small stone that showed different colors depending on how the sun struck it — an opal, Hasso realized — and a smooth, rounded pebble that looked thoroughly ordinary.

"What is that?" Hasso asked, pointing at it.

"A capon's gizzard stone. A five-year-old capon's gizzard stone," Aderno answered with relentless precision. "It aids in gaining one's desire from any man. The other two, taken together, will make you victorious against your adversaries."

Oh, yeah? Hasso thought. Back home, he wouldn't have believed it, though he knew plenty of high-ranking Nazis were gaga for the occult and the supernatural. Much good that had done them, or the Reich. The way Germany was collapsing seemed to him the best argument in the world — in that world — against sorcery.

But things were different here. On the back of his unicorn, Aderno started juggling the three stones. Hasso Pemsel thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever seen, especially when the wizard thrust out his right index finger at a Grenye rider while all three stones were in the air at the same time.

It might have looked ridiculous. Hell, it did look ridiculous. That didn't mean it didn't work. The Grenye from Bucovin — the wild Grenye, the Lenelli would have called him — didn't want to ride up to King Bottero's army. He didn't want to approach the wizard on the unicorn. Hasso could see that more and more plainly as the fellow rode closer and closer. No matter how unwilling he was, he did what Aderno required of him, not what he wanted to do.

"Well, well." Aderno sounded pleased with himself. "Isn't that nice. Isn't that something?"

"Something, yes." Hasso wasn't sure what. He was sure it made his hackles rise. But as long as it worked, how much did that matter?

"Here you are, Grenye," Aderno said as the horseman came up alongside him and Hasso. "Do you speak Lenello?"

"Yes, I speak it." The Grenye's accent was thicker than Hasso's, but he made himself understood.

"Tell me your name," Aderno said, and then, in an aside to Hasso, "One more sorcerous hold on him."

Again, the Grenye didn't want to but found he had no choice. "I am called Nebun," he said.

Instead of a Lenello-style conical helm, he wore a leather cap strengthened with iron strips. His mailshirt showed less skill than the elegant armor Lenelli wore.

His sword, though… Hasso would have guessed a Lenello smith forged it, for it seemed the same as the ones Bottero's soldiers carried. What had Lenin said about capitalists selling the Soviet Union the rope it would use to hang them? No, some things didn't change a bit from one world to another.

"What are your orders, Nebun?" Aderno asked, and twisted his fingers in a certain sign. Again to Hasso, he added, "Keeps him docile."

So it did — or it seemed to, anyhow. Nebun answered readily enough: "To spy out your force. To see how strong you are."

"Tell your superiors we have twice the numbers you really see," Hasso put in. "Tell them you fear for your land. Do not let them persuade you of anything else no matter what they say. Do you follow me?"

"Yes, sir." Nebun might have been talking to a superior. "I will obey you as I would obey my own father."

Hasso glanced over to Aderno. "Can I rely on that?" he asked — in German, so the Grenye wouldn't understand.

Aderno's magic let him follow the alien tongue. He nodded. "I think so. You might almost have set a spell on him." He glanced over at Nebun. "For all I know, you did. You are not without power, as my lost goldpiece reminds me."

The idea that he might be able to work magic made Hasso want to laugh. The extra gold jingling in his belt pouch was a good reason to take the notion seriously, though. "Go, Nebun," he said. "Go back to your chiefs. Tell them how strong we are. Tell them we are very strong. Tell them you see all this with your own eyes. Go now."

"I go." Nebun booted his pony up into a walk, and then into a trot. He wasn't such a smooth rider as most of the Lenelli, but he got the job done.

"That should confuse them," Hasso said. "If they think they know things that are not so, they get confused. They make mistakes."

"If they think they know…" Aderno raised a wry eyebrow. "I get confused, too."

"Finding out what is really so is important," Hasso said. "The one who knows that better usually wins."

Inevitably, the German invasion of Russia came to mind again. The Wehrmacht thought Stalin had far fewer divisions than he proved able to pull out of his hat. By the time the first winter's fighting was under way, the Germans had destroyed as many divisions as they'd believed the Russians could raise. But more Ivans kept coming at them, and more, and still more… and now, if Hasso were magically transported back to Berlin, it would be a Berlin under the Hammer and Sickle. Anything was better than that.

"One thing that is really so I already told you — we can work magic and the Grenye can't," Aderno said. "Now you see it with your own eyes."

"I see that you can work magic and that that Grenye can't," Hasso half-agreed. He said nothing about his own magical abilities, if any. "But if this is so wonderful, why don't Lenelli take Falticeni a long time ago?"

The wizard gave him a dirty look but no answer. Not even Velona had an answer for that, or so it seemed. If your men are so much better, why didn't they take Moscow? How many times would people throw that in Germany's face? The surviving veterans would blame the winter, the Russian T-34 tank's wide tracks, the Siberian troops brought in to stiffen the Soviet line… everyone and everything but themselves. No, some things didn't change a bit from one world to another.

"Do the Grenye in Bucovin worship the goddess?" Hasso asked Velona at breakfast the next morning. "Or do they have their own gods, the ones they have before you Lenelli come here?"

She sipped from a mug of beer. Hasso still missed coffee and tobacco. This was this world's New World, wasn't it? Why didn't it have tobacco in it? Whatever the reason, it didn't. After swallowing, Velona said, "Some worship the goddess. They've seen she has true power. Their old gods are just statues of stone or wood. Some of them look pretty, but what do they do?"

She might have been a Hebrew prophet mocking the local Baals. No sooner had that thought crossed Hasso's mind than he laughed at himself. If the prophets had any descendants, the Reich would have settled most of them once and for all. You didn't ask questions about what the Einsatzgruppen were up to. You didn't really need to ask. The big wheels were serious about making sure the lands they ruled were Judenfrei.

But the goddess here wasn't sleepy like the long-ignored Baals of Palestine. She didn't ignore her worshipers, the way the Jews' God forgot about them. She was as real as a river. No wonder the Grenye started bowing down before her. The wonder was that any of them stayed stubborn enough to keep on following whatever gods they'd had before.

That brought up another question. "What goed — no, went, curse it — wrong when you went into Bucovin before?" Hasso asked.

Before answering, Velona smiled at him. "Your Lenello is getting better all the time."

"Baptism by total immersion," Hasso said in German. It wouldn't have meant anything to Velona even in her language. But when he needed to use Lenello to talk at all, he had the biggest incentive in the world for getting fluent as fast as he could. He could have used Aderno to translate… if he and the wizard didn't rub each other the wrong way all the time. He'd learned the language faster because he was doing it on his own. With an effort, he brought his mind back to the business at hand. "Bucovin."

"Yes, Bucovin." Velona stopped smiling. "I don't know what went wrong. I told you that before, I think. Things… stopped working, that was all. The whole country might have been trying to see through me, and finally it did."

"How do you stop it?" Hasso asked.

"If I knew, I would tell you," she answered. "Once we settle our knights on the land, once we have our wizards in the towns, things should take care of themselves. I hope so, anyhow."

Hasso didn't know what to say to that. The Germans had been sure that, once they seized Moscow, things would take care of themselves. Then, after Moscow didn't fall, they'd been just as sure that grabbing Stalingrad would set everything right. Then, after Stalingrad didn't fall… Hasso forced his mind out of that unhappy groove.

Saddling his horse and getting going did the job. The tackle the Lenelli used wasn't the same as what he'd known in Germany. The way horses and people were made dictated a lot about bits and reins and saddles and straps and stirrups, but not everything. He had to think about what he was doing here, more than he would have with familiar equipment.

The land was new, too. Far off to the east, he saw mountains against the horizon. Were they visible from Castle Svarag? If they were, he didn't remember them. A Lenello told him that was the Palmorz Range. "What is on the other side of it?" Hasso asked.

"Well, I don't exactly know," the horseman answered. "Not many Lenelli have been over it, and you know what liars travelers are. Could be anything." He shook his head. "Well, I don't think there's mermaids. Dragons, though, maybe."

"Dragons?" Hasso had seen them on everything from banners to belt buckles. But he could have seen them on things like that in Germany, too. "Are they real?"

"I hope to spit," the Lenello said, or words to that effect. "Didn't one burn down a village in King Cherso's realm three winters back? Wouldn't he have burned another one if a catapult didn't get lucky and put a bolt through his wing and make him fly away?"

King Cherso's realm lay well to the north of Bottero's. That was all Hasso knew about it. No, now he knew one thing more: it had a dragon problem, or had had one three winters back. "If the catapult missed, what would the dragon have done?" he asked — he was starting to get the hang of the subjunctive.

"Torn up everything in sight, I expect," the Lenello said. "That's what dragons do when they get pissed off, right?"

"I suppose," Hasso answered — a handy phrase that could mean anything or nothing. Hasso approved of cliches. They helped him get his meaning across, even when he hardly had one.

By the way Bottero's army behaved in Bucovin, it might have been an angry dragon. A lot of Grenye farmers fled before it, taking as much of their livestock with them as they could. The Lenelli grabbed everything the locals left behind. The pigs and occasional cattle and sheep went into the army's larder. So did the ducks and odd chickens and geese. So did all the grain the soldiers could find, regardless of type. The horses and donkeys were mostly too small for Lenelli to ride, but the invaders took them anyhow, to help haul wagons and carts.

And farmhouse after farmhouse, village after village, went up in flames. Bottero's soldiers took a childlike delight in arson. Hasso hadn't known any soldiers, Germans or Russians or Poles or Frenchmen or British, who didn't. He would have bet the Grenye got hard-ons watching things burn, too. But there was more to it than that.

The way the Lenelli went about torching houses and smithies and taverns and shops, they might have felt the Grenye had no right to build such things. No, it wasn't that they might have felt the Grenye had no right to do it — they did feel that way, and weren't shy about saying so.

"Goddess-cursed savages," a sergeant growled as he touched a burning brand to the overhanging thatch of a farmhouse roof. He swore some more when the thatch, which was damp, sent up a cloud of thick gray smoke without catching the way he wanted it to. In the end, persistence paid, and he got the farmhouse blazing. "They've got their nerve, pretending to be as good as we are."

"Where do you want them to live?" Hasso asked, genuinely curious. "In holes in the ground?"

The sergeant spat. "They'll be in holes in the ground when we're done with 'em, all right. Only thing is, they won't be living."

Bucovin affronted Aderno at least as much as it did the underofficer. The wizard was more articulate about it — or at least mouthier. "Do you know what this land reminds me of?" he said as the Lenelli rode past the funeral pyre of a village.

"No, but you're going to tell me, aren't you?" Hasso said.

Aderno missed the sarcasm. "Yes, I am," he said, and Hasso carefully didn't smile. "You've seen the paintings we do, haven't you?"

"Oh, yes. Fine work." Hasso sounded more enthusiastic than he was. Some of the canvases he'd seen in Drammen did show talent, but the Lenelli were just starting to understand perspective. To someone who'd admired work by Raphael and Rembrandt and Rubens, among many others, these people were no better than promising amateurs.

"I should hope so." Confident of his own folk's superiority, Aderno heard enthusiasm whether it was there or not. "Well, the Grenye remind me of a twelve-year-old trying to copy, say, Tibero's Coming Ashore. You know the painting I mean?"

"Oh, yes," Hasso said again. To his eye, the artist had tried to do too much in not enough space. Ships and heroic Lenelli and savage Grenye and waves and animals peering from the forest… and the naked goddess watching everything next to the sun. Sometimes art was more about knowing what to leave out than about what all to put in. Tibero wasn't a bad artist, but he'd never figured that out.

"Well, if a child tries to copy a masterpiece, all you get is a sorry mess," the wizard said. "And that's what Bucovin is — a sorry mess."

Hasso nodded. And the Lenelli were making it a worse mess. They didn't care what the Grenye thought of them because of their fondness for arson. The Wehrmacht hadn't cared what the Ivans thought when it marched into Russia, either. Later… Later turned out to be too late.

A Lenello died of lockjaw not long after Bottero's army entered Bucovin. Hasso wondered how the warrior managed to puncture himself. With so much manure around, a tiny wound was all it took. No vaccine or antitoxin here — even the idea for them was a universe away. Hasso hadn't seen or heard of smallpox in this world, for which he was duly grateful. He did know that cowpox could keep you from coming down with the horrible disease. And, except for first aid, his knowledge of medicine started and stopped right there.

He wondered when the Grenye would try to fight back. Or would they at all? Would they try to suck the Lenelli into their heartland and let winter deal with them, the way the Russians did with Napoleon? How bad were winters here, anyway? Milder than Russia's, anyhow, from what Velona said.

"Cursed Grenye are cowardly scuts," King Bottero said when Hasso asked him what the enemy was up to. "If they can keep from fighting us, chances are they will."

Not half an hour after the king said that, an excited courier brought word that a Grenye scout had popped up from behind a bush, shot an arrow into the unarmored leg of a Lenello scout, and managed to get away in the confusion that followed. "Miserable skulker!" The man who brought the news sounded furious at the native. "Stinking sneak!"

Remembering how the partisans went about their business in German-occupied Russia, Hasso said, "Teamsters need to be careful. Outriders need to be careful. The Grenye may go after people who don't expect to fight."

"Only proves they're cowards," the king said.

"If they hurt us, how much does that matter?" Hasso asked. "War is not about being brave. Not all about that, anyway."

Bottero stared at him, an uncomprehending gape he'd seen too many times. "What is war about, then?" the king demanded.

"Winning." Hasso's one-word answer came without the least hesitation. It was the answer of a man who'd seen his comrades show more courage than humanly possible in the grinding retreat across Russia and Poland and Germany itself. It was the answer of a man who'd seen that courage on display in Berlin, where in the end it would do no good at all. "Winning, your Majesty," the Wehrmacht officer repeated. "In the end, nothing else counts."

King Bottero still didn't get it. "Well, of course we'll win," he said. "How we do it counts, too."

Hasso saw only one thing to say to that, and he said it: "Yes, your Majesty." He didn't believe it for a minute. A few Lenelli — Orosei sprang to mind — knew better. The rest of them were full of chivalric nonsense… except when they were pillaging Bucovinan farmhouses and firing Bucovinan villages. That was the small change of war, though. In battle, they could show their style.

His deep attacking column let the Lenelli show their style. Bottero had probably said he could try it out for just that reason. After everything Hasso had seen on all the fronts of Europe, he'd given up on style. Only results mattered.

The natives seemed to agree with him. They dug pits in the road ahead of the advancing Lenello army and mounted sharp stakes in the bottom. Those killed one horse and wounded a rider. Then Bottero's men started to be more careful.

When they saw that the roadway looked suspicious, they pulled off into the fields to either side of the dirt track.

Before long, the Grenye started digging pits in the fields, too. Those were harder to spot than the ones in the road. They killed several horses and a couple of Lenelli. They also infuriated the survivors.

Some of the Lenelli wanted to kill all the Bucovinans they found from then on to warn the others not to do such things. Velona was in that camp, which worried Hasso. She did make it plain she was speaking for herself, not for the goddess. That being so, Bottero had the nerve to say no. "After we conquer this country, who will till the land if we use up all the peasants?" he demanded, and no one had an answer for him.

Frightfulness… Hasso had mixed feelings about it. The Germans had used it widely, of course. Sometimes it intimidated people into behaving. Other times the hatred it stirred up only made occupied areas boil with resistance. You couldn't know which ahead of time.

Frustration and anger built up in Bottero's army because there were no enemy soldiers to attack. And then, all at once, there were. Lenello scouts reported a large force of Grenye ahead, blocking Bottero's advance deeper into Bucovin.

When the news came back, the Lenelli burst into cheers. "Now they'll pay for screwing around with us!" a horseman yelled.

"Now we'll see how well your famous attacking column works," Marshal Lugo told Hasso. The German had no trouble understanding the words behind the words. Now we'll see how smart you really are, the marshal meant.