Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

No, he was nobody's fool. "That's right," Hasso said.

"The Lenelli have all kinds of things. They are clever, the Lenelli." Maybe Berbec felt he could talk freely about them because Hasso wasn't one. "But they don't have thunderflashers." He eyed Hasso again, this time, the Wehrmacht officer judged, apprehensively. And why not? If the Lenelli all carried Schmeissers, Bucovinan resistance would last a minute and a half, tops.

"Can't make them here." Hasso wanted the words back as soon as they came out. Some Intelligence officer he was, blabbing like a fool!

Velona came up to the two of them. As soon as she saw Berbec, she understood what was going on. "He's one you caught yourself?" she asked. When Hasso nodded, she went on, "Good. You've been doing too much for yourself." She brushed her lips across his and walked on.

Berbec stared after her — not as a man will watch a good-looking woman, but more as anyone might stare at a lightning bolt smashing down close by. "That was — the goddess — the woman who, uh, carries the goddess." He might be a slave, but this was the first time Hasso had seen him without his self-possession.

"Yeah." Hasso nodded.

"She doesn't need a thunderflasher to cut through us," Berbec said sadly. "Only a sword — and herself."

Hasso nodded again, not without sympathy. What was it like for the Grenye, without magic of their own, to try to stand against Velona when the goddess was strong in her? Like a lone rifleman against a King Tiger panzer? Worse, probably, because the panzer and the infantryman belonged to the same world. The Grenye had to feel the very heavens were fighting against them — and they wouldn't be so far wrong, would they?

Berbec's stare swung back to Hasso. It was as if he could still see the mark of her kiss glowing on the Wehrmacht officer's face. "She is… your woman?" He sounded like someone afraid to be right.

"Yes, she's my woman." Hasso felt the irony in his voice. Berbec might not understand, but, to the Lenello way of thinking, Hasso was Velona's man and not the other way around.

He succeeded in impressing his new servant, anyway. "I knew you were a great lord. I already told you that," Berbec said. "But I didn't know you were such a great lord." He bowed himself almost double. "I cry pardon. Forgive me."

He wouldn't straighten till Hasso touched him on the back. "It's all right. Forget it. I still put on trousers like anybody else. I still shit. I still piss. I still need you to see to my horse. That's what you say you do." He was getting better with past tenses, but he still wasn't good enough to feel comfortable using them.

"I do it," Berbec said. He seemed mostly stuck in the present indicative, too. For no sensible reason, that made Hasso feel better.

King Bottero's army pressed deeper into Bucovin. The natives didn't stand and fight again. They didn't go away, either. Raiders picked off Lenello scouts. Horsemen attacked the wagons that brought supplies forward. And, to Hasso's dismay if not to his surprise, flames and clouds of smoke rose up in front of the invaders.

"They burn their own crops," he said. The Russians had scorched the earth in front of the oncoming Wehrmacht. Later, moving from east to west instead of from west to east, the Germans used the same ploy to slow down the Red Army. The Ivans screamed about war crimes. They hadn't said a word when they used those tactics. Winners said what they pleased. Who could call a winner a liar?

King Bottero eyed the smoke and sniffed the breeze. Hasso couldn't smell the burning, not yet. Maybe the enormous Lenello could. "They think they'll make us too hungry to go on," the king said.

"Are they right?" Hasso asked.

"Not yet," Bottero said, an answer that struck the German as reasonable.

Aderno and the other wizards put their heads together. They worked a spell that might have come straight out of Macbeth. They danced; they chanted; they incanted. Dark clouds filled the sky. Rain came down — rain poured down, in fact. It drenched the fires. Whether it did the Lenelli any good was a different question, and one harder to answer. The roads got soaked, too, and turned to mud.

Hasso remembered the first Russian rasputitsa, the time of rain and muck. He remembered motorcycle drivers, their mechanized steeds hub-deep — sometimes headlight-deep — in muck, their rubberized greatcoats ten or twenty kilos heavier than they should have been, their goggles so splashed that they were almost useless (or, sometimes, worse than useless), the eyes behind those goggles gradually growing alarmed as one rider after another began to see it wouldn't be as easy as the High Command claimed. He remembered bogged-down panzers and artillery pieces, half-drowned horses, the sucking goo trying to pull the marching boots off his feet with every step. He remembered bone-crushing exhaustion at the end of every day — and well before the end, too.

Yes, the mud slowed down the Ivans. But they weren't trying to go forward, not that first autumn, anyhow. They were just trying to hold back the Germans, to keep the Wehrmacht out of Moscow. And they did, and blitzkrieg turned to grapple and slugging match… and Hasso found a magical way to escape from burning, pulverized Berlin, but not one the rest of the city would ever be able to use.

And so he was here in western Bucovin, listening to the rain patter down. Soldiers greased their mailshirts every morning and night and draped themselves with cloaks. They swore when they found tiny tumors of rust anyhow — as of course they did. The horses that squelched through the deepening ooze couldn't swear, but the men on their backs made up for that. And the teamsters who fought to keep supply wagons moving cursed even harder than the knights.

By the time it had rained for a couple of days, Hasso began to think the wizards' spell might be worse than the scorched-earth disease. By the time the rain had poured down for a week, he was sure of it. He rode up alongside Aderno, whose unicorn was so splotched and spattered with mud that it looked to have a giraffe's hide.

Hasso waved his arms up toward the weeping sky. "Enough!" he said. He waved again, like a conductor in white tie and tails pulling a crescendo from a symphony orchestra. "Too much, in fact! Call off your storm!"

Aderno's answering glance would have looked even hotter than it did had water not dripped from the end of the wizard's long, pointed nose. "It's not our storm any more," he said. "It's just… weather now."

"Well, work another spell and turn it into good weather, then," Hasso said.

Were there any justice in the world, the water on Aderno's nose would have started to steam. "What do you think we've been trying to do?" he said pointedly.

"I don't know," Hasso answered. "All I know is, it's still raining."

Aderno's gesture was as extravagant as the ones the German had used not long before. "Weather magic is never easy. We'd do a lot more of it if it were," he said. "And trying it here in Bucovin was worse. We were glad when we got what we wanted. Now — "

He broke off when a raindrop hit him in the eye. "Now you've got too much of what you want," Hasso finished for him. The wizard nodded unhappily. "And you can't close the sluice, either," Hasso said. In German, it would have been something like, And you can't turn it off, either. The Lenelli didn't have enough machinery to make phrases like that a natural part of their language.

"Air and sky and land in Bucovin don't want to listen to us," Aderno said. Hasso would have thought he was making excuses if Velona hadn't said the same thing.

Thinking of Velona, though, inspired him, as it often did — though not in the same direction as usual. Instead of erotic excess, his mind swung toward military pragmatism. "Do the air and sky and land here listen to the goddess?" he asked.