Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

As far as the Lenelli were concerned, what they'd done was all part of a day's work. They hardly looked at the smoldering ruins of Muresh. Instead, they started yelling for the cooks. Burning the place and massacring the people only seemed to have given them an appetite.

They hadn't killed everybody. A few Bucovinan men survived as slaves, a few women as — Hasso supposed — playthings. Some of the locals had the dazed look of people who'd lost everything in a natural disaster but somehow come through alive. Others seemed more calculating, perhaps trying to figure out how to make the best of what had happened to them. Seeing that thoughtful gleam in some of the women's eyes made Hasso want to cry and swear at the same time.

Berbec clung close to him — close enough to be annoying, like a dog that always stayed at his heel. "Why don't you get lost?" Hasso snapped when he'd had enough.

"If I leave you, master, I am lost," the captive replied. "I think someone will do for me." He hacked at his throat with the edge of his hand to leave no doubt about what he meant.

And he was right enough to embarrass the German. "All right. Stay with me, then," Hasso said roughly. "Enough killing."

"Too much killing," Berbec said.

King Bottero took matters into his own hands — or rather, used his own foot. He booted the cooks out of their cots and bedrolls. They grumbled, but they came. When the king woke you up, you either got to work or tried to assassinate him. None of the cooks seemed ready for anything that drastic.

Across the river, the Bucovinans in their castle would be eating breakfast, too. They had to know the Lenelli would try to cross the Oltet as soon as they could. They also had to know that, if Bottero's men made it across the river, their own chances weren't good. Hasso had seen and joined in more rear-guard actions than he liked to remember. Recruiting sergeants with medals and campaign ribbons all over their chests didn't talk about that kind of soldiering.

He was spooning up porridge when Bottero came over to him. Berbec tried to disappear without moving a muscle. He needn't have worried; the king either truly didn't notice him or affected not to. It amounted to the same thing either way. To Hasso, Bottero came straight to the point: "Do you know any easy way to get across the Oltet?"

"Is there a ford close by?" Hasso asked.

Bottero shook his big head. "No."

The Wehrmacht would have used rubber rafts to seize a bridgehead. No such items were part of the Lenello logistics train. "Have we got boats? Can we make rafts?"

"We don't have boats. How could we carry them along?" Bottero said. With ox-drawn wagons as his main supply vehicles, he had a point. "Building rafts would take too cursed long. The weather won't get better. I want to hit the Grenye again, just as soon as I can."

That made good sense. Even if the winter here wouldn't turn Russian, it wouldn't be a delight, either. Hasso shrugged. "Sorry, your Majesty. Then we have to do it the hard way — or can your wizards knock down that castle for you?"

What did the Americans call that? Passing the buck, that's what it was. King Bottero, who had been scowling, brightened. "I'll find out," he said, and stomped off.

Hasso carefully didn't smile. Even if the wizards told Bottero no, he'd get angry at them, not at his military adviser who'd fallen out of the sky. That suited Hasso just fine.

Berbec might have tried to disappear, but he'd kept his ears open. He sketched a salute. "You are not just a bold warrior, my master," he said. "You are sly, too."

"Danke schon" Hasso said, perhaps with less irony than he'd intended. He studied the Grenye he'd vanquished and then acquired. How much of that did Berbec mean, and how much was the grease job any slave with a gram of sense gave his master? Some of each, the German judged: the best flattery held a grain of truth that made all of it more likely to be believed.

"What do you say?" Berbec scratched his head over the sounds of a language only one man in this world would ever speak.

"I say, 'Thank you,'" Hasso answered, and then, "How do you say that in your language?" Berbec told him. When Hasso pronounced the words, Berbec's dark eyebrows twitched, so the German judged he'd made a hash of things. "Tell me when I am wrong," he said. "I want to say it right. Repeat for me, please." He'd had plenty of practice saying that in Lenello.

"You sure you want me to say you are wrong?" Berbec understood the dangers inherent in that, all right.

But Hasso nodded. "By the goddess, I do. I am angrier if I make mistake than if you tell me I make mistake."

"Hmm." The native's eyebrows were very expressive. Frenchmen had eyebrows like that. So did Jews in Poland and Russia. Their eyebrows hadn't done them any good. Neither had anything else. Berbec's… made Hasso smile, anyway. "Well, we see." The Bucovinan still seemed anything but convinced.

"If you tell me sweet lies and I find out, I make you sorry." Hasso tried to sound as fierce as… as what? As a Lenello who'd just sacked a town in Bucovin, that was what. Yes, that would do, and then some.

It would if it convinced Berbec, anyhow. "Hmm," he repeated. Next to the Lenelli, maybe I'm not such a tough guy after all. He'd spent five and a half years in the biggest war in the history of the world, most of the last four on the Russian front — and in spite of everything he'd seen and done, he was still a softie next to Bottero's knights and foot soldiers. Maybe that said something good about the civilization that had blown itself to smithereens from the Atlantic to the Volga. He smacked Berbec on the back, not too hard. "You listen to me, you hear?"

"You are my master. You could have killed me, and you didn't. Of course I listen to you," Berbec said. Something in his deep-set dark eyes added, If I feel like it.

Hasso did him a favor: he pretended not to see that. He just laughed and slapped the Bucovinan on the back again and got ready for another day of warfare, for all the world as if there hadn't been a sack and a slaughter here the day before. He'd done that kind of thing back in his own world, too.

King Bottero's artisans started gathering lumber from what was left of Muresh to resurface to bridge across the Oltet. That told Hasso the king's wizards hadn't come up with any brilliant ideas on their own. The artisans had to do considerable scrounging, too, because not much was left of Muresh.

Orosei came over to Hasso as the Wehrmacht man watched the artisans at work. "You didn't have any sneaky schemes for getting across?" the master-at-arms asked.

Hasso shrugged and spread his hands. "No miracles in my pockets. No ford. No boats. I think we have to do it the hard way."

"Oh, well." Orosei shrugged, too. "I told the king to ask you. It was worth a try"

"So you're to blame, eh?" Hasso made a joke of it. Orosei might have been doing him a favor.

"That's me." Orosei grinned. Either he wasn't trying to screw Hasso or he had more guile in him than the German guessed.

"I say to King Bottero, try the wizards." Hasso shrugged. "They have no miracles in their pockets, either."

"Too bad," Orosei said. "They talk big. I'd like 'em better if they delivered on more of their promises, though. That poor bastard the Bucovinans caught… If he was hot stuff, why didn't he turn 'em into a bunch of trout before they got to work on him?"

"Swords are faster than spells," Hasso said. So everybody had told him. Like a lot of things everybody said, it must have held some truth, or Flegrei would still be around. Hasso suspected it wasn't the last word, though.

Bottero's master-at-arms let out a sour chuckle. "Yeah, they are. A good thing, too, or clowns like you and me'd be out of work. When kings wanted to fight wars, they wouldn't use anybody but those unicorn-riding nancy boys." He spat in the mud to show what he thought of wizards.