Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

Hasso had seen his share of homos in the Wehrmacht, and maybe more than his share in the Waffen-SS, where they seemed to gravitate. Yeah, sometimes you could blackmail them. But when they fought, they fought at least as well as anybody else. Some of them, in fact, made uncommonly ferocious soldiers, because they didn't seem to give a damn whether they lived or died.

More boards thudded onto the stone framework of the bridge across the Oltet. The Bucovinans in the keep on the far bank watched the Lenelli work without trying to interfere… till Bottero's men replanked about half of the bridge. That brought them into archery range, and the Grenye started shooting as if arrows were going to be banned day after tomorrow.

A Lenello shot through the throat clutched at himself and tumbled into the turbid green water five meters below. He wore a heavy mailshirt; he wouldn't have lasted long even without a mortal wound. Another big blond warrior came back cussing a blue streak, an arrow clean through his forearm.

"You're lucky," somebody told the wounded man. "Now they can get it out easy — they won't have to push it through."

"Bugger you with a pinecone, you stinking fool," the bleeding Lenello retorted. "If I was lucky, this goddess-cursed thing would've missed." Good grammar would have called for a subjunctive there. None of the soldiers seemed to miss it. Like any language, Lenello spoken informally was a different beast from the one the schoolmasters taught. Hasso smiled reminiscently, remembering all the German dialects he'd coped with. He wouldn't have to worry about that any more.

The archery on the bridge was a different story. Other Lenelli fell, a few dead, more wounded. Some of the hurt men made it back under their own power; others needed buddies' help. Every soldier who helped a wounded friend was a soldier who wasn't retimbering the bridge. That work slowed to a crawl.

Bottero sent archers out onto the span to shoot back. They were bigger, stronger men than the Bucovinans in the castle. But most of their arrows fell short. The natives, shooting down from a height, had gravity on their side. Working against it was a losing proposition.

The Lenelli didn't need long to see as much. They quit shooting at the Grenye, and brought a troop of men with shields forward to protect the soldiers moving the planking forward. That wasn't perfect, but it worked well enough.

Meter by meter, the planking advanced. As it neared the east bank of the Oltet, the Bucovinans in the castle tried something new. They stopped shooting at the men setting the planks in place and sent volley after volley of fire arrows at the lumber itself. Some of the long shafts with burning tow and tallow attached near the tip fell into the river and hissed out. But the Lenelli had to stomp out lots of others or drench them with buckets of water dipped up from below. One soldier, in a display of bravado, dropped his trousers and pissed a flame into oblivion.

Here and there, though, the fire arrows started blazes before the Lenelli could suppress them. If those had spread, they might have driven King Bottero's men from the bridge. But some of the wood the Lenelli used was wet, which slowed down the flames. And the blonds managed to keep ahead of the fires in spite of everything their enemies could do.

When it became clear that the Lenelli were going to make it over the Oltet, the Bucovinans in the castle fled, as they'd abandoned Muresh. They left Bottero nothing he could use. Not long after they abandoned the tower, smoke started pouring from it — they'd fired whatever was left inside.

"Miserable bastards," Orosei grumbled.

"Good soldiers," Hasso said. "They do their job, then they pull out. They hurt us, they delay us, they deny us the tower. Good soldiers."

"They've got no business being good soldiers," the master-at-arms said. "They're nothing but a pack of Grenye savages."

He sounded personally affronted that the enemy should do anything right. Some Germans in Russia had sounded the same way about the Ivans in 1941. After that, such expressions of amazement came a lot less often. The Wehrmacht was the best army in the world — which meant the Red Army had the best schoolmasters in the world. The same was bound to be true here.

"How much do the Bucovinans learn from you?" Hasso asked.

"Too bloody much, if you want to know what I think." No, Orosei didn't want to take them seriously.

After the defenders fled, replanking the last bit of bridge went fast. With typical Lenello swagger, an officer leaped from the bridge onto the riverbank. He leaped — and he vanished. A moment later, a shriek rang out that Hasso could hear all the way across the river.

"What the — ?" he said. Orosei spread his hands and shrugged, as baffled as the man from another world.

Before long, the story came back across the bridge. So did the officer's body. The Bucovinans had dug themselves a mantrap on the riverbank: a cunningly concealed pit, with upward-pointing spikes set in the bottom. They knew their foes' habits, all right. They made the trap, and the Lenello jumped into it.

"I've heard of them doing things like that before," Orosei said. "You've got to watch out for the spikes they use. They smear shit on them, to poison the wounds they make."

"No matter here," Hasso said. He'd got a look at the dead officer. One of those spikes had gone through his chest, another through his throat. He'd bled like a stuck pig, which he might as well have been. His wounds wouldn't have time to fester.

More Lenelli stepped onto the eastern bank of the Oltet. They moved more cautiously than that first luckless officer had, and probed the ground in front of them with spears. They found another mantrap a few meters farther in from the water's edge. The Grenye had used the night well indeed.

Hasso wondered whether watchers would be waiting to harass the Lenelli as they filled in the pits. But the natives seemed to think they'd done everything they could to slow down Bottero's men here. The Lenelli crossed the Oltet with no further trouble.

Orosei pointed to smoke rising up in the east. "They're burning things again," he said. "Do they really think that will slow us down?"

"Yes," Hasso answered. "They're liable to be right, too. Where's the wagon train that should be here yesterday?"

"Should have been — you talk funny, you know that?" the master-at-arms said. "I don't know where the miserable wagons are. We can't detach enough men to cover all of them."

"I know," Hasso said. "Do you think the Bucovinans don't know, too? Without the wagons, without foraging on the country, what do we eat?"

Orosei looked around. "Mud. Rocks." He rubbed his belly. "Yum."

He startled a laugh out of Hasso. "All right — you have me there. But what do we do when we get hungry?"

"Eat the goddess-cursed Bucovinans, for all I care," the Lenello answered. For all Hasso knew, he meant it. The Germans thought the Ivans were Untermenschen. The Lenelli thought the same thing about the natives here, only more so. Did they think the Grenye were far enough down the scale to do duty as meat animals? Hasso decided he didn't want to find out.

He didn't want to let go of his own worries, either. "If the Bucovinans burn their crops, what do they eat?"

"Their seed grain," Orosei answered. "Then they starve along with us, but they take longer."

Bucovin was a big place — Hasso remembered the maps Bottero used. They weren't anywhere near so good as the ones the Wehrmacht used, but they showed that well enough. Could the natives bring in enough food from places where they weren't burning it to supply the ones where they were?

He had no idea. When he asked Orosei, the master-at-arms only shrugged his broad shoulders. "Beats me," he said. "You're the spymaster, right? You're the one who's supposed to find out stuff like that, right?"