Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

"Right," Hasso said tightly. Orosei made intelligence work sound easy, which only proved he'd never done any. By the end of 1941, the Germans were sure they'd knocked out as many divisions as the Red Army had at the start of the war — but the Russians weren't within a million kilometers of quitting, or of running out of men.

King Bottero sent out raiding parties to the north and south of his main line of march. They drove some pigs and a few cattle and sheep back to the army — and a few horses and donkeys as well. Those were riding or draft animals, but you could eat them if you had to. Though not a Frenchman who did it by choice, Hasso had chewed gluey horseflesh plenty of times on the Russian front. He'd been glad to get it then; if the Lenello cooks served it up, he'd eat it again now.

The raiders also brought back some grain the Grenye had already harvested. It didn't make up for the wagons that weren't going to get to the army, though. Had the Bucovinans burned that grain or captured it? Only they knew.

But they left no doubt about what had happened to the Lenello teamsters. They left a bloated, foul-smelling blond head in the road in front of Bottero's oncoming army. Someone had written a message in Lenello on a sheet of bark and put it by the head. Even Hasso had no trouble sounding out the two words: YOU NEXT.

When King Bottero saw that, Hasso thought he would have a stroke. Hitler's rages were the stuff of legend in Germany; Bottero's fury now matched any fit the Fuhrer could have pitched. For a little while, the German didn't understand just why the king was going off like a grenade. Yes, the warning in the road was grisly, but it was no worse than a hundred things the Lenelli had done when they sacked Muresh.

But then Bottero roared, "My horse — my horse, I tell you! — has more business pushing me around than these goddess-cursed, mindblind, soul-dead Grenye! They'll pay! Oh, how they'll pay!"

That made the Wehrmacht officer nod to himself. It came down to the business of who were Untermenschen again. Bottero really would have taken it better had his horse tried to tell him to go back to his own kingdom. For the Bucovinans to assume equality with the invaders, even an equality of terror, was a slap in the face to everything the Lenello kingdoms stood for.

And it wasn't just Bottero. All the Lenelli who saw the head and, even more important, who could read the crude threat by it, quivered with outrage. Velona was quieter than the king — Krakatoa erupting might have been noisier than Bottero, but Hasso couldn't think of anything else that would — but no less angry.

"They dare," she whispered, as if speaking louder might make her burst. "They truly dare to try conclusions with us, do they? Well, his Majesty has the right of it — we'll teach them a lesson they'll remember for the next hundred years. The ones we leave alive will, anyhow."

Germans had talked like that in Poland in 1939, and in Russia in 1941. Poles and Russians by the millions had died, too. The Germans had expected nothing less; those deaths were reckoned a prerequisite for clearing the Lebensraum Germans needed in the fertile croplands of the east.

What the Germans hadn't expected was how many of their own number would die. The Slavs were uncommonly stubborn about refusing to be cleared, and now Hasso's folk fled before them instead of driving them away.

Could that happen here? He had trouble believing it. The Bucovinans were brave, and there were lots of them, but they were outclassed in ways the Ivans hadn't been. Still, that head and the warning by it spoke of more implacable purpose than Hasso had looked to see from the natives.

They spoke of such things to him, anyhow. King Bottero took another message from them. "Burn the head," he commanded in a voice like iron. "His soul will ascend to the heavens." He looked around. Had he spotted any Bucovinans, he probably would have ordered them sacrificed to serve the Lenello teamster in the world to come. His face had that kind of intense, purposeful stare, anyhow. But, since he didn't, he pointed to the bark with the writing. "Dig a hole and throw that in. Don't cover it over yet, though, by the goddess."

His men sprang to obey him. That was partly their own anger working, and partly their fear. Anyone who tried standing against Bottero in that moment would have been a dead man in the next. The dirt by the side of the road was soft and easy to dig up. One of the Lenelli picked up the piece of bark with his fingertips, as if it were unclean. After he dropped it into the hole, he scrubbed his hands on the dead grass and then spat after it.

Spitting wasn't enough to satisfy Bottero. He dismounted from his great war-horse, walked over to the hole, undid his trousers, and took the most furious and majestic leak Hasso had ever imagined, let alone seen.

Even that didn't suffice, not for the king. He gestured to the leaders around him. Hasso didn't care one way or the other about pissing on an offensive sign. If Bottero wanted him to, he would. The king did, and so he did. Other officers' efforts made a pretty fair puddle in the hole in the ground.

Hasso was taken aback when Bottero waved Velona up to the hole. He could see why Bottero wanted to show the goddess' utter contempt for the Bucovinan warning, but… Velona didn't seem embarrassed; she just squatted and pissed. If it didn't bother her, Hasso told himself it shouldn't bother him, either.

After that, the Lenelli shoveled in some dirt, too. The army rode on. Velona looked… maybe unhappy, maybe just distant. "You don't like what you just did?" Hasso asked, guiding his horse up alongside hers.

"Oh," she said in some surprise, as if recalled to herself. "No. It isn't that. The natives deserve what we gave them. But… I wish he hadn't buried it, that's all. The earth here fights for Bucovin."

She'd said that before, about her last visit to the Grenye land. What did it mean here? Did even she know? Hasso thought about asking, and then thought again.

Bucovinan raiders hit harder at Bottero's scouts and supply wagons once the Lenelli got over the Oltet. They didn't stop the king's army, but they harassed it and slowed it down — the last thing it needed as fall moved on toward winter. Falticeni, the capital of Bucovin, lay… somewhere up ahead, anyhow.

As winter snow came down, a few German units fought their way into the suburbs of Moscow and, in the distance, got a glimpse of the Kremlin. Then the Ivans threw them back, and they never came so close again. Hasso wished he hadn't thought of that, even if the weather here was milder.

The king's temper frayed. He gathered his generals and wizards together so he could shout at them all at the same time. "Why aren't you keeping the outriders safe, curse you?" Bottero bellowed.

"We're doing everything we know how to do, your Majesty." An officer named Nuoro had charge of the supply train. "But there aren't enough of us, and there are too stinking many Bucovinans. Things go wrong sometimes, that's all."

"That's all, he says!" King Bottero rolled his eyes. "If things go on like this, we'll be eating our belts and our boots before too long."

He exaggerated — by how much, Hasso wasn't sure. Nuoro gave him a stiff, almost wooden, salute. "What would you have me do, your Majesty?"

"Push the supplies through. Don't let the teamsters get massacred. How hard is that?" Bottero demanded.

"In a land full of raiders and bushwhackers, sire, it's not so easy. How many more soldiers will you give me to keep the wagons safe?" Nuoro asked.

"Well, maybe a few," the king said. "I can't give you too many more. We need them to beat the savages back. That's what we're here for, you know."

"Maybe we haven't got enough soldiers for everything we need to do… sire," Nuoro said. How many times had the Germans worked through the same agonizing choices in the vastnesses of the Soviet Union? How much good did their agonizing do them? Not bloody much.