Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

Berbec came back with wine. Hasso wondered where he'd got it. From the king's cooks, maybe? If Berbec said the goddess wanted something, who would have the nerve to tell him no? Even Bottero would think twice before he did that.

The wine was thick and sweet, like all the vintages here. Anybody with a sophisticated palate would have thrown up his hands in despair. Hasso didn't give a damn. The alcohol gave him a jolt, and the sugar gave him another one. By the time he'd downed a big mug, he'd improved all the way up to elderly.

Velona drank some, too. Then she kissed him one more time. He didn't know about kisses sweeter than wine, but kisses sweetened with wine were pretty nice. And he remembered Berbec, and the line in the Bible about not binding the mouths of the cattle that thresh the grain. He sloshed the wine jar. It was almost empty, but not quite. He gave it to the Bucovinan. "Here," he said. "Finish this."

"Me?" Berbec sounded astonished. Velona looked even more astonished, and angry, too. Hasso nodded, pretending he didn't see the storm on her brow. Berbec gulped hastily, then gave a sort of half-bow. "Much obliged, master," he said, and scurried away before that storm burst.

It did, as soon as he was gone. "Keeping slaves content is one thing. Wasting wine on them is something else," Velona said pointedly.

"So I'm a crappy master. The world won't end," Hasso said. "I don't have it in me to fight right now, either. Let's see how the magic turns out, all right?"

He wondered if a soft answer would turn away wrath. Velona followed her own road, first, last, and always. If you weren't heading in that direction, you were commonly smart to stay out of her way. But she just said, "I'll try to talk sense into you later, then."

If those weren't words of love, Hasso didn't think he'd ever heard any.

Come morning, he looked up into the sky. It was still cloudy. It wasn't exactly raining, but it wasn't exactly not raining, either. A fine mist got his face wet.

He had the feeling someone was watching him. He looked around, but the only person he saw was Berbec. The servant had his tunic off. He was getting lice and their eggs out of the seams. Hasso wondered how many times he'd done that since 1939. More than he wanted to remember, anyhow. You never got ahead of the goddamn bugs. You had a bastard of a time staying even.

"Are you watching me?" Hasso asked." Were you watching me?" Yes, pasts and futures were starting to come.

Berbec paused. After crushing something between his thumbnails, he said, "I try to keep an eye on you, see what you want." He had a mat of hair on his chest and belly. He also had some impressive muscles. He might be a runt, but he was a well-built runt.

And he and Hasso were talking past each other. "No," the Wehrmacht officer said. "I mean, were you watching me just now?"

"Not me." Berbec shook his head. "I was paying attention to these lousy things." He looked surprised, then started to laugh. His Lenello was also imperfect, and he'd made the joke by accident.

"All right. Maybe it isn't — wasn't — you, then." Hasso looked around again. He still didn't see anyone else close enough to have given him the willies that way. He looked up into the sky again. The mist kept coming down, but it was no more than mist.

And the feeling that he was being watched got worse. He remembered the Bucovinan envoy, and he remembered how Velona felt when she got deep into Bucovin. The land wasn't on the Lenelli's side here. Did the land include the sky? He didn't know. How could he? He was more foreign in these parts than the Lenelli were, a million times more foreign. His sorcery might not have stopped the rain, but did seem to have slowed it down. Would that be enough to get the countryside pissed off at him?

If it was, how worried did he need to be?

He was still chewing on that, and not liking the taste of it very much, when King Bottero strode over to him. The king paused every few steps to kick mud off his boots. Berbec saw him coming, too, and unobtrusively got lost. Bottero's smile almost made a substitute for sunshine. "You see? I knew you could do it," he said.

"Did I do it?" Hasso shrugged. "I don't know, your Majesty. Still some rain." He blinked as a drop got him in the eye.

"Not bloody much." King Bottero was inclined to look on the bright side of things. "It was coming down like pig piss" — which was what the Lenelli said when they meant it was raining cats and dogs — "but now we've only got this drizzle. We can cope with this. The other, that was pretty bad."

"I don't know if this is because of me," Hasso repeated. "If it starts raining hard again — "

"In that case, you'll work your magic again and slow it down." The king didn't have to listen to anybody if he didn't feel like it. The Fuhrer hadn't had to, either. Hitler was still in Berlin when Hasso disappeared from that world. If he was lucky now, he was dead. If he wasn't so lucky, Stalin had him. Hasso had trouble thinking of anything worse than getting caught by Uncle Joe.

And Stalin didn't have to listen to anybody, either.

"It's still muddy." Bottero kicked glop off his boots again. "But if it doesn't get any worse than this, we'll manage. It's on to Falticeni."

"I hope so, your Majesty." Hasso meant that, anyway.

The king slapped him on the back. "You can do it. We can do it. And you will do it, and so will we." Off he went, pausing every now and then to clear those boots.

When the army set out, of course, the ground was still muddy from all the rain that had fallen before. That meant the Lenelli still had to move slowly. Hasso's horse probably felt like doing what Bottero had done. No matter what it felt like, it kept slogging forward.

One bit of good news: with all that rain, the Bucovinans couldn't burn everything in the path of the king's army. They did dig more camouflaged pits in the roadway, as they had when the Lenelli forced their way across the Oltet. A few unwary scouts rode their horses into them. The sharp stakes set up at the bottom of the pits pierced men and horses alike.

Bottero fumed when supplies didn't come up fast enough to suit him. "What are our wizards doing back there?" he complained. "Are they too busy screwing little brown women to pay attention to their proper business?"

He was screwing little brown women himself, or at least one little brown woman. No one seemed to want to mention Sfinti to him. Hasso, a near-stranger in these ranks, found discretion the better part of valor. Orosei did remark, "It's muddy behind us, too, your Majesty."

"Well, yes," Bottero said. "But we need the food, curse it."

"Jumping up and down about what you can't help won't make it any better," the master-at-arms said. Hasso would have liked to tell King Bottero the same thing, but didn't know how the monarch would take it from him. Orosei, more at ease in a society where he'd belonged since birth, didn't hesitate.

And the king did take it from him. A sheepish grin spread across Bottero's face. "It makes me feel better," he said.

"Hurrah." Orosei wasn't afraid to be sarcastic to his sovereign, either. And King Bottero laughed out loud, for all the world as if the soldier were kidding.

Somewhere up ahead lay Falticeni. Over the next set of hills? Past the next forest? Around the next bend in the road? The Germans had looked for Moscow like that in the winter of '41, and they knew exactly where it was. Half the time, the Lenelli seemed to think Falticeni lay somewhere over the rainbow. With the maps they had, who could blame them? They knew its direction, but not where along that line it was.

And, the farther east they went, the worse the rain got again. Hasso worked his amateur spell once more. He was smoother at it the second time around; he didn't come close to cooking himself in his own juices, the way he had the first try. But he couldn't see that the magic did much to the weather this time.