Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

"We're deeper into Bucovin now," Velona said in what had to be meant for consolation. "The land does work against spells here."

"Why isn't that magic?" Hasso asked irritably. "It screws magic up."

"It's like trying to fight a battle in the rain and mud," she answered. "It screws up everything. It's just the way things are here. If the Grenye worked magic, they'd have trouble with it, too."

But the natives didn't, couldn't, work magic. The Lenelli sneered at them for that, and made them out to be, well, Untermenschen on account of it. If the big blonds' big advantage faded, though, the farther east they went…

"We just have to do it the hard way, that's all," Velona declared. "We can do that, too. We're better warriors than those scrawny little buggers ever dreamt of being. And speaking of doing it the hard way…" She looked at him sidelong That turned out to be better consolation than all the words in the world.

The Bucovinans didn't seem to know they couldn't stand up against Bottero's army. Raiding parties tangled with his scouts. No mystery about where these bands came from: they rode down from the northeast, shot arrows at the Lenelli or pitched into them when enjoying the advantage of numbers, and then rode off again.

Bottero thought about sending Hasso forward with the scouts. "A wizard could remind the little bastards why we're better than they are," the king said.

"I don't know how much I can do on this ground." Hasso left it there: anymore and he would have looked bad.

"We'll save you," Bottero decided after some thought. "You go up with just a few of our men along, something stupid can happen. Don't want that, not when there's bound to be a big battle ahead. Chances are we'll need you more then."

"Whatever you say, your Majesty." Hasso was more relieved than he let on. The prospect of combat didn't faze him. After everything he'd been through, he had its measure. No, what did make him sigh (unobtrusively, he hoped) was the good sense King Bottero showed. He didn't throw away the potential of a large gain later for some small one — or the potential of that small one — now.

The striking column of Lenello knights practiced whenever it could. It had won a battle for the army, so even Marshal Lugo wasn't complaining about it anymore. The big blonds did like to fight aggressively; the idea fit them well enough once they got used to it. Punch a hole in the other fellow's line, then pour on through. What could be better than that?

Nothing — as long as it worked.

"This time, the Bucovinans likely expect us to do something with the column," Hasso warned. "A surprise is only a surprise once. We need to watch their line, see where the weakness is. Then we hit there." He slammed his right fist into his left palm.

Captain Nornat got the idea. "They'll give us a hole to go through, sure as sure," he predicted. "They're nothing but Grenye, after all. They always make sloppy mistakes like that. It's one of the reasons we keep thrashing them."

"You don't want to have to count on the other guy doing something dumb," Hasso said. "You want to be able to beat him even if he does everything as well as he can."

"Well, sure," the Lenello officer said. "But when he does screw up, you want to make him sorry."

Hasso nodded; he couldn't very well disagree. In Russia, you could bet the Ivans wouldn't move as fast as they should have. Lieutenants didn't dare do much on their own — they had to get authorization from higher up the chain of command. For that matter, so did colonels. Again and again, the Germans made them pay for being slow.

Hasso's laugh was so bitter, Nornat raised a questioning eyebrow. "Nothing," Hasso said, which was an out-and-out lie. The Wehrmacht had taken advantage of the Russians time and again, sure. And in the end, so what? Stalin won the goddamn war anyhow.

The Bucovinans' faults were different from the Russians'. These guys were still trying to figure out how the Lenelli fought. They didn't have enough practice to be as good as the invaders from across the sea. No wonder they screwed up every once in a while.

"They fall to pieces when we take Falticeni?" Hasso asked.

"They'd better!" Nornat said. "We grab their stupid king or lord or whatever they call him, we hold his toes to the fire, they'll spread their legs for us, never you fear."

"Good." That was what Hasso wanted to hear. He remembered how Skorzeny's paratroopers had stolen Mussolini. What if some of those guys had managed to grab Uncle Joe? Wouldn't that have been something? The Reich would have got what it wanted then, by God!

Or would it? Would some other Moscow bureaucrat have grabbed the reins instead and gone on fighting? How could you know with Russians? Stalin was a strong leader, but he didn't personify things the way Hitler did in Germany. You couldn't imagine the Reich without the Fuhrer. Russia might be able to go on without the tough bastard from Georgia.

What about Bucovin, which was the only enemy that mattered to Hasso nowadays? "What's the lord in Falticeni like?" he asked. "Can they find somebody to take over if we get our hands on him?"

"He's a Grenye," Nornat said. "He kind of pretends to be like a Lenello king, but it's just pretend. The savages used to think their lords were gods, like. That was before they found out we knew about the real gods and we could work magic on account of it. Now the poor stupid bastards don't know what the demon to think." His snort held more scorn than sympathy.

Magic here was like gunpowder in America: it not only gave the invaders an edge, it gave them a big, scary edge. But the Grenye were closer to the Lenelli than the American Indians had been to the Spaniards. They knew how to work iron, and they had had plenty of real kingdoms of their own.

If the Lenelli had guns as well as wizardry… That thought had gone through Hasso's mind before. But it was one for another time, another war. Bottero wouldn't let him fool around with sulfur and saltpeter and charcoal now, or stand by while he tried to show local smiths how to make cannon that wouldn't blow up.

Nornat hadn't said anything about whether the Bucovinans could get along without their lord. That probably meant he didn't know. If the Grenye had decided their kings weren't gods after all, they had a better chance of doing without them.

I hope we get to find out, that's all, Hasso thought.

The Bucovinans hadn't given up. They didn't seem afraid of the Lenelli, either, even if they couldn't fully match them. The raiding bands they sent out against Bottero's army got bigger and bolder, and slowed the army's advance. Several times, the king had to send reinforcements forward to keep his scouts from getting overwhelmed. And, in spite of all of Hasso's magic, the rain got worse again.

He waited for Bottero to scream at him. To his surprise, the king kept quiet. Velona explained why: "I reminded him how deep inside Bucovin we are. We can't expect things like that to go our way here. We just have to win anyway."

Maybe the Grenye didn't think their rulers were gods any more. King Bottero had no doubt Velona was at least part goddess, and that what she said went. After some of the things Hasso had seen, he didn't have many doubts along those lines, either.

And then the rain blew away. Hasso would have taken credit for it if he'd worked a spell any time recently. Since he hadn't, he just accepted it along with the Lenelli. The weather stayed cool — it was November, after all, or something close to it — but it was crisp and sunny: the kind of weather that made having seasons worthwhile. It seemed as if he could see for a thousand kilometers.

One of the things he could see was a smudge of smoke on the horizon ahead, a smudge big enough to mark a good-sized city or a really big camp. "Is that Falticeni?" he asked Velona, pointing. Are we there yet?