“Huh?” The Lenello trooper really was slow on the uptake. After much too long, he went, “Oh.” Then he got angry – not at himself, but at the Bucovinans. “Why, those cursed, sneaky sons of whores!”
“Right,” Hasso said tightly. If you expected the enemy to act dumb all the time, you’d get your head handed to you. The Ivans had driven that lesson home with a sledgehammer.
A Bucovinan pikeman, seeing Hasso on a horse without a lance, rushed at him shouting something unintelligible that probably wasn’t a compliment. As so many of the men from Bucovin had found out the hard way, being without a lance didn’t mean he was unarmed. He shot the Grenye down. By now, his horse didn’t jump out of its skin every time he fired.
But the Schmeisser ran dry just then. Automatically, Hasso reached for another clip. That was when he remembered he didn’t have one. He felt much more naked without the submachine gun than he would have without his mailshirt and the Wehrmacht helmet with a nasal riveted on. He slung the Schmeisser over his back; even though it was useless now and would be forevermore, he couldn’t stand to throw it away. Out came his sword. With it in his hand, he looked every inch the warrior. Maybe that would be enough to keep the Bucovinans from harrying him. After all, they couldn’t – he hoped to God they couldn’t – tell at a glance what a lousy swordsman he was.
Velona’s sword was red with blood. Scarlet drops flew from the blade as she brandished it. Her face bore the same intent, inward, seeking expression it did just before she came. Was she communing with the goddess, or did she really enjoy fighting? Hasso wondered whether he wanted to know.
More and more Grenye broke away from the battle and made off toward the east. Some went singly, others in knots of five or ten or twenty. The men who stuck together and still showed fight had a better chance of getting away in one piece. The Lenelli were like any soldiers in any world – they went after what looked like easy victims first. Why chance getting hurt when you didn’t have to?
A Bucovinan came up to Hasso with his helmet hanging on the point of his spear. “Peace,” he said in halting Lenello. “Peace, please.”
Hasso realized he didn’t know the rules for taking prisoners here. But that question no sooner formed in his mind than it got answered. Not ten meters away, a Lenello tapped a surrendering Grenye on the shoulder with his sword.
In Hasso’s world, he might have been knighting the enemy warrior. Not here. Here, with a doglike grin of relief, the Grenye threw down his weapons and kissed his captor’s hand. Then, hands clasped behind his head, he shuffled off toward the rear.
Now that Hasso knew how to do it, he did it. The Grenye in front of him also looked massively relieved. He understood that. Deciding to give up wasn’t the hard part. Getting the guys on the other side to accept your surrender was. Plenty of would-be POWs got killed. It wasn’t always ill-will. Sometimes the winners were just too busy to bother with prisoners, so they disposed of them instead.
“Thank you! Thank you! I is your slave!” the Bucovinan said as he fervently kissed Hasso’s hand. Did he mean that, or was he only being polite? In his own world, Hasso would have known the answer. Here … Well, he’d worry about it later.
He jerked his thumb in the direction the other captive had taken. “Go there,” he said. Away the Grenye went. He too put his hands behind his head. It wasn’t quite the same as raising them high, but it evidently meant the same thing.
Hasso looked around to see if any more fighting was left. There wasn’t much. As he watched, a Lenello used the broken shaft of his lance to smash in a Bucovinan’s skull. No, surrendering here was no easier than it was in Hasso’s world. The big blond knights with the brutal one laughed and cheered him on.
Lenello foot soldiers and dismounted lancers walked over the field. Every so often, they stooped to plunder or to finish off a wounded Bucovinan. Hasso’s men had done that with the Ivans often enough. Here, a knife across the throat did duty for a bullet in the back of the neck.
The Lenelli also gave the coup de grace to some of their own wounded men: those too badly hurt to have any hope of recovering. Hasso had seen that happen, too. It happened more often here. German doctors could do things nobody here had ever dreamt of. He made a note to himself not to get wounded here. Then he laughed. If he knew how to guarantee that…
Somebody slapped him on the back, almost hard enough to pitch him off his horse. “We did it!” Nornat yelled. “The column worked. Your scheme worked!” He sounded overjoyed and surprised at the same time.
“Good men make it work,” Hasso said. The Lenello cavalry captain grinned and bowed in the saddle. Hasso wouldn’t have wanted to try that himself. He hadn’t been kidding, though. Grinning back, he went on, “Commanders get the glory. Lancers do the hard part and make commanders look good.”
“Goddess only knows that’s the truth,” Nornat said. “Too many marshals can’t see it, though. They think the sun rises and sets on them. I could name names, but….”
But you’d put your ass in a sling if you did, Hasso thought. But if Nornat wasn’t thinking of brave but hidebound Marshal Lugo, Hasso would have been mightily surprised. “We could do better,” he said. “We should do better. Column should all turn in on center, not out on wing.” He gestured with his hands. “We do that, maybe we catch enemy, uh, lord. He can’t get away.”
“Well, yes.” Nornat sounded as if he was humoring him. “Don’t get too upset, though. We walloped the snot out of the savages the way it was.”
Somebody – a Frenchman? – said the good was the enemy of the best. A solid victory satisfied Nornat. Hasso wanted more. He wanted to annihilate the enemy, the way Hannibal annihilated the Romans at Cannae.
Ever since before the First World War, German officers made that battle their model. Hasso understood why – who’d ever done better? But despite the triumph, Carthage lost the war. How many officers who carefully memorized every detail of Hannibal’s double envelopment remembered that?
Hasso got down from his horse. “You! Come here!” he called to the first foot soldier he saw. When the man obeyed, Hasso tossed him the reins. “Here. Hold these for me till I get back.”
“Yes, lord,” the foot soldier said – the only possible answer. But then he went on, “What about my chance to loot?”
That was a fair question. Hasso dug in his belt pouch and pulled out one of the gold coins he’d won from the wizards. It bore the jowly image of Bottero’s father. “Here. You might do better than this, but you might not, too.”
The Lenello made the goldpiece disappear. Grinning, he said, “You may be a foreigner, and you sure talk funny, but you’re a sport.”
“Thanks,” Hasso said dryly, and began his tour of the battlefield.
He’d walked plenty of fields in his own world, wherever victory let him do it. The last year and a half of the war, he thanked God every time he got away from a battlefield in one piece. He hadn’t had many chances to look around afterwards, not unless he wanted the Russians to leave his body there along with too many others wearing Feldgrau.
Here, though … The Bucovinans had stood more bravely than he’d thought they could. Even after they had to know they were beaten, they went on doing as well as they could for as long as they could. They fought like soldiers, not like savages fierce in victory who panicked and broke the minute things went wrong.
A dead native clutched the shaft of the spear that pinned him to the ground. The horrible grimace he’d worn when he died was relaxing towards a corpse’s blankness. His eyes stared sightlessly up at the sky.
Not far away, a dead Lenello sprawled in a pool of blood. His left hand clutched the stump of his right arm. He’d lost his right hand, and bled to death before a surgeon or a wizard could do anything to help him. Flies buzzed around the blood. A big one landed in the blood-streaked, callused palm of the severed hand.
You had an easier time telling how hard and how well someone fought on this field than on a lot of them on the Russian front. Artillery and bullets could be nearly random in how they killed and maimed. But if a sword or spear went in from the front, the dead man faced his foe when he died. If he had a wound in the back, he was likely trying to run away when he died.
The Grenye killed from behind almost all lay at some distance from where they’d posted their line. Those were the men who’d tried to escape, most of them after the fight was irretrievably lost. Yes, they’d fought hard, all right.
King Bottero rode up to Hasso. The king had a cut on the back of his right hand; he’d been in the thick of the fighting himself. The edge of his shield was as notched as a saw blade. His horse limped.
“You did what you said you’d do,” Bottero declared. “Have you got any idea how unusual that is?”
Hasso saluted Lenello-style, his fist over his heart. “Your Majesty, I am a stranger, a foreigner, at your court. I don’t dare fail.”
“Why not? My own people do, all the time.”
“They are your people,” Hasso replied. “You forgive them because they are. But if I go wrong, you say, ‘He is a foreigner trying to fool us. Off with his head!’“
Bottero threw back his head and laughed. “Are you sure you were never a king yourself?”
“Never!” Hasso pushed away the words with both hands, which set Bottero laughing again. The German went on, “Never want to be a king, either.”
“You’re smart,” Bottero said. “You don’t have everybody below you looking up at you and thinking what an idiot you are.”
“Not me, your Majesty,” Hasso said, which was plenty to make Bottero almost fall off his horse with mirth. Hasso spoke as innocently as he could – with exaggerated innocence, in fact. He was glad he’d amused his new sovereign. He was also glad Bottero believed him when he said he had no royal ambitions. It was true. Even if it weren’t, he had to act as if it were. Confessing that you did want to wear a crown was apt to be more hazardous to your life expectancy than a Russian armored division.
“Find any loot worth keeping?” Bottero asked.
Soldiers here made a big part of their living from booty. Hasso, used to regular pay, had to remind himself of that. He had picked up one nice dagger with gold chasing on the blade. He showed it to the king.
Bottero nodded. “That’s not bad. It’s one of our patterns, but it looks to me like a copy by a Grenye smith. The chasing is very nice – I like that dragon – but the work on the blade itself is cruder than what we’d do.”
Hasso didn’t have the eye for such fine details. He’d kept the dagger because of the gold. He didn’t expect to use it as a weapon. He had nothing against war knives; he carried one of his own. But it was just a tool, not a fancy Solingen blade like the ones SS men were so proud of.
“Where do we go now?” Hasso asked. “We should push after the Bucovinans. Not let them come back together, get ready to fight again.” He wanted to say regroup, but he couldn’t come up with the word in Lenello. He was a lot more fluent than he had been even a month before, but talking still sometimes felt like wading through glue.
“You have been eating meat, haven’t you?” King Bottero smiled at him like a father smiling at an adventurous little boy. “We need to get ready to fight again ourselves, you know. Do you think your striking column will work as well now that they know we use it?”
That was a genuinely shrewd question. “I don’t know, your Majesty,” Hasso replied. “You know the Bucovinans better than I do, so you are a better judge. How fast do they learn? Will they have an assault column of their own in the next battle?” The possibility hadn’t occurred to him till now.