“Defense,” Hasso muttered. Did he know enough about the Swiss hedgehog to teach it to Bottero’s men? He had to hope he did, because they were going to need it, if not at the next battle then before too long. He could see that coming.
“All this is worry for another time,” Bottero said. “You kept your word to me. I won’t forget, and you won’t be sorry.” With the wave of a gauntleted hand, he rode off.
Not far away, a Lenello foot soldier was slitting the throat of a feebly writhing Bucovinan. Still holding the bloody knife, he nodded to Hasso. “Boy, I wish the king would talk to me that way,” he said.
Everybody had problems. The foot soldier thought his were worse than Hasso’s. Maybe he was even right. All the same, Hasso knew his own weren’t small. He also knew they wouldn’t go away any time soon.
Back in Germany, women prided themselves on how little they ate. A birdlike appetite was a sign of femininity. After the battle, Velona ate enough for two troopers, maybe three. “Where do you keep it?” Hasso asked. He was hungry, but not that hungry. “Have you got a hollow leg?”
The joke was old in German, but new in Lenello. Velona laughed so hard, she almost spat out the swig of beer she’d just taken. “No, no, no,” she said. “You have to understand – I’m eating for two.”
“You’re going to have a baby?” Hasso took the phrase to mean what it would have in his native tongue. The next question that ran through his mind was, Is it mine? He didn’t ask that one, not least for fear she would up and tell him no.
But she laughed again, this time at him, though as far as he could tell without malice. “No, not a baby. I’m sure I’m not pregnant,” she said. “I just stopped flowing a couple of days before the battle, remember, and I’m glad I did, too. What I meant was, I’m eating for me and the goddess both.”
“Oh.” Feeling like a fool, Hasso thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. It hurt more than it should have; somewhere in the battle, he’d got a bruise there, even if he couldn’t remember how or when. And he found himself nodding. No wonder Velona never gained a gram! But carrying a goddess around wasn’t the sort of diet likely to become popular in Berlin or Cologne or Vienna… even if the German women in those towns were free of invaders, which they weren’t.
How big a toll did the goddess take on a mere mortal’s metabolism? Hasso had no idea, but Velona knew the answer from the inside out.
Her smile, he judged, held more than a little relief. “I could feel the goddess’ power running through me,” she said. “The savages could feel it, too, when I struck and even before that, when I bore down on them. I could tell.”
“I believe you,” Hasso said, which was nothing but the truth. When the goddess manifested herself in Velona, she definitely seemed more than human. Just being near her at such times made your hair prickle up, as if lightning had crashed down close by. Then, several beats more slowly than a Lenello would have, Hasso saw what she was driving at here. “We are in Bucovin, but the power still runs through you.”
“The goddess is still with me,” Velona agreed. But then her smile slipped. “It was like this the last time I came into Bucovin, too. At first, it was like this. After that… It wasn’t that the goddess left me, or not exactly like that. When she tried to speak, though, I couldn’t make out what she was saying. The land in these parts was thinking about something else.”
How did she mean that? Never having had any kind of divinity speak to him or through him, Hasso couldn’t know, not the way Velona did. He thought of a bad telephone connection. Then he laughed at himself. What good did a thought from his own world do him? He couldn’t make Velona or anyone else here understand it. What would telephones seem to the Lenelli but magic?
Crystal balls, now … They had crystal balls, or something like them. “Wizards can talk back and forth from far away, right?” he asked, an idea starting to sprout in his mind.
“Yes, that’s true.” Velona nodded. She laid her hand on his in what was, he realized a moment later, a gesture of sympathy. “I can guess how strange that must be to you, coming from a world with so little magic in it.”
Hasso didn’t laugh. If he started, he feared he wouldn’t be able to stop. Stick to business, he told himself. And so he did: “All right. If we split our army in two, the Grenye would also have to split their army in two, wouldn’t they?”
“I’d think so, but I’m no Grenye general, goddess be praised,” Velona said. “Where are you going with this?”
All at once, the sprouted idea flowered and fruited. “We can keep track of our two armies with magic, always know where they are, move together thanks to magic. We can come back together when we need to, and defeat the Grenye in detail.” For once, he found the technical term he needed right on the tip of his tongue. If that wasn’t a good omen, what would be?
Would Velona get it? Was it, in fact, a thought worth getting? Or was he misunderstanding the way things worked here? He waited to see how she responded.
He started to worry when she didn’t answer right away. Her brow creased in serious thought. Seeing those tiny wrinkles reminded him she was human as well as divine. Were these human, normal moments the ones Jesus’ followers had cherished most? Hasso wouldn’t have been surprised, though none of the Gospels talked about anything so completely mundane.
“It could work,” Velona said at last. “It could well work. We didn’t need such tricks when we fought the Grenye after we first came across the sea. We knew so much more than they did, the fights were walkovers. A ploy like that wouldn’t work when Lenelli fight Lenelli, because there’s magic on both sides then. But against Bucovin … Yes, it might be just the thing.” A slow smile spread across her face. “And how fitting to turn their mindblindness against them, to use it as one of our weapons of war.”
She kissed him. It didn’t go any further than that, not then. They were both weary from the fighting. Hasso stank even in his own nostrils: of horse, of sweat, of fear, and of the blood that splashed his mailshirt and his skin. He didn’t think Velona smelled of fear. That was a pretty good sign she had the goddess dwelling in her. After a battle, few people could avoid the sour stink of terror.
“You will tell the king tomorrow,” she said, as if she were an officer giving a common soldier his orders.
Does she have the right to tell me what to do like that? Hasso wondered. In her own person, she probably didn’t. But that was the point, as he’d realized a moment before. She wasn’t just in her own person, not when she had the goddess for company. And the goddess could tell King Bottero what to do, let alone a newly arrived foreigner like Hasso Pemsel.
Automatically, Hasso’s arm shot out in the salute he was more used to than the one the Lenelli used. “Zu Befehl!” he said, German tasting strange in his mouth. He turned it into Lenello: “At your command!”
“Well, all right,” Velona said. “I didn’t mean it quite like that. But for now, let’s get some sleep.” There was an order Hasso was glad to obey.
IX
“I am your slave,” the Grenye prisoner insisted.
Hasso had never expected to see the warrior he’d captured again. But there the fellow was, helping one of the cooks dole out bowls of porridge flavored with salty, fennel-filled sausage and onions. It wasn’t delicious, but it filled the belly. On campaign, that counted for more.
“Is he yours, sir?” the cook asked. “I didn’t mean to take him if he really belonged to somebody, but you know how it is. We can always use an extra pair of hands.”
“What is the custom?” Hasso asked in return. “He did surrender to me yesterday.”
“Then he’s yours if you want him,” the cook said. “If you don’t, I’ll go on using him – he seems willing enough. Or you can feed him to the water snakes – but if you wanted to do that, you could have done it when he tried to give up.”
The Bucovinan pointed to Hasso. “You spared me. I work for you now. I am Berbec.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “You are a great lord, yes? A great lord, sure, but you never have man like me before.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Hasso said dryly. Berbec laughed louder than the joke deserved … if it was a joke. Was taking a prisoner as a batman, as a valet – hell, as a slave – clasping a water snake to his bosom? The cook didn’t seem to think so. Hasso found himself nodding. “Well, come on, then, Berbec. What can you do for me that I can’t do for myself?”
“All kinds of things.” Berbec bowed to him, then also bowed to the cook for whom he’d been working. The motion was different from the stiffer one the Lenelli – and the Germans – used. It might almost have been a move from a dance. “You don’t have any other slaves?”
“Not right now,” Hasso said.
Berbec clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You poor fellow.” He cocked his head to one side, eyeing Hasso with sparrowish curiosity. “You look like a Lenello, but you don’t talk like. Where you from?”
“A faraway country,” the German replied, which was true but uninformative. He still didn’t trust Berbec not to disappear the minute he turned his back. “Can you take care of a horse?”
“I do that.” Berbec nodded eagerly. He might have picked the next thought out of Hasso’s mind, for he went on, “Not steal him, neither. You could kill me, but you spare. I owe you my life. I pay back.”
Maybe he meant it. Some people, and some peoples, were punctilious about their honor, to the point that looked like stupidity to anyone with a less rigid code. Whether the Grenye of Bucovin were like that, whether Berbec himself was … I just have to find out, Hasso thought. In the meantime, I have to be careful.
“You have funny helmet,” Berbec remarked. His hands shaped the flare of the German Stahlhelm.
“In the style of my country,” Hasso said. The Lenelli wore plain conical helms, more like those of the Normans than any others he knew. So did the Bucovinans, probably in imitation of the blonds from overseas.
“Not bad. Maybe turn sword better.” Berbec might be a little man, but he was a warrior. “But nasal is new. Not have before?” He was a warrior with sharp eyes, too. That nasal was riveted on. The Lenelli couldn’t weld steel, and Hasso didn’t trust solder to hold. Berbec chattered on: “Why you not have before? Keep face from getting split open.”
“War in my land doesn’t usually come down to swordstrokes,” Hasso replied. And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth? A helmet wouldn’t stop a rifle round, though it would keep out some shell fragments. High-velocity bullets made most body armor more trouble than it was worth. Only if you were fighting with bayonets or entrenching tools would a nasal matter. Once in a blue moon, in other words. German armorers didn’t see the point of adding one, and who was he to say they were wrong … for the kind of war they fought?
Berbec stared at him. Hasso thought the Bucovinan would call him a liar. But then Berbec thrust out a stubby, accusing finger. “You have the thunderflasher,” he said. That wasn’t a word in Lenello, but it was a pretty good description of a firearm. “You point it at someone, and it goes boom, and he falls over. All soldiers in your country carry thunderflashers, then?”
No, he was nobody’s fool. “That’s right,” Hasso said.
“The Lenelli have all kinds of things. They are clever, the Lenelli.” Maybe Berbec felt he could talk freely about them because Hasso wasn’t one. “But they don’t have thunderflashers.” He eyed Hasso again, this time, the Wehrmacht officer judged, apprehensively. And why not? If the Lenelli all carried Schmeissers, Bucovinan resistance would last a minute and a half, tops.
“Can’t make them here.” Hasso wanted the words back as soon as they came out. Some Intelligence officer he was, blabbing like a fool!
Velona came up to the two of them. As soon as she saw Berbec, she understood what was going on. “He’s one you caught yourself?” she asked. When Hasso nodded, she went on, “Good. You’ve been doing too much for yourself.” She brushed her lips across his and walked on.