“Yeah.” Hasso nodded.
“She doesn’t need a thunderflasher to cut through us,” Berbec said sadly. “Only a sword – and herself.”
Hasso nodded again, not without sympathy. What was it like for the Grenye, without magic of their own, to try to stand against Velona when the goddess was strong in her? Like a lone rifleman against a King Tiger panzer? Worse, probably, because the panzer and the infantryman belonged to the same world. The Grenye had to feel the very heavens were fighting against them – and they wouldn’t be so far wrong, would they?
Berbec’s stare swung back to Hasso. It was as if he could still see the mark of her kiss glowing on the Wehrmacht officer’s face. “She is … your woman?” He sounded like someone afraid to be right.
“Yes, she’s my woman.” Hasso felt the irony in his voice. Berbec might not understand, but, to the Lenello way of thinking, Hasso was Velona’s man and not the other way around.
He succeeded in impressing his new servant, anyway. “I knew you were a great lord. I already told you that,” Berbec said. “But I didn’t know you were such a great lord.” He bowed himself almost double. “I cry pardon. Forgive me.”
He wouldn’t straighten till Hasso touched him on the back. “It’s all right. Forget it. I still put on trousers like anybody else. I still shit. I still piss. I still need you to see to my horse. That’s what you say you do.” He was getting better with past tenses, but he still wasn’t good enough to feel comfortable using them.
“I do it,” Berbec said. He seemed mostly stuck in the present indicative, too. For no sensible reason, that made Hasso feel better.
King Bottero’s army pressed deeper into Bucovin. The natives didn’t stand and fight again. They didn’t go away, either. Raiders picked off Lenello scouts. Horsemen attacked the wagons that brought supplies forward. And, to Hasso’s dismay if not to his surprise, flames and clouds of smoke rose up in front of the invaders.
“They burn their own crops,” he said. The Russians had scorched the earth in front of the oncoming Wehrmacht. Later, moving from east to west instead of from west to east, the Germans used the same ploy to slow down the Red Army. The Ivans screamed about war crimes. They hadn’t said a word when they used those tactics. Winners said what they pleased. Who could call a winner a liar?
King Bottero eyed the smoke and sniffed the breeze. Hasso couldn’t smell the burning, not yet. Maybe the enormous Lenello could. “They think they’ll make us too hungry to go on,” the king said.
“Are they right?” Hasso asked.
“Not yet,” Bottero said, an answer that struck the German as reasonable.
Aderno and the other wizards put their heads together. They worked a spell that might have come straight out of Macbeth. They danced; they chanted; they incanted. Dark clouds filled the sky. Rain came down – rain poured down, in fact. It drenched the fires. Whether it did the Lenelli any good was a different question, and one harder to answer. The roads got soaked, too, and turned to mud.
Hasso remembered the first Russian rasputitsa, the time of rain and muck. He remembered motorcycle drivers, their mechanized steeds hub-deep – sometimes headlight-deep – in muck, their rubberized greatcoats ten or twenty kilos heavier than they should have been, their goggles so splashed that they were almost useless (or, sometimes, worse than useless), the eyes behind those goggles gradually growing alarmed as one rider after another began to see it wouldn’t be as easy as the High Command claimed. He remembered bogged-down panzers and artillery pieces, half-drowned horses, the sucking goo trying to pull the marching boots off his feet with every step. He remembered bone-crushing exhaustion at the end of every day – and well before the end, too.
Yes, the mud slowed down the Ivans. But they weren’t trying to go forward, not that first autumn, anyhow. They were just trying to hold back the Germans, to keep the Wehrmacht out of Moscow. And they did, and blitzkrieg turned to grapple and slugging match … and Hasso found a magical way to escape from burning, pulverized Berlin, but not one the rest of the city would ever be able to use.
And so he was here in western Bucovin, listening to the rain patter down. Soldiers greased their mailshirts every morning and night and draped themselves with cloaks. They swore when they found tiny tumors of rust anyhow – as of course they did. The horses that squelched through the deepening ooze couldn’t swear, but the men on their backs made up for that. And the teamsters who fought to keep supply wagons moving cursed even harder than the knights.
By the time it had rained for a couple of days, Hasso began to think the wizards’ spell might be worse than the scorched-earth disease. By the time the rain had poured down for a week, he was sure of it. He rode up alongside Aderno, whose unicorn was so splotched and spattered with mud that it looked to have a giraffe’s hide.
Hasso waved his arms up toward the weeping sky. “Enough!” he said. He waved again, like a conductor in white tie and tails pulling a crescendo from a symphony orchestra. “Too much, in fact! Call off your storm!”
Aderno’s answering glance would have looked even hotter than it did had water not dripped from the end of the wizard’s long, pointed nose. “It’s not our storm any more,” he said. “It’s just… weather now.”
“Well, work another spell and turn it into good weather, then,” Hasso said.
Were there any justice in the world, the water on Aderno’s nose would have started to steam. “What do you think we’ve been trying to do?” he said pointedly.
“I don’t know,” Hasso answered. “All I know is, it’s still raining.”
Aderno’s gesture was as extravagant as the ones the German had used not long before. “Weather magic is never easy. We’d do a lot more of it if it were,” he said. “And trying it here in Bucovin was worse. We were glad when we got what we wanted. Now – ”
He broke off when a raindrop hit him in the eye. “Now you’ve got too much of what you want,” Hasso finished for him. The wizard nodded unhappily. “And you can’t close the sluice, either,” Hasso said. In German, it would have been something like, And you can’t turn it off, either. The Lenelli didn’t have enough machinery to make phrases like that a natural part of their language.
“Air and sky and land in Bucovin don’t want to listen to us,” Aderno said. Hasso would have thought he was making excuses if Velona hadn’t said the same thing.
Thinking of Velona, though, inspired him, as it often did – though not in the same direction as usual. Instead of erotic excess, his mind swung toward military pragmatism. “Do the air and sky and land here listen to the goddess?” he asked.
“Sometimes.” Aderno’s attention sharpened. “Sometimes, yes. And if the goddess’ person begs her…”
Did Velona beg the goddess the last time she went into Bucovin? What did the goddess do for her then? Anything? Hasso’s first, rational, inclination was to say no. But he realized Velona didn’t see things that way herself. As far as she was concerned, the goddess gave her just what she asked for: a rescuer from another world, one Hasso Pemsel.
“I speak to her of this,” Hasso said. He didn’t think of himself as anybody’s answered prayer, but in this crazy world he might be wrong, and he knew it.
As he made his way through the mud to the tent he shared with Velona, he reminded himself that he would have to grease his boots. If he didn’t, the leather would turn hard as stone when it dried … if it ever dried. It would also start to rot. The Lenelli made boots at least as good as the ones he’d worn when he got here, but he’d got used to the idea of not wasting anything.
He wondered if he would be wasting his time talking to Velona. Try as he would, he didn’t have a real feel yet for how things worked here. Maybe he was only suggesting the obvious. Maybe his idea wasn’t obvious but was stupid.
Or maybe you’re a goddamn genius, he told himself. That made him laugh. He sure as hell didn’t feel like a genius. Back in Germany, he bloody well wasn’t. But the things he knew from there often made him seem smarter than the locals here. Don’t believe your own press clippings, he thought. Wasn’t that one of Hitler’s big mistakes? He was so convinced the Ivans were bums, he went after them without thinking about what a big bunch of bums they were.
Here heading toward the middle of Bucovin, Hasso could have done without that thought.
Velona took him seriously. That a woman like her might take him seriously was just about enough to make him believe in her goddess, or at least in miracles. When he finished, she said, “I will do what I can. I don’t know how much that will be. The goddess didn’t seem to hear me when I was in Bucovin before. I feared she’d abandoned me … and then there you were, on the causeway.”
“There I was,” Hasso agreed. Was he the answer to Velona’s prayer? Or had the Omphalos stone sent him here of its own volition? Or was it just dumb luck, with nobody responsible one way or the other? The goddess and whatever powered the Omphalos might know. Hasso didn’t believe he ever would.
When Velona decided to do something, she didn’t do it halfway. Beseeching the goddess proved no exception to the rule. She carried a statuette of the deity with her. The bronze – about a quarter of a meter tall – was nothing fancy. Had Hasso seen it in a museum back in Berlin, he would have walked past it without a second glance.
Velona set it up on the muddy floor of the tent with a candle burning to either side: a makeshift altar. Then she stripped herself naked and prostrated herself before it. Hasso’s admiration for her beauty was almost entirely abstract, his pleasure at seeing her long, smooth length esthetic rather than lustful. She seemed as much in the divine world as in the material, which had a lot to do with that.
Or maybe she just intimidates the crap out of me, he thought – not a reflection likely to have crossed his mind for any ordinary woman. Whatever else you said about Velona, ordinary she was not.
“Hear me!” she said, as if the statuette were an equal. “Hear me!” Hasso wondered whether the bronze image would answer, but it didn’t – at least not so he could hear. Velona went on, “Enough of rain! Enough of mud! Enough of barbarism! Time for Bottero’s troopers to storm forward!”
Hasso wanted to go outside and look at the weather. If it wasn’t changing right then … If it wasn’t, then Velona would have to give the goddess another talking-to.
One of the candles flared up. Maybe that was what made the statuette’s eyes flash. The rational part of Hasso could believe it was, anyhow. That way, he didn’t have to believe he was watching the goddess’ response to a petitioner who was fully entitled to treat with her.
He didn’t have to believe that, no, but believing anything else wasn’t easy. And Velona only made it harder when she said, “Well, I should hope so! It’s about time, don’t you think?” She might have been talking to a neighbor woman about reining in the neighbor’s unruly children.
The bronze goddess’ eyes flashed again. This time, Hasso didn’t notice any candle flare to cause it. He tried to convince himself that he didn’t see the statuette nod in response to Velona’s urging. He tried, but he didn’t have much luck. His eyes saw what they saw. What it meant … was probably about what it looked like. If he had trouble believing that, wasn’t it because the God he was used to worshiping was so leery of doling out miracles? Things were different here.
With an athlete’s grace, Velona got to her feet. Hasso had never seen such an… inspiring votary of any god. He tried to imagine her arising, naked and beautiful, from in front of the altar in a Catholic or Lutheran church. The picture didn’t want to form. In a way, that was hardly surprising, however rough her presence would have been on a celibate priest. In another way, though, wasn’t the impossibility of such a scene too damn bad? If Velona didn’t make you want to worship, weren’t you already dead inside?
Beaming, she said, “I think that took care of it. Thank you for giving me a push there.”
“Any time.” Hasso reached out and cupped her left breast in his right hand.
“A push, I said.” Velona tried to sound severe, but didn’t have much luck. “What would happen if your slave walked in here right now?”
“Berbec? He’d be jealous.” Hasso didn’t let go. “And he’d think I was the bravest man in the world, for daring to touch you.”