“What’s he going to do now?” the other tracker said, his voce also not quite sotto enough. “Dowse with that stick? We already know where the cursed river is.”
Hasso hadn’t even thought of dowsing. In Germany, that was an old wives’ tale. It probably wasn’t here. If any kind of magic was practical, finding water fit the bill. But, as the tracker said, he already knew where the water was here. He was after something else.
He thrust the pole into the Aryesh. He wasn’t enormously surprised when only the first twenty-five or thirty centimeters went in. After that, it hit an obstruction. His grin was two parts satisfaction and one part relief.
Orosei was only confused. “What’s going on?” he asked.
Instead of answering with words, Hasso probed with the pole again. Then he stepped out into – or onto – the river. Walking on the water, he felt like Jesus. The Aryesh didn’t come up to the tops of his boots. He strode forward, probing as he went.
“What the – ?” one of the trackers exclaimed.
“They don’t put their bridge where we can see it,” Hasso said, turning back toward the Lenelli. “They build it underwater, build it sneaky, so they can use it and we don’t know.”
“Well, fuck me,” the tracker said. If that wasn’t his version of coming to attention and saluting, Hasso didn’t know what would be.
“I don’t know, not till I see,” Hasso answered. “But I think maybe. In my world, the enemies of my land use this trick.” The Russians used every trick in the book, and then wrote a new book for all the tricks that weren’t in the old one. The Wehrmacht used this one, too. A bridge that was hard to spot was a bridge artillery wouldn’t knock out in a hurry.
Artillery couldn’t knock this one out – no artillery here. Hasso looked across the Aryesh. He didn’t see anybody, which was all to the good.
“What we need to do is, we need to pull up ten or fifteen cubits of this tonight,” he said. He almost said five or six meters, but that wouldn’t have meant anything to the blonds with him. They used fingers and palms and cubits, and weights that were even more cumbersome. What could you do? Since he couldn’t do anything, he went on, “Then the Bucovinans ride across, go splash.”
Orosei grinned at him. “If that doesn’t make those bastards turn up their toes, I don’t know what would!”
“That’s the idea, isn’t it?” Hasso said.
Even the trackers, who had been dubious about him, laughed and nudged one another. “He’s not so dumb after all, is he?” one of them said.
“Not so dumb,” another agreed, which struck Hasso as praising with faint damn. But he would take what he could get.
He made the trackers love him even more when he said, “You stay here and keep an eye on things. Orosei and I, we go back to the king and let him know what needs doing.”
“What if the savages come across the river at us now?” a tracker demanded.
“Not likely, not in the daytime. They want to keep this a secret, right?” Hasso said. Before the trackers could answer or complain, he added, “But if they do, then you bug out.” They couldn’t very well bitch about that, and they didn’t.
“An underwater bridge?” King Bottero said when Hasso brought him the news. “How the demon did they do that?”
When Hasso hesitated, Orosei took over. The German’s Lenello wasn’t up to technical discussions of pilings and planking. Bottero’s master-at-arms finished, “I never would have thought of it. I didn’t know what to think when I saw him walking on the water.” (Yes, that was funny, though only Hasso in all this world knew why.) “But he says they use this trick in war where he comes from, so he was ready for it.”
Nice to know Orosei doesn’t try to hog credit, Hasso thought, or not when the guy who deserves it is around to hear him, anyway.
“What do we do about it?” the king asked. Hasso told him what he had in mind. Bottero stroked his beard. A slow smile stole over his heavy-featured face. “I like that, fry me if I don’t. We’ll do it tonight, and we’ll watch the Grenye go sploot.” Hasso didn’t think sploot was a word in Lenello, but he had no trouble figuring out what it meant.
“Send a good-sized band of men, your Majesty,” Orosei suggested. “If the barbarians decide to bring more raiders across tonight, they might swamp a little party of artisans.”
Hasso hadn’t thought of that. Plainly, neither had King Bottero. He nodded. “You’re right. I’ll do it.” He turned and shouted orders to the officers who would take charge of that. Then he nodded again. “There. I’ve dealt with something, anyhow.” A frown spread across his face like rain clouds. “Or have I? Have the Bucovinans built more of these underwater bridges, ones we don’t know about yet?”
“A wizard could – ” Hasso broke off, feeling stupid. All the wizards were scattered along the army’s long supply line. Now that the main force needed one, it didn’t have any.
Then he noticed that Bottero was eyeing him. “Didn’t Aderno say you had some of the talent?” the king rumbled.
“He says it, but I don’t know if I believe it.” Hasso’s voice broke as if he were one of the fifteen-year-olds to whom the Volkssturm gave a rifle and a “Good luck!” as they sent them off to try to slow down the Red Army. “And even if it’s true, I don’t know how to use it.”
“About time you find out, then, isn’t it?” Bottero said. “If you can do it, you’ll give us a big hand.”
“But – But – ” Hasso spluttered.
“His Majesty’s right,” Orosei said. “Magic isn’t a common gift. If you’ve got it, you shouldn’t let it lie idle. The goddess wouldn’t like that.”
Did he mean Velona or the deity who sometimes inhabited her? Hasso didn’t know, and wondered whether the Lenello did. “But – But – ” he said again. He hated sounding like a broken record, but he didn’t know what else to say.
The king slapped him on the back, which almost knocked him out of the saddle. If he’d fallen off the horse and landed on his head, it would have been a relief. “Talk to Velona,” Bottero said. “She’ll give you some pointers, and you can go from there. It doesn’t sound like the kind of magic that can kill you if you don’t do it right. Give it your best shot.”
Hasso hadn’t even thought about the consequences of a spell gone wrong. He wished his new sovereign hadn’t reminded him of such things, too. But what were his choices here? He saw only two: say no and get a name for cowardice – the last thing he needed – or give it his best shot.
He’d long since decided that a big part of courage was nothing more than a reluctance to look like a coward in front of people who mattered to him. And so, reluctantly, he said, “Yes, your Majesty.”
Velona came up and kissed him, which was a hell of a distraction for somebody contemplating his very first conjuration. “You can do it,” she said. Her voice was full of confidence – and perhaps some warm promise, too. “I’m sure you can do it. The goddess wouldn’t have brought you here to let you fail.”
He didn’t know why the goddess had brought him here. He didn’t even know that the goddess had brought him here. King Bottero had a point, though. Velona knew a lot more about magic than he did. Christ! My horse knows more about magic than I do, he thought. Between her suggestions and his own few feeble ideas, he’d come up with what might be a spell.
It turned dowsing upside down and inside out. He wasn’t trying to find water flowing underground – he was looking for unmoving objects concealed beneath running water. If everything went exactly right, the forked stick in his hands would rise when he pointed it at a submerged bridge.
The not-quite-dowsing stick was carved from one of the timbers the Lenelli had torn from the first underwater bridge. Velona said that would give it a mystic affinity with the other bridges … if there were others. The idea seemed reasonable, in an unreasonable kind of way.
Even so, he let his worry show: “If I find no bridges, does that mean there are no bridges? Or does it mean I can’t find them? If I am no wizard, casting a spell does not help. Will not help.” He remembered how to make the future tense. He didn’t need to worry about the future, though. He was tense right now.
“Cast the spell. Then see what happens,” Velona said. That also seemed reasonable – if your view of reason included spells in the first place. Hasso’s didn’t. Or rather, it hadn’t.
Fighting not to show his fear, he started to chant. Velona had come up with a lot of the spell. Hasso would never make a poet in Lenello – come to that, he’d made a lousy poet auf Deutsch. What he had to remember here was to get the words right. He understood what the magic ought to do, even if he didn’t perfectly follow all the phrases in the charm. Poetry was supposed to be challenging … wasn’t it?
Velona gestured. That reminded him to move the not-dowsing rod. He swung it slowly from southwest to northeast, paralleling the course of the Aryesh. All of a sudden, it jerked upwards in his hands. He almost dropped it, he was so surprised. He’d no more thought he could truly work magic than that he could fly.
“There!” Velona said. “Go back, Hasso Pemsel. Go back and get the exact direction, so the artisans can find the hidden bridge.”
He did, and damned if the rod didn’t rise again. His own rod rose, too. He remembered how she’d called him by his full name when they met, there on the causeway through the swamp. He remembered what they’d done right afterwards, too, and he wanted to do it again.
His thoughts must have shown on his face, for Velona laughed, softly and throatily. “Soon,” she promised. But then she tempered that, adding, “But not yet. First we see where the savages can sneak across the river.”
“Oh, all right.” Hasso knew he sounded like a petulant little boy who couldn’t have what he wanted just when he wanted it. (Quite a bit like the Fuhrer, in fact, he thought.) Velona, who knew nothing about Hitler except that he was the man who ruled the country Hasso came from, laughed again, this time with rich amusement in her voice.
Hasso wished he had a compass, to give him a precise bearing on where that bridge lurked under the water. Nobody here had any idea what a compass was. If he could float an iron needle in a bowl of water … But he had too many other things to worry about right now.
Velona marked off the bearing as best she could. Hasso decided it would probably serve; they weren’t very far from the Aryesh. “Go on,” she urged him. “See if there are any more.”
He wished she were urging him on while they were doing something else, but he saw the need for continuing with this. That need might not delight him, but he did see it. And working magic had a fascination, and an astonishment, all its own. He didn’t think he’d been so delightfully surprised since the first time he played with himself.