Hasso shook his head. “It would be nice. Then I would have a better idea of what I’m doing.”
“If you don’t know, no one does.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he answered.
He ground a little of the saltpeter, the charcoal, and the sulfur very fine and mixed them together, then touched them off with a flame. They burned enthusiastically, but not so well as he’d hoped. He mixed up another small batch, wet it, and kneaded the mixture into a paste. Then he let it dry and ground it again, being very careful not to do anything that could make a spark.
Once he finished, he had enough powder to fill a fat firecracker. The only problem was, the natives didn’t have cardboard to make a firecracker casing. (Neither did the Lenelli.) After some thought, Hasso asked for thin leather. Drepteaza had trouble containing her amusement as she watched him struggle to put together the case. “You may make a good apothecary, but you were never a glover or anything like that.”
Shakespeare’s father was a glover. Hasso didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. Knowing it was useless back in his old world, and worse than useless here. He gave Drepteaza an irritated look. “And so?”
“And so you ought to have someone else do the work instead of trying to do it all yourself,” she answered. “You know what you want to do. Let other people do what they know how to do.”
He was flabbergasted, not least because she was so obviously right. He knew lots of things the Bucovinans didn’t. He’d let that blind him to an obvious truth: they knew lots of things he didn’t, too. One of their artisans would have taken twenty minutes to deal with what was costing him a day’s worth of work and turning out crappy.
Maybe Drepteaza knew a fine leatherworker herself. Maybe she asked one of Lord Zgomot’s servants for a name. However she did it, she found a Grenye with a nearsighted squint who was miraculously capable with a knife and a needle. Drepteaza translated for Hasso, explaining exactly what he wanted.
“I’ll do it,” the glover said. Hasso understood that bit of Bucovinan just fine. It took the man longer than twenty minutes, but not much. His stitches were as tiny and as close together and as perfectly matched as a sewing machine’s might have been.
The glover watched with interest as Hasso used a clay funnel from the kitchens to fill the case with powder. After the Wehrmacht officer had done that, he told Drepteaza, “Now he can sew up almost all of the opening at the top.”
“Why not all of it?” the glover asked. Then he brightened, finding an answer of his own: “Is this thing a suppository?” Drepteaza translated the question with a straight face.
If you stuck it up there and touched it off, it would get rid of your hemorrhoids, all right – assuming it worked. Imagining that, Hasso started to giggle. He couldn’t explain why. None of the natives had seen gunpowder in action.
“Just tell him no,” he replied, as matter-of-factly as he could.
“How will you make it do whatever it does without hurting yourself?” Drepteaza asked after she told the glover no. She might not have seen gunpowder, but she had a good eye for the possibilities.
“I need to make a fuse” Hasso said. The key word necessarily came out in German. If gunpowder caught on here – and if I live long enough, he thought – the technical terms would be in a very foreign language.
In the Wehrmacht, fuses came in two flavors – timed, which burned at about a meter a minute, and instantaneous, which burned at about forty meters a second. You could improvise a fuse with powder and cord, but it would burn pretty damn quick. Hasso didn’t know how to make timed fuse. He didn’t think the Bucovinans would let him spend very long experimenting, either. He wouldn’t have if he were Lord Zgomot.
And so he did some more improvising. He rubbed gunpowder into about a meter of cord, and put the end of that into the leather case holding the rest of his charge. Then he attached the other end to a length of candle wick, which would have to do duty for timed fuse.
He borrowed a toy wagon and a couple of little wooden soldiers and set them near the charge. Everything sat on the bare rammed-earth floor of a palace storeroom. Lord Zgomot, Drepteaza, and Rautat were the only witnesses when Hasso lit the wick and hastily stepped out of the room.
“It makes a loud bang – don’t be afraid,” he said. I hope like hell it does. They’ll hang me up by the balls if it doesn’t.
Rautat nodded. “You can say that again. If it’s like your thunder weapon, it’ll go blam! Blam! Blam!”
“Only once,” Hasso said. “Thunder weapon is all used up. Can’t make anything like that – too hard. Too hard for Lenelli, too. They – ”
Boom! The explosion interrupted him. Rautat flinched. Lord Zgomot jumped. Drepteaza opened her mouth, but she didn’t let out a squeak. Neither did the two men. The Bucovinans had nerve, all right.
“Let’s see what it does,” Hasso said.
Before they could, several servants came running up to find out what the demon had happened. They’d never heard a boom like that before. Lord Zgomot sent them away. Hasso couldn’t follow most of what he said, but it sounded reassuring. He seemed to have a knack for giving people what they needed.
After the servants went away, Hasso and his comrades walked into the storeroom. Rautat wrinkled his nose. “Smells like devils,” he said. Hasso thought the brimstone reek smelled like fireworks. It didn’t smell like war to him; the odor of smokeless powder was different, sharper.
The toy wagon lay on its side near one wall. One of the wooden dolls wasn’t far away. The other one was in pieces on the other side of the room. Only a couple of tattered scraps were left of the leather sack that had held the gunpowder.
“A pot full of this could smash real people and real wagons the same way, yes?” Lord Zgomot asked.
“Yes, Lord. That’s the idea,” Hasso said. That was one of the ideas, anyway. The Bucovinans had catapults – they’d borrowed the idea from the Lenelli. Catapults could fling pots full of gunpowder at charging Lenello knights. The big blonds wouldn’t like that. Neither would their horses, or their wizards’ unicorns.
Wizards … Wizards went on worrying Hasso. What could they do to gunpowder? How soon would they figure it out?
And how soon would he have to go into the cannon-founding business? Cannon could easily outrange catapults. But he didn’t know how to make them. Oh, he had an idea. You needed a hollow tube with a touch-hole at the end opposite the muzzle. But how thick did it have to be? If it blew up instead of sending a cannonball at the enemy, he wouldn’t make himself popular in Bucovin. What kind of carriage should it have? Sure, one with wheels. That covered a lot of ground, though, ground he knew nothing about. One firecracker was a tiny start, no more.
No, this wouldn’t be easy. Lord Zgomot wanted weapons to sweep away the Lenelli. Who could blame him? Hasso couldn’t give him those weapons with a snap of the fingers. It wasn’t that easy. And who’ll blame me because I can’t?
He knew the answer to that. Everybody.
Hasso didn’t trust the Bucovinans to make gunpowder, not yet. They didn’t know enough to be careful. After they watched him for a while, they probably would – after they watched him and after they saw some explosions. You had to respect the stuff or you had no business working with it.
At Drepteaza’s suggestion, Rautat started learning the craft from him. The veteran underofficer had seen what firearms could do. If he didn’t respect gunpowder, what Bucovinan would?
Hasso needed a while to realize that question had two possible answers. The one he wanted was that the Bucovinans would do fine after they got the hang of things. But the other one was also there. Maybe they wouldn’t get the hang of it at all. Maybe they were too primitive. The Lenelli were somewhere close to the level where Europeans had been when they started making guns. The Bucovinans…
The Bucovinans were trying to pull themselves up to that level by their own bootstraps. How far below it had their several-times-great-grandparents been when the Lenelli first landed on these shores? A thousand years below? Two thousand years? Something like that. They’d started working iron, and they’d had kingdoms of sorts. The Lenelli had smashed a lot of them to confetti.
Bucovin survived. Because it lay farther east, it had had more time to absorb what the Lenelli brought with them before they actually bumped up against its borders. And, for whatever reason, magic didn’t work so well near Falticeni. Hasso scratched his head. He wondered why that was so.
But he had more urgent things to worry about. “This isn’t just like the thunder weapon you had before,” Rautat remarked.
“It sure isn’t,” Hasso agreed. With a couple of dozen Schmeissers and enough ammo, he could have gone through all the Lenello kingdoms and Bucovin without breaking a sweat. But he didn’t have them, so no point getting wistful about it.
“I know you say you can’t make anything like that,” Rautat said. Hasso nodded. The Bucovinan went on, “Well, how close can you come?”
“Not very.” With a lot of work, Hasso figured he could eventually make a smoothbore matchlock musket. That wouldn’t happen soon. It also wouldn’t be that much more deadly than a bow and arrow, though it would be a lot easier to learn.
“Too bad,” the underofficer said, and then, “You’d better not be holding out on us.”
“I’m not, curse it!” Hasso said. “Why would I show you this much and not the rest, if I could do the rest? It makes no sense.”
Rautat fingered the graying tendrils of his beard. “I guess so,” he said, but he didn’t sound a hundred percent convinced.
Wonderful. Just what I need, Hasso thought. Even the guys who work closest with me don’t trust me. But he’d had that unhappy thought before. Nobody trusted someone who changed sides. You got what you could from a turncoat, but trust him? He’d already thrown away one loyalty. Why would he worry about another?
And Hasso knew he would go back to Bottero’s kingdom in a flash if he got the chance. The Bucovinans had to know it, too, because they made sure he never got a chance. They didn’t go into the garderobe with him when he needed to take a leak – not usually, anyhow – but that was about the only time he wasn’t watched except when he was alone in his room. Lord Zgomot didn’t get watched over the way Hasso did.
Well, why should he? Zgomot had no reason to light out for the tall timber. Hasso damn well did.
Would Velona take him back? He could hope so, anyhow. And even if she decided he was a racial traitor, Bottero would still think he was useful, wouldn’t he? Sure he would.