XXI
They did have crossbows, the bastards. Quarrels rustled through the leaves and branches and thudded into – sometimes right through – trunks. The Lenelli wanted to put them right through Hasso. He couldn’t go as quietly as he wanted because they were pushing hard after him. The more noise he made, the more foliage he disturbed, the better the target he handed the archers.
He had to give the Lenelli something to think about, or they’d catch him and kill him. He picked up a rock and flung it off to one side. Luck was with him – it crashed off a trunk or a thick branch.
“There he goes!” Bottero’s men yelled to one another. “After him! Don’t let him get away!”
They crashed toward whatever the rock had hit. Hasso moved that way, too. Now he was trying to be quiet. The Lenello behind whom he suddenly appeared had no idea he was there till a callused hand covered his mouth and jerked his head back. The blond did no more than gurgle as a knife sliced across his throat.
Hasso slipped off. The other Lenelli took longer than they should have to realize they were following a trail that led nowhere. “Sondrio!” one of them called as they regathered. “Where’d you go, Sondrio?”
If Sondrio was who Hasso thought he was, he wouldn’t answer till Judgment Day. The Lenelli all started calling for him. “He was over this way, wasn’t he?” somebody said.
By then, Hasso wasn’t over that way anymore. Now he’d gained a little separation from his pursuers, and he could use all the skill at skulking he had. If they were going to catch him, they would have to earn it. They weren’t such hot stuff in the woods themselves. He was glad he wasn’t up against the trackers and poachers Orosei had given him by the Aryesh.
At last, one of these guys stumbled over Sondrio, perhaps literally. “Dead!” the Lenello yelled, horror in his voice. “He’s dead! Bled like a goddess-cursed hog!”
All the soldiers started shouting and carrying on then, which was just what Hasso had hoped for. “He must have Grenye in the woods with him,” one of them said. “Sondrio ran across them, and look what they did to him!” They didn’t imagine that Hasso might have doubled back. That must have seemed too crazy even to contemplate. Maybe it was, too. Hasso wondered how dumb he’d been.
Dumb or not, he got what he wanted – they quit chasing him. If they thought the undergrowth was full of lurking little swarthy men with knives … well, they could do that. They could do whatever they damn well wanted, as long as they didn’t mess with him.
He didn’t breathe easy till he got back over the rise that shielded the Bucovinan encampment. No, he didn’t feel easy then, either. If Rautat and the rest of Lord Zgomot’s merry men were waiting for him with blood in their eye … Well, what happened then? If both sides wanted to kill him, he was dead meat. Why didn’t you think of that sooner, you dumb asshole?
But he knew why. Down below his belly, down in his balls and his dick, he didn’t want to believe Velona didn’t want him anymore, didn’t love him anymore, didn’t want to lay him anymore. However you put it, he didn’t want to believe it, even if it was true. No. Especially if it was true.
Want to or not, he didn’t see that he had much choice any more. With Aderno’s help, she’d tried to fry him twice at long range. Even that hadn’t convinced him, which only proved he was a jerk or he was thinking with his cock – assuming those two weren’t one and the same. No way in hell, though, that Bottero’s soldiers would have done their best to massacre him unless their goddess told them it was all right. Since they had, she must have. Damn!
He looked back over his shoulder. He stopped so he could listen. Nothing either way. He breathed a sigh of relief, which differed only in his own mind from the panting he was also doing. The Lenelli behind had given up chasing him. Now – what was going on with the Bucovinans ahead?
However much he didn’t want to, he had to find out. He couldn’t very well stay right here and carve out a one-man realm sandwiched between Bottero’s and Zgomot’s. Since the Lenelli wanted him dead for sure, he had to hope the Bucovinans didn’t. How much fancy talking would he need to do?
The answer turned out to be – none. When he got back to the camp, he found Rautat and the rest of the natives still sawing wood. They’d hardly moved from where they were lying when he slipped away. He hadn’t expected his magic to work that well. Of course, he hadn’t expected it to clobber him, either.
Next interesting question was, could he wake them up again? If he couldn’t, he would have to throw them into the wagon and get out of there as best he could. But Rautat’s eyes opened when Hasso shook him.
“What’s going on?” the Bucovinan said, and then, seeing how light the sky was, “Lavtrig! Is it daytime? I was supposed to take a watch in the night, wasn’t I?”
“I don’t know. I don’t keep track of that,” Hasso said. They didn’t give him night watches. They didn’t trust him not to desert to the Lenelli – and they had reason not to. Fortunately, they didn’t know for sure what good reason they had.
Rautat scrambled to his feet. “Did anybody keep watch in the night? Doesn’t look like it. We’re all asleep!” He started shaking his countrymen. As he did, he went on, “Did the Lenello doglegs use a spell on us? You could’ve just walked off, and we never would’ve known the difference. Or were you asleep, too?”
“Till a little while ago,” Hasso answered. The spell had got him, too. That it was his own spell hadn’t occurred to Rautat. Damn good thing, too, the German thought.
The other Bucovinans woke up as readily as Rautat had. But how long would they have gone on sleeping if Hasso hadn’t got Rautat moving? He had no idea. “Where are the Lenelli, anyway?” Dumnez asked as he ambled off to take a leak behind a tree.
“Somewhere over that rise,” Hasso and Rautat answered together.
“Then we don’t have to worry about them right away,” Peretsh said. “Let’s eat breakfast.” That was such a good idea, nobody said a word against it. Hasso ate hard bread and an onion – a funny breakfast, but any food was better than none, as he’d found out too often in Russia. He washed it down with lousy Bucovinan beer. If he knew anything at all about brewing, he could have made a fortune among the Lenelli or a bigger fortune in Bucovin.
He started digging holes in the road, filling them in, and running lengths of fuse off to the side. Yeah, he’d tried to desert, but his magic seemed to have covered his tracks. The other side didn’t want him. This side did. Even if he didn’t much want it, it looked like his best bet – his only bet – right now.
“What are you doing?” Rautat asked. “You aren’t putting any gunpowder in those holes.”
“I know.” Hasso started digging another one.
“A hole in the ground won’t hurt anybody, even with a fuse running off from it.”
“I know,” Hasso said again.
“I should have cut your throat in the pit and saved myself the aggravation,” Rautat opined. “Do you have some kind of reason for doing this the way you are?”
“Ja.” Hasso went on digging without another word.
The air Rautat blew out through his lips made a whuffling noise. “Will you tell a poor dumb Grenye savage what your brilliant reason is?”
Hasso realized he’d pushed it as far as he could. When Bucovinans talked like that, they were only half kidding. The other half was all pain and rage. They didn’t want to think they were as stupid and backward as the Lenelli made them out to be. They didn’t want to, but they had trouble thinking anything else. When they made those jokes about themselves, you’d better not agree, not if you were big and blond.
So Hasso said, “You aren’t dumb. But the Lenelli think Grenye are. You know that. I saw that.” He wanted to remind Rautat he wasn’t what he looked like.
“Well, sure,” the underofficer said. “But what’s the point of the holes?”
“I want the Lenelli to see dug-up places in the road. I want them to see fuses, even burning fuses,” Hasso answered. “I want them to see that none of that does anything. Then they forget about it. They think, Stupid Grenye try to make magic, and of course it doesn’t work. Then they don’t worry about dug-up places or fuses any more. You follow?”
He wasn’t just kissing Rautat’s ass – the Bucovinan was plenty smart. And, after frowning for a few seconds, Rautat started to laugh. “Yeah, I get it! Bugger me blind if I don’t! One of these times, they won’t be just dug-up places. They’ll be jars of gunpowder. And the Lenelli won’t even care – till too late!”
“That’s it,” Hasso agreed.
Rautat came over to him, pulled him down so their faces were on a level, and kissed him on both cheeks like a Frenchman. Rautat had been eating onions, too, and hadn’t cleaned his teeth any more recently than Hasso had. They were odorous kisses. Hasso didn’t care. He was glad to get them. But if he’d kissed the Bucovinan, he would have felt like Judas.
“So we don’t drive forward, then?” Dumnez had the wagon ready to go. “We drive back instead?”
“That’s right,” Hasso said.
“They’ll think we were scouts or something, or maybe a crazy merchant because of the wagon,” Rautat said.
One of the other Bucovinans pointed west, toward the rise. “Here come some of the bastards!” he called.
“Let’s get out of here!” Rautat said.
That was a wonderful order. Hasso was sure he couldn’t have put it better himself. “When we get over the next rise, we can make some more fake holes,” he said. “Someone ought to stay behind to light fuses for them. I do it if you want – there are bushes to hide in.”
“No, I’ll let Gunoiul take care of it.” Rautat pointed to one of the Bucovinan escorts. “We can’t afford to lose you if anything goes wrong.”
We can’t afford to have you go back to the Lenelli, either. Rautat didn’t say that. Hasso thought he heard it even so. Rautat was right to worry, too; Hasso would have gone back to Bottero’s men if only they would have taken him. Since they wouldn’t, he was stuck on this side.
He was, he feared, stuck on the losing side. No matter what he showed the Bucovinans, there was only one of him. All the Lenelli had several hundred years’ worth of technology the natives didn’t – no matter how hard they were working to get it.
And the Lenelli had magic, and the Grenye couldn’t match that no matter what they did. So the big blonds insisted, and Hasso hadn’t seen anything to make him think they were wrong.