He wished he hadn’t thought of it that way, because you could if you were sly enough and smart enough. Magnesium would burn even underwater. If you tossed a lump of metallic sodium into water, it would start burning all by itself.
So … did the Lenelli have the sorcerous equivalent of sodium? Hasso shrugged. How was he supposed to know? He was a stranger here himself.
The Lenelli – the Lenelli of Bottero’s kingdom, anyhow – had Velona. If she wasn’t sodium, Hasso couldn’t imagine what would be. Did they know how to use her, or perhaps the goddess, to best advantage? He shrugged again. One more thing he couldn’t be sure of.
Well find out, he thought, a little – or maybe more than a little – uneasily.
Zgomot knew where he wanted to make his fight. Hasso hadn’t been there before, so he couldn’t judge the position firsthand. When he listened to Zgomot and Rautat talk about it, it sounded good. Sometimes you had to assume the other guys on your side knew what the hell they were doing.
Sometimes you got royally screwed making assumptions like that, too. Hasso had to hope this wasn’t one of those times.
Knowing where his own force would stand let Zgomot chivvy Bottero in the direction he wanted him to go. Bucovinan raiding parties shoved the Lenello line of march a little farther south than it might have gone otherwise. With a little luck, the invaders wouldn’t even notice they were getting shoved.
Peasants fled before the Lenelli. They clogged the roads. In the Low Countries and France, fleeing civilians had worked to the Wehrmacht’s advantage. They slowed up the enemy. Then, years later, German civilians fled before the Ivans and made life difficult for the army. What went around came around.
At Hasso’s suggestion, Zgomot tried channeling the refugees down some roads, with luck leaving others clear so his soldiers could move on them. It didn’t work as well as Hasso hoped. The Bucovinan traffic cops were trying something they’d never done before, and the peasants didn’t want to listen to them.
You did what you could with what you had, that was all. With a couple of machine guns and enough ammo, he could have slaughtered the Lenelli without losing a Bucovinan. With a battery of 105s, a forward observer, and a couple of radio sets, he could have slaughtered them before they got within ten kilometers of him. With experienced German Feldgendarmerie personnel, he could have kept the peasants from mucking up the roads so badly.
As things were, the soldiers had to push through and past the farmers and their livestock. They lost time doing it. They lost less time than they would have with no Bucovinans directing traffic, but more than Hasso liked.
“We will use more gunpowder in front of the Lenelli to slow them down, too,” Zgomot said when Hasso complained. “Things will even out.”
“So they will.” Hasso knew he sounded surprised. He should have thought of that himself. Good thing somebody did. No, no flies on Zgomot. Who was the barbarian, anyway?
One evening, Hasso saw the smoke of Lenello campfires – or maybe of farmhouses the Lenelli were burning – rising against the bright western sky. “Soon now,” he said.
“Yes.” Zgomot nodded. He was never a talky man. The closer the battle came, the less he said. His whole realm rode on this, and he felt the pressure. Well, why wouldn’t he, the poor son of a bitch?
Hasso said, “We put the Hedgehogs in front of the catapults, yes?” The Lord of Bucovin nodded. Hasso continued, “On their flanks, we dig trenches. That way, we worry not so much about other troops protecting them.”
“Bottero’s men will see the trenches,” Zgomot said.
“Ja. So what? They see they can’t get past them. They go fight somewhere else. We want them to do that, yes?”
“Yes.” Zgomot nodded. “We will dig – if we have time.”
More smoke fouled the horizon the next day. The day after that, the Bucovinans came to Zgomot’s chosen battle site. Hasso smiled when he saw it – the Lord of Bucovin could pick ‘em, all right. Well, the German had already found that out the hard way. If Zgomot couldn’t pick ‘em, Hasso would still be fighting for the other side. Falticeni might have fallen. If it hadn’t, it would this time around for sure. And he would still be bedding Velona. Details, details…
Details here looked good. A small river anchored the Bucovinan right – the Lenelli wouldn’t turn that flank. On the left, a forest made it hard for the enemy to get through. Zgomot would have to post some soldiers in there, but not many. If Bottero wanted to get past the Bucovinans, he’d have to come right at them.
And he would. Hasso knew the Lenello king well enough to be sure of that. Down in his gut, Bottero wouldn’t believe a bunch of Grenye savages could stop his knights. Yes, they’d done it the autumn before, but with a trick. He’d have his wizards looking for pitfalls this time. He wouldn’t get fooled the same way twice, and he wouldn’t think the natives could come up with two new things in a row.
By now he would know about gunpowder, of course. Bucovinans swarmed over the field in front of where they would post their line. At Hasso’s direction, they dug dummy mines and planted real ones. A lot of the real ones were nearer the trees, where soldiers could light the fuses without risking their lives … too much. Minefields weren’t made to stop enemies, though. They were made to channel them. These would aim the Lenelli right at the catapults.
That would be great – if the Hedgehogs did their job. Could they really hold off horsemen? Could they, say, hold off a deep striking column? If they couldn’t, Lord Zgomot’s strong position was, in a word, fucked. If they can’t, I am, in a word, dead, Hasso thought.
He spoke to them: “You have to stand fast. No matter what, you have to. If you do, we win. Bucovin wins. If you don’t, you screw us all. Have you got that?”
“Yes!” they shouted. They seemed eager enough. How eager they’d be when Lenello knights on big horses couched lances and thundered down on them, Hasso would just have to see. Even in the fight the Bucovinans lost the autumn before, he’d thought they were plenty brave. Now they had better tools to be brave with. Maybe that would turn the trick. He had to hope so.
Scouts rode out of the west, pointing over their shoulder as they came. Most of them rode donkeys, not horses; the greater part of the horses Bucovin had were under Bucovin’s knights. The shouts the natives let out gradually turned into words, and the words were, “They’re coming!”
The Lenelli reached the field late that afternoon. Bottero’s banner fluttered, big and bright and red in the distance. Velona would be somewhere over there. Hasso spotted several unicorns. The wizards had come in force. Well, he hadn’t expected anything else.
Zgomot’s men stood in line of battle, ready to fight. A Lenello rode forward, waving green branches as a sign of truce. He came straight toward the center of the line – right where the charge would likely go in. He was scouting the ground, but what could you do? When he got close, he shouted, “Tomorrow, you die!” in Lenello and rode away without waiting for an answer.
XXVII
It was a long, restless night. Hasso and Zgomot feared the Lenelli might try to steal the battle under cover of darkness. The Bucovinans slept in shifts and in their armor, with weapons close at hand. Zgomot sent scouts and sentries as far forward as he could, and well out to both flanks as well.
Hasso wouldn’t have wanted to try a nighttime cavalry charge. He feared an attack on foot. If Bottero thought that was the best way to cut down the value of gunpowder … well, the Lenello king might well have been right.
And, a little past midnight – so the German judged by the position of the moon – the Lenelli did try something. Bucovinan scouts gave the alarm. Horns blared in the Bucovinan camp. Soldiers who had been sleeping sprang up, clutching swords and spears. Hasso grabbed a smoldering length of punk and ran to the catapults. Lobbing shells at night was one more thing he didn’t want to do. He couldn’t aim, and they were much too likely to go off before they flew because the catapult men would be clumsy in the dark. He shook his head – not they. It wouldn’t happen more than once.
But, to his surprise, the Lenelli drew back instead of striking home. Big fires blazed in and around their camp – maybe they feared Bucovinan raiders. That was a comforting thought. By the light of those fires, Hasso made out tiny figures – in reality, blonds mostly taller than he was – running back and forth and gesticulating at one another.
He wished for Zeiss binoculars. With them, he might have learned something about what was going on over there. As things were, he could only guess. Whatever the Lenelli had planned, it didn’t seem to have worked.
“I wonder if they tried to use magic to lull our scouts to sleep so they could get close without our knowing,” Drepteaza said when he went back to their tent. He didn’t think he would sleep any more, but he hoped he was wrong.
He chewed on that. Slowly, he nodded. “Makes more sense than anything I think of,” he said. “And it means our amulets work.” He reached up and touched his through his tunic. “The Lenelli can’t be happy about that.” He imagined Bottero screaming at his wizards and the wizards yelling back. The Bucovinans couldn’t have prayed for a prettier picture.
“It only means they’ll hit us harder come the dawn,” Drepteaza predicted. “They’ll think they have to pay us back.”
“Pay us back?” Hasso said, puzzled.
“Of course.” She sounded surprised he couldn’t see what she meant. “We’ve insulted them. We didn’t fall over when they expected us to. And when Grenye insult Lenelli, the Lenelli pay back in blood.”
Hasso grunted uneasily. That had the feel of truth to it. The Wehrmacht felt the same way about the Red Army when the Russians didn’t roll over and play dead after 22 June 1941. How dare they keep fighting when they’re licked? was the thought in German minds all through that summer. The Reich had two years of nothing but victory behind it by then. Its soldiers expected more, as if that were theirs by right.
Well, the Lenelli had generations of victories behind them by now. They too expected more. Drepteaza was right – they were liable to turn mean if they didn’t get them. The Germans sure had.
Yes, the Germans had got mean … and then they’d got desperate. If you jumped on a bear’s back, all you could do was hang on tight. Sometimes that didn’t help, either. Hasso wouldn’t have been fighting in the ruins of Berlin if it did.
The Lenelli wouldn’t have gone that far down the road yet. But they’d still be angry, affronted. They’d want their revenge, all right. Didn’t Bucovin also have some revenge coming, though?
“We see who pays, uh, whom,” Hasso said. Drepteaza kissed him.
The sun came up behind the Bucovinans. That would help their archers and slingers and hurt the bowmen of the Lenelli, who would have a harder time aiming. Were the battle different, it would have mattered more. This fight wasn’t going to be about archery. It would be about knights and gunpowder.
And it would be about the Hedgehogs. They took their places in front of the catapults, a hundred men wide, ten men deep. As they marched into position, they held their spears high, and they kept on holding them high. The Lenelli would see that they had unusual weapons, but Hasso didn’t want them seeing what the Hedgehogs intended to do with those weapons, not till the very last moment.
He rode out in front of the pikemen on the unicorn, just to give Bottero’s men one more thing to think about. “You can do it,” he told the pikemen again. “If you do it, we win. If you run, Bucovin runs with you. You will fight!”
“Yes!” they shouted. Sure as hell, they thought they could hold the Lenelli out. Hasso was sure of that. And it mattered. If you thought you could win, you were halfway home. Not all the way; Hasso knew that too bitterly well. But halfway was a lot better than going into a fight with your heart in your throat, sure the enemy would do something horrible to you any minute now.
Slowly, the Lenelli formed their battle line. Would they use a strike column? If they did, where would it go in? He knew where he expected it to go: toward the Hedgehogs. Whether he wanted it going there was a different story. If they held, he would blow the Lenelli to kingdom come. If they didn’t… Well, shit, if they didn’t he’d be too dead to worry about anything else anyway.