After the downfall

X

Stories were enough to get out the word about how Flegrei died. Before long, everybody in Bottero's army seemed to be talking about it. Not all the stories had much to do with what really happened. Hasso heard Lenelli talking about how a squadron of sorcerers had been ground up in a mill and fed to Grenye hogs.

"You gonna quit eating spare ribs?" one knight asked another.

His friend thought about it, but not for long. "Nah," he said. "They probably won't be from the same pigs. And if they are… Well, shit. If they are, I won't think they are, so that's jake."

"Sounds right," the first knight agreed, and they rode on.

Since they were arguing about the shadow of an ass that wasn't there, Hasso didn't waste his time trying to set them straight. Crazy rumors were part and parcel of war. Some of the stories he'd heard on the Russian front… There, they didn't talk about feeding dead Germans to pigs. They talked about Ivans eating German corpses, and their own. He'd believed those yarns, too. As a matter of fact, he still did believe some of them. If you got hungry enough, you were liable to do anything.

If you got mean enough, you were liable to do anything, too. Three days after Flegrei's untimely and unpleasant demise, the Lenelli came to a place big enough to show up on their map. It was called Muresh, and it was bigger than a village, even if it didn't make much of a town. Behind it, a bridge spanned the Oltet River; the bridge was probably the reason Muresh had been founded, and the reason it had grown.

The place didn't boast a wall. It did have a Bucovinan garrison, in a small, sad imitation of a Lenello castle just in front of the bridge. The soldiers in there couldn't have held the place more than a few hours against everything King Bottero had to throw at them. They weren't idiots. They could see that for themselves.

So they got out. They hurried across the bridge, tipping its timbers into the Oltet as they went. Another castle, none too big and none too strong-looking, stood on the far bank. The Lenelli wouldn't have a whole lot of trouble repairing the bridge… till they came within bowshot of that other castle. Then things wouldn't be so much fun. Fixing bridges while the bastards on the other side took potshots at you was nobody's idea of fun, not in any army.

A few ordinary Bucovinans escaped from Muresh, too, fleeing with the men who were there to guard the bridge and not them. Most of the locals stayed where they were, though, either because they couldn't get away or because they didn't think anything bad would happen to them.

Most of the time, they would have been right. The Lenelli hadn't struck Hasso as wantonly cruel. Maybe he just hadn't watched enough. Maybe he hadn't seen them when their blood was up.

King Bottero looked at the peasants and craftsmen of Muresh, at the women and children. He folded his thick arms across his broad chest. "Boys, these stinking Bucovinans killed Flegrei filthy," he shouted to his men. "I want you to go in there and pay the bastards back!"

The soldiers roared, a deep, baying sound that put Hasso in mind of the wolves he'd heard in Russian woods. The locals knew what a noise like that meant. They made a noise of their own then: a cry of horror and despair. Some of them tried to run away. Laughing at the joke, the knights rode after the running men and women and speared them from behind.

Then they swarmed into Muresh, and things got worse.

Some of the Grenye went down on their knees and begged for their lives. Most of them were, on the whole, lucky. The Lenelli killed them quickly. What happened to the men who tried to fight back…

No one could say the Lenelli didn't have imagination. A gray-bearded cook had used a big two-pronged fork and a knife to try to keep them out of his tavern. It didn't work — the Lenelli laughed as they beat down his unskilled defense. One of Bottero's soldiers smeared cooking oil into the Bucovinan's beard while three more knights held him. The native snapped like a dog, which only made the Lenelli laugh harder.

Then the fellow who'd used the oil lit a stick at the tavern's cookfire. The Bucovinan must have known what was coming next. Hasso feared he did, too. "No!" the cook howled — it might have been the only word of Lenello he knew. "No! No! NO!"

His howls did him no more good than his tries at biting had. Stretching out the moment, enjoying every bit of it, the Lenello slowly brought the flame closer to the oil-soaked beard. Then he set the cook's face on fire. "Fight us, will you, you stinking, scrawny savage!" he shouted.

The men who had been holding the Grenye didn't just let go of him. They shoved him away, so that he ran down the streets of Muresh screaming and beating at his burning hair and skin. The Lenelli thought he was the funniest thing they ever saw. "Look at him go!" they yelled.

"Maybe he'll burn this louse-trap down," one of them added.

"Serve them right if he does," another said. "Serve them all right if he does, by the goddess!"

In the sack and massacre that followed, Hasso might as well have been… aman from another world. He didn't hate the Bucovinans enough to want to kill them for the fun of it, though he'd done that to Russians a time or two. But he knew the Lenelli wouldn't listen to him if he tried to stop them. And so he walked through the narrow, stinking, muddy streets of Muresh as if he were a camera.

All the Lenelli who saw the cook with the burning beard liked the idea. They set the faces of several other Bucovinans on fire. One of them torched a woman's hair. Her shrieks were even higher and shriller than those of the men. Some of Bottero's troopers laughed at that. But others shook their heads. "Waste of pussy," one of them declared.

"Still plenty to go around," said a knight who thought the woman with her hair ablaze was funny.

He wasn't wrong. Even more than the Germans in Russia, the Lenelli in Bucovin lived by the law of the jungle. Winners did whatever they wanted, and the enemy's women were fair game. The Lenelli raped with the practiced efficiency of men who took it for granted. A gang of them would catch a woman, throw her down on the ground, force her legs apart and hold her arms, and then mount her one after another, roughly in order of rank.

Some of them let the women shriek; maybe they thought the noise added spice to the game. Others used rough gags of cloth or leather to cut down the din. Sometimes, when they were finished, they would send the woman off with a pat on the backside or even a coin. Sometimes they would get a final thrill by cutting her throat and leaving her there to die in the mud.

One Lenello tried to gag a screaming woman with his member instead of a crumpled rag. A moment later, he was screaming himself, and pouring blood — she bit down, hard. It did her no good, of course. Another blond soldier thrust his sword up where he and his friends had taken their pleasure. She died, slowly and agonizingly, while they tried to bandage their wounded buddy.

Velona watched the rapes as she might have watched animals rutting in the farmyard. "What does the goddess think of this?" Hasso asked her.

For a moment, the incomprehension with which she greeted the question made him wonder if he'd asked it in German by mistake. But no — he'd spoken Lenello. Even if he had, Velona didn't understand him. "Why should the goddess care about Grenye?" she said.

A potbellied Lenello missing half his left ear flung himself onto a wailing Grenye woman spreadeagled on the ground in front of them and started pumping away, his heavy buttocks rising and falling. "Does the goddess care about women?" Hasso asked. "She is one, yes, in a way?"

"She is a Lenello woman." Velona set a finger between her breasts. "She is, some of the time, this Lenello woman. And the Grenye… are only Grenye. When I say she doesn't care about them, I know what I'm talking about."

"All right. I only wonder — wondered." Hasso didn't feel like quarreling. If she did care anything about the natives, she might have done something about the sack. The soldiers would have listened to her. If they didn't, the goddess might have come to her… and it would have taken a bold — and a foolish — Lenello to gainsay her when the goddess made herself manifest.

He looked across the river. The Bucovinan soldiers in the castle on the other side of the Oltet had to be watching — and listening to — the ruination of Muresh. Did they have wives or sweethearts or sisters in the town? What were they thinking? Hasso knew too well the bitter mix of fury and despair and impotence that descended on the Wehrmacht as the Ivans started raping their way through Germany. Were the little swarthy men draining that cup to the dregs right now? How could they be doing anything else?

The Lenello sergeant or whatever he was grunted and pulled out of the Grenye woman. A last few thick drops of semen trickled from the head of his cock as he did up his trousers again. A younger Lenello took his place and began to thrust like a man possessed.

Somebody handed Hasso a big jar of beer. He drank — and drank, and drank. That way, he didn't have to think. And maybe, just maybe, he'd forget some of the things he'd seen.

Come morning, he wasn't sure whether King Bottero's men had deliberately torched Muresh or the fires they set got out of hand. What difference did it make, anyhow? The place was just as gone either way.

He woke with a bursting bladder, a pounding headache, and a mouth that tasted like the bottom of a latrine trench. The stink of smoke and burnt flesh assailed his nose when he left the tent he shared with Velona to ease himself. He looked around for the cookfires — maybe porridge would settle his sour stomach. He didn't see them anywhere, though. The cooks still had to be sleeping off the previous day's orgy of slaughter and lust.

He looked across the Oltet again. The Bucovinans had men on the battlements of their keep. The place would be easy to take even so — once the army got across the river. With the planking down from the bridge, that might not be so easy. He shrugged and winced, wishing again for aspirin.

As far as the Lenelli were concerned, what they'd done was all part of a day's work. They hardly looked at the smoldering ruins of Muresh. Instead, they started yelling for the cooks. Burning the place and massacring the people only seemed to have given them an appetite.

They hadn't killed everybody. A few Bucovinan men survived as slaves, a few women as — Hasso supposed — playthings. Some of the locals had the dazed look of people who'd lost everything in a natural disaster but somehow come through alive. Others seemed more calculating, perhaps trying to figure out how to make the best of what had happened to them. Seeing that thoughtful gleam in some of the women's eyes made Hasso want to cry and swear at the same time.

Berbec clung close to him — close enough to be annoying, like a dog that always stayed at his heel. "Why don't you get lost?" Hasso snapped when he'd had enough.

"If I leave you, master, I am lost," the captive replied. "I think someone will do for me." He hacked at his throat with the edge of his hand to leave no doubt about what he meant.

And he was right enough to embarrass the German. "All right. Stay with me, then," Hasso said roughly. "Enough killing."

"Too much killing," Berbec said.

King Bottero took matters into his own hands — or rather, used his own foot. He booted the cooks out of their cots and bedrolls. They grumbled, but they came. When the king woke you up, you either got to work or tried to assassinate him. None of the cooks seemed ready for anything that drastic.

Across the river, the Bucovinans in their castle would be eating breakfast, too. They had to know the Lenelli would try to cross the Oltet as soon as they could. They also had to know that, if Bottero's men made it across the river, their own chances weren't good. Hasso had seen and joined in more rear-guard actions than he liked to remember. Recruiting sergeants with medals and campaign ribbons all over their chests didn't talk about that kind of soldiering.

He was spooning up porridge when Bottero came over to him. Berbec tried to disappear without moving a muscle. He needn't have worried; the king either truly didn't notice him or affected not to. It amounted to the same thing either way. To Hasso, Bottero came straight to the point: "Do you know any easy way to get across the Oltet?"

"Is there a ford close by?" Hasso asked.

Bottero shook his big head. "No."

The Wehrmacht would have used rubber rafts to seize a bridgehead. No such items were part of the Lenello logistics train. "Have we got boats? Can we make rafts?"

"We don't have boats. How could we carry them along?" Bottero said. With ox-drawn wagons as his main supply vehicles, he had a point. "Building rafts would take too cursed long. The weather won't get better. I want to hit the Grenye again, just as soon as I can."

That made good sense. Even if the winter here wouldn't turn Russian, it wouldn't be a delight, either. Hasso shrugged. "Sorry, your Majesty. Then we have to do it the hard way — or can your wizards knock down that castle for you?"

What did the Americans call that? Passing the buck, that's what it was. King Bottero, who had been scowling, brightened. "I'll find out," he said, and stomped off.

Hasso carefully didn't smile. Even if the wizards told Bottero no, he'd get angry at them, not at his military adviser who'd fallen out of the sky. That suited Hasso just fine.

Berbec might have tried to disappear, but he'd kept his ears open. He sketched a salute. "You are not just a bold warrior, my master," he said. "You are sly, too."

"Danke schon" Hasso said, perhaps with less irony than he'd intended. He studied the Grenye he'd vanquished and then acquired. How much of that did Berbec mean, and how much was the grease job any slave with a gram of sense gave his master? Some of each, the German judged: the best flattery held a grain of truth that made all of it more likely to be believed.

"What do you say?" Berbec scratched his head over the sounds of a language only one man in this world would ever speak.

"I say, 'Thank you,'" Hasso answered, and then, "How do you say that in your language?" Berbec told him. When Hasso pronounced the words, Berbec's dark eyebrows twitched, so the German judged he'd made a hash of things. "Tell me when I am wrong," he said. "I want to say it right. Repeat for me, please." He'd had plenty of practice saying that in Lenello.

"You sure you want me to say you are wrong?" Berbec understood the dangers inherent in that, all right.

But Hasso nodded. "By the goddess, I do. I am angrier if I make mistake than if you tell me I make mistake."

"Hmm." The native's eyebrows were very expressive. Frenchmen had eyebrows like that. So did Jews in Poland and Russia. Their eyebrows hadn't done them any good. Neither had anything else. Berbec's… made Hasso smile, anyway. "Well, we see." The Bucovinan still seemed anything but convinced.

"If you tell me sweet lies and I find out, I make you sorry." Hasso tried to sound as fierce as… as what? As a Lenello who'd just sacked a town in Bucovin, that was what. Yes, that would do, and then some.

It would if it convinced Berbec, anyhow. "Hmm," he repeated. Next to the Lenelli, maybe I'm not such a tough guy after all. He'd spent five and a half years in the biggest war in the history of the world, most of the last four on the Russian front — and in spite of everything he'd seen and done, he was still a softie next to Bottero's knights and foot soldiers. Maybe that said something good about the civilization that had blown itself to smithereens from the Atlantic to the Volga. He smacked Berbec on the back, not too hard. "You listen to me, you hear?"

"You are my master. You could have killed me, and you didn't. Of course I listen to you," Berbec said. Something in his deep-set dark eyes added, If I feel like it.

Hasso did him a favor: he pretended not to see that. He just laughed and slapped the Bucovinan on the back again and got ready for another day of warfare, for all the world as if there hadn't been a sack and a slaughter here the day before. He'd done that kind of thing back in his own world, too.

King Bottero's artisans started gathering lumber from what was left of Muresh to resurface to bridge across the Oltet. That told Hasso the king's wizards hadn't come up with any brilliant ideas on their own. The artisans had to do considerable scrounging, too, because not much was left of Muresh.

Orosei came over to Hasso as the Wehrmacht man watched the artisans at work. "You didn't have any sneaky schemes for getting across?" the master-at-arms asked.

Hasso shrugged and spread his hands. "No miracles in my pockets. No ford. No boats. I think we have to do it the hard way."

"Oh, well." Orosei shrugged, too. "I told the king to ask you. It was worth a try"

"So you're to blame, eh?" Hasso made a joke of it. Orosei might have been doing him a favor.

"That's me." Orosei grinned. Either he wasn't trying to screw Hasso or he had more guile in him than the German guessed.

"I say to King Bottero, try the wizards." Hasso shrugged. "They have no miracles in their pockets, either."

"Too bad," Orosei said. "They talk big. I'd like 'em better if they delivered on more of their promises, though. That poor bastard the Bucovinans caught… If he was hot stuff, why didn't he turn 'em into a bunch of trout before they got to work on him?"

"Swords are faster than spells," Hasso said. So everybody had told him. Like a lot of things everybody said, it must have held some truth, or Flegrei would still be around. Hasso suspected it wasn't the last word, though.

Bottero's master-at-arms let out a sour chuckle. "Yeah, they are. A good thing, too, or clowns like you and me'd be out of work. When kings wanted to fight wars, they wouldn't use anybody but those unicorn-riding nancy boys." He spat in the mud to show what he thought of wizards.

Hasso had seen his share of homos in the Wehrmacht, and maybe more than his share in the Waffen-SS, where they seemed to gravitate. Yeah, sometimes you could blackmail them. But when they fought, they fought at least as well as anybody else. Some of them, in fact, made uncommonly ferocious soldiers, because they didn't seem to give a damn whether they lived or died.

More boards thudded onto the stone framework of the bridge across the Oltet. The Bucovinans in the keep on the far bank watched the Lenelli work without trying to interfere… till Bottero's men replanked about half of the bridge. That brought them into archery range, and the Grenye started shooting as if arrows were going to be banned day after tomorrow.

A Lenello shot through the throat clutched at himself and tumbled into the turbid green water five meters below. He wore a heavy mailshirt; he wouldn't have lasted long even without a mortal wound. Another big blond warrior came back cussing a blue streak, an arrow clean through his forearm.

"You're lucky," somebody told the wounded man. "Now they can get it out easy — they won't have to push it through."

"Bugger you with a pinecone, you stinking fool," the bleeding Lenello retorted. "If I was lucky, this goddess-cursed thing would've missed." Good grammar would have called for a subjunctive there. None of the soldiers seemed to miss it. Like any language, Lenello spoken informally was a different beast from the one the schoolmasters taught. Hasso smiled reminiscently, remembering all the German dialects he'd coped with. He wouldn't have to worry about that any more.

The archery on the bridge was a different story. Other Lenelli fell, a few dead, more wounded. Some of the hurt men made it back under their own power; others needed buddies' help. Every soldier who helped a wounded friend was a soldier who wasn't retimbering the bridge. That work slowed to a crawl.

Bottero sent archers out onto the span to shoot back. They were bigger, stronger men than the Bucovinans in the castle. But most of their arrows fell short. The natives, shooting down from a height, had gravity on their side. Working against it was a losing proposition.

The Lenelli didn't need long to see as much. They quit shooting at the Grenye, and brought a troop of men with shields forward to protect the soldiers moving the planking forward. That wasn't perfect, but it worked well enough.

Meter by meter, the planking advanced. As it neared the east bank of the Oltet, the Bucovinans in the castle tried something new. They stopped shooting at the men setting the planks in place and sent volley after volley of fire arrows at the lumber itself. Some of the long shafts with burning tow and tallow attached near the tip fell into the river and hissed out. But the Lenelli had to stomp out lots of others or drench them with buckets of water dipped up from below. One soldier, in a display of bravado, dropped his trousers and pissed a flame into oblivion.

Here and there, though, the fire arrows started blazes before the Lenelli could suppress them. If those had spread, they might have driven King Bottero's men from the bridge. But some of the wood the Lenelli used was wet, which slowed down the flames. And the blonds managed to keep ahead of the fires in spite of everything their enemies could do.

When it became clear that the Lenelli were going to make it over the Oltet, the Bucovinans in the castle fled, as they'd abandoned Muresh. They left Bottero nothing he could use. Not long after they abandoned the tower, smoke started pouring from it — they'd fired whatever was left inside.

"Miserable bastards," Orosei grumbled.

"Good soldiers," Hasso said. "They do their job, then they pull out. They hurt us, they delay us, they deny us the tower. Good soldiers."

"They've got no business being good soldiers," the master-at-arms said. "They're nothing but a pack of Grenye savages."

He sounded personally affronted that the enemy should do anything right. Some Germans in Russia had sounded the same way about the Ivans in 1941. After that, such expressions of amazement came a lot less often. The Wehrmacht was the best army in the world — which meant the Red Army had the best schoolmasters in the world. The same was bound to be true here.

"How much do the Bucovinans learn from you?" Hasso asked.

"Too bloody much, if you want to know what I think." No, Orosei didn't want to take them seriously.

After the defenders fled, replanking the last bit of bridge went fast. With typical Lenello swagger, an officer leaped from the bridge onto the riverbank. He leaped — and he vanished. A moment later, a shriek rang out that Hasso could hear all the way across the river.

"What the — ?" he said. Orosei spread his hands and shrugged, as baffled as the man from another world.

Before long, the story came back across the bridge. So did the officer's body. The Bucovinans had dug themselves a mantrap on the riverbank: a cunningly concealed pit, with upward-pointing spikes set in the bottom. They knew their foes' habits, all right. They made the trap, and the Lenello jumped into it.

"I've heard of them doing things like that before," Orosei said. "You've got to watch out for the spikes they use. They smear shit on them, to poison the wounds they make."

"No matter here," Hasso said. He'd got a look at the dead officer. One of those spikes had gone through his chest, another through his throat. He'd bled like a stuck pig, which he might as well have been. His wounds wouldn't have time to fester.

More Lenelli stepped onto the eastern bank of the Oltet. They moved more cautiously than that first luckless officer had, and probed the ground in front of them with spears. They found another mantrap a few meters farther in from the water's edge. The Grenye had used the night well indeed.

Hasso wondered whether watchers would be waiting to harass the Lenelli as they filled in the pits. But the natives seemed to think they'd done everything they could to slow down Bottero's men here. The Lenelli crossed the Oltet with no further trouble.

Orosei pointed to smoke rising up in the east. "They're burning things again," he said. "Do they really think that will slow us down?"

"Yes," Hasso answered. "They're liable to be right, too. Where's the wagon train that should be here yesterday?"

"Should have been — you talk funny, you know that?" the master-at-arms said. "I don't know where the miserable wagons are. We can't detach enough men to cover all of them."

"I know," Hasso said. "Do you think the Bucovinans don't know, too? Without the wagons, without foraging on the country, what do we eat?"

Orosei looked around. "Mud. Rocks." He rubbed his belly. "Yum."

He startled a laugh out of Hasso. "All right — you have me there. But what do we do when we get hungry?"

"Eat the goddess-cursed Bucovinans, for all I care," the Lenello answered. For all Hasso knew, he meant it. The Germans thought the Ivans were Untermenschen. The Lenelli thought the same thing about the natives here, only more so. Did they think the Grenye were far enough down the scale to do duty as meat animals? Hasso decided he didn't want to find out.

He didn't want to let go of his own worries, either. "If the Bucovinans burn their crops, what do they eat?"

"Their seed grain," Orosei answered. "Then they starve along with us, but they take longer."

Bucovin was a big place — Hasso remembered the maps Bottero used. They weren't anywhere near so good as the ones the Wehrmacht used, but they showed that well enough. Could the natives bring in enough food from places where they weren't burning it to supply the ones where they were?

He had no idea. When he asked Orosei, the master-at-arms only shrugged his broad shoulders. "Beats me," he said. "You're the spymaster, right? You're the one who's supposed to find out stuff like that, right?"

"Right," Hasso said tightly. Orosei made intelligence work sound easy, which only proved he'd never done any. By the end of 1941, the Germans were sure they'd knocked out as many divisions as the Red Army had at the start of the war — but the Russians weren't within a million kilometers of quitting, or of running out of men.

King Bottero sent out raiding parties to the north and south of his main line of march. They drove some pigs and a few cattle and sheep back to the army — and a few horses and donkeys as well. Those were riding or draft animals, but you could eat them if you had to. Though not a Frenchman who did it by choice, Hasso had chewed gluey horseflesh plenty of times on the Russian front. He'd been glad to get it then; if the Lenello cooks served it up, he'd eat it again now.

The raiders also brought back some grain the Grenye had already harvested. It didn't make up for the wagons that weren't going to get to the army, though. Had the Bucovinans burned that grain or captured it? Only they knew.

But they left no doubt about what had happened to the Lenello teamsters. They left a bloated, foul-smelling blond head in the road in front of Bottero's oncoming army. Someone had written a message in Lenello on a sheet of bark and put it by the head. Even Hasso had no trouble sounding out the two words: YOU NEXT.

When King Bottero saw that, Hasso thought he would have a stroke. Hitler's rages were the stuff of legend in Germany; Bottero's fury now matched any fit the Fuhrer could have pitched. For a little while, the German didn't understand just why the king was going off like a grenade. Yes, the warning in the road was grisly, but it was no worse than a hundred things the Lenelli had done when they sacked Muresh.

But then Bottero roared, "My horse — my horse, I tell you! — has more business pushing me around than these goddess-cursed, mindblind, soul-dead Grenye! They'll pay! Oh, how they'll pay!"

That made the Wehrmacht officer nod to himself. It came down to the business of who were Untermenschen again. Bottero really would have taken it better had his horse tried to tell him to go back to his own kingdom. For the Bucovinans to assume equality with the invaders, even an equality of terror, was a slap in the face to everything the Lenello kingdoms stood for.

And it wasn't just Bottero. All the Lenelli who saw the head and, even more important, who could read the crude threat by it, quivered with outrage. Velona was quieter than the king — Krakatoa erupting might have been noisier than Bottero, but Hasso couldn't think of anything else that would — but no less angry.

"They dare," she whispered, as if speaking louder might make her burst. "They truly dare to try conclusions with us, do they? Well, his Majesty has the right of it — we'll teach them a lesson they'll remember for the next hundred years. The ones we leave alive will, anyhow."

Germans had talked like that in Poland in 1939, and in Russia in 1941. Poles and Russians by the millions had died, too. The Germans had expected nothing less; those deaths were reckoned a prerequisite for clearing the Lebensraum Germans needed in the fertile croplands of the east.

What the Germans hadn't expected was how many of their own number would die. The Slavs were uncommonly stubborn about refusing to be cleared, and now Hasso's folk fled before them instead of driving them away.

Could that happen here? He had trouble believing it. The Bucovinans were brave, and there were lots of them, but they were outclassed in ways the Ivans hadn't been. Still, that head and the warning by it spoke of more implacable purpose than Hasso had looked to see from the natives.

They spoke of such things to him, anyhow. King Bottero took another message from them. "Burn the head," he commanded in a voice like iron. "His soul will ascend to the heavens." He looked around. Had he spotted any Bucovinans, he probably would have ordered them sacrificed to serve the Lenello teamster in the world to come. His face had that kind of intense, purposeful stare, anyhow. But, since he didn't, he pointed to the bark with the writing. "Dig a hole and throw that in. Don't cover it over yet, though, by the goddess."

His men sprang to obey him. That was partly their own anger working, and partly their fear. Anyone who tried standing against Bottero in that moment would have been a dead man in the next. The dirt by the side of the road was soft and easy to dig up. One of the Lenelli picked up the piece of bark with his fingertips, as if it were unclean. After he dropped it into the hole, he scrubbed his hands on the dead grass and then spat after it.

Spitting wasn't enough to satisfy Bottero. He dismounted from his great war-horse, walked over to the hole, undid his trousers, and took the most furious and majestic leak Hasso had ever imagined, let alone seen.

Even that didn't suffice, not for the king. He gestured to the leaders around him. Hasso didn't care one way or the other about pissing on an offensive sign. If Bottero wanted him to, he would. The king did, and so he did. Other officers' efforts made a pretty fair puddle in the hole in the ground.

Hasso was taken aback when Bottero waved Velona up to the hole. He could see why Bottero wanted to show the goddess' utter contempt for the Bucovinan warning, but… Velona didn't seem embarrassed; she just squatted and pissed. If it didn't bother her, Hasso told himself it shouldn't bother him, either.

After that, the Lenelli shoveled in some dirt, too. The army rode on. Velona looked… maybe unhappy, maybe just distant. "You don't like what you just did?" Hasso asked, guiding his horse up alongside hers.

"Oh," she said in some surprise, as if recalled to herself. "No. It isn't that. The natives deserve what we gave them. But… I wish he hadn't buried it, that's all. The earth here fights for Bucovin."

She'd said that before, about her last visit to the Grenye land. What did it mean here? Did even she know? Hasso thought about asking, and then thought again.