After the downfall

IX

"I am your slave," the Grenye prisoner insisted.

Hasso had never expected to see the warrior he'd captured again. But there the fellow was, helping one of the cooks dole out bowls of porridge flavored with salty, fennel-filled sausage and onions. It wasn't delicious, but it filled the belly. On campaign, that counted for more.

"Is he yours, sir?" the cook asked. "I didn't mean to take him if he really belonged to somebody, but you know how it is. We can always use an extra pair of hands."

"What is the custom?" Hasso asked in return. "He did surrender to me yesterday."

"Then he's yours if you want him," the cook said. "If you don't, I'll go on using him — he seems willing enough. Or you can feed him to the water snakes — but if you wanted to do that, you could have done it when he tried to give up."

The Bucovinan pointed to Hasso. "You spared me. I work for you now. I am Berbec." He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "You are a great lord, yes? A great lord, sure, but you never have man like me before."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Hasso said dryly. Berbec laughed louder than the joke deserved… if it was a joke. Was taking a prisoner as a batman, as a valet — hell, as a slave — clasping a water snake to his bosom? The cook didn't seem to think so. Hasso found himself nodding. "Well, come on, then, Berbec. What can you do for me that I can't do for myself?"

"All kinds of things." Berbec bowed to him, then also bowed to the cook for whom he'd been working. The motion was different from the stiffer one the Lenelli — and the Germans — used. It might almost have been a move from a dance. "You don't have any other slaves?"

"Not right now," Hasso said.

Berbec clicked his tongue between his teeth. "You poor fellow." He cocked his head to one side, eyeing Hasso with sparrowish curiosity. "You look like a Lenello, but you don't talk like. Where you from?"

"A faraway country," the German replied, which was true but uninformative. He still didn't trust Berbec not to disappear the minute he turned his back. "Can you take care of a horse?"

"I do that." Berbec nodded eagerly. He might have picked the next thought out of Hasso's mind, for he went on, "Not steal him, neither. You could kill me, but you spare. I owe you my life. I pay back."

Maybe he meant it. Some people, and some peoples, were punctilious about their honor, to the point that looked like stupidity to anyone with a less rigid code. Whether the Grenye of Bucovin were like that, whether Berbec himself was… I just have to find out, Hasso thought. In the meantime, I have to be careful.

"You have funny helmet," Berbec remarked. His hands shaped the flare of the German Stahlhelm.

"In the style of my country," Hasso said. The Lenelli wore plain conical helms, more like those of the Normans than any others he knew. So did the Bucovinans, probably in imitation of the blonds from overseas.

"Not bad. Maybe turn sword better." Berbec might be a little man, but he was a warrior. "But nasal is new. Not have before?" He was a warrior with sharp eyes, too. That nasal was riveted on. The Lenelli couldn't weld steel, and Hasso didn't trust solder to hold. Berbec chattered on: "Why you not have before? Keep face from getting split open."

"War in my land doesn't usually come down to swordstrokes," Hasso replied. And wasn't that the sad and sorry truth? A helmet wouldn't stop a rifle round, though it would keep out some shell fragments. High-velocity bullets made most body armor more trouble than it was worth. Only if you were fighting with bayonets or entrenching tools would a nasal matter. Once in a blue moon, in other words. German armorers didn't see the point of adding one, and who was he to say they were wrong… for the kind of war they fought?

Berbec stared at him. Hasso thought the Bucovinan would call him a liar. But then Berbec thrust out a stubby, accusing finger. "You have the thunderflasher," he said. That wasn't a word in Lenello, but it was a pretty good description of a firearm. "You point it at someone, and it goes boom, and he falls over. All soldiers in your country carry thunderflashers, then?"

No, he was nobody's fool. "That's right," Hasso said.

"The Lenelli have all kinds of things. They are clever, the Lenelli." Maybe Berbec felt he could talk freely about them because Hasso wasn't one. "But they don't have thunderflashers." He eyed Hasso again, this time, the Wehrmacht officer judged, apprehensively. And why not? If the Lenelli all carried Schmeissers, Bucovinan resistance would last a minute and a half, tops.

"Can't make them here." Hasso wanted the words back as soon as they came out. Some Intelligence officer he was, blabbing like a fool!

Velona came up to the two of them. As soon as she saw Berbec, she understood what was going on. "He's one you caught yourself?" she asked. When Hasso nodded, she went on, "Good. You've been doing too much for yourself." She brushed her lips across his and walked on.

Berbec stared after her — not as a man will watch a good-looking woman, but more as anyone might stare at a lightning bolt smashing down close by. "That was — the goddess — the woman who, uh, carries the goddess." He might be a slave, but this was the first time Hasso had seen him without his self-possession.

"Yeah." Hasso nodded.

"She doesn't need a thunderflasher to cut through us," Berbec said sadly. "Only a sword — and herself."

Hasso nodded again, not without sympathy. What was it like for the Grenye, without magic of their own, to try to stand against Velona when the goddess was strong in her? Like a lone rifleman against a King Tiger panzer? Worse, probably, because the panzer and the infantryman belonged to the same world. The Grenye had to feel the very heavens were fighting against them — and they wouldn't be so far wrong, would they?

Berbec's stare swung back to Hasso. It was as if he could still see the mark of her kiss glowing on the Wehrmacht officer's face. "She is… your woman?" He sounded like someone afraid to be right.

"Yes, she's my woman." Hasso felt the irony in his voice. Berbec might not understand, but, to the Lenello way of thinking, Hasso was Velona's man and not the other way around.

He succeeded in impressing his new servant, anyway. "I knew you were a great lord. I already told you that," Berbec said. "But I didn't know you were such a great lord." He bowed himself almost double. "I cry pardon. Forgive me."

He wouldn't straighten till Hasso touched him on the back. "It's all right. Forget it. I still put on trousers like anybody else. I still shit. I still piss. I still need you to see to my horse. That's what you say you do." He was getting better with past tenses, but he still wasn't good enough to feel comfortable using them.

"I do it," Berbec said. He seemed mostly stuck in the present indicative, too. For no sensible reason, that made Hasso feel better.

King Bottero's army pressed deeper into Bucovin. The natives didn't stand and fight again. They didn't go away, either. Raiders picked off Lenello scouts. Horsemen attacked the wagons that brought supplies forward. And, to Hasso's dismay if not to his surprise, flames and clouds of smoke rose up in front of the invaders.

"They burn their own crops," he said. The Russians had scorched the earth in front of the oncoming Wehrmacht. Later, moving from east to west instead of from west to east, the Germans used the same ploy to slow down the Red Army. The Ivans screamed about war crimes. They hadn't said a word when they used those tactics. Winners said what they pleased. Who could call a winner a liar?

King Bottero eyed the smoke and sniffed the breeze. Hasso couldn't smell the burning, not yet. Maybe the enormous Lenello could. "They think they'll make us too hungry to go on," the king said.

"Are they right?" Hasso asked.

"Not yet," Bottero said, an answer that struck the German as reasonable.

Aderno and the other wizards put their heads together. They worked a spell that might have come straight out of Macbeth. They danced; they chanted; they incanted. Dark clouds filled the sky. Rain came down — rain poured down, in fact. It drenched the fires. Whether it did the Lenelli any good was a different question, and one harder to answer. The roads got soaked, too, and turned to mud.

Hasso remembered the first Russian rasputitsa, the time of rain and muck. He remembered motorcycle drivers, their mechanized steeds hub-deep — sometimes headlight-deep — in muck, their rubberized greatcoats ten or twenty kilos heavier than they should have been, their goggles so splashed that they were almost useless (or, sometimes, worse than useless), the eyes behind those goggles gradually growing alarmed as one rider after another began to see it wouldn't be as easy as the High Command claimed. He remembered bogged-down panzers and artillery pieces, half-drowned horses, the sucking goo trying to pull the marching boots off his feet with every step. He remembered bone-crushing exhaustion at the end of every day — and well before the end, too.

Yes, the mud slowed down the Ivans. But they weren't trying to go forward, not that first autumn, anyhow. They were just trying to hold back the Germans, to keep the Wehrmacht out of Moscow. And they did, and blitzkrieg turned to grapple and slugging match… and Hasso found a magical way to escape from burning, pulverized Berlin, but not one the rest of the city would ever be able to use.

And so he was here in western Bucovin, listening to the rain patter down. Soldiers greased their mailshirts every morning and night and draped themselves with cloaks. They swore when they found tiny tumors of rust anyhow — as of course they did. The horses that squelched through the deepening ooze couldn't swear, but the men on their backs made up for that. And the teamsters who fought to keep supply wagons moving cursed even harder than the knights.

By the time it had rained for a couple of days, Hasso began to think the wizards' spell might be worse than the scorched-earth disease. By the time the rain had poured down for a week, he was sure of it. He rode up alongside Aderno, whose unicorn was so splotched and spattered with mud that it looked to have a giraffe's hide.

Hasso waved his arms up toward the weeping sky. "Enough!" he said. He waved again, like a conductor in white tie and tails pulling a crescendo from a symphony orchestra. "Too much, in fact! Call off your storm!"

Aderno's answering glance would have looked even hotter than it did had water not dripped from the end of the wizard's long, pointed nose. "It's not our storm any more," he said. "It's just… weather now."

"Well, work another spell and turn it into good weather, then," Hasso said.

Were there any justice in the world, the water on Aderno's nose would have started to steam. "What do you think we've been trying to do?" he said pointedly.

"I don't know," Hasso answered. "All I know is, it's still raining."

Aderno's gesture was as extravagant as the ones the German had used not long before. "Weather magic is never easy. We'd do a lot more of it if it were," he said. "And trying it here in Bucovin was worse. We were glad when we got what we wanted. Now — "

He broke off when a raindrop hit him in the eye. "Now you've got too much of what you want," Hasso finished for him. The wizard nodded unhappily. "And you can't close the sluice, either," Hasso said. In German, it would have been something like, And you can't turn it off, either. The Lenelli didn't have enough machinery to make phrases like that a natural part of their language.

"Air and sky and land in Bucovin don't want to listen to us," Aderno said. Hasso would have thought he was making excuses if Velona hadn't said the same thing.

Thinking of Velona, though, inspired him, as it often did — though not in the same direction as usual. Instead of erotic excess, his mind swung toward military pragmatism. "Do the air and sky and land here listen to the goddess?" he asked.

"Sometimes." Aderno's attention sharpened. "Sometimes, yes. And if the goddess' person begs her…"

Did Velona beg the goddess the last time she went into Bucovin? What did the goddess do for her then? Anything? Hasso's first, rational, inclination was to say no. But he realized Velona didn't see things that way herself. As far as she was concerned, the goddess gave her just what she asked for: a rescuer from another world, one Hasso Pemsel.

"I speak to her of this," Hasso said. He didn't think of himself as anybody's answered prayer, but in this crazy world he might be wrong, and he knew it.

As he made his way through the mud to the tent he shared with Velona, he reminded himself that he would have to grease his boots. If he didn't, the leather would turn hard as stone when it dried… if it ever dried. It would also start to rot. The Lenelli made boots at least as good as the ones he'd worn when he got here, but he'd got used to the idea of not wasting anything.

He wondered if he would be wasting his time talking to Velona. Try as he would, he didn't have a real feel yet for how things worked here. Maybe he was only suggesting the obvious. Maybe his idea wasn't obvious but was stupid.

Or maybe you're a goddamn genius, he told himself. That made him laugh. He sure as hell didn't feel like a genius. Back in Germany, he bloody well wasn't. But the things he knew from there often made him seem smarter than the locals here. Don't believe your own press clippings, he thought. Wasn't that one of Hitler's big mistakes? He was so convinced the Ivans were bums, he went after them without thinking about what a big bunch of bums they were.

Here heading toward the middle of Bucovin, Hasso could have done without that thought.

Velona took him seriously. That a woman like her might take him seriously was just about enough to make him believe in her goddess, or at least in miracles. When he finished, she said, "I will do what I can. I don't know how much that will be. The goddess didn't seem to hear me when I was in Bucovin before. I feared she'd abandoned me… and then there you were, on the causeway."

"There I was," Hasso agreed. Was he the answer to Velona's prayer? Or had the Omphalos stone sent him here of its own volition? Or was it just dumb luck, with nobody responsible one way or the other? The goddess and whatever powered the Omphalos might know. Hasso didn't believe he ever would.

When Velona decided to do something, she didn't do it halfway. Beseeching the goddess proved no exception to the rule. She carried a statuette of the deity with her. The bronze — about a quarter of a meter tall — was nothing fancy. Had Hasso seen it in a museum back in Berlin, he would have walked past it without a second glance.

Velona set it up on the muddy floor of the tent with a candle burning to either side: a makeshift altar. Then she stripped herself naked and prostrated herself before it. Hasso's admiration for her beauty was almost entirely abstract, his pleasure at seeing her long, smooth length esthetic rather than lustful. She seemed as much in the divine world as in the material, which had a lot to do with that.

Or maybe she just intimidates the crap out of me, he thought — not a reflection likely to have crossed his mind for any ordinary woman. Whatever else you said about Velona, ordinary she was not.

"Hear me!" she said, as if the statuette were an equal. "Hear me!" Hasso wondered whether the bronze image would answer, but it didn't — at least not so he could hear. Velona went on, "Enough of rain! Enough of mud! Enough of barbarism! Time for Bottero's troopers to storm forward!"

Hasso wanted to go outside and look at the weather. If it wasn't changing right then… If it wasn't, then Velona would have to give the goddess another talking-to.

One of the candles flared up. Maybe that was what made the statuette's eyes flash. The rational part of Hasso could believe it was, anyhow. That way, he didn't have to believe he was watching the goddess' response to a petitioner who was fully entitled to treat with her.

He didn't have to believe that, no, but believing anything else wasn't easy. And Velona only made it harder when she said, "Well, I should hope so! It's about time, don't you think?" She might have been talking to a neighbor woman about reining in the neighbor's unruly children.

The bronze goddess' eyes flashed again. This time, Hasso didn't notice any candle flare to cause it. He tried to convince himself that he didn't see the statuette nod in response to Velona's urging. He tried, but he didn't have much luck. His eyes saw what they saw. What it meant… was probably about what it looked like. If he had trouble believing that, wasn't it because the God he was used to worshiping was so leery of doling out miracles? Things were different here.

With an athlete's grace, Velona got to her feet. Hasso had never seen such an… inspiring votary of any god. He tried to imagine her arising, naked and beautiful, from in front of the altar in a Catholic or Lutheran church. The picture didn't want to form. In a way, that was hardly surprising, however rough her presence would have been on a celibate priest. In another way, though, wasn't the impossibility of such a scene too damn bad? If Velona didn't make you want to worship, weren't you already dead inside?

Beaming, she said, "I think that took care of it. Thank you for giving me a push there."

"Any time." Hasso reached out and cupped her left breast in his right hand.

"A push, I said." Velona tried to sound severe, but didn't have much luck. "What would happen if your slave walked in here right now?"

"Berbec? He'd be jealous." Hasso didn't let go. "And he'd think I was the bravest man in the world, for daring to touch you."

"I like it when you touch me." Velona set her hand on his, which made his breath come short. But she went on, "If I didn't like it and you touched me, then you would be the bravest man in the world. And the stupidest."

"I believe you," Hasso said. Men had amused themselves with their enemies' women since the beginning of time. The Germans had done their share of it in France and in Russia. And now the Ivans were paying the Wehrmacht back with their trousers down around their ankles.

Things in this world were bound to be the same. Not all the halfbreeds here had happened because Grenye women welcomed Lenello men with their legs open. But if anyone tried to force Velona to do anything she didn't want to do when the goddess was with her… Hasso didn't know what would happen to a bastard dumb enough to try that. He did know he wouldn't care to find out.

Instead of drawing him down to the cot with her, she slipped away. "I'd better get dressed," she said. He must have looked like a man who'd just bitten down hard on a lemon, because she started to laugh. "Not now doesn't mean never, my dear," she reminded him, wagging a finger under his nose. "We both have other things to worry about, though. Why don't you see what the weather's doing?"

Because I'd rather lay you, he thought grumpily. But, after what he'd been thinking, he couldn't very well say that. And if a woman decided you only wanted her for her twat, you were in trouble, big trouble. If a woman like Velona decided that…

If that happened, what the two of them had was dead. And if it was dead, Hasso figured his own chances of ending up literally dead got a lot higher. The Lenelli cut him extra slack because he was the goddess' boyfriend. If anybody picked a fight with him with swords, though, he was in big trouble. He'd got a lot better with a blade since coming here, but he knew enough to understand the difference between better and good.

Since he didn't want to worry about that, he stepped outside. The rain was gone. A brisk breeze blew the dark clouds across the sky. In the west, the sun poured wet, buttery light across the landscape. A slow smile spread across Hasso's face. The Lenello wizards had started the rain. Now the goddess had ended it.

And the Bucovinans would have a tough time setting their fields aflame for a while — things would be too wet to catch easily. If the roads dried out enough to keep foot soldiers and horses and wagons from bogging down, King Bottero's army could press a lot deeper into Bucovin.

Then what? Hasso wondered. The question wouldn't have occurred to the Lenelli, but the Lenelli had never tried invading the Soviet Union. Hasso looked around their encampment and slowly shook his head. Goddamn lucky bastards.

Bottero's army did push deeper into the barbarians' country. A day and a half after Velona and the goddess persuaded the rain to clear out — Hasso had no other explanation for what happened there — Aderno rode up to him and asked, "Have you seen Flegrei?"

"No." Hasso shook his head, which meant the same thing to the Lenelli as it did in Germany. "Should I see him?"

"Well, I was hoping somebody had." Aderno didn't sound happy. "I wanted to ask him something. Nobody's set eyes on him since not long after we got moving this morning."

"He's a wizard. He rides a unicorn. He should be easy to spot," Hasso said.

"I know," Aderno answered, and Hasso realized he was working hard not to show how worried he was. "He should be… but he isn't. I'm afraid something's happened to him."

"Scheisse" Hasso muttered. He could swear in Lenello to let the people around him know he was pissed off, but he got no satisfaction from it himself. For that, he still needed his native speech. "Do you think the Grenye used to ambush him?" He muttered to himself again — that was the wrong form of the past tense, and he knew it. Now, too late, he knew it.

Aderno was too rattled to sneer, though. "I'm afraid they did. I'm afraid they must have," the wizard replied. "We need to take enough men down our trail so we can be sure we don't get bushwhacked looking for him."

"Scheisse," Hasso repeated, louder this time. The word wouldn't mean anything to Aderno unless he had his translating spell working, but the tone was bound to get through. Hasso added a few more choice opinions auf Deutsch. But Aderno was right. They needed to find out what had happened to Flegrei. If the Grenye suddenly had a wizard working for them — maybe with a knife at his throat, but even so — the Lenelli needed to know about that. And if the knife had gone into Flegrei instead, the invaders needed to know that, too.

Hasso had enough clout to pull a troop of horsemen out of the line of march on his own hook and start them back the wrong way. A couple of captains asked him what the demon he thought he was doing. When he told them he was looking for a missing wizard, they did some swearing of their own.

"You shouldn't let some of those people run loose," one Lenello opined. "They just get into trouble."

Aderno looked highly affronted. He might have had more to say to the soldier if traveling in opposite directions hadn't swept them apart. Later… Hasso shook his head. He'd worry about that later, by God.

"Look for the unicorn," he told the men with him. "We have a better chance of spotting the animal than we do of spotting the wizard."

The troopers nodded. Aderno looked surprised, as if that hadn't occurred to him. Maybe it hadn't; he didn't always operate within the restrictive confines of the real world himself. After a moment, he added, "The Grenye may have taken Flegrei away, too. It's possible that they can get him to do what they want if they hurt him enough. But no Grenye can ride a unicorn. So they'd likely kill it first — they can't deal with it any other way."

That made sense to Hasso, who gave the wizard a mental apology. He didn't waste time on a spoken one. He was too busy trying to look every which way at once. Out away from the Lenello army, he felt the way he had behind the front in the Soviet Union. Every tree, every rock, every bush was liable to be dangerous. And you'd never know which one till too late. How many eyes were watching him and his comrades right now? How many Bucovinan fists tightened on weapons? Hasso couldn't see anybody, but that didn't mean nobody could see him. Oh, no.

But would the men of Bucovin have enough soldiers back here to take on so many Lenelli? He could hope not, anyhow.

The farther from the security of Bottero's main force he got, the more he worried, the more his head swiveled back and forth, back and forth. He watched the Lenelli with him. The big blond knights also seemed to be trying to grow eyes in the backs of their heads.

"I wouldn't want to do this when the sun was going down, not for all the beer in Bari," one of them said. Several others nodded. Hasso had no idea where Bari was, but he understood the sentiment just fine.

Not far from the road, a farmhouse was charred wreckage. Had the Lenelli torched it, or did the retreating Bucovinans do it themselves? Whatever the answer was, would that matter to the peasants whose home was only a ruin? Hasso had trouble making himself believe it.

Fire had also run through the fields, which inclined him to believe the incendiarism was Bucovinan work. King Bottero's men would have taken the nearly ripe millet for themselves… if they had the time, and if flames from the burning buildings hadn't got loose. So hard to be sure about anything you didn't see for yourself. Too damned often, it was hard to be sure about things you did see.

A Lenello stabbed out a pointing forefinger. "What's that behind the barn there? Something white, I think."

Hasso hadn't noticed it till the soldier pointed it out. It wasn't much more than a flash; the barn hid it pretty well. That made him apprehensive. So did the fruit trees within easy bowshot of the barn. All the same, he said, "We have to check it out." The knights nodded with the air of men who knew they were liable to be sticking their dicks in a meat grinder and also knew they had no choice. Or did they? Hasso turned to Aderno. "Do you sense an ambush?"

After a few passes and a murmured versicle, the wizard shook his head. "I sense no enemies close by," he said. But he didn't sound happy about his own judgment, either, for he added, "If we were in Lenello-ruled land, I would be surer."

It wasn't magic. The Lenelli swore it wasn't, anyway. But the countryside of Bucovin liked the Grenye better than it liked their foes. The blonds had been grumbling about that ever since they crossed the border. "We go like we expect an attack," Hasso said.

Nobody quarreled with him. One knight said, "You may be a foreigner, but you've got your head nailed on tight, by the goddess." That made Hasso feel good.

That good feeling didn't last long — only till he got a closer look at the flash of white the alert Lenello had spotted. It was a unicorn; it was on the ground; and it was dead. Blood marred the pristine perfection of its coat: blood from at least a score of wounds. Hasso saw some that came from arrows, others from spears, and a few sword cuts as well. The unicorn's silvered horn wasn't bloodied; the beast hadn't had the chance to fight back.

"You hate to see them hurt," Aderno said. Hasso found himself nodding. Seeing a unicorn brought down that way was like looking at the corpse of a beautiful woman caught in a bomb blast. Hasso had had to do that more often than he cared to remember. In a way, this was even worse. A beautiful woman could be a deadly enemy. The poor unicorn didn't know anything about the war between Lenelli and Grenye.

Somehow, Hasso didn't think the Grenye of Bucovin would have appreciated the distinction.

"Here's the wizard," a Lenello knight called, pointing into the woods.

Hasso swung down from his horse and tossed the reins to another Lenello. There didn't seem to be any Bucovinans close by. He drew his sword anyway.

Because of the unicorn, the smell of blood was already thick in his nostrils. It got thicker. He walked around a scrubby oak sapling and got a good look at what the enemy had done to Flegrei.

He swore softly, in Lenello and then in German. He'd seen such things on the Eastern Front, when the Ivans got hold of some Germans. He'd seen his countrymen do the like to Russians they caught. It jolted him here all the same. The men who started seeing how clever they could be with their knives always aimed to make their foes afraid — if they aimed at anything past a little sport and revenge. They commonly made those foes more determined than they would have been otherwise.

The first thing that came out of his mouth was, "Well, now we know."

"Now we know," Aderno agreed in a voice like ashes. "I hope he was dead before they did… some of that, anyway."

"Yes." Hasso nodded. Flegrei couldn't have lived through everything the Bucovinans did to him… could he? Hasso didn't like to think the wizard had been alive when they… He didn't cross his hands in front of his crotch, but he had to make himself hold still. "He is a wizard," he said. "How do they do this? Why doesn't he hit them with spells?"

"If they tied his hands, he wouldn't have been able to make passes. Maybe he was stunned when the unicorn went down," Aderno said. "And then after that, of course…" He pointed to one of the creative things the Grenye had done.

"Yes. After that." Hasso wanted to look away, but he didn't. He couldn't remember the Ivans coming up with that particular mutilation and insult. If the Bucovinans were more inventive than Stalin's soldiers… He wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. He didn't like believing it now.

"They aren't usually this bad," a knight said. "Of course, I don't suppose they catch a wizard very often."

"I wonder what made poor Flegrei ride back of that farmhouse," Aderno said. "Maybe he just wanted to ease himself away from everybody else. Whatever it was, he should have known better."

"Do Lenelli do… this to Grenye, too?" Hasso asked.

"To avenge him, we will," the knight answered. "Those bastards have to know they can't get away with this crap. We haven't done anything this bad in a while, and they had it coming then."

Would they have thought so? Hasso wondered. But that was a pointless question. He found one that wasn't: "What do we do with him?"

"Two choices I see," the knight answered. "Either we burn him here or we take back the pieces so the king and the army find out what kind of war we're fighting."

Hasso couldn't see anything else to do, either. He didn't feel the call was his to make, even if he held the highest rank here. As a foreigner, he would be missing too many nuances. He turned to Aderno. "You follow the same craft," he said. "What would he want?"

The wizard plucked at his neatly trimmed beard. "I don't think he would want to be a spectacle, not… the way he is," he answered. "Better we make a pyre for him here."

"All right. We do that, then." Hasso waved at the forest. "Plenty of branches, as long as we cut them. Can we get them dry enough to burn well?"

"I know a spell for that," Aderno said. "It's mostly used to get enough wood for campfires, but I can make it bigger."

Hasso started hacking at branches with his sword. "Let's get to work, then." The Lenelli joined in. Maybe they wouldn't have done it of their own accord; like the knights of medieval Germany or France, they thought a lot of physical labor was beneath their dignity. But seeing the man set over them go to work without hesitation brought them around. If he didn't hold back, how could they?

They got enough for a pyre in less than an hour. Aderno murmured and swayed in front of the pile. Steam rose from the rain-soaked wood. When it stopped, the wizard nodded to Hasso. "This magic worked, anyhow. We can burn him now. Lay him on the pyre."

"Me?" Hasso hoped he didn't squeak too much.

"Of course," Aderno said. "You command here. Who else?"

Hasso had dealt with enough corpses that one more didn't really faze him, but it wasn't a duty he would have wanted. He had to make sure he had all of Flegrei; the Lenelli wouldn't have liked it had he left any of the cut-off bits behind. After he finished, he scrubbed his hands on wet grass. That got most of the blood off, but not all of it. The knights gathered around the pyre nodded to one another. They would have done the same thing. Then they would have forgotten about it. Hasso still wanted to get his hands really clean, which showed he came from a different world.

"May the life to come prove kinder to Flegrei than this one did," Aderno said.

"So may it be," the knights intoned.

"May he have joy of all his friends to come, and overcome all his foes," the wizard went on.

"So may it be." This time, Hasso joined the chorus. It wasn't the funeral service a German chaplain would have read, but it wasn't so very different, either.

"May the goddess avenge him against the barbarians who wickedly stole his life."

"So may it be."

"As the smoke of the pyre rises to the sky, so may Flegrei's spirit rise to the heavens beyond the sky."

"So may it be."

One of the knights had used flint and steel to get a small fire going. The Lenelli carried their firestarters the way Wehrmacht men carried matches and cigarette lighters. Aderno lit a small branch and used it to touch off the pyre. His magic had done what it needed to do; the flames took hold with no trouble. Hasso smelled wood smoke, and then the stink of burning meat. Flegrei might have been — was — a bastard, but they were on the same side. You never wanted to see one of your guys get it. That reminded you your number might come up next. You knew anyway, sure, but who needed reminding?