"I am on a unicorn." Lord Zgomot sounded amazed. Well, who could blame him?
How the Bucovinans cheered! Drepteaza looked as proud of her sovereign as could be. And Hasso said, "King Bottero never does this."
"No? He is missing something, then," Zgomot said. "Will it walk for me?" He urged the unicorn forward as if it were a horse. But it wouldn't go, not even the couple of steps it had for Drepteaza. Shrugging, Zgomot slid off. "I am a Grenye, and I have been on a unicorn," he declared, as Drepteaza had. By the way he said it; he might have been the first man to set foot on the moon.
His subjects cheered louder than ever. Hasso looked at the unicorn. It looked back at him. If it didn't wink, he was losing his mind. Or maybe he was losing his mind if he thought it did wink. No one else seemed to notice. Was he going to start collecting omens and portents?
Why not? Everybody else in this world did. And, as far as he could see, a winking unicorn couldn't be anything but a good one.
A Bucovinan named Shugmeshte was almost out of his mind with glee. He was one of the gunpowdermen who'd gone forward to slow down Bottero's advancing army. "I fooled 'em!" he told Hasso and Zgomot. "Bugger me blind if I didn't fool 'em!"
"What did you do?" Hasso asked.
Shugmeshte swigged from a mug of beer. "So I dig holes in the road and run fuses to them, right? This is before the big blond bastards get there, you understand. So then I plant some real jugs in the field alongside, but real careful-like, so you can't spot 'em easy."
Hasso grinned." I think I like the way this story is going." The Lord of Bucovin nodded. Hasso said, "Well? Tell us more."
"So the blond pricks come by," Shugmeshte said. "So they see there's trouble in the road. So they get smart — or they think they do. So they ride into the field so whatever happens in the road doesn't hurt 'em. So I light the fuses, and bam! They go flying! I blew up a unicorn, I did."
"I'm not sure I want to hear that," Hasso said — he was still riding the wild one himself. But he clapped Shugmeshte on the back. "You do good — you did good. And this says something important."
"What?" Zgomot asked.
"It says the amulets really do keep Lenello wizards from spotting gunpowder. This is good news." Hasso wondered whether Shugmeshte had blown Aderno to hell and gone. That would be very good news. He could hope, anyhow.
"Ah." The Lord of Bucovin nodded. "I see. Yes, what you say makes good sense. You seem to have a way of doing that."
"Thank you, Lord," Hasso said. Coming from a resolutely sensible fellow like Zgomot, that praise meant something.
Zgomot turned back to Shugmeshte. "Are you ready to do this to the Lenelli again?"
"Lavtrig, yes!" the gunpowderman exclaimed."We can hurt them. We can scare them. We've never been able to scare them before. I like it."
"Go, then," Zgomot said. Shugmeshte saluted: clenched fist over his heart, the same gesture the Lenelli used. How long ago had the Bucovinans adopted it? Did anyone here even remember? Hasso wouldn't have bet on it. Zgomot nodded to Hasso. "We have kept security as well as we could. None of the gunpowdermen knows how to make the stuff. Not many folk besides us and the men who get them — oh, and Scanno — know our amulets are made from dragon bone."
"This is how you should do things, Lord," Hasso said. "Sooner or later, secrets get out, but you always want it to be later, not sooner."
"You do make sense," Zgomot told him. "One of the first things a ruler learns is that secrets always get out."
Hasso thought of the American bazooka. It was a wonderful weapon — it let a foot soldier wreck a panzer without needing to creep suicidally close. As soon as the Germans saw it, they knew they wanted something like it. They made capturing one a top priority. Once they had one, the Panzerschreck got into production in a few months. And it was better than the bazooka that spawned it. With a larger-caliber rocket, it had a longer range and could pierce thicker armor.
"Later is better," Hasso said again.
Once the Lenelli got their hands on some gunpowder — and they would, because his fuses were imperfectly reliable — how long would they need to figure out what went into it? Not too long, odds were: none of the ingredients was especially rare. How long would they need to start making their own? That could take a while. They would need to work out the right proportions. Then they would have to figure out how to mix them without blowing themselves a mile beyond the moon. So it wouldn't be a few months. But it might be only a few years.
Cannon! Can I build a cannon? Hasso got the same answer he always did — maybe, but not right now.
And how long would the Lenelli take to realize dragon bone was thwarting their spells? Getting their hands on an amulet wouldn't be hard, but how could you sorcerously analyze something that didn't let you work magic? Damn good question, he thought.
Even if they did know, what could they do about it? Even if you knew what water was, could you get something to burn in it?
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?