Hasso didn't get quite so low as that: he needed to see out. One of the blond outriders stared at a dummy hole with a dummy fuse running from it. Another one said something to him. They both laughed and rode on. They were convinced it was just the Grenye savages trying to play games with their minds. Hasso wished he'd left somebody to light some of the dummy fuses. Too late to worry about it now.
Much too late — here came Bottero's main body, red flags flying. This had to be a bigger force than the one that was plundering Bucovinan villages. Hasso wondered why, but he didn't wonder for long. They're after me, he thought. It was a compliment of sorts, but one he would gladly have done without.
On rode the Lenelli: big fair men in mail and surcoats on horses big enough to bear their weight. Soon Hasso could hear the thud of hoofbeats, the jingle of harness and armor, and even the odd snatch of conversation: "Oh, that? Don't worry about it. Just the Bucovinans, trying to make us jumpy."
"Dumbass barbarians," another Lenello said.
"When?" Rautat's question was a tiny thread of whisper, inaudible from more than a couple of meters away.
"Soon," Hasso whispered back. He wanted about a third of the enemy army to pass over the real gunpowder pots before he lit the fuses. His guess was that that would cause the most confusion — and the most casualties.
He swung a stick of punk through the air to get it to glow red. Then he touched it to the fuses, one after another. From the ground beside him, Rautat grinned wolfishly. Trails of smoke streaked toward the burning pots.
A couple of Lenelli pointed to them. Others snickered and shook their heads, as if to say those didn't mean anything, either. Up till today, they would have been right. The pots buried in the road blew up, one after another.
They didn't just hold gunpowder. They had rocks and sharp bits of metal in there, too — homemade shrapnel. They gutted horses and flayed knights' lightly armored legs. Some fragments hit men in the face. Some managed to punch right through mail.
And the noise was like the end of the world, especially to men and beasts who'd never heard the like and weren't expecting it. Hasso was closer than he might have been, but still used to much worse. But even Rautat, who'd heard gunpowder go off before, let out an involuntary yip of alarm. The Lenelli and their horses screamed as if damned.
The big blonds in back of the explosions wheeled their mounts and rode off to the west as fast as they could go. The ones in front… They don't know whether to shit or go blind, Hasso thought happily. They milled about, afraid to advance and even more afraid to retreat.
Then Bucovinans started sliding forward and shooting at them. Normally, Bottero's men would have driven off the archers annoying them without even breaking a sweat. Here, the bowmen were just enough to tip the Lenelli into panic.
"Magic!" somebody screamed. "The goddess-cursed Grenye do have magic!"
They fled then, with no shame and in no order at all. Had more Bucovinans and better-mounted Bucovinans pursued, they might have bagged most of that leading detachment of the army. Next time, Hasso thought. No matter how much you wanted to, you couldn't do everything perfectly the first time around.
But he'd done plenty. The way Rautat sprang up and kissed him on both cheeks proved that. So did the way the Lenelli ran. From now on, they'd piss themselves whenever they saw a cord running to some freshly turned earth. Professionally, Hasso was happy. Personally… He'd worry about that later. When he had time. If he ever did.
XXII
Things in western Bucovin were going to be different for a while — maybe for quite a while. Hasso could already see that. The natives had their peckers up. And the Lenelli… The Lenelli had to be wondering what the devil had hit them. They sure would start to sweat whenever they saw string running to what looked like holes in the ground. And they would have to be ten times more worried about bushwhackers than they ever had before.
And all because of black powder, Hasso thought. If I knew how to make nitroglycerine… After a little pondering, he realized he might. Medieval alchemists had used nitric acid, so maybe the Bucovinans knew about it. And you got glycerine from animal fat some kind of way.
Then he shook his head. To make nitro safe to handle, you had to turn it into dynamite, and he knew he didn't know how to do that. Turning out gunpowder was dangerous. You had to be careful as hell. Turning out nitroglycerine? No, he didn't even want to try. And he really didn't want untrained Bucovinans trying. That wasn't a disaster waiting to happen — it was a goddamn catastrophe.
Rautat nudged him. "Let's get out of here."
Plain good sense ended his woolgathering in a hurry. "Right," he said. Getting away wasn't hard. King Bottero's men had either fled back to the west or were hotly engaged with Lord Zgomot's soldiers. They didn't have time to worry about a couple of men heading the other way.
Not getting scragged by the Bucovinans was more interesting. Hasso was glad he had Rautat along. The underofficer was able to convince his countrymen that the big blond beside him wasn't a Lenello and was a friend. Hasso might not have had an easy time doing that on his own.
He felt better when he and Rautat caught up with the wagon that held the rest of the gunpowder jars. Dumnez and Peretsh and Gunoiul and the other Bucovinans on his crew were beside themselves with excitement. "It worked!" they shouted, and, "We heard it blow up!" and other things besides. Once they'd said those first two, though, they'd said everything that mattered.
"What now?" Hasso asked
"Now we go back to Falticeni and find out what new orders Lord Zgomot has for us," Rautat answered.
"We ought to leave the wagon somewhere closer to the front, so even without us it can go into action fast if it has to," Hasso said.
"Not too close," Rautat said. "Can't let it get captured no matter what."
He would have been right about that in medieval Europe. He was righter here. Hasso still worried about magic. The longer till Aderno and the other Lenello wizards figured out what gunpowder was and how it worked, the better. How much of a spell would you need to ignite it from a distance? "Where do you want to leave it, then?" the Wehrmacht officer asked.
"How about Muresh?" Rautat said. "Even if the big blond bastards do come that far, it can always go back over the Oltet."
Hasso found himself nodding. "Muresh should do." He liked the idea of putting such a potent weapon in a town the enemy had ravaged only the autumn before.
In fact, he needed a moment to remember that he'd been part of the army that ravaged Muresh. It seemed a long time ago — and that despite his trying to rejoin that army only a few days before. King Bottero didn't want him back? Well, long live Lord Zgomot, then!
He really had turned his coat. He shook his head. No, he'd had it turned for him. If the Lenelli wanted him dead — and they damn well did — how could he think he owed them anything but a good kick in the nuts the first chance he got?
It all made good logical sense. Which proved… what, exactly? If Jews had a country of their own, would Germans feel easy about fighting for it? He had a hard time seeing how. Why would Jews want Germans on their side, anyway?
But that one had an answer. Whatever else you said about Germans, they were better at war than damn near anybody else. They'd shown twice now that they weren't as good as everybody else put together, but that wasn't the same thing.
So here I am. I'm good at war, by God. I'm even better here than I would be back home. And I'm fighting for the side that looks like a bunch of fucking Jews. And if that ain't a kick in the ass, what is?