One catapult crew wrestled its unwieldy contraption around so it could shoot at the Lenelli off to the right. Swoosh! Thump! ..Boom! One shell bursting where the blonds didn’t expect it created far more fear than a whole salvo they were braced to receive.

“Good job!” Hasso yelled. “Good job!”

And then Meshterul yelled a command the natives might never have given on the battlefield before: “Forward!”

Hasso wondered if the Hedgehogs’ commander had lost his mind. The pike-men had stopped the Lenello cavalry charge in its tracks. That was all they had to do. Hasso had been far from sure they could do even so much. Could they drive the blond horsemen back?

Damned if they couldn’t. They thrust their long pikes at the unarmored horses, not at the knights on their backs. The wounded horses shrieked. Some reared. Some fell. Their riders had a devil of a time keeping them under control. The Bucovinans speared the Lenello knights who went down with their mounts – speared them and then trampled them underfoot as they surged ahead.

The Lenello line wavered. The knights had never met infantry like this. As Hasso knew too well from bitter experience, if you couldn’t go forward, all too often you couldn’t hold your ground, either. In what seemed like no time at all, there was no line in front of the Hedgehogs. There were only frightened knights riding away as fast as they could.

Swoosh! Thump! … Boom! More shells sped the Lenelli fleeing the center on their way. Then, at Hasso’s shouted orders, all the catapult crews swung their weapons to one side or the other and started bombarding the Lenelli on the wings.

A bigger force of Hedgehogs could have rolled up the Lenelli to either side of them. By what struck Hasso as a miracle, Meshterul realized he didn’t have that kind of force, and halted his men before they advanced too far and got cut off. Such intrepid, brainless heroism had cost the Saxons dear at Hastings.

Swoosh! Thump. ..Boom! The catapults couldn’t fling shells anywhere near so fast as a battery of 105s. They didn’t have so many shells to fling, either. Hasso was painfully aware that they wouldn’t have any more for weeks once they ran dry here. Everything rode on this battle.

Swoosh! Thump! ..Boom! That was a good one. It burst just above the Lenelli on the left, and knocked down four of them. A 105 round couldn’t have done much more. And it panicked the knights who were still fighting. They decided all at once that they’d had enough. Going up against Grenye savages was one thing. Facing death from out of the air? That was something else. They rode off, too.

Seeing them retreat, the knights on the right also pulled back. The Lenello archers who’d come up behind them now screened their withdrawal. Well, the archers tried. The catapults outranged them, though. Three or four shells bursting among them sent them on their way.

“You know what we just did?” Rautat said as the archers withdrew.

“We beat ‘em.” Hasso knew it damn well.

But Rautat was going to make his joke whether Hasso gave him a straight line or not. “We just circumcised the big blond pricks, that’s what,” he said, and went off in gales of laughter. All the natives who heard him broke up, too. And Hasso laughed along. Why the hell not? To a winner, everything was funny.

Along with the Bucovinans, Hasso tramped the field after the battle. They were looking for loot, and to finish off or capture surviving Lenelli. He was looking for faces he knew. He soon found one, too: there lay Mertois, castellan of Castle Svarag. A pike had punched through his thigh, and he must have bled to death.

“So many dead horses,” Rautat said sadly. “What a waste.” At least a hundred of them lay twisted right in front of the Hedgehogs’ position. They’d done what their riders told them to do, and they’d paid for it. So had a lot of the men who spurred them forward. The Lenelli didn’t know what they were up against till too late.

There lay King Bottero. Bucovinans had already stolen his fine sword, his helm with the gold circlet, his gilded mailshirt. Despite the byrnie, he’d taken a lot of wounds. He didn’t have a son. The succession in Drammen was liable to get messy. That was good news for Bucovin, too.

And there lay Velona, her golden hair all sodden with blood. None of the Bucovinans had taken the sword from her hand. They knew who she was, and they knew what she was, and they didn’t want anything to do with her.

They weren’t so dumb.

Even Rautat hung back a couple of steps as Hasso knelt beside her. “So that’s what she looks like up close,” the underofficer said. “If you like great big blondes, I guess she’s pretty.”

Hasso hardly heard him. He eased the sword from his one-time beloved’s grip, then reached out to touch her hand. When he did, he frowned. She should have been cooler than that if she were dead. His index and middle fingers found that spot on her wrist by the thumb side of the tendons. Her pulse was slow, but it was there. “Jesus!” he muttered: another deity missing in action here.

“What?” Rautat said.

“She’s not dead,” Hasso said. “She’s just knocked out.”

Rautat started to draw his belt knife to remedy that. Then he jammed it back into the sheath. “I don’t dare,” he said, “not against the goddess.” He took off on the dead run.

Hasso would have stopped him if he had tried to kill Velona. He wondered why, when she’d come so close to killing him. He also wondered what the hell he was going to do with her – to her? – when she came to. He didn’t fear the goddess the way Rautat did, which probably meant he didn’t understand the situation as well as the native did.

Cautiously feeling, he found a knot on the side of her head. He nodded to himself. Going into battle without a helmet was great for heartening your friends and frightening your foes. When it came to actually fighting … not so good. He probed a little harder. If she had a fractured skull, she might not wake up – which might prove a relief for everybody but her.

She grimaced and tried to twist away from him. She wasn’t deeply out, then. That was a good sign, or maybe a bad one, depending on how you looked at things. Then her eyes opened. For a moment, she had no idea who he was, who she was herself, or what the hell was going on. Hasso sympathized. He’d been down that road himself the autumn before. A concussion was not your friend.

She blinked, and blinked again. Her mouth set. Reason was coming back. Those blue, blue eyes found his. “You!” she said, her voice a hoarse croak.

“Afraid so.” Lenello came rustily from his lips. He wasn’t used to hearing it without a rough Bucovinan accent any more, either. “Want some water?”

“Please.”

He had a jug on his belt. He took it off and held it to her lips. She drank and drank. “Better?” he asked when she’d almost emptied it.

“A little, maybe.” She needed two tries to sit up. When she looked around and saw Bucovinans roaming the field and Lenelli and their chargers down and dead in windrows, she looked first humanly astonished and then more than humanly outraged. “What did you do to us? What did we do to you to deserve … this?”

“Well, trying to kill me makes a pretty good start.” Hasso worked hard to remember the past tenses that had given him so much trouble; he needed them here. “I loved you, and you tried to cook my brains for me.”

He watched her gaze sharpen. If she could have slain him right there, she would have done it. But she couldn’t even start; it was like watching an archer try to shoot in a driving rainstorm. “My wits are all scrambled,” she muttered.

“I believe it,” Hasso said. “You are going to have headaches like you don’t believe. Takes days, maybe weeks, to get over.” He tapped the side of his own head. “I know.”

“What did you do?” Velona repeated. “The flying thunder … That forest of spears …” She shuddered, then winced, plainly wishing she hadn’t. “And none of our magic worked. We’ve had to deal with renegades, but this …! How the goddess must hate you!”