Rautat talked to the soldier who warned of the advancing Lenelli. Not too much later, he talked to another Bucovinan, this one an officer sweating in a helmet and mailshirt. Rautat pointed toward Hasso several times. He pounded his fist into his palm once. He might be only a Feldwebel, but he acted like a general.
He got away with it, too – damned if he didn’t. The Bucovinan officer nodded, sketched a salute, and hurried away. Rautat grinned till the top of his head threatened to fall off. He also nodded to Hasso. If he hadn’t been the Official Bucovinan in Charge of the Dangerous and Important Blond Person, he never could have pulled that one off, and he knew it.
Hasso placed the fuses in the jars. Next time, he would come with jars already fused. You couldn’t think of everything at once, not when you were reinventing a whole art all by yourself. The Bucovinans watched him intently. If they got away and he didn’t, they would at least be able to go on with what he’d already shown them. Whether they’d be able to do anything more … wouldn’t be his worry, not in that case.
He hid in some bushes off to the side of the road. A lot of the fuses ran toward those bushes, but he wasn’t too worried about that. For one thing, there were some dummies that went other places. And, for another, by now the Lenelli ought to think all the fuses were nothing but a big bluff. They wouldn’t pay any attention to them – till too late.
Rautat left him some hard bread and dried meat, a jar of beer, and, most important of all, a couple of sticks of something a lot like punk. It glowed red and slowly smoldered without burning away in nothing flat. “Good luck,” the Bucovinan said, and then, “Want me to hang around with you?”
“Whatever you want.” After what had happened while they slept, Hasso didn’t have any trouble sounding casual when he answered the question. “I’m not running back to the Lenelli.” No matter how much he might regret it, he was telling the truth there, too.
Rautat plucked a hair from his beard, considering. At last, he said, “Maybe I’d better. I don’t think you’re any trouble, but if it turns out I’m wrong I don’t want to have to explain to Drepteaza and Lord Zgomot how I left you all by yourself.”
“Fair enough,” Hasso said. From the underofficer’s perspective, it was. You did need to be careful about relying on a turncoat. The German felt he had to ask, “Can you stay down and keep quiet?” Those talents were more useful in warfare in his world than they were here. Most fighting in this world was right out in the open. How long would that last if gunpowder caught on?
“I’ll do it. I already thought about that,” Rautat said.
“Good. Start now, because here they come,” Hasso said, and hunkered down in the bushes. The first Lenello scouts had just topped the swell of ground to the west. Rautat got as flat as if a Stalin panzer had run over him. He didn’t let out a peep. He barely even breathed.
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.