After the Downfall (41 page)

XVIII

People who ran stuff didn’t like you to tell them no. It didn’t matter whether you called them lord or king or
Führer
- they still didn’t like it for beans. Stories about Hitler’s tantrums - even his carpet-chewing made the whispered rounds in Germany. When you said no to Bottero, he could look as if he wanted to pinch your head off.

And as for Lord Zgomot ... well, he just looked mournful. “We have some of this thing. It is, for once, a thing the Lenelli have not got. Why not use it against them, then?”

“Lord, if you order, I use it,” Hasso said - he didn’t want to push his luck too far. “But this is not the best time.”

“They are on our land again,” Zgomot said. “They are killing and raping and robbing, the way they do. Why is this a bad time?” His tone said Hasso had better have himself some goddamn good reasons. And Hasso thought he did. He ticked them off on his fingers as he spoke: “First, Lord, not much gunpowder yet. We have more later.” The Lord of Bucovin nodded impatiently - he knew that. Hasso went on, “Second thing is, better not to let Lenelli know what you have too soon, yes? These are raids, yes? Better to use gunpowder in big fight, get big win, not let them see what it does till too late.”

He wished he could talk better. Even in Lenello, he sounded like a jerk to himself. Why should Zgomot take him seriously if he sounded like a jerk? And it was a good thing he didn’t have to try to speak Bucovinan. He was better at it than he had been when he got to Falticeni, which meant - dismayingly little, when you came right down to it. He still needed to go some to get to sound like a jerk in Bucovinan.

Lord Zgomot sat lonely on his throne, thinking things over. Torches crackled as they burned in their sconces. Fat candles glowed to either side of the high seat. All the same, in the predawn stillness the throne room was a cold, dark, drafty place. Torches and candles couldn’t push darkness back the way lightbulbs did.

At last, the Lord of Bucovin sighed. It was cold enough in there to let Hasso see his breath smoke. “You make more sense than I wish you did,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully - Hasso remembered Lenello was a foreign language for him, too. “Let it be as you say. I will move against the bandits with ordinary soldiers, as we have already begun to do.”

Hasso bowed. “You are wise, Lord.”

“Am I?” Zgomot’s tone was as bleak and wintry as the air inside the throne room. “You know I do not trust you completely, or even very far. You know I wonder if you do not want to use the gunpowder because you fear it will hurt the Lenelli and you are still loyal to them in your heart.”

He was uncommonly blunt - scarily blunt, in fact. The dagger of ice that went up Hasso’s back had nothing to do with the cold in here. “It is not so,” the
Wehrmacht
officer insisted. “I want to hurt them more. I am sorry it needs to be later. This is not a big enough field to do it the good way, the, uh, right way.”

“So you say.” Zgomot leaned forward a little to eye him more closely. “So you say, when you lay with the Lenello goddess and our priestess does not care to lie with you. Never mind that you are tall and fair and they are tall and fair and we are not so tall and not so fair. Woman trouble will turn a man towards one side and against the other as easily as anything else. More easily than a lot of things.”

Hasso thought of Helen of Troy, and of Brunhilde. Zgomot wasn’t wrong, not speaking generally. And Hasso longed for Velona the way the tongue longs for a tooth after it got pulled. Never mind that it was hurting you. The tongue still wanted it to be there, wanted things to go on as they always had.
It won’t
happen, tongue,
Hasso thought.

“Velona tries to kill me now twice in my dreams,” he told the Lord of Bucovin.

“So you say.”

“Yes, Lord. So I say. If I am a liar about this, I am a liar about everything.”

“That thought has also crossed my mind.” Zgomot’s voice grew more wintry than ever. “And what about Drepteaza, Hasso Pemsel?”

“Why ask me? Why not ask her?” Hasso spread his hands. “A woman who does it but doesn’t want to

... Not much fun in that. I think it’s a shame - that is no lie. But what can I do?”

“No, you are not a Lenello,” Zgomot said, as several Bucovinans had before him. Hasso waited to find out why the sovereign didn’t think so. He didn’t have to wait long. Zgomot continued, “Most of the big blond bastards - excuse me - force our women for the fun of it. We have seen that. I daresay you have seen it, too.”

“Yes, I see that.” Hasso admitted what he could scarcely deny. He might have argued that it wasn’t true of
most
Lenelli, but he knew it was true of enough to make Zgomot’s point for him.

“Maybe, in this snow, we can ambush a raiding party....” Careful and methodical, the Lord of Bucovin started making plans to deal with the enemy even if he couldn’t do it the way he’d wanted. The Lenelli didn’t understand why they had trouble beating Bucovin when so many other Grenye kingdoms fell at the first shove. Hasso wondered whether Zgomot’s father and grandfather were as clever as he was. That might go a long way towards explaining things. And why
did
magic have more trouble the closer you got to Falticeni? Hasso didn’t know. Neither did the Lenelli. Obviously, neither did the Bucovinans. There had to be a reason. How would you go about finding out? A real wizard might know. Hasso hadn’t the faintest idea. Maybe he was lucky such things didn’t work so well here. Maybe that had helped keep Velona and Aderno from cooking his brains in his dream. He had no idea how to go about learning whether that was so, either.

Lord Zgomot seemed to remember he was there. “You may go, Hasso Pemsel. For better or worse, you persuaded me. You persuaded me you aren’t deliberately lying to help Bottero’s men, anyhow. I am not sure you are right, but I am not sure you are wrong, either, so I will take your advice.”

King Bottero might or might not have listened to him. Whether he did or not, he wouldn’t have analyzed things so carefully. Hitler ... Telling Hitler no wasn’t a good idea. Of course, telling him yes might not be a good idea, either, because he often demanded the impossible.

Hasso got out of the throne room as inconspicuously as he could. When you were a big blond in a land full of squat brunets, that wasn’t very. Lord Zgomot’s guards and his courtiers all followed him with their eyes till he was gone.

One thing Zgomot hadn’t asked him to do once gunpowder was out of the picture: he hadn’t asked him to go to Bucovin’s western marches and either fight against the Lenelli or use his magic against them. Why not? An obvious question with an only too obvious answer.
He doesn’t trust me that far. He said
so himself.

He almost turned back and volunteered to go fight the Lenelli, with bare hands if need be. But he knew Zgomot would turn him down, and for reasons other than mistrust. The
Wehrmacht
wouldn’t have handed a top panzer engineer a Schmeisser and sent him out against the Ivans. He was more useful making better panzers, and no corporal plucked from the ranks could replace him at that. Here, Hasso might be able to stand in for a Bucovinan horseman, but no native could stand in for him. No Lenello wizard could stand in for him, either.
I’m unique,
he thought. If he’d known he would be so alone after he sat down on the Omphalos ... he would have damn well done it anyway. Whatever his troubles were in this new world, they beat the hell out of getting shot in Berlin or enduring the Red Army’s not so tender mercies. Whenever he felt bad about the way things were going, he needed to remember that. And he needed to remember that the difference between bad and worse was a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.

Rautat ran into him in the hallway, surely not by accident. “Well?” the underofficer asked. “Did you talk the lord out of using gunpowder?”

“Yes, I do that.
Did
that,” Hasso answered. His Lenello wouldn’t get any better in Falticeni. Pretty soon he’d have a Bucovinan accent to go with the German accent he’d never be able to help. Then he’d sound really funny to somebody from Drammen.

“Well, well!” Rautat didn’t even try to hide his surprise. “You don’t change Zgomot’s mind every day.”

He laughed at himself. “I never change his mind. If not for you, he wouldn’t know who the demon I am. Life would be easier that way, too.”

“Life is never easy. It has teeth.” Hasso pointed to the dragon’s fang that had been here since before the Lenelli crossed the ocean and found this new land for themselves.

Rautat eyed the formidable fang. “Most of the time, I hope, not such sharp ones.”

Hasso wouldn’t have wanted anything with teeth like that crunching down on him, either. “Dragons live in the north?” he asked, pointing in that direction.

“Yes, of course. Everybody knows that.” Rautat caught himself. “Everybody but you, I guess. No dragons in the place you come from?”

“Only mothers-in-law,” Hasso answered.

It wasn’t much of a joke - he didn’t think so, anyhow. Rautat blushed like a scandalized schoolgirl, though, and giggled like one, too. “We ... don’t usually talk about those people,” he said. “You startled me when you did. Like dragons? Oh, my!” He started giggling again.

He not only didn’t like to talk about mothers-in-law, he wouldn’t even name them. Hasso wondered how big a taboo he’d just violated. Not a small one, not by Rautat’s reaction.

“How often do dragons come down here?” Hasso asked. Maybe he could find out more about the mother-in-law business from Drepteaza. It might give him something to talk about with her that wasn’t too dangerously intimate, anyhow. “Can you make them go one way or another?” he persisted. Vague thoughts of siccing a dragon on the Lenelli flitted through his mind.

“Dragons come when they want to come. You can’t do anything about it. We were lucky to kill even one,” Rautat said. “We thought it was a miracle. We thought we were wonderful. Then the big blonds came out of the west, and we found out we weren’t so wonderful as we thought.”

The way his eyes traveled Hasso’s long frame said the German was still about ninety-eight percent Lenello to him, too - maybe ninety-nine percent. Since he felt much more Lenello than Grenye here himself, and since those were the only choices he had in this world, how could he blame Rautat - or Drepteaza - for seeing him that way?

Lord Zgomot gave whatever orders he gave. Hasso stayed in the palace in Falticeni. Eventually, he supposed, after everyone else did, he would find out what happened. In the meantime, he could keep on fiddling on with gunpowder, getting ready for the real war he and Zgomot and the rest of Bucovin knew was coming.

He wondered how big a fool he was. Should he have promised the Lord of Bucovin the sun and moon and little stars, gone off toward the western border, and tried to get back to the Lenelli, back to Bottero’s kingdom? Magic worked better in the west. He might have put one over on the natives and slipped away without their being the wiser.

Yes? And then what?
he asked himself. Would Bottero welcome him back with open arms after he’d given Bucovin the secret of gunpowder? He hadn’t even given that to the Lenelli - when was there time?

Besides, after rescuing Velona he wasn’t in such desperate need of another trick to keep himself alive among them.

And they were more willing to take him at face value. Unhappily, he nodded to himself. That was the phrase, all right. The Lenelli
wanted
to accept him, because he looked like them. The Grenye didn’t, because to them he was guilty of being a Lenello till proved innocent - and probably after that, too. His thoughts drifted back to the escape he hadn’t made, hadn’t even tried. What about Velona? Would she welcome him back with open arms? Even more to the point, would she welcome him back with open legs? Not by what he’d seen in his dreams. He hadn’t just betrayed the Lenelli, not to the goddess on earth. He’d betrayed her personally when he lay down with Leneshul. That was how she saw it, anyway. She was good at an awful lot of things. Was she good at forgiving? Hasso didn’t think so.

“God damn it to hell,” he muttered, there in the loneliness of his room. “I am fucked. I am really fucked.”

When he came out into the wider loneliness of the palace, he felt the same way. How could he help it?

He had trouble getting excited about working on the gunpowder. He stayed careful and attentive with that, because he didn’t want to blow himself up. With less urgent items like language lessons, he had trouble meeting even a lesser standard.

Drepteaza noticed right away. “Shall I find you another tutor?” she asked. “Are you so angry that I don’t want to go to bed with you that you don’t want anything else to do with me anymore? I can understand how you might be. It seems petty to me, but maybe it doesn’t to you.”

“No. It is not you.” To emphasize that, Hasso spoke in Bucovinan as best he could. “It is - everything.”

His wave took in not only the room, not only the palace, not only Falticeni or Bucovin, but the whole world. “I do not belong here. I never belong here. Never.”

“I think you are wrong. I think you must be wrong,” the priestess said seriously. “You told me how you came here, how you sat on the stone in your world and then suddenly you found yourself in this one.”

“Yes? And so?” Hasso said.
The first thing I did when I got here was shoot myself some Grenye.
The next thing I did was screw the Lenello goddess on earth.
Once upon a time, he’d thought that meant something important. Now? Now he had to do some new thinking.

But Drepteaza insisted, “It must mean something, Hasso Pemsel. Things don’t just happen. They happen for a reason.”

“What about the Lenelli?” Hasso asked.

She winced, but she had the courage of her convictions. “Even the Lenelli came here for a reason,” she said. Then her mouth quirked in one of her wry grins. “To rob, to kill, to rape, to enslave...” But she shook her head. “That is not what I mean. They are part of the larger purpose, too.”

“Whose purpose?” Hasso asked. “The purpose of your gods? The purpose of the Lenello goddess?”