After the Downfall

“Aderno and I, we are not happy with each other.” Sometimes Hasso came out with phrases he’d read. They often made people smile. In Lenello as in German, the written language wasn’t just the same as the spoken one.

Bottero smiled now… for a moment. Then he looked severe – and a man as large and tough as he was could look very severe indeed. “You serve the kingdom. You serve it well. Aderno was doing the same thing with that Grenye wench.”

“Aderno serves Aderno with that Grenye wench,” Hasso said stubbornly. “Aderno likes to hurt people. Fight with Grenye gives him a reason.” He shook his head. That wasn’t the word he wanted. “Gives him an excuse.” That was what he wanted to say.

“He serves the kingdom.” Bottero couldn’t see anything else.

Hasso shrugged, seeing no point in arguing with his sovereign. National Socialist doctrine shouted that that psychiatrist in Vienna was nothing but a crazy damn Jew. All the same, Hasso would have bet Deutschmarks against dung that Aderno had a big old bulge in his pants when he dragged Zadar off to what might literally have been a fate worse than death.

“You serve the kingdom, too,” Bottero reminded him. “You and Aderno both serve the same goal. So you should get along with each other.”

That was logical. As far as Hasso was concerned, it was also next to impossible. “I would rather kill him than get along with him … your Majesty,” he said.

The king stared at him. At first, Hasso thought he’d badly offended Bottero. Then he realized Bottero was fighting hard not to laugh. The king lost the fight. “You fell from beyond the moon,” he said between snorts. Hasso nodded. That wasn’t so very different from his own thought of a little while before. Bottero went on, “You fell all that way – and you’re just as touchy and proud as a Lenello born a short spit from my palace.”

Hasso clicked his heels, which showed once more how foreign he was. But his words said the opposite: “I am a man, your Majesty.”

“Well, Velona told me the same thing,” Bottero said.

“What? That she is a man? Don’t believe her.”

Bottero snorted again. “If she told me that, I wouldn’t believe her. I know better, and so do you.” He grimaced; he must have remembered that his sharing Velona didn’t make Hasso happy. Before the German could say anything, Bottero continued, “No, she told me you were a man, and it’s so. And you’re a man I need. That’s so, too.”

“And Aderno?” Hasso asked.

“Is also a man I need,” the king said. “Don’t try to kill him unless you really have to. If you do try, you may find that wizards take a deal of killing, and sometimes they aren’t dead even after they die.”

Thinking fondly of his Schmeisser, Hasso said, “I take the chance.”

Detachments from west of Drammen, and from north and south, flowed into the capital, some by river, others by road. Soldiers camped inside Castle Drammen, and on the wide grounds of the Lenello estates around it. They swarmed into the Grenye districts closer to the walls. When they came back, most of them were drunk. Some had unfortunate diseases. Several got their belt pouches slit.

A couple of them got their throats slit instead. Several Grenye also ended up dead, some in fair fights, others, by all appearances, slaughtered for the sport of it. Hasso had seen that the Grenye districts had plenty of brothels. Not all the Lenelli bothered going to them. If some warriors saw a short, dark woman whose looks they liked, they went and took her. If she wasn’t a whore, she was only a Grenye.

How many times had Hasso heard that phrase since coming here? More often than he wanted to: he knew that. He didn’t bother taking his worries to Bottero; the king wouldn’t do anything about it. Instead, he talked to Velona, asking, “Does the goddess like what the soldiers do to women who don’t want it or deserve it?”

“They’re soldiers,” she answered with a shrug. “They act that way because that’s how soldiers act. What can you do about it?”

“Me?” With a sour laugh, Hasso jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I can’t do anything. I am only a man, and only a foreigner at that.”

“Not only a man. Quite a man,” Velona purred.

“I thank you.” Hasso hoped she’d talked to Bottero that way. He tried not to let her distract him now. It wasn’t easy, but he managed. ‘I can’t do anything, no. But can you? You are the goddess. Does the goddess care for women, or not?”

“Of course she does.” Velona paused. “I am not the goddess. Sometimes the goddess is me. It’s not the same thing.” Now Hasso shrugged. It came close enough for him. He knew he would never understand the difference, not unless or until a god possessed him. He didn’t think that was likely. It might not be impossible here, but even so…. Velona went on, “If she wants me to do anything about those Grenye sluts, I’m sure she’ll tell me about it.”

Some of them weren’t sluts. That was the point Hasso kept trying to make, the point none of the Lenelli wanted to see. Instead of banging away at it, he tried a different tack: “Next time she is in you, maybe you should ask her. Maybe she needs a question to think about it.”

“Maybe I will.” Velona sounded more as if she was humoring him than as if she really intended to do it, but he couldn’t do anything about that. He’d done what he could do. If it wasn’t enough … Well, when had the Grenye ever caught anything close to an even break? If they didn’t catch one now, it wouldn’t change the way the world worked very much.

When enough of his soldiers came into Drammen to satisfy him, King Bottero started east, toward the border with Bucovin. Hasso gathered that some units were late, and that the king wasn’t about to wait for them. That made sense to the German. Despite his own best efforts, surprise was bound to be gone. All the same, you didn’t want to waste time on campaign and let the enemy get ready for you. The Wehrmacht waited around at Kursk, and how the Ivans made them pay! Fewer men on time were often better than plenty a few days too late.

Plenty of men on time were better still, but Hasso had realized he couldn’t expect too much from the Lenelli. They knew nothing about Germanic efficiency. He hoped to teach them, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Everything pointed to their being more efficient than the Grenye, and not just because of magic. That would probably do. When civilized soldiers attacked barbarians, the barbarians usually lost. That was how civilization advanced.

Hasso thought of Arminius. He thought of three Roman legions cut to pieces in the Teutoberg Wald. Germany stayed outside the Roman Empire because the barbarians won that time. What would his world look like if they’d lost? Nobody would ever know now.

He’d watched and ridden along when the Wehrmacht roared into Poland, into France, into Russia. Because he’d done all that, watching and riding along when the Lenelli moved out of Drammen impressed him less than it might have. It felt more like a scene from a historical movie with plenty of extras than the start of a real campaign.

The stinks of sweat and horse manure said it was real enough. Foot soldiers trudged along in loose order, shields and quivers on their backs, unstrung bows in their right hands, shortswords on their hips. Almost all of them wore iron helms. A few had mailshirts. The ones who did wore surcoats to keep the sun from cooking them in their own juice.

Teamsters kept wagons rolling. Ungreased axles screeched. Horses and mules strained in the traces. Choking clouds of dust rose. Hasso knew all about unpaved roads – one more thing the Russians had taught him. He hoped it wouldn’t rain. This particular unpaved road would turn to rutted mud, and then to glue.

Barges and boats came up the Drammion alongside the marching men and noisy wagons. Moving bulky supplies by water was easier, cheaper, and faster than it was by land. When the river turned to marsh, as it would, the Lenelli would have to unload the vessels. In the meantime, they took advantage of them.

Companies of mounted archers and lancers rode along as if everything depended on them alone. In a way, the armored men were right. They were the strike force, the spearpoint, of Bottero’s army. They could crack the enemy line, the way panzers could in the other world. But if the archers ran out of arrows, if the lancers were reduced to scattering over the countryside to scrounge for food, they wouldn’t be able to fight the way they should. The Lenelli understood that … up to a point.

Bottero’s army had one accompaniment the Wehrmacht wouldn’t have: Aderno and