After the Downfall

This time, Aderno might have been sucking on the mother of all lemons. “I was wrong about you, and it cost me. I am not wrong about the Grenye, by the goddess.” He paused thoughtfully. “Maybe I was wrong when I said they had no unicorns. They’ve stolen a few from us, the way they steal big horses to improve their herds, and it’s possible that they’ve bred the unicorns, too. But no one has ever seen a Grenye on unicornback, not in all the years since Lenelli crossed the sea.”

He sounded positive. Hasso, who’d been here a matter of months, was in no position to contradict him. “I see,” the German said again – let Aderno make whatever he wanted of that.

Before long, Hasso saw something else, too: the first armed Grenye he’d spotted in the field. They weren’t an army, only scouts – a handful of men on horseback who kept their eye on King Bottero’s army but stayed as far away from it as they could while still doing their job. Every so often, one of them would ride off; no doubt to report to their superiors, while another took his place.

“We should catch some of them,” Hasso said. “We should find out what they know. We should find out what they think.”

“We should find out if they think,” Aderno said scornfully. “Besides, they’ll just scurry off into the woods if we chase them. You see how close to the trees they stay?”

“Yes.” Hasso had noticed that. “Can’t you bring them in by magic, though?”

He’d rarely seen any Lenello at a loss. He did now with Aderno. “By the goddess, I don’t know,” the wizard said. “It would be child’s play on the other side of the border. Here? Well, I can find out.”

Back in his own world, Hasso might have asked a radio technician to find the direction from which a Soviet signal was coming. Aderno set to work with that same kind of unflustered competence. He rummaged first in his belt pouches and then in his saddlebags for what he needed. He found a chunk of amber, a small stone that showed different colors depending on how the sun struck it – an opal, Hasso realized – and a smooth, rounded pebble that looked thoroughly ordinary.

“What is that?” Hasso asked, pointing at it.

“A capon’s gizzard stone. A five-year-old capon’s gizzard stone,” Aderno answered with relentless precision. “It aids in gaining one’s desire from any man. The other two, taken together, will make you victorious against your adversaries.”

Oh, yeah? Hasso thought. Back home, he wouldn’t have believed it, though he knew plenty of high-ranking Nazis were gaga for the occult and the supernatural. Much good that had done them, or the Reich. The way Germany was collapsing seemed to him the best argument in the world – in that world – against sorcery.

But things were different here. On the back of his unicorn, Aderno started juggling the three stones. Hasso Pemsel thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever seen, especially when the wizard thrust out his right index finger at a Grenye rider while all three stones were in the air at the same time.

It might have looked ridiculous. Hell, it did look ridiculous. That didn’t mean it didn’t work. The Grenye from Bucovin – the wild Grenye, the Lenelli would have called him – didn’t want to ride up to King Bottero’s army. He didn’t want to approach the wizard on the unicorn. Hasso could see that more and more plainly as the fellow rode closer and closer. No matter how unwilling he was, he did what Aderno required of him, not what he wanted to do.

“Well, well.” Aderno sounded pleased with himself. “Isn’t that nice. Isn’t that something?”

“Something, yes.” Hasso wasn’t sure what. He was sure it made his hackles rise. But as long as it worked, how much did that matter?

“Here you are, Grenye,” Aderno said as the horseman came up alongside him and Hasso. “Do you speak Lenello?”

“Yes, I speak it.” The Grenye’s accent was thicker than Hasso’s, but he made himself understood.

“Tell me your name,” Aderno said, and then, in an aside to Hasso, “One more sorcerous hold on him.”

Again, the Grenye didn’t want to but found he had no choice. “I am called Nebun,” he said.

Instead of a Lenello-style conical helm, he wore a leather cap strengthened with iron strips. His mailshirt showed less skill than the elegant armor Lenelli wore.

His sword, though … Hasso would have guessed a Lenello smith forged it, for it seemed the same as the ones Bottero’s soldiers carried. What had Lenin said about capitalists selling the Soviet Union the rope it would use to hang them? No, some things didn’t change a bit from one world to another.

“What are your orders, Nebun?” Aderno asked, and twisted his fingers in a certain sign. Again to Hasso, he added, “Keeps him docile.”

So it did – or it seemed to, anyhow. Nebun answered readily enough: “To spy out your force. To see how strong you are.”

“Tell your superiors we have twice the numbers you really see,” Hasso put in. “Tell them you fear for your land. Do not let them persuade you of anything else no matter what they say. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, sir.” Nebun might have been talking to a superior. “I will obey you as I would obey my own father.”

Hasso glanced over to Aderno. “Can I rely on that?” he asked – in German, so the Grenye wouldn’t understand.

Aderno’s magic let him follow the alien tongue. He nodded. “I think so. You might almost have set a spell on him.” He glanced over at Nebun. “For all I know, you did. You are not without power, as my lost goldpiece reminds me.”

The idea that he might be able to work magic made Hasso want to laugh. The extra gold jingling in his belt pouch was a good reason to take the notion seriously, though. “Go, Nebun,” he said. “Go back to your chiefs. Tell them how strong we are. Tell them we are very strong. Tell them you see all this with your own eyes. Go now.”

“I go.” Nebun booted his pony up into a walk, and then into a trot. He wasn’t such a smooth rider as most of the Lenelli, but he got the job done.

“That should confuse them,” Hasso said. “If they think they know things that are not so, they get confused. They make mistakes.”

“If they think they know…” Aderno raised a wry eyebrow. “I get confused, too.”

“Finding out what is really so is important,” Hasso said. “The one who knows that better usually wins.”

Inevitably, the German invasion of Russia came to mind again. The Wehrmacht thought Stalin had far fewer divisions than he proved able to pull out of his hat. By the time the first winter’s fighting was under way, the Germans had destroyed as many divisions as they’d believed the Russians could raise. But more Ivans kept coming at them, and more, and still more … and now, if Hasso were magically transported back to Berlin, it would be a Berlin under the Hammer and Sickle. Anything was better than that.

“One thing that is really so I already told you – we can work magic and the Grenye can’t,” Aderno said. “Now you see it with your own eyes.”

“I see that you can work magic and that that Grenye can’t,” Hasso half-agreed. He said nothing about his own magical abilities, if any. “But if this is so wonderful, why don’t Lenelli take Falticeni a long time ago?”

The wizard gave him a dirty look but no answer. Not even Velona had an answer for that, or so it seemed. If your men are so much better, why didn’t they take Moscow? How many times would people throw that in Germany’s face? The surviving veterans would blame the winter, the Russian T-34 tank’s wide tracks, the Siberian troops brought in to stiffen the Soviet line… everyone and everything but themselves. No, some things didn’t change a bit from one world to another.

“Do the Grenye in Bucovin worship the goddess?” Hasso asked Velona at breakfast the next morning. “Or do they have their own gods, the ones they have before you Lenelli come here?”

She sipped from a mug of beer. Hasso still missed coffee and tobacco. This was this world’s New World, wasn’t it? Why didn’t it have tobacco in it? Whatever the reason, it didn’t. After swallowing, Velona said, “Some worship the goddess. They’ve seen she has true power. Their old gods are just statues of stone or wood. Some of them look pretty, but what do they do?”

She might have been a Hebrew prophet mocking the local Baals. No sooner had that thought crossed Hasso’s mind than he laughed at himself. If the prophets had any descendants, the Reich would have settled most of them once and for all. You didn’t ask questions about what the Einsatzgruppen were up to. You didn’t really need to ask. The big wheels were serious about making sure the lands they ruled were Judenfrei.