After the Downfall

“Breathing,” the Bucovinan replied, which echoed Hasso’s own thoughts much too closely. “You want to keep doing it?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but nudged Hasso in the ribs with a boot. “Can you stand up now?”

“I … think so.” The German sandbagged a little. He wanted to seem weaker and more harmless than he was. But he would have swayed on his pins any which way. The Bucovinans didn’t instantly shove him into motion. More teams of little swarthy men with torches were moving over the battlefield, in the pits they’d dug and around them. Every so often, a native would stoop – and that, presumably, would be that for some luckless Lenello. “Do you – uh, did you – get the king?” Hasso asked.

“No, curse it.” The Grenye sounded unmistakably disgusted. “He fought his way clear. But he won’t be going forward any more, by Lavtrig.” He and the other Bucovinan swirled their torches clockwise when he named the deity. “The rest of you big blond bastards won’t, either.”

I’m not one of those big blond bastards, Hasso thought. But he was blond and he was big by Grenye standards – and he’d fought for King Bottero. Keeping his mouth shut looked like a real good idea.

Keeping his mouth shut about that did, anyhow. He couldn’t help asking, “What about Velona?”

“Who?” The native who spoke Lenello gave him a blank look.

“The goddess,” Hasso said.

“Oh. Her? The Bucovinan spoke to his buddy. They both swirled their torches again, this time counterclockwise. What was that supposed to mean? Reverence? Fear? Warding? All of the above? The native went on, “No, we weren’t too sorry when she got away. If we could have killed her, fine. But how would we keep her prisoner? It would be like keeping the sun in a roomful of kindling.”

He wasn’t far wrong, not from what Hasso knew of Velona. No god or goddess possessed him, but he was a wizard … of sorts. Maybe that would do him some good. Maybe the land here wouldn’t let him work magic. He’d have to see.

“Come on.” The native shoved him. “Move.” Hasso moved – slowly, but he moved.

They fed him. They gave him something that tasted like beer brewed from rye, which was just about as bad as that sounded. The native who spoke Lenello stuck with him as they took him to Falticeni. Hasso found out the fellow’s name was Rautat, and that he’d worked in Drammen for several years before going home to Bucovin.

“Why did you go?” Hasso asked. “Why did you come back?”

“I had to see,” the Bucovinan answered.

They were standing next to a couple of trees by the side of the road, easing themselves. Three soldiers in leather jerkins aimed arrows at Hasso’s kidneys in case he tried to get away. The persuasion worked remarkably well.

“Yes, I had to see,” Rautat repeated as he laced up his trousers. “You Lenelli can do all kinds of things we don’t know how to do. You can make all kinds of things we don’t know how to make. I worked for a smith. I wasn’t even a ‘prentice. I pumped the bellows. I carried things. I banged with a hammer. And I watched.

My uncle is a smith, so I knew something about it – the way we do it, anyhow. Now I know a lot of your tricks, too, and I use them, and I teach them to other people who want to learn them. Other Grenye, I mean. My people.” He jabbed a forefinger at his own chest.

You were a spy, Hasso realized, buttoning his own fly. Rautat watched that with interest. He watched everything Hasso did with interest. The Lenelli didn’t use a fly fastening. Hasso had on his old Wehrmacht trousers.

As they stepped away from the trees, the German nodded to himself. Rautat had been just as much a spy as an Abwehr agent who tried to steal the secrets of some fancy new British steel- manufacturing process. The only difference was, the Lenelli didn’t seem to know their processes were worth guarding.

And I didn’t think of it, either, he reminded himself as he swung up onto the scrubby little horse they were letting him ride. He muttered angrily in German. He’d been Bottero’s spymaster, and he’d been better at the job than any Lenello ever born. But he hadn’t been good enough. How many just like Rautat were there, in all the Lenello kingdoms? Hundreds? Thousands?

“What is that tongue you used? It’s not Lenello,” Rautat said. How many of those Grenye were as sharp as he was? Probably very few.

“No. It’s my own language,” Hasso answered. “I’m not a Lenello.”

“You look like one,” Rautat told him. Hasso shrugged. The dark little man plucked at his curly beard. “You don’t sound like one, I will say.” He took a scrap of parchment, a reed pen, and a little clay flask of ink from a belt pouch and scribbled a note to himself. Seeing Hasso’s eyes on him, he said, “I learned your letters when I was in Drammen, too. We mostly use them now.”

“Yes, I know that,” Hasso said. The crude warning the Bucovinans posted had used Lenello characters and, indeed, the Lenello language.

“We had writing of our own before you big blond bastards came.” Rautat sounded like a man anxious to prove he wasn’t a savage and half afraid he was in spite of everything. “Your way is a lot quicker to pick up, though. It’s mostly the priests who still write the old characters. They take years to learn, and who else has the time?”

How had the natives written in the old days? Hieroglyphics? Things like Chinese characters? Some slow, clumsy, cumbersome system, anyhow. One of these days, chances were even the priests wouldn’t use it any more. And then who would be able to read the accumulated wisdom of Bucovin, assuming there was any?

Rautat cocked his head to one side and eyed Hasso like a curious sparrow. “So you’re not a Lenello, eh? Where are you from, then? Some other kingdom across the sea, I suppose.”

“No. Farther away than that.” Hasso told how he’d come to this world.

What would the Bucovinan make of it? Hasso knew what a German Feldwebel – for he took Rautat to be a top sergeant, more or less – would have made of it, even if the fellow had worked in Cleveland for a while. The Feld would have laughed his ass off and said, “Bullshit!” Hearing a story like that, Hasso would have said the same thing himself.

But this was a different place. Rautat frowned. It wasn’t that he disbelieved; he was trying to figure out how the pieces fit together. Well, Hasso had been doing that ever since he splashed down into the marsh. He didn’t have all the answers yet, and he would have bet anything that Rautat wouldn’t, either.

The native pointed at him. “So you’re the whoreson who spat thunder and lightning at us in the first big battle! That’s why we worked so hard to find your name!”

“Ja, that’s me,” Hasso said, and then, “Ja means yes.”

“No wonder they want you in Falticeni,” Rautat said. “Can you do that some more?”

“No. My weapon needs cartridges’’ Again, a word came out in German – it had to. “They come with me from my world. The Lenelli know more tricks of making things than you people do, yes? Well, the folk of my world know more than the Lenelli do. The Lenelli can’t make these cartridges. No one here can.”

“Ah.” As a wily Feldwebel would, Rautat had a good poker face. He sounded almost artistically casual as he asked, “Can you teach us any of what you know and the Lenelli don’t?”

“I don’t know,” Hasso answered, trying to keep worry out of his own voice. “I’m not sure.”

He could show the natives this and that. He could show them most of the same things he would have shown to Bottero and Velona. He could, yes, but should he? He knew what he thought of Field Marshal Paulus, who’d surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad and then got on the radio for them, telling the Germans they couldn’t win and had better give up while they still had the chance. Maybe Paulus did persuade a few Landsers to desert. To Hasso and the rest, though, he was nothing but a goddamn traitor.

Of course, maybe the NKVD held Paulus’ feet to the fire before he started broadcasting. And maybe the Bucovinans will hold my feet to the fire. What do I do then?

Hasso had an Iron Cross First Class. If you’d lived through the whole war, it was hard not to have one. He’d been put up for the Knight’s Cross, but it didn’t go through for some dumb reason or another. He didn’t much care. He’d never thought of himself as heroic. He wanted to live. Would he have plomped his butt down on the Omphalos stone if he were bound and determined to die for the Vaterlandl