After the Downfall

“Yes, so you keep insisting, and it seems to be true. But you still look like one, so it helps you less than you think even if it is.” The skin at the corners of Drepteaza’s eyes crinkled; the ends of her mouth turned up the tiniest bit. “And we both know a man will say anything at all to coax a woman into bed with him.”

“What?” Hasso did his best to look comically astonished.

It must have worked – Drepteaza burst out laughing, which didn’t happen every day, or every week, either. She wagged a finger at him. “You are a wicked man. Wicked, I tell you.”

Most of her was kidding; she made that plain enough. But down underneath, at some level, she had to mean it. And so Hasso couldn’t just go on with the joke and say something like, At your service. Instead, he said, “Well, the Lenelli think so, too.”

“Yes.” The priestess sent him a hooded look. “And it could be, couldn’t it, that all of us are right?”

A blizzard roared in that afternoon. If anything, it came as a relief to Hasso. It took his mind off the foot he’d stuck in his mouth, anyway. Listening to the wind wail, watching it blow snow past almost horizontally, reminded him there were bigger things in the world than his own foolishness. For a while that morning, he hadn’t been so sure.

Then his nose started to freeze, so he quit watching the blowing snow. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before – that was for damn sure. Next to some of the blizzards he’d seen in Russia and Poland, this one was no more than a plucky amateur.

He wondered how soon he’d regret telling Leneshul to get lost. Then he didn’t wonder any more: he’d regret it as soon as he got horny again. That was as plain as the – chilly – nose on his face.

But, dammit, she wasn’t what he wanted. Yeah, any pussy was better than none, but he missed Velona. There was a woman and a half – well, more than a woman and a half, when you got right down to it. A woman and a goddess.

Drepteaza wasn’t a woman and a half. She was so short, she hardly seemed one whole woman. But she was, and then some. And so? So she didn’t want him.

“I can’t win,” he muttered. Maybe she was a lousy lay. Maybe she’d think he was a lousy lay. Maybe they just wouldn’t work. Maybe I’m trying to tell myself the grapes are sour because I don’t get to taste them. Aesop was no dummy. He knew how things worked, all right.

A Lenello woman came in with his supper. Mutton stew, it smelled like, and heavy on the garlic. He didn’t much care for garlic, but the Bucovinans put it in everything this side of beer. The pitcher of beer wouldn’t be anything to write home about, either – as if he could write home from here. Then again, the natives could have boiled him in beer and shoved garlic cloves up his ass, so how could he complain?

“Good day,” the serving girl said in Lenello.

“Good day,” Hasso answered in his bad Bucovinan.

“You have heard about the trouble?” she asked. Most of the people who dealt with him here knew more Lenello than he did. Back when the German tribes bumped up against Rome, how many Goths and Franks would have spoken Latin? Quite a few, probably.

“No. What trouble?” Hasso stuck to Bucovinan – he needed the practice. He was also out of the gossip loop. No surprise – he was a foreigner who didn’t speak any known language very well.

Still in Lenello, the serving woman said, “Your people attack our border villages again. Much burning. Much killing.”

“My people? I have no people here,” Hasso said.

She looked at him as if he were an idiot. That had to be what she was thinking, too. “King Bottero’s people,” she said, speaking slowly and plainly. “You are from King Bottero’s kingdom, yes?”

Hasso couldn’t even say no. That had been his local address till the Bucovinans captured him. Even so, he told the serving woman the same thing he’d told Drepteaza: “I am not a Lenello.”

Drepteaza listened to him. Drepteaza appreciated subtleties. Even Rautat recognized the possibility that he might be different from the rest of Bottero’s men. The serving woman just sniffed. “You look like a Lenello. You come from Bottero’s kingdom. What are you supposed to be, a parsnip?” She walked out of the room without giving him a chance to answer.

“Ja. A goddamn parsnip,” he said in German. “What am I supposed to be? God, I wish I knew.” He poured beer from the pitcher into a mug. She hadn’t given him enough to get drunk on. The Grenye of Bucovin didn’t get smashed every chance they could, the way so many Grenye in the Lenello kingdoms seemed to. These natives didn’t have to measure themselves against the big, blond, magic-using invaders every hour of the day, every day of the week. They still kept some sense of their own worth.

He ate the stew. Damned if it didn’t have parsnips in it. So now he was part parsnip, anyhow. He put more charcoal on the brazier, crawled under his furs and blankets, and went to bed. What else did he have to do when he wasn’t making gunpowder? He hadn’t taken a woman: not Leneshul, not Drepteaza, not even this snippy servant. He hoped Aderno and Velona wouldn’t hound him in his dreams. After everything else today, that would have been too much, even if he lived through it.

They didn’t. He got a full night’s sleep – or most of one, anyway. Somebody banged on his door before the sun came up the next morning. When he opened it, Rautat stood in the hallway. “Can you use your gunpowder against the Lenelli?” he asked. The German word sounded odd in his mouth. “Have you got enough?”

“Do I have a choice?” Hasso said. “If I do, I’d rather not.”

Rautat scowled. “You better talk to Lord Zgomot. He sent me.”

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 Fuhrer – 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.”