After the Downfall

dumping garbage on the midden. He might have been talking about a yoke of oxen.

“It may be there, but I don’t know how to use it. Even if I did, could I reach back into my old world, like that?” Hasso asked.

“I don’t know,” Aderno admitted. “If your world is so inimical to sorcery, maybe not. Maybe a wizard in the capital will have a better notion than I do.” He shook his head. “He may have a better notion. There aren’t many wizards, even among us. Whether any of them will know of your world and what it is like … well, who can say?”

The commandant at Castle Kalmar gave the travelers fresh horses to speed them on their way. Hasso took that as a mixed blessing; he’d started getting used to the animal he was riding. His new mount seemed more spirited, which was the last thing he wanted. Trucks and cars didn’t vary so much.

He found out that Drammen, the name of the capital, meant something like high and mighty in the Lenello language. Aderno was ready to go on and on about the place, but Hasso didn’t want to listen to him. He tried his few words of Lenello with Velona instead. He might not follow her, but he enjoyed trying.

She used gestures to show him Drammen was big, and opened and closed her hand many times to show him it was populous. “How many people?” he asked. When they stopped, he drew in the dirt with a stick to show her he understood the idea of written numbers. To show one was easy. Five and ten weren’t hard, and fifty and a hundred just took patience.

Velona got excited when she saw what he was doing. She called Aderno over. The wizard was chewing on something; the peppery fumes he breathed into Hasso’s face proved it was a chunk of sausage. “Well, well,” he said, examining the numbers. “Those aren’t what we use, but you’ll follow ours, all right.”

To the Lenelli, one was a horizontal slash. Ten looked like a plus sign. A hundred was a square with a horizontal line through the middle. If you put the symbol for three – three horizontal slashes piled on one another – to the left of the symbol for ten, it meant thirty. If you put it to the right of the symbol for ten, it meant thirteen. The Lenelli didn’t use a zero. The system struck Hasso as better than Roman numerals, not as good as Arabic.

To show him how many people Drammen held, Aderno needed to teach him one more symbol: a square divided into quarters by vertical and horizontal lines. The wizard seemed impressed when he didn’t boggle at the idea of a thousand.

Drammen, by what Aderno wrote, held somewhere between thirty and forty thousand people.

With a patronizing smile, Aderno asked, “And how many people in the town you come from, Hasso Pemsel?”

Hasso had to think about his answer. He took the stick from the wizard and wrote the symbol for four and the symbol for a thousand. Aderno’s smile got wider. Then Hasso wrote the symbol for a thousand again, to the right of the first quartered square.

Velona blinked. Aderno stopped smiling. “No, that can’t be right,” he said impatiently. “You have written the numbers for four thousand thousand – we would say four million. But that is obviously impossible.”

“Four million, ja,” Hasso said. “That’s about how many people there are in Berlin.” At least till the Russians get through with it, he thought glumly. God only knows how many they’ll leave alive.

“You can’t expect me to believe you,” Aderno said.

“You asked me. Now you don’t like the answer,” Hasso said.

“Only a madman would like it,” the wizard insisted. “No one could keep four million people fed. The idea is ridiculous. Even if by some miracle you could, their filth would pile up in mountains. You must be lying.”

Hasso swung the Schmeisser’s muzzle toward him. “What did you say?” he asked softly. “You may want to think about what comes out of your mouth.”

Aderno had the courage of his convictions. “Do not act as if your honor is threatened if I challenge a clear lie,” he said. “It will only make you look more foolish when I use the truth spell.”

“Ah, the truth spell. I forgot about that,” Hasso said. “Yes, go ahead.”

“You really are a crazy man, outlander. If you want to prove it to the world, if you want to prove it to the woman who has taken a fancy to you … well, we can do that.” Aderno aimed a long, lean wizardly forefinger at him. “Tell me again how many people live in this town of yours.”

“About four million,” Hasso answered stolidly.

The wizard sketched a star in the air between them. It glowed green. Velona clapped her hands together and laughed out loud. Aderno look as if someone had stuck a knife in him. “But it can’t be!” he protested – to whom, Hasso wasn’t sure. Most likely to the ghost of his own assumptions.

“You can apologize now,” Hasso said. Or you can kiss my ass. I don’t much care which.

Aderno had the air of a man who’d put out his foot for a step that wasn’t there and fallen five meters. “I think I would rather believe you can fool the truth spell than believe in a city with four thousand thousand people in it,” he muttered.

“Believe whatever you please,” Hasso said. “You asked me, so I told you. If you don’t like it, it’s no skin off my nose. You wanted to brag about how wonderful Drammen is, and you got a surprise. Shall we ride now?”

They rode. As they went along, Velona and Aderno got into a screaming row. Every so often, one of them would point Hasso’s way, so he figured they were arguing about him. Velona went on laughing, so he guessed she believed him, whether the wizard did or not. Hasso heard the words four million more than once. Maybe it would have been better if Aderno hadn’t asked him. Too late to worry about that, though.

Hasso wondered what the ordinary Lenello troopers thought. He couldn’t tell. Those proud faces might have been carved from stone for all they showed. SS recruiting posters with men like that on them would have pulled in twice the volunteers – or maybe none at all, since so many would have despaired of measuring up to that standard.

Still, men were men, horses were horses, pigs were pigs … and Aderno’s unicorn was a goddamn unicorn, and his magic was, without a doubt, real, live magic. Hasso didn’t know much about this world, but he knew it was different from his. And his was different from this one, and the people here seemed to have more trouble than he did working that out.

Drammen lay on the Drammion. Hasso judged the river more impressive than the Spree, which ran through Berlin, but less impressive than the Danube or the Rhine. Barges and sailboats came down the river to the city; sailboats fought their way up to it against the current. No motors anywhere, which didn’t surprise him. He didn’t miss the stink of exhaust.

And if he had, there were plenty of other stinks to savor. He’d grown intimately familiar with horse manure and unwashed humanity during the war. The wind wafted those odors from Drammen to his nose. And with them came the stench of what might have been every sour privy in the world. He’d seen at the castles that the Lenelli didn’t have much of a notion of plumbing. Now, approaching a city – not a large city, by his standards, but a city even so – he got a real whiff of what that meant. No wonder Aderno hadn’t wanted to imagine the filth from four million Berliners.

Catching Velona’s eye, Hasso screwed up his face and held his nose. She laughed and nodded, but then shrugged and spread her hands as if to say, What can you do?

“Cities always stink,” Aderno said.

Sure they do, if there’s no running water and horses shit in the streets, Hasso thought. He didn’t want to think about the flies in Drammen. As if to mock him, a big shiny one lit on the back of his hand. He swatted at it – and missed.

“Stink or no stink, though, have you ever seen finer works than the ones protecting Drammen?” Aderno had his share of hometown pride and then some.

Artillery could have knocked down the curtain walls around the city in hours. The castle on a hill near the center of town would have taken a little longer, but not much. Hasso thought of G Tower again. That reinforced concrete could hold up against damn near anything. It wasn’t a fair comparison, though, and he knew as much.

“They’re very strong,” he said, and by the standards of this world that was bound to be true. The wizard looked pleased, even smug, so he hadn’t sounded too sarcastic. Good.