After the Downfall

didn’t, because to them he was guilty of being a Lenello till proved innocent – and probably after that, too.

His thoughts drifted back to the escape he hadn’t made, hadn’t even tried. What about Velona? Would she welcome him back with open arms? Even more to the point, would she welcome him back with open legs? Not by what he’d seen in his dreams. He hadn’t just betrayed the Lenelli, not to the goddess on earth. He’d betrayed her personally when he lay down with Leneshul. That was how she saw it, anyway. She was good at an awful lot of things. Was she good at forgiving? Hasso didn’t think so.

“God damn it to hell,” he muttered, there in the loneliness of his room. “I am fucked. I am really fucked.”

When he came out into the wider loneliness of the palace, he felt the same way. How could he help it? He had trouble getting excited about working on the gunpowder. He stayed careful and attentive with that, because he didn’t want to blow himself up. With less urgent items like language lessons, he had trouble meeting even a lesser standard.

Drepteaza noticed right away. “Shall I find you another tutor?” she asked. “Are you so angry that I don’t want to go to bed with you that you don’t want anything else to do with me anymore? I can understand how you might be. It seems petty to me, but maybe it doesn’t to you.”

“No. It is not you.” To emphasize that, Hasso spoke in Bucovinan as best he could. “It is – everything.” His wave took in not only the room, not only the palace, not only Falticeni or Bucovin, but the whole world. “I do not belong here. I never belong here. Never.”

“I think you are wrong. I think you must be wrong,” the priestess said seriously. “You told me how you came here, how you sat on the stone in your world and then suddenly you found yourself in this one.”

“Yes? And so?” Hasso said. The first thing I did when I got here was shoot myself some Grenye. The next thing I did was screw the Lenello goddess on earth. Once upon a time, he’d thought that meant something important. Now? Now he had to do some new thinking.

But Drepteaza insisted, “It must mean something, Hasso Pemsel. Things don’t just happen. They happen for a reason.”

“What about the Lenelli?” Hasso asked.

She winced, but she had the courage of her convictions. “Even the Lenelli came here for a reason,” she said. Then her mouth quirked in one of her wry grins. “To rob, to kill, to rape, to enslave…” But she shook her head. “That is not what I mean. They are part of the larger purpose, too.”

“Whose purpose?” Hasso asked. “The purpose of your gods? The purpose of the Lenello goddess?” He didn’t bother naming the God he’d left behind in the ruins of Berlin. Once upon a time, he’d been a believing Christian. How you could go on being a believing Christian after five and a half years of war … Well, he hadn’t, so what point worrying about that? And they already had plenty of deities running around loose here. What did they need with another one imported by the only man who’d once believed in Him?

“I don’t know,” Drepteaza answered with another of those disarming grins. “The goddess is real – that is plain. We believe Lavtrig and our other gods are real, too, though they are quieter in the way they poke the world with their fingers. Whether something larger lies behind all that – well, who can say? But the wicked do not triumph forever. Nothing can make me believe that.”

Then why did the Reds beat Germany? Hasso wondered. Why wouldn’t the USA and England see that Stalin was more dangerous than Hitler ever could be?

Maybe God was out having a few drinks with the Lenello goddess and the Bucovinan gods. That made as much, or as little, sense to Hasso as anything else. He spread his hands. “I have no answers, priestess.”

“You would scare me if you said you did,” Drepteaza said. “You would scare me worse if you made me believe you.” She eyed him. “More than most people, you would make me wonder if you did say something like that.”

“Me? All I’m trying to do here is stay alive,” Hasso said.

“You’ve seen another world. You must have had a god – or maybe gods – of your own there.”

“Ja. I was just thinking about Him, in fact. He doesn’t answer.”

“Then why are you here now?”

He shrugged. It was a damn good question. But, again … “I don’t know.” Did the Omphalos have anything to do with the God Who was also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? The ancient Greeks wouldn’t have said so. Whether they were right – again, Hasso didn’t know.

Drepteaza didn’t want to leave it alone. “And,” she continued, “you spent all that time with the goddess on earth. If you don’t know more about such things than most people, who does?”

“I know a good bit about Velona – what a lover can know in the time we were together. A lover who has to learn a language first, I mean.” Hasso corrected himself. “About the goddess … All I know about the goddess is that she frightens me. She’s… bigger than I am.”

“Well, yes,” Drepteaza said. “Of course. That’s what makes her a goddess. Whether she’s big enough to eat Bucovin … She thinks she is. So far, she’s proved wrong, but she keeps trying.”

Thinking you were bigger than you really were was one of the worst mistakes you could make. Not even Hitler could argue with that, not any more. If you got into a war with the two biggest countries with the two strongest economies in the world – mm, chances were you wouldn’t be happy with the way things turned out. And chances were Hitler wasn’t, if he was still alive.

“Is that all you need to be a god?” Hasso asked. “To be strong?” He hadn’t thought about it in those terms before. Back in his own world, he’d taken for granted the answers other people gave him. He had more trouble doing that here, because he was hearing different things from different people.

Maybe they’re all wrong, he thought. But how can I know? How do I make up my mind? He’d never imagined there could be such a thing as too much freedom, but maybe there was.

And Drepteaza looked at him in surprise. “What else is there, Hasso Pemsel?”

Another alarmingly keen question. Hitler and Stalin ruled their countries as virtual gods because they were strong. Some people would say one of them was good and some the other, but who would say they both were? Nobody. Maybe it was true for beings genuinely supernatural, too. Why wouldn’t it be?

One reason occurred to him. “A god should be good, too, yes?” That, to him, needed to count more for real gods than for the self-made variety.

“What is good?” Drepteaza asked, and, like Pilate asking about truth, she didn’t wait around for the answer.

Reports about the Lenello raiders came back from the west. They plundered and killed, and then they withdrew. How much Bucovinan harassment had to do with that, Hasso couldn’t tell. He couldn’t tell how much good his gunpowder would have done, either.

He took another lover, a woman named Gishte. He didn’t think she was any more excited about him than Leneshul was, but she was more polite about it. That would do – for a while, anyhow.

He made damn sure he never took another bath with Drepteaza. It wouldn’t have meant anything to her. That wasn’t the point. It would have meant much too much to him. As things were, he played back memories of her nakedness as if he’d been a frontline Signal cameraman filming it on the spot.

All sorts of crazy thoughts went through his head. What would happen if he got enough gunpowder to blow up the castle here? Falticeni and Bucovin would never be the same. Of course, he would also blow himself up, and he didn’t want to do that. If he were suicidal, he never would have sat on the Omphalos. He would have fought on till he got killed. It probably wouldn’t have taken long.

Rautat made sure he had plenty of beer and mead and even wine. Gishte liked that; she got lit up whenever she saw the chance. That told Hasso some of what she really thought of him, though she didn’t slip even when she was drunk.

“What good does drunk do you?” he asked her one morning before she started drinking hard.

“What good does sober do me?” Gishte returned, a counter-question for which, like so many here, he had no good answer. He did hope she wasn’t drinking because she was going to bed with a Lenello – or somebody who looked like one. When he came right out and asked her about that, she shook her head. “No, you’re not so bad, and the priestess told me I didn’t have to screw you if I didn’t care to. I just like to get drunk, that’s all.”

What was he supposed to say to that? Plenty of Lenelli liked to get drunk, too – Scanno came to mind. So did plenty of Germans. As for the Russians, the less said about that, the better. It didn’t stop them from beating the snot out of the Wehrmacht. Sometimes it even helped. Waiting in the trenches, you’d hear them getting plowed and yelling and shouting and carrying on, and then they’d come at you not caring if they