After the Downfall

or I hope we can, anyhow. If we drive him back, then we deal with Bottero.” Try to deal with Bottero. But he kept that to himself.

“You don’t think Bottero will have told Iesi about the kinds of things you do?” That will have told perplexed Hasso for a moment; he didn’t hear a future perfect every day. Before he could answer, Zgomot took care of it for him: “No, of course he won’t. If he ever had to fight Iesi or one of the other blond kings, he would want to be able to give him a surprise. Fair enough. If Iesi comes by himself, we try to hit him first and knock him out of the fight.”

He might be mindblind, but he was nobody’s fool. Neither was Bottero, come to that. If you were going to make a halfway decent king, brains were an asset.

“Do you let me fight your enemies, Lord?” Hasso shook his head in exasperation. He felt mindblind himself, fighting with languages he didn’t speak well enough. “Will you let me fight your enemies, Lord?”

Zgomot looked pained. Hasso knew things he didn’t and could do things he couldn’t. That made the Wehrmacht officer valuable. It made using him necessary and losing him unfortunate. It also made him dangerous. As if that weren’t obvious enough anyway, Hasso came in a large, blond package.

“I do not want you hurt.” The Lord of Bucovin picked his words with care. You didn’t want to offend the captive genie, lest it turn on you. After gnawing at the inside of his lower lip for a moment, Zgomot added, “I do not want to take the chance that you will desert to the Lenelli again, either.”

He must have decided that Hasso could see that he could see the possibility. It was, in the mildest possible way, a compliment. It was one Hasso could have done without. “If you don’t trust me to fight, why do you trust me to make gunpowder for you?” he asked. “Maybe I blow the palace to the sky.” He’d thought about it.

“Maybe you will,” Zgomot said steadily. “My thinking is, you are less likely to do that if you stay inside the palace yourself.”

Hasso gave him a crooked grin. “My thinking is, you’re right.” He remembered Russians who’d killed without caring for their own lives. Before things really fell to pieces in the Reich, the papers had stories about Japanese pilots who flew their airplanes into American warships. Hasso admired their courage without wanting to emulate it. He liked living. Dying at the age of 103, shot by an outraged husband, struck him as a good way to go.

“This also strikes me as one more reason to keep you where you are,” Zgomot said.

Damn! Hasso thought. He could see why it would strike the Lord of Bucovin that way. “How do I persuade you that you can trust me?” he asked.

Zgomot gave him the courtesy of taking the question seriously. He didn’t answer right away, but plucked at his beard as he thought things over. “If you fight well against Bottero’s men,” he said at last, “that may convince me.”

“If you don’t let me fight against Bottero’s men, how am I supposed to fight well?” Hasso inquired, less acidulously than he might have.

Zgomot stroked his chin again. His eyes twinkled – or maybe it was just a trick of the light. “It is,” he admitted, “a puzzlement.”

Iesi didn’t move. Bottero kept moving. He worked more methodically than he had during the autumn. That invasion had been a blow aimed at Bucovin’s heart. When it failed to reach Falticeni – when it failed, period – the Lenelli pulled back to their own border.

Now Bottero was trying something different. He was taking one town, making sure he had it, and then going on to the next. Making sure he had a town involved either massacring the local Grenye or chasing them off to the east with no more than the clothes on their backs. Some of the women didn’t even get those.

As news of what the Lenelli were doing and how they were doing it came to Falticeni, Lord Zgomot’s face got longer and longer. His own people had to be screaming at him to do something. How long would he stay Lord of Bucovin if he didn’t?

What’ll happen to me if Bucovin gets a new lord? Hasso wondered. He feared it wouldn’t be good. He also feared Zgomot would order him to use gunpowder against the Lenelli, and he didn’t think the time was ripe.

If you have trouble, attack from an unexpected direction. That maxim had served the Germans – especially Manstein – well in Russia.

So Hasso decided he’d better take the initiative with Zgomot before Zgomot took it with him. “Lord, you are in touch with a lot of Grenye inside Bottero’s kingdom, is it not so?” he asked.

“Yes, of course it is so,” Zgomot answered impatiently – his temper was fraying round the edges, something Hasso hadn’t seen from him before. “You ought to know it is so, outlander. If what you told me is true, you did your best to keep them from doing Bucovin any good, and your best was better than I wish it were. So why do you want to know now?”

“Can you touch them off?” Now that Hasso had gunpowder, he could use figures of speech based on it. He hadn’t realized how many of those there were till he had to do without them. “If the peasants blow up behind Bottero’s line, he’ll need to leave Bucovin alone to deal with them.”

“Gods help them when he does,” Zgomot said. Hasso only shrugged. The Lord of Bucovin sent him a measuring stare. “You’re as cold-blooded as a serpent, aren’t you, Hasso Pemsel?”

With another shrug, Hasso said, “If I serve Bucovin, I have to think of Bucovin first, yes?”

“Yes … if you serve Bucovin.” Zgomot didn’t mean it the same way Hasso had.

Well, he had his reasons for doubting the German. His biggest reason likely was that Hasso looked like a Lenello. Besides, Hasso was fighting on King Bottero’s side when the Bucovinans captured him. The Lord of Bucovin wouldn’t forget it, or that Hasso had been boffing the goddess on earth. None of that would inspire confidence, not from Zgomot’s point of view. All right, maybe my looks aren’t the biggest reason, Hasso thought. But they sure aren’t the smallest one, either.

Back to business now. “What I tell you to do probably does hurt King Bottero,” Hasso said. “I don’t see how it can hurt Bucovin. A lot of Grenye in Bottero’s kingdom aren’t even Bucovinans.”

“I should hope not. They belong to the small tribes, the weak tribes,” Zgomot said. Bucovinans had almost as much scorn for the Grenye who’d quickly succumbed to the invaders from overseas as Lenelli did for Grenye in general. But the Lord of Bucovin continued, “Even if they are ruined men, I hate to throw them into the fire. They are still of our blood, of our flesh.”

“What good does it do them if Bucovin falls?” Hasso asked.

Zgomot grunted. “A point, no doubt. I do not know how much good an uprising will do us, but I do not suppose it can hurt. And you are right, of course – we have ways of making one happen.”

If the border was as tightly held as Hasso had tried to arrange, it wouldn’t be so easy to sneak into Bottero’s realm. He’d tried to make it hard for Grenye to sneak out of the Lenello kingdom, though; he hadn’t worried about any of them sneaking in. He thought he would have, sooner or later, but he hadn’t yet. So many different things going on…

And how much attention would Bottero’s marshals and wizards pay to his advice now that he wasn’t in Drammen anymore? How much attention would they pay now that he’d gone over to the other side? They would probably do the opposite of anything he’d ever proposed, just on general principles.

If he aimed to return to the Lenelli’s good graces, he’d find some magical way to get in touch with Aderno and warn him the uprising was coming. Could he manage to touch the wizard in his dreams? Maybe he could. He whistled softly. Talk about playing both ends against the middle!

Next question was, did he want to try anything like that? He fit in better in Drammen than he did in Falticeni, no doubt about it. But fitting in better wasn’t the same as fitting in well – no doubt about that, either. And Aderno and Velona had both done their level best to kill him, which didn’t encourage him to try to do anything nice for them.

If I could get Velona back again … Any man would do almost anything to have a woman like that. But it wouldn’t be the same as it was. He could see as much, however much he wished he couldn’t. And, except for Velona, he had no overwhelming reasons to prefer the Lenelli to the Grenye.

I look right among the Lenelli. There was the other side of Zgomot’s worrying about his loyalty because he was big and blond. It did matter, but only so much. He was a foreigner in Bottero’s kingdom, too, even if a less obvious foreigner.