After the Downfall

Grenye women are homely. Much of that went back to Velona again. Velona would have been a knockout – a knockout and a half – anywhere. Next to her, most Lenello women were homely, too; Hasso wouldn’t have wanted to end up in bed with Queen Pola for all the tea in China. He did think the average Lenello woman was prettier than the average Grenye.

Drepteaza … He muttered to himself. No matter what he thought of Drepteaza, she didn’t think much of him. She thought he looked like a goddamn Lenello, was what she thought. And there he was, banging head-on into looks again.

“You’re thinking hard.” Zgomot startled him out of his none too happy reverie.

“Yes, Lord.” Hasso couldn’t very well deny it.

“You don’t say much,” the Lord of Bucovin remarked.

“My head is full of mud,” Hasso answered. “I don’t have much worth saying.”

“No, eh?” Zgomot didn’t believe him, but seemed too polite to push about it. Since Hasso hadn’t told the whole truth, that was just as well. Zgomot lifted an imaginary mug. “May you bring as much confusion to our enemies.”

“May it be so.” Did Hasso mean it? He decided he didn’t want to try to reach Aderno in his dreams, so maybe he did.

When Scanno was sober, he remembered he was a fighting man. He liked to practice with Hasso. “Now I can pick on somebody my own size,” he said. He was bigger than the German, too, but only a little. When they used wooden practice swords, he did pick on Hasso. Even half-drunk, which he was a lot of the time, he was better with a blade than the Wehrmacht officer ever would be.

“How old were you the first time you picked up a sword?” Hasso asked, rubbing his ribcage where one of Scanno’s strokes had got through. He would have an ugly bruise there tonight.

The renegade shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Two, three, maybe four. If you’re going to be a warrior, you need to be a warrior. You start learning how as soon as you can.”

That was true among the Prussian Junkers, too, but not to the same degree. Learning to shoot a rifle – especially a modern one, with a flat trajectory and good sights – was a lot easier than learning to fence and ride. Hand-to-hand combat in Hasso’s world was nice to know, but you needed it a lot less than you did here.

“Let’s try spears,” Hasso said. The Bucovinans used shafts with rags padding the end, the same as the Lenelli did. Had they come up with the idea on their own or borrowed it from the blonds? Hasso wondered whether even the locals knew any more.

He could hold his own with spears. That made him feel better about himself and his place here. Moral – don’t get caught with just a sword, he thought. Though the day was chilly, he and Scanno worked up a good sweat thrusting and parrying.

Scanno swigged from a big mug of beer. “Can’t sweat all the good stuff out of me,” he said, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. He took another pull at the mug. “Now I suppose you’ll want to thump my sorry ass.”

“You give me fencing lessons. Shouldn’t I give you wrestling lessons?” Hasso hoped he sounded more innocent than he felt – he did want some of his own back. “If you’re going to be a warrior, you need to be a warrior. Who says – said – that? Somebody who looks a lot like you.”

“Me and my big mouth.” Scanno gave a crooked – and rather slack-lipped – grin. “All right. Let’s get it over with. You can throw me around like a sack of beans.”

Hasso did, too. He also got thrown around some himself, even if Scanno wasn’t so quick learning the new moves as Orosei had been. But then, Orosei was the king’s master-at-arms, and Scanno never more than middling good. He might have learned faster had he stayed sober more, but he might have done all kinds of things had he stayed sober more.

At one point in the proceedings, he landed on his head. He didn’t move for close to a minute afterwards. Hasso eyed him in some alarm – he hadn’t intended to throw him that hard. You didn’t want to hurt anybody while you trained, but accidents happened every now and then.

Just when the German was about to see whether artificial respiration would do any good, Scanno rolled over, sat up, shook his head, and winced. “Got to make my eyes uncross there,” he said.

“Sorry,” Hasso told him. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Shit happens.” Scanno shrugged, then winced again. “Don’t think I got hit so hard since I ran into a dragon’s skull.”

“Right,” Hasso said. Scanno was full of figures of speech for a hangover. He hadn’t heard that one before, but he liked it.

“Wait. Wait.” Scanno shook his head once more, despite the horrible face he pulled as soon as he did it. “You think I’m talking about being drunk, don’t you? I really did run into a dragon’s skull. Came cursed close to killing myself doing it, too.” He got to his feet. It took some effort, but he managed.

Hasso steadied him. “Well, all right. That sounds like a story worth hearing.”

“I know what you mean. You mean you won’t believe a bloody word of it,” the renegade said. That was exactly what Hasso meant, but he didn’t feel like admitting it. Scanno went over to his mug of beer and upended it. Hasso didn’t think he could have drunk so much at a single draught, but he hadn’t had Scanno’s practice. “This was probably about twenty years ago, you understand.”

“Sure,” Hasso said. A lot of things could change in twenty years. Twenty years ago, Hitler was probably just about getting out of jail and publishing Mein Kampf. The Weimar Republic still ruled Germany, whose army was just big enough to blow its own nose, and maybe to sneeze if it got permission from France and Poland first. The shackles of the Treaty of Versailles still held the country down. Hitler’d thrown them off, all right, just the way he promised he would … and started down the path that would wreck the Reich far more completely than Versailles did.

“I was hunting deer in a noble’s forest – you know how it is,” Scanno said.

“Poaching.” Hasso knew just how it was.

“Yeah. You better believe it, buddy.” Scanno’s grin was utterly without self-consciousness – or guilt. “I needed the venison a demon of a lot more than that rich bastard did, too. My backbone was rubbing against my belly, and there aren’t many feelings worse’n that one.”

“Tell me about it.” Hasso had been hungry more than he cared to remember on the Eastern Front. Who hadn’t?

“Uh-huh.” Scanno took hunger for granted, too. In this world, one bad harvest meant people went hungry. Two bad harvests in a row meant famine. Scanno continued, “So there I was, where the law said I wasn’t supposed to be. Right at the beginning of summer, you know, when everything’s all green and grown and luscious – me and my bow, sneaking through the woods.” He grinned again, relishing the memory.

“So you run into a dragon then?” Hasso said. “I hear about one in King Cherso’s realm – what was it, three years gone by now?”

“I heard about that one, too. Never saw it, ‘cause it never came this far south, goddess be praised.” Scanno still swore by the Lenello divinity, then. That was interesting, or might be. “Yeah, I ran into a dragon, all right, only not quite the way you think.”

“Tell me more,” Hasso urged. Scanno could spin a yarn, all right. How much of it to believe … Well, you could always figure that out later.

Before going on, Scanno refilled the mug from a pitcher. “Can’t hardly talk with a dry throat,” he remarked, and poured down another good draught. After what he’d drunk, Hasso wouldn’t have been able to walk, but the Lenello seemed to need more even to feel a buzz. “Where was I?”

“In the woods, running into a dragon.”

“Oh, yeah. I spotted this buck – a big old fat buck. Nice antlers on him, too, if you care about that kind of crap. Me, I was after meat. He was upwind of me, so my scent didn’t give me away. I did the best sneak ever – I mean ever – till I got close enough to draw and let fly. Hit the bastard, too.” He quaffed again.

“Then what happened?” Yes, Hasso was hooked in spite of himself.

“You know how it is. Only way you can kill clean is through the eye or maybe through the heart if you’re lucky.