After the Downfall

A group of Grenye leading donkeys were ahead of them at the gate. The sad little beasts were piled high with sacks of this and that, so high that Hasso marveled that their legs didn’t collapse under them. The Grenye, seeing Lenelli behind them, made haste to get out of the way. The Lenelli accepted that as their due.

The guard who swaggered out to question Aderno had top sergeant written all over him, from that rolling, big-bellied walk to the double chin and the silver hair frosting gold. Most officers treated a senior noncom with the respect his position and his years deserved. Aderno didn’t. He spoke more brusquely than Hasso would have in his shoes.

Whatever the wizard said, though, had enough oomph to impress the veteran. The fellow came to attention, saluted with clenched fist over his heart, and waved Aderno’s party through. When Hasso looked up as he rode through the arched gateway, he saw more Lenelli staring down at him through murder holes. In case of trouble, what would they pour on attackers? Boiling water? Boiling oil? Red – hot sand? Something anybody in his right mind would rather give than receive – he was sure of that.

The gateway had two stout, spike-toothed iron portcullises, one near the outer end, the other near the inner. Would even a panzer be enough to smash them down? Hasso wasn’t sure. They didn’t have to worry about panzers here, anyhow.

Inside the wall was a clear space to let troops maneuver. That would be prime real estate. If the king kept people from building there, he had real power. He also had real worries, or worries that seemed real enough to him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered to keep that area open.

The houses closest to the wall put Hasso in mind of the sorry Grenye huts he’d seen on the way to Drammen. And, as he and his escorts rode through the narrow, stinking streets, he discovered that almost all of the people living in those huts were Grenye. When he saw one obvious Lenello sitting on a front stoop with a jug of wine beside him, he was so surprised that he pointed to the big blond drunken man.

Two troopers’ eyes traveled to the sodden Lenello. As soon as they saw him and recognized him for what he was, they looked away, pretending that they didn’t. After a moment, Hasso realized it went deeper than that. The men on horseback weren’t pretending. They were denying. Were he able to ask them if they saw their compatriot, they would have said no. And they would have meant it, all the way down to the depths of their souls.

Hasso started to ask Aderno why that should be so. Something in the set of the troopers’ jaws, something in the ever so slight narrowing of their eyes, told him that might not be a good idea, especially when he noticed that same existential disapproval clotting the wizard’s features. Aderno must have noted the derelict Lenello, too.

How did the British in India react to one of their own who went native? How had Americans responded to a trader who stayed with the redskins and preferred a squaw to a white woman? A lot like this, unless Hasso missed his guess.

A dumpy Grenye woman came out of the hut and took the jug from the Lenello. She wasn’t trying to keep him sober; she wanted a drink for herself. The blond man gave her a slack – jawed grin and patted her on the ass.

Comparing her to Velona and the other Lenello women Hasso had seen was almost like comparing a gorilla to human beings. That fellow could have had one of those, but he’d ended up with – that? No wonder he drinks, Hasso thought.

Shabby shops and taverns and eateries lay within the first ring of huts. Again, all the proprietors and most of the customers were Grenye. When they bargained, they gesticulated and shouted and jumped up and down and did everything but poke each other in the eye. They reminded Hasso of the Jews in the villages in the east that the Wehrmacht had overrun.

When the shouting got especially raucous, Aderno stuffed his fingers in his ears. The racket had to drive him nuts. Maybe it also damaged his sorcerous sensitivity. Hasso just found it annoying. Velona caught his eye. She pointed to the Schmeisser he wore slung across his back. Then she pointed to eight or ten Grenye, one after another, and made guttural noises in her throat to suggest many rounds going off. And then she laughed and brought a forefinger up to her red lips in a gesture he couldn’t misunderstand. Mischief glinted in her eyes. Without a word, she was saying shooting Grenye was the only way to make them shut up.

A man with an unkempt beard and a mop of curly, dark brown hair came over to the Lenelli riding past. He held up a little jar – what was in it? salve? perfume? fish paste? – and went into a passionate, practiced sales pitch.

“No,” one of the troopers with Hasso said. The Grenye followed, still yakking a blue streak. “No!” the Lenello said again, louder this time. The Grenye had to be used to rejection, because he went right on with his spiel, coming ever closer as he did.

“No!” the Lenello shouted. He lashed out with his right foot. With a kick a World Cup footballer might have envied, he booted the jar out of the Grenye’s hand and sent it flying into a dungheap six or eight meters away.

The Grenye yelped in surprise and pain. All of Hasso’s escorts, even Aderno, laughed at him. Plainly, he was used to that. But his own people laughed at him, too, maybe for pushing too hard, maybe for not getting out of the way fast enough. His head hung as he trudged over to retrieve the jar from its noisome new home. He brightened when he discovered it wasn’t broken, and wiped it off on his tunic so he could try to sell it to some friendlier customer.

Inside the ring of shops, closer to the castle, dwelt the Lenelli. Had Hasso not already known, one glance at their homes would have told him who was on top here and who was on the bottom. Wide, well – kept lawns separated one Lenello home from another; the overlords weren’t packed cheek by jowl the way their subjects were. Each Lenello home was at least six or eight times as big as a Grenye hut. The buildings were solidly made of stone or brick. They weren’t built from wattle and daub and whatever scraps a Grenye could beg, borrow, or scrounge. They had roofs of red tile or gray or green slate, not tired thatch and bits of planking. The Grenye would have fallen in love with corrugated sheet iron if only they’d heard of it. Most of the Lenello homes could have doubled as fortresses. Even their stables and other outbuildings were far finer, far sturdier, than anything the Grenye lived in.

Velona saw Hasso eyeing the Lenelli’s houses. “Aren’t they good?” she said.

He understood that, and nodded. “Yes. Good,” he said. There was a word you soon learned whenever you picked up a new language.

“Lenelli are good,” Velona said.”Grenye…”Hasso had already seen she was a good mimic. Now he discovered she could do an uncanny impersonation of a grunting hog. It startled a laugh out of him. She pointed ahead. “And the king lives – there,” she said.

The gesture was nicely timed. They’d just come round a corner. An avenue – or as close to an avenue as Drammen boasted – led straight to the royal palace. If the avenue was muddy and rutted and odorous… well, what streets in this world weren’t? The palace was an impressive piece of architecture, no two ways about it.

A moat surrounded the gray stone outer walls. Soldiers on the walkway atop the outwalls surveyed the city between chest – high crenellations. Hasso had seen the towers of the keep even from outside the city walls. A red flag floated from the tallest of them. His lips quirked in a mirthless smile. He couldn’t hold that banner against the Lenelli, even if he’d been fighting one very much like it for almost four years. Yeah, artillery could have breached the walls and knocked down the towers in jig time. But he wouldn’t have wanted to try taking the place without it.

They rode down the avenue. It wasn’t the same as parading under the Brandenburg Gate after France fell. It really wasn’t the same as parading under the Brandenburg Gate would have been after Russia fell. Hasso feared only the Red Army was parading through Berlin these days. Was anything left of the Brandenburg Gate?

He shrugged. He’d never know. And a glance at his comrades said they all thought approaching the royal palace was a pretty big deal. Even Aderno looked like a second lieutenant about to get the Knight’s Cross straight from the Fuhrer himself.

What would happen to Hitler with Berlin falling? Hasso tried to imagine him in Russian captivity. The picture didn’t want to form. The Fuhrer would do anything, anything at all, before he let himself turn into Stalin’s plaything. Why couldn’t England and the USA see that, if Germany went down, the last dam against the spread of Bolshevism fell? It was as if they thought the Reich even worse, which struck him as insane.

He shrugged again. He would never know the answer there. As soon as his backside touched the Omphalos,