After the Downfall

sharpening that chopper.

So don’t screw up, he thought. Good advice – but hard to live up to.

Coming back to Falticeni wasn’t exactly coming home. Hasso had no home in this world, and wondered whether he ever would. But he knew lots of people in the palace. Zgomot was interesting to talk to. And Drepteaza – was Drepteaza. Hasso sighed. He would be glad to see her. One of these days before too long, he would probably need to get drunk, too.

Hell, he’d done that on account of Velona, too. But it was different with her. He’d got smashed because she screwed Bottero. Drepteaza wasn’t screwing anybody, not as far as Hasso knew. That was the problem.

How the natives stared when he rode through the crowded, muddy, smelly streets with his Bucovinan escort! Nobody had any idea who he was – the Bucovinans figured him for a Lenello. Without photography and printing, nobody except kings could get famous enough for everyone to recognize them. And kings put their portraits on coins, which struck Hasso as cheating.

“Look at that big blond prick,” a Bucovinan said, pointing at him.

“Who are you calling a prick, you asshole?” Hasso replied in Bucovinan. The native gaped. His buddies gave him the horselaugh. Rautat slapped Hasso on the back. They rode on.

“So he did it?” one of the gate guards said to Rautat when they got to the palace.

“He sure did.” The underofficer sounded proud of Hasso. He probably was. If he hadn’t found the Wehrmacht officer in the pit and decided not to finish him off, he wouldn’t have got soft duty at the palace. He was enough of a Feldwebel to know when – and why – he was well off.

“Good,” the gate guard said. “About time we had some magic on our side.”

It wasn’t magic. Lord Zgomot understood that. So did Drepteaza. So did the Bucovinans who worked with gunpowder. As for the rest – well, what if they thought it was? That was probably good for morale.

Grooms came out to take charge of the travelers’ horses. Hasso stretched and grunted. He stumped around bowlegged, like an arthritic chimpanzee. That got a laugh from Rautat and the rest of the Bucovinans. Then he said, “I want a bath.”

“Me, too,” Rautat said. Gunoiul and Peretsh and Dumnez and the others who’d ridden with them nodded.

“Boy, when he says things like that, you’d hardly think he was a Lenello,” the gate guard said, as if Hasso weren’t there or didn’t speak Bucovinan. The German didn’t bash the native in the head, however much he wanted to. The man had already shown he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

But most of the Grenye in Falticeni were bound to think the same things about Hasso – the ones who’d heard of him, anyway. How many had? No way for him to know.

He wondered if he could figure out how to make a printing press. In the long run, ideas were as important as weapons. Ideas were weapons. But that was in the long run. Lots of other things to worry about first.

That bath, for instance. Hasso let Rautat lead the way. He was glad to get out of his grubby clothes, and even gladder to soak in the warm water with the root the Bucovinans used in place of soap. If only he had some cigarettes …

“If you were a Lenello, you’d still stink,” Rautat said.

“If I were a Lenello – ” Hasso dropped it right there. If he were a Lenello, he would have deserted when he got to the west. If he were a Lenello, he probably would have got away with it, too. “But I’m not.” He was sick of saying that. If only the Bucovinans would listen to him for a change!

Or maybe Rautat was listening. “I said, ‘If you were,’“ he reminded Hasso. “You don’t stink. You enjoy being clean, just like a human being does.”

Back in Drammen, Hasso hadn’t especially missed baths. When you got into the field, when you stayed in the line for weeks at a time, you learned to do without getting clean. You stopped worrying about it. It was nice to have the chance to scrub the dirt off, though. Hasso grabbed it without hesitation.

He didn’t even have to get back into his dirty duds. Servants laid out some others that fit him, no doubt borrowed from one renegade or another. “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

“Not even a little bit,” Rautat agreed. He had on clean clothes, too. “Now I could do with chopped pork and garlic over millet. That’d fill up the hole in my belly – and some mead to wash it down, too.”

“Sounds pretty good,” Hasso said. Rautat leered at him. He even understood why. The underofficer’s meal was what the Lenelli would sneer at as native food. Hasso didn’t care, even if he wasn’t wild about garlic. Once you spent some time campaigning, you ate anything that didn’t eat you first. Either that or you starved. He did add, “I think beer goes better.”

“Suit yourself,” Rautat said magnanimously. “Let’s go get outside some.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Food brightened the way Hasso looked at the world. It always did. Some of the meals he remembered mostly fondly were, by any objective standard, pretty horrible. Half a kilo of part-burnt, part-raw horsemeat wouldn’t put the Ritz out of business any time soon. But when you’d had nothing but snow and a mouthful of kasha for three days before you stumbled over the carcass, it seemed like the best supper you’d ever had.

The Bucovinan meal wasn’t half bad, even if it wasn’t what Hasso would have ordered given a choice. He’d just emptied his mug of beer when an attendant came up to him and said, “Lord Zgomot wants to see you now that you’re done eating.”

“He tells you to wait till I finish?” Hasso asked. The man nodded. Hasso shook his head in amazement. A ruler who thought of things like that! What was this world coming to? The Wehrmacht officer got to his feet. He towered over the native, as he towered over all the natives here. “I am at his service, of course.”

“Congratulations, Hasso Pemsel,” Zgomot said.

Hasso bowed. “Thank you, Lord.” As usual, he found the throne room cold and drafty and badly lit. Zgomot’s throne looked like a dining-room chair smothered in gold leaf.

“You kept your promise. Your weapon did everything you claimed it would.” The Lord of Bucovin raised an eyebrow. “Do you have any notion of how unusual that is, Hasso Pemsel?”

How many people – renegades and Bucovinans alike – would have promised him and other Grenye rulers that they could drive back the Lenelli? How many of those snake-oil salesmen would have been talking through their hats? Just about all of them, or the big blonds wouldn’t have pushed forward as far as they had.

“What I say I can do, Lord, I can do,” Hasso answered stolidly.

“So it would seem,” Zgomot allowed. “If you knew how many of the others said the same thing, though…” His mouth tightened, likely at some unhappy memory. Then he brightened – as much as he ever did, anyhow. “And you did something else marvelous, too.”

“What’s that?” Hasso asked.

“You came back,” Zgomot said. “We trusted you. We had not a lot of choice, maybe, when you were showing us something so new and strange, but we did it, and you did not betray us.” He might have been a priest solemnly proclaiming a miracle.

Shame flooded through Hasso. He hoped the throne room was too dim to let the Lord of Bucovin see him blush. Yeah, he’d come back, but only because the Lenelli didn’t want him anymore. He wondered whether Bottero was wishing he’d given his soldiers different orders. And he wondered whether Velona wished she hadn’t lost her temper with him.

Maybe Bottero did wish he’d welcomed back the man from another world. Hasso couldn’t make himself believe Velona felt any different about him. Velona didn’t do things because they were expedient. She did them because she felt like doing them. She loved as she pleased – and she hated as she pleased, too.

“Here I am, all right,” Hasso said. Let the Lord of Bucovin make anything he pleased of that.

“Yes.” Zgomot actually smiled a smile that didn’t look cynical. That didn’t happen every day – nor every week, either. “And now that you are here again, what other things can you show us that will drive the Lenelli wild?”

“Well…” Hesitantly, in a mixture of Lenello and Bucovinan, Hasso explained what he hoped to do with catapults and flying pots of gunpowder.

“Interesting,” Zgomot said – which, from him, was better than wild enthusiasm from a lot of people Hasso knew. “But a catapult only shoots so far. It only shoots so fast. How do you keep the Lenello knights from charging up and murdering the crew while they put a new pot in the throwing arm and cut the fuse just so?”