After the Downfall

he’d put his own world behind him forever. He didn’t have many answers here, either, but he could hope he would one of these days.

Velona caught his eye and winked. She blew him a kiss. “You will see the king. He will like you.” She made it sound simple and inevitable. She didn’t seem so overawed as the wizard and the troopers.

If you can keep your head when all those about you are losing theirs … chances are you don’t understand the situation. Hasso knew too well that he didn’t.

He found out how much he didn’t understand in short order. Another man – another wizard? – rode a unicorn up to the guards at the outer end of the drawbridge just ahead of the group of which the Wehrmacht officer was a part. The guards talked with him for a moment, then stood aside and let him through.

Then Hasso’s group approached. When the guards saw them, they stiffened to attention and saluted. Then they bowed themselves almost double, and then, straightening, they saluted again. They bawled out some sort of honorific or another – Hasso didn’t understand it, but he heard the fervor with which they shouted it. SS troopers yelled, “Heil Hitler!” the same way.

The fuss wasn’t for Hasso. Nobody at the castle knew him from the man in the moon. It wasn’t for Aderno. Hasso had figured out the wizard’s place in the scheme of things: he was hired help. He was high – class hired help, entitled to some respect, like a first-rate dentist back in the Reich. But nobody jumped through hoops for a dentist there, and nobody was likely to jump through hoops for Aderno here. The mounted soldiers? They were exactly what they looked like – muscle, nothing else.

No. The guards were having conniptions because Velona was back. She said something to them, then pointed toward Hasso. As soon as she did that, they saluted him, too.

Uneasily, he returned the salute. “Hello. Good day,” he said, a couple of phrases in Lenello that couldn’t land him in too much trouble.

“Good day,” they chorused, and then something he didn’t understand.

“What does that mean?” he asked Aderno. He wanted to learn Lenello on his own. If he had the wizard magically translating for him, he wouldn’t. And he didn’t like Aderno all that much, and he didn’t think Aderno fancied him, either. Put all that together and he didn’t want much to do with the wizard. Once in a while, though, he needed a shortcut.

“They said, ‘Good day, savior of the priestess!’” Aderno told him.

“Priestess?” Hasso hadn’t known she was one. He chuckled. No nun he’d ever heard of would have said thank – you the way she did.

“Priestess, yes.” But Aderno didn’t seem quite happy with the German equivalent Hasso offered for what he said. “You might also think of her as the goddess on earth.”

Hasso glanced over at Velona. She smiled and fluttered her fingers at him. Priestess? Goddess on earth? What the hell have I got into? he wondered. But he liked what he’d got into just fine. Along with Velona and the escort, he rode across the drawbridge and into Castle Drammen.

III

After laying a goddess on earth, getting presented to a mere king was a piece of cake. King Bottero was a great big man, as so many Lenelli seemed to be. Hasso didn’t feel much shorter after he went to his knees in front of the massive, blocky throne than he did before. The king’s guards murmured when Bottero rose and set a hand on Hasso’s shoulder; maybe he didn’t do that for every Hans, Franz, and Dietrich who got an audience.

Bottero gestured. Hasso got to his feet. Even standing, the top of his head came up to about the bottom of the king’s nose. In Germany, he’d got used to looking at the tops of other people’s heads. Most of the Lenelli could do it to him. He didn’t like that, especially since his sandy hair was beginning to thin up there.

When the king said something, Hasso had to shrug. “I’m sorry, your Majesty. Don’t speak much Lenello yet,” he said. Velona had taught him your Majesty just before he went into the throne room. What was he supposed to call her? Your Divinity? She was divine, all right, but not in the theological sense of the word.

Bottero looked annoyed – not at Hasso, but at himself. He said something else. Then he called Aderno’s name. The wizard came up and went to his knees. Bottero spoke to him, impatiently. Get up! Get up! It had to mean something like that. As Aderno rose, he said, “His Majesty says you look like one of us, so he forgot you weren’t.”

If I’m a Lenello, I look like a damn runt, Hasso thought. They couldn’t shoot you for thinking, not if you kept your big mouth shut. Not even the Gestapo or the NKVD did that. “Tell his Majesty I’m glad to be here.” I’m glad to be anywhere. I wasn’t a good bet to still be breathing now.

As usual, Hasso heard the Lenello words without understanding them when the wizard spoke to the king. He couldn’t follow Bottero’s reply, either. But when Aderno spoke to him, he heard Lenello in his ears and what might as well have been German in his mind. “His Majesty says he is glad to have you – all the Lenelli are glad to have you – since you saved the goddess on earth from the Grenye savages.”

“I was glad to do it,” Hasso said. He’d been glad to do it even before Velona offered him what maidens – not that she was – used to call their all. After that…

After that, he would have followed her to Siam, or maybe to the moon.

What would he have done if she were small and dark and plain – Jewish-looking went through his mind – and the men chasing her were perfect Aryans? Would he have opened up on them anyway? Or would he have waited to find out what the hell was going on? He had no idea.

King Bottero spoke again. “Not half so glad as we were to have it done,” Aderno translated.

“Where do we go from here?” Hasso asked. He’d seen the Fuhrer a couple of times, but never spoken to him. He would have been awed if he had. Talking to a king didn’t awe him a bit. Talking to this king didn’t, anyhow. If a Kaiser still ruled Germany, or even if he’d met George VI of England, that might have been different. But Bottero seemed no more than an ungodly tall man in odd fancy dress who wore a gold circlet with ball-topped knobs sticking up from it.

He did have an impressive bass rumble. Aderno’s lighter voice turned his words into ones that made sense to Hasso: “You did us a service. I hope you will take service with us. I have heard you know fighting tricks we would all do well to learn, and I have also heard the power dwells in you.”

Hasso started to say he didn’t know anything about the power. At the last second, he clamped down on that. The less he gave away, the better off he was likely to stay. And so all that came out was, “I’ll be happy to join you, your Majesty.”

After the wizard turned that into Lenello, King Bottero’s ice-blue eyes suddenly twinkled. A grin pulled up the outer corners of his mouth. He set a massive hand on Hasso’s shoulder and said something in what could only be a man- to- man tone. Hasso figured out the likely translation even before Aderno gave it: “I’ll bet you will. She’s quite a woman, isn’t she?”

“Yes, your Majesty.” Hasso could say that in Lenello. He would have meant it no matter what language he used. Then he eyed the king’s roguish expression in a different way. Was he imagining things, or did Bottero sound as if he knew exactly what he was talking about?

The Wehrmacht officer didn’t see any polite way to ask the king. Maybe he would be able to find a polite way to ask Velona. Or maybe he didn’t want to know.

Then Bottero spoke again, and Hasso found out whether he wanted to or not. “His Majesty makes himself remember you are a foreigner, and so you are not used to our ways,” Aderno said. He waited for Hasso to nod, then went on, “He will borrow the goddess for the coming summer solstice, as he does each solstice and equinox. No doubt, he says, you have some such customs in your own land.”

“No doubt,” Hasso said tonelessly. He’d heard of pagan fertility rites, but he’d never dreamt they might matter to him. And what the hell was he supposed to say when the king told him, Hey, I’m going to borrow your girlfriend for a night? If he said, No, you’re not, chances were he’d be shorter by a head. And if he said no to Velona, she was liable to laugh at him. If she was the goddess on earth, wasn’t this part of her job requirement?

“You don’t say much,” King Bottero observed through Aderno. He might be the size of a draft horse, but he was no dummy.