After the Downfall

bite from so far off. You weren’t kidding when you said close would be worse.”

“No, I wasn’t kidding,” Hasso agreed. Why had the other man wondered if he was? Because he’d never seen anything like this, that was why. Hasso understood as much. Well, now the native hadn’t just seen it – he’d felt it. And he was a believer.

Everybody except the wounded man walked out into the meadow to see what was left of the shell. What was left was about what Hasso had expected: some sharp, twisted shards of bronze casing, and not much more.

“Lavtrig! Every time you throw one of these metal balls, you waste it.” The smith who’d stayed behind at the estate sounded appalled.

“Not waste.” Hasso shook his head. “We hurt the enemy with it.”

“But you can’t use it again,” the smith said. “The metal flies once, and it’s gone.

Gone for good. Metal isn’t cheap, you know.”

“Neither is losing a war,” Hasso pointed out once more. “You want your smithy burned? You want to get killed? You want your daughter raped and killed? You want another Muresh?”

“Of course not,” the Bucovinan answered. “But I don’t want to go bankrupt, either. We could win the war and throw all our metal away. Then where would we be? Does Lord Zgomot really know this is how things are?”

“Yes,” Hasso said, a one-word reply that made the smith blink.

“Hasso is right. We have to do this. Lord Zgomot says so, and I think he is right, too,” Drepteaza said. “The other choice is giving up more land and more people to the Lenelli. Do you want that?”

“No, priestess,” the smith answered. He would argue with Hasso. The German was just… a foreigner. But he wouldn’t argue with Drepteaza. He assumed she knew what she was talking about because she was a priestess.

Well, Drepteaza commonly did know what she was talking about. But that was because she was Drepteaza, not because she was a priestess. Hasso understood as much. He thought Drepteaza did, too, which was a measure of her good sense. The smith, by contrast, had not a clue.

“Shall we send off another one?” Rautat asked.

“Maybe not right now,” Hasso said. “First we make sure our wounded can do what they need to do.”

“I’m all right,” the injured catapult man said.

“It can wait. It should wait,” Hasso said. “One thing at a time.”

“Suits me – and not because of my leg,” the catapult man said, wrinkling his nose. “Smells like demon farts around here.”

“How do you know what demon farts smell like?” That wasn’t Hasso, even if he had the thought. It was Drepteaza.

“Well, I don’t, not really,” the native soldier admitted. “But it smells like what I think demon farts ought to smell like.”

“Does it smell that way to you, too, Hasso?” Drepteaza asked.

He shook his head. “It reminds me of fireworks.” The key word came out in German. He had to explain what fireworks were, starting just about from scratch – the Bucovinans had no idea. “They can light up the sky with flames of different colors,” he finished. “Best at night, of course.”

“How do you make flames different colors?” Rautat asked. “Flames are flames, right?”

Hasso didn’t know how pyrotechnic engineers did what they did. But Drepteaza said, “Haven’t you seen how salt makes a flame yellower?”

“Bits of copper or copper ore can turn flames green,” the smith added.

“You should know that, Rautat,” Hasso said. “You were a smith.”

“An ironsmith, not a coppersmith or bronzesmith,” Rautat said. “That’s why I went to learn Lenello tricks. Iron is the coming thing. I wanted to see what the blond bastards knew that we don’t.”

The coming thing. Hasso hid his smile. Rautat wasn’t wrong, not for the way things were in Bucovin. And if iron had come to Germany a couple of thousand years earlier … well, so what? Hasso damn well wasn’t in Germany any more, and he never would be again. A damn good thing, too. He was better off here. There he would have got killed. Or, if he was very lucky – or maybe very unlucky – he would have ended up a Russian POW.

He supposed he was still a Bucovinan POW. But the Ivans wouldn’t have hurt any V-2 engineers they caught. They needed what those fellows knew. The Bucovinans needed what Hasso knew. If good treatment was the price of getting it, they were willing to pay. The Reds were probably doing the same for their German engineers. Come to that, the Amis were bound to be acting the same way.

Love got stale or flamed out. No one knew that better than Hasso these days. Common interests, on the other hand, could last. They’d better, the Wehrmacht officer thought. If they didn’t, he was dead.

Without the least bit of warning, flat-footed, Drepteaza tried to kick Hasso in the crotch. He sprang back out of danger – one of the rules when they trained together was that you had to be alert every second. She’d never actually got him in the balls. Bruises on his hip and thigh where he’d had to twist away instead of jumping back said she’d come close more than once.

She looked disappointed that she hadn’t made him sing soprano this time. “What did I do wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Hasso said. “But I know you are dangerous, so I watch you all the time. When you move, I move, too.”

“You’re fast,” she said. “I didn’t think anybody that big could be that quick. I’m sure you’re faster than most of the Lenelli who live in Bucovin.”

She didn’t say than most of the other Lenelli. Hasso couldn’t remember when she’d last said that. It had been a while, anyhow. He shrugged. “They can do things I can’t. I am never going to be anything much with a sword. They learn when they’re little. I learn now. They have too much head start. But this? This I know how to do.”

“You must,” she said. “You -” She tried to kick him again. Again, she gave nothing away beforehand. If he hadn’t suspected she might try to give him a double shot, she might have done what she aimed to do – leave him writhing in the tall grass clutching at himself.

Instead of leaping away or twisting, he grabbed her right foot and yanked it up farther than she’d intended it to go. She let out a startled squawk as she lost her balance and went over on her back.

He sprang on her and pinned her to the ground. She tried to knee him when he did – he really had trained her well – but he didn’t let her do that, either. “Got you this time,” he said, his face a few centimeters above hers.

She nodded. “Yes, you did. Now will you let me up? You’re squashing me flat.”

“Sorry.” He shifted so he took more of his weight on his knees and elbows. But then he said, “I let you up in a little bit,” and leaned down and kissed her.

If she’d wanted to nail him then, she could have done it. He realized as much just after his lips met hers, which was exactly too late. If she’d twisted away and screamed … Well, nobody was anywhere close by, but someone likely would have heard her. People would have come running. And then he wouldn’t have got hurt – he would have died: chances were, a millimeter at a time.

She didn’t do either of those things. For a couple of seconds, she didn’t do anything at all. He feared it would be a hopeless botch like the one in the garden back in Falticeni. But then she kissed him back – after a fashion. It was the most… experimental kiss he’d had since he was a kid and learning how himself.

The way she did it convinced him he’d better not push anything too hard. He drew back instead, and asked, “Well?”

Drepteaza stared up at him. “Not … so bad,” she said, sounding honestly surprised. “I didn’t used to think I would ever want a big blond to touch me in any way. But with you teaching me to fight … You had to touch me for that. And it was what it was, and after a while I didn’t worry about it anymore. And this, what you just did, what we just did, wasn’t so bad after all.”

Hasso bent toward her again. “How about this?” he asked softly.

This time, the kiss got down to business. She knew how, all right. She hadn’t been sure she wanted to. Now she seemed to be. Quite a while later, when their lips parted, she murmured, “That was pretty good.”

“Ja,” Hasso said, and she smiled. So did he, no doubt like an idiot. He went on, “I want to do this for a very long time.”