After the Downfall (16 page)

“If you care for someone” - he stayed away from the explosive word
love
- “you worry about things like that. I thank you.” He gave her a gesture that was half a nod, half a salute. She sighed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re thinking of a broken heart. You can get a broken heart if you fall in love with a milkmaid. Even a Grenye in love with another ugly little Grenye can get a broken heart. But if the goddess ever has reason to be angry at you...” She left it there. Hasso started to ask her what might happen. Maybe she’d already answered him, though.
Like a moth
that loves a torch.
In his world, it would have been one more figure of speech. Here? He wasn’t so sure he wanted to find out.

“Have to keep the goddess happy with me, then,” he said, and reached for Velona. “Even if she does smell like a horse.”

Laughing, Velona kissed him. But then she said, “Oh, no - that’s just me.” He thought about teasing her some more. It didn’t seem like a good idea. Making love, on the other hand ... never seemed like a bad idea. He blew out the lamp.

Castle Pedio, hard by the border between Bottero’s kingdom and Bucovin, was less a fortress than an observation post. It had the tallest towers Hasso had seen since coming to this new world. The reason was simple: those towers let the Lenelli see as far into Bucovin as they could. Half a kilometer east of Castle Pedio rose another structure, one that looked a lot like it. Castle Galats, that one was called. The Grenye had built it. It was clumsier, heavier - the Grenye didn’t have the tools or the skills the Lenelli did. But Castle Galats served its purpose: a signal fire at the top warned Bucovin that King Bottero was on his way by this route.

Hasso swore when he saw the fire. “Should take that castle by surprise when you decide to go to war,”

he told Bottero. “Then signal doesn’t go out.”

The king frowned. “You tell me that
now.
I see it makes sense, but why didn’t you suggest it before?”

“I don’t know this castle is here then,” Hasso answered with a shrug. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“Everyone must have thought you did know,” Bottero said. “Anybody who knows anything about the border would.” He stopped and sighed. “But you don’t know anything much about the border, do you?”

“Only what I hear,” Hasso said. “I don’t hear about watchtowers - I’m sorry. But this is the first time I am here, your Majesty. I am stranger here. This place can still surprise me. It still
does
surprise me every day.”

“Well, you surprise us, too - mostly in good ways,” King Bottero said. “Except when you show you don’t belong here, we think you do.”

“Thank you,” Hasso said, even if the king meant,
You don’t seem
too
barbarous most of the time.
He pointed toward Castle Galats. “Do we take that place, or do we just mask it?”

“Mask it,” Bottero said at once. “The men from Castle Pedio can do that. Neither place has a big garrison.”

“However you like,” Hasso said. “I just don’t want any nasty surprises when we go by. I don’t like getting nasty surprises. Giving is better.” He pointed toward the beacon fire in the Grenye tower. “We don’t give any for a while now.”

“Sooner or later, we will.” As usual, the king sounded confident. “When the Grenye try to face us, we’ll make them pay. Your striking column will help, by the goddess.”

“I hope so.” Hasso had all kinds of reasons for saying that. He wanted to make Marshal Lugo look like the stick-in-the-mud, the French general in Lenello’s clothing, that he was. He wanted to make his own stock rise. And he wanted to beat Bucovin, which would help him reach both those other goals. The Grenye in Castle Galats jeered at the Lenelli as the invaders went by. Bottero’s men stayed out of arrow range of the watchtower, so Hasso couldn’t get a close look at the barbarians’ equipment. Some of the Grenye seemed to be wearing iron, while others made do with bronze.

“They know iron when Lenelli come here?” Hasso asked Aderno.

“Yes, but they were just learning to use it.” The wizard looked as if he’d just bitten down on a particularly sour pickle. “They’ve learned a lot more since - from us. They buy as much as they make themselves - from us.”

“Why sell to them?”

“Some people care more about money than anything else, and don’t care how they get it,” Aderno replied. “Is it not the same in your world?”

Since it was, Hasso nodded and let it go. He looked around. “So we are inside Bucovin now?”

“Oh, yes.” Aderno nodded, too. “Can’t you see how shabby everything looks?”

To Hasso’s eyes, the land on this side of the border seemed no different from the land on the other side. The peasants in Bottero’s kingdom were also Grenye. The thatch-roofed cottages here looked the same as the ones farther east – to the
Wehrmacht
officer, anyway. “How do you mean?” he asked. Aderno made an exasperated noise. “Anyone with eyes to see would know... Well, maybe you don’t have eyes to see. All right, then.” He started ticking points off on his fingers. “A lot of their crops here are native weeds. They don’t grow the fine vegetables and good grains we brought with us from across the sea. You can live on millet and sorghum and squashes, but why would you want to?” He made a face. Were the Grenye slobs, or was Aderno a snob? Some of both, probably, Hasso judged. He and his buddies had sneered at the Ivans for eating kasha and sunflower seeds ... till they gradually realized that sneering at the Ivans wasn’t such a good idea any which way. “I see,” he said slowly.

“Do you? I hope so,” Aderno said. “I was just getting started, though. Their livestock is inferior, too. They had no chickens before we came, only ducks - miserable things, too - and half-tame quail and partridges. Their pigs are only a short step up from wild boars. The sheep and cattle they breed, they stole from us. Their native horses are barely even ponies. And they have no unicorns at all. They can’t ride them, and unicorns also come from across the sea.” He laid a hand on the side of his mount’s white neck.

Europeans would have said the same kinds of things about Red Indians. But how much of what the Grenye had was really that much worse than its Lenello equivalents, and how much just seemed unfamiliar to Aderno and his folk? Hasso didn’t know the answer. He did know Aderno didn’t even see the question.

“Are you sure the Grenye can’t ride unicorns?” he asked. An edge came into his voice as he added,

“Remember, not long ago you say that about me.”

This time, Aderno might have been sucking on the mother of all lemons. “I was wrong about you, and it cost me. I am not wrong about the Grenye, by the goddess.” He paused thoughtfully. “Maybe I was wrong when I said they had no unicorns. They’ve stolen a few from us, the way they steal big horses to improve their herds, and it’s possible that they’ve bred the unicorns, too. But no one has ever seen a Grenye on unicornback, not in all the years since Lenelli crossed the sea.”

He sounded positive. Hasso, who’d been here a matter of months, was in no position to contradict him.

“I see,” the German said again - let Aderno make whatever he wanted of that. Before long, Hasso saw something else, too: the first armed Grenye he’d spotted in the field. They weren’t an army, only scouts - a handful of men on horseback who kept their eye on King Bottero’s army but stayed as far away from it as they could while still doing their job. Every so often, one of them would ride off; no doubt to report to their superiors, while another took his place.

“We should catch some of them,” Hasso said. “We should find out what they know. We should find out what they think.”

“We should find out
if
they think,” Aderno said scornfully. “Besides, they’ll just scurry off into the woods if we chase them. You see how close to the trees they stay?”

“Yes.” Hasso
had
noticed that. “Can’t you bring them in by magic, though?”

He’d rarely seen any Lenello at a loss. He did now with Aderno. “By the goddess, I don’t know,” the wizard said. “It would be child’s play on the other side of the border. Here? Well, I can find out.”

Back in his own world, Hasso might have asked a radio technician to find the direction from which a Soviet signal was coming. Aderno set to work with that same kind of unflustered competence. He rummaged first in his belt pouches and then in his saddlebags for what he needed. He found a chunk of amber, a small stone that showed different colors depending on how the sun struck it - an opal, Hasso realized - and a smooth, rounded pebble that looked thoroughly ordinary.

“What is that?” Hasso asked, pointing at it.

“A capon’s gizzard stone. A five-year-old capon’s gizzard stone,” Aderno answered with relentless precision. “It aids in gaining one’s desire from any man. The other two, taken together, will make you victorious against your adversaries.”

Oh, yeah?
Hasso thought. Back home, he wouldn’t have believed it, though he knew plenty of high-ranking Nazis were gaga for the occult and the supernatural. Much good that had done them, or the
Reich.
The way Germany was collapsing seemed to him the best argument in the world - in that world against sorcery. But things were different here. On the back of his unicorn, Aderno started juggling the three stones. Hasso Pemsel thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever seen, especially when the wizard thrust out his right index finger at a Grenye rider while all three stones were in the air at the same time. It might have looked ridiculous. Hell, it
did
look ridiculous. That didn’t mean it didn’t work. The Grenye from Bucovin - the wild Grenye, the Lenelli would have called him - didn’t want to ride up to King Bottero’s army. He didn’t want to approach the wizard on the unicorn. Hasso could see that more and more plainly as the fellow rode closer and closer. No matter how unwilling he was, he did what Aderno required of him, not what
he
wanted to do.

“Well, well.” Aderno sounded pleased with himself. “Isn’t that nice. Isn’t that something?”

“Something, yes.” Hasso wasn’t sure what. He was sure it made his hackles rise. But as long as it worked, how much did that matter?

“Here you are, Grenye,” Aderno said as the horseman came up alongside him and Hasso. “Do you speak Lenello?”

“Yes, I speak it.” The Grenye’s accent was thicker than Hasso’s, but he made himself understood.

“Tell me your name,” Aderno said, and then, in an aside to Hasso, “One more sorcerous hold on him.”

Again, the Grenye didn’t want to but found he had no choice. “I am called Nebun,” he said. Instead of a Lenello-style conical helm, he wore a leather cap strengthened with iron strips. His mailshirt showed less skill than the elegant armor Lenelli wore.

His sword, though ... Hasso would have guessed a Lenello smith forged it, for it seemed the same as the ones Bottero’s soldiers carried. What had Lenin said about capitalists selling the Soviet Union the rope it would use to hang them? No, some things didn’t change a bit from one world to another.

“What are your orders, Nebun?” Aderno asked, and twisted his fingers in a certain sign. Again to Hasso, he added, “Keeps him docile.”

So it did - or it seemed to, anyhow. Nebun answered readily enough: “To spy out your force. To see how strong you are.”

“Tell your superiors we have twice the numbers you really see,” Hasso put in. “Tell them you fear for your land. Do not let them persuade you of anything else no matter what they say. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, sir.” Nebun might have been talking to a superior. “I will obey you as I would obey my own father.”

Hasso glanced over to Aderno. “Can I rely on that?” he asked - in German, so the Grenye wouldn’t understand.

Aderno’s magic let him follow the alien tongue. He nodded. “I think so. You might almost have set a spell on him.” He glanced over at Nebun. “For all I know, you did. You are not without power, as my lost goldpiece reminds me.”

The idea that he might be able to work magic made Hasso want to laugh. The extra gold jingling in his belt pouch was a good reason to take the notion seriously, though. “Go, Nebun,” he said. “Go back to your chiefs. Tell them how strong we are. Tell them we are very strong. Tell them you see all this with your own eyes. Go now.”

“I go.” Nebun booted his pony up into a walk, and then into a trot. He wasn’t such a smooth rider as most of the Lenelli, but he got the job done.

“That should confuse them,” Hasso said. “If they think they know things that are not so, they get confused. They make mistakes.”

“If they think they know...” Aderno raised a wry eyebrow. “I get confused, too.”

“Finding out what is really so is important,” Hasso said. “The one who knows that better usually wins.”

Inevitably, the German invasion of Russia came to mind again. The
Wehrmacht
thought Stalin had far fewer divisions than he proved able to pull out of his hat. By the time the first winter’s fighting was under way, the Germans had destroyed as many divisions as they’d believed the Russians could raise. But more Ivans kept coming at them, and more, and still more ... and now, if Hasso were magically transported back to Berlin, it would be a Berlin under the Hammer and Sickle. Anything was better than that.

“One thing that is really so I already told you - we can work magic and the Grenye can’t,” Aderno said.

“Now you see it with your own eyes.”

“I see that you can work magic and that that Grenye can’t,” Hasso half-agreed. He said nothing about his own magical abilities, if any. “But if this is so wonderful, why don’t Lenelli take Falticeni a long time ago?”

The wizard gave him a dirty look but no answer. Not even Velona had an answer for that, or so it seemed.
If your men are so much better, why didn’t they take Moscow?
How many times would people throw that in Germany’s face? The surviving veterans would blame the winter, the Russian T-34

tank’s wide tracks, the Siberian troops brought in to stiffen the Soviet line... everyone and everything but themselves. No, some things didn’t change a bit from one world to another.

“Do the Grenye in Bucovin worship the goddess?” Hasso asked Velona at breakfast the next morning.