After the Downfall (31 page)

“No. It’s my own language,” Hasso answered. “I’m not a Lenello.”

“You look like one,” Rautat told him. Hasso shrugged. The dark little man plucked at his curly beard.

“You don’t sound like one, I will say.” He took a scrap of parchment, a reed pen, and a little clay flask of ink from a belt pouch and scribbled a note to himself. Seeing Hasso’s eyes on him, he said, “I learned your letters when I was in Drammen, too. We mostly use them now.”

“Yes, I know that,” Hasso said. The crude warning the Bucovinans posted had used Lenello characters and, indeed, the Lenello language.

“We had writing of our own before you big blond bastards came.” Rautat sounded like a man anxious to prove he wasn’t a savage and half afraid he was in spite of everything. “Your way is a lot quicker to pick up, though. It’s mostly the priests who still write the old characters. They take years to learn, and who else has the time?”

How had the natives written in the old days? Hieroglyphics? Things like Chinese characters? Some slow, clumsy, cumbersome system, anyhow. One of these days, chances were even the priests wouldn’t use it any more. And then who would be able to read the accumulated wisdom of Bucovin, assuming there was any?

Rautat cocked his head to one side and eyed Hasso like a curious sparrow. “So you’re not a Lenello, eh? Where
are
you from, then? Some other kingdom across the sea, I suppose.”

“No. Farther away than that.” Hasso told how he’d come to this world. What would the Bucovinan make of it? Hasso knew what a German
Feldwebel
- for he took Rautat to be a top sergeant, more or less - would have made of it, even if the fellow had worked in Cleveland for a while. The
Feld
would have laughed his ass off and said, “Bullshit!” Hearing a story like that, Hasso would have said the same thing himself.

But this was a different place. Rautat frowned. It wasn’t that he disbelieved; he was trying to figure out how the pieces fit together. Well, Hasso had been doing that ever since he splashed down into the marsh. He didn’t have all the answers yet, and he would have bet anything that Rautat wouldn’t, either. The native pointed at him. “So you’re the whoreson who spat thunder and lightning at us in the first big battle! That’s why we worked so hard to find your name!”

“
Ja
, that’s me,” Hasso said, and then,
“Ja
means
yes.
”

“No wonder they want you in Falticeni,” Rautat said. “Can you do that some more?”

“No. My weapon needs
cartridges’’
Again, a word came out in German - it had to. “They come with me from my world. The Lenelli know more tricks of making things than you people do, yes? Well, the folk of my world know more than the Lenelli do. The Lenelli can’t make these
cartridges.
No one here can.”

“Ah.” As a wily
Feldwebel
would, Rautat had a good poker face. He sounded almost artistically casual as he asked, “Can you teach us any of what you know and the Lenelli don’t?”

“I don’t know,” Hasso answered, trying to keep worry out of his own voice. “I’m not sure.”

He
could
show the natives this and that. He could show them most of the same things he would have shown to Bottero and Velona. He could, yes, but should he? He knew what he thought of Field Marshal Paulus, who’d surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad and then got on the radio for them, telling the Germans they couldn’t win and had better give up while they still had the chance. Maybe Paulus did persuade a few
Landsers
to desert. To Hasso and the rest, though, he was nothing but a goddamn traitor.

Of course, maybe the NKVD held Paulus’ feet to the fire before he started broadcasting.
And maybe
the Bucovinans will hold my feet to the fire. What do I do then?

Hasso had an Iron Cross First Class. If you’d lived through the whole war, it was hard not to have one. He’d been put up for the Knight’s Cross, but it didn’t go through for some dumb reason or another. He didn’t much care. He’d never thought of himself as heroic. He wanted to live. Would he have plomped his butt down on the Omphalos stone if he were bound and determined to die for the
Vaterlandl
He also wanted to be able to go on looking at himself in the mirror, even if mirrors in this world were sorry things of polished bronze. He’d taken service with Bottero, who could have carved a stranger into strips and fed him to his hounds. And he’d fallen in love with Velona, even if the word scared him and her both.

If any place in this world was, Bottero’s kingdom was his country now.
I’ll escape if I can,
Hasso told himself.
Even under the Geneva Convention, that’s my duty.

The Ivans hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention. The Lenelli and the Bucovinans had never heard of it, never even imagined it.

Rautat took out a little knife and started cleaning under his nails with the tip. The watery late-autumn sun flashed off the sharp edge. What else could that knife do? Anything the bastard holding it wanted it to, that was what. The day wasn’t too cold. Hasso shivered anyway.

He wasn’t the only captive heading back to Falticeni. Every so often, he passed other big blond men on the road with large guard contingents. They traveled on foot, in small groups, hands tied behind them and left legs bound one to another. They eyed him as he rode past. Rautat wouldn’t let him talk with them. He didn’t suppose he could blame the Bucovinan, things being as they were.

“What do you do with these men?” he asked after his mounted party went by another group of Lenello prisoners.

“Use them,” Rautat answered. “They work for us. They teach us things. If they settle down and behave, they live better with us than they would in their own kingdom.”

At the price of exile, of course. Still, when the other choice was getting your throat cut or worse ... But Hasso also remembered Scanno, who even in Drammen preferred the company of Grenye to his own folk. Scanno wouldn’t be the only Lenello who thought that way, either. There might not be many, but there were bound to be some.

And Hasso also thought about Japan after the Western powers made it open up in the nineteenth century. What did the world look like to the Japanese then? The little yellow men had to acquire all the skills they lacked, and in a hurry, too, or else go under like the Indians and Africans. And they did it. They smashed the Russians in 1905 - which made Hasso jealous - and they were giving the Americans all they wanted now. The Grenye of Bucovin were in the same boat.

But the Japanese
could
acquire all the tricks the Americans and British and Russians and French and Germans knew. The Grenye found themselves behind the eight-ball in a way the Japanese didn’t. “Have you got any Lenello wizards in Falticeni?” Hasso asked, not least to see if he could make Rautat twitch. He didn’t. The native just shook his head. “Not right now. For us, wizards are like holding a sword by the blade. We can cut ourselves, not just the enemy. Somebody who can make spells is liable to try to rule us, not to do what we want. It’s happened before.”

Obviously, it hadn’t worked. “How do you - how
did
you - stop that?” Hasso inquired, genuinely curious.

Rautat shrugged. “We killed them. Not easy, not cheap, but we did it. Even a wizard has to sleep some of the time.”

“Er - right,” Hasso said. The Man Who Would Be King - he’d read the Kipling tale in translation didn’t have an easy time of it no matter who the natives were.
One of you, lots of them. As long as they
don’t believe you’re a god, they can get you. And even if they start out thinking you are, pretty
soon they’ll change their minds.

“What
can
you do for us?” Rautat asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Hasso answered uncomfortably. “I need to see what you can already do before I say.”

Rautat grunted and left it there. That was a relief. If the natives decided Hasso couldn’t do anything useful, wouldn’t they just knock him over the head? But if he did show them things he knew about gunpowder, say - he’d betray Bottero. And Velona. He had to think their meeting on the causeway meant
something:
for him, for her, for the Lenelli, for this whole world. Could he turn his back on that and help these swarthy little bastards against the folk who were bringing civilization,
Kultur,
to this whole continent? How, if he wanted to be able to live with himself afterwards?

Well, if he didn’t give the Bucovinans a hand, odds were he wouldn’t live with himself afterwards for very long.

Smoke smudged the horizon to the northeast. Pointing to it, he asked, “Is that Falticeni?” If he thought about the landscape, he wouldn’t have to worry about himself. Not so much, anyway.

“That is Falticeni,” Rautat said proudly. “Soon you will see it with your own eyes. You will. Not King Bottero. He runs away like a beaten dog.”

Back in 1941, after the
Wehrmacht’s
drive on Moscow faltered in the face of blizzards and Siberian troops and the men and panzers had to fall back, the Russians jeered about Winter Fritz, a poor, freezing starveling who was hardly worth the effort it took to shoot him. Rautat, naturally, had never heard of Winter Fritz. But he got the idea all the same.

Hasso’s escort stopped at a farmhouse a few kilometers outside of town. The farmer turned out to speak a little Lenello. He’d never been to Drammen, but he’d visited Castle Svarag, closer to the border. He gave Hasso a bowl of stewed turnips and cheese, a chunk of black bread, and a mug of rye beer. It wasn’t wonderful, but it filled the belly - and it was no worse than what his family ate. At Rautat’s order, Hasso slept in the farmhouse. That wasn’t for the sake of comfort, but to make it harder for him to get away. The farmer and his wife and sons and daughters all snored. Hasso might have stayed awake an extra fifteen seconds because of it: maybe even thirty. Breakfast the next morning was the same as supper had been. And after breakfast, it was on to Falticeni.

XIV

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue... Hasso had heard that somewhere, but damned if he could remember where. His first good look at Falticeni, even before he got inside the town, called the jingle to mind again.

The lower courses of stonework on the walls of Bucovin’s capital looked half as old as time. The stones weren’t shaped into neat square blocks; the idea didn’t seem to have crossed the minds of the Grenye who’d put them there. The big gray masses of granite or whatever the rock was had just been trimmed to fit together. And they did. Despite the lichen and moss that had been growing on them for God only knew how many years, they looked sturdy and solid.

Then, suddenly, the wall got five or six meters taller. These stones
were
squared off. They looked much like the ones that formed the walls around Drammen and other towns in Bottero’s kingdom. Plainly, the Bucovinans had realized the wall they had wasn’t good enough to keep Lenelli out. Just as plainly, they’d learned from the men from overseas that squarish stones were a lot easier to handle than ones left in their original shapes.

And the towers that projected out from the wall might have been copied straight from Lenello fortifications. They gave defenders more places from which to shoot at attackers and to drop heavy things or hot things or pointed things on their unfortunate heads. Even the crenelated battlements were lifted from works farther west. The soldiers pacing those battlements, though, were indubitably Bucovinans.

“It is a great city, yes?” Rautat said proudly.

“It is a great city, yes.” Hasso made it a point never to disagree with anybody who could order him chopped into cat’s meat. It certainly was a big city, anyway. To his surprise, it looked at least twice the size of King Bottero’s capital.

Its entryway boasted a stout iron portcullis. Like the towers, that was an obviously modern addition. Like all the entryways Hasso had seen here - and like all the ones he’d seen at castles in Europe Falticeni’s had a dogleg to the right. That made attackers trying to swarm through expose their left sides, the side on which their hearts lay, to whatever the defenders could do to them. Hasso glanced up. No murder hole in the ceiling. The natives hadn’t thought of such a thing when the entryway was built, and excavating one out of solid stone would have been too much work. He couldn’t deny the position was plenty strong without one. Had Bottero’s army reached Falticeni, it wouldn’t have had such an easy time breaking in.

Rautat and the other Bucovinans escorting Hasso went back and forth with the guards at the entryway. The
Wehrmacht
officer understood not a word of what they said. Their language, of course, was no more related to Lenello than Cherokee was to English. He sighed mournfully. Just when he started getting fluent ... he had to start over. Yes, some of these people spoke Lenello. Some Russians spoke German, too. That didn’t mean they enjoyed doing it.

Rautat pointed to him and gave a pretty good impression of a Schmeisser going off.
He’s the guy
- or maybe,
He’s the son of a bitch
-
with the thunderstick.
Hasso could guess what the commentary meant, even if he didn’t know words or grammar. The gate guards looked and sounded suitably impressed. Sure, they were natives, but they were also people. He could read their expressions and their tone of voice.
And a whole fat lot of good that may do me, too.

“I take you to the palace,” Rautat told him. “The lord will want to talk to you.”

Hasso made himself nod, made himself seem calm.
But do I want to talk to him?
That would have been funny, if only it were funny.
Do I have a choice?
He had the choice the native named when capturing him: he could die. He didn’t want to do that. Of course, the Bucovinans hadn’t got to work on him yet, either.

The guards stepped aside, waving Hasso and his escorts around the last kink in the entryway and into Falticeni. Not without pride, Rautat gave a wave of his own. “This is
our
city,” he said. At first, it looked a lot like the Grenye districts in Drammen. Streets were narrow and winding and muddy, and they stank. Most of the houses and shops Hasso could see were of wattle and daub, with thatched roofs. Big ones sat next to small ones with no order Hasso could find. None seemed to be more than two stories high.