After the Downfall (37 page)

“So we could use it as well as the blonds?” Drepteaza said. Hasso didn’t say yes or no. She went on,

“You had better show us some of this.”

“You know why I don’t. I have an oath to King Bottero.” Hasso liked the Lenelli. He felt he could almost become one of them if he stayed here long enough and got used to their ways. In Bucovin his looks, if nothing else, would leave him a stranger the rest of his life. He would be as bad off as a Jew in Germany. Maybe worse - some Jews looked like Aryans. He sure as hell didn’t look like a Grenye. A good thing they took oaths more seriously here than in his own world.

“Velona tried to harm you, yes?” Drepteaza said. “The wizard tried to harm you, yes? What is your oath to their king worth to you if it’s worth nothing to them? Or do you think they struck at you without his knowledge, without his let?”

“I don’t know,” Hasso said slowly. “I have to think about that.” It was worth thinking about, too. Priestesses were supposed to have answers, weren’t they? He didn’t know whether Drepteaza did. She sure had some good questions, though.

“We have to think about you, too,” she said. “You can’t do much! Oh, Lavtrig preserve us!” She walked out of the room shaking her head.

When Hasso got breakfast the next morning, the serving girl who gave him his tray looked at him as if he had horns and a tail and she thought he’d start breathing fire any minute. The morning before, she’d laughed and joked with him. She’d taken him for granted. She didn’t any more. He knew what that had to mean.

“Only I,” he said, knowing he’d botched the Bucovinan grammar as soon as the words were out of his mouth. But Jiril didn’t speak Lenello - or at least she’d never let on that she did. She might have just found a scorpion in her sock. “Wizard!” she said, and aimed at him a pronged gesture that couldn’t possibly do her any good.

He sighed. Either Drepteaza had blabbed - which didn’t seem likely, but wasn’t even close to impossible

- or the guards had overheard and started running their mouths. It made no real difference. Any which way, the cat was out of the bag.

The Lenelli admitted that some of their renegades had used magic for the natives. The Bucovinans had said the same thing. They’d also talked about the trouble they had keeping Lenello wizards using the magic for them and not to rule them....
Or worse,
Hasso thought. If the SS had had magic to help it clear out the ghettos in Poland and Russia, wouldn’t it have used every spell it could? In a heartbeat. Hasso had no doubts about that at all.

What
could
he do? He muttered to himself. What he could do and what he might do were two different creatures. Could he run a panzer without training? Not bloody likely. So why should he expect to work magic without learning how?

But the Bucovinans probably thought he could. All they knew about magic was that they couldn’t work any. That might be useful.

Or it might get him killed, if they decided it made him too dangerous to leave alive. And he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Some wizard that made him!

How Jiril looked at him wasn’t the only sign that things had changed. Nobody else came in all morning. The guards didn’t want to let him out, either. He was half surprised that they didn’t come in and take away his furniture. The maid who brought him lunch seemed less frightened than Jiril had, but she also wasn’t easy with him.

No sign of Leneshul at all, dammit.

Drepteaza didn’t visit till late afternoon. When she did, a full complement of tough-looking guards came in with her. The natives hadn’t bothered with that for a while. They looked ready to ventilate him if he breathed funny, too. Maybe not back to square one, but square two? It seemed that way, worse luck. Drepteaza didn’t act afraid, but she didn’t act even halfway friendly any more, either. What
did
her expression mean? Something on the order of
more in sorrow than in anger,
Hasso judged. And, sure enough, the first words out of her mouth were, “What are we supposed to do with you, Hasso Pemsel?”

The way she used his full name reminded him of Velona, a sudden stab he really didn’t need just then. She spoke in her own language, but he answered in Lenello: “Priestess, you should set me free and give me a big estate and servants and plenty of gold and silver to pay for them.”

She blinked. Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it. One of the guards glowered at him. Another one laughed. They knew Lenello, then. After a moment, Drepteaza said, “Maybe that would keep us safe from you. If we were sure it would, it might be worthwhile. Killing you is surer - and cheaper.”

She wasn’t kidding. She didn’t joke very often, and he always knew when she did. Much too conscious that he was talking for his life, he said, “I am a captive for some time now. You could kill me whenever you want.”

“Before, we knew you were a snake. Now we know you are a viper,” Drepteaza said. “You can do more and worse to us than we thought.”

“Or I can do more and better for you,” Hasso said.

“Maybe you can. But you still have your famous oath to King Bottero - Bottero the invader, Bottero the robber, Bottero the murderer, Bottero the torturer.” No, Drepteaza wasn’t joking. “The goddess who does not care what a man is, the wizard who tries to slay his own lord’s sworn man. Do they deserve your oath, Hasso Pemsel?”

That was a different way of asking what she’d asked the night before. Unhappily, Hasso said, “They’re worried about what I can do, what I know. So are you, remember.”

“There is a difference,” Drepteaza said.

“What?” Hasso asked.

She gave him a look that said he was either disingenuous or very, very stupid. “You already helped them. That attacking column you showed them, and whatever magic you worked for Bottero...”

Not to mention rescuing Velona,
Hasso thought. The Bucovinans didn’t know about that, which was a good thing for him. He uncomfortably recalled the spell he’d made to find the underwater bridges. The natives didn’t know about that, either, and Hasso wasn’t a bit sorry they didn’t.

“In my world, a prisoner only has to give his name, his rank, and his pay number to his enemies,” he said. Never mind that people broke the rules all the time when they needed to squeeze something out of somebody. The rules were what they were.

“You give your soldiers numbers?” Drepteaza frowned. “Why aren’t names enough?”

“We have more soldiers than we have names - many more,” Hasso answered. When he told her how many men the
Wehrmacht
held, she didn’t want to believe him. Neither had the Lenelli when he talked about such things.

Unlike the Lenelli, who usually thought they knew it all, Drepteaza didn’t argue with him. She just said,

“Well, let that be as it may,” and went on, “You are not in your world now, Hasso Pemsel. You are here, and you have to live by our rules.”

“Don’t I know it!” he exclaimed.

“We could have killed you. We could have killed you the width of a millet grain at a time. We could have sent you to the mines - a living death. Did we do any of that? No. We treated you well. Don’t you want that to go on?”

“Of course I do. But you don’t do it for me. You do it for you,” Hasso said.

“And Bottero helped you just because he liked you.” The priestess could be formidably sarcastic. Hasso didn’t know what to say, so he kept his big mouth shut. Drepteaza looked through him. “So you still need to think, do you? If you must, you can do that - for a little while, anyway.” Out she went. Nothing much changed for the next few days. One thing did, though: Leneshul stopped coming to him. He knew what that meant: the Bucovinans weren’t going to let anything stand in the way of whatever magic Aderno and Velona aimed at him. Whose clever idea was that? Drepteaza’s? Lord Zgomot’s?

The trouble was, it
was
clever. If the people he called his friends kept trying to kill him, how long would he, could he, stay friendly to them?

If they did kill him, not very long.

If they didn’t... Hasso hoped Drepteaza was counting on his living through whatever the Lenelli aimed at him. He hoped so, yes, but he couldn’t be sure.

Since he didn’t have a woman, he took matters into his own hands, so to speak. But, as he’d found with Leneshul, he couldn’t get it up every day. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was older than that, dammit. Had he been twenty-one... One night, he fell asleep unshielded by self-abuse. He’d seen Velona in his dreams before, but not the way he had when she and Aderno assailed him. He’d had dreams the past few nights that made him think he would have company when he slept unwarded by pleasure of any sort: dreams that reminded him of someone knocking on a distant door. Tonight, the door wasn’t distant. Tonight, Aderno didn’t bother to knock - he just walked on in. “Ah, there you are,” he said, as if he and Hasso were picking up a conversation after breaking off to eat lunch. Hasso suggested that the wizard and his unicorn enjoyed a relationship different from mount and rider. It was a male unicorn.

“Naughty, naughty,” Aderno said, his voice surprisingly mild. “That was a - a misunderstanding, you might say.”

“You
might say,” Hasso retorted. “The only thing that misses is, I don’t end up dead.” Yes, he went right on sticking to the present tense when he could.

“It was a misunderstanding, I tell you.” Aderno seemed to look back over his shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Velona?”

She hadn’t been there before. She was now. Dreams could do some crazy things - Hasso knew that. Seeing her strongly sculpted features sent a lance of pain through his heart. “I
am
sorry,” she said. “I was upset when I found out. But it makes sense, where you are.” She sounded like someone having trouble getting an apology out. Hasso didn’t think she sounded like someone who had to lie to get an apology out.

But, when you got right down to it, so what? She’d done her level best to kill him, and it damn near turned out to be good enough. If he weren’t some sort of half-assed wizard himself, chances were he’d be holding up a lily right now.

“Thanks a lot,” he told her, as sardonically as he could.

He watched Aderno’s dream-projection of her blush. She got the message, all right - unless Aderno was playing with her image to fool him. The only thing Hasso was sure of was that he couldn’t trust anybody. He had no one to watch his back. He had had the Lenelli, but no more. Now he was ... what?

The loneliest man in the world, that was what. Lots of people said that; for him, in this world, it was literally true. No doubt it had been ever since he got here, but he hadn’t wanted to look at it. For quite a while, he hadn’t had to. Now he saw no other choice.

“We worried about you,” Velona said. “For a while, we didn’t know if you were alive or dead. Then we got word the savages had you in Falticeni. We didn’t know what they were doing to you, so - ”

“You decide to do it yourself, in case they don’t do a good enough job,” Hasso broke in.

“No!” Velona said. But, Hasso noted, she didn’t say,
By the goddess, no!
She took swearing by the goddess seriously; she wouldn’t do it if she didn’t mean it. Since the goddess, as it were, kept a flat inside her head, that made sense. The absence of the oath saddened Hasso without much surprising him. Velona went on, “We think we can bring you out of there, bring you back to Drammen, by magic.”

“Oh?” Was that hope inside Hasso, or suspicion? “Why don’t you do that before, instead of trying to boil my brain?”

“I was angry,” Velona said simply - the first thing Hasso heard from her he was sure he believed. “I thought the Grenye would use their sluts to seduce you away from the cause of civilization. And I wanted you all for myself. By the goddess, I still do.” She meant that, then. It was flattering, no doubt about it. She was one hell of a woman. She was one hell of a hellcat, too.

“I think we can do it, Hasso,” Aderno said before the
Wehrmacht
officer could answer her. “If you open your will to mine - ”

“No,” Hasso said at once. If he opened himself to Aderno, he left himself vulnerable to the Lenello sorcerer. He might be a half-assed wizard, but he could see that much. And if you left yourself vulnerable to somebody who’d just tried to do you in - well, how big a fool were you if you did that?
A bigger fool
than I am,
Hasso thought.

“You don’t trust me.” Aderno sounded affronted.

“Bet your balls I don’t,” Hasso said. The
Führer
had got an awful lot of mileage out of making promises he didn’t mean to keep. Anyone who watched him in action had to wonder about promises forever after. Words, after all, were worth their weight in gold.

“Would you trust
me,
sweetheart?” Velona’s dream-image looked almost, or maybe not just almost, supernaturally beautiful. Was she calling the goddess into herself to overwhelm his senses? But for what she’d done a few nights earlier, it likely would have worked. Now ... He was inoculated against such things.

“I don’t trust anybody any more,” he said. “How can I?”

Even in the dream, he saw he startled her. Would anybody from this world have been able to resist her when she did something like that? He wouldn’t have been surprised if the answer was no. But he wasn’t from here. He knew there was something to the goddess - he’d seen as much - but he didn’t automatically accept her as his deity.

After Velona’s amazement, anger came back. And it wasn’t just hers: it was also the goddess’. “Would you turn your face against
me,
Hasso Pemsel?” Velona asked, only something more rang in her voice.

“I don’t want to turn against anybody,” he said. “I just want people to leave me alone for a while.”

He might as well not have spoken. “You will pay,” Velona intoned - or rather, the goddess intoned through her. “You will pay, and Bucovin will pay for harboring you. Do you think you can thwart
my
will?”

“Well, the Bucovinans are still doing it,” Hasso said. If anyone had talked to Hitler that way after Operation Barbarossa failed, the
Führer
would have handed him his head. But it might have done the
Reich
some good.