After the Downfall (55 page)

“As soon as I light the fuse, you shoot,” he told the catapult crew. “I light, I yell ‘Now!’ and you shoot. No waiting, not even a little. You understand?”

“What happens if we’re slow?” a Bucovinan asked.

“You get a lead ball in the face, that’s what. Or in the nuts.”
And so do I,
Hasso thought. He wished for an 81mm mortar and a trained crew. Since wishing - surprise! - failed to produce them, he got back to business. “You ready?” The Bucovinans solemnly nodded. Hasso waved a stick of punk to heat up the coal. Then he brought it down on the fuse, which sizzled to life.
“Now!”
he shouted. He didn’t throw himself flat, not because he trusted the catapult crew but because the natives didn’t know enough to do the same. If something went wrong, the survivors would think he took unfair advantage. Swoosh! The catapult arm shot forward, hurling the shell far across the meadow - but not so far as a lighter, emptier one. It was just about to hit the ground when fire touched the main charge.
Boom!
Hasso whooped. If he could do it that well all the time, he’d make one hell of a gunner. Then he stopped whooping, because a catapult man yelped and grabbed his leg. Blood ran out between his fingers. One of the lead balls had flown all the way back here. Hasso hadn’t dreamt that could happen.

“Lie down,” he said. “Let me see it.”

“Hurts,” the catapult man said as he obeyed.

“I bet it does.” When the German got a good look at the wound, he breathed easier. It was a gash, not a puncture - the ball must have grazed the Bucovinan going by. If he bled freely, chances were he wouldn’t get lockjaw. If he did, neither Hasso nor anybody else in this world could do anything for him. One of the other catapult men handed Hasso a rag for a bandage. It looked pretty clean. He put it on. One of these days, he would have to talk about boiling bandages. No time now, and he didn’t figure it would matter here.

“Can you walk?” he asked the wounded Bucovinan.

“I... think so.” The fellow got to his feet. He limped, but he managed. “Yeah, it’s not too bad. Thanks, foreigner. You tied it up good.”

“Sure.” Hasso always would be a foreigner. That didn’t mean he enjoyed getting reminded of it. The catapult man hadn’t meant any offense. “You’ve got a demon of a weapon there. I never figured it could 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.”

“You haven’t known me for a
very
long time.” Drepteaza was relentlessly precise. “What else have you wanted to do?”

He did his best to show her. He hadn’t thought he would be her first, and he wasn’t. He did hope he pleased her. He wasn’t sure, because she didn’t show what she felt as extravagantly as Velona. That he should think of Velona now, even for an instant... only showed he really had it bad. Well, he did, dammit. Afterwards, he had no idea what to say. Before he could come up with anything, Drepteaza beat him to the punch: “There. Are you happier now?”

He started to laugh. That was as blunt as usual. “Yes,” he answered. “Are you?”

She frowned, thinking it over the way she so often did. If she said no, he thought he would sink down into the ground. But, thoughtful still, she nodded. “Yes, I am. I don’t know whether I will be if I bear a wizard’s child three seasons from now, but that is in the hands of the gods.”

Could a halfbreed work magic? Hasso thought so, but he wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t sure a German-Grenye halfbreed would be the same as a Lenello-Grenye halfbreed. Since he couldn’t do anything about that, or about whether Drepteaza would catch, he asked her, “Was it all right for you?”

If you have to ask, you won’t like the answer.
That was a rule as ancient as women. Drepteaza, though, was out of the ordinary. She kept so much of herself to herself. She nodded now - slowly, but she nodded. “You were ... sweeter than I thought you would be,” she said. “You really meant it.”

“I said so,” Hasso replied. “What I say, I mean.”

“It would seem so,” Drepteaza admitted. “But I told you before - I know a lot of men will say anything to get a woman to go to bed with them.”

“Not in bed,” Hasso said with dignity - and with precision of his own. “On the grass.”

“So we are,” Drepteaza said. “We ought to get dressed, too, before someone comes over to find out why we’re not trying to ruin each other.”

“Wait,” Hasso said, and kissed her again. The kiss took on a life of its own, but not quite enough to start a second round.
I’m getting old, dammit,
the German thought. Even if he was still this side of forty, two in a row were only a memory.

She shook her head as she put on her breeches and tunic. “You are a very strange man, Hasso Pemsel.”

He shrugged. He couldn’t very well tell her she was wrong, not here, even if he would have been ordinary enough in the
Reich.
“I come from another world. What do you expect?”

As she had a habit of doing, she answered what he’d meant for a rhetorical question: “I expected you to act the way you look. I expected you to act like a Lenello. If I’d doubted you were one, I’d be sure you weren’t now.”

How did she mean that? Did she know how Lenello men made love? Did she know from experience?

Do I want to find out?
Hasso wondered, and decided he didn’t. He pulled on his own trousers. “A good thing I see - uh, saw - those kicks coming,” he said.

“Otherwise, we never do this now. If both those kicks get home, maybe we never do this forever.”

“I just have to practice more,” Drepteaza said sweetly. And how the hell did she mean
that7.
Once more, Hasso decided he didn’t want to find out.

Even if no one came out on the meadow and caught them
in flagrante,
the rest of the Bucovinans didn’t need long to figure out that Hasso and Drepteaza had become lovers. Rautat spoke for them: “You make her unhappy, you big blond prick, and I’ll cut you off at the knees so we’re the same size. Then I’ll really give you the whipping you deserve.”

“I don’t want to make her unhappy,” Hasso protested.

“You’d better not,” the underofficer growled. “She’s special, and not just ‘cause she’s a priestess, either.”