After the Downfall (57 page)

“Not with you ruling, Lord.” Hasso wasn’t throwing out flattery to butter Zgomot up. The Lord of Bucovin was doing as well as he could against long odds.

“I think Bottero made a bigger mistake last year, too,” he said now. Hasso made a questioning noise. Zgomot eyed him. “He let me get my hands on you. He will regret that to his dying day - and may it come soon.”

“You give me too much credit,” Hasso said.

“I’d better not,” Lord Zgomot replied.

After Hasso and Velona became lovers, they moved in together and never separated till he got left for dead on the battlefield and she had to withdraw. Drepteaza didn’t take up residence with him in Zgomot’s castle, no matter how much he wished she would have. She moved more slowly than Velona in almost every way.

But she didn’t stay away from his chamber, either. Sometimes he could talk her into coming by on a particular night. Sometimes she would knock on her own. Most of the time, she would make love with him. Once in a while, she only wanted to talk. He quickly decided getting annoyed about that was a bad idea.

One evening, when she was leaving after talking with him for a couple of hours, he gave her a crooked smile and asked, “Do I pass the test?”

Even in the lamplight, even with her olive skin, he could see her turn red. It took him by surprise; he hadn’t meant to embarrass her. But she answered as frankly as usual: “As a matter of fact, you do. A woman wants to think a man wants her for something more than just this.” She touched herself between the legs for a moment. “And I think you do. And I think that is good.”

“I can talk with you better than with anyone else - except maybe Rautat.” Hasso barked laughter. “And that is not the same.”

“No, it isn’t,” Drepteaza agreed. “Not that Rautat is stupid - I’ve seen he’s not. But there are times when he would rather not think.”

“Yes!” Hasso nodded vigorously. Rautat made a good underofficer: he liked routine. He would have made a wonderful friend for another underofficer whose mind worked the same way. Hell, he was friends with other sergeants like that. Hasso’s mind ranged further. In this world, it damn well had to. “You can go places with me where he doesn’t want to - and not just in bed.”

“You may end up changing us more than the Lenelli have,” Drepteaza said. “For better? For worse?

How can we know ahead of time? But you change us.”

He thought again about the printing press. One of these days. When he had time. If he ever did. If the Bucovinans ever started printing books, that would change them even more than gunpowder did. But that lay in the future, a future that might never be born. “If I don’t, the Lenelli do,” he said.

“We know it,” Drepteaza answered. “If you change us, maybe we stay ourselves, too. If the Lenelli change us, we lose ourselves forever. There used to be lots of little kingdoms in the western part of the land. They’re gone now. Even the Grenye who still live in them don’t know much about how they used to be. That could happen to us, too.”

Hasso had seen those Grenye peasants. They had nothing but work and drink. Some of them had nothing but drink. As far as the Lenelli were concerned, that was fine. The Germans would have run the Ukraine and Russia the same way if they’d won. Hasso hadn’t thought much about that while he was fighting the Ivans. Now he did. His country had aimed to destroy another one - not just to beat it, but to destroy it. No wonder the Russians fought back so ferociously. And what did Germany end up doing? Destroying itself instead. So much for all the glorious triumphs of the
Reich.

“What were you thinking?” Drepteaza asked. “For a moment there, you looked over the mountains.”

To the Bucovinans, that meant
a long way off.
Most of the time, it made an effective figure of speech. Not here. Not now. “I was thinking about my old land,” Hasso answered. “Farther away than over the mountains.”

“What about it?”

“I begin to understand why we lost our war. We wanted to treat our enemies the way the Lenelli treat Grenye,” Hasso said. “But the Lenelli know more tricks than the Grenye. We didn’t know more tricks not enough more.”

“Will you be angry if I say it does not sound as though your land was on a good path?” Drepteaza asked.

Hasso shook his head. “No. It does not sound that way to me, either, not now. But in the middle of a war, who worries about such things? You have enemies. You fight them. You try to beat them. You try to keep them from beating you. You don’t think past that. To think past that is your, uh, king’s job.”

“If your king orders you to do something you know is wicked, should you do it?”

He frowned. “If you know it is wicked, no. But mostly, for a soldier, much simpler. You fight the other side’s army. You try to beat it. What happens in the land you take - that’s not your worry.”

No. That wasn’t the
Wehrmacht’s
worry. That was up to the SS, to the
Gestapo,
to people like that. They didn’t think Hitler
could
order them to do anything wicked. If he ordered it, it had to be all right.

“Your conscience troubles you.” Drepteaza didn’t make it a question. He could have denied it - by lying to her, and to himself. “Some,” he said. “I did a lot of fighting, the last four years against our worst enemies. Maybe we were not always good. I know we weren’t. Not them, either.”

“Few people would choose war,” Drepteaza said, and then qualified that by adding, “Few Bucovinans would, anyhow. I am not so sure about the Lenelli.”

Hasso wasn’t so sure about the Lenelli, either. They thought they had a goddess-given mission to civilize

- that is, to conquer - the Grenye. The Germans had thought the same thing about their Slavic neighbors. They’d tried conquering them again and again ... and now the Russian Slavs had turned things upside down. The Germans had usually had an edge, but not one big enough to make up for the numbers against them.

The British made it work in India and North America, the Spaniards farther south. So it could, if the gap between attackers and attacked was wide enough. Would it have been here? Hasso didn’t know. All he knew was that he was doing his damnedest to throw a spanner into the works.

“Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe I owe somebody something.”

When a Bucovinan messenger ran up to Lord Zgomot’s palace, Hasso took no special notice. That happened all the time. He did notice when a messenger rode up to the palace. The natives didn’t have that many horses. They saved the ones they did have for important business. And since he was waiting to hear about some important business ...

A messenger - on foot - summoned him to Zgomot’s throne room. “What is it about?” Hasso asked, his hopes rising.

“I don’t know. The Lord of Bucovin didn’t tell me,” the palace flunky answered. “If you go, though, he will tell you.”

So there,
Hasso thought. He made himself nod and smile and not give the messenger the satisfaction of knowing he’d irked him. “I go, then,” he said, and he did.

When he got to the throne room, he found Lord Zgomot in animated conversation with the man who’d come in on horseback. Zgomot in animated conversation with anybody was a prodigy; the native ruler wasn’t long on personality. But the Lord of Bucovin looked up and actually smiled as Hasso approached.

“Good day, Hasso Pemsel,” he said. “I owe that drunken Lenello a large reward. I am slow to spend my gold and silver without need, but I gladly do it here.”

“We have dragon bones?” Hasso asked.

“We have dragon bones,” Zgomot agreed. He gestured toward the messenger. “I learn that they are in our lands, and they passed by Bottero’s men without suspicion. The Lenelli thought we might grind them up to manure our soil. We did not discourage them from thinking this.”

He sounded pleased with himself - and well he might. He sounded
very
pleased with himself, in fact. “A nice touch, Lord,” Hasso said. “Your idea?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Zgomot answered. “Things you said about keeping the Lenelli from knowing what we are up to came to mind. A story like that will also let the blonds think we are stupid barbarians who could not get bones closer to home. They think we are stupid barbarians anyway, of course.”

“Yes, they do.” Hasso had, too, when he was in Drammen. Now he was glad to get the chance to speak of the folk he resembled as
they.
Compared to the Lenelli, the Bucovinans
were
on the barbarous side. But, as he’d seen, that didn’t make them stupid. The Lenelli just knew some tricks of the trade that they didn’t. Well, no, not
just:
the Lenelli could also work magic. Lord Zgomot pursed his lips. “Wheels inside of wheels, eh?”

“Always,” Hasso said. “When do bones get to Falticeni?”

“I do not know.” The Lord of Bucovin turned to the messenger. “Yurgam?”

“Ten days or so,” Yurgam answered. “Once they made it over the border, they got horses instead of donkeys, but they are still pulling a heavy wagon.”

Hasso shrugged. “It has to do.” He would have wanted the bones here sooner, but he couldn’t turn a horse-drawn wagon into an Opel truck or, better yet, a captured American Studebaker. That wouldn’t have been magic; it would have been a bigger miracle than the one that brought him here. He nodded to Zgomot. “We need saws to cut bone. We need drills to put holes in pieces. We need cord or thongs to hold them in place.”

“What
are
the bones for, if not manuring?” Yurgam asked.

Before Hasso could speak, Zgomot did: “I do not want to tell you, not yet. The fewer people who know, the better. The more things we learn, it seems, the more secrets we need to keep.”

Hasso beamed. Sure as hell, Zgomot was starting to see what security was all about. He might be a mindblind Grenye, but he was one damn sly mindblind Grenye. There’d almost been some security hiccups about gunpowder and dragon bones. If the Lord of Bucovin had anything to do with it, there would be no more. He learned from his mistakes.

That’s more than Hitler ever did,
Hasso thought.

And, if the dragon-bone amulets worked, how much would being mindblind matter in a few years? Oh, some. Magic would still be able to do things to the world, if not directly to people. Wizards would still be able to ride unicorns. Hasso grinned. He could ride one himself, as he’d proved. The Grenye still wouldn’t be able to.

Yeah, magic would matter some. But it wouldn’t mark enormous distinctions between one folk and another, the way it did now.

Equality. This is equality.
Hasso hadn’t had much use for it when he saw it in action - and in inaction during the Weimar Republic. But he’d also seen that the
Führerprinzip
had some flaws in practice. The
Führer
led, the people followed - right over a goddamn cliff. Maybe making everybody as good as everybody else worked better.

He could hope so. In fact, he had to hope so. If the Lenelli had magic and the Grenye didn’t, and if that magic stayed important, he feared the big blonds would win in the end no matter what he did. Someone called his name through the echoing corridors of dreams: “Hasso! Hasso Pemsel!”

He tried to shape the ward spell again, this time in his sleep. He had some luck with that, anyhow: enough to let him wake up without waking up screaming. Once awake, he went to the door of his room and told one of the guards, “Ask Drepteaza to come here, please.”

The winter before, a Bucovinan guardsman would have laughed in his face at the idea of bothering her in the middle of the night. This fellow nodded and said, “All right. If she chooses not to come, though, don’t blame me.”

“Fair enough,” Hasso said. The guard set off down the corridor.

Drepteaza was yawning and rubbing her eyes when she came back with the soldier. “What is it?” she asked blurrily, around another yawn. “Something important, I expect.”
It had better be.
She didn’t say that - or need to.

“Maybe. I hope you are not angry at me.” He led her into the room and shut the door behind them. “The Lenello wizard and the goddess are hunting me in dreams again.”

“And so? What has that got to do with me?” No, Drepteaza wasn’t awake yet, or thinking very fast. Then she remembered. The dim lamplight shadowing her face only made her smile look more crooked.

“Oh. A woman will hold that away from you, for a night at least. A new way to tell me you care, eh?”

“Sorry,” Hasso said. “Should I get someone like Leneshul? I don’t much want her, but if you want me to use her for medicine and not bother you, I can do that.”

Drepteaza started to laugh. “The really funny part is, I believe you when you say you don’t much want her,” she said. “What kind of fool am I, though, if I give you the chance to change your mind? I may not be at my best, but I’ll try.”

Hasso feared he wasn’t at his best, either. Maybe they matched each other, because it turned out all right, or better than all right. “You are the best medicine,” he said afterwards, stroking her cheek. “They should make you into syrup and put you in bottles.”

She laughed again, on a startled note. “That’s the most ridiculous sweet thing - or maybe the sweetest ridiculous thing - anyone ever told me.”

“It’s true,” Hasso said.

“Ha!” Drepteaza replied, which wasn’t a laugh at all. She yawned once more. “Try not to wiggle too much. I don’t feel like going back to my room.”

“You wiggle more than I do,” Hasso said. From where the two of them ended up when they slept together, he thought that was true. He added, “Besides, tonight I don’t wiggle at all,” and mimed limp exhaustion.

“A likely story,” Drepteaza said, but she closed her eyes and soon fell asleep. So did Hasso, and Aderno’s wizardry didn’t trouble him for the rest of the night.

The wagon full of dragon bones came into Falticeni the next morning. The driver had to fight his way through the narrow, winding, crowded streets to the palace. None of the locals knew what an important cargo he had. Thanks to the way the bone-hunters were chosen, the driver didn’t fully understand that himself.

One look at some of the teeth and claws in the wagon told Hasso the bones were real. “Good,” he said.

“Now we go to work. We cut them up small, we make them into amulets.”