After the Downfall (6 page)

Hasso glanced over at Velona. She smiled and fluttered her fingers at him. Priestess? Goddess on earth?
What the hell have I got into?
he wondered. But he liked what he’d got into just fine. Along with Velona and the escort, he rode across the drawbridge and into Castle Drammen.
III

After laying a goddess on earth, getting presented to a mere king was a piece of cake. King Bottero was a great big man, as so many Lenelli seemed to be. Hasso didn’t feel much shorter after he went to his knees in front of the massive, blocky throne than he did before. The king’s guards murmured when Bottero rose and set a hand on Hasso’s shoulder; maybe he didn’t do that for every Hans, Franz, and Dietrich who got an audience.

Bottero gestured. Hasso got to his feet. Even standing, the top of his head came up to about the bottom of the king’s nose. In Germany, he’d got used to looking at the tops of other people’s heads. Most of the Lenelli could do it to him. He didn’t like that, especially since his sandy hair was beginning to thin up there.

When the king said something, Hasso had to shrug. “I’m sorry, your Majesty. Don’t speak much Lenello yet,” he said. Velona had taught him
your Majesty
just before he went into the throne room. What was he supposed to call her? Your Divinity? She was divine, all right, but not in the theological sense of the word.

Bottero looked annoyed - not at Hasso, but at himself. He said something else. Then he called Aderno’s name. The wizard came up and went to his knees. Bottero spoke to him, impatiently.
Get up! Get up!
It had to mean something like that. As Aderno rose, he said, “His Majesty says you look like one of us, so he forgot you weren’t.”

If I’m a Lenello, I look like a damn runt,
Hasso thought. They couldn’t shoot you for thinking, not if you kept your big mouth shut. Not even the
Gestapo
or the NKVD did that. “Tell his Majesty I’m glad to be here.”
I’m glad to be anywhere. I wasn’t a good bet to still be breathing now.
As usual, Hasso heard the Lenello words without understanding them when the wizard spoke to the king. He couldn’t follow Bottero’s reply, either. But when Aderno spoke to him, he heard Lenello in his ears and what might as well have been German in his mind. “His Majesty says he is glad to have you - all the Lenelli are glad to have you - since you saved the goddess on earth from the Grenye savages.”

“I was glad to do it,” Hasso said. He’d been glad to do it even before Velona offered him what maidens

- not that she was - used to call their all. After that...

After that, he would have followed her to Siam, or maybe to the moon. What would he have done if she were small and dark and plain –
Jewish-looking
went through his mind

- and the men chasing her were perfect Aryans? Would he have opened up on them anyway? Or would he have waited to find out what the hell was going on? He had no idea. King Bottero spoke again. “Not half so glad as we were to have it done,” Aderno translated.

“Where do we go from here?” Hasso asked. He’d seen the
Führer
a couple of times, but never spoken to him. He would have been awed if he had. Talking to a king didn’t awe him a bit. Talking to
this
king didn’t, anyhow. If a Kaiser still ruled Germany, or even if he’d met George VI of England, that might have been different. But Bottero seemed no more than an ungodly tall man in odd fancy dress who wore a gold circlet with ball-topped knobs sticking up from it.

He did have an impressive bass rumble. Aderno’s lighter voice turned his words into ones that made sense to Hasso: “You did us a service. I hope you will take service with us. I have heard you know fighting tricks we would all do well to learn, and I have also heard the power dwells in you.”

Hasso started to say he didn’t know anything about the power. At the last second, he clamped down on that. The less he gave away, the better off he was likely to stay. And so all that came out was, “I’ll be happy to join you, your Majesty.”

After the wizard turned that into Lenello, King Bottero’s ice-blue eyes suddenly twinkled. A grin pulled up the outer corners of his mouth. He set a massive hand on Hasso’s shoulder and said something in what could only be a man-to-man tone. Hasso figured out the likely translation even before Aderno gave it: “I’ll bet you will. She’s quite a woman, isn’t she?”

“Yes, your Majesty.” Hasso could say that in Lenello. He would have meant it no matter what language he used. Then he eyed the king’s roguish expression in a different way. Was he imagining things, or did Bottero sound as if he knew exactly what he was talking about?

The
Wehrmacht
officer didn’t see any polite way to ask the king. Maybe he would be able to find a polite way to ask Velona. Or maybe he didn’t want to know.

Then Bottero spoke again, and Hasso found out whether he wanted to or not. “His Majesty makes himself remember you are a foreigner, and so you are not used to our ways,” Aderno said. He waited for Hasso to nod, then went on, “He will borrow the goddess for the coming summer solstice, as he does each solstice and equinox. No doubt, he says, you have some such customs in your own land.”

“No doubt,” Hasso said tonelessly. He’d heard of pagan fertility rites, but he’d never dreamt they might matter to him. And what the hell was he supposed to say when the king told him,
Hey, I’m going to
borrow your girlfriend for a night?
If he said, No,
you’re not,
chances were he’d be shorter by a head. And if he said no to Velona, she was liable to laugh at him. If she was the goddess on earth, wasn’t this part of her job requirement?

“You don’t say much,” King Bottero observed through Aderno. He might be the size of a draft horse, but he was no dummy.

“What am I supposed to say?” Hasso made himself shrug. “If it doesn’t bother Velona, how can I squawk?”

Bottero laughed when he heard that. “I knew you were a sensible fellow,” he said, and gave Hasso a slap on the back that almost knocked him sprawling. “When you get right down to it, the women do the deciding.”

“
Ja
,” Hasso agreed with a crooked smile. Pagan fertility rites or not, this world and the one he’d escaped weren’t so very different. He turned to Aderno. “If I take service here, I know whose service I’m joining. Who’s on the other side?”

“A wise question. You should always know your foes at least as well as your friends,” the wizard said. The
Wehrmacht
officer grunted. Hitler should have thought about that before he got into a war against both the USA and the USSR. If the
Führer
had, Hasso wouldn’t have been standing here right now. Aderno went on, “You would serve his Majesty against the other Lenello kingdoms, except the ones that are allies.”

Hasso nodded. “That makes sense.”

But Aderno wasn’t done. “And you would serve him in ensuring that the Grenye in his kingdom know their place - know it and keep it.”

“Fair enough.” If you were going to rule people you’d conquered, they had to respect you. Hasso had seen that in Russia. Let them think they were as good as you were and there’d be hell to pay. The Germans had paid it, too.

“And” - now Aderno seemed like someone holding his nose against a bad smell that wouldn’t go away “there is Bucovin.” When King Bottero heard the name, he made a horrible face, too.

“Bucovin?” Hasso echoed, as he was no doubt meant to do.

“The heart of the Grenye infection,” Aderno said grimly. He pointed. “It lies to the east.”

Bottero spoke. “His Majesty says the Grenye lie all the time, and from any direction.”

“Heh,” Hasso said. How close to the border was Castle Svarag? Had Velona been escaping from Bucovin? If she had, why didn’t the people on her heels carry anything better than peasant weapons? All kinds of interesting questions. But a bigger one occurred to Hasso: “You have magic and the Grenye don’t?”

“Certainly.” Aderno drew himself up like an affronted cat. “We are Lenelli, after all, and they are only Grenye.” When the wizard translated the question for the king, Bottero’s big head bobbed up and down.

“Right,” Hasso said. He hoped the sarcasm wouldn’t make it through the translation spell. To try to blunt it if it did, he went on, “What I don’t understand is, if you can work magic and they can’t, why didn’t you beat them a long time ago?” He thought of the conquistadors with their guns and horses and dogs and iron armor, and of the Indians who’d gone down in windrows before them. Again, Aderno turned the question into Lenello for his king. “We’re getting there,” Bottero said. “Our ships only found this land two centuries ago. We’ve pushed the savages back a long way from the sea. But Bucovin ... Bucovin is difficult.” He nodded again, seeming pleased he’d found the right word. Hitler would have said that about the Russians in 1942. And he would have been right - much righter than he knew then, in fact. The
Reich
and the Russians were both behind Hasso forever now.
So I’m in
the New World, am I?
he thought. Bottero didn’t look a bit like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and probably nothing like what’s-his-name, Roosevelt’s replacement, either. None of that brainfuzz mattered a pfennig’s worth to the Lenelli. “Difficult how?” Hasso asked, as any soldier might. Aderno didn’t look happy about translating the question. King Bottero didn’t look happy about answering it, either. He bit off some harsh-sounding words. “When we attacked the Grenye there, we had a couple of armies come to grief.” Aderno echoed what the king said so Hasso could understand. “We don’t know exactly why.”

“Did they somehow learn magic on their own?” Hasso thought about Indians learning to ride horses and shoot guns.

But the wizard shook his head. After he translated the question, so did the king. This time, Aderno showed no hesitation in answering on his own: “It is not possible. They are Grenye, and mindblind. There are no wizards among them. There never have been. There never will be. There never can be.”

Slavs are
Untermenschen.
All we have to do is hit them a good lick and they’ll fall over,
went through the German’s mind. How much baggage he brought from the world he’d fled! Would he ever escape it? How could he? It made him what he was.

Something he’d seen in this world occurred to him. “When we rode into Drammen, do you remember that drunken Lenello with the Grenye girlfriend we saw?”

By Aderno’s expression, he might have stuck pins under the wizard’s fingernails. Very unwillingly, Aderno nodded. Even more unwillingly, he said, “I remember.” The king barked a question. Most unwillingly of all, Aderno translated Hasso’s question. What Bottero said after that should have scorched paint off the walls. When the king ran down, Aderno found a question of his own: “Why do you ask?” In contrast to his sovereign’s words, his might have been carved off a glacier.

“I was wondering whether some Lenello renegade might have made magic for Bucovin if the Grenye couldn’t do it on their own,” Hasso said.

Again, King Bottero had to ask his wizard for a translation. When he got one, he did some more cursing, but then shook his head and answered the question. “There was no magic used against us,” he said flatly.

“None. We failed anyhow, failed twice, failed badly. Our own magic faltered there. Other Lenello kingdoms have failed, too. Bucovin is ... difficult. We have not sent an army there for a while. Maybe we will try again before too long - there has been talk of it. But we will be wary if we do.”

“I see.” Hasso wasn’t sure he did. Plainly, though, the Lenelli didn’t see what had gone wrong against the ... difficult Bucovin, either.

Bottero gave him a crooked grin. “Now that you know my realm’s old shame, outlander, will you still take service with me against my enemies, whoever they may be?”

What would the king and the wizard do if he said no? They’d throw him out on his ear, that was what. And so would Velona, and he’d deserve it. What would happen to him them? Would
he
end up a drunken stumblebum in the Grenye part of town?

He hadn’t crossed worlds for that. He gave Bottero his own salute, arm thrust out ahead of him. “Yes, your Majesty!”

The ritual that followed came straight from the Middle Ages. Following Aderno’s instructions, Hasso dropped to both knees again and held out his hands clasped together. King Bottero enfolded them in his own big mitts. “I am your man,” Hasso said, prompted by Aderno. “I pledge you my full faith against all men who may live and die, so help me God.” A Lenello would have sworn by the goddess, he supposed. He wondered if Aderno would correct him, but the wizard let it go.

Bottero hauled him to his feet with effortless ease. The king wasn’t just a big man; he was strong, too. He leaned forward and kissed Hasso on both cheeks. They were big, smacking kisses, the kind a Russian might have given - no French sophistication here.

“You are my man. I accept your homage. By the goddess, I will do nothing to make myself not deserve it,” Bottero said through the wizard. “I welcome you to my service.”

“Thank you, your Majesty.” Hasso felt better because of the oath he’d sworn. Now he had a real place here. He belonged. He didn’t know all of what that place entailed yet, but he could find out. He wasn’t just somebody who’d fallen from nowhere. He was one of King Bottero’s men. All the Lenelli would understand that. So would the Grenye.

A couple of small, dark servants came into the throne room. They started sweeping and dusting. None of the Lenelli paid any attention to them; they might have been part of the furniture. As they worked, they chattered in low voices in a croaking, guttural language that sounded nothing like Lenello.

“What are they saying?” Hasso asked Aderno.

The wizard shrugged. “I have no idea. It could only matter to another Grenye.”

“Doesn’t your translation spell work on their language?” Hasso couldn’t imagine why it wouldn’t. Why have a translation spell if you weren’t going to use it to understand a tongue you didn’t speak?

“It would,” Aderno said with the air of a man making a great concession. “But why would I care to listen to Grenye grunting? I’d just as soon listen to what the king’s hunting hounds had to say.”