After the Downfall (11 page)

“This whole land is ours. It is our destiny. If the savages don’t bend the knee to us, we’ll push them aside like the dirt they are.” Aderno didn’t care who was listening to him. Sometimes disasters followed talk like that. Hasso had seen as much at first hand. But sometimes they didn’t. The Americans hadn’t worried about Indian raids for a lifetime. The aborigines in Australia had even less left to them than the redskins in the New World. Europeans ruled India and Africa. Conquest
could
work.

“Come on,” Hasso said. “Let’s get back to the castle.”

Aderno went off to commune with a fellow wizard and try to figure out why his magic failed. Hasso thought about telling King Bottero what he’d done, but decided not to. This kingdom was tiny by the standards of the
Reich,
but not so tiny that the man at the top would want to hear every little detail. Chances were he’d listen politely - once. Hasso didn’t care to burn up his credit like that. He asked one of the guards where Velona was. The fellow shrugged, which made his mailshirt clink ever so slightly. “Don’t know,” he answered. Maybe he really didn’t. Or maybe he didn’t care for a jumped-up foreigner. His tone wasn’t rude enough to be insubordinate. Hasso asked the same thing of a Grenye maidservant carrying a heroic amount of laundry wrapped in a sheet. “She is in the chapel, my lord,” the woman answered. Her Lenello was fluent, but flavored with an accent that said she’d be more at home in one of the swarthy natives’ languages.

“Thank you very much,” Hasso said. The maidservant looked as startled as the tapman at Negustor’s had. Lenelli didn’t waste much politeness on their social and political inferiors. The chapel wasn’t so fancy as its name suggested. Hasso heard it with Christian ears, which gave him expectations the Lenelli didn’t have. The room was small and simple and spare. It had an altar with a low relief of the goddess carved into soft golden limestone. The lithe silhouette might have been taken from Velona’s - except that the altar had crossed with early Lenello settlers. But for the altar and a few stools, the chapel was bare. Maybe Christianity needed more in the way of display because, in Hasso’s world, miracles were hard to come by. Here, with magic working and the goddess taking possession of her mortal acolyte, the impossible was as real as a punch in the nose. Velona had prostrated herself before the altar. She didn’t notice Hasso come in. Was that a faint radiance hovering around her? He wouldn’t have sworn it wasn’t, not after the way she seemed to glow as she strode naked toward Bottero on the night of the solstice. Hasso grimaced, not wanting to remember the rest of that night.

He wondered if he ought to cough, or if it would break some kind of spell. Erring on the side of caution, he stood and waited. After a couple of minutes, Velona stood up and turned toward him. When she did, her eyes flashed fire like a wild animal’s. Human eyes didn’t do that ... except hers did. Hasso had no doubt of what he saw.

“Who disturbs the goddess?” The voice wasn’t quite hers. It was deeper, more reverberant, as if it came from deep inside her - or maybe from far beyond her. Either way, the hair at the back of Hasso’s neck wanted to stand on end. “Who dares?”

“I is sorry,” he said, startled out of his grammar. He didn’t care to admit, even to himself, that he was scared out of it.

She recognized his voice. He could tell the moment she did: it was the moment her aura died away. Suddenly she was just a woman, just his woman, again. “Oh. Hasso,” she said, and her voice was the one he knew. “You ... surprised me.”

“Sorry,” he said again, now certain to whom - and to what - he was apologizing. “Not mean to bother.”

“It’s all right. You didn’t know any better. I was almost done communing anyhow.” She made him feel like a kid who’d interrupted something very important that he wasn’t big enough to understand. The more she pretended it was all right, the more certain he got that it wasn’t. She tried to be brisk: “Well, you must have had a reason to come looking for me. What was it?”

In his halting Lenello, he told her about the curse Aderno had tried to drop on Scanno, how he’d failed, and how, despite failing, he’d seen that no magic protected the renegade. “I think you need to know this,” he finished.

“Well, you’re right,” she said. “I do. Thank you. The goddess needs to know it, too.” She kissed him. For a split second, the tingle that shot through him seemed even more than the high voltage Velona put into whatever she did. Imagination? In the world he came from, he would have thought so. Here? He had no way to know.

“What do you do about it?” he asked. “What does goddess do?”

She set a forefinger between her breasts. “
I
will take the word to the king. It marches too well with what happened to me when I went into Bucovin. One by one, my disguises and wards failed, but not for any reason I could find.”

“The wizard tell - tells - he, too,” Hasso said.

“No doubt. But Bottero will take it more seriously from me, because I am who I am and what I am,”

Velona said. “As for the goddess...” Hasso could see the deity come forth in her. Her eyes brightened and focused somewhere not of this world. Her hair spread and thickened till it reminded him of a lion’s mane. She seemed altogether larger; though he still looked down at her, he felt as if she were peering down at him from a considerable height. She went on, “The goddess will deal with it in her own way.”

Then divinity disappeared, and she was Velona again.

What is the goddess’ way?
Hasso wondered. He didn’t ask, though. He didn’t have the nerve. Her gaze sharpened in a merely human way. “If Aderno’s spell won’t bite on this wretch of a Scanno, what does that say? That he’s in Bucovin’s service, most likely. That he’s a spy, a viper. You should have brought him here. Pins and pincers would tear the truth out of him even if magic failed.”

If the Grenye in Bucovin couldn’t find a better spy than a man busy drinking himself to death, they were in more trouble than they knew what to do with. But that thought led Hasso to another: “Can - how you say? - test Grenye? If magic works, ordinary, safe people. If magic does not work, maybe they have to do with Bucovin. Yes? No? Maybe?”

Velona thought about that. Her eyes glowed in an entirely human fashion. The way she showed she liked an idea was more drastic than he’d known from any other woman, to say nothing of more enjoyable. Was it sacrilege on a stool in the chapel? Not, he supposed, if your panting partner was a part-time goddess.

“What if someone comes in?” he asked afterwards, but only afterwards - he didn’t worry about that, or anything else, while she straddled him.

She only laughed. “You ask the strangest questions. No one would come near the chapel while I was in it. No one but you, I mean, because you don’t know our ways.”

“Oh.” How big a blunder
had
he made? A good thing she was fond of him, or even standing in the doorway might have been dangerous.

Velona had no trouble figuring out what he was thinking. “Don’t worry about it. You told me things I needed to know. I did and the goddess did. Who knows? Maybe she even led you here.”

Even though he’d begun to realize they didn’t always fit in this world, Hasso clung to the rational, orderly patterns of thought he’d brought from the one that bred him. “How can she did that if she is here with you? If she is here
in
you?” he asked.

By the way Velona looked at him, the question had never occurred to her. The idea that there
could
be a question had never occurred to her. “She is the goddess. She can do anything she pleases,” she said, as if stating an axiom of geometry.

How am I supposed to argue with that?
he wondered, and then,
Why do I want to argue with it?

What would have happened to someone who argued about the Virgin Birth with a bishop in the tenth century? Hasso didn’t know, not in detail, but it wouldn’t have been pretty. He was sure of that. “All right,” he said quickly.

Too quickly. Velona knew he wasn’t in the habit of backing down. “You don’t believe it,” she said.

“I not say that,” Hasso protested.

“I didn’t say you said it. I said you believed it.” Velona turned toward the altar. “If the goddess wanted to make that rise up in the air, she could.”

It weighed several hundred kilos. If it was going to rise up in the air, the goddess had to lift it. If she didn’t, nothing this side of a massive block and tackle would. Hasso was going to make a polite noise of agreement and escape the argument when he realized Velona wasn’t paying any attention to him. Again, he had the feeling he was standing too close to where lightning had just crashed down. Power filled her. He watched it happen, as if he could watch a battery taking a charge. She pointed at the altar again, this time with an air of command.

And it rose about half a meter into the air.

That was impossible. Hasso knew as much. He also knew that what he knew wasn’t worth as much as he thought - convoluted, but true. Velona lowered her hand, and the altar descended, too. The stones under it creaked as they took up the weight again.

“You see?” Velona said. Did the goddess still resonate in her voice? Maybe a little.

“I see,” Hasso agreed. Did astonishment still resonate in his voice? He knew damn well it did. Fearsweat prickled at his armpits. Velona was a hell of a high-powered woman all by herself. When you added in the other...

“If you see, what do you have to say now?” She sounded like herself again. Like herself, yes, but proud of what she and the goddess had done.

“Why she not do that to Bucovin?” Hasso asked. “Pick up, then drop and smash?”

Velona started to answer, then suddenly stopped. She looked very human then, human and confused. “I don’t know, Hasso Pemsel,” she said after that longish pause. “That is the goddess’ truth, and she keeps it to herself. I’ve prayed. All the Lenelli have prayed. The power to do that doesn’t seem to be there. Maybe she wants us to overcome the challenge on our own. Some people think so.”

“Maybe Bucovin has a power, too,” he suggested.

By the way she looked at him, he’d said something stupid. “Bucovin is full of Grenye. Grenye have no power. That’s what makes them Grenye.” Again, it sounded like a geometry lesson.

“Why Lenelli not beat Bucovin by now, then?” Hasso asked.

“Some of it’s bad luck,” Velona answered. “Some of it... Well, we’ve been on this side of the sea a while now. The Grenye in Bucovin have had all that time to learn to fight the way we do. And some of it... some of it, I can’t tell you the reason. That’s why I went to Bucovin - to try to find out.”

“But no luck?” Hasso said.

“Well, some luck,” she said. “I found you, didn’t I? If you’re not a gift from the goddess, I don’t know what you are.”

“I am a man,” Hasso said.

She kissed him. “I should hope you are, sweetheart. But you’re a gift from the goddess, too.” He wasn’t sure he liked that. He wanted to count for himself, not for any ... theological reasons. By the way she said it, though, he didn’t get a vote.

King Bottero’s mounted lancers and archers were pretty good. Hasso enjoyed watching them practice on the meadows outside of Drammen. The lancers tore bales of straw to shreds. The archers pincushioned targets. He wondered how he would handle the Schmeisser from horseback. He could ride, but he was no cavalryman.

“Lancers tear hole, then archers and foot soldiers go through?” he asked Lugo, who was also watching the soldiers drill. Panzers opened the way for infantry in his world. He figured knights would do the job here.

But the Lenello didn’t understand what he was talking about. “Lancers fight on the line,” he said.

“Archers on the wings, to harry the enemy. Infantry in the rear, to try to protect if things go wrong.”

Haven’t they ever heard of the
Schwerpunkt? Hasso wondered. The French had scattered their panzers all along the line. They’d paid for it, too, when German armored divisions punched through them. Hasso thought the same thing could work here, too. Why wouldn’t it?

He tried to explain, using pebbles and twigs to show what he meant. Lugo looked at what he was doing, looked at him, and shook his head. “This is how we’ve always fought,” he said. “I don’t see any reason to change.”

That pissed Hasso off. “You not want to win? You not want to beat Bucovin? You not want to beat other Lenello kingdoms? Why not?”

“This is how we’ve always fought,” Lugo repeated. “It works fine.”

For ten pfennigs, Hasso would have blown his brains out, assuming he had any. To Lugo, Hasso was a no-account foreigner to be tolerated as the goddess’ bed-warmer but not taken seriously. Maybe letting the Lenelli think the goddess sent him wasn’t such a bad idea after all. “We see what the king thinks,” he said.

“If his Majesty wants to let you waste his time, that’s his business.” The marshal looked down his nose at Hasso. Since he was a short Lenello, he had to tilt his head back to do it, which didn’t stop him.

“I hope he listens. Why not? You not win with what you do now. Maybe you win with a different thing, a new thing,” Hasso said.

“And maybe we lose, too.” By the way Lugo said it, that blew up a mine under the idea right there.

“Maybe,” Hasso said, and the Lenello gaped in amazement that he would admit the possibility. He added, “How are you worse off to lose new way, not old way?”

Lugo didn’t answer him. Hasso chose to believe that was because he couldn’t answer him. The marshal took himself off, leaving the twigs and pebbles behind like untranslated hieroglyphics. Hasso wanted to kick him in the ass to speed him in the air, but feared giving him a brain concussion if he did. What would the lancers think of being used as a breakthrough group?
Only one way to find out,
he thought, and walked over toward them. Their leader was a captain named Nornat.
Captain,
here, more or less equaled lieutenant colonel. The Lenelli had soldiers and sergeants and lieutenants - who were kids getting their feet wet - and captains and marshals, and that was about it. Who ranked whom depended far more on prestige than on a table of organization. The system caused more friction than Hasso liked, but he had more urgent things to worry about.