After the Downfall (14 page)

That got him kissed again. “You are as slippery as a slug, as sneaky as a serpent!” Bottero said. Hasso supposed those were compliments. The king went on, “I never would have thought of that - never, I tell you!”

Suppose Heinrich Himmler came from the Philippine Islands. That would probably make him more valuable to the
Führer,
not less. He would still make a dandy security chief. But, as a manifest foreigner, he could never think of grabbing the topmost job for himself.

In Bottero’s kingdom, Hasso was far more foreign than a Filipino in Berlin. Another country? He was from another world! He would never be king, not even with the goddess at his side and at his back. Security minister and technical adviser was as high as he could rise. He had the post. Now he needed to deliver the goods.

“Can magic help to find Grenye who want to go east?” he asked. “Grenye who go through the swamp, say, not by the built-up road?”

“Grenye who
sneak
through the swamp.” Bottero tiptoed with his fingers on a tabletop to show what
sneak
meant. Hasso nodded his thanks; that was a useful verb for a security man to know. The king went on, “I’m no wizard myself, so I can’t really tell you. Aderno could.”

“Aderno and I, we are not happy with each other.” Sometimes Hasso came out with phrases he’d read. They often made people smile. In Lenello as in German, the written language wasn’t just the same as the spoken one.

Bottero smiled now... for a moment. Then he looked severe - and a man as large and tough as he was could look very severe indeed. “You serve the kingdom. You serve it well. Aderno was doing the same thing with that Grenye wench.”

“Aderno serves Aderno with that Grenye wench,” Hasso said stubbornly. “Aderno likes to hurt people. Fight with Grenye gives him a reason.” He shook his head. That wasn’t the word he wanted. “Gives him an excuse.” That was what he wanted to say.

“He serves the kingdom.” Bottero couldn’t see anything else.

Hasso shrugged, seeing no point in arguing with his sovereign. National Socialist doctrine shouted that that psychiatrist in Vienna was nothing but a crazy damn Jew. All the same, Hasso would have bet Deutschmarks against dung that Aderno had a big old bulge in his pants when he dragged Zadar off to what might literally have been a fate worse than death.

“You serve the kingdom, too,” Bottero reminded him. “You and Aderno both serve the same goal. So you should get along with each other.”

That was logical. As far as Hasso was concerned, it was also next to impossible. “I would rather kill him than get along with him ... your Majesty,” he said.

The king stared at him. At first, Hasso thought he’d badly offended Bottero. Then he realized Bottero was fighting hard not to laugh. The king lost the fight. “You fell from beyond the moon,” he said between snorts. Hasso nodded. That wasn’t so very different from his own thought of a little while before. Bottero went on, “You fell all that way - and you’re just as touchy and proud as a Lenello born a short spit from my palace.”

Hasso clicked his heels, which showed once more how foreign he was. But his words said the opposite:

“I am a man, your Majesty.”

“Well, Velona told me the same thing,” Bottero said.

“What? That she is a man? Don’t believe her.”

Bottero snorted again. “If she told me that, I
wouldn’t
believe her. I know better, and so do you.” He grimaced; he must have remembered that his sharing Velona didn’t make Hasso happy. Before the German could say anything, Bottero continued, “No, she told me
you
were a man, and it’s so. And you’re a man I need. That’s so, too.”

“And Aderno?” Hasso asked.

“Is also a man I need,” the king said. “Don’t try to kill him unless you really have to. If you do try, you may find that wizards take a deal of killing, and sometimes they aren’t dead even after they die.”

Thinking fondly of his Schmeisser, Hasso said, “I take the chance.”

Detachments from west of Drammen, and from north and south, flowed into the capital, some by river, others by road. Soldiers camped inside Castle Drammen, and on the wide grounds of the Lenello estates around it. They swarmed into the Grenye districts closer to the walls. When they came back, most of them were drunk. Some had unfortunate diseases. Several got their belt pouches slit. A couple of them got their throats slit instead. Several Grenye also ended up dead, some in fair fights, others, by all appearances, slaughtered for the sport of it. Hasso had seen that the Grenye districts had plenty of brothels. Not all the Lenelli bothered going to them. If some warriors saw a short, dark woman whose looks they liked, they went and took her. If she wasn’t a whore, she was only a Grenye. How many times had Hasso heard that phrase since coming here? More often than he wanted to: he knew that. He didn’t bother taking his worries to Bottero; the king wouldn’t do anything about it. Instead, he talked to Velona, asking, “Does the goddess like what the soldiers do to women who don’t want it or deserve it?”

“They’re soldiers,” she answered with a shrug. “They act that way because that’s how soldiers act. What can you do about it?”

“Me?” With a sour laugh, Hasso jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I can’t do anything. I am only a man, and only a foreigner at that.”

“Not
only a man.
Quite a man,” Velona purred.

“I thank you.” Hasso hoped she’d talked to Bottero that way. He tried not to let her distract him now. It wasn’t easy, but he managed. ‘
I
can’t do anything, no. But can you? You are the goddess. Does the goddess care for women, or not?”

“Of course she does.” Velona paused. “I am not the goddess. Sometimes the goddess is me. It’s not the same thing.” Now Hasso shrugged. It came close enough for him. He knew he would never understand the difference, not unless or until a god possessed him. He didn’t think that was likely. It might not be impossible here, but even so.... Velona went on, “If she wants me to do anything about those Grenye sluts, I’m sure she’ll tell me about it.”

Some of them weren’t sluts. That was the point Hasso kept trying to make, the point none of the Lenelli wanted to see. Instead of banging away at it, he tried a different tack: “Next time she is in you, maybe you should ask her. Maybe she needs a question to think about it.”

“Maybe I will.” Velona sounded more as if she was humoring him than as if she really intended to do it, but he couldn’t do anything about that. He’d done what he could do. If it wasn’t enough ... Well, when had the Grenye ever caught anything close to an even break? If they didn’t catch one now, it wouldn’t change the way the world worked very much.

When enough of his soldiers came into Drammen to satisfy him, King Bottero started east, toward the border with Bucovin. Hasso gathered that some units were late, and that the king wasn’t about to wait for them. That made sense to the German. Despite his own best efforts, surprise was bound to be gone. All the same, you didn’t want to waste time on campaign and let the enemy get ready for you. The
Wehrmacht
waited around at Kursk, and how the Ivans made them pay! Fewer men on time were often better than plenty a few days too late.

Plenty of men on time were better still, but Hasso had realized he couldn’t expect too much from the Lenelli. They knew nothing about Germanic efficiency. He hoped to teach them, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Everything pointed to their being more efficient than the Grenye, and not just because of magic. That would probably do. When civilized soldiers attacked barbarians, the barbarians usually lost. That was how civilization advanced.

Hasso thought of Arminius. He thought of three Roman legions cut to pieces in the Teutoberg Wald. Germany stayed outside the Roman Empire because the barbarians won that time. What would his world look like if they’d lost? Nobody would ever know now.

He’d watched and ridden along when the
Wehrmacht
roared into Poland, into France, into Russia. Because he’d done all that, watching and riding along when the Lenelli moved out of Drammen impressed him less than it might have. It felt more like a scene from a historical movie with plenty of extras than the start of a real campaign.

The stinks of sweat and horse manure said it was real enough. Foot soldiers trudged along in loose order, shields and quivers on their backs, unstrung bows in their right hands, shortswords on their hips. Almost all of them wore iron helms. A few had mailshirts. The ones who did wore surcoats to keep the sun from cooking them in their own juice.

Teamsters kept wagons rolling. Ungreased axles screeched. Horses and mules strained in the traces. Choking clouds of dust rose. Hasso knew all about unpaved roads - one more thing the Russians had taught him. He hoped it wouldn’t rain. This particular unpaved road would turn to rutted mud, and then to glue.

Barges and boats came up the Drammion alongside the marching men and noisy wagons. Moving bulky supplies by water was easier, cheaper, and faster than it was by land. When the river turned to marsh, as it would, the Lenelli would have to unload the vessels. In the meantime, they took advantage of them. Companies of mounted archers and lancers rode along as if everything depended on them alone. In a way, the armored men were right. They were the strike force, the spearpoint, of Bottero’s army. They could crack the enemy line, the way panzers could in the other world. But if the archers ran out of arrows, if the lancers were reduced to scattering over the countryside to scrounge for food, they wouldn’t be able to fight the way they should. The Lenelli understood that ... up to a point. Bottero’s army had one accompaniment the
Wehrmacht
wouldn’t have: Aderno and six or eight other wizards on unicornback. Hasso would have preferred Stukas and Messerschmitts overhead, or even a hot-air or hydrogen-filled observation balloon. He knew he would never get the airplanes; they were much too far over the technological horizon. A balloon might be possible ... one of these years. His own horse was a good, steady gelding. He could hope it wouldn’t go mad with fear when he started shooting from its back. He did envy the wizards the elegance and beauty of their mounts. He also envied them the unicorns’ horns, some silvered like Aderno’s, others gilded. Not only were they splendid; they looked to be formidable in battle, too.

“A pity lancers and archers don’t ride unicorns,” he said when they stopped for supper the first evening out of Drammen.

Aderno looked through him. Since they almost came to blows over the Grenye serving woman, the wizard barely bothered staying polite. “For one thing, unicorns are rare, and so deserving to carry on their backs men with rare talent,” he said. “For another, they will not suffer men without sorcerous talent to mount them. Anyone but an ignorant newcomer would know as much.”

It wasn’t quite,
Screw you, stupid,
but it came close enough. “I bet I can ride one,” Hasso said. The rest of the wizards laughed till they had to hold their sides. “You want to be thrown and stomped and gored, don’t you?” said one of them, a beanpole of a man named Flegrei.

“No. I want to ride a unicorn.” Hasso reached into a pocket - he was wearing his
Wehrmacht
trousers, which boasted such refinements - and pulled out a goldpiece. “This says I can do it.”

“You’re on!” Flegrei shouted, and showed off his own shiny coin.

All the wizards except Aderno clamored to bet Hasso. He had to check whether he had enough money with him to cover them. As it turned out, he did. He thought they really wanted not just his gold but to watch him get thrown and stomped and gored. Since he figured Aderno had more reason to want that than any of the others, he asked, “You, too?”

Aderno bit his lip. Yes, he wanted to watch the foreigner fail, too. He just wasn’t so sure as the rest of the wizards that Hasso would. In the end, though, he nodded. “Yes, me, too. Why not?”

Hasso turned out not to have one more coin. “If the unicorn kills me, tell Velona I say she should pay you,” he said. Aderno nodded. Hasso bowed to the other wizards. “Whose unicorn do I ride?”

“You mean, whose unicorn
don’t
you ride?” Flegrei jeered. “You can try with mine. Once you get what you deserve, maybe you won’t strut so tall.”

That gibe stung. Hasso didn’t like being short among the Lenelli. He briefly wondered how the Grenye, most of whom were much shorter than he was, enjoyed looking up to the big blond men from out of the west. But then the Grenye slipped from his mind. He bowed again. “Shorten the stirrup leathers, please,”

he told Flegrei, whose legs were much longer than his.

Flegrei’s answering bow was scorn personified. “At your service, my prickly little hedgehog,” he said. Hasso watched him closely as he adjusted them, but he did an honest job of it. That had to mean he really didn’t believe Hasso could stay on the unicorn. When Flegrei finished, he stepped away from the beautiful snowy beast. “All yours.”

“Danke sch ö n”
Hasso forgot Lenello for the moment. He walked up to the unicorn. It looked at him sidelong out of an eye as blue as Velona’s. A low snort, more curious than anything else - he hoped came from it. The wizards murmured among themselves. Maybe they’d expected the unicorn to run him through with its horn as soon as he got anywhere near it.

Before he could think about what he was doing, he swung up into the saddle. The unicorn snorted again, this time sounding distinctly surprised. It started to buck.

“Cut that out,” he said, and went to work calming it as he would have with a restive horse. And the unicorn, sensing that the new rider, though a stranger, had some notion of what he was doing up there,
did
calm down. He rode it in a slow circle around the staring wizards and halted directly in front of Flegrei.

Dismounting, he bowed yet again and held out his hand. “Nice animal. Now pay up, you cocksure bastard.”

Goggling, Flegrei paid. “How did you do that?” he choked out.

“Easy.” Hasso jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I’m magic. You’re smart, you stop screwing with me.”

He went around to the other wizards, collecting a goldpiece from each of them. He saved Aderno for last. “You, too.”