After the Downfall (15 page)

“Here.” Aderno gave him the coin. “You
are
magical, or you can be. If you saw the gold star, you certainly can be. But I didn’t think potential would satisfy a unicorn - which shows I don’t know as much as I wish I did. There is more to you than meets the eye, Hasso Pemsel. How much more keeps surprising me, and not always happily.”

Back in Germany,
Hasso thought,
I’d have to be a virgin to ride a unicorn.
But there were no unicorns in Germany. And, with the Russians rampaging through the country all hot with vengeance, there probably weren’t a hell of a lot of virgins left there, either.

The wizards squabbled furiously. “He saw
gold?
” Flegrei shouted at Aderno. “Why the demon didn’t you say so? You would have saved us all some money!”

“You would have saved us from looking like idiots, too,” another sorcerer said.

“Nothing could save
some
people from looking like idiots.” Aderno could be bitchy.

“You must be one of them,” the other wizard retorted. “If he saw gold and you bet against him, you deserved to lose, by the goddess.”

“It’s not just the talent - it’s the training. Or I thought it was,” Aderno said. “But it seems I was wrong.”

“Yes, it seems you were.” Flegrei sounded disgusted. “And it cost all of us gold, and now the goddess-cursed foreigner will be more puffed up than ever.”

Hasso felt like making his chest swell up and strutting around like a pouter pigeon. He decided not to, though; Flegrei was already angry enough at him. And Aderno said, “Watch your mouth, you blockhead!

Whatever the foreigner is, he’s not goddess-cursed. Velona will put your ears on a necklace if she hears you go around saying he is.”

“Ha! I’m not afraid of her,” Flegrei declared.

“Well, if that doesn’t prove you’re a blockhead, I don’t know what would,” Aderno said. By the way the rest of the wizards stepped back from Flegrei, they agreed with Aderno. That was one more sign of the power of the woman Hasso had taken up with - or rather, the woman who’d taken up with him. As for his own power ... Security minister wasn’t bad.
De facto
General Staff officer wasn’t bad, either. And showing up a bunch of haughty wizards, and making money while he did it, was a hell of a lot better than not bad.

Coming back to Castle Svarag wasn’t quite like coming home for Hasso. He wondered if he would ever feel at home anywhere here. He doubted it. Giving up the sense of home was the émigré’s curse. But he’d spent some time at Mertois’ castle, and he’d got to know a good many of the castellan’s soldiers. He felt less not at home here than he did most other places in this world. The convoluted thought made one corner of his mouth quirk up in ironic amusement.

“Good to see you, little man. Good to see you,” Sholseth boomed. The clout on the back he gave Hasso almost knocked him over. “I hear you and Orosei couldn’t take each other out.”

“After a while, we stop trying,” Hasso answered. “We decide, why bother? One of us could get hurt bad.”

Sholseth nodded. “Makes sense. I tell you, I felt better when I heard Orosei didn’t beat you. He’s as good as we’ve got. I know I can’t take him, even though I’m bigger. So if you’re as good as he is, no wonder you knocked me for a loop.”

“Maybe I’m just lucky,” Hasso said.

“Nah.” Sholseth shook his head. “You’re good. When you threw me over your shoulder, I thought,
What the demon am I getting into?
Then I went wham, and I pretty much stopped thinking after that.”

He thumped Hasso again, still good-naturedly. He seemed to take a perverse pride in being the first Lenello to discover what a formidable fellow this foreigner could be. Hasso was glad enough to drink and talk with his old acquaintances. But he also found he had serious business at Castle Svarag. Mertois was keeping close to a dozen Grenye who’d got caught slipping east toward Bucovin in his dungeon. Hasso had them brought out one at a time. “If you lie to me, you be sorry,” he told the first one, a stocky man named Magar. He nodded to Aderno. “And the wizard, he knows if you lie.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Magar said stolidly.

“No one ever does anything,” Hasso answered with a weary sigh. “Everyone is always so innocent, it makes you cry. Why you run off to Bucovin?”

“I wasn’t going to Bucovin,” Magar said. “I had a fight with my woman. I was going away when these Lenelli on horseback grabbed me and hauled me back here.”

“Well?” Hasso asked Aderno.

The wizard used the little truth spell Hasso had seen before. Then he frowned. “I’m not sure. It doesn’t say yes or no.” His head came up and his nostrils twitched; he might have been a hunting hound taking a scent. “This reminds me of how that goddess-cursed Scanno masked his taste for Grenye-loving.”

“Does it?” Hasso eyed Magar. “Where do we go now?”

“Where else? The torturers. They’ll pull the truth out of him,” Aderno answered. Magar let out a horrified yowl. “I didn’t do anything!” he wailed when he found words. “Don’t hurt me!

I didn’t do anything!”

Aderno waited to see what Hasso did next. If Hasso didn’t go along, the wizard would suspect
him
of liking the Grenye too well. But that wasn’t what decided him. Bucovin was the enemy. If Magar worked for the Grenye there, he would know useful things, things King Bottero needed to find out. “Yes, we give him to them,” Hasso said. Magar howled again. Ignoring him, Hasso went on, “They need to go after truth, not to hurt for the fun of hurting. They know the difference?”

“They know,” Aderno assured him. He couldn’t help adding, “I wasn’t sure you did.”

“Oh, yes,” Hasso said. Like any army, the
Wehrmacht
squeezed enemy prisoners when it had to. So did the
Waffen-SS,
often more enthusiastically. “Sometimes prisoners say anything just to stop hurting,”

he warned. “Have to be careful, keep him away from others, weigh what he says, what they say.” He used his hands as a set of scales coming into balance.

“Yes.” Aderno nodded. “You
do
know something about this business. I wondered how soft you were.”

“Because sometimes I think you are a jackass, that makes me soft?” Hasso asked. Aderno blinked. Hasso went on, “I know sometimes you think I am a jackass, too. I do not think that makes you soft.”

He jerked a thumb at Magar. “Have them work on him where the ones we question can hear him yell. When they hear that, they want to tell us everything we need to know, yes?”

Magar quailed from the wizard’s smile. Hasso didn’t blame him; he would have quailed, too, were those teeth and that twist of lip aimed his way. “A good thought, outlander. Yes, a very good thought.”

Sure enough, the Grenye’s shrieks pierced the interrogation chamber like so many spearthrusts. The other little dark men quivered whenever a new one rang out. Hasso let a couple of them go free after Aderno’s magic showed they really were hunting or fishing when the Lenelli scooped them up. “If you are not King Bottero’s enemy, I am not your enemy,” he told them. “But if you are the king’s enemy, my job is to make you sorry. I do - I
will do
- my job.”

The ones he turned loose blubbered their thanks. Some of the ones he didn’t turn loose went on claiming they had nothing to do with anything. Aderno’s spell didn’t always prove they were lying. It didn’t exonerate them, either. It did... nothing. The ambiguity, the blankness, were plenty to make Hasso and Aderno suspicious. Those Grenye went to the torturer, too.

One peasant sang like a goldfinch. His name was Lupul, and he admitted everything as soon as he heard another Grenye yell in torment. Hasso could almost watch his ballocks crawl up into his belly. “Yes, I wanted to tell Bucovin what you were doing,” he gabbled. “Why not? My people rule Bucovin. You blond robbers don’t.”

“We will,” Aderno said. He turned to Hasso. “Now what do we do with him?”

“He should have a quick end, anyway,” Hasso said. “Give him to the headsman.” Lupul wailed. Hasso felt like wailing himself, though he didn’t show it. If the Grenye were still clan against clan, tribe against tribe, beating them in detail would be easier. If they saw the struggle as all of them against the Lenelli... well, it sure didn’t help.

VII

King Bottero didn’t invade Bucovin along the causeway road through the swamp. He sent soldiers along it, but only to hold it against any counterthrusts from the Grenye to the east.

“Once we drive the savages back, we can send supplies and reinforcements up the causeway,” he said. Hasso nodded along with Bottero’s marshals. The men of Bucovin could have blocked an advance along the causeway for a long time with only a handful of men. Hasso was relieved that the Lenelli could see as much for themselves. He didn’t like having to point out their stupidities and blindnesses to them. Some of it was necessary - hell, a lot of it was necessary - but he recognized the difference between gadfly and pain in the ass.

He felt Orosei’s ironic eye on him. The master-at-arms was no marshal, but Bottero would have had a mutiny on his hands if he tried to keep him in the dark. Did Orosei know what Hasso was thinking? It looked that way to the
Wehrmacht
officer.

Some of the lighter boats could go out into the marsh, at least partway. The rest unloaded their supplies, which went into more wagons. That made the army slower and more unwieldy than it had been, but Hasso didn’t know what anybody could do about it. You needed
things
to fight, and you needed to haul them to where you fought.

His horse’s hooves drummed on the planks of a bridge that took him over the Drammion to the south bank. Grenye farmers looked up from their fields to stare at the Lenelli riding by. In their dull homespun, the peasants seemed hardly more than domestic animals themselves. Looks could deceive, though - and probably did.

In Russia, the Germans hadn’t paid much attention to the peasants. Once the Red Army was beaten, the new overlords would get around to the
muzhiks.
Then the partisans started dynamiting railroad lines and sniping from the woods.

How many of these Grenye would try to slip off and let Bucovin know which way the Lenelli were going? Too many - Hasso was sure of that. His security cordon had stopped a lot of the natives from succeeding as spies. Had it stopped all of them? Could it? He knew better. He rode up alongside the king. Pointing out the peasants in the fields, he said, “More spy trouble.”

“Well, we’ll deal with it,” Bottero answered. “By now, we’re moving as fast as they are. They won’t get to Bucovin much ahead of us.”

“Yes, your Majesty,” Hasso said - that was true. “I wished they like Lenelli better than they do.”

“I don’t care what they think about us. As long as they don’t make trouble, they can think whatever they want,” the king said.

In a way, he made sense. That offered the Grenye a safety valve. In another way, though ... “If they think bad things about Lenelli, maybe they try to do bad things, too,” Hasso said.

“Let them try. We’ll squash them. We’ve done it before - we can do it again.” Bottero didn’t lack confidence. From everything Hasso had seen, Lenelli rarely did. But the Germans had been sure they would have no trouble ruling Russia. Maybe they wouldn’t have, had they won. The Lenelli would be fine, too - as long as they kept winning. So it seemed to Hasso, anyway. If they ever started to lose...

With magic on their side, could they lose? Were the Grenye really forever barred from it? What about halfbreeds? There had been renegade wizards - Bottero had spoken of them. What if another one arose?

Hasso laughed at himself. Was he trying to see how much trouble he could borrow? The laughter died. Every time he’d done that in the
Wehrmacht,
there always turned out to be even more than he thought. He had a tent for himself and Velona. He wondered why she’d come along. Was she a mascot for Bottero’s army? Did she intend to fight? He knew she was strong enough and skilled enough to do that if she wanted to. She’d gone into Bucovin all alone, without an army at her back. She’d gone in alone, yes, and she’d barely come out alive. If not for somebody literally falling into the swamp from another world, she wouldn’t have. The Grenye would have caught her and killed her. What did that say?

Whatever it said, she didn’t want to talk about it. All she wanted to do was joke. Holding her nose, she said, “You smell like a horse, my dear.”

“So do you,” Hasso answered. She did, too. But she also smelled like herself - better than any other woman Hasso had ever known. Still bantering, he went on, “I love you anyhow.”

That sobered her as effectively as a bucket of cold water in the face. “Be careful, Hasso Pemsel,” she said, her voice altogether serious. “It is dangerous to love me too much. Deadly dangerous for a Lenello. Deadly dangerous for you, too, unless you’re much more different from us than I think you are.”

“How can anyone help it?” he asked.

“Men can’t help it,” she answered, without modesty and also without doubt. “That’s part of what makes it so dangerous.”

“Only part?” He kept trying to tease.

But Velona’s nod was the next thing to somber. “Yes, only part. Remember, I am the goddess, too. A man, a mere man, who loves me is like a moth that loves a torch. He flies too close - and he burns.”

“What about King Bottero?” No, the night of the summer solstice wouldn’t go away. And the autumn equinox was coming. Would Bottero and Velona - and the goddess - celebrate it in front of the army? If they did, Hasso expected another drunken night and another painful morning. In the dim lamplight, Velona’s eyes went even wider and bigger than they were already. “By the goddess, no!” she exclaimed. “He enjoys me. I know that. But love me? He’s not so foolish - he knows better.”

“But I don’t? Is that what you mean?” Hasso didn’t try to hide his bitterness.

“Some of what I mean.” Velona was nothing if not blunt. Maybe some of that had to do with the indwelling divinity she carried. More, though, Hasso judged, came from her own nature. She went on,

“The other difference is, I like Bottero, but I really care for you. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you because of me, but it may.”