After the Downfall (2 page)

The woman glided past him. Her head didn’t turn his way; she must not have seen him dive for cover. Not surprising, not with the sun in her face the way it was. She didn’t look back to see how close her enemies were. All her attention was on the way ahead. He admired that even more than he admired her elegantly chiseled features. She would go on as long as she could - so she proclaimed with every line of her body. But her harsh panting said she couldn’t go on much longer.

Her pursuers were worn, too, but not so worn as she. They could still talk to one another as they ran. Their harsh, guttural language meant nothing to Hasso. He didn’t think it was Russian ... but then, he hadn’t really believed these were the Pripet Marshes, either.

Deciding what to do and doing it were quick, easy, almost automatic. Just before the three shambling men came abreast of him, he rose up a little and gave the leader - the one with the pitchfork - a short burst in the chest. As the fellow crumpled, Hasso shot the man with the carving knife. The swarthy man with the hatchet showed admirable presence of mind. He flung the weapon at Hasso just before one more burst from the Schmeisser caught him in the midsection. The
Wehrmacht
captain ducked. The hatchet spun past, less than half a meter above his head. It splashed into the swamp. He scrambled to his feet, ready to finish off any of the three who still showed fight. But they were all dead or dying fast. He looked down the road in the direction from which they’d come. Were more like them trotting along in their wake? He didn’t see anybody else, not for a couple of kilometers. Slowly, he turned toward the woman. She’d stopped when she heard the gunfire. Now she was trying to catch her breath, her head down, her hands on her knees. After most of a minute, she straightened, looking at him with as much curiosity as he felt about her.

Curiosity wasn’t the only thing he felt. She’d seemed striking as she ran past. Now he saw that striking was much too mild a word. She was improbably, outrageously, beautiful. If she was only a product of his wild imaginings in the split second before the pain of a mortal wound seized him, he had more imagination than he’d ever imagined.

She said something. Whatever tongue it was, he didn’t understand a word of it. He didn’t care. He could have listened to her forever, no matter what she said. Her voice was a honeyed caress. But she stopped and waited expectantly. He realized he needed to answer. “I’m sorry - I don’t understand,” he said in German. A tiny frown creased the perfect skin between her eyebrows - she didn’t follow him, either. He said the same thing in French, remembered from school, and then in bad Russian acquired at the front. She shook her head each time.

She slowly walked toward him. Little by little, he realized what a mess he was: filthy, unshaven, in a wet, muddy, shabby uniform. He would have apologized if only he knew how.

She pointed to the dead men, then to his machine pistol, and said something that had to be a question.
You killed them? With that?
’What else could she be asking?

He nodded.
“Ja.
I did for ‘em, all right.” He stuck to German from then on. Why not? At least he’d be sure of what he was saying. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest and told her what his name was.

“Pemsel. Hasso Pemsel,” she repeated thoughtfully. His name had never sounded so good as it did in her mouth. She laid an index finger between her small, upstanding breasts. “Velona,” she said. He touched the brim of his coal - scuttle helmet, echoing, “Velona.” He couldn’t make her name seem nearly so wonderful as she did his.

“Pemsel. Hasso Pemsel,” she said again, and then something else that had his name in it. When he just stood there, she laughed at herself. She must have forgotten he couldn’t follow what she was saying. What she did next didn’t need any words. She pulled off the torn and tattered shift - Hasso couldn’t come up with a better name for it - she was wearing, spread it out in the middle of the road, and, naked, lay down on it. She beckoned to him to join her.

His jaw fell. He almost dropped the Schmeisser. What went through his mind was,
You’re a hero, pal.
Here’s your reward. Beats the hell out of the Knight’s Cross, doesn’t it? Even with Swords and
Oak Leaves.

No, his imagination definitely didn’t work this well. He’d saved a couple of German women from death or a fate worse than or both together. They didn’t want to screw him afterwards to say thank - you. They wanted to go off somewhere and have hysterics. That seemed reasonable enough to him. But Velona was plainly different all kinds of ways. She played by way different rules. When she spoke again, it was with a touch of impatience.
What are you waiting for, big boy? Come and get it.
In case he was a congenital idiot, she twitched her hips and opened her legs a little. He looked up the road again. Nobody. He looked down the road. Also still nobody. The two of them were the only live people for quite a ways. It was lay her or jump in the swamp.

“If you’re sure...” He stopped, feeling dumb. If she wasn’t sure, she was auditioning for a stag film. She’d get the part, too.

Awkwardly, still wary, he got down beside her. She nodded, as if to say,
It’s about time.
When he took off his clothes, he was careful to keep himself between her and them - and between her and the Schmeisser. But she wasn’t interested in the uniform or the weapon, not then. Her hands roamed him, soft and knowing at the same time. He stroked her, too. This all felt more surreal than a Max Ernst painting, but he didn’t care. If it was a figment of his dying imagination, his brains were working overtime. He was less and less inclined to believe that, though. Everything was too vividly detailed, from the grittiness of the hard - packed dirt to the sweaty heat of Velona’s flesh to the way her breath stirred the hair above his left ear.

He rapidly discovered that under her curves she had muscles to rival an Olympic athlete’s. Well, the way she ran had already told him that much. He was broader through the shoulders, and probably outweighed her by twenty kilos, but he wasn’t sure which of them was the stronger. Then she kissed him, and he stopped caring. Had he run all that way, he thought his mouth would have been dry as dust. Hers was warm and moist and sweet. His hand slid between her legs. She was warm and moist there, too. She made a small sound of pleasure, down deep in her throat. Her hand closed on him. He made the same sound, only an octave deeper.

He was disappointed when she broke off the kiss, but only for a moment. Limber as an eel, she bent to take him in her mouth. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had a woman do that before without being asked. He also wasn’t sure how much he could stand without exploding.

The thought had hardly crossed his mind before she pushed him down and over onto his back and impaled herself on him. She rode him like a racehorse. She made that pleased noise again when his hands closed on her breasts. She teased his nipples, too. He hadn’t thought they were especially sensitive, but they were, they were.

As his pleasure rose toward the crest that said he would have to come soon, he decided he would rather drive things himself. When he rolled the two of them over, Velona let out a startled yip and then laughed. So did he. He poised himself above her and thrust home again and again. Her breath came faster than it had when she was running. Her face went slack with pleasure. She gasped. “Pemsel! Hasso Pemsel!” she cried in a high, shrill voice. Her nails scored his back. A wordless groan escaped him at the same time. He drove deep one last time, and tried to stay at the peak forever. Whether he wanted it to or not, the world returned, the way it always does. Velona said something to him. He couldn’t understand it, of course. But he understood when she mimed pushing him off her. He had to be squashing her, and that ragged shift wasn’t much to protect her from the ground. He went back onto his knees.

She got to her feet and brushed as much of the dirt off her behind as she could before she put the shift back on. Hasso also stood, and did the same thing. His clothes were more complicated than hers; he took a little longer to dress. By the time he finished, she was walking back toward the men he’d killed. She didn’t let lovemaking distract her long. Her gesture could mean only one thing:
pitch them in the
swamp.
Two of them wore rawhide boots. He pointed to those, and then to her feet. Did she want them if they fit?

Velona shook her head and looked revolted. “Grenye,” she said, pointing to the corpses. “Grenye.” To her, the word must have explained everything.

It didn’t explain one damn thing to Hasso, but he wasn’t inclined to be critical. And Velona wasn’t fussy about grabbing Grenye boots, whatever those were, only about wearing them. Into the water and muck went the bodies and the knife and pitchfork. The bodies would come back up soon enough; Hasso knew that all too well. If Velona also did, she didn’t care. She nodded, as at a job well done.

“Where now?” Hasso asked her, as if she understood.

And maybe she did, for she linked arms with him and started west down the road - the same direction she’d been going before, but not the same killed pace. As the sun kissed the western horizon, Hasso slipped his arm around her waist. She smiled and swayed close and rested her head on his shoulder for a moment. He had no idea what he’d just volunteered for, but she made one hell of a recruiter. Castle Svarag struck Hasso as ... well, medieval. What else would a castle be? It had no running water, though there was a well. It was a long drop from the seat in the garderobe to where the stuff landed, but that was as close as the place came to sophisticated plumbing. Fires and torches and candles and oil lamps gave light after sundown. Food was either very fresh or else smoked or salted or dried; none of Velona’s people knew anything about canning or refrigeration.

Had Hasso fallen into this world in 1938, he would have thought it too primitive to bear. Coming here in 1945, he’d done without running water and flush toilets and electricity and refrigeration for five and a half years of war. He missed them much less than he would have back in the days when he took them for granted.

And there were compensations he’d never had in Poland or France or North Africa or on the Eastern Front. Velona kept coming to his bed. She started teaching him the local language. And she vouched for him with the castle’s commander, a dour noble - Hasso thought - named Mertois. Hasso wouldn’t have wanted Mertois angry at him, as the commandant was close to a head taller than he was and proportionately broad through the shoulders.

Average men among the Lenelli - Velona’s people - stood close to two meters tall, and some, like Mertois, were considerably bigger than that. They had yellow hair, blue or green or gray eyes, granite cheekbones, and chins like cliffs. Back in the
Reich,
Hasso had been a big man. Here, he was decidedly short. The Lenelli had never heard the name of Aryan, but they exemplified the ideal. To all of them but Velona, the first impression seemed to be that he barely measured up. Then one - a bruiser called Sholseth, who was almost Mertois’ size - picked a fight with him. Hasso got the idea it was as much to see what he would do as for any real reason except maybe boredom. Out of what passed for fair play with the Lenelli, Sholseth made sure Hasso understood they
were
fighting before he uncorked a haymaker that would have knocked Max Schmeling’s head off. It would have, had it landed. But it didn’t. Unlike Max Schmeling, Hasso wasn’t in the ring. He didn’t have to box with Sholseth.
Wehrmacht
combat instructors taught all sorts of dirty but highly effective techniques. Action on the Russian front was a whole separate education. Hasso grabbed Sholseth’s arm just behind the wrist. Half a second later, Sholseth flew through the air with the greatest of ease. The big Lenello had time to begin a startled grunt, but it cut off abruptly when he slammed down on the rammed - earth floor of Castle Svarag’s great hall. Hasso had hoped that would put him out of action, but he started to get up. The
Wehrmacht
officer kicked him in the ribs - and had to skip back in a hurry, for a long arm snaked out and almost tripped him up. He didn’t want to get locked in a grapple with Sholseth, not even a little bit. The boot to the ribcage made the Lenello flatten out again. Hasso darted in and kicked him once more, this time in the side of the head, not
too
hard. Hard enough, though. Sholseth groaned and went limp. A pitcher sat on a table a few meters away. Hasso walked past half a dozen staring Lenello warriors, picked it up, and poured two liters of not very good beer over Sholseth’s head. The big man groaned and spluttered. His eyes opened. He made a horrible face and clutched at his temples. The
Wehrmacht
officer nodded to himself. Concussion, sure as hell. Sholseth wouldn’t be worth the paper he was printed on for the next few days.

Another Lenello said something to Hasso. It was probably,
How the devil did you do that, you
shrimp?
With an inward sigh, Hasso made a gesture inviting him to find out for himself. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of these big apes would cream him. But how many he smashed up first would go a long way toward showing where he fit in the pecking order.

He flattened four and had a fifth on the ropes before the fellow landed a blow to his solar plexus that folded him up like an accordion. He couldn’t do a thing about it, either. The Lenello was groggy, but not too groggy to fall on him like a landslide and thump him while he couldn’t fight back. Hasso got paid back for some of what he did to the soldier’s friends. He’d known that would happen, too, which didn’t make it any more enjoyable while it was going on.

When he could, he got up and washed the dirt and blood off his face. The Lenelli pounded his back, which hurt almost as much as getting beaten up had. They pressed mug after mug of that indifferent beer into his hand. He drank everything they gave him. Maybe it would numb him a little. Any which way, it was less likely to give him the runs than the local water.

Sholseth asked him something. The battered would - be tough guy was drinking beer, too. His head had to be killing him. Hasso didn’t understand the question, but it was bound to be something like,
Where did
you learn all that stuff?