After the Downfall (32 page)

That meant Hasso could see what had to be the royal palace in the middle of town. As the reconstructed wall aped Lenello fortifications, so the palace imitated Lenello castles. Even the red clay semicylindrical roof tiles copied the ones the Lenelli used. The local lord might have been saying,
See? All the modern
conveniences. We can do this stuff, too.

Getting there was less than half the fun. Nobody already in the streets wanted to let newcomers by. Scrawny dogs yapped and snarled and made as if to bite the horses’ fetlocks. Scrawny children of all sizes from toddlers on up raced around like maniacs, some wailing, others yelling at the top of their lungs. A few paused to stare at the spectacle of a big blond captive going through their streets. Hasso didn’t think the things they shouted were endearments.

One kid bent to scoop up a handful of mud, or maybe manure, and throw it at him. Hasso ducked. The stuff flew over his head and splatted against a wall across the street. Rautat yelled at the kid. The brat bent over and showed off his bare backside, which was as skinny as the rest of him. Rautat made as if to kick it. He couldn’t come close, not without dismounting. The kid scampered off.

“Thanks,” Hasso said.

“Oh, I didn’t do it for you,” the Bucovinan replied. “I just want to make sure you’re in one piece when I deliver you, so they can get the answers they need.”

You’re nothing to me but an interesting piece of meat.
That was daunting. But if Hasso weren’t an interesting piece of meat, Rautat would have slit his throat and gone on to the next one in the pit.

“Well, thanks anyhow,” Hasso said.

Rautat gave him a long look. “You’ve got nerve, anyway,” he said grudgingly. Hasso shrugged. “Big deal.”

“You talk like a soldier,” the native remarked.

“I am - I was - a soldier before I came here, in a bigger war than this world ever saw,” Hasso answered. “The tools of the trade were different. The life isn’t, not very much.”

Outside a tavern, a drunk in ragged clothes sprawled in the street snoring, a jug clutched tight to his chest. Hasso could have seen - hell, he had seen - the like in any number of Russian villages ... and, yes, in some German ones as well. People were people, in his own world or here, Lenelli or Grenye. Rautat scowled at the sot and rode a little faster to get by him. Hasso hid a smile. The native was self-conscious about his folk’s shortcomings, as almost anyone from any folk would have been. They rode past a brothel, too, with a couple of naked women displaying themselves in second-story windows. Hasso thought they were more likely to catch pneumonia than customers. They gaped at him, for a moment startled out of their cocked-hip, bosom-thrusting poses. One of them called something to Rautat. He laughed and shook his head. Turning to Hasso, he said,

“She wants to know if you’re really big.”

Hasso was made ... like a man. He said, “But you think all Lenelli are big pricks.” The joke worked in Lenello the same as it did in German. Odds were it worked in most languages. Rautat laughed and laughed. “You’re a funny fellow, all right. Pretty soon, you’ll find out whether it does you any good.”

“
Ja
.” Hasso didn’t like the sound of that.

In Drammen, the Lenello nobles had their fine houses in the center of town, near the royal palace. Broad lawns separated those mansions from the streets and from the lesser dwellings of
hoi polloi.
Again, the Bucovinans imitated the newcomers ... to a point. Their prominent people did have large houses. Sometimes the buildings even had stone ground floors. But the second story was invariably timber or wattle and daub, and almost all the roofs were thatched. Only a handful had tiles like the palace. Almost all of them, though, had a garden rather than a lawn - or if they did have grass, a cow or a couple of sheep grazed on it under a herdsman’s watchful eyes. The idea of bare ground for the sake of decoration or swank didn’t seem to have got here from the west.

A plump man in a tunic with extra-fancy embroidery took a chicken from someone who looked poorer than he was. He wrung the chicken’s neck and cast the carcass onto a brazier heaped high with glowing charcoal. ‘“What’s he doing?” Hasso asked.

“He’s a priest making a thanks-offering or a sin-offering for that fellow.” Rautat gave him a curious look.

“Don’t your priests do that?”

Hasso thought of the last
Wehrmacht
chaplain he’d talked to, a dour Lutheran who didn’t even smoke (and, once again, the longing for a cigarette sneaked up and bit him in the ass). He tried to imagine Klaus Frisch sacrificing a chicken to propitiate an angry Jehovah. “Well,” he said, “no.”

“How do you know your gods pay any attention to you, then?” Rautat persisted.

“Good question,” Hasso said, and then, counterattacking, “How do you know your gods do? Why don’t you follow the goddess?”

Even riding through the streets of his own capital with the
Wehrmacht
officer a helpless prisoner, Rautat looked scared shitless. “The goddess hears Lenelli first,” he said. “She wouldn’t listen to the likes of me.”

From what Hasso had seen, that might well be true. And yet ... “Plenty of Grenye in King Bottero’s realm worship her.”

The most scornful majordomo in two worlds couldn’t have let out a sniffier sniff than Rautat’s. “There are Grenye who want to be Lenelli,” he said.”
I
don’t, thank you very much.”

He spoke fluent Lenello. He wore Lenello-style armor. His city had Lenello-style fortifications grafted onto its older works. His sovereign’s palace even had Lenello-style roof tiles. And he said he didn’t want to be a Lenello?

Well, maybe he didn’t. The Japanese wore Western-style clothes. They had Western-style industries, and a Western-style military, too. But did they want to turn into Americans or Englishmen or Germans?

Hasso didn’t think so. They used Western techniques to let them stay what they already were: Japanese. Maybe the Bucovinans could pull off the same stunt here.

But, if they couldn’t work magic and the Lenelli damn well could, the odds were against them. Still affronted, Rautat went on, “Besides, who knows what mongrel clans those Grenye come from?

We’re better people than that, we are.”

Once more, Hasso carefully didn’t smile. Had the plains Indians looked down their noses like that at the coastal Indians who quickly succumbed to the English colonizers? They probably had ... till it was their turn.

When Hasso got a close look at Lord Zgomot’s palace, he decided he wouldn’t want to try to take it without heavy artillery. Yes, maybe Bottero was lucky he didn’t make it to Falticeni. He might have thrown away a lot more men here than he did in the lost battle.

Or the goddess might have manifested herself through Velona and knocked the capital of Bucovin flat. If you had magic, if the gods really did take part in what happened on earth, maybe you didn’t need 105s and 155s. After all, Joshua knocked down Jericho’s walls without them. Every time Hasso thought about anybody from the Old Testament, he started to look around nervously. No,
dummy,
he thought.
Nobody from the
Gestapo
’s going to haul you away, not here. You can let
a Jew cross your mind every now and then.

Rautat shouted to the sentries in their own language. They yelled back. Hasso couldn’t understand a word of it. His mind went back to wandering. If the goddess could come through here, why didn’t she do it a long time ago?
The land fights for them.
Velona wasn’t the only one who’d said it. What did it mean? It wasn’t magic - the Lenelli insisted on that. But it was
something.
One of the guards yelled some more, and gestured. Rautat and the other Bucovinan soldiers dismounted. A moment later, Hasso did the same. Grooms came out to take charge of the horses. Hasso’s captors escorted him into the palace.

The palace was gloomy. It was drafty. It didn’t smell very good. Of course, you could have said the same things about King Bottero’s establishment. Everything here, though, seemed just a little worse, a little sloppier, than it had back in Drammen.

And Hasso found one danger here that he hadn’t had to worry about there: doorways. Lots of Lenelli were taller than he was. Their lintels were high. The Bucovinans, on the other hand, mostly came up to his chin. And he banged his forehead twice in quick succession before realizing he had to watch - and duck every goddamn time. Getting one - no, two - right above the eyes did nothing for the headaches that still plagued him. He wished his head would come off. Inconsiderate thing that it was, it stayed attached and hurt. Rautat spoke with a court official whose spiffy embroidery probably meant he was a big wheel. The fellow with the gaudy tunic looked Hasso over.
Him?
his glance said. Well, Hasso didn’t think he cut a very fancy figure just then, either. The palace functionary asked Rautat a couple of questions. Hasso’s captor answered with emphasis, jabbing a forefinger at the other man’s chest. With a sigh, the official yielded. He said something to Hasso in Bucovinan. “I am sorry. I do not speak your language,” Hasso answered in Lenello.

He wasn’t astonished when the native turned out to know that tongue. “Come with me,” the fellow said.

“Your name is on a list. Lord Zgomot wanted to see certain folk if we captured them. Here you are, so he will see you.”

“Here I am,” Hasso agreed, so mournfully that Rautat laughed and the court official smiled a most unpleasant smile.

They led him down a hallway decorated with art of a sort he didn’t think he’d ever seen before. For lack of a better name, he thought of the pieces as feather paintings. Some of them were quite realistic, others bands or swirling lines of color. They must have taken enormous labor to create, first in finding the feathers and then in arranging them.

“Nice work.” Hasso pointed at one - a picture of the palace, done all in feathers. “Very pretty.”

Rautat and the functionary both stared at him, then started to laugh. “By Lavtrig, now I know you’re no ordinary big blond bastard! They all think featherwork is stupid and ugly and foolish because they don’t do it themselves,” Rautat said.

He spoke in Bucovinan to the soldiers escorting the
Wehrmacht
officer. They gaped at Hasso, too. Hasso couldn’t remember any Lenelli ever talking about featherwork. It really must have been beneath their notice. He wondered why. It sure looked good to him.

Then they led him past what he first took to be a small elephant’s tusk. But it was shaped more like a sword blade, and had a formidable point on the end. “What is that? What beast does it come from?” he asked.

“A dragon,” Rautat answered matter-of-factly. “That is the greatest fang of the Dragon of Mizil, which we slew when Bucovin was young. His bones lie under the walls of Falticeni, and under the palace here.”

“A dragon? What does a dragon look like?” Hasso asked.

They went on a little farther. Then the court functionary pointed to a big featherwork on the wall.

“Behold the Dragon of Mizil!” he said.

Hasso beheld it. He wondered from which birds the natives had got those iridescent green and bronze feathers, or the yellow and orange and red ones that showed the fire it breathed. He also wondered whether the artists had actually seen the dragon or limned it from the stories of those who came before them. And he wondered ... “How do you kill something like that?”

Together, Rautat and the court official burst into something between verse and song. After a moment, the rest of Hasso’s guards joined in. Germans might have launched into
“Deutschland über Alles”
or the “Ode to Joy” with as much ease and as little self-consciousness. Everybody in Falticeni had to know the story of the Dragon of Mizil.

Everybody but me,
Hasso thought. And he didn’t understand a word of Bucovinan. “Can you translate, please?” he said.

To his surprise, Rautat shook his head. “Not this,” the soldier answered. “This is ours. This is special. This is not for Lenello dogfeet.” He must have translated one of his own words literally, for he corrected himself a moment later: “Scoundrels.” The palace flunky nodded agreement. Hasso only shrugged. He was in no position to argue with them. They hadn’t killed him. Except for when he went into the pit, they hadn’t even hurt him. Yet. All things considered, he had to figure he was ahead of the game.

They turned a last corner. There was the throne room. There, on what looked like a dining-room chair wrapped in gold leaf, sat Lord Zgomot. The court official poked Hasso in the ribs with an elbow. “Bow!”

he said.

Again, Hasso was in no position to argue. Bow he did. As he straightened, he sized up the ruler of Bucovin. King Bottero had put him in mind of Hermann Goring, Goring the way he had been before defeat and drugs diminished him: big, bold, swaggering, flamboyant, enjoying to the hilt the power that had landed in his lap.

Zgomot, by contrast, wore a mink coat that would have made Marlene Dietrich jealous, but still looked like nothing so much as the druggist in a small Romanian town. He was small himself, and skinny, with a pinched face, a beak of a nose, and a black beard streaked with gray. His eyebrows were thick and black, too, and almost met in the middle. The dark eyes under them, though, seemed disconcertingly shrewd. He was taking Hasso’s measure as Hasso studied him.

“So ... You are the strange one, the one from nowhere, of whom we have heard.” Unlike Rautat’s or the functionary’s, Zgomot’s Lenello was almost perfect. The only hint that he wasn’t a native speaker was the extremely precise way in which he expressed himself. He wasn’t at ease in the language, as Bottero or Velona or Orosei would have been.

Poor Orosei,
Hasso thought. He was glad the king and the goddess - the king and his lover - had got away. He wished like hell he’d got away himself.

But he damn well hadn’t. And now he had to deal with this native - who was no doubt trying to figure out how to deal with him. “Yes, Lord,” he said: he was who Zgomot claimed he was. The Lord of Bucovin pursed his lips. He didn’t look like a happy man, the way Bottero usually did. He had the air of someone whose stomach pained him. “Are you as dangerous as people say you are?” he asked.